INFORMED RESISTANCE
Spiritually we all exist in one of three states, ignorant rebellion, passive acceptance, or informed resistance.
God has given us the gift of self-government. That means we as individuals create the internal laws that we use to control our own selves. (Self control is listed as one of the fruits of the Spirit, so rest assured, God is willing to help those who want to be helped.) For most of us our internal code is shaped by our environment.
If you grow up hungry in a home or neighborhood that is impoverished you can (to yourself) justify stealing to feed yourself or your family. If you grow up in a wealthy home with no lack you can justify (again, to yourself) a contempt for the poor and live in excess with no feeling at all for the hungry or the homeless.
When our internal code makes contact with an external one with which we are not familiar than we reach a crisis point. We are forced to choose one of the three above mentioned states in response.
Ignorance is the manger for poverty. Without knowledge the only perceptible savior is rebellion. Many impoverished nations have seen bloody uprisings with thousands of men, women and children dying brutally at the hands of a civil war that replaces the current government with a new one that is, for all practical purposes, the same or worse than the previous one. Those in power continue in corruption because the masses are not educated to a better way.
Ignorant rebellion chooses not to attempt to understand this external code and instead begins to rise up against it.
Passive acceptance is as detrimental (if not more so) than ignorant rebellion. It is a place of death, where a person exists without a purpose to spur him into action.
The third response is the state of informed resistance. Christianity doesn’t need a rebellion. The spirit of rebellion will never mix with the purpose of Christ. They are polar opposites, but there does need to be a generation of informed resistors, people who are willing to “know the Truth” so they can be set free. If ignorance is bondage, than knowledge is freedom.
If this generation is to become what Christ called the previous ones to be than we have to let them ask the hard questions that make us uncomfortable and peel away the layers of religion that we have added to the faith.
