Tried With Fire

Another timely quote from Body Broken: One of the reasons Christians tend to fight with each other over politics is that we are often secret utopians. We say we trust in Christ, but we really trust in ourselves, or some human solution, to make the world a better place. We keep hoping for and believing in the "silver bullet" - the candidate, the policy, the platform, the Supreme Court configuration - that will fix things. And when we find that someone else's silver bullet differs from ours, we don't trust him anymore - even if he is a fellow believer. Or we keep clinging to the mistaken notion that American is God's chosen nation, positioned to make things right in the world: if we can just get America "right" we will put the world to rights. And when we find someone with a different vision for what it means to get America "right" we demonize him. pg. 37, location 877 I wrote some comments about the above passage, but I deleted them. I'...

I started Body Broken yesterday and finished it this morning. I ordered a used physical copy because there are too many good passages that need to be underlined, passages like this one: "If the crucified and risen Messiah cannot hold Democrats and Republicans together under the same roof, if he cannot enable them to work through their differences, then he is not much of a Savior - he certainly is not the Messiah of the world. Stories like Woodland Hills 1 "prove" that in the final analysis, we are a social organization just like any other social organization - united by the same sort of bonds that unite other human groups, and apt to dissolve for the same reasons that other human groups dissolve. This is more than unfortunate. It is disobedient, a betrayal of our Saviour, the cause of which he has called us, and the purpose for which he died. It proves that we have allowed our vision of America to capture our hearts more deeply than God's vision for us as his amba...

I normally don't read from my Kindle so I forget what books I've downloaded, usually ones that were free. As I was skimming the index, I found this book - Body Broken: Can Republicans and Democrats Sit in the Same Pew? by Charles Drew. I am not looking forward to the upcoming election cycle. If we are already this polarized, can it get any worse? So I started reading. Those who bemoan the moral and social disintegration of American culture are often right. But when they speak to us in such a way as to stir up fear and panic in our hearts, they are wrong. God reigns, and therefore we need not - we must not - be afraid as we exercise our civic responsibilities no matter what seems to be going on around us. Consider the damage panic can bring. First of all, panic impairs judgment. If we give in to the voice that cries "Act now, or our great country will the forever lost!" we will find ourselves demanding easy and quick solutions to our nation's problems, when in...