How Did We Get Here?
The backstory and heart behind the League of Believers newsletter
Many journeys begin with a simple question. The League of Believers newsletter arose out of a question spurred by repeated observations of a creeping sickness, both spiritual and physical in its manifestations, afflicting God’s people.
“How did we get here?”
We sensed disorder and apathy in our church meetings, witnessed chronic dysfunction in our families, and observed a dullness in our personal walks and witnesses. It was as if a spirit of stupor had slowly lulled us into a deadly complacency (Romans 11:8).
At the same time, we noticed that the world was running circles around us at breakneck speed—right into the deepest rungs of Hell. And, although we were certainly not too far behind in many respects, still, the Church appeared largely tone deaf, lethargic, out-of-touch, and unconcerned. Business as usual.
Those that were waking up were often merely “going woke,” wishing they had led the way into compromise they now heartily embraced, rather than joining so late in the game.
Where were the great leaders of the faith, sounding the clarion call to arms? Where were the prophetic voices, rising up from the wilderness to bring correction to a people that had lost its way? Had they all gone AWOL?
More questions followed. “What accounts for these disconnects? What is going on with the Church? How did we fade to such a low ebb of impotence, anemia, and irrelevancy? Where did our power go? What sapped it all away? What accounts for the sorry state of our condition?”
We began seeking the Lord for answers.
A call to the Great Physician
God often prompts us with leading questions so that we can reflect on the conundrum He’s highlighting, respond, and in turn, seek Him for answers.
To Adam (Genesis 3:9): “Where are you?”
To Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:3): “Son of man, can these bones live?”
To the disciples (Matthew 16:13b): “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
And so forth. It’s part of His teaching method.
We soon realized that our questions were not merely arising out of a vexed spirit (2 Peter 2:7), but were ultimately prompted by the Lord. He was inviting us to dig in deeper by inquiring of Him. And who else do you turn to to diagnose and treat a debilitating spiritual illness but the Great Physician Himself? Matthew 9:10-13:
“And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and His disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to His disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ But when He heard it, He said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
And so we began to call on the Great Physician in the hope that He would begin to reveal His diagnosis and remedy for our ills.
Physician, heal thyself
One time, when Jesus was back in His hometown of Nazareth, He found Himself presented with the opportunity to share a message based on a reading from the scriptures in His local synagogue. Here’s how that story went (Luke 4:16-30):
“And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as was His custom, He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and He stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to Him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because He has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.’
And He rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And all spoke well of Him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from His mouth. And they said, ‘Is not this Joseph's son?’ And He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’ And He said, ‘Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, He went away.”
In a parallel account of this episode in Matthew’s Gospel, we also find this (Matthew 13:57, 58):
“And they took offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.’ And He did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.”
Like modern American Christians, the Jews of Jesus’ day found themselves in a period of moral, spiritual, social, and civilizational decline. It was easy and on one level completely understandable to point the finger at the Roman overlords with their worldly pretensions and decadence. Or to blame the Greeks and their licentious living. Or especially those dreaded tax collectors and sinners mentioned above, compromising colluders with the Devil and the powers that be.
But in His sermon at Nazareth, Jesus didn’t blame the gentiles for the Jew’s woes, nor the Greeks, nor the sold-out profligates in the gutters, brothels, and tax booths. He blamed synagogue-going, Torah-reading, Rome-hating Jews and their outwardly righteous, conservative religious leaders. Yes, in an act of sheer chutzpah, or so it seemed to them, Jesus pointed to the unbelief of the supposedly believing people of God as the real root cause of all their maladies. Indeed, it was because of their unbelief that He performed so few miracles among them. Their unbelief left some of them literally consigned to their sickbeds.
The irony of it all is that, despite their shiny façade, the religious establishment of Jesus day was corrupt as all get-out (Matthew 23:27, 28):
“For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
They too were morally squalid, embracing the very same sins as the great unwashed, albeit the sanitized, Church-approved versions. They too were in cahoots with the principalities and powers, but in a respectable, backdoor sort of way, so as to protect their meticulously curated public image.
And as we queried the Great Physician on the diseases of our day, we too saw the Lord’s finger pointed squarely in our direction.
It’s us, the Church— we’re the problem.
There is none righteous, no, not one
It’s important at the outset of this newsletter to underscore the point that when we say that “we’re the problem” we, that is, the folks behind these articles, mean that literally, inclusively. We are part of the problem too. Not “we” in a general sense of mere corporate guilt or guilt by association. Not “we” theoretically. We are really, truly, individually, personally guilty. As Paul states in Romans 3, echoing Psalm 14 and 53:
“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
Each one of us in the American Church, even the best among us, has been personally complicit in the compromise we are now witnessing all around us, either through direct participation in it or tacit approval of it. We have all dropped the ball, on one level or another.
