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Yes, today in my personal quiet time I was reviewing Romans 13. For many Americans, this topic has been mostly just intellectual exercise heretofore, I think. The prosperity gospel and its proponents are to be ignored and avoided at all costs, for they have weakened and pampered those it seeks to deceive. Better that God himself speaks to and nudges those he wishes to call to special prayer and fasting. Then it’s not an orchestrated event, but a God-inspired sacrifice. I’m sick to death of religious programs and schemes. Would love to see God’s spirit unleashed.

I have had the opportunity of studying church history under some excellent professors, and I still marvel at the different spirit between early Christianity and what passes for American Christianity. In the early church, people expected to suffer for following Christ. Today, people become Christians to escape from suffering. Christ's command to take up our cross of self-denial and follow Him is as foreign to American Christianity as a rainbow is to a blind person. If people were told today that if they became a Christian that you and your whole family would be tortured and killed, I suspect that there would far fewer people in the pews on Sunday.