"Who gets your vote?" my wife asked me speaking of the U.S. primary.  My short answer was, "None of them!"  I know that my American fellow believers will among themselves keenly discuss the country´s political situation which does lead, however, to a "dead end".

We should commit ourselves afresh to Christ as God´s answer to this world. True God may put one of His prophets on the political scene, for He is sovereign, but our job is not politics, but imitation of  Christ.

When Paul wrote, "Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ!" (1 Cor.11:1), his cause was the gospel, not a political program.  Did that make him  strangely starry-eyed and no earthly good? 

 No, just read his words about being "subject to the governing authorities" (Rom. 13:1), which reflect a good Roman citizen doing more good than the politicians who are not always so good.  Some of them are even taken up with disguised tax transactions or secret immoral affairs.

As a young soldier in Germany in 1957 I was invited  to dine with an old  missionary to Africa in her children´s hospitable home in Hameln.  She told me something precious from Hitler´s Germany.  She one day greeted a bypassing friend with a loud shout, "Heil Christus!"  instead of the usual Nazi cliché, "Heil Hitler!", but at a great risk she lifted up Christ instead.

That story has been a beacon to me.  "Speak well of Christ!" was the advice an elderly brother once gave me in the U.S.  Indeed, we are not of this world , but lifting up Christ doesn´t mean that we now leave this world.  We are not supposed, though, to make this world better, for if we try to do that "we´re smarter than God is" as an old friend said in 2014 at a fellowship in Williamsport, PA, whose mayor he once was.  I liked that.

So let´s not try to be smarter than God or the apostle Paul, but lift up Christ as the only rescue from a lost world that won´t last long any more.

Aril 21, 2016 - jn