Category: What do you think?

Should Christians engage in civil disobedience?

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

You may feel tension when you see the state of the world. Governments pass unjust laws. Authorities act corruptly. Culture drifts further from the values of scripture. And in that tension, a question rises: is it right, even righteous, for Christians to resist, to protest, to engage in acts of civil disobedience?

Paul wrote to the Romans about this. He spoke of the Christian’s relationship to governing authority in all of the New Testament. Paul writes with clarity: be in subjection to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God. He goes further. Whoever resists the authorities, he says, resists what God himself has appointed. That is a statement with weight. It does not simply ask us to tolerate government; it grounds governmental authority in the ordering of God himself.

Paul returns to this theme in his letter to Titus, instructing believers to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable and gentle, showing humility to all people. Notice the posture Paul is describing. It is not passive indifference to injustice. It is an active, costly peaceableness. It is the disposition of someone who remembers what they once were, foolish, disobedient, deceived, driven by various lusts, and who now lives differently because of grace. We were once like those whose conduct we might be tempted to condemn. That memory ought to soften us, even as it emboldens us.

Now, this does not mean that Christians are called to silence. The call to avoid rebellion is not a call to abandon conviction. We may vote. We may stand publicly for what is right. We may uphold morality, speak the truth, and above all, carry the gospel into every corner of society. These are legitimate, honourable means of engaging the world and its systems. What we are not called to be is rebels. We are not called to take up the spirit of the age, which shouts and protests and tears down, and wear it as though it were a Christian garment. It is not. We are a force for peace in a world convulsed by conflict.

The deeper question underneath all of this is one of testimony. What does the watching world see when it looks at the followers of Christ? Do they see people who have been transformed by a grace that makes them peaceable, humble, and gentle, even under pressure? Or do they see people who have simply adopted the tactics of whatever political movement they most favour, dressed in slightly different colours? The apostle’s vision is far more subversive than any protest: a community of people so changed by the gospel that they stand as visible, living evidence that another way of being human is possible.

Let your gentle spirit be known to all people. The Lord is near.

Philippians 4:5

The only rescue from a hopeless sentence

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

There is a kind of honesty about the human condition that takes genuine courage to speak aloud. To stand before God and say: I am a sinner. I have broken your law. I have earned judgement. I deserve the consequences of my own choices. There is nothing I can do to rescue myself. That is not defeat. That is clarity. And it is the beginning of everything.

Because the gospel does not begin with good news about human potential. It begins with an honest assessment of human failure. We are all implicated. Not one person has kept God’s law perfectly. Not one person stands before heaven with a blameless record. The sentence is just. The judgement is deserved.

But the story does not end there, and this is precisely why the gospel is called good news. Jesus Christ entered history with a specific purpose: to take upon himself what you could not carry. Your sins. Your judgement. The death that your choices had earned. He did not come to applaud your effort or encourage you to try harder. He came to stand in your place, to absorb in his body what should rightly have fallen on yours.

This was not a transaction of obligation. It was an act of love, the most extravagant love ever demonstrated in the history of creation. He came because he loved you, knowing full well what you were.

That is the heart of the message. And it is available to you, not as a reward for improvement, but as a gift to be received.

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all time, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit;

1 Peter 3:18

The foundation beneath every believer’s hope

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JEFF TURNER

Strip away everything secondary from the Christian faith and you eventually arrive at the thing upon which the entire structure depends. That thing is the atoning death of Jesus Christ at Calvary and the forgiveness of sin made possible through his blood. This is not one doctrine among many; it is the load-bearing wall without which nothing else stands.

Your faith and mine rest on one central confidence: that Jesus Christ died as a substitutionary sacrifice, that his death was sufficient to satisfy the demands of divine justice, and that through his blood, genuine and permanent forgiveness of sin is available to all who come to the Father through him. If that death did not occur, if that blood was not shed, then on what basis could anyone approach God and expect to be received?

Jesus came in human flesh precisely because our condition required it. He entered our world at our level, clothed in the same humanity we wear, so that we could hear him, understand him, and through him, come to understand the nature of the God he came to reveal. The incarnation was not a theological abstraction; it was God making himself accessible to the people he came to save.

To live without this foundation is to live without a floor beneath your feet. Those who have not come to Christ through faith, given by God, have no settled basis for hope, no reason to believe that the weight of their sin has been addressed, no assurance that what awaits them beyond this life is anything other than the consequences of their own record.

But for those who have received what Christ accomplished, the ground is firm. Here is where we stand: on the cross, on the blood, on the risen Saviour who now intercedes for us. Nothing in this life or the next can remove that foundation from beneath us.

For no one can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 3:11

The blood, the resurrection, and the courage to face anything

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JEFF TURNER

Every doctrine that gives the Christian faith its shape and substance, every promise that anchors the believer’s heart through suffering and uncertainty, every reason we have to approach God with confidence rather than terror, all of it flows from a single source: the redemption purchased by the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ.

Remove that from the centre of Christian teaching and the consequences are total. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Without forgiveness, there is no restored relationship with God. Without that relationship, the hope we speak of is borrowed language with no corresponding reality. And without genuine hope, human existence is reduced to what it always threatens to become without the gospel: a long, purposeless journey toward a door that opens onto nothing.

But because the blood was shed, because Calvary is real, because Jesus Christ rose bodily from the grave and demonstrated that death itself could not hold him, everything changes. The Christian does not stand on wishful thinking.

The blood and the resurrection together produce something in the believing heart that nothing else can: the quiet, unshakeable confidence that we are held.

But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

Romans 8:11

Children who stumble, and the advocate who stands for them

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

Every parent of young children knows the particular tenderness that comes with watching someone you love struggle to keep rules they genuinely intend to keep. The bedroom left in disarray. The homework left until the final desperate hour. The house rule cheerfully forgotten for the fifth time that week. These failures do not come from a lack of love or a hardened rebellion; they come from the simple reality of being young, growing, and imperfect.

First John 2:1 holds this image before us with uncommon grace. John writes to his “little children,” urging them not to sin, yet acknowledging immediately that they will. Not because the standard is too high or because sin is inevitable in some fatalistic sense, but because we are frail and our growth is genuinely incomplete. We are, in the most honest sense of the word, still children.

What could be a source of despair becomes instead a source of comfort, because of what follows. We have an advocate. Jesus Christ, the righteous one, stands before the Father on behalf of every stumbling, well-intentioned, imperfect believer who falls short of the standard they genuinely desire to meet.

We are children in the house of a good Father, with the best possible counsel in our corner.

For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin.

Hebrews 4:15