Virtually every crisis that the American Republic is now facing is the result of disregarding the Constitution, which is “the supreme law of the land.” The parallel in the church is striking. Virtually every crisis in the U.S. church is the result of a disregard of our founding document—The Bible. In both cases, the ultimate answer to fixing these problems is to return to the founding documents—studying them, knowing them, and adhering to them.
A complicating factor is the general deception. It is so pervasive that few can discern truth. Some of those screaming the loudest about the violations to the Constitution are the worst violators. Likewise, many who decry the departure from the sound doctrine of The Scriptures can be some of the biggest violators. Politicians could not get away with this if citizens were knowledgeable and informed about the Constitution. Neither could the Christian leaders get away with such twisting of Scripture if believers were knowledgeable of them. As Spurgeon lamented, one can still find ten people who will die for The Bible for every one that will read it. This has led to what The Lord warned about through Isaiah 5:13, “Therefore My people go into bondage for their lack of knowledge.”
What can be done to change the ignorance and deception that is so pervasive now? A lot. And you could be a major part in turning the tide against the prevailing deception. As Gladwell pointed out in his classic work The Tipping Point, the percentage of people needed to bring about profound change is the square root of one percent of the population. This means that just one hundred people can bring radical change to a million.
This equation has been proven repeatedly in history. Some of the most profound changes have come by a much smaller percentage. Look at what The Lord did with just twelve! This means that if just those of you who read this Word for the Week become knowledgeable, informed, and discerning, we would have almost five times as many people as would be needed to bring about a profound change in the U.S.
What are we waiting for?
One of the delusions those in democracies come under is thinking they need a majority of the people to accomplish anything. First, we need to understand that what needs to be done is not going to happen by a vote. It is going to happen the way that our Republic was founded—by the spreading of powerful ideas that capture the hearts of the people who will take action on their beliefs. In the case of our revolution, this was a small percentage of the people, which never grew to more than 30% of the population.
As The Lord showed Gideon, sometimes we try to accomplish things with too many people. The laws that govern great and transcendent change are similar to poker—four of a kind beats a full house. Unity is far more powerful than numbers.
Just about every new political movement in America claims a “grassroots” strategy, which means to influence the multitudes. Most of these movements die from the discouragement of not reaching the great numbers they expected, but this is a wrong strategy. As demented as Karl Marx was he got one thing right—it only takes a small fraction of the passionate to take over the multitudes that are indifferent.
Neither does it take much time to get educated on our founding documents. If we took as much time to feed our inner man with daily manna from The Bible as we spend cleaning and trying to make our outer man look good, we would likely have been Bible scholars a long time ago. If we read just four chapters of The Bible a day, we would read it entirely in less than a year. Then we would immediately know if what preachers and teachers are proclaiming is true or not.
It is even easier with our national founding documents because we can read them in just a couple of hours. It takes more study to grasp the insights, but there are scholars who have spent years studying the applications and deviations of the Constitution and have put them in books we can read in just a few hours. If we spent just fifteen minutes a day reading these, within a year we would have a very strong foundation for understanding what is being done to us by our present government leaders.
Democracy did not fail in America—we failed democracy. We can have the best form of government but still have bad government if we do not have good people in it. At the root of the crisis that now threatens the continued existence of our Republic is the way that we choose those who run for office. It is a process that the best potential leaders in the country will not get involved in because it is so contrary to what would bring out the best leadership. It rewards compliance and loyalty to the party above competence and loyalty to the nation.
This is parallel to the way leaders are now chosen in the church. Loyalty to a denomination or a movement can eclipse our loyalty to Christ. In both the spiritual and the natural we must return to and strengthen ourselves in the only foundations that will stand. What do we have to do that is more important than this?
