Buy the Truth and Sell it Not

Reflections on the new & improved false gods of D.C.

I once heard a perennial local candidate say she was running for office for the umpteenth time because “I love politics,” as though her lust for authority were a qualification for it. In fact, it provided a compelling reason not to vote for her, just as one would not hire a marriage counselor who’s been to the altar several times. (I also heard the late Mickey Rooney say in all seriousness that his eight marriages demonstrated his commitment to the institution.)

Not voting for a bad candidate, however, should never lead to not voting at all, as was the temptation for many conservative Christians during the 2016 Presidential elections. To the contrary, we should participate in the process, not because we love politics, but because we love the God who ordained politics. Romans 13:4 calls the office holder “God’s servant for your good,” so that truth alone makes us responsible both to pray and vote, if not to run for office.

President Ronald Reagan’s awareness of his own accountability to God seemed to settle on him after he took office, and my affection for him grew along the way. Such conviction could never have come from loving politics, but only from a love for Truth. Not your truth vs. mine. Not new truth, but the Truth.

Hero Series #1: Bev

Angel of Chernobyl

I once made an if-you-go-first pledge to my close friend, Beverly Schmidgall, that “someday” I would sing my song, Soldier, at her funeral. Of course, I didn’t expect someday to come early, but on February 25, 2001, at age 51, Bev died in England, due to complications from radiation exposure at Chernobyl, the toxic Ukrainian town where a nuclear meltdown had occurred fifteen years earlier.

We make such promises, hoping never to have to keep them, not only because we dread a last goodbye, but also because the death of a peer reminds us that our own “someday” might come sooner than we expect.

I met the fiery redhead with hair the size of a ten-gallon hat in February 1969, when thirteen Oral Roberts University students formed a weekend singing group that quickly became an international missions ministry called Living Sound. By the late 70s, we had toured in almost forty countries on five continents, along the way forging the kind of foxhole bond that war veterans try in vain to describe.

When Bev went solo in 1977, she headed straight to the world’s trouble spots was. Among other adventures, she lived in Croatia for a year and hitchhiked with soldiers into the battlefields of Bosnia to pray for war victims. She also traversed nearly all of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s 6,000 miles of track, often disembarking on impulse in some dowdy Russian town, and then whispering the word Xristianski to passersby until she either met a fellow believer or got hauled in for interrogation by the Soviet KGB.

In one city, the secret police took her into an unheated office and made her strip to her underwear while undergoing more than an hour of questioning. It was minus 50 Fahrenheit that day.

Getting Righteous Anger Right

Sometimes stomping the serpent's head means breaking a few toes

Representing Christ properly occasionally leaves you no choice but to stop a trash-talker in his tracks, to stomp the serpent’s head even if it means breaking someone’s toes in the process. But most Christians aren’t confident in their ability to obey St. Paul’s instructions to “put off falsehood and speak truthfully to [your] neighbor,” while being careful that “in your anger, [you] do not sin” or “give the devil a foothold” (Ephesians 4:25-27).

Gets harder as it goes, doesn’t it? Don’t lie; no problem. Tell the truth to my neighbor; well, sometimes I’d sooner let things pass. But be angry without sinning? Hah! Try doing my taxes sometime.

Anger needn’t become the launching pad for ongoing resentment, not if you understand that “righteous anger” is always founded on a righteous standard: the Bible. But, like spanking a child or punishing a criminal, displaying righteous anger also comes with a couple of rules.

  • It is never to be exercised on non-scriptural grounds.
  • It is never to be withheld on non-scriptural grounds.

So, when is it appropriate to blow your stack for Jesus?

My wife and I once found ourselves facing that quandary during a tour of Apartheid-era South Africa, where I was addressing primarily white congregations, challenging them to not merely express sorrow for past racism, but to actively, sincerely embrace their black brothers while time remained.

More Babies Please

Evangelism that lasts for generations

If you’re pregnant and currently walking through—okay, waddling through—your ninth month of pregnancy, please don’t slap my face when I tell you that you’re beautiful. Here’s why.

First, it’s neither a corny attempt to make you feel better, nor veiled sarcasm to try and get a laugh. No, it’s just the truth. You are Eve before the apple.  And even though you probably—no, almost certainly—don’t feel the least bit beautiful…you are.

Second, I have long maintained that the biblical way to outnumber the wicked is to simply outnumber them. The late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, evil and twisted though he was, once predicted that Islam would conquer Europe without a shot fired, simply because Muslim immigrants were averaging about five children per household while birthrates amongst Europe’s native populations were (and still are) plummeting. Today, it looks like mad Muammar was prophesying.

11/9/1991: The Day the Monkey Died

Darwinism takes a dirt nap

Charles Darwin succeeded in foisting bad science upon the world only because bad science was preferable to the truth that God really is God and we have to stand accountable before him. Being a smart monkey is a better deal to sinful man than admitting he’s sinful. Grow a tail, lose a soul. Nice trade.

The outworking—effluence actually—of Darwin’s theories culminated in a modern vanity called communism, that state of perfection a society achieves after socialism has worked its magic. Vladimir Lenin promised, in fact, that within two generations he would produce a perfect state, a “worker’s paradise,” where the only government necessary would be a few administrative clerks, and where the public urinals would be made of solid gold. Ah, yes, gold: But would they flush?

Humanism Goes to School

How "free" turned out to be so expensive

Early in the fight for America’s soul, rationalists emerged from within the ranks of the Congregationalist churches in New England where, in no small part as a reaction to the stirrings of what would become America’s Second Great Awakening, they began to propound “Unitarianism,” a heresy as old as the Reformation itself. Unitarians saw man as inherently good, Jesus as strictly human, Satan as non-existent and God as a hands-off Creator. Evil was attributable to a lack of education and opportunity (sound familiar?) thus rendering sin the playing out of ignorance and repression. Give a man enough information, their reasoning went, and his natural inclination must be to better himself and his world around him.

Information plus opportunity equals paradise. It was an idea as old as the seduction of Eve, and it proved as powerful, especially around Boston. By the early nineteenth century the new world’s first Congregational church had bitten the apple to become America’s first Unitarian church.

While the evangelists of both Awakenings had drawn thousands to arbors and altars where tears of repentance were emphasized, these humanist forebears quietly set their sights on key areas of society like economics, civil government, and especially education.

The Truth about Lies

Why the Left can't govern and the Right can't make a sale

Have you ever noticed that the Left tends to be far better at motivating crowds—especially young, emotional ones—than their counterparts on the Right? I mean, really, wasn’t Bernie more entertaining than Hillary, Ted, Rand and just about every other horse in the 2016 race with the exception of Candidate Trump?

Truth be told, the celebrants of the cultural Left—political progressives, entertainment elites and most news media—are nearly always better at propaganda, because they generally deal in untenable ideals (aka fantasies) rather than reality, and hold little regard for truth other than to turn it into balloon animals they will then proclaim alive. Such truth-twisting is grounded in the moral quicksand of relativism, and it shows up in bogs everywhere from the halls of academia to the Supreme Court, with its “living document” view of the Constitution, to Saturday Night Live, whose stock in trade is caricature trying to come off as commentary.