At the risk of a violation for this here it is as a copy and paste. I could not find a link that would not be seen as Promoting another website.
FOLLOW-UP to "OUR DEAR AMERICA"
by Wolfgang and Mercy Simson
This follow-up letter is not only for America, but also to all the
Western European nations that find themselves in a similar
political and economic situation like the US...
The "Our Dear America" message was not sent out as a pacifying,
soothing message for all those that wanted Romney to win and
Obama to lose. This message is not meant to calm down your
troubled spirit, so you can now take a deep breath and think:
"God has mysterious ways"! Rather it is a wake-up call to shake
those in America that call themselves after Christ from a toxic
slumber, and encourage them to seek their true King, and to
submit to his rule. Would you therefore please allow us take this
to a next level and try to be as clear and concise as we can?
First, our motive. We love the US. My (Indian) wife and I (German/
Hungarian/Jewish roots) have been given a passion and burden for
the US that we can´t really explain. For the past 21 years, we have
been praying for your nation and we continue to do so. We bought
your flag and have it in our office to remind us to ask God for
supernatural love for America. And sometimes, love makes you
tell it as it is, without diplomatic language and plan, without
scheming for a certain angle, plain - just like that. We know that
this can make us a target for undue praise, but also for mis-
understanding, anger and criticism - by now, we have been called
all sorts of untrue things, good and bad - but we are ready to
remain vulnerable.
Secondly, we have cogent reasons to believe that there is a very
real hope for a historic, mind-blowing turnaround and a possible
re-invention of America - IF Jesus would be accepted as the ruling
King of his people with the same or more passionate fervor that
people went about electing a new president and spending their
hope and money on it. What happened during the election time
now is that we felt God said, (in our paraphrase) They are missing
it again; they are again looking for another Saul to be King, not
me; yet another human Messiah, a political solution for a spiritual
problem. The involvement in a process to elect yet another "most
powerful man of the most powerful nation in the world" can lead
to a toxic drunkenness of what the Bible calls - The Flesh: `we-
can-do-it´ power. It is a symptom of the very same spirit that had
people build the Tower of Babylon.
If that continues, it will all come to nothing and yes, all will go
down in flames, Christian churches, denominations, ministries,
foundations and businesses included, with those in leadership
wringing their hands in complete, perplexed despair - unless:
Those who claim the name of Jesus would finally emigrate out of
a gigantic Babylon (Mammon-driven) Captivity and repatriate into
the Kingdom, seen as the domain of God´s uncontested rule.
Repatriation means we emigrate, decidedly move out of one
country into another country, apply for citizenship and diligently
keep the laws and regulations of that country out of passionate,
obedient love for its King. Then we would no longer be Americans
first and Christians second, but Kingdom Citizens who happen
to be pilgrims temporarily living in America - or any other nation.
That is the right order, anything else is a deception.
Does God judge or blesses us because of our Government? You
don´t expect sheep to behave like goats. And you don´t expect
pagans to behave like saints. God knows that even better.
Therefore, all nations (political entities) are under Gods general
merciful blessing, seen in the fact that he has not yet wiped us
all out (Psalm 9:17; Isa 8:9; 40:17 etc). But all nations are not
only under his permissive blessing for a shrinking time window
of grace, but also under Gods rightful judgment. One of the puppets
of God is Satan, to whom God has given a limited but terrible
allotment: "The whole world is under the control of the evil one"
(1 John 5:19).
A dramatic event is narrated in the Bible that is so sobering that
it might heal anyone of all false nationalism or even patriotism. It
is Jesus and Lucifer standing on a mountain (Luke 4:5), and Lucifer
says, in the face of Jesus: All these Kingdoms and their splendor
have been given to me - and I give them to whom I want. This is
why, with very few amazing exceptions, power, money and
splendor seems to be always bestowed on the wrong people.
People whom Lucifer likes, and he definitely always likes the wrong
ones. This is why nations - with one exception -the Kingdom of
God (Hebrews 12:28) - are all very shakable and fragile. In the
coming days, they will all start to face more and more violent and
unsolvable problems (Matthew 24) within themselves, through
internal strife. And by flexing their muscles like teenagers on too
much testosterone, this will lead to more rumors of war, nation at
the throat of other nations. We should expect blind nations that
they would try to blame someone else for its problems. And what
is easier than to blame the others in general, and the neighbor in
particular? There is a Kingdom solution to this, but it will simply
not fit into such a short letter.
