Exciting News! Video from our event last Monday featuring former Muslim terrorist turned Christian Kamal Saleem and former gubernatorial candidate Pastor Ralph Rebandt are up on YouTube now. Click here to check it out!
With this past week’s election results behind us and the uncertainty of what that portends looming yet before us, Pastor John Byl’s front page article from our November newsletter seems to be what we should put before you on the Friday’s 3 in 3. As you read the Decency Minute scripts or listen to Bill Johnson narrate them, I would urge you to keep Pastor Byl’s words in mind.
Who is Pastor John Byl? He is the newly installed pastor at Bethel Reformed Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Fremont, MI – which also is the home church of Bill and Jan, as well as ADA staff members Chris and his family, and Lisa. As one reads the following article, one will quickly see the heart of a pastor who loves and desires the best for his country. I pray that this article will leave our readers encouraged, challenged, and blessed.
The theme of this newsletter is How Shall We Then Live? It is a takeaway (and a very apt one for today!) from Francis Shaeffer’s book – How Shall We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, released in 1976. In many respects, Francis Schaeffer was miles ahead of the Protestant contemporaries of his time in regard to the trajectory of Western civilization and the church’s response to it.
What Francis Schaeffer witnessed in his time was the erosion of moral absolutes. Christianity was being replaced by secular humanism; a predominately Christian worldview was being radically and rapidly overrun by a secular worldview. What gave rise to this?
As culture shifted away from Biblical truth as well as the Bible being the sole authority of all matters of faith and practice, moral values, as taught clearly in Scripture, were being replaced with moral relativism, determined mainly by individual subjectivism rather than objective truth. The results have been and continue to be devasting – abortion, the rise of the LGBTQ+ movement, Antifa, DEI, gender mutilation, the phenomenal rise of sex and slave trafficking, rebellion and riots as we witness in France and as we have witnessed here in America over the past 10 years, voter and financial fraud, fake news, defamation of political opponents who hold to an ideological Christian worldview contrary to a secular worldview – these and many others have plagued our society as a result of abandoning the Bible as our sole authority in all matters of faith and practice.
As we witness these things in our country and throughout the world theater, we understand the environment conducive for the Man of Lawlessness, of whom Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2, is drawing nearer – the Rebellion, the great falling away. Presently, this Man of Lawlessness has been restrained by Christ through the Church’s witness as salt and light, but the time is coming wherein this restraint will be lifted (2 Thess. 2:7), and the Lawless One will wear out the Church (cf. Dan. 7:25; Rev. 13:5), and he will oppose and exalt “himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God,” (2 Thess. 2:4; Dan. 11:36 – 39; Rev. 13:1 – 8). But his time is limited (Rev. Dan. 7:25; 13:5); for, the Lord Jesus will kill him with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of His coming,” (2 Thess. 2:8).
Francis Shaeffer, in the opening words of his book How Shall We Then Live, writes “There is a flow to history and culture.” We are to understand the times and know which way our present culture is flowing and how we are to now live in that culture – there are two ways, only one of which determines whether we are alive or not. Are we swimming against our current culture or are we floating along with it? Dead fish swim with the current. Live fish swim against it. God calls you and me to swim against it. What does this look like?
First, God calls us to be men and women of faith, who live in expectation of Christ’s coming and conquering of all His and our enemies. Second, God calls us to be men and women of prayer. Third, God calls us to be men and women of action, to use our talents and be good stewards of what He has given us, which includes taking responsibility to choose men and women who will lead our nation according to God’s Word and turn the tide of secular humanism.
We must be the clarion call of Truth
The midterm election was not what we prayed for, but it certainly was what our nation deserved.
We can blame the Iran war, affordability, a prideful president. Yet, it is God alone who sets up kings and removes them.
We are a nation in rebellion against God and His Word. Americans elected those seeking the “right” to kill unborn babies. They voted for wolves who call themselves “Christians,” pushing the LGBT agenda – what God calls an abomination. They elected Islamists who want to take down America from within.
God’s judgment often comes by giving rebels exactly what they desire. As the Lord says in Psalm 81, “So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels.”
As former rebels, our calling as Christians has not changed: be a voice for truth in a nation that desperately needs it.
Far from being the religion of peace that they claim to be, Islam teaches its followers that they are justified in killing infidels. Remember this, an infidel is ANYONE who is not a follower of Allah and his prophet Mohammed. Islam has a blood-thirsty history which continues its trek into a bloody present.
Former Muslim, Danny Burmawi, writes:
“Christians are being murdered for their faith by Muslims so regularly … In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Mozambique, across the Sahel, and elsewhere, Christian communities have been bombed, burned out of their villages, kidnapped, enslaved, and driven from lands where some had lived for centuries before Islam even existed.”
The Left tries to paint Islam as peaceful because it fits with their agenda to destroy America. Let us recognize the dangers of believing whatever we are told, without looking to history and contemporary events.
Kamal Saleem’s Encouraging Words
I’d like to encourage you with a note I received from my friend, Kamal Saleem, following the election. He wrote:
Our Father in Heaven Is Still on His Throne!
God is not wringing His hands. “He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and raises up kings” (Daniel 2:21). “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes” (Proverbs 21:1).
Elections matter. Votes matter. Policy touches real families. But nothing that happened moved the throne of heaven one inch. We are “receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken” (Hebrews12:28).
On the cross Jesus cried, “It is finished!” He didn’t say, “It is pending the next election.” The decisive victory over sin, death, and the evil one was won two thousand years ago.
So, move forward – sent out from a victory already won.
Regardless of election results, God is still on the throne and working out His perfect will. Might all of us find solace and encouragement in the following verse, particularly the last half of it. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” (Ps. 43:5)
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