However much we who love Jesus may want to, we don’t get to redefine the words of Scripture to make them more palatable. We don’t get to embrace various ideologies that lead to a view of the person that destroys and then throws it away. We can’t take our own ideas of goodness and impose them over what God has already said is good. We can’t do that because we will have to answer to our Sovereign on the last day when he returns again in power and great glory. While Christians in the West may enjoy the benefits of a pluralistic society that grants them the freedom to worship without fear, they are nevertheless constrained by the True Shepherd to the painful wilderness of obedience. 

The Church Year is drawing to a swift close and the final Sunday, Christ the King, is upon us. Besides being a moment to sing some glorious hymns, it is also a fitting hour to make a most essential declaration–that Christ is the ruler over the world, over time, over nations and kingdoms, but most of all over every plan and inclination of every person.
It is a most comforting certainty for Christians that, if Christ is King, while of course it matters what the governments of the world do, it also doesn’t matter. Twitter may fall to the dust, Trump may get his account back, the price of gas may go up even higher, Congress may enact any kind of law, but none of it unthrones the Lord nor nullifies the truth that the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Lest we become too comfortable, however, because Christ is King, it absolutely does matter what Christians do and say. It is the Church—not the world—whose concerns and anxieties are shaped by Christ being King. If you’re scrolling for depressing signs of dark times, look at what Christians are saying and doing.
Which makes this particular piece by David French—a person I have studiously avoided on the internet for fear of failing in winsomeness—all the more bad. It is titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet: The Respect for Marriage Act, and the harmony between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights.” After discussing what happened before and after Obergefell and what it all means, French writes this:
The bill doesn’t give either side everything, but it still contains crucial provisions that can comfort (almost) everyone. First, it states that “no person acting under color of State law” can deny “full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.” In plain English, that means if your marriage was legal in the state where you’re married, then government officials from other states and localities can’t refuse to recognize the validity of that marriage on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. And what of religious freedom? The bill does two important things. First, it declares that “[n]othing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to diminish or abrogate a religious liberty or conscience protection otherwise available to an individual or organization under the Constitution of the United States or Federal law.” This is an important provision and distinctly different from the Democratic approach to the Equality Act, which limited the reach of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In other words, the bill explicitly diminished religious-freedom protections under federal law. The Respect for Marriage Act does no such thing.
I wandered around Twitter, looking for what other people think about the new law, and found this long fact check that paints a much gloomier picture for religious people. What impresses me about the piece by French, however, isn’t so much what he says about the law, but the sort of desultory tone with which he says it. After six years of moral teaching online about the failures of Christians here is nary an indication that what we might be facing is not a petty quarrel between two morally neutral sides. It is as if, to quote almost everyone on Twitter, French doesn’t know what time it is. It is as if the tenseness with which people across the ideological divide are warily considering each other has entirely escaped his notice. Thus, amazingly, he concludes the piece this way:
The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions. The Senate’s Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t solve every issue in America’s culture war (much less every issue related to marriage), but it’s a bipartisan step in the right direction. It demonstrates that compromise still works, and that pluralism has life left in it yet.
As so many people online said in various pithy ways, tell that to that cake baker, or to all the people who lost their Twitter accounts for noticing that some people pretending to be women are actually men. Or rather, look at the way that denominations are splitting apart. Open your eyes to the ways that gender ideology eats up and destroys not only individual people, but communities and families.
If I hadn’t just spent the last three months going back through the archives imbibing an immense amount of Auron MacIntyre’s content I would have maybe—minus the bit about calling the American republic “magic,” an astonishing claim, given the last six years—taken hope from French’s idea that “pluralism has life left in it yet.” What was I supposed to do? Believe my lying eyes?
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Pray that the Lord would protect our neighbors a world away, especially those of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10). Pray that as God delivered Paul from the sentence of death (2 Corinthians 1:8-10) he would deliver those who have entrusted their souls to him in faith by any means necessary. Pray that the Lord would wondrously convert the wicked (Acts 9:1-7) and if not, that he would restrain or destroy them for the sake of His bride, the church (Psalm 139:19).

I was sitting in Mr. Scott’s 10th grade English class when the principal’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker: “Attention teachers and students, I’ve just received word of a terrible accident at the World Trade Center in New York City.”  No doubt, many of you remember where you were on September 11, 2001, when you first heard the dreadful news. In the days and weeks that followed, America and her allies declared war against the al-Qaeda terror network responsible for the attack and the Taliban regime who harbored them in Afghanistan.
Now, 20 years later, our lives are being flooded again with unsettling images of people falling, not from burning buildings but from swarmed airplanes, men in truck beds toting AK-47s, and women and children running for their lives. In the wake of the withdrawal of remaining American troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban surged, retaking cities previously liberated from their barbaric tyranny. In just days, the capital city of Kabul fell and the country has since slipped back beneath the dark waters of fear and oppression. Only this time the Taliban are armed to the teeth with billions of dollars in American weapons left behind in the evacuation.
