A Sunday Morning Meditation and Reflection - 2/20/2022
Memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism 1647, is having a profound impact on my life, my theology, and my relationship with the one and only self-existing Christian Trinitarian God who has revealed Himself in His self-authenticating Bible. To think the Shorter Catechism is a simplified version intended for children to memorize affects me deeply.
I have received more benefit and more sound Biblical theology from this endeavor than in all the years of Seminary, and all the years of preaching and teaching of the Bible that I have done since starting my ministry in 1984, over 38 years ago.
It was a common practice for Christian parents to have their covenant children memorize the Shorter Catechism. Without television, electronic devices, games, and social media families routinely ate meals together, prayed before eating, read the Bible, and memorized the Catechism..
It strikes me as I write these words that people may think it extreme for children to be raised this way. Yet, I am thinking that no matter what, parents are “catechizing” their children. It may not appear to be so, but what a child learns or is exposed to regularly is a form of indoctrination. Whether it is the songs of Disney, Sponge Bob, Critical Race Theory, Nonbinary Gender Identity, Evolution, the Pledge of Allegiance, Covid-19 safety protocols, etc, and ad nauseam, our children are being catechized.
What we expose them to, and what we teach them regularly, divulges what is most important to a culture. All the aforementioned subjects are, in fact, deeply religious and connected to a modern, yet ancient “faith” of Statism, which is humanism personified.
Is it any wonder that our country, even the whole world, continues to slip into totalitarianism, when most pastors themselves, have become mere agents of the State in their 501(c)3 corporations rather than Shepherds who fiercely defend, diligently teach, and lovingly care for the Flock of Jesus Christ from all dangers within and without? That Pastors like Pastor Artur Pawlowski are the exception, and not the rule is a damning testimony of how far modern Christianity has fallen.
I hardly know what to write, especially since I myself am counted among the guilty concerning my own practice of being a pastor. Several years ago, I resigned as pastor of a church I planted and shepherded for over twelve years, abandoning the congregation. I so completely lost my way that I participated in shameful behavior which culminated in consented to the sin of divorce, which I wholeheartedly repudiate.
Even now, I am not part of a church community. This is now mainly due to the fact that, in my repentance and zeal, I cannot worship in a church under a pastor who is okay with being a State church through incorporation. And I wrestle with whether or not my past sin disqualifies me from planting a new unincorporated church, or helping an incorporated church untangle themselves from the tentacles of the State by dissolving their unholy alliance with the State.
I do not have an answer to these, and other internal conflicts with which I wrestle within my heart and mind. But I know this much: the Bible tells me that God knows the “thoughts and intentions” of my heart, and He requires me, to the best of my ability, to obey Him with a sound heart, a keen mind, and clean hands. And so I do trusting to the promises of Scripture such as Proverbs 3:5+6:
“Trust in the LORD, with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.”
Thank you dear reader for walking beside me in my ramblings of the last several paragraphs, and I ask that those who share my faith in Jesus Christ would take a moment and pray for me, as I have for you. Amen