November 12, 2023

I recently finished reading a very timely and hard-hitting book zeroing in on the American church called, Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity by Lucas Miles. Much of what Miles writes about in Woke Jesus rings true with me and my experiences with what passes as a Christian response to the evil we see all around us and all over the world today.

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The battle against evil is heating up, especially when we consider what happened just a few short weeks ago on October 7th in Israel. It’s hard to believe that, after that barbaric, sickening attack on innocent, unarmed citizens you will still find Christians saying, “Well, there’s good and bad on both sides.” These Christians seem to be hedging their bets, intent on not offending the wrong people perhaps, and are careful to remain lukewarm in their response to anything controversial. Even when the evil is over the top, they cannot find it in their hearts (or theology) to admit what’s staring all of us right in the face: What Hamas did was pure evil.

If the church doesn’t wake up and stop being woke, this nation—and by extension, the world—is a goner.

One of the biggest takeaways from Woke Jesus is what Lucas Miles sees as the proper use of the word “Christian Nationalist.” Miles makes a solid case for applying the term to any church that goes along with the Far-Left agenda since it’s very apparent that the Far-Left is now solidly in charge of the federal (and many state) governing bodies. The churches in this category are obvious: As a rule of thumb, any church that flies the rainbow or BLM (or both) flags, and any church that looks the other way and doesn’t preach against the idea of children being urged to consider changing their immutable, biologically-determined sex—or the grooming of children—these churches support and advance those issues which are front-and-center on the national agenda.

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Want another example? Churches that obeyed orders from the government and coerced congregants into taking the (experimental) COVID-19 vaccine. Some, as Miles points out, used guilt-ladened arguments like, “Is your freedom in Christ more important than other people’s health?” Or (and this is my all-time favorite), “Jesus would get vaccinated.”

When I read that Jesus would get the jab, it recalled a couple verses I thought I might have read in some obscure translation of the New Testament. Verses like, “And Jesus could do no more miracles in that town because he was laid up for three days with a really bad flu.” And, “Jesus could not continue adding more Beatitudes to the list because of his persistent, hacking cough.” I’m going to take a wild guess here, but I believe that Jesus not only healed the sick and raised the dead and took away the sins of the world—but He was the healthiest human that ever walked planet Earth.

Fortunately, Lucas Miles isn’t the only Christian influencer eagerly trying to wake up a sleeping church. There are quite a few others who have boldly jumped into the fray over the past many years.

Jonathan Cahn, in his book, Return of the Gods, along with Eric Metaxas’s Letter to the American Church, are but two additional “voices crying in the wilderness” (or “watchmen on the wall,” if you will) who are trying desperately to shake Christians from their slumber. Their books and their “ministries” (Cahn in the pulpit every weekend at Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, New Jersey, and Metaxas every day on his nationally-syndicated radio program) address the warning that came from George Orwell in the late 1940s. Was Orwell observing we who inhabit the 2020s when he wrote this?

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

So, where is the “revolutionary” spirit that was shown by the Apostles in the first century when they preached a countercultural perspective of love and human value against a strong-arm system of war prevalent in the overwhelming power of the Roman Empire? Or that same spirit when colonial Christians joined the fight for independence in the mid- to late-1700s? Where is that spirit in our current Church? Have church men and women of today become church mice?