All of my Christian life I considered pragmatism to be an evil. I equated it to compromise, while in my idealism I tried to see myself as a hero taking courageous stands for Christ. Way back, there was one sermon that got a lot of play around here, and its message was that “compromise is of the devil”.
And so I was surprised several months ago, when in my reading of the New Testament I came across the parable of the nobleman, found in Luke 19 . The story is about a nobleman who travels to a distant land to secure his kingdom. He leaves his subjects behind in an adverse environment, and tells them to “occupy”, or “do business” until he returns.
I had heard that word, occupy, bandied about a lot. It is what we Christians are supposed to do until the Lord returns for us. But I never really got what it meant. Occupying seems a very passive endeavor. It is what protesters often do. It is what sluggards do at work, instead of actually working. It didn’t seem right that the Lord would want us to simply take up space or be content with the status quo, so I went to the Greek to find out what it might mean.
It turns out that occupy in the Greek is Pragmateuomai. This is where we get the word pragmatism. It’s used in the verse as a verb: “pragmatize until I return”. I was shocked to see this word used there. It was the last thing I expected.
Jesus was saying, “guys, I’m going to be a while. There are some very dark elements here. They hate Me and are opposed to My rule, and they are going to make things very hard for you. Because you will be up against adversity, you are going to have to be very practical. Keep your feet solidly on the ground, even as you continually think about Me and look for My return.”
Once again the amazing word of God had liberated me from an old and stale understanding of a concept I had heard from my earliest days. I prayed that the Lord would always increase my understanding in this way, for this is the path to freedom and power!
I bring all this up because of the crazy presidential primary season we have experienced. I have followed it closely, and my own feelings about some of the candidates changed as I learned more.
I began to notice that Donald Trump was destroying political correctness time and again. Before him, nothing else could. And then I saw him take a strong stand against illegal immigration, and even radical Islam, which no one else would do. Over the years I never had been a Trump fan, but now I found I actually began to think he might have something to offer.
At the same time, the guy who I should have been favoring, who had all the Christian “cred” – I found I was liking him less and less. And indeed, trusting him less and less. His actions didn’t seem to line up with his rhetoric.
There are times it’s definitely true that compromise is “of the devil”. When first principles are at stake, we dare not trade them for a lesser good. But short of that, when there is no ideal option, we need to evaluate the situation and make the best practical choice.
Now, that would be the end of this article, except that I have come across an amazing prophecy concerning Trump. This prophecy was given five years ago, yet it describes what has been going on as if it’s last week’s newspaper. The upshot is that Trump is going to be elected, and he will be used of God to return this nation from the abyss of political correctness. You will find the prophecy here: http://www.trunews.com/trunews-041816-mark-taylor-gods-man/. It’s a captivating one hour radio show.
And then there’s a second prophecy, this one shorter. It’s similar to the first, but adds the parallel of the biblical Cyrus to the mix. Cyrus was a Persian king that the Lord used to bring the Israelites out of captivity and back to the land. He was not saved. He was, to our knowledge, not religious. But that wasn’t important. He was a secular power and he used his position to help the Jews. And that’s all that mattered. The prophecy is here: http://charismapodcastnetwork.com/shows/strangreport/fa261ca761fb800f76c6804ed34998f5
My own feeling is that America has sunk so low that it is going to take a hard-nosed battering ram like Donald Trump to break the stranglehold that grips her. The church cannot afford to wait around for an ideal leader who does everything the ideal way. We’re going to have to take what we can get, and trust in the Lord to put it all together.
