Holding Fast for God & Country…by Pastor Jared Deckerfor God & Country

Christmas is almost here. It is a time of fond memories for most of us. Everyone has their Christmas traditions. Many we carried over from our childhood, and some we came up with ourselves when we had families of our own. However, one tradition that needs to die in Christianity is the hypocrisy of believing we are keeping Christ in Christmas while telling our children that their gifts came from Santa. I know that what I am about to say will probably ruffle some feathers, but it needs to be said. We so often get in a mold of thinking things are “harmless fun” that we do not see the significance or severity of those things.

Before you turn me off, please continue reading and consider some of the points I will try to make in this post. I am not the kind of person to bring someone dressed up like Santa in front of kids and pretend to shoot him…that doesn’t teach anything about the issue. (I do know of someone who has…it was a stupid thing to do!) However, I do want to lay out a few very simple and yet spiritual principles to this subject that should open our eyes to the seriousness of this issue. I know that many people see this as a ridiculous fight over a trivial matter, but as you will see if you continue reading, I believe it is much more than trivial. Satan has sold us a bill of goods wrapped up in cute and “harmless” Christmas paper, and we have accepted the gift.

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Do you pray? I mean, do you pray the way the Bible describes prayer? Probably all of us spend some time each day praying. However, in our modern day, we have minimized the importance of prayer. We have also diminished the importance of unwavering faith when we do pray. That issue is addressed in a very clear and defined way in the first chapter of James.

James 1:6-7
6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
7 For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.

The Bible tells us here that, when we pray, we are to pray as if there is no option but God answering our request. We are to pray not just believing that God can but believing that He will. Do you pray like that? Or do we pray in such a way that God answering our pray would shock us? It should shock us if God doesn’t answer our prayer. In Mark 11, Jesus taught His disciple about praying for the impossible to happen.

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This post is written to address one key issue in our President’s speech before the UN yesterday…his dangerous statements about the nation of Israel. I will not go into detail in this post about how dumbfounded I am that someone with this view of Israel has the unmitigated GALL to supposedly claim to be a “Christian”. I’ll deal with that issue in a post very soon; however, I do want to give a little bit of a commentary, from a Biblical view, on President Obama’s statements about the nation Israel and where America will stand on issues about them.

Let me begin by reminding you of what the Word of God says reguarding a nations relationship with the nation of Israel. In Genesis 12:3, the Bible says, “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” The Bible also tells us in Genesis 22:18 that Israel is the source by which “all the nations of the earth” would be blessed. A GENUINE, Bible believing Christian knows the value of the nation of Israel.

The following excerpts are taken from the second point of President Obama’s speech. I am going to break it into six individual statements, so that I can comment effectively on the dangers of each of them.
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I just thought that I would start the updates off with a little bit of background leading us to the present blessings at Grandview Pines Baptist Church. When God brought me and my family here in January of 2007, thing were…well, they were very different than they are now. Our first service at GPBC consisted of 12 people, which included my 5. In the early days, it was nothing unusual for us to have 8 or 9 on Wednesday night and be excited for 25 on Sunday morning. I still remember the burst of energy I felt when we hit 30 for the first time.

[ Let me pause for a moment and clarify one thing. MINISTRY IS NOT ABOUT NUMBERS! It is about the people in those numbers...however large or small those numbers are. I am consistently disturbed by the prevailing attitude that a ministry is successful if it is running over 300 "in Sunday School" and struggling if it is running only 40 "in Church". Most of our Bible Colleges are failing our Pastoral students by not preparingthem to work with small number and see God's blessing in that. Come on guys...don't you remember what it was like to be a young pastor who got excited when you had 1 visitor in the last three weeks? Pass on the knowledge, not the numbers! ]

During those first couple of years, God brought us through struggles as well as triumphs. We lost a couple of good families over differences of organization and ministry goals. (It never pays to compromise on your vision of what God can do.) We lost a couple of good families due to doctrinal issues. (It never pays to compromise on the Bible…even with those we count as friends.) But God has brought along mutliplied numbers of good, doctrinally sound families to replace them. We have seen God change lives in the most miraculous ways. We have seen answers to prayer that you think you’ll only read about in the Scriptures. We have seen some of our “original” church folks get the victory over sin in their lives that they have been struggling with for 10 or 15 years. God is working in people.
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The Lord has blessed us over the last couple of years to be able to undertake some much needed renovations of our facility. This is just a little rundown of the progress that we have made on our building since early 2007.

The first project we undertook in 2007 was to upgrade the lighting in our fellowship hall and repair some wood and siding on the exterior of that part of the building. Our fellowship hall lighting up to that point has consisted of two 60w bulbs. So, needless to say, when we installed 8 fluorescent fixtures, it changed the entire look and usability of the fellowship hall. We also took the time to clean out a bunch of junk that had accumulated over the years and was taking up valuable Sunday School space.

In the spring of 2008, the Lord allowed us to remodel the nursery, bathrooms, and prophet’s chamber. We were able to expand the nursery into two sections, splitting the toddlers and the babies into two connected rooms. Our bathrooms were in a major state of disrepair and neglect, so we had to strip everything down and start from scratch. It is wonderful to have nice, clean bathrooms for our members, but especially for our visitors. We also renovated the prophet’s chamber to be more of a nice hotel room. The Lord provided a new queen bed and futon/bunk-bed, so we can now accommodate up to 5 adults. It has made for a much more welcoming atmosphere to parents putting their children in our care, and it has been more refreshing for our missionaries as they stay with us.
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My Fellow Christians,

The time for passivism in the political arena by God’s people is dead and gone. It is time for Christians to awake out of sleep and do something about our current situation in this great but wayward country of ours. I have for years tread softly on political issues from my pulpit, but NO MORE. Since the government of our nation has seen fit to propose and push legislation that will threaten the freedoms that we have as citizens, parents, children, and eventually Christians, I see no other recourse but to state my moral oppositions to our governments infringement upon our freedoms. So, state it…yeah shout it from the house top and from the pulpit I will. When the government decides to back away from pushing its immoral agenda, then I will back away from pushing back with our moral agenda. It is time to be proactive in our righteousness. Let us stop making the same careless mistake that Lot made in Sodom. Let there be some with us because we have stood for something, lest we fall for anything.

In the service of the KING,

Pastor Jared Decker