What Are We Fighting For?
Last Sunday (4th April 2010) there was a programme on television asking whether Christians were being marginalised in Britain. I have not seen the programme but I have read reviews and apparently it dealt with the situation reasonably fairly. It seems it showed how Christians are suffering a degree of mistreatment in our society. This is something I have discussed before and no doubt it will continue to come up. That is very likely since the Labour Party has indicated that they will seek to repeal Lord Waddington’s free speech safeguard from the sexual orientation ‘hatred’ offence if they win the next election. This Equality and Diversity agenda will continue to eat into what we as Christians see as free speech and religious liberty.
It is undoubtedly important that we maintain our efforts to argue for the liberty to preach the Gospel freely, and to speak openly about what the Bible says. That is why we should be constantly thanking God for the Christian Institute and similar organisations that monitor trends and developments in our society, and praying for them.
However, the prominence given to these issues in the Media in general, in the Christian press in particular and by individual believers raises a question in my mind. How would the Apostles and the Early Christians regard our approach? How would the Reformers and the Scottish Covenanters react to our reaction to a degree of persecution? How would our brothers and sisters in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Northern Nigeria and many other countries assess our complaints about loss of freedom?
The question surely is what are we as twenty-first century believers fighting for? Why do we demand freedom of speech and religious liberty? Are we buying into the secular concept of human rights? What really is our motivation? I have hopes and fears about what the answer might be.
My fears are that we are mourning a supposed lost golden age and we want to go back to a time when it was easier to be a Christian. I am afraid that we have grown so used to our comforts and advantages that we dread losing them and even fear having to try to live truly christianly in a changed world. The values and attitudes of those who suffer elsewhere in the world and of those who have gone before us are quite alien to us. Is it the restriction on preaching the Gospel that really worries us? If that is so how active have we actually been in going out and using the freedoms that now we appear to be losing? How earnest are we in witnessing to our families and friends, our neighbours and work colleagues; to people we meet each day? I confess that I fall so far short here that I feel ashamed to berate politicians over lost freedoms. I have had them and wasted them. How can I now bemoan their loss without being a hypocrite?
I fear that the Lord may be removing our privileges. And would He not be just in doing this? It may be that we are being called to a time when we have to stand up and pay a price for the Gospel. That may not, of course, be a bad thing. We have had a time of great opportunity for the Gospel and in that time the church has regressed. It is not uncommon for churches to go years without seeing any conversions at all. The impact of the Gospel on our society is almost nil. The rising generation is quite heathen with scarcely any appreciation of what Christianity truly stands for.
Of course, we pray about this and we are deeply sad, but we also tend to accept it. We hide in the Sovereignty of God. But on what basis? The Scriptures give us no ground for such acceptance. Yet we have learned to be too content about these things. There is a multiplicity of promises about the effectiveness of the Gospel in its saving power, and the giving of the Spirit in His convicting and enabling power. Yet we do not claim these promises. We do not persist in prayer and plead with God to fulfil His promises. Our forefathers did that. To go any protracted time without conversions saw them holding special times of prayer and bombarding heaven until God took away their barrenness. We have not been desperate enough about the absence of the manifest presence of the Lord among us in convicting and saving power. Where is the crying for Revival? Where is the spirit of prayer that Jacob knew and made him refuse to let go until God blessed him? Where is the spirit of Elijah that kept praying until it stopped raining and then kept praying until it started raining?
But I said I had hopes as well. And so I do. My hope is that we might be roused by the threats that appear to be coming to us: That where God’s mercies have not stirred us the withdrawing of privileges might. My hope is that we will not only pray about the loss of liberty but we will really start to pray about the need for the Spirit to come. The truth of Scripture is undiminished – “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty” (Zechariah 4:6). My hope is that the pressures that may come may stop us being so preoccupied with our methods, innovations, and activities, and more dependent on the Lord Himself. My hope is that with the loss of liberty we might be shaken out of our worldliness and preoccupation with things so that eternal realities might become much more prominent in our thinking.
So let us maintain our efforts to argue for the liberty to preach the Gospel freely and to speak openly about what the Bible says. And let us grasp what opportunities still remain to us and be bold and earnest for the Lord. But let us also realise that there is something more important than physical and political freedom. It is the freedom that comes through the Gospel. Multitudes are physically and politically free who are yet captive in sin and darkness and doomed to a lost eternity. If God must take our privileges away so that we may become more zealous for the lost then so be it! Better to suffer in this world and win men and women for Christ, than be comfortable now and stand empty-handed before our great Saviour on that day! I think His honour and kingdom are the things we ought primarily to be fighting for.