Roberto Miranda : Liberty Sunday Presentation October 15, 2006

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen please welcome senior pastor of Lion of Judah church in Boston, Massachusetts, Dr Roberto Miranda.

Thank you. You may be seated. Good evening, like the Parkers I also have been mobilized and radicalized in a sense, by an issue that I did not seek but that was forced upon me.

We have gathered here tonight indeed to sound an alarm, because we are all aware that there is a crisis unfolding in America regarding the issue of same sex marriage and that a particular resolve, an uncompromising stance is required of the church of this time.

In times of crisis when the truth of scripture and the interests of God’s kingdom are threatened, God’s people must assume a stance of clarity and boldness that perhaps in more peaceful times would not be necessary.

We all praise the spirit of Esther, who boldly intervened in a moment of great crisis for the people of Israel and yet scripture tells us that her involvement required breaking the law, confronting the king, denouncing the actions of a major national leader and initiating with the ultimate permission of the king a violent confrontation between the Jews and those who wanted to exterminate them.

Now, we are not recommending actively any of these actions, of course, but my point is that there are times in the history of the struggle between truth and falsehood, that boldness and a willingness to engage in controversial action, are absolutely indispensable.

In the struggle to protect America’s religious rights and to uphold the Christian foundation that has made this country great, the church must assume the decisiveness of such biblical characters as Esther and Deborah, and of such historical Christians as Martin Luther, William Wilberforce and our own Martin Luther King Jr. More than ever Christians in America must renounce the spirit of timidity and false grace and embrace our prophetic call. Certainly, the homosexual movement in this country does not suffer from self doubt, timidity or lack of organizational capacity.

Many sincere, gentle believers in this nation refuse to embrace a posture that they perceive as needlessly confrontational and alienating. But they neglect to acknowledge that homosexuality is a powerful, aggressive, social and political movement animated by a reformist agenda, seeking to conform society to its own image and likeness and to align the cultural, legal, political and moral system of this nation with the postulates of its foundational world view.

The legal and moral space that we all inhabit is not endlessly elastic and expandable, and sooner or later the ambitious expansion of what a particular social group sees as its legitimate social domain will begin inevitably to impinge on and reduce the space occupied by other groups, such as the church.

The homosexual movement is propelled by a powerful, aggressive instinct. The legitimacy and privileges it craves will not come without great cost to the moral and social system within which it seeks insert itself. Like a rogue foreign cell inside an organism it will continue to replicate itself and eventually wreck havoc within its overall structure.

We can only sustain the passive, falsely gracious attitude being recommended these days by certain sectors of the church at our own peril, as an aggressive, imperialistic, gay culture takes advantage of our hamlet-like vacillations and efficiently entrenches itself in the strategic realms of politics, psychology, education, the arts, entertainment and the social sciences.

God is calling his church at this time to a spirit of boldness and clarity. The whole gospel must be proclaimed soberly and without apology. Grace, frailty, transparency, yes, they must permeate our declarations and our methodology, but God’s unswerving commitment to holiness and repentance must not be compromised.

Our desire to be winsome and gracious must never compete with our duty to speak the whole truth, both to each other as well to unbelievers. The marketing techniques of today’s political climate must be sacrificed at the altar of the child-like honesty that befits obedient disciples of Jesus Christ.

God’s admonition to Ezekiel calling him to faithful proclamation of his complete balanced message, must never be far from our mind: “Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel, so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me.”

A powerful move of the spirit is on the way in this country. The winds of revival are beginning to blow all over this nation. I firmly believe that the greatest harvest of souls that America has ever seen, still awaits us. Amen.

Now, God expects us to gird our loins, so to speak, and to align ourselves with his eternal word, his sovereign methodology and his irresistible purposes. In this critical hour he expects us to pray and fast more, to repent and confess more, to become more bold and united in announcing the truth to the culture in a spirit of meekness and transparency.

I do pray that as evangelicals we will rightly discern the times, and that rather than limping away into timidity and irrelevance with respect to secular culture, rather than bowing down to its demands that we consign the gospel to the ghostly realm of private belief and cultural accommodation, we will renew our vow to stand firm on what we believe, and in the words of the Apostle Paul “to boldly contend for the faith once given to the saints”.

Nothing less than the healing of an entire generation and perhaps the health of the evangelical soul hang in the balance. God bless you.

Announcer: Thank you Dr Miranda, I appreciate your boldness and your courage, your stand here in Boston.