We are gathering to worship God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit through the name and righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ. In short, we are a congregation of Christians.
We are doing this as citizens of a nation that continues at war, and we have a two-fold duty in this respect. The first is to reject all forms of earthly partisanship in our worship. We are ascending into the heavenly realms, and we are gathering there in peace with Christians from all nations, including the nation of Iraq.
But the second duty consists in remembering that political responsibilities and connections are not detached from the rule and realm of Jesus Christ. The gospel does have political ramifications, some of them direct. We must be like the men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.
We are on the threshold of the establishment of an unbelieving American empire. This by itself does not exclude our involvement—think of Daniel, Joseph, the faithful centurion, and Erastus. The problem is caused by the fact that this is a militantly secularist and pragmatic empire and, as such, the pressure is already being applied to the Christian church to abandon its exclusivist claims concerning the Faith. The logic of such empires always insists upon joint worship of various gods in the pantheon. This, above all else, places us at odds with the current religious and political climate.
So from this point out, every Lord’s Day, as you worship the triune God only, remind yourself, remind your family, that we worship as exclusivist Trinitarians. We pledge allegiance to one nation under Christ. We pledge allegiance to nothing under any idol, or under any generic and undefined deity. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.