Revival or Reprieve?

The election is now over. For the second time in our history, a president who served a previous term in office will once again come to power after being out of office for four years (Grover Cleveland’s second presidency was the other instance). Many, especially among those who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, are relieved that Donald Trump won the presidency rather than his opponent, whom many considered a great danger to our nation. Many others, however, see in Trump a dangerous actor who will be a “dictator” and impose some sort of harsh retribution on his political enemies.

The Essential Nature of Discipleship

Just before Jesus left the disciples to return to the right hand of the Father, He gave them a number of commands related to their subsequent ministry. One of them, recorded for us by Matthew in the 28^th chapter of his gospel, was to go into the world and, as they were going, to “make disciples of all nations, teaching them all that I have commanded you.” Thus, the disciples were to basically reproduce themselves by forming new disciples, we could say they were to do so in their own spiritual image. This they did with great zeal for, as we read in the book of Acts, their passion for spreading the good news of Christ was unmatched in the annals of history.

Chaos and Mayhem

William Shirer, witness to what was the Third Reich and author of the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” once made an interesting and insightful comment about Germans as they stood by watching Hitler and his rise to power. “How did it happen that an ancient and cultured people steeped in Christianity, cultivating the arts and sciences, preeminent in technology who gave us Luther and Kant, Bach and Beethoven, Gorta and Einstein, collapsed into savage barbarism in the mid-20^th century?”