The Devil’s tactic for many years in America has been to convince the church to feel comfortable, and trouble free so the body of Christ has no reason to Disciple and influence the culture outside the front door. Satan knows this prevents the body of Christ from having the prowess to force the seat of righteousness at the table to influence in the public square.
Today’s church needs to figure out what is biblically obvious. Satan has most of his influence outside the church, not inside. Outside is where Christians are told to make disciples in all nations. Inside is where Christians are taught how to go outside and make Disciples.
Shepherds should know the sin of silence is to worship Christ as a hermit inside the church, and not spread the truth of Christ outside to the ends of the earth. However, to get around the sin of silence, many Church leaders rationalize they need to please and affirm unbelieving attendees. This is trying to please men through the process of absorption of the holiness inside the Church where no one has to be bold or risk ridicule.
Trying to please men is called the fawn response. Fawns stay silent, and are nearly odorless having a natural camouflage that helps them hide in plain sight. The human fawn response is to respond to a threat by becoming silent or more appealing to the threat. This is an emotional response when people try to avoid conflict in order to feel safe from ridicule, judgement, and/or rejection. These Christians have trouble disagreeing with evil, and fear revealing God’s truth, because His truth will cause conflict. Normal responses are fight, flight, or freeze, where your nervous system sees an immediate threat. The fawn response morphs into a strategy to make the person look more pleasing, noncommittal, and hidden in plain sight from the threat. Therefore, they feel they can overcome evil, by being less of the threat to evil. This is delusional at best, fawns are no threat but when discovered they are killed and eaten.
Paul asks and answers the critical fawn question in Galatians 1:10 “For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” Paul’s response is the opposite of a fawn response. Then when we compare Paul’s answer with Jesus’s command in Acts 1:8, “…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses …to the remotest part of the earth.” From this, we can conclude Disciples receive the power of the Holy Spirit to be Christ’s witness to the ends of the earth. However, Disciples only have Christ’s power to speak his truth which is witnessing. They have no power to please men. Our obedience to Christ is focused on pleasing God, not men and to please God we must be obedient and put on the whole Armor of God so we “may speak boldly, as we ought to speak”, (Ephesians 6:19-20).
Witnessing Christ is speaking God’s Word, who became flesh and brought truth and grace into men living in Darkness so they can see the light of God, and has the chance for eternal life.
God’s truth is the only verbal truth that can counter the political spin today that is truly the Art of the Lie. The spin today is so persuasive in convincing people to see hell favorably that some end up asking for directions. It is only the truth of Christ, who can successfully refute the lie. This is why one of the main duties of Christ’s Church is exposing the darkness outside in the culture with the absolute truth of Christ, because His truth is the world’s only chance for salvation.
This seems to cause many shepherds heartburn. Many see no reason to be concerned with a seat at the public table of influence because they are focused inside on half the Gospel, which is the devotional experience of praising God, prayer, and preaching the good news to the choir. They must reason, after all, the front door is wide open for anyone. Failing to understand the churches main mission is to train Disciples of Christ to go out to the ends of the earth to make disciples of all nations.
If the Church remains in the fawn response mode, one day, Satan will show up as the uninvited guest, the executor of worldly justice. The church that focused on pietism, will have no worldly seat at the table, and will discover they are now on the menu. Satan through government laws will have successfully sponsored the oppression of Christ’s church in America. His minions will lock the front door claiming they now have a legal right to redefined Christianity as the prison of the mind. The church will then be filled with the choir trapped inside, oppressed, and eventually burned alive with their Bibles. This has happened throughout history thousands of times.
If the Church of Christ does not wake up to this reality this is going to happen in America. Satan’s forever con game relies on masquerading as something he is not to convince the world to be disobedient to the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit of truth. His game is to get the church to travel away in their minds from Christ’s truth so they can convince themselves they will be safest as fawns; silent in the face of evil, which itself is evil. This mimics Saul silently standing by consenting to Stephen’s death, while guarding the clothes of those who were killing him, (Acts 22:20).
The end will look like, Deuteronomy 28:29 – “And you shall grope at noonday, as a blind man gropes in darkness; you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you.”
It is time to take the blinders off, eradicate the fawn response, and be the light on the hill, while boldly speaking Christ truth into darkness, as we are commanded by Christ to do.
David Howard, Foxhole Ministry, Billings, Montana