Yesterday I got a commentator who was talking about a reaction many men have in this fallen time. One I did not understand when I was younger. When the society gets too unjust, and the women too fallen, men just walk away. They hold women in contempt. Now, this is an error, and this error is corrected by the text below.
In many ways, you see, this is the best time to be a Christian. For the society is evil, and desperately needs faith. We do not need to travel to find the third world and injustice: it is coming to us
If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world. If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writers, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.
Of course, if Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, The New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore — as the pope did — that you don’t have to be a Christian to go to heaven. Evangelize in Liberia, and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof will be totally impressed.
Which explains why American Christians go on “mission trips” to disease-ridden cesspools. They’re tired of fighting the culture war in the U.S., tired of being called homophobes, racists, sexists and bigots. So they slink off to Third World countries, away from American culture to do good works, forgetting that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.
America is the most consequential nation on Earth, and in desperate need of God at the moment.
Well Ann is wrong. America is not the last balwark against a reversion to savagery. That would be the church, and this is why the church is opposed by all “progressives” (a most unusual euphemism for socialists in the USA: in the rest ot fhe world they call themselves, correctly, communists).
But to the text. The harvest is ripe when the society is most spiritually poor. It is now a time when those nations evangelized by the great missionary expansion in the times of Victoria are sending missionaries back to the West.
Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
(John 4:27-42 ESV)
As an aside on Ebola: the correct thing for a missionary to do, when he gets a tropical disease, is to stay where he is. Dying in the field is a risk you take: either from some nasty infection, but more commonly from driving off a road, or having a plane crash on you: martyrdom used to be rare, but in this time when the feral nature of Islam is becoming more apparent, more believers are witnessing by their death.
For we should stand out. We should be different. When we are not, it is too our shame. We have listened to the sweet lies of the prosperity gospel, and that has made us cowards.
Once He has you, He will put you through the sweet, sweet meat grinder of love. Don’t think that entering the Church is going to make you rich or perpetually deliriously happy or anything like that. If what you need to get to heaven is suffering, then that is what is going to happen. Believe me. But understand that His yoke is indeed light and sweet IF and ONLY IF you surrender to it and trust Him. He will not give you more than you can carry. And remember, He suffered in every way that a human being can suffer, so no matter what happens to you, if you pray and meditate on His Passion, you will find your own sufferings right there with Him, and then you will realize that you are not alone because He is right there with you, and that your sufferings are how He is drawing you closer to Him, because He really, really loves you. And that certainly takes the edge off, to put it mildly.
Christ converted that very damaged woman at the well. This led to the Samaritans being of the faith: in this day he uses women as well as men.
Not all women are evil and feral: I have quoted from two people called Ann this morning. But in this fallen age, the feral nature of our society affects both men and women, and we can see the damage done.
