Steve Deace – Easter: The only hope we have, and the only hope we need

Source: Conservative Review | April 15, 2017 | Steve Deace

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So as we enter into the Lord’s passion in 2017, we must remind ourselves of the importance to pray without ceasing to the only God who can manifest them in our lives. Even on our best day, His guidance is the only true north. And we have so few ‘best days’ anymore.

America is in shambles on every front. We are economically stagnant and indebted almost beyond calculation. The vicious hate of ISIS is met just as often with concerns about Islamophobia as it is with calls for justice. Men are putting on dresses and entering women’s bathrooms because they and the enablers of their psychosis think they are the 21st century’s Rosa Parks. A death-cult, that receives hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers each year, is seen on camera cavalierly bargaining away the dismembered remains of the human beings they murdered. And the very freedom to call out to God at all, religious freedom, is being pushed as far back into a corner as our cowardice and moral ambiguity will allow.

This is all, quite frankly, beyond the power of any man — or even our formidable Constitution — to cure. These are mortal wounds. We need an exorcism. We need to be raised from the dead.

But our Savior has been there. He has done that. He can show us the way. Not, though, if our faith is a fetid pool of confusion. If we have been praying at all, we have largely been praying to the god we want and not the God we need. That just won’t do. We may as well be praying to a Buick or a tomato.

To get ourselves right, we must set ourselves aside. We must trust God in His ways and not make St. Peter’s mistakes. The rooster is ever crowing in the face of our denials and rationalizations. Get behind me, Satan!

Do we pray for our enemies? Or is our idolatry such that God is fashioned as nothing more than the image of a lottery ticket, Oprah, or a leprechaun in our mind’s eye?

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If that be our God, let not our hearts be troubled regardless of what times lay ahead. Are the challenges daunting? Yes, but despair is not an option. Not when Easter makes it possible to face what’s in front of us with this promise:

“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:31-39)

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