OH LORD, HOW LONG?

Until 9/11 America seemed impregnable. No longer. 

Who could have imagined that Islamic Jihadists huddled in an Afghan cave, could have been so successful at shattering our sense of safety, and challenging our world-class military complex? 

Peggy Noonan writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “It marked the end of ‘we are protected,’ and the beginning of something else.”

It was a wake-up call that should have driven our nation to her knees in prayer to the God of our Fathers—but tolerance, now our foremost virtue, demanded we pray to the God of the Bible, and to the Great Spirit, and to the deities of the Hindus, and to the god’s of our own making, and even to Allah—the God who supposedly ordered this attack. Church attendance climbed for a few weeks after the attack, but it wasn’t long until football, fun-times, and family outings, were again our Sunday priorities.

It was a wake-up call that should have awakened us to our moral deficits—but we are more concerned with fiscal woes and government spending deficits. Immorality and irresponsibility are expensive. We must somehow find the funds to continue the party.

When a few ministers suggested that America’s immorality—abortion, sodomy, the breakup of the family, and unbridled greed—had lifted God’s hand of protection from our nation, they were quickly scorned into retractions.

It was a wake-up call that should have strengthened the resolve of America’s 350,000 ministers to call our nation to repentance, moral rectitude, and Biblical truth—but tragically there are fewer Men of God, who will prophetically and unapologetically stand for Scriptural holiness and righteousness. On a per capita basis there are fewer than at any other time in our nation’s history. (Barna)

It was a wake-up call that should have, and could have, been the beginning of a national revival of Scriptural Christianity, but it was not.

The attack of 9/11 was not a wake up call. But that’s not all!

The hurricanes were not.

The earthquakes were not.

The sunamis were not.

The tornadoes were not.

The fires were not.

The epidemics were not.

The great recession was not.

It seems that nothing will drive us to repent.

How long then should we continue to preach the truth of God’s Word?

How long then should we persist in our efforts to reach the lost of this nation?

How long then should we open the doors of our churches for services? (If they will not come should we keep opening the doors, turning on the lights, and preaching to empty pews?)

It was a question that Isaiah asked in His day. And the answer God gave him is our answer to the question.

“Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, And the Lord have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.” Isaiah 6:11,12.