“Thy Kingdom Come”
"In recent years we have witnessed the rapid decline of more than 150 years of strong Christian biblical influence in this country. A few years ago someone suggested that we were living in post-Christian America. Although it struggles to deserve a nominal Christian label, today it is more like sub-Christian America. People attend religious services and say they believe in God, but at best they adhere to a practical atheism and situation-al morality. Whatever vestiges of Christian religion still remain in our culture have become weak and compromising, if not cultism and apostate.
Our nation now affirms, through its legislative bodies and courts, a distinctively anti-Christian agenda. Anything singularly Christian has been virtually swept away under the aegis of equal rights and moral freedom. The divine standards and biblical morality that our nation once embraced are assaulted constantly. Moral freedom now reigns. Materialism and the breakdown of the family are epidemic. Abortions, sexual evils, drugs, and crime are rampant. And our leaders are at a loss to know what to do because there are no standards left to provide controls for these problems.
For those of us who remember the great revival of the ’70s, the debauchery of the ’90s is particularly saddening. But that sadness, if left unchecked, can lead to resentment—and in particular a resentment toward those in control of the government, the media, and society who encourage an anti-Christian agenda.
What concerns me most, however, is the open hostility that resentment with our nation’s leadership often fosters. When that attitude merges with the perspective that Christians ought to impact the culture by legislating morality, the church is severely diverted from its main purpose. Although changing our society by calling it back to a safer morality is a noble goal, that has never been Christ’s goal for His church.
The church has but one mission in this world: to lead people destined to spend eternity in hell to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and an eternity in heaven. If people die in a communist government or a democracy, under a tyrant or a benevolent dictator, believing homosexuality is right or wrong, or believing abortion is a woman’s fundamental right to choose or simply mass murder, that has no bearing on where they will spend eternity. If they never knew Christ and never embraced Him as their Lord and Savior, they will spend eternity in hell. ..."
John F. MacArthur, Jr., Alone With God (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1995).
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