From the Pastor - Rev. Luke Juaregui, Pastor The world situation is an uneasy one with the rise of Islamic fascism growing in ferocity and achieving victory against the societies of democracy. Radicals, who push for violence on civilians, are relentless in their pursuit for eventual world domination. We had hope for an Arab spring; however, it seems that in actuality those nations in revolution are slipping into the old ways of Sharia law. ISIS is carving out vast territories in order to implement their view of life at the expense of others. The interesting aspect of Islamic fascism is that they know that a direct battle would be useless against the greater democratic military might, so they seek to destroy democracy in a more subtle way by using tactics of fear, deception, and political fraction. And currently that is where we stand with our military might holding back and only giving air support and a small amount of supplies. This issue is that the west is not united but rather fractured. The Islamic fascist’s tactic is not to win by right ideas but to manipulate the good will of free peoples into submission. Once free peoples are broken, they are enslaved with terrible brutality. We can now see this coming to reality in the territories which ISIS now controls: theft, slavery, execution, and decapitation. In the same way, evil attempts to manipulate us into submitting our lives over to the consumption of Sin because direct confrontation with the Lord would be useless. Evil’s tactic of terrorism attempts to cause fear in us, which will ultimately push us away from God. For example, the sin of mistake becomes a source of great guilt for many, and causes us to fear the judgment of God. Some feelings of guilt are good for motivating us to improve; however, guilty feelings, which result in a fear of sin, cause us to reside in an evil state. If one is focused on sin and the fear of judgment then God is not your focus. On the other hand, the opposite can happen where we are deceived in thinking that there should be no guilt caused by the sins we do; or we think we have no sin. This causes us to lose our humility and honesty resulting in a worship of ourselves instead of the Father. The third terrorist tactic of evil is to cause a fractioning of our Christian unity. This is the most diabolical of evil’s techniques for when people of good intentions disagree in excess about non-essential matters of worship, faith, and doctrine then the focus is on something that may be important but not essential to fight over, or to hold grudges, resulting in no compromise. This is a fractioning of the body of Christ, which results in the doubt of God’s dependable Love and secretly destroys faith. As a people of faith, waiting for the return of the Son of Man, let us look for the signs of the times supporting each other in unity against the true enemy of evil. We need to commit ourselves to the way of Christ’s freedom by fearing no evil, maintaining our eyes on the reality of truth, and gathering each other into the body of Christ. Evil only divides and destroys; it is by our life through which we decide to embrace the way of Evil’s destruction in honoring our own mastery or we honor the way of Christ’s humble, glorious gathering.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 12:46:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015