Our point is this: all nations are under Gods rightful judgment,
because all of them have long ago removed themselves from under
his rule - Israel, Germany, Australia, Sweden and the USA
included. The romantic and sugarcoated myth of a Christian nation
is just that - a myth (A helpful book here is Gregory Boyd: The
Myth of a Christian Nation). Sin is first and foremost a disposition,
not the individual acts that result from our disposition. All have
sinned - nation-states included. Whether they sin a lot or sin a
little, sin they do all the same.
The really big issue, the one we can and should actually do
something about, is that God is looking at the level of holiness of
his saints in regards to their alignment to the constitution of the
Kingdom. Remember - judgment starts at the house of God. That
is where the crux is. And may we be blunt? We have done empirical
research and statistics all our life. If we would rate the corporate
behavior of the collective body of Christians in our Western nations
against the normative decrees and commands of the King, we
would be at a catastrophic obedience level of around a 2-5%, out
of 100. The Body of Christ in countries like India would be more
at a level of 20%; China, the same. My American friend Curtis
Sergeant who worked in China, used to describe many Chinese
followers of Christ with these three attributes: quick, costly
obedience. We in the West replaced those attributes with slow,
cheap arguments. This is just one of the main reasons for God to
bless his people there - rather than us in the cultural West.
Unless we change, this will not change.
The real pink elephant in the room, the problem so big that hardly
anyone can or wants to see it, is this: most Christians are not in
the Kingdom. They may have knocked at the door, but never
entered in. Or they may have entered, said a quick prayer, raised
a hand, but quickly walked out of the Kingdom again, unable or
unwilling to leave the ways of the world and submit themselves to
the King. It really breaks our heart to say this, but we really mean
it: if Jesus does not evidently rule our lives, he is not our King.
For us, as your distant lovers and foreigners who come in and go
out of the US, one thing hits us in the face like a sledgehammer
each time we pass emigration. It is the screaming testimony of
the lives of most Christians that we have met in the US, who live
an ignorant, shameless, or even violent disobedience, in regards
to almost all royal commands of Jesus the King. They are
ignorantly or even deliberately trespassing, with their heads kept
high, especially in the key areas of sex, money, power and church.
Yes, we know a few precious exceptions, but it seems to be more
like a modern day group of 7000 who have not bowed their knees
to Baal. Christian people, in the four areas mentioned above,
simply do whatever they want, if they want, when they want, with
whom they want, where they want, thinking this is OK because
everybody does it.
In today´s America, it is just like in those days when Israel had
no king, and everyone did as he pleased. This is why most (not
all) church-going, praying, singing, tithing, book-writing, book-
buying, conference-addicted, small-group and Bible-study attending
Christians with or without a fish sticker on their car are, in fact,
illegal aliens, having crept a few meters over the border of the
Kingdom without yet being found out that they actually don´t
belong here (Matthew 22). They actually are in a spiritual no-man´s
land, people not at home in the Kingdom, and not at home in the
world; they have become people with no legal authority, power nor
significance in the Kingdom - and the world ignores them anyway.
Many of you secretly see and admit this powerlessness, which
screams in our faces: divine power cut! Even after (because?) all
those years of bible studies, songs, retreats, programs, prayers,
laying on of hands, prophesying this and decreeing that, driving
out that spirit and driving in another, many don´t even have the
power to overcome the most basic carnal addictions (lust, porn,
work, greed, fear, fun, gossiping, eating, dating, shopping, touring),
and compulsions (buying, selling, facebooking- voicing your opinion
without being asked, writing endlessly, twittering, preaching, giving
and reading "prophetic" words, chasing after what is new), just like
the folks in Apostle Paul´s Athens (Acts 17:21).
Such a life has not even arrived at Square One of the Kingdom -
the denial of self (Luke 14:33), and therefore does not have the
power to change the life of our own teenagers, let alone our
neighbors, let alone our city, county or country. From the per-
spective of Jesus and his Kingdom, this describes the life of
rebels; nice rebels, maybe, but rebels all the more. Religious
versions of any other US-citizen, pursuing as their top priority
anything but the Kingdom: money, toys, happiness, life, fun,
success, selfish significance of even the religious significance
like some of those who export a dysfunctional cultural religion
that has completely failed to disciple its own home base, and
calling it missions.
