What is the greatest idol in the lives of most Americans?
I know what I consider it to be, but Bob Russell, a grad of the local CIncinnati Christian University, came away from a pastor’s meeting with a different answer. Thinking about it, his may be right, at least for many Americans.
“The Number One False God in America”
Check it out. Is he right?
What do you think?
There are two kingdoms, one of darkness, the other of Light. Can you discern which is which?
Strength / Weakness
Gain / Sacrifice
War / Peace
Clamor / Quiet
Taking / Giving
First / Last
Kingship / Servanthood
Self / Selflessness
The thread that runs through all the words on the right side?
Humility.
Remember that word. I believe with all my heart that it is the most important word for Christians to understand at this point in history.
Humility.
For followers of Jesus to properly discern truth in the coming days, I believe we must be looking for humility.
The Kingdom of God is an upside-down kingdom. For that reason, most people cannot understand it, even people who claim to be part of it. Everything about the Kingdom of God makes little sense from a worldly perspective.
What good is weakness? What benefit comes from being last? How can one attain the heights as a servant? Why dwell in quiet? Humble? Really?
To lost people, it’s all foolishness.
Humility runs through that foolishness.
If Christians want to discern the times, the people, the events, and the truth, we must be looking to see humility.
Where there is no humility, there is no Presence of God. Where there IS humility, we will likely find God there.
I believe this is “first line” discernment for our times. Almost everything that is not of God will fail the humility test.
I look around and I see supposed Christians who are displaying no evidence of humility in their lives. Many of these folks have a national stage. For the sake of their souls, they should well consider leaving that stage. They show no humility at all.
I see many “Christian” events that are filled with loud, clanging gongs, with noise, self-promotion, and smug self-satisfaction. They are dominated by people who pat themselves on the backs for how much better they are than others. Read their books, and they always refer to each other. There is no humility in any of it.
You look on all sides, and the Church in America is filled with more, better, louder, bigger, and every level of eyecatching production and excellence, but there is not a shred of humility in any of it.
Where is God? He is in the things that go overlooked, the small, the quiet whisper, the person of no account. Those who lack humility cannot find Him because they are constantly looking in the wrong places, to the wrong people, and to the wrong ideas.
Christian, in all things, look for the humble. That is where God will most likely be.
But the humble is humble for a reason, and few people will take the time and effort needed to look through all the noise, pride, power, and fame to find what is truly humble and embrace it.
Please, look for humility. And consider walking away from anything that lacks it, no matter how worthwhile it might seem otherwise.
The soul you save may be your own.
Back in the day when a strange, wood-pulp-based communication device landed on our doorsteps daily, Americans enjoyed their “funnies.” At least that’s what I called the comics section of the newspaper. I would usually be the one to run out to gather the paper, then open it up and follow the adventures of Charlie Brown, Marmaduke, and Beetle Bailey. And sometimes, if I got ahold of the afternoon paper in Cincinnati, I would read Pogo.
Walt Kelly was a brilliant artist and a barbed wit, and he embued his opossum character Pogo and his animal friends with biting observations to match their lovely woodlands surroundings. Pogo beat Doonesbury to acerbic political commentary status by decades. The strip ran many years, and in 1970, an Earth Day edition gave us what became Pogo’s most well known quote:
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
I recalled that strip the other day when responding to a friend on Facebook. I was commenting about what has happened to America as a country. Today, a thuggishness seems to pervade our country, especially when it comes to dialoguing about ideas. Whereas Pogo was distraught over pollution, we have become people who cannot abide ideas that are different from our own, whether those ideas are polluted or as pristine as a clear, babbling brook.
Here is where we are:
We Americans have become the very people from whom the Founders of our country fled.
When I see American corporations, politicians, and loud, angry citizens wielding their power as a club to beat down anyone who does not bow down to their ideas, then I think back to the Pilgrims, to a bunch of brave men wondering if they would all hang separately if they did not hang togther, and to the reasons this country came into being in the first place.
From what did our forefathers flee? What drove them to pack up, brave a cruel ocean, and come to an unknown land filled with equal measures of uncertainty and freedom? How is it that we no longer recall our own country’s reason for existence? How is it that we have become the oppressive autocrats from whom our forefathers fled to find freedom?
Consider those boldfaced words above. And may God have mercy on the USA.