Speaking from our own experiences, we have personally endorsed positions, given counsel, and taught doctrines that we now believe to be gravely mistaken. And, we’ve also just flat out sinned, participating to varying degrees in the very practices on account of which the wrath of God is coming (Colossians 3:5, 6). And not just before we were saved—the sins we will be discussing here are primarily sins of Christians.
We freely admit our failures in the areas we will be addressing and want to state this up front. We are not trying to fool anyone or pretend to be something we’re not. We will do our best to be transparent. We are still detoxing from American Church culture and smarting from the stings of our own mistakes. We are still finding our way into pure and undefiled religion (James 1:27).
Unlike Jesus in the passages quoted above, we are not issuing pronouncements of woes on our brothers and sisters from a position of perfection; we have been and are still on the receiving end of these rebukes from time to time. So, like Daniel, we pray (Daniel 9:4-7a, 11a, emphasis mine):
“O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame, as at this day […]. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice.”
If Daniel, a blameless and upright man, was implicated in the transgressions of his people, how much more are we?
The definition of immaturity
Around here we have a saying: immaturity never accepts responsibility. It always seeks to shift blame to someone, or something else. That is its defining attribute.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, President Kennedy said to a reporter “There's an old saying that ‘victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.’” To his credit, at least on this occasion, he owned up to his failure, as a humble leader should.
As the Church, we need to own up and do the adult thing by taking responsibility for the hot mess that we see all around us. Just as “wisdom is justified by all her children” (Luke 7:35), so too is the folly of false prophets: “You shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16a). We cannot blame the world, or even the Devil, for the offspring that we in the Church have birthed in recent decades; they are monsters of our own making.
Although our journey began with a question, and God has begun to answer, His insights will profit us nothing unless we first fess up and take ownership of our own problems. Painful as it may be to admit, we have only ourselves to blame for the quandaries we now find ourselves in. Historically and factually speaking, it was our waywardness, the sins the Church was soft on, then silent on, the embraced, that paved the way for the sins of society at large.
Even Alcoholics Anonymous has enough wisdom to know that step one on the road to recovery involves admitting that one has a problem. Otherwise, what are we all sitting around in a circle talking about in the first place?
How long will we simply blame the Democrats? Or their woke, commie Christian collaborators? Even if there is plenty of blame to lay at their feet (and there certainly is), it is fruitless to blame others for problems we cannot fix while refusing to acknowledge our own problems that we can fix.
How long will we shrug our shoulders in incredulity and blame God with shouts of “Physician, heal thyself!” when we are the ones in need of healing?
Unity and maturity
We need to recover a sense of the grandeur and glory of what it means to be a Christian, full gown. It’s a high calling, and it’s on full display in Ephesians chapter 4:1-6:
“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
Now that’s unity. But, it’s not uniformity. There is staggering variety in the Body of Christ (4:7-16):
“But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it says,
‘When He ascended on high He led a host of captives,
and He gave gifts to men.’
(In saying, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that He had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.) And He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
That’s maturity.
How is this made possible? “The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63).
It is the “unity of the Spirit” (Ephesians 4:3) that enables our attainment of the “unity in the faith” (Ephesians 4:13). If we have the first, then there’s hope for attaining the second (hat tip to the late David Pawson for first bringing this vital connection to my attention).
One of the great hopes and principle motivations behind this newsletter is that it would contribute, in its small way, to achieving, in our day, both the unity and maturity that are ours by birthright and calling as believers. We are not in “a League of our own,” but rather we are, and forever will be, a League of Believers, in league with one another for eternity. We need one another, healthy and active, about our Father’s business (Luke 2:49), operating in the gifts, roles, and offices that he has assigned to each on of us:
“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.”
We are in this together, folks. And so it is our contention that we might as well start acting like it.
But we are so often worldly, petty squabblers, acting like mere men (1 Corinthians 3:3). In this newsletter we have no interest in stirring up controversy or whacking the hornets nest or picking a fight (Titus 3:9-11). There are no chips on our shoulders, only a burden of love (Romans 13:8).
Indeed, we echo David’s sentiment in Psalm 120: “I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!” David? That great warrior and shedder of blood (1 Chronicles 28:3)? Yes—have you not heard of “peace through strength”? What did all his warring bring about for the next generation? Peace on every side. Yes, we may wield a sword (Ephesians 6:17), but that same sword, in the hands of the Sweet Psalmist of Israel (2 Samuel 23:1), also served as a pen for expressing love to God for the benefit of His people for all time.
Consider these our Psalms, our love letters borne out of long, hard battles, and all for the glory of God and the good of His people.
