An excerpt from an earlier post.
If this kind of Christianity (“Christianism”?) really had a “God who is there”, a God who responds to prayer of integrity, surely the prayer going on in churches all over this country would have brought much healing and health to this culture.
Schools would be much more effective and wholesome places because of the genuine prayer going on in the churches and neighborhoods around them, and in the hearts inside them.
So either their God is not there, or He is not listening to their prayers – or they are not praying out of school nearly as much as they say they’d like everyone else to be praying in school.
Saint Paul once wrote, ‘the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but are mighty through God.’ It seems to me that the current politicized religious activist groups have that quite backwards – their God is not mighty enough to work through spiritual means, so they will use carnal and even corrupt weapons to fight on his behalf – poor weak God.
Instead of effective prayer, and imitation of the One who described himself as “meek and lowly of heart”?, we get all this war-talk and war-reality.
They give us both “culture war” and the more immediately bloody and destructive military war. Charles Finney wrote of this approach to spreading Christianty, 170 years ago, “They contend for peace in a spirit of outrageous war.”
The Spirit whose fruits are more attractive to me is the one who produces “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness … self-control.”
Smashing. Pun intended.