Jesus must come first

I was reading Diane’s post from Saturday today at Crossroads. She was writing about the analysis of the evangelical church that she had gotten from a post by Ingrid at A Slice of Laodicea.

I went to Ingrid’s and started reading the entire post. At the end, she had written the following:

The bottom issue is that we can’t compromise the name and Gospel of Christ so that we can still run interfaith political action committees to end temporal problems in this country. I’m not against working against these evils and have, in fact, done so for many years in Christian information radio. I also don’t believe in a doctrinal litmus test before you sign some guy’s petition against higher taxes or whatever. We can work on public policy issues with those we don’t theologically agree with. But we must never stop being outspoken representatives of Christ whatever we are doing. If we work with Jewish people, Muslims, Mormons, etc. in the civil sphere, we can’t allow that to impede our sharing the truth with them when given the opportunity. We can’t put more value on their political influence than on their soul’s worth. And we must not worship together or pray together with those who reject our Savior. We must keep our Christian integrity. We must be faithful. Jesus must come first. That is the point.

The lines that stood out to me were “We must keep our Christian integrity. We must be faithful. Jesus must come first. That is the point.” And, that is just the point. When we shove Jesus aside for any reason, we are letting the devil get a foot in the door. And, he only needs a small opening to impact our lives and others! We should never be ashamed to let people know what we believe or to share Christ with them in a loving way.

Ingrid had given a press release at Christian Newswire in which she spoke about Dr. Ravi Zacharias not praying in the name of Jesus on the official National Day of Prayer website. The Bible specifically says that we are pray to the Father in the name of Jesus.

NDP Chairwoman, Shirley Dobson, owes a biblical explanation to Christians around the nation as to why the name of Jesus is absent from the official prayer. We are not here as Christians to appease those of other world religions. We cannot come to God except through His Son's righteous merits. To pray as "Christians" in any other way is both a farce and a mockery. While other believers around the world are dying for that name, in America, Dr. Zacharias will not even breathe that name in his official public prayer because it might "offend".

Christians need to get back to the business of doing what God’s Word says, without the fear of offending anyone. If anyone is offended, it is by the Word, not the person. We may appease the people, but God isn’t pleased. The Christians of this nation have bowed down to outsiders long enough in order to appease and it hasn’t worked. Why not get back to God’s business, do things HIS way, and see what the outcome is. I believe we could benefit by acting like we were truly made in HIS image!

Linked at Conservative Cat
Sunday OTB at Cao's Blog

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