Sometimes I read things in the Bible that – at the very least – concern me deeply. So, let me be up-front about some background.

I believe I’m a born-again Christian and therefore a secure child of God. I don’t say that because I’m able to point to a specific time where I prayed a prescriptive prayer. While I can indeed do that, my salvation isn’t contingent on the fact that I strung some key phrases together in the right order, or because I asked Jesus to “come into my heart and forgive my sins.”

Much more importantly instead, I am fully and consciously convinced that Jesus is the Christ, the only Son of God. I believe with all my heart that He miraculously came to earth in the form of a man (Philippians 2:5-7), lived a sinless life, and paid the full price for all of my sins when He was sacrificed on the cross as the substitutionary Lamb of God (John 1:29). I believe that He rose from the dead and He’s coming back to supernaturally receive me to Himself, and to deliver me from His wrath which is forthcoming on an unrepentant world (1 Thess. 1:10).

Furthermore, I believe God chose to redeem me before the foundations of the world (Eph. 1:4), and I believe no element of this salvation blueprint was ever “Plan B.” God didn’t miscalculate my situation at any point, nor did He underestimate the condition or reactions of anybody else in the whole process. What came together in the beautiful choreography of the Gospel contains no regrets or insufficiencies on God’s part. All the details were designed to play out exactly as they did.

Now I don’t fully understand every nuance about all this, but I also believe that God, by His grace, gave me the faith to believe every single part of it.  And so I chose to believe in Him because He first chose me in His great love (I John 4:19). I believe there is nothing I can contribute to any part of this salvation transaction that would have improved my odds.  Simply stated, Jesus did it all.

Now, there are a lot of “believes” in those prior paragraphs, and as I read them over once more I’m glad to see them there.  I believe what I am saying.

It was the same for one of the thieves that died beside Jesus Christ (Luke 23:42-43).  He believed that Jesus was who Jesus said He was even as they both hung on crosses – suffering and dying together! The thief exercised his faith and he confessed that to Jesus. In a most remarkable and unfathomable moment, the thief looked beyond the way things appeared to what he knew them to be instead. And Jesus granted him salvation for his faith that was expressed in that belief.

It was also true for the jailer who’d never had any prisoners quite like Paul and Silas (Acts 16:30-31).  They acted different. They were different! They made the sort of choices the jailer had never seen anyone else make, and so he sought them out when his own coping skills failed.  Paul and Silas told him to “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved…” So he did – and he was!

These examples are some which prove that salvation is not guaranteed by reading aloud the prayer in the back of a tract or memorizing the Four Spiritual Laws. Much as it may grate some that I say it, salvation is not assured by responding to an altar call any more than it’s evidenced by the mindless babbling, gibbering, stuttering, and frothing that too many in the modern church define as “speaking in tongues.”

What the Bible proves in so many passages is salvation comes by way of an active confession that Jesus Christ is who He said He was (John 14:6), by a complete trust that He is God’s only provision for our depraved condition (Rom. 5:8), and by an absolute belief that His death and resurrection paid the full penalty for our sin that we could not pay (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

This brings me full circle to my opening comments. So why do I read things in the Bible that cause me to feel a healthy fear? It’s because according to Matthew 7:21-27, many well-intentioned, highly-regarded, and devoutly-religious people will discover too late that they never believed in Jesus Christ the way they most needed to, and this should give you and I both pause.

Nobody wants to end up being one of these folks! This passage essentially says they’ll argue with Jesus as they face their certain fate. They will claim they’d already checked all the necessary boxes, but their problem will be they’d defined their faith on their terms and not on God’s. They believed more in their position, their language, their achievements, their education, their rituals, their reputation, their social circles, their denomination, and a host of other things more than they believed in Jesus Christ.

As the truly terrifying account of Matt. 7:21-27 outlines, there are far too many “Christians” who rest in these kinds of false assurances. They’re no different than the Pharisees of Jesus’ time who appeared righteous to most people, but were exposed as “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27).

Here’s a firm reality check. It’s dangerous to assess one’s spiritual condition by the values of a church that has “left her first love” (Rev. 2:4). It is downright fatal to be seduced by any contrivances of “Christian culture” which the Scriptures condemn as “….wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, naked, and….lukewarm” (Rev. 3:15-17). Our Matthew passage is an admonition for each of us to get our act together while we still can, and I contend it’s healthy to feel a certain anxiety when one is warned of great personal risk.

