I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. (2 Tim. 4:1 & 2)

The text for this post was part of Paul’s charge to Timothy.  Paul knew that his life would end soon (and it did – though I’m wary of trusting tradition without objective support, the tradition is that the Romans beheaded Paul), and he was giving his young protégé instructions on how to carry out the ministry God had given him.

And Paul’s instructions boil down to three words: “Preach the word.”  Preach what God has said, preach the revelation of God – in our day, preach the Scriptures, which we find in the Old and New Testaments.  As W.A. Criswell told the Southern Baptist Convention a number of years ago, this is “the one great assignment of the man of God” (I’m quoting from memory here; I no longer have the tape of this sermon).  Now Criswell had his flaws, but he was absolutely correct here – whatever else a preacher may do, he must preach the Word of the living God.

It isn’t enough to preach the Gospel.  It is, of course, necessary to do so.  The Gospel – literally the good news that God is in Christ reconciling sinners to Himself – is an absolute essential.  As Paul wrote,

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him; for "WHOEVER WILL CALL ON THE NAME OF THE LORD WILL BE SAVED."  How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?  How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard?  And how will they hear without a preacher? (Rom. 10:12-14)*

How shall they hear without a preacher?  And how will hearing what the preacher says lead the lost to salvation, if what the preacher says isn’t the Gospel?  It is the literal truth that “there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)  Therefore it is absolutely necessary for salvation that the one who needs salvation, hear the Gospel of the Lord Christ – that He came to this earth as a man, though still God by nature; that He died to save all who trust Him; that He rose from the dead and returned to the Father in heaven; and that He will return to judge all men.

But what happens after salvation?  That is where so many modern churches and modern preachers fall flat on their faces.  For preaching the Gospel, though it results – as the Spirit wills and calls – in the salvation of lost men and women and children, doesn’t tell anyone how to live after he’s come to Christ.  “Repent and believe” is a necessary call, but it doesn’t say anything about how a Christian is to behave in marriage, at work, with relation to his children, or when others mock and persecute him for his faith, nor does it tell Him the nature of God, the origin of the universe, the point at which human life begins, or how good works relate to faith and salvation.  It doesn’t say a thing about what happens, or ought to happen, after one repents and believes

It is necessary not merely to preach the Gospel, but to preach the Word – the whole Word, and nothing but the Word, to paraphrase the oath one takes before testifying in court proceedings.  The Word of God contains the Gospel, but that’s not all that the Word contains.

It is not part of the Gospel, for instance, that God created the world in seven days, that Abraham traveled from Haran to Bethel, that Peter was a fisherman, that Herod accepted it without question when the crowd called him a god, or that Esther’s original name was Hadassah.  These things are all part of the Bible, they’re all true, and they may serve as illustrations of the Gospel or starting points for preaching the Gospel – but they are not themselves the Gospel nor parts thereof.  It is quite possible to be a genuine Christian, to know the Lord and to be part of His kingdom, and never know these things that are in the Bible.

If a preacher preaches only the Gospel, he might as well emulate Thomas Jefferson, take scissors to his Bible, and bind what’s left into a pamphlet.  It will be the most useful and necessary pamphlet in the world – but it will be only a small portion of the Word which God saw fit to reveal to us.  And I offer it as an unassailable axiom that what God saw fit to reveal, we must pay close attention to – in its entirety.

Take, as an example, the fifth chapter of Ephesians.  The Gospel isn’t in that chapter.  Instead we find instructions on marriage, which Paul says symbolizes the relationship of Christ and His church.  And what Paul says here on marriage is something which our society sorely needs to know, and not merely to know, but to put into practice.  Even in the church, even among people who study the Scriptures, there are wives who are habitual rebels against their husbands, and husbands who don’t love their wives as Christ loves the church.  I’ve been in churches where in every service you could hear a clear presentation of the need for faith in Christ – and where for years on end there wasn’t a single word of teaching which would help build and maintain godly marriages.  Yet God thought instruction on marriage worth putting into the Bible.

When someone goes into the pulpit week after week and seldom, if ever, preaches something other than “You must be born again,” he is discarding an enormous amount of divine revelation.  And who is he – who is any human being – to decide that this bit of the Word is unimportant, and that portion is irrelevant, and this other part just isn’t worth the trouble of looking at?  If God revealed it, isn’t that sufficient reason for teaching it?  If God saw fit to say it, ought we not give close heed to it – even if it isn’t an explicit call to repentance?