The core symptom of an illegal alien from a Kingdom perspective
is this: It is all about me. The center of this world is me, my opinion,
my church, my ministry, my book, my, my, my. But you are not
in the Kingdom if you can´t say: Your Kingdom come - my kingdom
go! If you have not kicked your ego out of the driver seat of your
life, then you run your life, not God. So don´t fool yourself and your
family. And if you are pledged - signed over - to this group, that
entity, the other purpose, then you have sold yourself away to
something else than God and his Kingdom. And your heart is
divided and torn. And that is idolatry. You serve two Gods; God
and Mammon; God and country; God and the NFL. That, however,
is no longer a life that Jesus describes like this: Make the Kingdom
and life according to its constitution your first priority (Matthew 6:33
in its proper translation). And that is why "everything else" that
Jesus talks about in this foundational Kingdom decree is not given
to many at all.
But it is not only self-centeredness that keeps us from understanding
or entering the Kingdom, it is also the phenomenal delusion that
we think far bigger and in unreasonable bias and favor of ourselves
than what we really are. Statistics tell us that most Americans, if
asked if they are "born again", would say yes, even if they don´t
even know what that means. Similarly, if Christians hear the word
Kingdom, many automatically respond: Kingdom? Oh yes, absolutely,
sure thing, aren´t we all Kingdom people, somehow automatically
when we prayed "the sinners prayer" or when we got baptized?
Many truly believe that therefore all they do is Kingdom; Kingdom
business, Kingdom worship, Kingdom church, Kingdom conferences.
This is a huge deception. It is therefore a very healthy start for all
of us to take time out and ask ourselves first, and God very seriously,
am I actually a legal citizen in the Kingdom? Jesus saved me by
his grace. But, do I keep his commandments?
Our experience in the US has been that, with a very few exceptions,
the vast majority of Christians all say "Lord, Lord" - but simply and
doggedly do not do what Jesus says, being disobedient to the
core, unconstitutional and Kingdom-law-breaking (Matthew 7:21-23).
The King is utterly displeased with this, and he will not bless such
a disposition. This "lack of blessing", of Kingdom authority is
evident in the problem-driven lives many Christians are leading.
They have become a product of their environment - and their
environment is no longer a product of them...
FOLLOW-UP to "OUR DEAR AMERICA"
by Wolfgang and Mercy Simson
This follow-up letter is not only for America, but also to all the
Western European nations that find themselves in a similar
political and economic situation like the US...
The "Our Dear America" message was not sent out as a pacifying,
soothing message for all those that wanted Romney to win and
Obama to lose. This message is not meant to calm down your
troubled spirit, so you can now take a deep breath and think:
"God has mysterious ways"! Rather it is a wake-up call to shake
those in America that call themselves after Christ from a toxic
slumber, and encourage them to seek their true King, and to
submit to his rule. Would you therefore please allow us take this
to a next level and try to be as clear and concise as we can?
First, our motive. We love the US. My (Indian) wife and I (German/
Hungarian/Jewish roots) have been given a passion and burden for
the US that we can´t really explain. For the past 21 years, we have
been praying for your nation and we continue to do so. We bought
your flag and have it in our office to remind us to ask God for
supernatural love for America. And sometimes, love makes you
tell it as it is, without diplomatic language and plan, without
scheming for a certain angle, plain - just like that. We know that
this can make us a target for undue praise, but also for mis-
understanding, anger and criticism - by now, we have been called
all sorts of untrue things, good and bad - but we are ready to
remain vulnerable.
Secondly, we have cogent reasons to believe that there is a very
real hope for a historic, mind-blowing turnaround and a possible
re-invention of America - IF Jesus would be accepted as the ruling
King of his people with the same or more passionate fervor that
people went about electing a new president and spending their
hope and money on it. What happened during the election time
now is that we felt God said, (in our paraphrase) They are missing
it again; they are again looking for another Saul to be King, not
me; yet another human Messiah, a political solution for a spiritual
problem. The involvement in a process to elect yet another "most
powerful man of the most powerful nation in the world" can lead
to a toxic drunkenness of what the Bible calls - The Flesh: `we-
can-do-it´ power. It is a symptom of the very same spirit that had
people build the Tower of Babylon.
