The United States is a great nation, no doubt — as "the land of the free and the home of the brave", home to the "American Dream", and a nation carved out of principles of equality and the pursuit of personal happiness, America has a lot of things to be proud of. Though we often take our surroundings for granted, just look towards the Grand Canyon or the skyscrapers of New York or even the quiet patches of rural Georgia...it really is "America the Beautiful."
But I've been feeling pretty burdened for this nation at various points this past year, and it suddenly hit me pretty hard yesterday while I was praying how much I had neglected this burden to pray. This country, our country, is broken, steeped in sin that we leave to fester because of societal pressures and twisted invocations of the terms "tolerance" and "freedom." I thought D.A. Carson (quoted on the Desiring God blog) put it quite aptly when he wrote:
"We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated."
Though he was writing about human nature in general, I think these natural drifts are quite applicable to the American people. I only had to experience the immense difficulties of finding a strong church in our capital, Washington D.C., last summer, and I immediately understood the dire spiritual state of this nation.
We, as a nation that glorifies self-acceptance&love ideologically and yet profits from self-deprecation (read: advertisements+products) and displacement of self-worth onto material possessions and popularity, have perverted the idea of God's unconditional love and His open embrace into one that suggests that God accepts sin, loves wrong, turns a blind eye to the shortcomings we refuse to repent from. If you want proof from the mainstream media, turn to no other than pop idol Lady Gaga's "Born This Way", which claims proudly in the chorus, "I'm beautiful in my way/cuz God makes no mistakes" (truth, God doesn't make mistakes), but then goes on to say that "A different lover is not a sin, believe capital H-i-m" (false, a "different" lover IS a sin and the Bible aka God's Word makes that super clear). Of course, God does love people no matter where they've been or what they've done, but if you are truly to be in an intimate relationship with God and you're not just thinking temporary comfort but an eternal bond guaranteed by the redemptive power of Christ's death, then it goes beyond just having a nice warm and fuzzy Father figure patting you on the head and saying, "It's okay! I LOVE you. And because I love you, you can be and do whateeever you want." I'm sure child psychologists would agree that that kind of loose and indulgent human parenting would only lead to one heck of a messed up child. We need to know that being separated from the Father absolutely stinks, that our actions and attitudes merit this eternal separation, BUT through Christ, who died and experienced this separation (albeit temporarily) in our place, we don't have to. We can approach the Father, who has always loved us but can now truly accept us as sons and daughters thanks to Jesus' atoning sacrifice.
In the aftermath of all this rapture business, one friend commented to me, "Now it'll be even harder to evangelize." Perhaps. Perhaps Christianity has (yet again) been made into a farce in the eyes of our nation, but that shouldn't be a discouragement — and I'm speaking to myself as well, fully acknowledging that I am super shy (and lazy) about evangelism and I am way too PC and unwilling to push buttons and dig deeper whenever we have to go out for servant evangelism with GCC. In fact, it should produce a greater urgency to speak out the truth, now that at least the idea — however comical or absurd the predictions were — of Christ's return is on the radar.
I don't know how much of this resonates with anyone else, but I do know that when I pick up the NYTimes every morning and I rifle through all the stories of chaos and destruction going on in every corner of this the world, I can't help but feel like there is something very, very wrong, and we are in immense need of God's mercy. So yeah, I'm not particularly good at thinking macro-level when it comes to God's plans since I'm usually really (selfishly) wrapped up in my own concerns and interpersonal relationships to even consider how to start praying for something as big as a nation of peoples, let alone a city, but if any of this resonates with you, I would really appreciate if you would join me in praying for this nation that so desperately needs prayers without even realizing how desperate it really is.
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