Daily Encounter: A Week-day Devotional by a staff of ACTS International.

Monday, April 10, 2017

"Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.^"1

On one occasion when I was teaching a class I asked the question, "What would you say was the number one sin of people who claim to be Christians?"

One jokester from the back of the room shouted, "Apathy, but who cares?" He may very well have been correct because, as the old saying goes "many a true word is spoken in jest."

Chuck Colson recently stated in Breakpoint, "Many Christians, once motivated by protecting the sanctity of life, religious freedom, and traditional marriage, seem inconsolableâ€"as if the fight is over and there’s nothing we can do about it."²

Embracing this attitude is a certain prescription for disaster.

Here in America, when the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, it is claimed that the Scottish writer, Professor Alexander Tyler,* wrote the following about the fall of the Athenian republic over two thousand years previous to that time:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."³

According to Chuck Colson, Don Reeverts of the Denver Leadership Foundation "thinks we [the U.S.A.] are entering the stage of apathy.... Apathy manifests itself in how people dress, how they talk, how they care for each otherâ€"and how concerned they are about the great issues of the day.... Apathy inevitably leads to dependency. And once we become dependent on Big Brother [the government], we are back in bondage. Can anybody really watch the dramatic growth of governmental power and not be alarmed? For the fact of the matter is that the more government acts as God, the less people depend on the one true God."⁴

If ever there was a time when Christians need to stand up and be counted it is today. Like the frog in the kettle that, because of the deadening of its response, allows itself to slowly but surely be boiled to death, we too will allow our nation and ourselves to be overrun by those who are determined to destroy every vestige of Christianity in our nation. Little by little it is already happening.

However, at this time it has never been easier to stand up and be counted by actively communicating the message of God's salvation and his Truth by a tactful use of the electronic media by forwarding suitable messages and websites to all of our contacts. For further helps please see the ACTS People Power for Jesus website at: www.actsweb.org/people_power.

Suggested prayer: Dear God, please open the eyes of my understanding so that I will clearly see what is happening in our ever increasing secularized and anti-God, anti-Christian world. Please give me the courage to be a living witness for you and do everything in my power to stand up and be counted and to communicate your saving gospel to as many people as I possibly can. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."

1. Revelation 3:3 (NIV).
2. Chuck Colson, Breakpoint, August 7, 2009. http://www.breakpoint.org/commentaries/12141-rejecting-apathy
3. Ibid.
*Note, there is doubt regarding the validity of the author of this quote. See http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler1.html
4. Ibid.

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