2021 YEAR END LETTER
Necessity of critical thinking!
An objective evaluation of the events of this year may serve to prepare our responses for 2022. To think more critically and clearly is not negative or judgmental. In fact, it seems more like growing up in response to Father’s invitation to come, let us reason together.
Some years ago, a surgeon with whom I was working offered to pay my way through medical school and surgical training because he observed that I was a natural to become a surgeon. When asking the Lord for permission to embrace his offer, He responded: “No, you are being prepared as a spiritual diagnostician!” I have never regretted that choice, earning my spiritual doctorate from Hard Knocks University! We are, without a doubt, entering such a climate.
This humorous anecdote illustrates the nature of critical thinking:
During a visit to my doctor, I asked him, “How do you determine whether or not an older person should be put in an old age home?”
“Well,” he said, “we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the person to empty the bathtub.”
“Oh, I understand,” I said “a normal person would use the bucket because it is bigger than the spoon or the teacup.”
“No,” he said, “a normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?”
2021 has presented us as a society, including the church, with three most serious “infections” from which we may not run away or hide. They are:
- Being asked to embrace false fathers. Politics is one of the false fathers promising that it can and will care for us from the cradle to the grave. No! The end will be a loss of freedom.
- Propagating the idea that “truth” is devoid of absolutes. Fake news, spin, disinformation, and hidden agendas flood the media and the internet. This is debilitating to rational thought. Falsity at all levels and from all sources including the church is very traumatic.
- Intentional division based on race, moral convictions, economics, political philosophy, education, or national interests. Everything and everyone are playing us against all the others, divide and conquer.
However, we are called to and dependent upon critical thinking. As Kingdom participants we are to know, beyond a shadow of doubt that:
- A false father deflects us from our real Father robbing us of our identity. It is He who has known us and cares for us with unchanging, unmitigated Agape. Knowing Him is life’s goal. Fatherhood cannot be displaced or replaced!
- “Truth” is not a set of distorted or corrupted facts; it is reality embodied in the Person–Jesus Christ. Ultimate reality cannot be discovered by human reason alone. It must be found in relationship. Christ is the Living Mind who through the Spirit of Truth (Reality) takes us to the Father. This Truth has been tried and tested through all human history. We can build our lives on it.
- A Father thinks God has made of “one blood” all the nations to dwell on this earth (Acts 17:26). We may have not have fully embraced or applied this; however, it remains foundational. Compassionate family is the basis of God’s government for the inhabited earth.
Please consider this diagram that has caused me much distress and consternation. Within our context, I can say it is now demanding from me critical thinking! It looks like this:
A myopic and ill-considered preoccupation on “revival,” misses the fact that revivals come and go, yet our communities continue downward toward political confusion and social death. The euphoria and personal renewal of revival most often conceals the awkward fact that revivals fail or refuse to present the true reality of the Kingdom offer: “Take my Yoke, Learn of Me” (Matthew11:28-30). His yoke requires us to apply critical thinking to effect lasting freedom from the three forms of corruption we have sought to identify. Oh, the heart-cry, for a more Kingdom emphasis.
Freedom must be central to our future. The Kingdom offers freedom, but freedom without human responsibility is anarchy. Lifechangers, as you know, seeks to identify, and apply the Kingdom value system as containing, correcting, and amplifying God’s will being done on the earth as it is in Heaven.
Would you consider, at my personal request, becoming more involved with us in Lifechangers? We continue to commit to the Agape of Christ being absolute in the earth as we co-labor with you to change how God as Father is known and represented to all creation.
As critical thinkers, let’s finish this year in hope and purpose, entering 2022 with an expanding Kingdom vision: The kingdoms of this world are becoming the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ! (Revelation 11:15).
In His Agape,
Bob Mumford