THE END OF CHRISTIAN BYSTANDERS

MIKE CUNNINGHAM

OCTOBER 22, 2006

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that some of the greatest sins that have been, and still are occurring in our world, are those committed by Christian bystanders. These are the folks, who, although they knew or suspected evil was occurring, remained silent. They sat on the sidelines, and did nothing. In other words, these followers of Jesus succumbed to the devils temptation into believing that the greatest good, whether it was for their church, political party or themselves, would best be served by them not getting involved or speaking about the truth in love.

In my current series of messages on resisting the devil I have cited classic examples of this kind of inaction occurring amongst those real Christians within various congregations in today’s Episcopal Church USA, the Roman Catholic Church, and also the  Christian members of the United States Congress. Please don’t think I’m on a vendetta against the Christians in these particular institutions because I’m not. I have singled them out because they are high-profile examples of very visible sins of omission.

However, I believe these “silent sins” are rampant in countless Christian Churches in our country today. Please don’t misunderstand me here either. I’m not suggesting that all Christian Churches are plagued by perverts and their misguided supporters, because nothing could be further from the truth. However, I’m firmly convinced that many Christians all too often close their eyes to the truth of what’s obviously going on within their churches.

For instance, does this scenario sound familiar? Allison and Ed had been married for thirty two years and faithfully attended the church they were married in. They were a committed Christian couple. Ed sometimes served on the Churches outreach committee and was an occasional volunteer for the neighborhood meals-on-wheels program. Allison taught kids in Sunday School for a good fifteen years and then moved over and served on the Missions Committee. She also faithfully visited the church shut-inns and once a week visited folks in a nursing home. All this was in addition to raising four children.

They had a normal marriage with its usual ups and downs, but no major problems that Allison was aware of. You can imagine her surprise the day Ed told her he didn’t love her anymore and was moving out. No, he wasn’t interested in going for counseling. She wasn’t meeting his needs. It was as simple as that. His mind was made up and that’s all there was to it.

Allison tearfully confided in her busy pastor who managed to squeak in a conversation with Ed between the end of an Outreach Committee meeting and one with the Trusties. Nevertheless, Ed moved out and two months later filled for divorce. No reason was or had to be given.

One by one, the church members became aware there was a problem when Allison and Ed started attending the churches worship service at different times. Some of the members told Allison how bad they felt for her. They promised to pray for her and Ed. And then, about four months after Ed had left her and before their divorce was final, Allison heard that he had stopped attending the worship service completely, and so she decided to go to that particular one. Midway through the service, she got the shock of her life when she spotted Ed seated in the back of the big auditorium accompanied by a woman younger than their four children. They were obviously a couple.

A few of women from the church, including the wife of an elder told Allison they suspected something had been going on and again expressed how sorry they felt for her. They quoted Romans 8:28 about how God would someday work it all out for her good and told her to trust God, and that was it.

During that difficult period of time and after the first couple of months, there wasn’t a single person, including the pastor and the rest of the church leadership who gave her as much as a phone call, or dropped her a “thinking of you” note. They did, and said nothing. Allison felt as though, as far as they were concerned, she no longer existed. And that hurt her deeply. She left her church “family” of more than thirty two years and stopped attending. In fact, she hasn’t set foot in a church even for a wedding or funeral for the past nine years.

God saw to it that His child Allison didn’t go through that painful ordeal alone, but He didn’t do it in a way you might imagine. He brought several unbelievers into her life to help her bear the heavy load. Her support team even included a couple of elderly gay atheists. These two guys had been living together for forty two years. They turned out to be the kindest, most compassionate, understanding, and funny people Allison had ever known.

For the most part, the Christians from her church had treated this hurting woman like the Jewish Priest and Levite did the man who was attacked and robbed and then stripped of his clothing and had beaten the man and left him for dead on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road in Christ’s “Parable of the Good Samaritan” (Luke 10: 25-37.

