November 18, 2008

• Insights:
  
  Thoughts on the Nation: An Answer for YankeeDaddy (and others who might want similar answers)

  Yesterday, I received an interesting response by YankeeDaddy to my last post.. I was going to respond to him within that post but it actually covers what I wanted to say next.   Here’s the reply…

  Welcome, Yankee Daddy…

  This is your first time visiting… I admire a man who knows what he believes but please try reading what I said again and don’t jump to conclusions. Think a little bit about what I said.  Love does no wrong to a neighbor…so who's our neighbor? Just who are those aborted babies? What about our children being corrupted with teaching about “alternative lifestyles”? What about our children who must listen to folks who teach that there is no God when they themselves have no clue and no authority to speak at all about it? What the poor who receive promises from folks who will never deliver just to get their vote? That’s not love, my good man, and like it would be true for any person, a government that does or allows these things is no one’s friend.

  You must understand also that my wife and I have spent nearly a year investigating this stuff that only some time later showed up in the news like WorldNetDaily and FoxNews, etc. Much of it was well before anyone figured that Obama would win the primaries and certainly not all of it made it to prime time. It likely that you haven't heard the half of it but perhaps you have.

  I was discussing how things “should be”… examining the authentic to clearly see the fraud... examining how it is supposed to work. The citizen’s obligation to a good government and a good government’s obligation to a good citizen … and bad ones as well. Love does no wrong to a neighbor… and one of those principles that goes along with that is avoiding false accusations even though we suspect the worst.

  I have commented at length about the godlessness in this nation and you are only touching on a small part of it and while it is on record he has been intimately involved in some of these things, we would have a difficult time attaching all of the wrongs of the world to Obama in any more specific way than we could with anyone else. What about a Congress that knowingly put us into the economic mess we are in who tax us into oblivion for their deeds and a judiciary that by in large has ended up permitting these atrocities? What about Clinton who actually made it financially advantageous to send our jobs overseas so that so many people are now in hardship?  If we imagined for a moment that Obama was taken off by an alien spaceship for a while, would wickedness concerning the same things all of sudden leave with him? I would think not.

  What is happening here is that you are not identifying the “opposition” correctly. He may or may not be involved with any of it but if we were to suppose he was, then he would be only one member of a large group who would be doing the same thing and they wanted him in office. Don’t be distracted by one man. This matter of doing wickedness to a neighbor is bigger than any single man. And it is too easy to become as bad as those you condemn.

  You have had some strong words but I need to warn you of something. They can get you in trouble so don’t be talking idly. We must not bear ill will for anyone. That is not our calling. In all this we need to be exceedingly careful because as you saw during the election, the media can make a saint or a devil out of you at its whim and there doesn’t even need to be any truth to the matter. In fact, if any of the stories are true that I see in the news about conspiracies, (and after what I've seen this year, I suspect that they are being concocted to be a setup for somebody) you just about figure that it’ll be the “fundamentalist” Christians who will be blamed even though none of them are even remotely willing to think of doing that. I’m already hearing some elements of hate speech from Christian-haters going in this direction. It wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to think it could even be one of their own leftists who does something like that, it gets covered up, and some Christians, who were nowhere near there, get blamed anyway. That’s not terribly far from the devious way it happened in Nero’s day in Rome. Don’t be foolish! Just don’t even go there.

  So I might advise one thing… the one whose temper flares quickly extinguishes just as quickly in adversity. You have written some serious words which may indeed reflect the thoughts of some. Yet those who are able to keep the flame of freedom and God’s grace toward man burning continuously and seek to do good in the land will have the courage to do the right things in the face of trouble.

  Remember the Objective – bring the message of Christ in a world in need of a Savior.

  Remember the Strategy – love one another so that the world may know you are His disciples

  Remember the Tactics – let the fruit of the Spirit show in our lives to bring the grace of God to man so that the Spirit’s conviction of sin, righteousness, and judgment will be very persuasive in drawing men unto Himself. For against the fruit of the Spirit, there is no law.

  It will then be that a person’s heart is filled with God’s goodness and good fruit will result to the benefit of the community and the nation.

  Here are some other things to think about…

  Prayer for Obama, our president-elect, makes a lot of sense since there is no leader in this world that the Lord cannot control. If you are worried about what he's going to do, then pray. Before I would do anything besides prayer, I would inquire about it with the Lord. Why?