If that continues, it will all come to nothing and yes, all will go
down in flames, Christian churches, denominations, ministries,
foundations and businesses included, with those in leadership
wringing their hands in complete, perplexed despair - unless:
Those who claim the name of Jesus would finally emigrate out of
a gigantic Babylon (Mammon-driven) Captivity and repatriate into
the Kingdom, seen as the domain of God´s uncontested rule.
Repatriation means we emigrate, decidedly move out of one
country into another country, apply for citizenship and diligently
keep the laws and regulations of that country out of passionate,
obedient love for its King. Then we would no longer be Americans
first and Christians second, but Kingdom Citizens who happen
to be pilgrims temporarily living in America - or any other nation.
That is the right order, anything else is a deception.
Does God judge or blesses us because of our Government? You
don´t expect sheep to behave like goats. And you don´t expect
pagans to behave like saints. God knows that even better.
Therefore, all nations (political entities) are under Gods general
merciful blessing, seen in the fact that he has not yet wiped us
all out (Psalm 9:17; Isa 8:9; 40:17 etc). But all nations are not
only under his permissive blessing for a shrinking time window
of grace, but also under Gods rightful judgment. One of the puppets
of God is Satan, to whom God has given a limited but terrible
allotment: "The whole world is under the control of the evil one"
(1 John 5:19).
A dramatic event is narrated in the Bible that is so sobering that
it might heal anyone of all false nationalism or even patriotism. It
is Jesus and Lucifer standing on a mountain (Luke 4:5), and Lucifer
says, in the face of Jesus: All these Kingdoms and their splendor
have been given to me - and I give them to whom I want. This is
why, with very few amazing exceptions, power, money and
splendor seems to be always bestowed on the wrong people.
People whom Lucifer likes, and he definitely always likes the wrong
ones. This is why nations - with one exception -the Kingdom of
God (Hebrews 12:28) - are all very shakable and fragile. In the
coming days, they will all start to face more and more violent and
unsolvable problems (Matthew 24) within themselves, through
internal strife. And by flexing their muscles like teenagers on too
much testosterone, this will lead to more rumors of war, nation at
the throat of other nations. We should expect blind nations that
they would try to blame someone else for its problems. And what
is easier than to blame the others in general, and the neighbor in
particular? There is a Kingdom solution to this, but it will simply
not fit into such a short letter.
Our point is this: all nations are under Gods rightful judgment,
because all of them have long ago removed themselves from under
his rule - Israel, Germany, Australia, Sweden and the USA
included. The romantic and sugarcoated myth of a Christian nation
is just that - a myth (A helpful book here is Gregory Boyd: The
Myth of a Christian Nation). Sin is first and foremost a disposition,
not the individual acts that result from our disposition. All have
sinned - nation-states included. Whether they sin a lot or sin a
little, sin they do all the same.
The really big issue, the one we can and should actually do
something about, is that God is looking at the level of holiness of
his saints in regards to their alignment to the constitution of the
Kingdom. Remember - judgment starts at the house of God. That
is where the crux is. And may we be blunt? We have done empirical
research and statistics all our life. If we would rate the corporate
behavior of the collective body of Christians in our Western nations
against the normative decrees and commands of the King, we
would be at a catastrophic obedience level of around a 2-5%, out
of 100. The Body of Christ in countries like India would be more
at a level of 20%; China, the same. My American friend Curtis
Sergeant who worked in China, used to describe many Chinese
followers of Christ with these three attributes: quick, costly
obedience. We in the West replaced those attributes with slow,
cheap arguments. This is just one of the main reasons for God to
bless his people there - rather than us in the cultural West.
Unless we change, this will not change.
The real pink elephant in the room, the problem so big that hardly
anyone can or wants to see it, is this: most Christians are not in
the Kingdom. They may have knocked at the door, but never
entered in. Or they may have entered, said a quick prayer, raised
a hand, but quickly walked out of the Kingdom again, unable or
unwilling to leave the ways of the world and submit themselves to
the King. It really breaks our heart to say this, but we really mean
it: if Jesus does not evidently rule our lives, he is not our King.
For us, as your distant lovers and foreigners who come in and go
out of the US, one thing hits us in the face like a sledgehammer
each time we pass emigration. It is the screaming testimony of
the lives of most Christians that we have met in the US, who live
an ignorant, shameless, or even violent disobedience, in regards
to almost all royal commands of Jesus the King. They are
ignorantly or even deliberately trespassing, with their heads kept
high, especially in the key areas of sex, money, power and church.
