Wake Up & Remember Who You Are, & Remember What We Forgot
Word-Of-The-Day: ‘<Jesus, through John, said to the Church of Ephesus>, “(2) I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. (3) You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. (4) Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. (5) Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. (6) But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.”’ (Revelation 2:2-6)
It has been twenty-five years ago, today, of the events of the morning of 11 September 2001, or what we have named 9/11. Four commercial airliners were hijacked by Islamic terrorists, tied to Al-Qaida that was led by Osama bin-Ladan. The airliners departed Boston, Washington DC, and Newark and diverted by the hijackers from their intended destinations, and three of the four hit the targets the hijackers had picked out; the two World Trade Center Towers in New York City, and the Pentagon just outside Washington DC. The fourth airliner was brought down by its passengers in a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Over three thousand Americans died that morning, and estimates of up to two thousand more died in the years that followed, mostly those first responders, construction workers, and volunteers who for months dug out the carnage of the demolished Twin Towers in the heart of Manhattan, from the toxic plumes of the smoldering fires caused by burning jet fuel and debris. It was our generation’s ‘Pearl Harbor’, the infamous and shocking sneak attack by the Imperial Japanese forces that started American involvement in World War II. The shock of 9/11 turned into resolve, and many Americans lined up to donate blood, volunteer for military, police, and firefighter service.
We fought a 20-year war, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and then against Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein, for their actions. It was a two-front conflict that the United States fought, with justification, to rid the US and the world the scourge of the terror threatened by these entities. Many American military members served in the Middle East and fought in these two nations, often having deployed multiple times in both Iraq and Afghanistan and in their neighboring nations that supported the US war effort.
The 9/11 attacks and subsequent efforts of the recovery afterwards and of the GWOT had many Americans vow to ‘never forget’. Yet, despite our efforts, I believe as a nation ‘we forgot’. I do not make this claim flippantly or with any desire to belittle the efforts we made, as I played a small role, as many Americans did, in that effort to avenge our fallen citizens of 9/11.
Yet, we find our nation today in the throes of division. Our nation, founded on Christian principles, has seen a soft, quiet invasion of Islamic fundamentalists, who have crept into positions of power and control, and are now attempting to subvert historical American culture and norms, siding with the failed policies of communism to undermine traditional American values and replace them with their own. This subversion comes from an improper vision many American Christians have, that tolerance of sin and sinful values is Godly, that we must submit to ‘co-exist’ and meld our Christian values, the ones our nation was founded on, with the foreign values of immigrants, who we no longer expect to adapt in any degree to our values.
This is, in part, what Jesus, through the provision of His Revelation to the Apostle John, shares with us in His summary of the Church of Ephesus. Jesus acknowledges that His followers attempt to be Faithful, that we, within the confines of the church, follow His Word and act according to His ways. We are devout in our activities within the church in ‘doing church’, and when the church encountered opposition, we will stand together, inside the confines of the church.
But Jesus has not called us to be only Faithful, devout, and steadfast inside the confines of the church, but to be so the other six-and-a-half-days outside of it, as individuals. Our worship, devotion, and love of Christ needs go beyond the confines of the ‘shadow of the steeple’ and our homes but out into the society we have let false religion, illicit values, and sin run rampant in. Jesus gives us the warning that in doing so we have forsaken Him, trading in our love and dedication to His ways for the tacit approval of the secular worldview through the inclusive tolerance for ‘co-existence’, mistaking tolerance of sin in others as a Christian virtue.
We may hate these sinful actions, and within the church repudiate them, as Jesus mentions with the ‘practice of the Nicolaitans’. But if we do not speak up against those practices, including the voice we carry in the public forum through our voting, we become complicit. If we speak against evil practices of pagan worship in church but then promote the importation of pagan principles through supporting unvetted immigration policies, we become complicit. Our corporate complicity in the twenty-five years since 9/11 screams, ‘we forgot’.
Jesus, in his condemnation of the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2, gives us a way to correct our wrongdoing; repent and return to Him and His ways, and live in His ways at all times, steadfast in Him and without compromise and giving into pagan values. It is not a physical battle we have to wage, but one of Spiritual conviction and purpose. Vote for Christian values and their growth, not for secular expediency or personal gain. Provide the ‘counterpoint’ of Biblical Truth, through the knowledge gained through the study of Scripture and the guidance of the Spirit, to confront the immoral points of the secular worldview.
The battle, prayerfully, never will be one that is physical or violent, but one fought softly through the promotion of Truth through our voices and actions. Show and speak of the Love of Christ wherever you go. Confront, with respect and love, those that oppose Jesus with Truth. Do not support activities that promote ‘co-existence’ as being Christian, instead promote that only Jesus alone can bring peace in the lives of people, as He is the only way to Salvation and Eternity with God.
‘We forgot’. We are here in the situation today because while we were focused on fighting the enemy physically ‘over there’, we did not focus in protecting ourselves, our society, culture, and way of life, ‘here’ in our own backyard. My plea for all us who are Faithful in Christ is to ‘wake up and remember’, who we are and what we are called to do, to regain that which we have lost, and honor the memory of those who sacrificed over the creation and preservation of our nation and, most importantly, the promotion of the cause of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our God.
