Month: May 2023

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Be Straight With Me. Was it Worth All That?

If you live a righteous life, you’re going to encounter opposition.

It’s a tricky thing, this balance Christians need to maintain. On the one hand, we need to have other Christians we can depend on, go to with our problems, and lean on for support. On the other hand, we can’t immerse ourselves so much in this support system that we never have contact with the people we’re meant to witness to. Our job, after all, is to go forth and make disciples of all nations. It’s tough to do that if we only spend time with other believers.

I’ve got a story to share that’s going to make me sound like I’m touting how perfect I was at a certain time in my life. That’s not my intent, so please hang in there for the point I’m trying to make. I worked construction for a couple of summers in college and then for about a year and a half after graduating. You meet a lot of interesting (translated: rough) characters in that line of work. The crude speech alone was enough to raise some eyebrows.

I stuck out quite a bit in this field. I didn’t swear, I didn’t drink, and I didn’t chase women. That’s pretty unusual for a young man in that line of work. I didn’t act in a morally superior or “holier than thou” way. It wasn’t necessary. People took notice over time. Different guys would leave or join the crew, but it seemed like everyone except me indulged in at least one of those three behaviors. One of the guys even told me “I’ve met dudes that avoid one of those things. I’ve even met a couple of guys that avoid two of those things. But you’re the only guy I’ve met that doesn’t do any of those things.”

A lot of times a few of the guys would try to prod me to let slip a dirty word or two. Occasionally a few of them would conspire to make me have a rough day, just to try to get me to lose my temper. Now why would they do that? They saw somebody more disciplined than them and they tried to get him to stumble so he’d “descend to their level.” I’m not going to sit here and tell you that people who drink or cuss or make mistakes can’t get into Heaven. I will tell you though, that blamelessness bothers sinners. I’m not perfect, but guys on that crew figured I was, and it was an image they wanted to mar for their own satisfaction. If they could make a “perfect” person stumble, it made them feel better about the way they lived their own lives.

That’s one side of the coin. There’s a very important flip side to it. When you stiffen your spine in response to consistent opposition day after day, week after week, month after month, there’s a certain amount of respect that others develop toward you. I wasn’t preachy about my faith to the other guys. In fact, I don’t know that I ever even threw “I’m a Christian” out there. One guy, who had given me a lot of grief, but who was also a very philosophical type of fellow, one day told me he had a lot of respect for my convictions. He seemed to take at least a little bit of joy in finding hypocrisy in people that called themselves religious. After months of working together and trying to get under my skin, he told me “you are who you say you are.” (I never had to say who I was.)

Not only was it a very high compliment coming from him, it was an acknowledgement to me that it had been worth the heat. Soon after that we spent some time talking about the Bible and some of the things it contained. We eventually went our separate ways, but a few years later my wife and I looked him up and visited him and his family. They had us over for dinner, breaking out some big steaks, sharing their table and their home with us. I can’t say I led the guy to Christ, and I haven’t had any contact with him in probably 15 years, but I hope to be one member of the team that takes part in his years-long journey to the Lord.

God will ask you to do things that are hard. He asks you to do it because He knows you’re uniquely suited to get it done. If He asks you to be above reproach in a difficult environment, it might just be because He knows blamelessness bothers sinners, and He’s using you to get somebody’s attention. Hang in there. God uses teams of believers to accomplish His will in any given person’s life, but you may be the one He’s chosen to get the ball rolling.

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Just Explain it to me in Plain English

When you’re a blogger, you’re always at least a little curious about which posts really resonate with readers. Unless someone says something to you, you never really know for sure. You can get insights into things like the number of people viewing the different pages on your blog. That’s about as good a proxy as you’re going to get, because you can use that metric to see what kind of posts are more popular than others. I can’t see things like the names of people that have viewed different pages, but I can see which posts get the most traffic.

It turns out that the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the odd politics of our nation (it’s easier for a minor to get a sex change than it is for them to get a tattoo, for example) generated significantly more hits than normal. While I fully intend for this blog’s main purpose to remain focused on pushing Christ-followers to use their lives as a living sacrifice and step into the role God’s designed for them, sometimes I also need to take my own advice and do what I’m good at, even if it’s not directly God-honoring.

Today I’d like to have another look at American politics, starting out with some of the basics and hopefully help translate a little of that into where we are today.

