Endurance 02

Endurance 02 To be honest, I did not know, nor am I totally sure right now where I am headed with this discussion. I had a number of questions that I needed to work out the answer to, but God is faithful. In church last Sunday, I saw the guiding hand of God take the pastors sermon, which was based largely around baseball, and use it to put me on the right track. His sermon? “Hitting Your Way Out of a Slump.” Mr. and Mrs. American, I have news for you. You have lost your first love and you need to get it back. That passage in Revelation 2:2-5, that may as well have been written to us. “I know all the things you do. I have seen your hard work and your patient endurance. I know you don’t tolerate evil people. You have examined the claims of those who say they are apostles for me without quitting. But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first.” (NLT). I think most of are aware of this on some level, but I want to point out just how far it has gone. The other day an employee of a large retail corporation was telling me that they were forbidden to say “God bless you” when a customer sneezed. They were told instead to just say, “Bless you”. Last night I channel surfed across one of these extreme video programs. A pickup truck had evaded the police and crashed. It spun around about thee times before coming to rest in the middle of the road, ejecting the passenger who was left lying on the street. The camera approached this man on the ground and caught his words which were both audible and sub titled for the audience. He called out, and they beeped over what was presumably a profanity forbidden by the FCC. TV and Radio broadcasters have a list of things they can not put or say on the air. But in the subtitles it read “J-----“ and I thought to myself, what cuss word starts with the letter ‘J’? Then it hit me. The man was calling out to Jesus! And that is what they cut out, bleeped over and considered too profane for the audience to hear! In contrast, right now I’m listening to a Top 40 radio station located in Spain. This is a secular station that plays only the songs that are on that nations top 40 list. And guess what I hear? I hear some songs that are all about God or Jesus. Some of which are more readily identified as ‘Christian music’ than a lot of what our local Christian music station plays everyday. The only such music to cross over from the ‘Christian’ stations to the popular stations here in America are those that DO NOT speak of God or of Jesus. Songs like ‘Butterfly Kisses’ which was nice, but had nothing to do with God. See the contrast? It is no longer a question of ‘Separation of Church and STATE’, we have progressed to the point where the things of God are considered socially unacceptable by PRIVATE parties that deal with the public. Private parties forbid the use of these words for FEAR of OFFENDING people. Think about that! How sad is that in a nation that was founded by and for the purpose of evading religious persecution? The FREE EXERCISE of religion is written into our laws as a guarantee of religious freedom, but our society has renounced the very faith that brought us this nation and this freedom! We have lost our first love! So what should we do? Take up arms and revolt? Build more churches? Invest in more outreach programs? Get a PR company to Christianity a total make-over? Who can hope to beat the advanced weaponry of our own government? America has more churches per capita than any other nation doesn’t it? We already have radio and TV dedicated to the ministry 24/7, what more could we ask for? Who would take charge of the PR corp? Few denominations agree enough with what message the Bible was written to express, imagine if they had to agree with what image we should all be identified with! Clearly we did not loose our first love because of these things, and attempting any of the above would be silly, or worse, even disastrous.