temporal1 wrote:joshuabgood wrote: Though I would support "marches" and "protests" and "civil disobedience" etc - so long as they were peaceful...
it could/should be noted that there is very little evidence that any Christians did much (any) of this for the first 1800 years or so...despite having lived in plenty of oppressive regimes.
as lester and max are speaking to above, there is a difference in reaching out to sincerely evangelize with a pure heart .. as opposed to political activism (while citing Christian principles.)
i think i agree with you, there was a change wherein pastors led their flocks to seek answers in government, probably not realizing the ultimate outcome would be for the laity to seek-after earthly answers when they should be seeking God's will. only one God.
how to tell the difference? mike is addressing this.
one red flag is when Christian acts are
preceeded with language like (to paraphrase:)
"i hate trump, i've always hated trump, i insist you hate trump, too - or you are not Christian."
o. and, this is why ..
following might be examples of how evil trump is, being a republican .. (but, i was just thinking last night) trump was a democrat when he (legally) did all those evil things .. further, he was a citizen, not an elected representative. lots of elected representatives have done lots of evil things, not all legal, abusing public trust+monies, but those folks have a short memory on their improprieties, some major.
today we have a sad situation where all matters are now exploited for their
political worth.
pastors: what have you done? laity: what are you demanding of pastors?
matters of faith, family, community, everything is hijacked for political divisiveness.
i pray we can turn away from this, somehow. i don't know how, Jesus does.
identifying the problems, admitting where we've gotten off-track, not where others have gone wrong, but where have we gone wrong?
we can fool ourselves and others, but Jesus knows our dark hearts.
so. His will? or, our vanities?
it's more than tweaking language to veil intent. that's a waste of time. Jesus knows.