I try to stay away from party names like “Democrat” or “Republican,” and instead use the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” The reason is partly because people don’t often fit cleanly into one camp or the other and people don’t react objectively to labels, but mainly it’s because each party’s views can be so wide-ranging that you could squeeze multiple ideologies into each party. You’ll hear me refer to the political left (liberals/Democrats generally, but Socialists and Communists if you go further and further left) and political right (conservatives/Republicans here, but dictators if you go further right). Both sides seek prosperity or financial security, but they take very different approaches to get there.

Please understand that these are broad generalizations. Of course you can find exceptions to the things I say here, but by and large, these principles hold true. Let’s start with an abridged look at the two groups.

Left: Their view is that the people work for the government, which provides stability, services, financial safety nets, etc. for its citizens (and non-citizens, in our case). Social issues are generally the most important things our country has to figure out. Quality of life is a good thing, but the government doesn’t like when there are large disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots,” so the “haves” should pay higher and higher tax percentages the more money they make. The government will take care of you from cradle to grave in return for your loyalty in paying high taxes. Life is hard, people have extenuating circumstances; they can’t always make the most of their opportunities and they should look to the government as the solution to their problems.

Right: In this group’s view, the government works for the people, providing basic national services (federal highways, FAA and FCC rules, a strong military), but not taking more taxes than necessary and allowing local-level politics to sort out the details. The law of supply and demand plays a big part in our economy. If people are willing to pay for something, someone will come up with a better or cheaper way to provide it. Individual innovators and service providers in the private sector drive the economy and wealth creation, and the government provides only basic guidelines to make sure those efforts don’t go off the rails (as an example, think about the reasonable rules/precautions the government should pass regarding artificial intelligence right now). Ideally there should be plentiful job opportunities for everyone, and those that work hard are encouraged to go as far as their potential and drive enable them to go.

If you’re a conservative, you kind of have the political deck stacked against you. People in the two camps have very different outlooks, as you might expect. The “best minds” of left-leaning thinkers end up in government. The “best minds” of right-leaning thinkers end up in the private sector. Who, then, on the right, ends up in government? There are some good ones, sure, but often the ones that are really good decide that they can make a more lucrative living doing something other than government service, and they end up leaving public office. I wouldn’t go so far as to say our government’s Democrats are the Varsity team and Republicans are the Junior Varsity team, but it’s tough to come up with a better analogy. As a result, the country has steadily marched left, even though we’re a mostly center-right nation. Even beyond Senators and Congressional Representatives, the bench is much deeper for liberals. When liberals can’t get their legislative agenda passed, faceless regulators and unelected officials use different avenues to advance the goals of hard-left politicians. Businesses that are just trying to make a profit are impacted when their bottom line is affected by regulations that get too complicated to understand. They have to pay for the services of lawyers and compliance officers to make sure they’re doing everything legally, rather than spending that money on enhancing the quality of their product or otherwise investing in their business. (Trump cleared a lot of regulations and the economy leapt forward. Biden reinstituted a lot of them and that’s part of the reason our economic recovery is so slow. Some regulations were good ideas, others were not, but the more regulations you have, the harder it is to run a business.)

Conservatives often have the viewpoint that they shouldn’t interfere in other peoples’ lives because that’s not what they’d want to happen to them. Legislatively, liberals tend to benefit from that outlook because they don’t have the same qualms and conservatives don’t normally fight back until it’s too late. Conservatives figure that as long as politicians in Washington don’t do anything too crazy, it’ll all be fine in the end. Well, then those politicians go and do things conservatives aren’t comfortable with. That gets the conservatives to vote in the next election or two, but eventually they go back to their complacency and the cycle starts again. The result is that the country’s politics have steadily shifted leftward over the last hundred years (examples: Social Security and the New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid, the mandatory health insurance of the Affordable Care Act, today’s practice of using well-qualified mortgage applicants to pay extra fees to help support riskier borrowers, and the functional removal of America’s southern border). The political left “takes new ground” while the best that conservatives hope for is “stopping the liberal agenda.” Conservatives don’t usually take new ground. (Or if they do, it causes face-melting rage fests and riots among the left.)

