It was always going to take a minor miracle for a real conservative/constitutionalist to win the White House in this age of idiocracy. And whatever it is we end up getting from Donald Trump, it appears our thirst for the juicy fruit of such an outcome will only sporadically be quenched.
Good thing we are a people of Easter then. At least I hope we still are.
Good thing we believe in miracles.
So as we enter into the Lord’s passion in 2017, we must remind ourselves of the importance to pray without ceasing to the only God who can manifest them in our lives. Even on our best day, His guidance is the only true north. And we have so few ‘best days’ anymore.
America is in shambles on every front. We are economically stagnant and indebted almost beyond calculation. The vicious hate of ISIS is met just as often with concerns about Islamophobia as it is with calls for justice. Men are putting on dresses and entering women’s bathrooms because they and the enablers of their psychosis think they are the 21st century’s Rosa Parks. A death-cult, that receives hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers each year, is seen on camera cavalierly bargaining away the dismembered remains of the human beings they murdered. And the very freedom to call out to God at all, religious freedom, is being pushed as far back into a corner as our cowardice and moral ambiguity will allow.
This is all, quite frankly, beyond the power of any man — or even our formidable Constitution — to cure. These are mortal wounds. We need an exorcism. We need to be raised from the dead.
But our Savior has been there. He has done that. He can show us the way. Not, though, if our faith is a fetid pool of confusion. If we have been praying at all, we have largely been praying to the god we want and not the God we need. That just won’t do. We may as well be praying to a Buick or a tomato.
To get ourselves right, we must set ourselves aside. We must trust God in His ways and not make St. Peter’s mistakes. The rooster is ever crowing in the face of our denials and rationalizations. Get behind me, Satan!
Do we pray for our enemies? Or is our idolatry such that God is fashioned as nothing more than the image of a lottery ticket, Oprah, or a leprechaun in our mind’s eye?
So sayeth the Lord:
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. — Matthew 5:43-48
Yes, we must pray for Islamic terrorists and progressive usurpers and Chris Christie. They most certainly have been enemies of the good, for by your fruits you will know them. But so have we. And that whole death on a cross thing was not grading on a curve. We are no less in need of its healing and salvific power than they are.
Are the challenges daunting? Yes, but despair is not an option.
We have been far more likely to be a vanity of vanities instead of the salt of the earth, haven’t we? Our sports teams and our wardrobes concern us to no end, but a rudimentary test of our faith so often ends in deceit or depravity.
We are basically good people, right? No. Thou shall not judge, right? Wrong again. A loving God really wouldn’t do fill-in-the-blank, right?
So sayeth the Lord:
“How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” — John 14:9-13
If that be our God, let not our hearts be troubled regardless of what times lay ahead. Are the challenges daunting? Yes, but despair is not an option. Not when Easter makes it possible to face what’s in front of us with this promise:
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:31-39)
Source: Easter: The only hope we have, and the only hope we need