Serving As Good Soldiers Of Jesus Christ

Recently I went to see the movie Darkest Hour with my dad at the theaters. A stunning film, and for Christmas this year I got a DVD copy of Dunkirk. Both of these stories revolve around the decisions and speeches of the great leader Winston Churchill during the dark days of World War II. A few years ago I read some of Winston Churchill’s biography. It was an absolutely stunning struggle. The whole world was at the brink of collapse. It’s 1939 and you’ve got this darkness spreading, through Nazism. You’ve got a military that can’t be stopped in the Nazis. You have a genocidal regime so terrible that it is exterminating millions of Jews and Christians. Think about how it must’ve felt for the people of Great Britain. They saw Austria fall, then they saw Poland fall. But the French, they were so strong, with their Maginot line. There’s no way the Nazis could defeat them. But in just a few weeks, the Nazis had crushed through the French defenses. And French and British troops faced double encirclement, they were surrounded. They’d fled to the city of Dunkirk. And they were waiting to be destroyed by the German panzers. They were trapped… Hopeless. Europe, conquered by the Nazis. And it seemed there was no hope for civilization left. Imagine that situation, and your Winston Churchill, prime minister, shivering at the thought of the fall of not only Great Britain, but all of western humanity.

This reminds me of the situation we are in as the church today. Our forces are crumbling. Corps are shutting down left and right. And we’re afraid to face that reality. We’re losing. We’ll falling to the great darkness, growing in our culture, and in our society. It’s a disaster scenario. It really is. I think about it every day. It’s my great obsession, the thought of the state of our country, of Europe, of the church, of the Salvation Army. We’re in great danger. And we seem to be standing at the cusp of darkness.

Thankfully Jesus lives, and we are his people. There is no one else. We are the Salvation Army. We are soldiers of the Salvation Army, and as such we have a great calling ahead of us. No one else will do it for us. We have to do it ourselves.

I imagine Winston Churchill felt the same way when he looked across the channel toward occupied France. Or when he felt the concussive force of bombs dropping over London. Is this the end? Will it really end like this? He must’ve wondered. But sometimes it takes just one man, one woman, willing to believe in the impossible, who can change everything. Just one. Is it you?

Winston Churchill believed. And he spoke his belief. He said “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Sometimes you have to boldly shout into the face of total darkness: We will Fight. They did fight. And they won the day, when it seemed impossible.

In the same way, we are soldiers. And as soldiers our job is to obey the orders of our commanding officer. Our commanding officer is the Lord Jesus Christ. And he has commanded us in the great commission: To make disciples of all nations with the living gospel of His life, death, and resurrection. Then Jesus was lifted to heaven. And he promised to return. I believe he will do just that. And he'll ask for a report on what we did while he was away.

As a soldier, my job is to fulfill my orders, under penalty of death. To fail to carry out his command is to be in breach of my orders, and there is no choice, in this army, there is only do and die.

The body will accomplish all that Christ has for us to accomplish. There is no way around it. Christ will do all he desires through us his people. We are yielded to Him. We are his body. He is the head, we are the agents. He is God, we are the servants. He is the general, we are the soldiers.

The world is crumbling. There is so much corruption, so much poverty, human trafficking, oppression, persecution, immorality, lies, and brokenness in this world. There are so many multiplying evils, what possible difference could we make? There are great difficulties ahead. But it's at just such times like these, when everything seems to be crumbling, that God loves to work to generate massive transformation! It's at times like these that we'll know through and through, bones to bones, that it was only by God's power, by Christ's efficacy that we could ever persevere forward into such darkness. We'll know that it wasn't of us, and our cleverness, but that it was by God's reality penetrating our reality, by God's miraculous designs and mercies in time and space that the tide finally turned!