Third Day

Hundreds of students across the Piedmont Triad walked out of class during Wednesday’s nationwide walkout, but Connor Groce had his own way of taking a stand by staying in his seat.  Connor said, “I just spent the moment in prayer and in reflection,” the West Forsyth senior explains.  “Obviously, for the families of the victims in Florida and the horrific tragedy down there but for our nation as a whole because I think we live in a very fragile time.”

At its core, the current debate taking place about gun control is about more than guns.  What’s being protested is a symptom of a much larger problem.  We will not be able to legislate away evil.  No laws written on any book will change the human heart.

Our day is a lost culture that the students have inherited from us.  It’s a lost culture that mocks or ignores God and His “Timeless Truths“.  We live in a generation that is top-heavy for carnal pleasures and temporary thrills.  We have lost control of ourselves.

There is a growing epidemic of gun violence.  In addition to Florida, there have been school shootings in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  “How many schools, how many children have to get shot?” Andrew Pollack asked and pleaded with the President of the United States.  Mr. Pollack’s daughter, Meadow, was murdered in Parkland, Florida.  He said, “It stops here, with this administration and me, because I’m not going to sleep until its fixed.”  Any parent can understand this man’s broken heart if it were one of us before President Trump.

Many of the people who want to control and eliminate the symptoms are the very ones, sadly, who want to ban the very things that will lead to healing and revival.  Unless this country and her churches turn back to God, those with a fervent and sincere faith are going to be continually mocked and marginalized rather than respected and uplifted, meaning there is absolutely no help or hope from outside of ourselves, for God is out and Satan is in.

John Adams, second President, remarked that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  History is very clear:  godlessness and immorality leads to any outbreak of evil.  If Conor Groce can take 17 minutes to pray in a classroom, can not God’s people take more and call upon God’s grace and mercy to start in us.

“To him whom my soul loveth, who wakens me morning by morning and helps me rise with “wings as an eagle.”

It takes prayer and it takes work to meet with God.  Prayer and Work seem to be an oxymoron.  What are they doing in the same sentence?  The two words together seem so contradictory, like jumbo shrimp, civil war — or child safe!  Prayer and Work seem to be opposite concepts.  Yet we have discovered that prayer that doesn’t work, doesn’t work!

Think about it:  it takes work to step out of time to enter into eternity.  It takes work to learn the art of leaving things undone so that the greater thing can be done.  It takes work to miss a meal to take special time to pray.  One might even lose some sleep to learn that prayer is work.  Prayer that works is work, and those who work at prayer realize that prayer works.  That’s not just a play on words, it is the concept of what it means to pray.

Prayer itself is a gracious gift of God.  He made it possible for us to walk right into his presence and talk to him as our Father.  Every child of God has the right and the privilege to come into His presence.  God is available and ready to meet with us at the drop of a hat.  But Satan has a way, for he desires to get into your devotional life, for he wants you to let go of your devoted life to God.  As the little couplet says, “The devil trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees.”

He will do anything to keep you from loving your Savior.  He wants you to stay in bed until the last moment and he wants you to rise not with the “wings of eagles” but with the “forlorn look of a tired soul.”  Find in Jesus your all in all.  Develop your fellowship with Him through your prayer conversation with your God and your Father.

“Wherefore, laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speaking, as newborn babies, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow by it” (I Peter 2:1-2).

With the breakup of the home we are becoming an angry nation.  With the advent of kids who are angry at life and what it has done to them there is an uptick in gun violence.  What used to be settled through normal communicable channels and court systems, we are now discounted and unsettled through the vengeance of young men or women with a gun.

The race issue has surfaced like days before.  Except now the media covers quickly what it took papers days to print.  Many conservative speakers can no longer enter our universities because of radical leftists who have resorted to violence.  Add white supremacists into the mix and we could have a war on our hands.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer lamented the fact that students and professors during the Hitler era resorted to silence so as not to lose their jobs, etc.  Today in our institutions Christian students, and especially professors, have to keep their convictions to themselves in order to graduate or continue teaching.  One cannot even say, “Jesus“, in a classroom without repercussions.

I have no hope that the immigration crisis will be ever resolved.  As both sides demonize each other we will continue to have a toxic atmosphere of name-calling and political posturing.  The good news with all of this is that the churches have the privilege of welcoming whomever God sends to us.

God has called us to honor Him by letting our light shine despite the consequences.  What is at stake are the eternal values that has been handed down to us.  The Lord Jesus has given His Church (notice that I said, “His Church“) all the resources she needs to be faithful in every culture, every generation, and every circumstance.  He will not forsake us now!  By His Grace let the Church be the Church!

“To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose…a time to gain, and a time to lose” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 6 NKJV).

A police officer pulled over a distinguished-looking woman, the story goes, and asked why she had exceed the posted speed limit.  The old gentlemen sitting in the passenger seat laughed and said, “Well, young man, we were speeding to get to the place before we forget where we are going!”  Many people forget that they are going somewhere — either  Heaven or Hell.   And many have forgotten, just as importantly, that there are those who are following them on the same journey.  As long as we are breathing we are leading the way.

Heaven is a time to gain, while Hell is a time of loss.  If you throw in Heaven on this earth, you will also gain Earth.  But if you throw in Earth without Heaven you will find yourself the loser, and you would have lost the most anyone can lose for eternity.  There is a season, and when that season is over we either have gained or we have lost.  Many people are ill-prepared for the realities of retirement and the realities of eternity.

“Then she arose…that she might return from the country of Moab; for she had heard…how the Lord had visited his people in giving them food” (Ruth’s 1:6).

Naomi left the Promise Land, the House of Bread, Bethlehem.  She, along with her husband and sons, only planned to stay for a little while in Moab, but she ended up dwelling there in the land that is half-washed.  She lost her husband and her sons to death.  She was a broken woman who was living in a barren and pagan land.

Repentance can be dramatic, but most true repentance is like a gentle rain, slowly and surely softening the hardened soil of our hearts.  In Psalm 23, the Lord “restores my soul” (v. 3).  The Hebrew word for “restores” is shun, which means “turn” or “return.”  When Naomi returns to Israel, to the house of the Lord, her own soul is restored.

If you a part of the group that is “weary and heavy laden“, return with your depression, anger, and withdrawal.  You can come back complaining, but “come back.”  Come to Jesus with your mess, grumpiness, loneliness, and your self-centered heart.  He will clean you up.  The point is to come back! He loves you with an everlasting love!