The situation is dire. Once again, women have been stripped of their humanity and civil rights, being required to veil themselves from head to toe and forbidden from pursuing education, employment, or leaving their homes alone. Once again, girls are being tortured, kidnapped, and sold into sexual slavery. Once again young men and boys are being conscripted into military service at gunpoint. And once again, our Christian brothers and sisters will be forced to choose: renounce Christ and live or confess him and die.
Even after the liberation in 2001, Christianity remained illegal in Afghanistan. But over the past twenty years, thousands have come to faith in Jesus Christ, worshipping secretly in their homes. Now, under the Taliban’s ruthless Sharia Law, conversion from Islam is a capital crime, punishable by death. We are already receiving disturbing reports from Afghan church leaders of soldiers gathering intelligence, checking the roles at local mosques, and going to the homes of suspected Christians. As footage of public beatings and executions surfaces, believers are being encouraged by their leaders to flee the country or remain hidden indoors. Unless the Lord intervenes with a mighty hand, the worst is yet to come for Afghan Christians.
In the face of such evil what can American Christians do? We can pray! Pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ facing persecution around the world knowing that the prayers of the righteous have “great power” in their working (James 5:16), not because the prayers of the righteous are great but because the one who has made them righteous and promised to hear them is great! Pray in light of Hebrews 13:3 “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated since you also are in the body.”
But how should we pray? Pray that the Lord would protect our neighbors a world away, especially those of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10). Pray that as God delivered Paul from the sentence of death (2 Corinthians 1:8-10) he would deliver those who have entrusted their souls to him in faith by any means necessary. Pray that the Lord would wondrously convert the wicked (Acts 9:1-7) and if not, that he would restrain or destroy them for the sake of His bride, the church (Psalm 139:19). Pray that God would pour out the Holy Spirit upon his people to galvanize their faith and give them the right words in the crucial hour (Luke 12:12). Pray that, if God has sovereignly decreed the deaths of Afghan Christians, that they would face their end with courage, clinging to Christ, “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name” (Acts 5:41). Pray that the blood of the martyrs would be the seed of a thriving Christian church in Afghanistan and spark a revival around the world. Pray that God would keep us ever mindful of and grateful for the delicate liberties we enjoy as Americans able to worship freely and without fear. Pray that the Lord would expand our capacity to sense the bigness of his kingdom and our union with Christians around the world, especially those facing persecution for the sake of his name. Pray that “in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:11).
Pray as those whose own souls depend upon the prayers of another, namely, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest, who “ever lives to make intercession” for us (Hebrews 7:25).
Jim McCarthy is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Senior Pastor of First PCA in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:6)
We can all recall a time when we had a seating assignment. Perhaps in schooling, at work, or around the dinner table, a particular chair may come to be known as your seat. We tend to size up the quality of our assigned seat by factors such as visibility, the ambience, and, above all, the surrounding company. If we’re off to a concert or sporting event, our first question may well be “Do we have good seats?” We intuitively recognize that where we sit and (more importantly) whom it is that we sit next to play no small role in our experience. Thus, as Christians, we do well to pause and ask the question, “Do we have good seats?”
Christians possess the most awesome of all assigned seats. How so? In this passage from Ephesians, Paul has just outlined the dreadful truth that mankind is dead in trespasses, in step with the age of this world, and by nature children of wrath. Far from making us victims, such realties are fully congruent with the desires of the corrupted heart and the passions of the flesh. Should we be offered a new and higher seat, we would resolutely decline, preferring instead our positions of autonomy.
But just as the tidal wave of despair is about to break, Paul interjects that great gospel conjunction “but,” as in “but God” (Eph. 2:4). How bleak our condition . . . but God . . . How ceaseless the diagnosis of death . . . but God . . . How settled in our seats of wrath . . . but God . . . For it was precisely in our state of death that God made us alive; namely by making us alive together with Christ (Eph. 2:5).
As an overflowing benefit of our life in Christ, Christians receive a novel assigned seat that postures us in the age to come. We have the best seat in all the cosmos: a seat in the heavenlies. Above all, we are seated with Christ Jesus. Since the believer is in Christ, then wherever Christ is seated, Christians are necessarily seated with Him.
Where, then, is Christ seated? As Hebrews tells us, it was “when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (Heb. 10:12). This act of “sitting down” crowns the truth that the Lord Jesus fully accomplished all the work that His Father gave to Him. To be a priest was to be “on your feet,” as it were, for a priest’s work was never done. To “take a seat” was not in the priest’s job description, as “every priest stands daily” (Heb. 10:11). The repeated sacrifices that could “never take away sins” required perpetual standing for the priests of old. But Christ’s single sacrifice was singularly perfect. That Christ lived, died, was buried, resurrected, ascended, and only then granted a seat at the “right hand of majesty” sets forth the irrefutable truth that His sacrifice was the “once for all” offering. Every reason to stand has been eliminated, and therefore “heaven must receive him” (Acts 3:21).