Always praying for the President
I’m not sure when but a tiny bit ago, Louie Giglio, the pastor of Passion City Church the founder of the Passion Conferences, was invited to give the inaugural prayer for President Obama. He was chosen for his leadership in the fight against human trafficking and slavery all over the world. Recently, a group searched through his sermons and found a sermon from the mid 1990s about Homosexuality. They highlighted that he preached that it was a sin and that the Bible believes that as sin people must repent and turn to Jesus Christ, as must all who are sinners. Due to this discovery, the White House has disinvited Pastor Louie Giglio to give the prayer.
Here’s a link to an article about it. There are also articles on NY Times but I couldn’t find them because I went over my monthly limit haha.
This makes me very sad to hear this and yet I’m not surprised. I feel like they’re not really looking for someone to offer up a prayer for the President who has any solid stance on any religion, let alone Christians. They should probably just write up a prayer they want said and give it to someone they chose and made a Pastor. Should they take out the inaugural prayer? They might as well at the rate they’re going. Or maybe they should have a list of requirements of things this person must believe before taking the opportunity. All these groups are saying that they want everyone to be tolerant of everything and yet they themselves are intolerant of very specific things. The way themselves are acting is very sad and disheartening.
And yet I’m not surprised. In NYC religious freedom in high school was always pretty restricted. My high school was pretty loose, but at several other schools, the administration would crack down on the Christian clubs. At one high school, the principle did not allow students to have the name Jesus written on flyers. So in advertisement for their annual outreach, they had posters that stated:
“Jes-s Day! All that’s missing is U!
It was a very creative way to go around the restriction but if schools are not allowing students to write the name of the God they worship they are essentially limiting the pursuit of knowledge itself. Religion and everything related to it is taboo. But of course the principle would never say that students were not allowed to say or write the name of “Allah” or the name of any Hindi god.
At another school, the principle would not allow the students to have their outreach day at all and the students had it in another school with another Christian club.
Should students fight it? Should we all hire lawyers and bring it to court? A lot of Christians would say that it’s our right and that we should fight for it. Yet in my heart, as sad as these things that happen are, I believe that we shouldn’t fight, unless we can truly do it in a loving way. People say that we have our rights and should fight for them. Yet the Bible says that we are slaves to Christ, and have no rights. We do not have any rights of our own because our lives and bodies were brought with the blood of Christ by God. He’s the one who says what rights we have and what we don’t. The Bible says that we will be persecuted and yet we act so offended when we are. Christians sometimes believe we have the right to not be persecuted just because we live in this country. I think that if we’re living by what the Bible calls us to, no matter what rights we have, we will be persecuted. It’s when we’re not that something is wrong. If we’re not persecuted, it might mean that we’re not preaching truth loudly enough or telling enough hurting people that Christ loves them and died for them. These are highly offensive things to tell people.
I think we need to love our neighbors no matter what they believe, preach truth to them because that’s what love means, no matter if they will be offended by it, and love our nation because it’s where God has placed us. Even if people don’t agree with our theological beliefs, I hope that our love will speak volumes into people’s lives. They will say:
I don’t agree with what this man believes, and it is even offensive to me, but I know that with all my heart he loves me.
As for the situation with the President and the inaugural prayer, even though Louie will not be giving that prayer, we know that he’ll be praying for him on that day and everyday after that. Even though many Christians may not like our President, he’s still our President. If you believe in a sovereign God, and this one may hurt, you’ll have to believe that God placed him there as well. So let’s place our eyes on Christ and pray for our neighbors, pray for our nation, and especially our President.