When Paul told Timothy what he ought to do, the apostle didn’t say, “Preach the Gospel – and only the Gospel.”  On the contrary, he said, “Preach the word” – preach all the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, even the “begats” if you come to them in your teaching, even the parts that require hard mental effort to understand, even those parts which deal with the mundane aspects of living as a Christian.  Jesus’ command to Peter before the betrayal and the crucifixion was, “Tend My lambs…Shepherd My sheep…Tend My sheep.” (John 21:15-17)

To care for sheep one doesn’t merely assist at their birth.  One must see to their feed, their water, their health throughout their lives.  Someone who called himself a shepherd, and duly saw to it that the lambs came safely into the world, yet left them to fend for themselves without further care, would be a liar and no shepherd at all.  Yet in thousands of churches in this country, there are so-called pastors who are perfectly willing to help others come to life in Christ, yet have never in their ministry helped those new-born Christians learn how to live as Christians.

We must preach the Word – not just the Gospel, as crucial as that is, but the entire Word of God.  We must preach all of it, those parts which people love to hear and those parts they hate; the pages full of “red words” and the pages of denunciation against sin; the parts which lead us to life, and the parts which teach us how to live that life once we’ve got it.  Preach the Word – that’s what God has commanded us to do.

*I use the New American Standard Bible which, like the King James Version, uses italics to indicate words which the translators added for clarity.

Because my schedule got bollixed up at work for a couple of reasons, and because I failed to think ahead, this post is late - and I won't be able to make a post at all next week.  I apologize to Ken and to anyone else who looks forward to reading my maunderings.

Ages ago – but within my lifetime, which says something about how short the ages are in rock music – John Lennon said in an interview, “We’re more popular than Jesus.”  He was, of course, talking about the Beatles, who were the first wave of the British Invasion (other groups in the Invasion included Cream, the Yardbirds, the Who, and the Rolling Stones).  There was a huge uproar about the statement.

But the thing is, he was right.  The Beatles were more popular, at that time, than Jesus.  The largest crowd Billy Graham ever drew wasn’t as large as the crowds that the Beatles could draw simply by showing up, never mind playing.  When they got off the plane in the United States, girls screamed and fainted, people mobbed the gates at Shea Stadium, and Ed Sullivan couldn’t book the group fast enough.  The Beatles really were more popular than Jesus.

The fact that John Lennon dared say it – though probably he wasn’t being especially daring, just stating what to him was an obvious fact – wasn’t as disturbing, or shouldn’t have been, as the fact that he was right.  It ought to disturb every Christian in the world that he was right.  It ought to worry us and scare us – because although a large majority of Americans still say they’re Christians, the fact is that in this country there are a lot of things that are more popular than Jesus.

Just try getting as much enthusiasm among professing Christians for someone preaching the Gospel in a football stadium, as those same people will display if the Super Bowl is happening there (just try getting the average congregation to forget football on Super Bowl Sunday!).  The difference between the crowd that will gather to hear a political speech, and the crowd that will gather to hear a sermon, is vast.  Millions upon millions of people – who claim to be Christians – will eagerly await the latest best seller, but haven’t opened the Bible, or even a light theological book, in decades.  Professing Christians can name the members of this or that band, but couldn’t tell you whether John the Baptist was one of the twelve apostles or who wrote the book of Isaiah.

I am in the minority – I contend that this country, while its foundation explicitly emerged from Christian values, is not a Christian country.  Indeed, nations can’t be Christian, for that’s an individual matter.  Not even every member of a church is a Christian – there are always false professors, whether hypocrites or sincerely in error – and there never has been a time when every single American was a member of a church or claimed to be Christian.  And nations cannot, as nations, exercise faith in the Lord Christ, which is the sole Biblical criterion for consideration as a Christian; a person can be a Christian, but a nation can’t.

But even more than that, I insist that any nation where anything – the Beatles, professional football, Mariah Carey, American Idol, just name your favorite poison – is more popular than Jesus isn’t a Christian nation.  For Christians, Christ is the most popular “thing.”  But if a nation puts everything before Christ, then can it really be Christian?  I say not.

What this country needs is a third Great Awakening.  We had one before the United States came into existence, with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield as the principle preachers.  Charles Finney was prominent in the second Great Awakening, in the early 1800s.  These were genuine national revivals, with people all across the country showing a renewed and lasting interest in the Bible and the Gospel, making professions of faith which “stuck,” and after their professions living lives that exhibited godliness.  But it’s been a long, long time since the second Great Awakening, over 160 years, and this country has been on a downhill slide for a very long time.

