"It should be our greatest grief that in our world the living God is not glorified. The living God is denied in aggressive atheism. The one true God is replaced or distorted in the practice of world religions. Our Lord Jesus Christ is abused and misrepresented in some popular cultures. And the face of the God of biblical revelation is obscured by Christian nomilnalism, syncretism, and hypocrisy."
Imagine for a moment that you are in a room filled with various people from all walks of life. Different nationalities, different religions, different cultures, different socio-economic backgrounds, and so on. See yourself walking from group to group and eavesdropping on their conversations. As you listen, you hear the groups talking about someone you know well...someone you love and care for deeply..someone who is not present to defend themselves. To your dismay, you hear the name of your beloved spouse being slandered by strangers. Men and women who have never met your spouse, never seen your spouse, never heard your spouse speak. Would you not be grieved? Would you not be disturbed? Would you not want to interrupt their slander and reveal to them how wrong they are in their estimation of your beloved? Would you not wish to correct their ignorant assumptions? What would you do?
In the statement quoted above, we hear the authors of this document, the Cape Town Commitment, ask us the same question. The biblical God is the one and only true God. There is no other. He is the supreme Monarch of all that exists, visible and invisible. Does He not deserve the adoration of His creatures? How then can we be indifferent to the lies made manifest in so many different ways...through false faiths, through denials of the divine, through mockery and slander? Should not the absence of true worship in the various groups around the globe not disturb us enough to break into the circle and to declare how wrong they are in their thinking? Their ignorance is not solely their fault. In part it is ours, for we know the One they slander and yet we choose to remain silent for whatever reason...nomilalism, syncretism, or hypocrisy and, indeed one more...materialism. Is it not strange that what we would not do in the case of our spouse, we do in the case of our Lord? We remain silent and we allow our Lord to be denied, replaced by what is false, distorted, abused, and misrepresented.
Pray with me for a holy discomfort to descend upon all the Lord's children...all of us...from the most pious to the most sincere to the most indifferent. And may our Lord not lift that sense of discomfort until He has driven us out from under our proverbial baskets to make His name known to every people group throughout the world so that He may receive what is His due - the worship of all His creatures.
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