Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that
 looks on tempests and is never shaken;

            Mr. Appel, you said something to us at the beginning of first term that has stuck with me all the way until the end. “Go out and do what [Christ] decrees with all of your heart; that is what it means to be a Christian.” Everything we have covered this year has been in light of that statement. Are we living for God – doing His will with all of our hearts, loving Him in our actions? Or are we living as citizens of the City of Man, weak-kneed and obliging – allowing culture and the world to define our faith and our Christianity? This is the ultimate antithesis between the City of God and the City of Man. Where do our loyalties lie? Are we loving the one to whom those loyalties are directed? Are we fighting for those loyalties with all that we are?
           Christians today pretend to love Christ; we are prepared to do His decrees if it makes us feel good. We are willing to take Sunday off as a “Sabbath” because it gives us a break. We are prepared “to love” Christ because it is easy, but in reality we are not willing to truly love Him. We are not willing to become vulnerable for His sake. We are not willing for the world to hate us for the name of Christ. We are not willing to give up our lives for Him. We have become weak and spineless. We have nothing to stand for because we choose not to make that stand. We step back and hang our heads in shame when we hear the words of Martin Luther – a man who knew what it meant to truly love God. We would tremble if we were in his place, but Luther stood strong. “My conscience is bound to the word of God. I will not and cannot recant. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.”
            Every month we hear of athletes that are injured or die doing what they love.  Does this stop the swimmers from swimming, the runners from running, the boxers from boxing, or the racers from racing? No. And it is because they love what they do with all of their being. They are willing to spend every minute of every day doing this activity. They are even willing to risk their very lives to continue doing what they love. However, all these things are simply reflections of God. It is God that gave the swimmers lungs, the runners, legs, the boxers, hands, and the racers, precision. Why then, do we not give up even more for God? God gives to us everything we have here on this earth. He is eternal, omnipotent, all-loving. He is greater than anything we could make or enjoy. And yet, when asked to commit our lives to Him, we quibble and squirm and ask why He needs ALL of our life. Why are we willing to give up everything for that one temporal win, for one dash of joy, but we are not willing to give up anything for the immortal God who freely gives to us anything for which we ask?  
            C.S. Lewis once said,

“It is no good asking for a simple religion. Real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I'm sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of - all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to my optic nerve and what it does to my brain - and, of course, you'll find that what we call 'seeing a table' lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not - and the modern world usually is not - if you want to go on and ask what is really happening - then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something is not more simple.”

          Our culture is a culture that wants this simple religion. We don’t want commitment. We don’t want to fight for Christendom with all of our hearts. We are far to content to rest in the dregs of Christianity that culture has left us in. We allow our lives to be defined by what is around us, accepting the vaporous and watered-down religion that the world smiles upon. We want to define religion as that which (as C.S. Lewis once said) ‘a man does with his solitude.' We want Thomas Kinkade paintings and Janette Oke novels. We want to divorce religion from the world, from our responsibilities. We are not willing to see Christ as Lord over all – just as Lord over Christianity. But this simple religion is impossible. As Peter Leithart wrote in Against Christianity, We only embrace the culture’s story because we forget that we have an all embracing story of our own. But we do have a story. And fighting for this story takes blood, toil, and sweat. It takes true commitment. It takes love. Christ tells us that we are not to be content with the place that we have been offered in the world... We are to stand apart.
        But Jesus never promised that this task would be easy. Throughout the gospels, He warned the disciples about the consequences of following Him; about the consequences of standing firm in the faith, of fighting for Christendom.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”

