A friend of mine and her husband just quit her church because they were becoming completely woke, demanding that Christians give up their liberties and defer to the wisdom of the secular left government. Well, my friend Jared sent me an article from a bold pastor who doesn’t think that it’s more pious or spiritual to capitulate to the culture.

Here’s the intro:

Spiritualizing cowardice has become du jour.

I am almost surprised we do not hear sermons about how David was being unspiritual, a poor witness, or uppity to fight Goliath.

Had David taken the plank out of his own eye? Surely both David and Israel had enough sins of their own to worry about without warring against the Philistines or their champion. What a hypocrite!

And what in the Biblical text indicates David prayed about taking up their challenge before approaching King Saul and offering to fight?

He should have just gone home like his brothers told him to, and there devoted himself to prayer and fasting until God changed his haughty heart.

So, my 3 enemies in the culture are secularism, feminism and socialism. Each of these is bad for me in different ways. Secularism makes it harder for me to do my job living as a Christian, and being able to speak about the big issues in life. Feminism has brought in the Sexual Revolution, and a host of evils, like abortion, no-fault divorce, and now even the rejection of the complementary genders in natural marriage. Socialism takes away my money and gives it to secular left politicians so they can buy votes from people who are lazy, reckless and irresponsible, driving us further into debt and weakening our ability to respond militarily to aggressors.

Whenever I present these 3 concerns to Churchians, they typically respond with laziness (they don’t want to work to learn how to fight), which results in ignorance (they don’t know how to fight), which results in cowardice (they are afraid to fight). If you point out that they cannot  fight, they try to justify themselves by appealing to piety and spirituality. The truth is, anyone can fight secularism, feminism and socialism – as long as you take time to read some evidence, and practice debating. We actually have great resources for all the challenges we’re facing – it’s just that people would prefer to not have to read or engage. They even have spiritual-sounding ways of getting out of reading and debating. So, the duty to be ready with an answer in 1 Peter 3:15 is dismissed as “pride”. And the duty to defeat attacks against the knowledge of God in 2 Cor 10:3-5 is dismissed as “arguing”. And so on. The Bible is twisted to support whatever is easy, happy and sociable for me. These emotion-based “Christians” fill our churches and dominate our response to the culture.

I’m going to pick my favorite points, but the whole article is worth reading.

First one:

If God had wanted Goliath and the Philistines defeated, He would have sent down fire from heaven or opened the ground beneath their feet. God did that sort of thing at other times. He could surely have performed a similar feat here.

Therefore, real faith on the part of David would have caused him to wait for God to act so David did not have to.

The pious and spiritual way to respond to secularism, feminism and socialism is to wait for God to fix it.

Here’s another one I’ve heard:

Why did David not just ask the host assembled against Israel to go bowling or golfing? Why did he not hand them gospel tracts? The text offers no evidence David tried to befriend them. Perhaps if he had just offered to “do life together” they could have avoided the conflict entirely.

[…]If only the Philistines had been invited to join a small group, or attend a Wednesday night church service. Instead David chose to fight them. How very disappointing. And what a poor testimony!

David was being rather presumptuous and divisive, really, entangling himself in Israeli-Philistia politics. And he was being judgmental, implying that Goliath or the Philistines were evil, a force to be defeated. That is hardly the way to go about winning friends and influencing people.

One more – another I’ve been hit with personally:

Focus on making people want to know about Jesus because of how happy and cheerful you are.

Eventually the lost will hit a low point in their life where they grow tired of being bitter and depressed. That is when they will remember how you smiled all the time, and were always so positive about absolutely everything.

Stop getting bent out of shape about abortion, the LGBT agenda, Islamism, atheism, socialism, evolution, public education, etc. Even if it is not the actual truth, addressing those issues repeatedly is going to give the impression that those things are all Christians care about.

And if you give lost sinners that false impression, you are going to hurt not only your own testimony but the reputation of the entire Church, perhaps even of Jesus himself.

In short, in the interest of not upsetting the world Christians must fall silent and stop talking about sin and folly. Stop calling sinners and fools inside and outside the church to repentance. After all, that’s what Jesus would do. Right?

Isn’t it a wonderful coincidence that each of these strategies frees the pious Churchian from having to read books, get into debates, be shamed and excluded? Everyone wins! Well, except God. But maybe that’s what he really wants – for non-Christians to rule the world, and for Christians to do what feels good and be liked by them?

If you’ve ever had a pastor not knowing how to respond to the secular left (ignorance), not wanting to learn how to respond to the secular left (laziness), or not wanting to endure the attacks of church people who want Christianity to be about their feelings (cowardice), then you’ll find a paragraph about them in this article.