My primary concern is whether our worship is preparing for a muscular Christendom. My argument is that saying “no” to government overreach requires heavy lifting, and not many people are willing to do that. They’d be comfortable doing whatever uncomfortable yoga poses the guba’ment demands. “Warrior poses on left foot,” please!” “Absolutely, as long as my right foot can remain where it is. This little series of contorted positions eventually leads to directions the body is not meant to go.
Little by little the ability to say, “no” is fleshed out of you one arduous pose at a time. So, if you want to say “no” as a way of life to the many and boost-erous amount of demands from the state, then you need to lift up holy hands and kneel and sing out. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit precisely because it is a training ground for the weightiness of God to abide in you. Therefore, you must say “no” with consistency.
You can’t collapse under the weight of statist imperatives, but you will if all you do is participate in the spontaneity of evangelical masses with floppy hands in the air one chorus at a time. When Paul says, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” I think he meant every part of that phrase in English and Greek. Work this whole liturgical thing first so that your muscles are ready for war when war cometh. Weak worship produces unsteady hands (Ps. 144:1).
If men think they can opine on social media against these efforts without the efforts of worship, it is in vain. They must respond to the rhetoric of the left with the worship of heaven. They need to take the weekly task as preparation for the Sunday duty. When this becomes common parlance in the home, then saying “no” to bureaucrats is as easy as spreading gee butter on freshly-baked sourdough bread.
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I mentioned in my sermon yesterday that Christians too often live in the glory of the past and therefore wish to repeat slogans of the past as a mode of operation. This can be a clear case of nostalgia or a clear case of laziness. Unlike whatever those Q-Anon imbeciles believe, Reagan is not coming back from the grave, and neither is J.F.K.’s brother.
It is much easier to repeat slogans than to refresh slogans to apply to our current societal decay. The latter takes hard work and muscle-building rituals, whereas the first requires only a handy textbook and memorization techniques.
Christians need to move forward and seek the glory of God in our regular exercise of killing sin lest sin kills us. It begins now by shutting off those stupid apps that consume our day; by giving your son a hug; by encouraging our wives in their domestic labors; by opening the Bible and our homes to others; by doing the hard work of worship when the world around us thinks it’s non-sensical.
You want to build your liturgical muscles, then fight it out in the private square and then watch the public square bow before Christendom like Caesar did to Messiah Jesus and how Biden will one day to the Ascended Lord of glory.
