Or as Jedi Master Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no ‘try’.” For anything important, anything that really matters, anything that’s truly a challenge, either you abandon yourself to it and you give it all you have, or you’d best walk away and go somewhere else. Otherwise, “squish like grape.” There’s no three ways about it.
This is truest when it comes to following God. That’s why God is very clear—we see it in Moses, and we see it in Jesus—that either you’re striving to follow him with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, or else you’re not following him at all. Granted, even at our best, the execution is never entirely there; but the intent and the desire and the commitment have to be. Obedience that wants to make an exception at any point isn’t obedience at all.Read more→
I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge these days, but Switzerland has long been known for its neutrality. It stayed out of both world wars of the last century, neither attacking anyone nor suffering invasion. Its neutrality was established by treaty among the principal military powers of Europe—specifically, the Treaty of Paris of 1815 that ended the Napoleonic Wars.
You also might know that the Pope’s bodyguards are Swiss. I’m not sure if that was widely known in this country or if I just learned it from reading Richard Scarry growing up. I know that’s where my mental image of the Swiss Guard came from (see above). Right along with the Queen’s Guard in their big bearskin hats, you had the Swiss Guard in Rome dressed up like a bunch of clowns. Knowing as I did that Switzerland was neutral, I figured they were a joke.
You can imagine my surprise when I found out that for over two centuries, Swiss mercenaries were the elite soldiers of Europe. The beginning of the end came in 1515 when Swiss troops suffered their first defeat since the 1200s, and the leaders of the Swiss Confederacy realized that there were major downsides to all that warfare. For one thing, after so many battles, other nations were learning to copy their tactics, and some of them were getting pretty good. For another, while exporting their people had brought a lot of money back into Switzerland, it had also put the country at risk. That wasn’t clear as long as they were winning, but once they lost a battle, the risk became obvious. Switzerland declared itself neutral and outlawed mercenary service, allowing only those troops serving in the French army and the Swiss Guard at the Vatican.Read more→
Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. He was also the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them, but I have my suspicions. You see, this was during the Thirty Years’ War, and in 1637 Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkart’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinkart wrote these words:
Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in whom his world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms, hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
During Napoleon’s reign in France,a man named Charnet offended the emperor—unintentionally—and was thrown in jail to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”
But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he saw that however much we may pound down this earth, the glory and beauty of God still breaks through, and so he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”Read more→
In October, we’re going to be participating in an initiative called Pray31. The men who’ve launched this are hoping to get one million Christians in this country to pray together methodically for the US every day in October. They aren’t asking for a major time commitment; the guide for this initiative is what they’ve called the “US Prayer Atlas,” which gives two simple prayer requests per day. These requests are laid out through the month to get all of us praying for every US state and territory, for our national system and institutions, for the church in this country, and for revival in the land. I’ve ordered copies of the Prayer Atlas for everyone, and I hope everyone in the church will use theirs daily next month as we pray together for our nation.
Now, I think this is an admirable project, and I’m glad to have our church join with churches across America in prayer for this country, but I do have one criticism: I think the vision of the men doing this is too small. Their materials seem primarily concerned with public moral standards and whether the US is being governed according to biblical principles, and I suspect that if suddenly this nation looked a lot more like it did in the ’50s, they’d figure their prayers had been answered. Certainly, back then there were many more people in church, the mainline denominations were still planting lots of churches, and there was public respect for Christian faith which is now going if not gone. On the other hand, I had a colleague in Colorado who pastored one of those 1950s church plants; I remember her saying that when she got there, the church knew nothing about Jesus, because their previous pastors had never talked about him.
Donald Grey Barnhouse, who was then the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia, read the signs of the times clearly. As Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary California tells the story,
Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
I think he was right. The Devil would as soon damn people through religion as debauchery, through morality as immorality; after all, people who are immoral and debauched are just likely to hit bottom and realize they need God. Moral, upstanding citizens are likely to think they already have him, whether they have any actual relationship with him or not.Read more→
