Soul Wounds

One of America's greatest actors, Charlton Heston, who played Moses in The Ten Commandments and was the star of Planet of The Apes, as well as seventy-three other great movies of the last century, died in April of 2008. He said, “ I was a good actor because I was a great pretender”.

From day to day, from news report to news report, we often wonder, can this world and the people in it get any crazier? We know that our politicians, most pastors, and many parents are just pretending. Pretense is a characteristic of the last 3 generations. I hear presidents and political leaders finish a speech by saying, “God bless you.” Whose God are they talking about? Many of these people could not possibly know the God that most people worship. Their walk betrays their talk.

Recently, my youngest grandson, a senior at a Baptist university was here in my house and I was asking him about his religious activities on campus. I was active in several religious organizations on campus and so was his father (Dr. John Morris). He and his brother were both reared on the mission field where their parents were foreign missionaries. His older brother is a senior law student. He said, “Most of the students on the campus are just pretenders.” It is much like a conversation I heard with a member of the musical group U2. He said, “We are Christians but not practicing Christians.” It occurred to me that this was the most honest thing I heard recently because it is an evaluation of most church goers. Believing Christians, not practicing Christians, but pretenders. I have never known a person who did not expect to go to heaven when they die. It has never occurred to most that God does not permit any sin into His heaven. I have known many men who could talk at length about ball teams, ball players, who could give ball statistics, who could spend hours chasing a small ball around a green pasture, who could sit for hours in a seminar pertaining to their profession or financial management, but could not tell you one thing concerning the theological doctrine of the church where they attended and to which they gave their support. I believe that 90% of faith is just raw courage. Most men, even professing Christians, do not have enough courage to stand up for their beliefs and be recognized from their fellow contacts in lifestyle or business practices.

Faith is action, based on belief, sustained by confidence. The Holy Spirit of God within us, as a born again child of God, separates and distinguishes us from the unbeliever. I have often been asked, “How can you tell a Christian?” The method I use, a system which has never failed, a Christian has a great love for God's word and, as I have told so many, you cannot get enough of it. It is the answer book. In the Bible, you find the answer for any question and any problem, because it is the divine word of God: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and sufficient for ever need. (Hebrews 11 & 12)

In 1934 a local newspaper in its section on religion, carried a masterful testimonial of a fundamentalist church and how it was surviving through the bleak days of the Great Depression. A farmer who lived near the church wrote a letter to the editor of the paper in which he expressed some of the following, “I plow on Sunday. I cultivate on Sunday. I never go to church; I have never prayed and I have the best crops of anyone in the area.” The editor in one sentence to that letter made this reply, “God does not always settle His accounts in October.”

When I was in Mongolia, in the city of Ulan Bator at a concert, I was introduced by my guide to a professor who had been living there. Having been reared in London, he said, “Look at what communism has done to this country. I was not born in a communist country and I will not die in a communist country. God willing, my grandchildren will not live under communism.” I thought of this the next day. I went to the Mongolian May Day Parade and this old blind man went through five checkpoints of inspection. Communism is a matter of control and inspections, such as we have now at our airports with inspectors looking into baby's diapers, checking the shoes of old women in wheelchairs and most recently, enveloping each one in a machine which x-rays you from top to bottom. Just this week, Obama gave $700 million for the new “whole body imaging” machines to be placed in the nation's 277 busiest airports.

WE SERVE WHAT WE FEAR. We have several generations in whom the government has instilled fear. This president has advised that one citizen report on another if he senses any disloyalty toward the government. In every communist country I have ever visited and asked the question, “How did this political disaster happen; the complete enslavement and control of the population?” I receive the same answer everywhere, “Instead of neighbors, we all became enemies. We became enemies of each other, we became enemies of the government, and the Communist Government could always find those who had already sold out to God, family and country, ready to assume the task of slave-master.”

An April 2009 Homeland Security Report made the following statement:

“DHS assesses that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists—including lone wolves or small terrorist cells—to carry out violence.”

Military exercises and surveillance do not have the power to change this country. Unlike this president who never shot a BB gun or owned a lemonade stand, there are millions of veterans and their families who are loyal to this Republic. The returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of how poorly this war has been executed, still have a loyalty and affection for this nation which they will demonstrate when given the chance to vote again. Even state leaders, governors, etc., are finally awakening to the disaster of reported marshal law threats and the quarantine of cities, checkpoints between states, and additional mandates on states for taxation. When you consider the facts that this country is involved in two wars, which have been going on for many years, in which thousands have already been killed, and from which the wounded will never recover; when you consider that the country has been, within the past seven months, shackled with debt that can never be repaid, that the citizens have never been as divided by a decadent policy of increased abortions, same-sex marriage (the Lutherans have now decided, like the Episcopalians, to install homosexual preachers), an economy in the throws of bailouts with increased Federal controls, and an implosion of the last vestige of individual sanctity, enslavement of health-care professions and uncontested security and privacy of health-care.

Never has there been a better time to remember the famous words of Julius Caesar, "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries "

I have witnessed the enslavement of decent people around the world who, in spite of their religious faith or accident of birth, have been treated inhumanly by their fellow man, their own fellow countrymen. It wounds the soul of this blind veteran, as I am sure it wounds the soul of every other citizen who has worn the uniform of this country, and the greatest heroes of all, the men and women brave enough to birth and rear children that their futures are being determined and threatened by a blight of political Markism one would never thought could happen here. The writer Sinclair Lewis, in his 1935 book It Can't Happen Here could not have foreseen how easily the totalitarian threat and conquest he had seen in Russia and other places could change this nation's mission so easily.