Yes, we know a few precious exceptions, but it seems to be more
like a modern day group of 7000 who have not bowed their knees
to Baal. Christian people, in the four areas mentioned above,
simply do whatever they want, if they want, when they want, with
whom they want, where they want, thinking this is OK because
everybody does it.
In today´s America, it is just like in those days when Israel had
no king, and everyone did as he pleased. This is why most (not
all) church-going, praying, singing, tithing, book-writing, book-
buying, conference-addicted, small-group and Bible-study attending
Christians with or without a fish sticker on their car are, in fact,
illegal aliens, having crept a few meters over the border of the
Kingdom without yet being found out that they actually don´t
belong here (Matthew 22). They actually are in a spiritual no-man´s
land, people not at home in the Kingdom, and not at home in the
world; they have become people with no legal authority, power nor
significance in the Kingdom - and the world ignores them anyway.
Many of you secretly see and admit this powerlessness, which
screams in our faces: divine power cut! Even after (because?) all
those years of bible studies, songs, retreats, programs, prayers,
laying on of hands, prophesying this and decreeing that, driving
out that spirit and driving in another, many don´t even have the
power to overcome the most basic carnal addictions (lust, porn,
work, greed, fear, fun, gossiping, eating, dating, shopping, touring),
and compulsions (buying, selling, facebooking- voicing your opinion
without being asked, writing endlessly, twittering, preaching, giving
and reading "prophetic" words, chasing after what is new), just like
the folks in Apostle Paul´s Athens (Acts 17:21).
Such a life has not even arrived at Square One of the Kingdom -
the denial of self (Luke 14:33), and therefore does not have the
power to change the life of our own teenagers, let alone our
neighbors, let alone our city, county or country. From the per-
spective of Jesus and his Kingdom, this describes the life of
rebels; nice rebels, maybe, but rebels all the more. Religious
versions of any other US-citizen, pursuing as their top priority
anything but the Kingdom: money, toys, happiness, life, fun,
success, selfish significance of even the religious significance
like some of those who export a dysfunctional cultural religion
that has completely failed to disciple its own home base, and
calling it missions.
The core symptom of an illegal alien from a Kingdom perspective
is this: It is all about me. The center of this world is me, my opinion,
my church, my ministry, my book, my, my, my. But you are not
in the Kingdom if you can´t say: Your Kingdom come - my kingdom
go! If you have not kicked your ego out of the driver seat of your
life, then you run your life, not God. So don´t fool yourself and your
family. And if you are pledged - signed over - to this group, that
entity, the other purpose, then you have sold yourself away to
something else than God and his Kingdom. And your heart is
divided and torn. And that is idolatry. You serve two Gods; God
and Mammon; God and country; God and the NFL. That, however,
is no longer a life that Jesus describes like this: Make the Kingdom
and life according to its constitution your first priority (Matthew 6:33
in its proper translation). And that is why "everything else" that
Jesus talks about in this foundational Kingdom decree is not given
to many at all.
But it is not only self-centeredness that keeps us from understanding
or entering the Kingdom, it is also the phenomenal delusion that
we think far bigger and in unreasonable bias and favor of ourselves
than what we really are. Statistics tell us that most Americans, if
asked if they are "born again", would say yes, even if they don´t
even know what that means. Similarly, if Christians hear the word
Kingdom, many automatically respond: Kingdom? Oh yes, absolutely,
sure thing, aren´t we all Kingdom people, somehow automatically
when we prayed "the sinners prayer" or when we got baptized?
Many truly believe that therefore all they do is Kingdom; Kingdom
business, Kingdom worship, Kingdom church, Kingdom conferences.
This is a huge deception. It is therefore a very healthy start for all
of us to take time out and ask ourselves first, and God very seriously,
am I actually a legal citizen in the Kingdom? Jesus saved me by
his grace. But, do I keep his commandments?
Our experience in the US has been that, with a very few exceptions,
the vast majority of Christians all say "Lord, Lord" - but simply and
doggedly do not do what Jesus says, being disobedient to the
core, unconstitutional and Kingdom-law-breaking (Matthew 7:21-23).
The King is utterly displeased with this, and he will not bless such
a disposition. This "lack of blessing", of Kingdom authority is
evident in the problem-driven lives many Christians are leading.
They have become a product of their environment - and their
environment is no longer a product of them...
