Meanwhile, the church is so concerned not to offend people and so eager to grow that the harder truths about God’s holiness, justice and power are buried under marketing campaigns, felt-needs-oriented messages and general bland banality. Our pulpits no longer thunder. In fact, we prefer not to have pulpits at all, just hipster pastors who give “talks” to help people feel better about themselves and live well-adjusted lives.

We live in the Atlanta area, where we are still recovering from “Snow-pocalypse 2014” – thousands of abandoned cars, hundreds of car accidents, students stuck on school buses for over 12 hours, people walking miles home after spending more than 8-10 hours in traffic going nowhere – all caused by 2 inches of snow.

We live such comfortable lives, seemingly immune to the powers and terrors of “Mother Nature,” as our culture likes to label impressive weather events. It has been shocking to see a modern metropolitan area of 6.5 million people absolutely thrown into chaos and paralysis by 2 inches of snow. People have been scrambling for explanations and looking for someone to blame. None of the roads in the Metro Atlanta area were pre-treated with salt, something my northern family and friends just can’t understand and have never experienced. We sat on our school’s campus Tuesday afternoon as both exits became blocked with motionless traffic and abandoned cars.

As believers, we know this was not an act of “Mother Nature,” but an impressive and yet very minuscule display of God’s almighty power. As our culture grows increasingly insane in its mockery of God and His moral standards, we all need to be reminded that we are absolutely powerless when God decides to act. It takes very little effort from God to completely thwart and frustrate all of our plans.

I tremble when I reflect on the reality of God’s unopposable power and our culture’s moral insanity:

• The Grammys mock God and “celebrate” gay “marriages” while Katy Perry – preacher’s daughter and former Christian singer – engages in occult acts to the adulation of millions.
• The Denver County Fair has added marijuana to its celebration of agriculture and tens of thousands of people gather in parks in Denver and Seattle to smoke pot and create clouds visible from space.
• While millions of babies are slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs, our president defends it as “reproductive health.”

Meanwhile, the church is so concerned not to offend people and so eager to grow that the harder truths about God’s holiness, justice and power are buried under marketing campaigns, felt-needs-oriented messages and general bland banality. Our pulpits no longer thunder. In fact, we prefer not to have pulpits at all, just hipster pastors who give “talks” to help people feel better about themselves and live well-adjusted lives.

When we reflect on the reality that God can paralyze a metropolitan area with 2 inches of snow and that He is holy, holy, holy and never changes, such reality calls for only one response: We need to wake up and repent and we need to proclaim the truth to our neighbors, even if they don’t want to hear it.

I am reminded of Ezekiel 33, a word that seems in due season today:

The word of the Lord came to me:

“Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. 

But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand. – Ezekiel 33:1-6, ESV

Pastors: Be watchmen! You are not called to be cool, hip, relevant, trendy, popular or to make people feel good. You are called to be faithful!

Jason A. Van Bemmel is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. This article appeared on his blog Ponderings of a Pilgrim Pastor and is used with permission.