When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” And he said, “No; but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come.”

Reflections on how to think about the wars, conflicts, and battles taking place:

I don’t know about you, but I am the sort of guy who loses sleep over certain things, and gets all rather worked up within. Many things can cause me angst, but one area especially involves the various conflicts and battles raging around the world, and the opinions of some folks on these things.

I find some people – even those calling themselves Christians and conservatives – saying quite silly, bizarre, irrational and frankly non-Christian things about some of these matters. In my view at least, they exhibit a deficiency in some basic mental and moral clarity.

They have taken sides on various matters that I find to be repugnant. Anyone reading my articles, or seeing my social media posts, will know about some of the things that I am referring to here. But I do not want to cover all that ground again.

I just want to give a few brief words of advice – primarily to myself at least. But these words might be of some use to you as well. First, it is a good thing to care about what is going on in our world. Being apathetic and indifferent helps no one. Indeed, it just makes matters worse.

Whether believers do not give a rip about the state of the church, the culture wars, or international conflicts, that is something we must repent of. We really need to care about what God cares about. We need to let God break our hearts over what breaks his heart.

But second, we of course are commanded to cast all our cares upon him, because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). We are not to even try to bear all these burdens – we must give them back to God. And we need to be humble enough and realistic enough to know that we cannot save the whole world. Only God can do that.

Sometimes we get so worked up about the issues of the day, and get so weighed down by them, that we can be crushed with the burdens that we are not called to carry. Yes, we must be concerned, and yes, we must ask God what it is that we can do.

But we cannot do everything – we can only do some things. Two famous quotes and a story bear this out:

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” C. S. Lewis

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” Mother Teresa

The story is this:

A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement. She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!” The girl seemed crushed, suddenly deflated. But after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied, “Well, I made a difference to that one!”

There is a lot of wisdom there. I cannot save Australia or even Melbourne. But I do have a sphere of influence that no one else has, be it my own family, my own neighbours, my own classmates or workmates, and so on. Some of those people I can reach.

Third, in some of these political battles, Christians can and will differ. On some issues I think the right things are pretty clear cut. For example, believers SHOULD support parties, policies and politicians who care about the sanctity of life and the importance of marriage and family. For example, I find it hard to see how Christians could support the Democrats in the US just on these two matters alone.

Fourth, and related to this, I recently had a great Christian friend contact me, feeling discouraged and the like. I replied in part this way: ‘I too can get discouraged here, but I guess I am learning that if I only have a tiny audience and only have a small impact, but if God is behind it, I better keep doing it then! 

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