WHAT GOD THINKS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, February 3, 2025 – Our most important decision, as children of God and brethren of Jesus, is to choose to do God’s will every day and in every circumstance, no exceptions. Choosing to do God’s will is more important than anything else we can choose to do during our time here. Jesus told us that he always did that which pleased the Father; he didn’t say he always loved; he didn’t say he always had mercy; he didn’t say he always fed everyone who came to him hungry or housed everyone who came to him homeless – he said he always did that which pleased the Father, which is the same as saying he always did God’s will and never rebelled against doing it. Since doing God’s will was Jesus’ number one priority during his time on Earth, it should be ours, too.
Unfortunately, the prioritizing of doing God’s will tends to get lost in the doctrinal shuffle of being a “good Christian”. Were he still here today, King Saul might have something to say about that. Saul was directed by God to completely obliterate a certain city and to leave nothing standing and no-one alive, but Saul thought it more expedient to take with him the choicest of the spoils, and to save the king alive for later slaughtering and some livestock for later sacrificing. This spur-of-the-moment decision, urged on by his soldiers, cost Saul not only his kingship but his soul. Why? Because God wants obedience, not expediency or creative compromise. Specifically, God demands the full obedience of his children who’ve been graced with his Spirit; anything less he considers rebellion.
Put this way, God may come across as rather heavy-handed, but there’s a reason why he both demands and expects obedience. God has a plan; the big picture of it is given in scripture, but the details are filled in by us day by day as we make our way from one point in the big picture to the next. But if we deviate by disobeying God’s explicit commands, he’ll have to find someone else to connect the dots. This is what happened to Saul, and much earlier also what happened to Satan and all the angels who followed (and fell with) him, and to Adam and Eve, and to Esau, and to many others. We don’t want this to happen to us.
Our obedience to God enables us to love whomever God directs to love, to have mercy on whomever God directs us to have mercy on, and to help whomever God directs us to help. Unlike doctrinal Christianity, which stipulates that we’re to love and have mercy on and help everyone with wild abandon and without exception, Jesus showed us to do those things only in accordance with God’s directives, that is, in accordance with God’s will. That means sometimes we have to burn it all down, if that’s what God directs us to do, and that sometimes we don’t extend love and don’t extend mercy and don’t extend help, if God directs us not to. This can look and sound decidedly unchristian to the world and to worldly Christians, but it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us.
It only matters what God thinks.
(1 Samuel 15:22-23)
KINGDOM SOLIDARITY
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, February 2, 2025 – There’s something about the term “solidarity” that makes my skin crawl. Although earlier popularized as a communist or socialist rallying cry, it’s usually trotted out today as a union or progressivist dog whistle. Cries of “Solidarity!” tend to go hand-in-hand with perceived victimhood, and being a victim is a slam-dunk payout these days, which may explain why we’re hearing solidarity more and more frequently.
But hearing it more frequently doesn’t make it any less grating to me. And since it’s one of those word trends that will likely not go away any time soon, I decided to explore my aversion of the term, aiming to dull my distaste or maybe even turn it around.
Here’s what I came up with. Standing in solidarity implies siding with or supporting a group, an organization, or an idea. I did a quick mental run-through of all the groups and organizations I interact with daily and the ideas that I entertain, and I honestly couldn’t imagine standing in solidarity with any of them. I tolerate them at best, but mostly I avoid them and dismiss them. No solidarity there. Ditto for my nation and “my people”. As a born-again believer, I have more in common with the people who lived 2000 years ago in the Middle East than I do with people living today in Canada or with the people of my heritage (German, Irish, and English). And I can’t really say that I stand in solidarity with God and Jesus because they don’t need me to side with them or support them: They’re perfect in and of themselves. If no-one at all sided with or supported God and Jesus, they’d still be perfect. They don’t need anyone’s solidarity.
And then it occurred to me who does need solidarity – we do. We in God’s Kingdom need each other’s solidarity. As born-again believers living in a world that’s hostile to everything we hold dear, we need to stand in solidarity with each other and only with each other, even if we’ve never met and don’t know each other’s names. We’re not standing in solidarity to announce our victimhood to the world or to financially benefit from it in some way. No. We’re standing in solidarity because Jesus told us that we’re to love one another, and to love another means to side with and support one another through thick and thin. So Jesus told us to stand in solidarity without actually telling us to stand in solidarity. Loving one another means standing in solidarity with our Kingdom homies, because on Earth, our Kingdom homies are the only ones we can really trust.
Seeing my fellow born-again believers as my solidarity homies has, for me, turned solidarity around to mean something good. I still cringe when I hear “solidarity” being applied in the world, but I like the idea of standing in solidarity with the Kingdom. I stand in solidarity with that idea as much as I stand in solidarity with all of you who are genuinely born-again and filled with God’s Holy Spirit.
I hope you stand in solidarity with me.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 