This is a miscarriage of Revelation 12:11.
καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐνίκησαν αὐτὸν διὰ τὸ αἷμα τοῦ ἀρνίου
καὶ διὰ τὸν λόγον τῆς μαρτυρίας αὐτῶν
καὶ οὐκ ἠγάπησαν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτῶν ἄχρι θανάτου.
Look, gang, the posts welcoming him home are more of the same. Again, and again, and again. And if you want to know what our issue is in this nation, look at tarrifs and sanctions.
My irritation is not in his release. It is in the lack of a full gospel. I am viscerally angered when we worship at the cult of comfort and refuse people the grace of martyrdom, and so fulfill the fullness of the opportunity afforded to others.
If you plant and pastor a church and spend 23 years in a nation, then your intents are clear, and relying on Uncle Sam to bail you out is evidence of a cult of comfort and a refusal to accept the gospel of fullness. The whole gospel.
I don’t do partial gospels. And whine all you wish about this man and his family and how dare I say something against his release. And go ahead and unfollow me. But do so knowing this…
We are so quick to pay lip-service with the Blood of the Lamb, and the Word of our Testimony, but it is absolute idiocy when that is all we pay, and we refuse the third part of that verse.
You overcome ultimately, by not loving your life so much that you shrink back from death.
And this is a key item right here.
The question of preference between civil religion and the kingdom. And we show that we do it all the time when we say, “well maybe it was not this person’s time to die”.
No, you still did not get it. Go read what the Mercy has to say, and read it until it gets embedded into you.
And stop refusing the fullness of the gospel.
I am not into partial, half-baked, three-quarters-baked, Cult-Of-Comfort, carnal Exhorter Christianity.
From my mother’s womb, I was into the wholness of the gospel. And nowhere do we get the gospel and the kingdoms of this world more confused with the Gospel of the Kingdom and His Kingdom than here in this meddling Prophet nation.
And when we rescued Saeed Abedani, look at what happened. Jay Sekulow got involved, and we got him back, and then he and his wife divorced.
And refusing someone the responibility to bear martyrdom when they so obviously know–and we know that that is part of the cost (but we don’t know that here in America)–is blatantly wrong.
If you violate the principles by trying to use other principles to get your way, you are opening the door to the very thing that you did not want.
And Muslims will not be won by our sanctions, tariffs, or anything else, but our death and our blood being shed.
Period.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
-Tertullian-