Millions for a killing, and a closed hand for the Gospel

Let me say the fair thing first, so I am not guilty of the same sloppiness I am correcting. Paying for a lawful defense is not the same thing as cheering a murder. A family in grief is not a campaign. A court is not a feed. God hates hands that shed innocent blood, and He also hates a lying tongue. We do not get to invent a verdict because we are angry, and we do not get to celebrate a grave because we liked the politics of it. The Mighty Warriors Ministry will not do either.

What we are watching is something else. A person is accused of killing, and a crowd does not merely say, let the law work. The crowd falls in love with the story. The dead person becomes an idea. The killer becomes a symbol, sometimes a hero. The link is passed around the way an altar used to be tended. People who have never sent a Bible, never fed a widow, never sat with a teenager who is losing the faith, will empty a card for that story before lunch. That is not charity. That is worship with a receipt.

Have today’s morals changed that much? The human heart has not. Genesis still tells the truth about us. What changed is the permission. Isaiah said, woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. There was a time when a person who praised a killing would have been ashamed to say it at the table. Now the shame runs the other way. If you will not clap, you are the problem. The sin is old. The microphone is new. A generation did not invent wickedness. It stopped blushing.

So where have we lost Christians, in all the generations, not only the young one everybody likes to scold? We lost them the way Israel lost them. The book of Judges says a generation arose that knew not the Lord, nor the works which He had done. That generation did not appear from nowhere. The one before it got quiet. Psalm 78 puts the charge on the parents: we will not hide them from their children, showing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord. A closed Bible in a living room will empty a church faster than any law.

We lost children where the faith was a Sunday mood and never a Monday practice. We lost young men and women in rooms that entertained them and never taught them to repent, to pray, or to open the Scripture for themselves. We lost the middle of life to a busyness we called provision. The house was fed. The soul was not. We lost elders when the church asked them to sit down, be honored, and stop teaching, as if gray hair were a retirement from the faith. Every age was handed a thinner Christ than the age before it, and some were relieved. They wanted a Jesus who would bless the life they had already chosen.

Do not let me aim this only at the people outside the church. A great many who still say the name have already moved their treasure. They will give to what makes them feel righteous in public, and they will not give to the slow work of making a disciple. A mission that crosses an ocean with a Bible does not trend. A sermon that asks you to forgive, to tell the truth, and to keep your hands clean will not fill a fund by Friday. Matthew says that because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. Cold love still attends. It just will not pay for anything that does not flatter it.

I am not shaming a poor saint who has nothing to send. God is not a beggar, and this ministry does not sell prayer. Salvation is a gift. If the Lord has put means in your hand, then hear the question without a salesman attached to it. Will you fund a story that calls evil good, and withhold the means from a people who are trying to teach the next generation the works of God? Galatians says, as we have opportunity, let us do good unto all, especially unto them who are of the household of faith. That verse is not a tip jar. It is a test of who your people are.

If this bothers you, do not only be bothered online. Open the Bible with a child this week, or with a grandchild, or with a young man who has never been taught. Tell the truth about murder, and tell the truth about the crowd that makes a celebrity out of it. Pray. And if God stirs you to stand with this work — Bibles in hands, houses that disciple, a Gospel that is not for sale — then give cheerfully, not because a minister pressed you. The crowd is not going to become the church. The church has to remember whose it is, in this generation, before we hand the next one an empty name.