We Have Met the Enemy

This week’s Moment of Truth: Hebrews 12:1-2 (NIV) — "Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus."

We've spent weeks talking about threats to Christianity. Here's the uncomfortable truth: every single one of them has the same accomplice. It's not the world. It's not the culture. It's you and me.

In this week's “Moment of Truth,” Colonel Richard J. Mendelow (Ret) names it plainly: no threat to the faith succeeds without our passivity, our pride, our ignorance of Scripture, or our fear of standing firm. The world will always be the world — it will lie, divide, and prey on the defenseless. That's not up for debate. What's up for debate is us.

A Christian man who storms a school board meeting armed with truth but delivers it with anger and vulgarity hasn't defended Christ — he's handed the world a win. A church that preaches the Bible until it collides with politics isn't living the gospel — it's playing at it. The only behavior any of us actually controls is our own.

As Oliver Perry once reported victory at Lake Erie, and Walt Kelly later parodied for a different kind of battle: we have met the enemy, and he is us. The future of the church in this culture won't be decided by the threats coming at it. It'll be decided by how we respond to them.