“IT IS THE TRUTH which is assailed in any age which tests our fidelity. It is to confess we are called,not merely to profess. If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point.”[1]
If this is true, it will not do for a pastor or spiritual leader to shrink from the point of attack. The point of attack today, the place where the war rages most intensely, is anything having to do with gender, men and women’s roles, or homosexuality.
We can rationalize: it’s not a gospel issue, or this will split my congregation, but in the end these are just evasions. They are merely attempts to flee from the point of attack, to flee the place of greatest danger. And this ultimately betrays the gospel. Jesus never shrunk from the point of attack. Instead, he took up his cross and died.
We are called to do the same.
[1]E. R. Charles, The Chronicles of the Schoenberg-Cotta Family, (Thomas Nelson, 1864).