These same Christians, including the leaders in her former church, didn’t care enough about her husband to lovingly confront him about his grave sins, and plead with him to stop. You could describe these people as being disinterested Christians traveling on the Road to Eternity. They had more of a resemblance to being bystanders than that of being fellow travelers.

At this point in my message I had intended for us to go right into God’s Word and stay there until the end, but I have been strongly inclined not to. I have to share certain things with you.

Last weekend while I was relaxing in New Hampshire with my wife, the Lord saw to it that I would come across a book in the Book Warehouse which was going out of business. I started reading it that night and have to say it had a profound effect on me. So much so, that I prayed and asked God that there would still be some more copies left the next day when I planned to return. I’m happy to say He granted my request. I was able to purchase the last two copies for our friends Guy and Archie. I’m trusting that the Lord will use these two men to put the things they learn in it to good use.

If the truth be known, there were several times during the past week when I was all alone and meditating on what I had been reading when I broke down and cried, a lot. In fact I prayed some of the most fervent prayers I can remember. That book has touched me deeply and I’m still not finished reading it.

The title is called “Unspeakable” and it was written by one of my favorite Christian authors, Os Guinness. The Lord has used his book to convict me that all too often, along with millions of other followers of Jesus; I also have allowed myself to be persuaded by the devil to become a Christian Bystander. The books subtitle is: “Facing up To Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.”

Guinness was born in China during World War Two and left in 1951 after the Chinese Revolution. He cites “Theodore White, the famous Time correspondent and author of The Making of the President. White was a young reporter at the time and he sent back harrowing accounts of the Henan famine. By his estimate, five million people died in the space of a few months. The devastation of draught, aggravated by the ravages of war and the callousness and ineptitude of the distant, uncaring government of Chang Kai-shek, made for a disaster beyond comprehension. What struck White first were the endless lines of people, strung-out families stumbling along in a hopeless search for food that was not there.”

“Food became the sole business of life and the one desperate obsession. Without it, death was sure. Lovers clutched each other in a long, farewell embrace out in the fields, intertwined to give themselves warmth until death released them. Speculators swarmed in to buy up land. Parents sold their children for food, and rumors of cannibalism were rife.”[1]

Guinness refers to the Rwandan bloodbath in which more than 800,000 Tutsis were butchered “in less than three months,” as being “one of the fastest massacres in history.” He writes, “It was the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center slaughters every single day for one hundred straight days.”[2]

“In 2001 the world responded to America’s tragedy with an outpouring of sympathy and aid. But in 1994, when the defenseless Tutsis cried for help the watching world watched and turned away. Not a single country went to their rescue.”[3]

I learned that during the past century more than two hundred million human beings; men, women and children including infants were killed in wars or butchered to death in political repression. Contrary to the prevailing conventional wisdom, Guinness enlightened me to the fact that; “More people in the twentieth-century were killed by secularists regimes, led by secular ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history.[4] Former Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, Christians all, spoke out against the evils I have been speaking about, but when the time came to act, little or nothing happened.

I urge each of you this morning to get a copy of this book and really study it. Meditate on it alongside of your Bible. Confirm the author’s observations and conclusions by the authority of the Scriptures. If anyone is short of funds let me know and our church will purchase it for you.

In my first message in this series I asked, “Are the sins of commission by abusive priests really greater than the sins of omission by folks who did and said very little by way of protest; folks content to “live and let live?”[5] We are all guilty of committing such sins and I’m not about to minimize the seriousness of them but they do pale in comparison to those of Evangelical Christians in the government.

From the president on down their silence as to ultimate truth is deafening. For instance, I believe those Christian politicians have a God given opportunity as well as the responsibility to tell the world the truth about what’s really going on in our world. Of course we should do everything possible to defeat the terrorists that plague our world and overthrow Roe vs. Wade.

And, we should also ceaselessly strive to set men free. But to naively imagine that freedom of all human beings on the planet or stacking the deck of the Supreme Court with Christians or enacting Christ honoring laws in our country will produce a better society apart from people embracing the Gospel of Jesus Christ is ludicrous.

