Shooting At Newtown Connecticut School

Tragically, shock, but not surprise, reflect my reaction to this morning's wanton, mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Predictably, our government will blame this calamity on America's failure to control guns, screen unbalanced people and detect their reprehensible intentions, and monitor dissident groups such as Evangelical Bible-believers. But oddly, accusations aimed at Christians and patriots will at once, be 180° off, and right on target.

God's church may not have physically pulled the fatal triggers during this carnage, but the fundamental responsibility for those terrible events falls squarely on our apathetic, Christian shoulders. If Christ-followers were truly obeying their Savior, tragedies such as mass-murders and bombings would be rare, rather than the stuff of daily headlines. Christ's Great Commission should have been all the instruction we needed to minister His redeeming love and grace to fallen mankind. Instead, grass-fires of error and disobedience began consuming the young churches, as they still do today.

We American evangelicals pride ourselves in our patriotism, clinging to our Constitutional rights as if they were holy writ. When we see those rights threatened, as they are today, we get irate, even hateful, toward those "accursed" liberals who want to rain on our 200 year old parade. So we spend far more time finger-pointing and name-calling than searching out our own responsibility in society's moral decline.

Church, we've not only dropped the ball, but we've picked it up and begun running toward the wrong goal line(Ephesians 6:12). So we must not simply wring our hands in despair over today's horrible events, but rather, fall to our knees in prayer, getting to know the lovely Savior who died to redeem us, and our sinful, broken world.