 We are not to be of the world. Christ has chosen us out of the world. To be a Christian does not mean that we should stand back and watch the walls of the church crumble as it embraces the culture’s definition of religion. We are instead to live as citizens worthy of the gospel. In the words of Peter Leithart, being a Christian “means to be refashioned in all of one’s desires, aims, attitudes, [and] actions, from the shallowest to the deepest.” Being a Christian should have more depth than the puddle that we accidently stepped into last week. It should permeate every nook and cranny of life. Being a Christian should redefine the very thoughts that we think, the words that we say, the actions that we do. Daniel understood this when he stood erect, refusing in the name of Christ to give allegiance to a king who was not the one true King. Saul understood this when he met Christ on the road to Damascus and turned his life into a living vessel for Him. Stephen realized this as he gave up his life for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. Martin Luther understood this when he stepped apart from the culture, from the expectations that the world held, from the clamoring of tradition, and nailed his 95 theses to the door at Wittenburg. The Crusaders also realized this, and were prepared to sacrifice their lives as they took up their arms and went to battle in the name of Christ with His Red Cross stamped upon their garments. Wilberforce understood this as he fought for the abolishment of slavery, as he stood alone, strong and sure, calling on the Lord as his helper. These men recognized what it meant to be a true Christian. They realized that, as Christians, they must go out and do Christ’s decrees with every fiber of their being. And they recognized that Heaven is more than a place that we go when we die. Heaven is in our midst here and now, and as Christians it is our responsibility to defend it. If we aim for this heaven, C.S. Lewis said,  [we] will get earth thrown in. [but if we] aim at earth, [we will] get neither.” We must be a people of God. We must strive for heaven.  “We must stand in the gap, and proclaim the truth as a testimony for all nations.”
            The history of the church was ultimately a history of redemption. Christ came to redeem those who were slaves to sin. Jesus came to *be* Israel again, to save her from exile. This is the job that Christ has handed over to us. Because God’s ultimate purpose is to restore His creation through His church, His wisdom is to be made manifest through the ministry of that body. This task is the task that we must take up with a pure and obedient heart.
            As Postmillennialists, we cannot just stand back and watch the strength of Christendom fail. We cannot offer dualistic and watered down religion. If we truly believe that Christ’s Kingdom is a kingdom of this world, the world for which He came to die, then we have a job to do. If Christendom is to be spread as leaven throughout a loaf, if it is to grow in strength and size until the name of Christ is known and proclaimed in all nations, then we must now, without timidity, take up our swords and fight for the restoration and progression of Christendom. We must take off our What Would Jesus Do bracelets, close up our Christian inspirational novels and we must step forward in faith. We must not sit idly back and watch as the church grows weak. We must spread her truth to every nation, and to every tongue. We are to continue the work that Christ began in His death: we must turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. Our culture trys to tell us otherwise. It fights against the permanence of things; As such we see the task that Christ, as first-fruits, set before us as a task that is done in vain. We don’t believe in striving for future restoration, because we allow the temporal view of the world to color our lives and actions.
But the foundational hope of the city of God is characterized by this task. This hope is grounded in the hope of Christ’s ultimate triumph over the Prince of Darkness. Christianity is to become a new cosmos. God promises that His word will not return to Him void, and it is our job to fight for that word until the end, and to fight for it as Christians -- with all of our hearts.

So, I guess I should have waited until I had fully edited the poems before I posted them. The second one has been slightly revised since yesterday :p

"An Ancient Library"

Dusty, unread, and deserted                          
Life and laughs and tales of sorrow.             
On the bookshelf volumes linger,                  
Waiting, watching, for the morrow.             

Grey from years of dust and sunlight           
Notes in margins closed in cages.               
Ink has faded from the chapters,                
Years have yellowed precious pages.         

Honor, glory, love, betrayal                        
Caught in tombs of words forsaken.            
Fables, legends, tales of valor,                     
Tales of cities lost and taken.                       

Caged in words which lay abandoned          
Morals hide beneath the binding.                   
Wipe the dust from off the covers,                
Gems of virtue therefore finding.



"Our Memories"

How thorny are the recollections brought  
To us by Life. When we remember days
That years have long disowned and threads of thought
Have left behind, the joys each time we praise.

We look in longing at the past and pine;
Why have the olden days of bliss passed by?
The years which we endure today are fine,
But why must we forsake good days and die?

In life we recollect those days of fun,
Of love, of joy.  The frosty evenings cold,
The iridescent flames of furnace sun,
The hugs of friends which feel to us like gold.