Guy’s former pastor has co-authored an article in which they state: “The assumption that unregenerate sinners-the real “majority” in our society-can and will turn from their hedonistic quests to embrace and practice enmasse a Mosaic code of morality is a misguided hope that totally ignores both the Old and the New Testament teaching to the contrary.”[6]

Jeremiah 13:23 (AMP) ²³ Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also can you do good who are accustomed and taught [even trained] to do evil.

“And Jesus Himself provided no reason to think that unbelieving sinners can be redirected to more righteous pursuits when He stated summarily,

Matthew 7:18 (ESV) ¹⁸ A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.

“The expectation that the moral improvement of our culture is possible rests on the false premise, whether explicit or implicit, that a majority of unbelievers still have a natural spark of goodness” that can be rekindled to support better legislation and stronger enforcement designed to restore traditional “values” (whatever that means. Again, however, the New Testament quashes such hopes when it provides this summary analysis of a fallen society:

Romans 1:29-31 (AMP) ²⁹ …they were filled (permeated and saturated) with every kind of unrighteousness, iniquity, grasping and covetous greed, and malice. [They were] full of envy and jealousy, murder, strife, deceit and treachery, ill will and cruel ways. [They were] secret backbiters and gossipers, ³⁰ Slanderers, hateful to and hating God, full of insolence, arrogance, [and] boasting; inventors of new forms of evil, disobedient and undutiful to parents. ³¹ [They were] without understanding, conscienceless and faithless, heartless and loveless [and] merciless.

“Sound familiar? It isn’t necessary to dredge up the names of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example of fallen mankind’s propensity for evil. Right here in “America the Beautiful” the evidence to universal bondage to sin fills our newspapers, our radio and television broadcasts, Hollywood’s productions, Madison Avenue’s advertising campaigns and every other aspect of our culture’s pursuits.

Promiscuity, pornography and permissive paganism are proudly promoted while participation in prayer, preaching and praise is perversely prohibited in the public square. It is a society of sin-blinded pleasure seekers “who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter Isaiah 5:20).”[7]

During the current election season these Christian politicians have a wonderful prime-time opportunity to share the only solution to the world’s problems. The president and the rest of the Christian politicians have been acting more and more like those bystanders I have been speaking about.

When they are on those talk shows or holding a press conference and are asked what they think is the solution to the world’s problems I wish they would love their fellow man enough and be honest and talk about the fall and its consequences. I wish they would speak about how helpless we human beings really are. I just wish the real Christian politicians would stop being bystanders and come out of the closet and tell the whole truth about the need of all men to repent of their sins and accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

I wish they would tell the unbelievers of the world that they must be born again, that they must have a heart transplant, that they must have their heart of stone removed and replaced with a heart of flesh and they must have the Holy Spirit dwell within them, a Spirit Who will strongly incline them and then give them the strength to follow Jesus.

I wish they would tell the truth as to who mankind’s real enemies are; and how the devil and the rest of the cosmic forces of evil greatly influence all human beings to commit the “evil of all evils,” the breaking of our Holy Creators laws. And I wish those famous self-proclaimed prophecy experts really loved the Jews in Israel enough to warn them over and over again that they also must accept the love of Christ as exemplified on His cross or perish eternally.

Each of us has the responsibility to do our best to introduce those lost sinners He has brought into our lives to the Gospel. Each of us has the responsibility to struggle with everything we have to overcome the temptations to sin. Each of us must constantly strive to live our lives in such a manner that the love of Christ will shine forth through us. I don’t know about you folks but I’m looking forward to the day that will mark “the end of Christian bystanders.”

[2] Ibid, p. 5.

[3] p 6.

[4] p 9.

[5] “WHATS YOUR HEART’S DESIRE?” MIKE CUNNINGHAM OCTOBER 01, 2006.

[6] Searching Together, Spring-Fall 1999-Volume 27:1, 2, 3, Jon Zens & Cliff Bjork.

[7] Ibid.