"God's Word Speaks to EVERY Issue We Face Today"

Our Assistant Pastor preached a VERY helpful message yesterday!! It was a one-shot message from the one chapter book of PHILEMON (photo of entire book shown above).  And, it indirectly addresses the new, contemporary question "Should we tear down statues of our Founding Fathers because they owned slaves?" 

You see, the book has the great Apostle Paul writing to PHILEMON, appealing to him to release a slave that he owned....so this nonsense that "the white man's Bible endorses slavery" is immediately debunked.  The Bible doesn't ENDORSE slavery any more than it endorses any other sin...it merely acknowledges its existence!! Anyway, in years past the main lessons from this section of God's infallible Word always seemed to be regarding Paul's HUMILITY and TACT in making his request, but since America now has this nutty new idea that our Founding Fathers should be "VILLIANIZED" (I just invented that word, I think) because they were once slaveholders, there's a "new" application which was there all along, yet not needed until TODAY.

As our pastor pointed out, when Paul praised Philemon's VIRTUES he was doing so under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit...therefore he was not just "buttering him up" to try to persuade him!!  When he called Philemon "brother," it was true just like every OTHER single word in Scripture is true. So the point is, yes, someone CAN be a righteous man and have blind spots, yet they are STILL counted as righteous.  The rest of the Bible bears this out...God summed up David as "the man after His own heart" and that was DESPITE David's lapses into sin. God evaluates us on the OVERALL bent of our lives, for which we can all be very thankful because ALL sin!! And sometimes "good" men do bad things and bad men do GOOD things.  Whether or not our Founding Fathers were all CHRISTIANS...those going to Heaven because of Christ's Righteousness ALONE,  well, I don't know.  But they WERE basically "good" men DESPITE (some of them) being owners of slaves.  And their statues don't deserve to be torn down anymore than the kind words the Apostle TRUTHFULLY spoke about Philemon deserve to be purged from God's unchanging and everlasting Word.  (CERTAINLY they shouldn't be removed just because some proud punks here in 2020 think that they are smarter than all the preceding generations of Americans who HONORED our Founding Fathers)!!

Personally, I did NOT need that sermon yesterday to convince me that destroying monuments of our Founding Fathers is wrong, but the message confirmed to me how GOD'S UNCHANGING WORD SPEAKS TO US IN OUR EVER-CHANGING WORLD.

And it speaks to EVERY issue we face today, if only we keep digging into it!!