The Power of Hope in a Faithless Age

I just wrote this letter to a friend, in part from my own failings and struggles, but with the desire to build others up who have the same questions that I have struggled through:

Christians have the burden of loving and not judging. The non-Christian has no desire not to judge as they have no desire to live according to the love of Christ. God forbid we start to sound the same. Christians (on the Right AND Left) tend to turn to the state to legislate morality more than we turn to Jesus to change our own hearts. The Lord gave me a question last Friday night during my bible study wherein I asked everyone to label what they considered the worst sin to be. I had answers ranging from rape, to causing others to sin, to murder. Then I asked them, "When you see others committing those sins does it bother you more than your own sins?" What do you think? We want to judge others so badly. We demand JUSTICE for their failings and then as soon as we screw up we beg for MERCY!

Take a fresh look at the bible. It is disingenuous to believe that it has been translated badly. There are literally tens of thousands of the earliest Apostolic and prophetic writings from antiquity that have been found which bear witness to the faithfulness of translations. Certainly there are very short segments that are difficult to translate correctly but the Book in its entirety is a marvel of faithfulness. Is God not powerful enough to preserve His word? Are His people so unfaithful that they should want to politicize it completely as so many of us modern Christians seem to have done? I don't think so. There are things more lasting, more eternal and more important than our fading political realm. As Peter said when Jesus asked if the Apostles would leave Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life!" THAT is our message. Eternal life. In the end, no one will care about our current state of politics but everyone will care about which side of Jesus they fall upon. Jesus held high the Scriptures (yes, even those "awful" passages from Deuteronomy and such). He even cited the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to say that if they had been commanded to repent they would have done so (insinuating that they were less wicked than the Pharisees). There is no evidence to show that the words of scripture have been so perverted as to be rendered untrustworthy. The root of our distrust is our own fallibility and cautiousness towards our own race. But God's power and grace supersedes our meager abilities to sin. He has preserved the meaning of Eternal Life (Salvation) for people of every tribe, tongue and nation to hear. Let us not try and remove His glory from our lives by questioning His very power to be King over creation.