By Dr. Lawrence White
Our America is in deadly peril. The issues currently under debate among us will not merely determine what kind of future America will have, but whether or not America will have a future at all. That's a difficult concept for Americans to comprehend.
We are an incurably optimistic people. God has poured out His blessing upon us in such incredible abundance that we have come to imagine ourselves immune from the patterns of history, but we are not exempt from the judgment of God. Righteousness - exalts a nation, our sin is a disgrace to any people, and that includes America.
I have two sons: Adam, who is 23, and Aaron, who is 21. I had the opportunity a year ago to take my two boys to Germany. A few days after our arrival in Berlin, December 26, we drove out of the city into the countryside to a little country town called Oranienburg.
No one would ever have heard of this place except for the fact that Heinrich Himmler chose this little town as the site for one of his prototype concentration camps. A horrible place, ironically named Sachsenhausen-the home of the Saxons.
A Grim Lesson
It was a grim and a forbidding day, and the memorial at Sachsenhausen was empty. My sons grew quiet as we walked through the iron gates of the camp with the lying slogan there engraved, "Arbeit machtfrei," promising the inmates that if they cooperated, if they worked, they might get free. They didn't. They died in that place.
We walked across the vast expanse where the barrack once stood, through the museums that show the horrendous medical experiments conducted on living human beings, who were categorized as less than human because of their race. We saw the piles of human hair and children's shoes, and finally, at the northeastern corner of the camp, we walked through the ovens where the bodies of the dead were burned.
On this third day after Christmas there was a faded and withered Christmas wreath on the ground in front of the oven. The slogan on the ribbon beneath that wreath said, "From the Christians of Germany. We kneel before God in bitter regret, and humble repentance, and we ask His forgiveness for the death of the Jews and all the others who died in this dreadful place."
The Christians of Germany learned only too late that God's people in Christ cannot disengage from the culture in which they live. They retreated into the comfortable security of their sanctuaries, they sat in their padded pews, they kept their religion and their politics strictly separate from one another, and their nation was destroyed. That retreat was encouraged and facilitated by the endlessly repeated lie of the absolute separation of church and state.
Pastor Martin Niemoeller, one of the few Christian heroes who stood against the tide in those grim days, would later look back on a meeting that took place in 1934 in Hitler's Reich Chancellery in Berlin as the moment he recognized that his country was doomed.
Confronting Hitler
Hitler called together the most important pastors, the leading preachers of the land, to stifle their criticism, to calm their fears, to bring them into line. He moved through the crowd that day patting the preachers on the back, making them feel important, stroking their egos, promising them that their tax exemptions were safe and secure, that their state subsidies would continue, that the Church of Jesus Christ had nothing to fearfrom a Hitler government.
Finally, young Pastor Niemoeller had had enough. He pushed his way to the front until he stood eye to eye with the German dictator and he said, "Our concern, Herr Hitler, is not for the church. Jesus Christ will take care of His church. Our concern is for the soul of our nation."
It was immediately evident that the brash, young pastor spoke only for himself as his chagrined colleagues hustled him away to the obscurity of the back of the room. Hitler, with a natural politician's instinct, noted their reaction and recognized exactly what it meant. He smiled, as he said reflectively, almost to himself, "The soul of Germany-you can leave that to me."
And they did. They looked the other way, they minded their own business, they kept their religion and their politics separate from one another, and the innocent were slaughtered, and the nation was led down the path to destruction.
Time to Be Salt and light
My friends, it's happening again. It's happening here in our beloved America. Once again, the innocent are being slaughtered in a 26-year abortion holocaust that makes Hitler look like a humanitarian by comparison. Once again, every time a Christian, particularly a Christian pastor, raises his voice in a matter of public policy, the immediate hue and cry from the liberal media and the intellectual elite is, "Wait a minute, we have a separation of church and state in this country. You Christians, you keep your morality to yourselves." As history repeats itself, they smile reassuringly as they tell us, "The soul of America you can leave that to us."The Time Has Come
My friends, the time has come, and has long since passed, for us to stop listening to and being immobilized by these lies from the father of lies. The time has come for us instead, finally, to pay heed to the Word of the Lord God Almighty, and be what He has placed us here to be-the stinging salt that stops the decay of death, the shining light that dispels the darkness of doubt and despair, the gleaming city set high upon a hill that shines as a beacon light of hope and life to this nation and to every nation.
God has given us this chance to reclaim our country. He has given us the power and presence of His Holy Spirit within us in the revelation of His
Word- inspired and inerrant. He has given us this moment in history to be His people so that generations yet unborn may look back upon today and thank God forthe Christians of America who snatched their country from the brink of destruction.
Let us take heart and courage my fellow believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us be what God has called and enabled us to be. Let us stand arm in arm, united as one, and declare to this nation and to this world: "The soul of America- you can leave that to us,"Dr. Lawrence White is the senior pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Houston. This warning to believers not to disengage from American culture was given in February to the 1999 Reclaiming America for Christ Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.