Why is Barack Obama the president today?  There are many reasons we could adduce – the desire of so many people for goodies that they don’t have to pay for, the desire of some to have others run their lives, affirmative action, feeble and half-hearted efforts on the part of putative conservatives, liberal lies, backing by people with money coming out their ears…  But there is one reason above all – most voters aren’t Christians.  They have no concept of absolute right and wrong, they don’t know or care about Biblical principles, they are completely ignorant of what the Bible says about important issues, and they above all aren’t doing all they do for the glory of God.  Whatever their motivations for voting as they do, the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom are not among those motivations.

Christianity is not, of course, a political party.  In my life I’ve known genuine, sincere Christians who were Republicans, Democrats, and members of no party at all.  I myself am, since February of 2009, a member of the Constitution Party.  But I have never yet known someone who genuinely trusted in the Lord, believed that the Bible says certain things and means them and has the authority to say such things, and who sought to live his life in accordance with the commands and character of God, who at the same time was pro-abortion, pro-terrorist, anti-American, deceitful, bigoted, foul-mouthed, mad for power, or willing to submit himself to a tyrant.  In other words, I’ve never yet met someone who lived according to the Bible who, at the same time, was politically liberal.  There may be such people – but after living for nearly 20 years in the south, where being a Democrat is about as common as having two legs, and never meeting such a person, I’m inclined to think that genuine Christians who are also genuine liberals are pretty rare birds.

And so it’s a lack of true Christianity that gave us Barack Obama – who is, after all, merely the logical next step after years of creeping communism.  We have huge numbers of people – the last figure I saw was over 80% of the population – who claim that they’re Christians, but obviously the number of people who make their decisions in light of Christian teaching is much, much smaller.  If every person who claims to be a Christian in this country voted in according with Biblical principles, not only would Barack Obama never have become president, he’d never have become a Senator, and the destruction that liberals has inflicted on families, on communities, and on the country could never have happened.

John Lennon got nothing but vilification for saying that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but he was right.  And things have not improved.  Nor will they improve, until those who profess to be Christians start acting like Christians.

I don’t know how many of y’all listen to Rush Limbaugh – not all conservatives do so, and some conservatives are actually critical of him, while liberals make it a point to call him names without ever bothering to listen to what he says (I’ve found that the more critical of Rush someone is, the less that person has actually listened, which means that if there are any liberal Rush-haters reading this, they probably haven’t listened to him a total of 30 minutes in their lives).  But those of us who do listen know that his current accuracy rating is 99.3%.

Since he went national Rush has had an outside firm do an opinion audit.  They review his predictions, and compare them with reality, and for 21 years the accuracy rating has only gone in one direction – up.  I can remember when it was just barely over 98%, and now it’s over 99% - a record that most of us wouldn’t even dream of achieving.

Meanwhile, I don’t see any of Rush’s adversaries submitting their views to outside review.  Even our Senators and Representatives, who do in fact have to deal with review on a regular basis (we call those reviews elections) don’t dare to have anyone scientifically examine what they’re doing and saying, and produce a percentage rating.  The simple fact is that the liberals are absolutely, totally, completely, provably dead wrong.

Just consider one issue – oil reserves.  When I was in high school (I graduated in 1978) there were predictions that we only had enough oil, worldwide, to last 10 years.  It’s been over 30 years since then, and we still have billions of barrels in reserves, a great deal of it just sitting there doing nothing.  There are wells in California which have been producing for nearly 100 years, and which may continue producing for another century.  Between Alaska, the continental shelf, and fields in various places in the continental United States, this country alone has enough oil to last us for a very long time.  If Congress would just allow the use of this oil, we could tell OPEC and anyone else we get oil from to walk north till their hat floats.  The liberals have been eagerly predicting for decades that we’ll run out of oil, and we’re no closer to doing so now than we were when I was in high school.

Can you wonder why, given this sort of record, the liberals don’t want anyone reviewing their claims and rating them for accuracy?  But Rush isn’t afraid of such review – indeed, he trumpets the result, with good reason.  Again, he is, in his words, documented to be almost always right 99.3% of the time.  That’s so close to perfection that it’s uncanny.  Rush is less than 1% away from actual infallibility.

And don’t you think we should vote for those who are provably right, rather than those who are provably wrong?  I do.

