Are You Prepared?

 

 

We live in confusing (confused?) times in our nation. It “feels” like dark times. Crime is rising in frequency and severity.  Suicides are increasing. Murder (in and outside the womb) is increasing. Prices are increasing. Our distrust of government and medicine are increasing. All this increase as the numbers attending church go down.

It brings up the question of what we, as Christians, can do to prepare for the continuation of a declining society.

Get a generator, store up extra food and water, make our homes like fortresses (or move to safer locations) and, help where we can?

Early in the Covid debacle a young man taught about being prepared for whatever might come in a Sunday School class. He pointed out that in history when there were true pandemics, the Christians were out on the streets and in the homes of the sick, serving and treating them in order to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

He started the class teaching about “Spiritual Preparedness.”  He pointed out that everyone, in their obsession with quarantining the healthy, wearing masks, and keeping their distance, were more concerned with their lives than they were with glorifying God and loving their neighbor.

It brought up the question of how much our willingness to follow the mandates and sequester ourselves from our neighbors was security to us but sin before God. We were essentially ordered to let the professionals care for the sick and we were to stay home and out of the way of the virus.

In Ezekiel 34 God gave Ezekiel a command to prophesy against the “Shepherds of Israel.” This included the priests and Levites, the spiritual leaders of Israel. Look at this accusation about the people from verses 4-5: The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered.

It seems apparent that the people who were spiritually prepared, who understood the goodness and grace of God to His people, who wanted to obey His command to continue to meet together, are still in our churches. But, where are those people who got comfortable on their couches or who just gave up because they did not see how the Word of God applied to the situation? Their shepherds were not leading and protecting them. Have they gone looking for those lost sheep?

There truly is a famine of the Word of God in our nation. One cannot be spiritually prepared if he/she does not know what the Word of God says. We are a lazy people, happy to claim our salvation and wait until Jesus comes to get us to think any more about it.

We do not know what is coming to us from a political or economic point of view. But as Christians we can look around and see that our neighbors are sick, lonely, depressed, fearful, confused and unaware that the Lord God Almighty has answers to all of these problems.  Are we prepared – spiritually prepared – to teach them and tell them the Truth?

So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come. Psalm 71:18