In that election, Theodore Roosevelt ran against his former friend William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination. When the Taft machine squeezed him out, Roosevelt and his people went the third-party route with the Bull Moose Party. Because of the split vote, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected. What I find of particular interest is that Alice Longworth seems to have no acquaintance with the issues of the election. One thing and one thing only mattered to her: her father. He was the truth. Whatever he did, she was for. And when he switched to the third party, she was all-in for him.
We will not begrudge this daughter the right to support and believe in her father. But she stands as a representative of countless others who support a candidate for reasons other than right or wrong. They like this one’s personality, they dislike the opponent, they identify with this position, they do not the other.
Their “convictions” look an awful lot like prejudice. No amount of reasoning could budge this young woman’s support of her father, no matter what he had done or how excellent were the opponents.
Christians, of course, were not called to spread their convictions, but the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are to “preach the Word,” not our personal set of doctrines.
Consider what Saul of Tarsus was doing. He was arresting Christ-followers and dealing with them harshly. And he was doing it out of strong convictions. No weak, mild-mannered rabbi was he. And then, outside Damascus the Holy Spirit humbled him and showed him he was in seriously error. “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting,” came the voice from Heaven (Acts 9:5).
Paul answered with the most honest and desirable of all responses when shown by the Holy Spirit that one has been in error: “What would you have me to do?” (Acts 22:10).
“Lord, what will You have me to do?”
When we pray that little prayer, we lock ourselves into certain obligations:
–We must be willing to do His will. Otherwise, asking for His will is pointless.
–We must be willing to wait for His will.
–We must be quiet until we know His will. And that may be the hardest part of all for some. Imagine some friend demanding to know whom we’re going to vote for, and we answer, “I’m waiting to hear from the Lord.” In most cases, the response would be unkind and harsh, I fear.
The question we have not considered
Someone will want to know why we address only conservative believers here and not liberals? “Don’t liberals need to change also? Even more than the rest of us?”
My answer is this. The positions which we think of as liberal on these moral/political issues—abortion, federal funding of abortion, political correctness in the public arena, Scripture being outlawed in more and more public places, etc.—can easily be shown to be false, unbiblical and unworthy. And yet those of the liberal persuasion seem undeterred.
In my experience, the liberal has little desire to find God’s will, but equates His will with their own. That’s my observation and the reader is free to disagree.
Liberals take their Scripture casually in my observation. When they find a passage that does not jive with their set of personal convictions, they quickly go past it in search of something that lines up with their point of view.
The conservative, Bible-believing follower of Jesus Christ has a hunger to know God’s will and to do it. And he/she is always subjecting their actions and thoughts to scrutiny by the Spirit in order to more perfectly line up with the will of God.
That’s why the question before us is redundant. If one is sincerely a follower of Jesus Christ, he is forever changing and growing and adapting. He is frequently “leaving those things which are behind” in order to “press forward.”
This article originally appeared here.
