To Christian Parents
American Christianity has long been of the world, and still, they came for us.
Do not heed my words because I am without sin. Hate me if you want to, but heed my words because they are true.
Brothers and Sisters – did we learn nothing from the past three years? Do you honestly think that we can simply return to the status quo of nominal cultural Christianity and its non-aggression pact with the world? How do we think our country and our culture got to a place where we are desperately defending our Christian safe spaces, and our supposedly Christian congregations never returned after we reopened our churches? Do you think that God is honored because we are able to keep kids from having gay pride celebrations in Christian schools, or that we will spare our families from persecution by laying low and compromising to avoid offending a world that hates our Savior?
American Christianity has long been of the world, and still, they came for us. Still, they closed down your corporate worship, shut down your schools, and ordered masks onto the faces of your children. Still, they target our businesses when we refuse to bake gay wedding cakes, drive us from the public square, and demand our preachers cease proclaiming the righteous and holy standards of God.
Do we think it is over? Are we so ignorant as to think that if we can keep our kids from being gay that they will be saved? Is this what our faith has become? Excusing pastors who refuse to call sin what it is and call sinners to repent, and instead preach “love” as defined by the godless world? Who are ashamed to stand for the rights of the unborn? When we rightly identify the wickedness of baptizing those who continue to practice homosexuality (Romans 1:32), do we see that this sinful deception is enabled by the replacement of the Gospel with a world-pleasing counterfeit that ignores the gravity of the sins that put Jesus on the cross?
Jesus said, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you (John 15:18). 2 Timothy 3:12-13 says, “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
Are we equipping our children for the persecution that comes from living a godly life (which is the fruit of repentance), or are we being deceived by impostors? Will our children find that the only thing we were willing to defend was our comfortable, protective Christian space, or will they find us faithfully preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ even if it costs us everything?
The Gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing. Jesus is a rock of offense to the lost, not a friend. Not until God works the miracle of salvation in the hearts of sinners and they are brought to saving faith and repentance is the righteous anger and wrath of an Almighty God against them covered by the blood of Christ. Only then are they part of the family of God.
Salvation is preceded and followed by repentance. Not caused, but evidenced by good fruit – obeying all that God commands. A person continuing in unrepentant sin is not a Christian, whether or not a preacher told them they were! And love does not hide God’s truth from the lost! Yes, Christians still sin, but when we do we are chastened by the Holy Spirit and returned to the narrow path of righteousness. We continue to repent because it is an inalienable characteristic of our new nature! Jesus did not die on the cross in order that we would stay enslaved to sin, but that we would be free of it! We must preach this to our children, to their school, and to a lost and dying world – with no compromises! Stand in fear of the holiness of God, and proclaim the full counsel of his Word because you love Him and you love your neighbors’ souls more than you love their feelings!
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. We will love our neighbors by sharing with them the convicting, offensive, glorious, miraculous truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And the world will hate us for it. And we will be persecuted as we desire to live godly lives – some of which will come from those who claim the name of Christ. I will praise the name of Jesus when my children are persecuted for his name.
Brothers and Sisters, I pray you will do the same. Be willing to lose everything this world has to offer before you move an inch from the Gospel that brought you to salvation!