The bottom line is there should be nothing more precious to any of us than a genuine saving faith, and according to the first few verses of James, that’s a faith that’s been rigorously tested and proved. As one old missionary once told me, “A Christian is like a teabag. He’s no good till he’s been through hot water.”

What does that process look like? Well, a real faith is one that remains unbroken after the ravages of protracted pain. A true faith is one that holds up under a gauntlet of diverse temptations and overcomes wrong choices with wisdom. An authentic faith walks the higher road set forth in the Word of God and shuns the lower bar of secularism. A faith of eternal value understands life’s trials from the perspective of a “victor” and not a “victim.” All of this ultimately boils down to the fact that true faith endures in choosing a right view of God over everything else, and that begins and ends with “….believing in the Lord Jesus Christ” the same way the thief and the jailer did.

Paul exhorts us to “….work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). Granted, the emphasis is to develop our faith in humility and obedience, but a subsequent point is also made that we should stay engaged in “pressing on” towards Christlikeness (Phil. 3:13-14). The “trembling” of the penitent believer conveys the attitude they should have in pursuing this goal—a healthy fear of offending God through disobedience, and a consuming and unwavering reverence for His power, majesty, and holiness.

We can myopically sing until the cows come home that “Jesus is my friend,” but I’d recommend we keep that in proper balance with the fact that Jesus is also our judge (James 5:9; 2 Cor. 5:10; Rom. 14:10, et al). That’s a necessary truth that sobers the bigger picture. Tensions in our doctrines help to keep us most faithful.

In conclusion, a true faith holds immeasurable eternal value. Matthew 7:21-27 reminds us of this fact. Any discomforts we encounter in this life to acquire genuine faith and to know it’s the real deal are – in the grand scheme of things – what’s best for us.

As Jim Elliott said, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

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I tend to dislike acronyms. That said, the title here implies a great deal in a few letters. It positions the “who,” the “what” and the “why” of our nation’s boiling, political climate in one line.

I’ll start with the “who” and the “what.” I recently watched the President of the United States (the POTUS) deliver his State of the Union speech (the SOTU) and I was absolutely appalled! Not at his speech, mind you. That was a very effective speech by a very capable leader. No – I was appalled at the behaviors of those who lead the left!

Consider the following examples as cases in point:

The Democrats refused to stand in recognition of basic achievements that make America great.

When President Trump talked about our nation’s recent economic boom, they frowned. When he stated the fact that overall unemployment is at a 45-year low – and black unemployment specifically is at an all-time low – they sat on their hands like indignant statues. When our President laid out sensible plans to end the violence of gangs like MS-13 by securing our border, the left shrieked he was sowing disunity. When he used words like “church,” and “family,” they wailed he was “promoting 1950’s-era” values.

It got worse for the donkeys when chants of “USA! USA! USA!” reverberated through the crowd. The left whined it was “embarrassing,” and some of them got up and left. When President Trump underscored his official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the liberals howled that he was “promoting violence and undermining sensible peace efforts.”

The left is marinated in a revolting double-standard. When Barack Obama referred to himself 114 times in his own SOTU address in 2010, he was interrupted by the applause of his base 86 times. But when President Trump referred to himself only 44 times in his SOTU, the left was outraged at his “self-congratulatory speech.”

Under Obama, America was reminded that a declining economy and rising unemployment was “the new normal” and that our best days were behind us. Now the left is frothing that we should credit Obama’s destructive policies for Trump’s unprecedented successes.

Here’s the bottom line: In one short year, President Trump has made America stronger, safer, and more successful. He has directed our country’s path back toward sanity, reassured its legal citizens, and put a healthy fear in those who are not. President Trump recognizes we are still a nation “under God,” and he has done what he can to align our country’s policies and positions with Bible-based principles.

If brains were dynamite, the left wouldn’t have enough to blow its nose. In a public moment where our President spoke to the foundational concerns of all American people – regardless of their race, color, creed, or gender – the left’s rabid loathing of Donald Trump overwhelmed any prudent instincts of their own maturity and responsibility.