Now Rush adamantly insists that he’s never going to run for office, and I believe him.  If he wanted to run, he’d have done so before now, and dittoheads across the country would have rallied to his cause.  But he isn’t politician material, and he’s having too much fun, and too much of an impact, behind the golden EIB microphone.

But we don’t need Rush to run for office in order to be able to vote for people who are right.  We merely need conservatives to run.  And in fact they do run.  They don’t necessarily run on the Republican ticket; indeed, these days the best place to find a conservative is not in the Republican Party, as y’all know from watching and listening to Republican candidates over the years.  Nor are genuine conservatives necessarily running for a plethora of local positions – mayors, city councilors, county commissioners, etc.  But they are out there.  And I for one intend to vote for them whenever I can.

For I want to vote for people who are right.  I want to vote for people whose views are correct, whose policies work, whose goals are constitutional and rational, and whose purpose is to defend the United States and the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.  I want to vote for people who truly represent me, rather than representing Karl Marx.

That means voting for people who are, like Rush Limbaugh, thoroughly conservative.  It does not mean voting for someone who’s slightly less liberal than Barack Obama.  It does not mean voting for someone who is conservative in these five areas, but liberal on those 12 points.  It means voting for conservatives, for they’re the ones whose views agree with Rush Limbaugh’s.

Or, to put it more accurately, we are the ones with whom Rush Limbaugh agrees.  For conservatism didn’t originate with Rush.  It didn’t originate with Ronald Reagan.  It didn’t even originate with Barry Goldwater, the best president we never had.  Conservatism, as we call it today, originated with those who first envisioned individuals making their own decisions, caring for themselves and their families, and living without the government interfering in every detail of their lives.  And the most prominent proponents of conservatism in American history were people like George Washington, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Henry Knox, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others who either politically or militarily, or both, fought to establish a nation where government would have no authority beyond that which was strictly necessary, and protecting personal liberty would be the whole purpose of that government.

In other words, what we call conservatism is nothing more or less than the vision of the founders of the United States.  It is, even today, still the predominant view of American citizens – even when those citizens don’t call themselves conservatives.  I have learned over the decades that most people, even registered Democrats, are conservative on an issue-by-issue basis.  In Stephens County, Oklahoma, a largely white and overwhelmingly Democratic place, J.C. Watts – a black conservative – easily won election to the House of Representatives.  And during the total of 11 years I lived there, I encountered very few people who opposed the second amendment (indeed, many of these Democrats were themselves gun owners), who supported abortion, who wanted higher taxes, who enjoyed the government making their decisions, or hated Ronald Reagan.  Indeed, I first moved there during Reagan’s presidency, and I never heard a single word against him the whole time I lived there – even when the liberal leaders were plumbing the depths of vilification in their attacks on him.

So it isn’t that conservatives agree with Rush Limbaugh, but that he agrees with us.  That is, after all, why he’s so right so often – for conservatism isn’t merely on the right, it is right.

And so we need to elect people with a proven record.  We need to elect people like Rush Limbaugh, whose views are right and whose policies will work.  We need, in short, to elect conservatives.

It’s axiomatic among conservatives that the first amendment guarantees us the right to believe as we please, and to speak accordingly.  Indeed, that’s what the amendment says – and we take it at face value.  But as we know, the liberals look at things very differently.  To them free speech is wonderful, as long as they’re doing the speaking, but when someone stands up and disagrees with them, then they cry out that there’s a need for “balance” and “fairness” – meaning that we ought to shut our mouths and let them have the floor to themselves, and if we won’t do it on our own they’ll find some way to force us to shut up.

Well, that’s not free speech.  It’s tyranny, pure and simple.  It’s the sort of thing that obtained in the USSR, where you were free to say anything you pleased just so long as the Kremlin wanted you to say it.  They called it the party line, and in the United States we call it political correctness, but it’s the same thing – the quashing, by whatever means, of speech that the elite doesn’t want to hear.

Hitler did the same thing.  If one of his generals insisted that it was necessary to withdraw in order to preserve his forces intact, the Fuhrer would summarily relieve that commander of duty.  He just didn’t want to hear it – all he wanted to hear was sycophantic boot licking, even though hearing and heeding the truth would have preserved his Third Reich for a longer time.  (It is, obviously, a good thing that Hitler didn’t like the truth.  If he had heeded his generals, the fighting would have gone on longer than it did.)

