A TIME OF CHOOSING: CULTURE OF LIFE VS CULTURE OF DEATH

By James Wilson, Coordinator

PrayNorthstate

During a recent PrayNorthstate event Mary – a woman in her seventies – approached Diana and me after the teaching time was ended for the evening. She asked us to pray healing for her cataracts, which had rendered her practically blind in both eyes. She had already undergone failed surgery; the doctors had written her off. We prayed for some time and saw no tangible result. We told her to get some good rest and promised to pray again in the morning. The next morning, after she – and we – had rested in the Lord’s promises, this septuagenarian entered the church running and shouting, “I can see; I can see!” Her role in her healing was submission in prayer and passion in waiting on the Lord.

A similar miracle happened for Dallas. She suffered intractable pain in her back – neither medication nor tazer therapy even touched it, and doctors had likewise called her hopeless. Prolonged prayer brought no visible results and she went home having chosen to depend on the Lord anyway; when she awoke in the morning she too was completely healed. Her participation in her miracle was just as Mary’s in hers.

These are great glory stories, but one might well ask what either one has to do with choosing a culture of life for California.

Near the end of his farewell speech to Israel, recorded in Deuteronomy 30:15-16, Moses says, “See, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.” He adds that if they turn away from God and into idolatry of any kind they will be destroyed and he finishes with this: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life.”

Remarkably, Moses declares that life and prosperity cannot be separated. If Israel loves God and clings to His word and statutes – all of them – she cannot but live well. This is echoed by Jeremiah six hundred years later – in the face of Babylonian invasion – when he quotes God to the effect that God’s plans are exclusively for a hope and prosperity which can only be when Israel seeks His face with enduring faith and passion; he then buys some real estate at the Lord’s command. No prophet of Israel ever said otherwise, but many make their claims for God in the face of national disaster that seems to offer compelling temptation to take a quick – and idolatrous – fix instead of waiting out the Lord’s graciousness. No good ever comes from doing it our way and only good has ever resulted from abiding in the Lord and His ways.

California is justly called the Golden State. Our economy is one of the ten largest in the world. Our agriculture feeds and our entertainment industry delights the world. We invented the California dream of perpetual sun and everlasting summer, and we are home to the most magnificent variety of climate and topography in the nation. We host the core of the high tech industries, much of the nation’s oil and refineries, and a system of state universities that led the way for the nation in their formation and quality. In the realm of the Spirit more revivals – from Azusa Street to the Jesus People to the Charimatic Renewal of both the sixties and the eighties – have broken out here than anywhere since the Great Awakening.

But we are also a state that prides herself on being home to the greatest gold rush of all time – we find much of our corporate identity in an event that made an idol of something that is lodged in the mud of creeks and hillsides – and for which we killed thousands of aboriginal people and destroyed great swaths of our own habitat. Although the Gold Rush is held up as the inaugural source of California’s prosperity the facts are that few got rich because of it. Most of the miners subsisted on pennies a day and eventually went bust.

In more recent times we find ourselves leading the nation in abortions (25%); pornography (85%); and suicide (especially the most violent kinds). Our economy has been amongst the slowest in the nation to recover from recession and we battle record budget deficits and fiscal desperation in local government. We are trembling on the brink of becoming the second state to legalize both homosexual marriage and physician assisted suicide – despite the fact that we voted against both practices by overwhelming majorities within the past five years. We find ourselves living in a culture of death – a culture in which the facts I cite are as much effect as cause – for the culture emerges from an accumulation of idolatries over centuries.

No group can claim innocence. Although the Native Peoples of California have suffered inhumanly at the hands of immigrant peoples, they too practiced shamanistic shortcuts to prosperity. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All have sought a shortcut to the good life and it always becomes an idol leading to death. But God is calling us to choose His life again – for such a time as this.

There was an amazing confluence of events at the end of March and the beginning of April that included the celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ with the peaceful death of Pope John Paul II and the violent and unconscionable death of Terri Shiavo. As I sought God in prayer over the “why” of an entire government and nation in paralysis over the lawlessness of one Florida judge and one unfaithful husband He spoke and said that He is using this event to call the nation to prayer, to repentance, and to a corporate choice for a culture of life to displace the culture of death.

He is calling His people to prayer – nothing shocking about that – but He is calling His people to sustained prayer for the blessing and forgiving of one another. He is calling for a time of Jubilee – in which debts are cancelled and reconciliation (defined as the renewal of relation) is both method and goal. This has always been the thrust of passages from 2 Chronicles 7:14 (if my people…called by my name…humble themselves…and pray) to Matthew 18 (how many times must I forgive my brother?) and Luke 10 (bless, hang out, minister, bear witness); it is especially so at this time.

He is calling His people to actively love one another regardless of differences over interpretation of doctrine or scripture. He has always said – from Isaiah 56 to John 10, and from Acts 17 to Revelation 22, that we are to respect one another in our differences as we are seeking and worshipping Him. He has always said that at the end of the day we are one flesh in Him – if we believe the words about Peter and the centurion in Acts 10 or the simple statement of Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. But at this time it is high time we stopped passing judgment on Catholics – if we are Protestants – and began to bless Protestants – if we are Catholics. He is One in Three and He will not tolerate less than that in the people of His Body.

He is calling His people to make the preparation of our hearts, our minds, and even our physical and social environment – known in Luke 3 as the highway in the desert for our King – our sole business. And He is cautioning us to reject the leaven of Herod – we can do it using earthly methods – and the leaven of the Pharisees – we can do nothing but await His coming in pious passivity – with equal enthusiasm. He expects us to pursue Him as He pursues us – and to wait on Him as He waits on us – with utter passion.

There are political initiatives in the works – and we need to support them as God gives us guidance. There is a proposed constitutional amendment to protect marriage and there are lawsuits pending concerning embryonic stem cell research and the tremendous fraud that was perpetrated on voters in Proposition 71 – as just two examples. But what God is up to is a call to His people to choose life across the board. The stakes are way beyond the issue of euthanasia, advanced medical directives, and the over-the-top power we have ceded to activist judges in America. This is an occasion for intensive and focused prayer coupled with ministry and sacrificial availability for the wooing of whole communities into the Kingdom of God. It is a time for every Christian to examine his own heart and repent for all of the compromises and shortcuts that each of us has chosen and worshipped as the idols they are.

To participate in this effort contact us at PrayNorthstate and ask about the California concerts of prayer, the Paah-ho-ammi prayer project, and other prayer and blessing initiatives underway in Northern California at this time – under our auspices and those of other ministries. But above all recognize that God wants to transform our region into a province of His Kingdom far more than we can ever desire it. He offers us the chance to participate in what He is doing – and to wait upon His grace with the same passion in which He waits for us to come into His will.

Early in May we received word that one of the public schools we prayer-walk each year was designated a distinguished school in its class. There are thousands of schools in that class nationwide and only about ninety qualify for this recognition. When we began to walk and pray on this campus – four years ago – it was a place of drugs and violence. When sustained prayer was introduced the hard work of a dedicated faculty and staff began to pay off for the first time – and this is only one such story of transformation amongst the forty-plus schools we are privileged to bless in our region.

What have a couple of miracle stories got to do with choosing life for a region and state? God has chosen life for us; He wants us to choose life with Him – and be passionately waiting for Him as He is waiting for us. There is nothing better in the world – and no more pregnant time in which to choose.

PrayNorthstate can be reached at 530-941-3470, or at praynorthstate@charter.net