The whole nation is watching as the liberal leadership is flailing, failing, and derailing. As David Horowitz said of late, “The Democrats’ hatred of Trump is going to bring them down.”

But it’s right here where I need to dig a bit deeper. It’s easy to say that the left doesn’t want America to succeed simply because the President under which all that success is taking place is Donald Trump. That is the conventional argument, but it doesn’t tell the bigger story.

I need to talk about the “why.” True believers – those who have placed their faith fully in Jesus Christ – are gaining simultaneous glimpses into the spiritual and physical dimensions with everything that’s going on. God is using the evolving conditions of life on Planet Earth to achieve His heavenly purposes, and there are few examples that illustrate this better than the left’s unhinged reactions to President Trump.

The political mayhem unfolding in front of us is – in most respects – spiritually-based, and I believe it has prophetic implications. It’s unpopular with the left to promote national pride, to secure borders, to enforce laws, to uphold the truth, to practice honor, and to exercise any common sense that finds its inspiration in God’s Word. If the left had their way, there’d be no borders, no religion, no genders, no personal responsibility, no morals, and no shred of Judeo-Christian values.

I’m in no mood to mince words here. In the name of this globalist agenda, Obama’s administration strategically choreographed the erosion of the strength and pride of America in order to reduce it to the vulnerabilities of a third-world country. His was the most divisive, destructive, and deceitful administration in our country’s history.

It was easier for President Obama to bring this nation down than to raise other nations up. To achieve his goals, lawlessness was encouraged, unrest was supported, poverty was expanded, history was rebranded, allies were rejected, enemies were coddled, virtue was buried, and Christians were mocked. We are only starting to peel back and expose the eight years of Obama’s deceptive “hope and change.”

The passions of the far left for a one-world government will ultimately be realized in the post-Rapture world of the Tribulation, but it’ll be a far cry from the utopia John Lennon crooned about in “Imagine.” It will indeed be a world without borders, without religion, and without possessions as we know these things to be today, but it won’t be a pretty place.

Lennon sang about “living life in peace,” and he lulled his listeners into the notion that this will happen when all “the world will be as one,” but his ideals are godless at their core and their impact will be catastrophic when God sovereignly permits them to bloom.

It’s easy to “imagine” what’s coming. The sudden disappearance of so many “deplorables,” those “stick-in-the-mud Christians,” and so many “racist” patriots will be seized upon as a great gift by the globalists. Legitimate questions about what really happened to the millions who vanished in the Rapture are likely to fade, as a celebratory mood – saturated in unparalleled spiritual deceit – takes over instead.

Those that remain will never have to worry that an “outsider” or a nationalist might be elected to the highest office in the land. They’ll realize that they won’t face any credible opposition to their New World Order (NWO) plans again. There won’t be any more pressure for them to secure borders, to encourage morality, or to believe the truth. They can finally ignore reason, logic, and common sense as they want to.

It’ll be like someone flipped the nitrous oxide switch as the principles of globalism will surge into the passing lane. People will clap each other on the back and clink their glasses as they sense their long-awaited goals are within reach. “Peace and security” is finally coming (1 Thess. 5:3).

Not so fast.

“Then sudden destruction will come upon them,” the Bible continues. There will be no escape from the horror and no alternative to the devastation. The ideals of the globalists will be shattered, and their utopia will come crashing down. God has ordained a time of reckoning for the globalists, and they will suffer the consequences of getting exactly what they wished for.

While smatterings of support for globalism exist in various places, the far left seems to represent the leading edge of those that want to plunge over the precipice and into the chaos of the post-Rapture world. Today, the socialists and progressives are screaming for a political climate that will ultimately introduce great horror. They don’t see it that way, and so they scowl, they rage, they riot, they plot, they lie – and unfortunately, they convince more and more people of their deception each day.

The world I live in has changed a lot in the past ten years. It’s hard for me to imagine we can continue on a similar course for ten more. Frank depravities are already at fever pitch, and reason has abandoned the premises.

Be all that as it may, God has a perfect plan and nothing is outside His control. We can rest assured in the wonderful promise that, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee” (Isaiah 26:3).

I say, “Maranatha!”