We are for peace, for unity working toward maturity. But we are not sappy ecumenicists. We are realists. We know how divided we are as a people. We hope that these newsletters will serve as an expression of the ministry of reconciliation that we have all been entrusted with as believers (2 Corinthians 5:18). We pray that God will use this outreach to “turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6a). A beautiful sight. But the verse doesn’t end there. Without such changes of heart, the consequences will be dire: “lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:6b).
These verses lie at the heart of what we are about.
We need each other. Urgently. As our nation’s founders understood in their hour of testing, we must “join, or die,” “hang together, or hang separately.” “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (Matthew 12:25). And so we are taking our stand. We hope you will join us.
We need to put childish things aside and grow up, before it’s too late (1 Corinthians 13:11; Hebrews 5:12, 13). We hope you will learn and grow with us.
We need to sit down together, as adults, and talk.
Let’s argue this out
Though I am loathe to do this, I am going to do something out of character here: I’m going to quote a passage from the book of Isaiah as it is translated in (gulp) The Message Bible. Translation philosophy scruples aside, The Message’s rendering of this well known passage helps encapsulate the spirit in which we offer this newsletter (Isaiah 1:18-20):
“‘Come. Sit down. Let’s argue this out.’
This is God’s Message:
“If your sins are blood-red,
they’ll be snow-white.
If they’re red like crimson,
they’ll be like wool.
If you’ll willingly obey,
you’ll feast like kings.
But if you’re willful and stubborn,
you’ll die like dogs.”
That’s right. God says so.
We have been asking questions, and for some time now. We’ve made and are making some major life changes. We’ve upped our prayer and Bible study game. We are making our attempt, feeble as it may be compared to others’ before us, to seek the Lord with all of our hearts. And, we’ve been coming to some conclusions. Think of a government commissioned “blue ribbon committee,” only one that hopefully isn’t corrupt and pointless and that isn’t staffed by leading experts, just average citizens. After conducting preliminary research and engaging in much discussion and prayerful introspection amongst ourselves, we want to share our initial findings. We believe we are onto something, and that our diagnoses match what the Lord would say is ailing us. We believe He is speaking to us and that we are gaining some insights and clarity.
However, we aren’t so foolish as to think that we’re the only ones He’s speaking to, or that we have all wisdom. Far from it. That’s why we’re putting this content out there. We want a dialog. We want feedback, pushback, even blow back. We are not put off by healthy, vigorous debate. Our heart is “Come. Sit down. Let’s argue this out.” Our sins are indeed like scarlet, but God can cleanse us of them as He brings them to the fore and we humble ourselves in confession and repentance. Again, from Isaiah (30:15):
“This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.’”
What a tragic ending to such a beautiful verse. We wonder, dear reader, will you have any of what the Lord might have to offer us, should we acknowledge our unintentional sins and turn from them? Will you hear us out on the practices modern Christians have adopted that we believe the Lord wants us to reexamine critically in the light of scripture? Are you open to scrutinizing the received wisdom of our traditions to see if we can uncover any blind spots?
Judgment day for the household of God
Jesus was crucified, rejected, and, frankly, widely despised and hated among religious folk like us because He repeatedly called them out on their self-righteous, well-put-together, highly presentable, hypocritical sinful practices: “it [i.e., “the world”] hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil” (John 7:7). Like their followers, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day turned a blind eye to the evil lurking just beneath the surface of their whitewashed sins. So dressed up were these practices in the garb of religion that they were deceiving those who adopted them into thinking that they were doing the will of God, when in reality, they were doing the exact opposite (Mark 7:6-13):
“And He said to them, ‘Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.’
And he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, ‘Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban’ (that is, given to God)—then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.’”
No wonder Jesus said of them “Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Matthew 15:14).
So the “Church” (so to speak) of Jesus’ day was, according to Him, up to its eyeballs in pervasive unbelief and sinful compromise. The problem was, nobody in the “Church” agreed with Him— they were convinced they were in the right and were incensed, even scandalized that He would suggest otherwise. Only a few deplorables on the outside looking in seemed to resonate with His message. As a result of this persistent, willful blindness, judgment was knocking on the very doors of Jerusalem’s gates. As bad as it was when Jesus was walking their dusty streets (which dust He was all too often shaking off His sandals), things got worse. Much worse (Luke 23:27-31):
“And there followed Him [Jesus] a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for Him. But turning to them Jesus said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?’”
And that is where we in the Church find ourselves today, in spite of the rosy assessments of some of our best prophets.
As the Apostle Peter put it (1 Peter 4:17):
“it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?”
Ready or not, judgment is already here. It’s knocking on our very door.
Thanks for reading the League of Believers.
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garrettpleague@proton.me
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