Yes!!!!!

You read the title correctly!!!!!

It is the time of every four years where I take a two week hiatus from church. I from past experiences have sat in church services in election years and seen the following pattern take place:

The Sunday Before Election: A sermon based on the Bible is never preached. Yes, the Bible is used and verses are quoted out of contest to promote a religious-right agenda. However, the sermon usually has a catch at the very end where the verbage at that point of the sermon was purposely worded by the “legal eagles of religious right groups” and sent to pastors via e-mail to indirectly endorse a political candidate in order to keep the 501c3 status calling a loophole a ‘divine revelation from God’. Because I did the ‘Skip Church Sundays” four years ago, friends of mine across America told me of hearing the phraze “The Lord’s favor is on the man who lives in Crawford, TX….”. Under the 501c3 law, you can’t directly say ‘vote for…..’, so ‘creative’ ways are used to get the word out.

The Sunday After Election: It depends on who wins. If the “DEMONcrats” win, then we get the ‘four years of gloom and doom’, the ‘big black cloud’ over this nation, the ‘judgement and wrath is on this nation…’ speeches.

If the God’s Official Party wins, then we get the “chance to brag, boast, and rejoice in the fact that Republican, homeschool, anti-marriage-penality-tax, school voucher, butterfly kissing Jesus can be sovereign for four more years and America escapes the big gloom and doom for four more years while we still have faith that we can legislate the Bible as law according to the social theories of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, and R.J. Rushdoony, end abortion, and use the Supreme Court to ban the lottery

When I go to church on Sundays, I need to hear a sermon from the Bible about everyday living relating to my real everyday life teaching me how to apply the Word of God to my Christian walk while convicting me of the sins of my scarred, imperfect, and flawed humanity.

If I want to hear, see, and discuss politics, various news sources online can help me with this issue from ‘CNN Church” to ‘Church of the Fox News’. I have a competent brain that I can use to think and pray for myself. I don’t need a ‘Christian voters guide’ with their ‘bias’ about being ‘unbiased’. I don’t need a ‘Pulpit Freedom Sunday’. I don’t need a minister who decides to parrot what Christian lawyers have reviewed as ‘loopholing’ the law. I don’t need a Christian radio ministry preaching politics in the name of ‘focused family news’ calling it ‘information and analysis’. I don’t need a 40 day ‘fast-a-thon’ dictated from the Apostolic Alchemists from the “E-LIE-JAW LISP”. Yes, they are trying to turn poisonous lead into purified gold and reaping a sickness that has ravaged a church into irrelevant moral failures of healing evangelists that can not heal their own families, best friends, and their own marriages.

When I hear these things preached over and over again, it comes across as being insulting of our intelligence that promotes a mentality that only these religious-right leaders have the ability to think in the sight of God. Instead of God being a very present help in time of trouble, all I see is fear-mongering to make a few Religious right leaders more richer by ‘preying’ on the Christians to tell them to ‘pray’ to God.

Join me on Sunday November 2, 2008 and Sunday November 9, 2008 for ‘Skip Church Sundays’ and do whatever the Lord tells you to do. Whether it is fasting and prayer, a home Bible study, a trip to ‘pillowside presbyterian’ or a visit to ‘St. Arbucks’ for a cup of coffee, let’s tell our leaders that we need to hear the Gospel and not the US Constitution. We need to hear of faith and salvation in Jesus Christ and not salvation in politicians.

God’s Gospel and not Governmental Gobbleygook

No matter what happens in the future after November 4, 2008, I still have to be a Christian. I still have to obey the Scriptures. I still have to fulfill the Great Commission. The persecution is going to come. The Bible clearly tells us this. The question here is not what can we do to prevent the persecution. The question here is will we be firmly rooted and grounded in our Christian beliefs to the point where we will still remain Christian to the point of losing our earthly life to obtain eternal life during the persecution?