God isn't fixing this--okay, then what should that tell us?

It’s not the New York Times asking, Is God Dead?  It is not the Time Magazine take on the same query.  It is something of a headline that hopes to generate the same sort of controversy and paper sales that the Daily News, a New York City publication, has put forth.

It might sell a few more papers, but God Isn’t Fixing This, is indicative not of the violence in America but of our propensity to need someone or something tangible to blame.

Gun owners, lobbies, legislation, and legislators will be the targets again for a while.  So long as we keep them in our sights, we don’t have to deal with the real issues.

What issues?

We don’t value the sanctity of life.

We are not seeking God and his kingdom and his righteousness.

We like being the most selfish people on the planet.

Yes, this is generalizing, but it is painfully accurate.  We can blame politicians and lobbyists or even God, but we are responsible for the current state of affairs in our nation.

Yes, many Christians pray daily.  Some try very hard to follow the teachings of Jesus.  Some try to love one another, but what the few are doing is not indicative of the direction that the country is heading.  The love of many has truly grown cold.

The history of God’s Chosen People is full of examples of a nation turning away from God time and time again.  We could look at what happened to them and learn or we could just find a target to blame instead.  We have chosen the latter.

So what can we do?

Turn back to God.  Really, what we need to do is turn back to God.

Let’s take the headline and just for the moment assume that it is valid on its face:  God is not fixing this.  The word God presumes some things even outside of the Christian community—all powerful, righteous, holy, just, and some non Christians will even add loving.

Very few picture God as the mean kid with a magnifying glass focusing sunlight on his creation until they burn.  In the premise of God is the understanding that God is good.

So if God is not fixing what is wrong with our country, then maybe, just maybe we are the ones that need to do the fixing.  We need to be the ones to make the course corrections.

These corrections won’t begin with our laws and law makers.  They must begin in our hearts.  We must turn away from the evil and wickedness in the world and turn back to God.  Let’s throw in a Bible term—repent.

We must repent of our wickedness.  We are the most narcissistic society on the planet.  We don’t value life in the womb.  We don’t value lives until a dozen are lost in some mass shooting.  Killing sells video games.  Life seems to be about what we can get for ourselves.

This whole store up treasures in heaven line of thinking falls on deaf American ears.  We have rejected God and still wonder why he isn’t fixing the problems of these horrific shootings that seem to come one after another these days.

Well, we are a special sort of stupid.  We want the benefits of being a godly society without having to be a godly society.

That dog don’t hunt!

We can turn to God—for real and not just in speeches—and he will help us break away from the wickedness that we know in this self gratifying, narcissistic, and blame prone society; or we can do nothing different and expect nothing different.

God isn’t fixing this, but he stands ready to fix it, heal us, heal our land, and bless us more than we can imagine if we will just turn back to him.

Those who currently seek God, his kingdom, and his righteousness are strangers in this world.  We don’t fit into the mainstream.  Our hope is in the Lord and our mission is to bring people to God through the good news of Jesus Christ.

We minister to a godless world.  We get that.  We don’t try to fix blame.  We try to lead people to the One who can fix hearts and lives and lead us to abundant and eternal life.

The answer is Jesus Christ!

The answer is Jesus.

Jesus is the way.

To follow him, we must first stop following the god of this age.  We must repent and give Jesus lordship in our lives.  One day he will reign in this world and we will know nothing but peace and love and righteousness. 

For now, each of us must turn away from the wickedness of the world and accept Jesus into our hearts.  The world will always have trouble, but we must take heart:  Jesus has overcome the world.

Let’s stop blaming God or guns or laws or lawmakers.  Let’s fix the condition of our hearts.

Let’s turn to God and put him first in everything.

God will fix this!  Are you ready to do things his way?