  The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns it wherever He wishes.  Proverbs 21:1 (NASB)

  If we combine that with:

  The mind of man plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps. Proverbs 16:9 (NASB)

  Its not hard to see if the Lord hears and answers our prayers and Obama is not the man of sin in II Thessalonians 2 setting up things for the very end where the Lord Himself  allows a strong delusion on those who refused to love the truth, then it stands to reason that the righteous can cry out to the Lord on behalf of all those babies slain by abortion and the injustice shown to the righteous in the land, etc. and pray that Obama be kept from doing any grievous things that would ultimately result in wickedness, then we have done what we need to do on that front. In fact, I could think of no better prayer than to ask the Lord to alter the outcome of all that he would do such that it would result in goodness and righteousness for everyone (even himself) instead of any wickedness.  Now I might imagine that Obama might even go for that one himself… at least we could hope for that.  But put first things first. The point is to promote goodness and righteousness for all people in our nation not exercising wickedness to get rid of wickedness. It is folly to think that anyone could fix anything that way.

  That does not mean that one should always exclude more drastic measures such as done during the Revolutionary War for the grievances mentioned in the Declaration of Independence for the atrocities done by the Crown toward the colonists but those should always be the means of last resort as it was in that case. I’m sure that we’ll know fairly quickly what the extent of the danger we face, if there is any. To be sure, we are certainly on alert. Yet it must be acknowledged that you are anticipating serious issues to come to pass, not that they have already come to pass unless you know something I don’t.

  If you think this is stupid, let me tell you that all that I’ve asked the Lord for in the last three months, except for asking that Obama not be elected, has already been answered in some rather amazing ways and those requests went well beyond Obama alone. Now I don’t consider myself special and I’ll bet there were numerous others who prayed the same things. I can even see that his election may even be the path of removing all the atrocities that you mention but God is setting up things right now to that end. Not that Obama himself would remove them but what God would allow him to do would result in total removal of the current wickedness in our government by God’s hand alone.

  Next, we need to realize that Obama didn’t put himself into office, a lot of voters (and perhaps fraudulent votes as well) along with a lot of money donated by other people who wanted him there. If you just focus on the one man, what will you do with the rest?  The wickedness goes a lot deeper than anyone might think Obama might do. He has an army of sympathizers who could, on their own, corrupt the very foundations of our Constitution and Bill of Rights without him. To a great degree, they already have done this by making law from those two documents subject to relativistic thinking.

  In addition, wickedness seems to have entered a whole lot of people who one might not expect to be really bloodthirsty, evil folks. I can start to see the turn in the media (and elsewhere) all sorts of hate directed toward believers.  The awful truth for them is that what they hate is the very thing that allows them to live. If you think not, remember Abraham’s request to God concerning Sodom… if only ten righteous are found in the city, will you destroy it? They may be contemplating Sodom’s folly in removing too many righteous and then find themselves destroyed.

  Finally, you had asked me what I would do if… That’s actually an easy answer. I’ll do whatever the Lord permits me to do. Nothing on heaven or earth can touch me without His permission and I can be sure some would certainly like to mess me over if they could. I already know that this has happened before. What would I eat, what would I wear, … He’ll provide what I need. There are some amazing stories I could tell.  What will I do without my Bible? I will remember it all exactly when I need it because the Holy Spirit will make up for what I cannot do myself.  He’s done that before, too, right in the midst of witnessing to a friend of mine over several years and remembered text I couldn’t remember reading before but I found it in the Word later.

  Yet that's the kind of God we have. He's with us and while we can often take ourselves into the depths of imaginations of what might happen and which for the vast majority of the time, never will, we can never say that He leaves or forsakes us. Yes, it could get bad. Who, even in their right mind could not imagine something they could call "the worst"? Then imagine again and find something yet worse again. However, who, among us, has the courage to think of better things and pray to the Lord for that? I hear a lot about what people fear these days. Should we not speak of and pray for what we hope for that is good? Reflecting on it, that indeed is the better way... faith, hope, and love. Faith in Christ brings hope for life and opens up into .... loving one another as its greatest development. It is the rebirth of faith in our hearts that trusts in Christ for our salvation.  Likewise, it is the rebirth of faith that our nation, built on those same principles, can return again to being what the Founding Fathers had envisioned long ago. Yes, indeed pray for that.

  I’ll close with this thought again… may good triumph over evil without becoming evil itself.  Blessings, Mr. Vee

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