Indeed, all tyrants are that way.  One of the invariable characteristics of a dictator is that he punishes those who tell him the truth, if the truth isn’t what he wants to hear.  Whether we look at Pol Pot, Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Francisco Franco, or any other dictator past or present, we’ll find this common denominator – if you speak your mind, and oppose the dictator, you suffer.  Dictatorships and free speech don’t go together – where there’s one, you absolutely won’t find the other.

But conservatism isn’t dictatorial, and we defend the right of everyone to speak his mind – even if what he says is anathema to us.  We don’t want to silence people like Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, or Barney Frank.  On the contrary, we insist that by letting everyone know exactly what they have to say, we’re helping ourselves.  We want them to stick their feet in their mouths in very public ways.  We don’t want to force the liberals to shut up – we want to protect their freedom of speech.

Someone once said that in this country, everyone has a perfect right to make a perfect ass of himself.  Conservatives seek to protect that right.  If the liberals want to look like utter, complete, total, absolute, blind fools, then we’re more than happy to let them do so.  We won’t give them government funds to do it, nor will we silence competing voices so that the liberals can receive a hearing – but we will guarantee them the right to speak their minds to as many as are willing to listen.  If that audience is only 50 people, that’s the fault of the message – but we’ll protect the liberals’ right to speak that message, and the right of those 50 people to swallow snake oil if that’s what they choose to do.

We don’t need a “fairness doctrine.”  Such a thing is only necessary for liars and cowards, whose message is palpably false and who are afraid to debate it in an open forum.  We’re neither cowards nor liars – what we have to say is the truth, and we have the courage of our convictions.  I don’t demand that the government silence any liberals who may happen to read, and violently disagree with, this post, or any other post I make – I on the contrary insist that the government protect the right of those liberals to say whatever they please in disagreement.  I can take it, and what’s more important, what I’m saying is true and therefore doesn’t need the government to smash dissenters.  The truth remains the truth, and will prevail.

Free speech means that I have a right to air my opinions to anyone who’ll listen – and so do you, even if you think my view of free speech is a crock.  Free speech means that I have a right to proclaim my conservatism, and so do liberals have a right to proclaim their views.  Free speech is an oxymoron, unless everyone is able to exercise that right.  If some people, or a certain point of view, are not free, then no one is free; if liberals don’t possess free speech, then free speech is a mockery and a fraud.

And so when the day comes that conservatism once again controls this country – and I have no doubt that the day is coming, and coming soon thanks to such bunglers as Barack Obama – we won’t muzzle the liberals.  We won’t give them official government support, as they have now; we won’t protect them from the consequences of their utterances; we won’t see to it that they don’t have to hear any dissent.  But we will protect their right to free speech.

Because if we don’t, then it won’t be free speech at all…and free speech is a large part of what we’re all about.

In New York’s 23^rd congressional district, there’s a special election to fill a seat left vacant when the incumbent accepted an appointed office.  The Republican Party – not to my surprise, alas – is running a liberal, as is, of course, the Democratic Party.  The only conservative in the election is running under the banner of the Conservative Party.*

Newt Gingrich, who once was a hero of conservatives, has endorsed the liberal Republican – a candidate whom some have said is the most liberal candidate in the race.  The man who led the takeover of Congress by conservatives during the Rodham maladministration, and who gave us that wonderful document called the Contract With America, has now apparently tossed his conservatism into the trash can.

We can’t win that way – whether you define “we” as Republicans, or as conservatives.  We cannot win if we abandon our conservative principles.  We’ve proved that – again, it matters not how you define the pronoun – over and over and over.  The Republican Party has tossed conservatism aside, and lost the 2008 presidential election, and doesn’t have enough people in Congress to block anything the Democrats really want to pass.  Conservatives have voted for liberal Republicans over and over, in the name of party loyalty, and the only result has been to see liberalism steadily – and today, at great speed – eroding our liberties.

If we want to win, we’ve got to be conservative.  Mr. Newt has aligned himself with the losing side, for even if the liberal Republican wins this election, the citizens who suffer under liberalism will lose.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick and tired of liberals, and I’m sick and tired of conservatives (or people who claim to be conservative, anyway) siding with the liberals just so they can (they hope) win elections.  If I were trying to avoid going over a cliff I wouldn’t cling to those who were falling – I’d let go and head toward safety.  And I’m doing that politically too.

I’m a conservative.  I’m going to support conservatives.  I’m going to vote conservative.  And if the liberals don’t like it, tough toenails – party loyalty cannot trump my loyalty to this country and its founding principles.

*Since I wrote this, the liberal Republican has dropped out of the race.