Taylor Mertins

Being a Christian isn’t popular, and it certainly isn’t easy.

Paul calls for us to put on the armor of God because we’re going to need it!

When we, the church, are out of touch with our vocation it’s as if we’re stumbling around in the darkness like drunken fools. We might feel a welcome reprieve from the mundanity of life, we might get the hit we need to forget our frivolity, but without our call we cease to be the church.

We are an angry people, we Christians, and that's okay. We worship a Messiah who spent most of his earthly ministry being angry. But our anger, like Christ's, should not send us into despair or violence. Our anger, like Christ's, should send us to an even stranger place: truth.

There is a tremendous difference between loving one another (like Christ), and being nice. Being nice often means being quiet, and not calling out the behavior of others. Loving like Jesus however, often means speaking up and actually calling someone out.

Easier said than done.

God loves us and there's nothing we can do about it.

Jesus’ peace is greater than any earthly vision we could possibly imagine. It is more powerful than any political policy, it is mightier than any magistrate’s order, it is more life giving than any piece of legislation.

Jesus’ peace is revolutionary.

This country, and our love of it, flirts very closely with what Jesus called idolatry. When the country we live in becomes more important than the God who created us, when the lights in the sky on the 4th of July shine brighter than the bread and cup on this table, when we care more about what’s happening in Washington DC than what’s happening in our local community, then we have a problem.

And part of the problem is that, like with David, we forget the tremendous cost of our victory.

We need Jesus to smack us across the head not with smooth stones from the wadi but with the hard wood of the cross.

We need to be brought low to the ground before we can be raised high.

We need to be defeated in order to be redeemed.

We complain about politics all the time.

We hold our elected leaders to standards that we ourselves do not adhere to.

And when they disappoint us we act as if no one could have predicted this.

But we get the politicians we deserve.

Words are important.

What we say often shapes what we believe and, perhaps even more importantly, it shapes how we behave.