Our country’s government was set up to have multiple political parties, so I wouldn’t want to see just one be completely dominant, even if it’s the one I tend to side with. It’s a little unfair to refer to the current Democratic Party as the actual Democratic Party. Over the last 20 years or so, the party has shifted far left very quickly, often to the extreme left. The Democratic platform has changed and now embraces extremism in almost every case. (Everyday middle-class Democrats who agree on almost all the Party’s main issues but disagree on one thing, like the issue of abortion, are shouted down and all but kicked out of the Party if they push their views, it seems.) People that have voted Democrat for decades out of principle maybe went along with this leftward migration, but are finding that their party traveled further left than they really agree with. Their options are to not vote, to vote Republican (which some of them will never do just on principle), or to vote for a third party. I’d argue that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party, but that the Democratic Party instead left them. They should get involved earlier, in the primaries, to try to reclaim their party and move it back toward the center, where the two sides can actually get some things done by working together.

There’s so much more to cover, but this is already getting longer than normal. No matter what side you’re on politically, please pray for our nation, that it would turn from evil and toward the Lord. Pray for revival in this land and for God to be glorified.

There’s a whole lot more, but I don’t know if you’d be interested to hear it. Want additional political posts? Want me to stay away from future political posts? Let me know. Leave a comment or use the “contact us” option to share your thoughts.

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This has a High Potential for Misuse

Ever come across a verse in the Bible that makes you go “huh?”

Matthew chapter 11 has one of those. Jesus is talking to a crowd about John the Baptist, and is letting them know that John is the fulfillment of a prophecy from the Old Testament. He more or less says “This is the guy that Malachi prophesied about when he wrote ‘behold, I send my messenger before You, Who will prepare Your way before You.’”

Christ goes on to say that John the Baptist is the greatest man who ever lived, but even the lowliest person in Heaven is greater than John.

That’s when the “huh?” verse comes into play.

Matthew 11:12 is that verse. Jesus continues: “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”

Time out. What’s He talking about here?

For the first part of the verse, think about John as having kicked off a new era. He’s the final Old Testament prophet, letting people know that Jesus is the guy all the scriptures have been pointing to. John was the one that announced Jesus’ arrival; he was the herald that had a part in dedicating Jesus to a life of ministry. The thing John commenced was something that flew in the face of Jewish custom and teaching. That brought violence, against John (who was beheaded), against Christ, and against many of Christ’s followers. Even so, God’s kingdom can never be subdued by human violence.

Okay, well that makes sense, but what about the last part of the verse, “and the violent take it by force?” Does this mean there has to be a certain level of violence to get into Heaven? Not at all, but there is a certain amount of tenacity involved.

Many times the gospels echo each other, and we can get a fuller picture of a given incident by looking at how other gospel writers cover the same event. Luke 16:16 says it this way. “The law and the prophets were until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it.” Think of the two versions’ meaning this way: “The kingdom presses ahead relentlessly, and only the relentless press their way into it.”

Christ warns us that it’s tough to put your own desires in the back seat and follow Him. He knows it’s tough. That’s part of the reason why He blesses us for doing it. Matthew says earlier in his book (7:13-14) to “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

Part of the reason few find it because it’s so difficult. Salvation is by grace alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s not natural to submit to someone else’s rulership of your life and declare your willingness to obey His will and instruction. It takes dedication and a constant dying to self for the purpose of magnifying your savior in your own life.

Nevertheless, this is the way to enter God’s kingdom.

So when things are tough, press on. Be relentless. God sees you, He sees your dedication to the Christian walk, and He’ll make it up to you. “Only the relentless press their way into it.”

Be relentless.

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This Would Make Spock’s Head Explode

I can’t speak much for other parts of the world, but in the United States of America, turning 18 is kind of a big deal.

This is the age when you transition from being a minor to being an adult. Before turning 18, you’re still considered too young to have a firm understanding (or insufficient life experience) to be grounded enough to make good decisions.

I mean, think about it. There are some exceptions, but for the most part you can’t do these things before turning 18:

  • Get a tattoo or body piercing
  • Vote
  • Rent an apartment or buy a house
  • Join the military
  • Get married

The intent behind making it mandatory for a minor to turn 18 before being able to make the decision to embark on any of these things is because they all carry a certain weight or have long-lasting consequences. Many of these, after all, are life-altering decisions.

So you’ll understand if I express my disapproval that in many parts of the U.S., it’s easier for an 11-year-old to obtain gender reassignment surgery than it is to get a tattoo. (No, I’m not advocating that we lower the minimum tattoo age.) It is disturbingly easy to empower children to set off on a journey of permanent change without them having a firm grasp of the ramifications they’re agreeing to live with. Even if you’re a pro-trans activist, I think you’d have to agree with me on some level up to this point of the posting.

