August 21, 2017 - "Time To Take A Stand"

Chaplain’s Corner

Monday, August 21, 2017

Time to Take a Stand

Greetings, Patriots!

I find myself doing a lot of thinking lately, and feeling the need to share some of the things I have been meditating on. Sadly, when a Christian wants to follow his Bible-trained conscience and follow God’s example of righteousness, he is quickly turned on, by his peers, and called many ugly things. I am going to take a chance that someone out there needs to read this blog and pray over the things that are mentioned here. I pray that the scriptures and the admonitions will fall on a fertile mind, and that there will be a chain of events that may lead to someone turning their life over to our glorious Savior, Jesus Christ.

 Romans 1:24-32 New International Version (NIV)

“24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”

 1 Corinthians 6:9-11New International Version (NIV)

“9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a] 10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

These two scriptures speak pretty plainly, and I take comfort in the second one. Of all of those lifestyles that separate us from God, you notice verse eleven says, “And that is what some of you were.” Even well-respected Christians that seem to be followers of Christ may have a past that they are ashamed of. This is why were are constantly told to love the sinner but to hate the sin. Our goal is to show Christ-like love to our fellow man, and not judge them or their hearts, but at the same time, become examples of how the Holy Spirit can and does indwell us and change our lives for the good. We are not to try to live life on the edge, flirting with sin, and celebrating the things that God detests. Sin is sin, and whether our sin of choice is drunkeness, adultery, homosexuality, etc., we must put those things behind us and ask God to clean us up from the inside out.

It is time for us to take a stand for morality and a clean life before God. If others want to choose to follow their weaknesses in the flesh and their passions into disfavor with God, that is between them and Him. But I will not be a part of it, and will not celebrate their immoral and indecent lifestyle. Please don’t ask me to wink at sin or to gloss over it with a simple, “God loves us all just the way we are,” type of approach. The fact is that yes, He does love us just as we are, and He desires to save all of us from the disaster that awaits us if we do not surrender to His perfect will. When someone comes to God with a broken heart and seeks a Savior from sin, he can and will be saved if it is truly from the heart. But someone who is sorry for their sin and seeking forgiveness will want to repent, turn around, and go toward Jesus and God’s clean moral life, and walk away from the depravity of this fallen world of sinful flesh. To continue to wallow in the mire and/or make excuses for the sinful life, or to even go so far as to be proud of the depravity makes one wonder if there ever was true repentance to begin with. And if there was no true repentance, then there was no saving grace, no indwelling of the Holy Spirit, no personal relationship with Abba, no real redemption from our inborn sin.

I mentioned in my last blog that there are only two choices in life: God, or the evil one. One of them will sit on the throne of your heart. Any time God is not your one priority in your life and in your heart, then by default the enemy wins. All he wants is to seek to devour and destroy. All God wants to do is save us from ourselves and clean us up and make us holy and useful as vessels in His service. It’s up to each of us to decide where we stand on the issue of sin. Do we love our fellow men and women even if they are engaged in this life? Yes. Do we pray for them? Yes. Do we see a need for them to surrender to God and become chaste and clean for Him? Yes. Are we going to celebrate sin in any form? No.

 Revelation 18: 4 New International Version

“Then I heard another voice from heaven say: 'Come out of her, my people,' so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues;”

Where do you stand? I would like to hear your feedback on this.

God bless you, one and all, and:
God Bless America!
Stephen King
Chaplain@3upi.com