Let’s call a spade a spade here: we’re talking about mutilating children’s natural body parts and acting like it’s somehow archaic if we do not give them the opportunity to alter the course of their natural lives. I’m sorry, but if you can’t even get tattoos at that age, the government shouldn’t be allowing people under 18 to pursue such permanent reassignment surgeries.

Switching gears slightly, I have to ponder…given the prevalence of this issue in the national spotlight today, one would think there’s a tremendous amount of pent-up demand among minors. I’m not ready to hit the “I Believe” button on that issue, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose it’s true for a moment. As responsible adults, it’s up to people on both sides of the aisle to say “hey look, I recognize there’s a lot of demand for this, but pursuing this course of action is a major decision, so we’re going to make you put it on hold until you’re legally an adult.” Why isn’t that an easy piece of legislation to get passed?

I don’t really believe there IS a lot of demand for this type of thing among kids. That begs another question. If that’s true and there’s no major demand, why such a big push for it? I mean, if politicians are making something out of nothing, what’s the political goal of such a thing?

I guess I’d have to pull in a few other things to round out the picture. “Protecting Women’s rights” does not include fairness for female athletes, and it seems that rather than create a separate category or class of athlete, the party line is that it’s in competition’s best interest to allow biological males (or those born biological males) to compete in Women’s sports. That’s just one additional item. Let’s open the aperture a little more.

It’s pretty scary how much traction the “Defund the Police” movement got within the past few years. I wouldn’t say the tide has completely receded, but I think it’s reached its high-water mark by now. The hypocrisy of the people with the loudest voices calling for such a defunding (hiring personal security details or building walls around their homes) helps illustrate that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Kicking it up a notch though, is the District Attorney from Manhattan who announced recently he would no longer prosecute theft with the intent of establishing racial equity. (Ironically, this viewpoint justifies the use of racism to level the playing field.) What good can the police do if they catch someone robbing a home if that person is released from custody within hours?

Hang with me a little longer. Did you hear about this new mortgage situation? People with high credit scores, the ones that have made good decisions (you know, like “live within your means” or “pay your bills on time”) are now going to be required to pay extra fees to offset the risk associated with granting large loans to people with low credit scores. While I agree that homeownership creates a pathway to wealth, this is not the way to do it. This is essentially Communism by another name. “Everyone else deserves what you’ve worked hard for.”

Finally, the move from equality to equity. It doesn’t sound much different, does it? It’s only a change of two letters. It’s a gargantuan difference, though. I’m all for equality. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had it right. The person best suited for the job should get the job, whatever their background. Equity, however, means that the same outcome is desired across the board, so each person should be given whatever is necessary to empower them to achieve that result. I’m an out-of-shape white dude that’s over 40 years old. If I want to play in the NBA, equity says I should be given whatever it takes to ensure my success in that league. In games, there should be trampolines only I can use. Performance-enhancing drugs, officiating that goes in my favor, special rules…all should be on the table if we want equity.

To bring this to a close, it seems to me that all these viewpoints, with as little logical sense as they make, actually make quite a bit of political sense in one respect. If your goal is to tear down the existing system, these things will help you get there.

Now everybody knows that a nation of more than 330 million people can’t just burn down its government and let chaos reign. If you’re trying to topple the government that’s already there, you surely intend to replace it with something. And that, my friends, is the problem. In societies overrun with discontent and anger at those perceived to be hoarding resources, Communism has a very real chance at taking hold. Communism is second-to-none when it comes to political systems that cause large amounts of human suffering.

Whatever its faults, Capitalism rewards those that work hard. If there’s an inequality in the system (which, I will concede, there often is), the solution is to create more opportunities (as opposed to handouts) for those getting the short end of the stick, not punishing those flourishing.

If you’re roughly 45 years old or more, you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of Soviet Communism. You remember the harsh realities behind the Iron Curtain. Very little freedom. Very little food. God is abolished and replaced with the State and state-run religion. This is where we’re headed if the present culture of participation trophies and “I’m too stressed to work five days a week” prevails. Do not accept the notion of making the illogical acceptable. Get involved in local politics. Attend school board meetings. There are more of you than you might think, but most of them are thinking someone else will show up at the meetings.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” – Edmund Burke