Michael Youssef - Hope for This Present Crisis

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HOPE FOR THIS PRESENT CRISIS by Michael Youssef

Published by FrontLine

Charisma Media/Charisma House Book Group

600 Rinehart Road, Lake Mary, Florida 32746

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwisewithout prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Copyright 2021 by Michael Youssef

All rights reserved

Visit the authors website at ltw.org, www.thispresentcrisis.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-62999-864-0

E-book ISBN: 978-1-62999-865-7

To all the faithful pastors, teachers, and preachers who proclaim the truth of the Word of God without compromise

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.

THE PRESENT CRISIS,

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1845

I HAVE BEEN WRITING this book during a time of global crisisor rather, multiple global crises. There was a crisis known as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which triggered another global crisis, the worldwide economic shutdown. Amid these crises, civil unrest erupted across America, with protesters and rioters setting fires, looting shops, and tearing down statues and monuments from Seattle and Los Angeles to New York and Atlanta.

But none of these crises are the present crisis that Ive written about in this book. Theres an even greater crisis that confronts our civilization today, and this book is a warning of the destruction that is yet to come upon our land if we do not act now in obedience to Gods Word.

Even though this book is not about the pandemic, the coronavirus crisis is a sobering reminder that our government, military might, economic power, and technological wizardry are all amazingly vulnerable to a submicroscopic organism. It is a virus so small it can only be seen with an electron microscope. Yet this invisible threat has shaken the foundations of human society and brought mighty corporations and governments to their knees.

But our God is sovereign and in control of world events. This virus did not take Him by surprise. God is not wringing His hands and saying, What should I do? He controls every breath we take. He controls every beat of our hearts. He is in control of our lives from birth to death. A crisis should not signal Christians to panic; it should ignite our faith and increase our obedience. We must not let our hearts be troubled.

I hope and pray that by the time you read these words, the pandemic will be history, the civil unrest will subside, the economy will stabilize, and your life will return to normal. But even when these tumultuous times have passed, we must never forget that an even more dangerous crisis still confronts us. Like the COVID-19 virus, this present crisis is spreading invisibly throughout our society. It affects every one of us, though most of us are completely unaware of it.

A crisis should not signal Christians to panic; it should ignite our faith and increase our obedience.

Simply put, this present crisis is the decline of the influence of the Christian church. All across America and Europe, churches are emptying, and an entire generation is turning away from God. People today have many godsmoney, pleasure, politics, the environmentbut they no longer acknowledge the God of the Bible. The devaluing of the family and human life has led to countless abortions, fewer marriages, and more empty cradles. Social scientists who once warned of a population explosion now warn of a population implosion, as birth rates are declining disastrously in Western nations.

The traditional values and social bonds that once held our society together are disintegrating, along with traditional Christian-based morality. Addiction, suicide, and crime are epidemic in Western society. The internet and social media, once thought to be bringing the world together, have unleashed humanitys most hateful, sinful urges, dividing people into warring tribes. This is our present crisisnot an external threat from terrorists or warlike nations or a viral pandemic, but a decline of faith, truth, and morality. It is hollowing out our society from within.

We in the West have assumed that our democratic institutions, culture, and way of life would go on forever. We expected our economy to always be strong, our military to remain invulnerable, and our traditions to endure. But empires and civilizations have collapsed again and again in the past. As former US Comptroller General David M. Walker warns, Western society today shows signs of imminent collapse.

Many of us think that a superpowerful, prosperous nation like America will be a permanent fixture dominating the world scene. We are too big to fail. But you dont have to delve far into the history books to see what has happened to other once-dominant powers.... Great powers rise and fall.... America presents unsettling parallels with the disintegration of Romea decline of moral values, a loss of political civility, an overextended military, an inability to control national borders, and the growth of fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. Do these sound familiar?

Historian Niall Ferguson suggests that when an empire falls, its demise comes swiftly, often violently, and almost always without warning: Empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.

I have had many conversations with Muslim thinkers, and they believe the fall of the West is already well underwaya result of the decline of Christianity. They tell me that, as Christianity disintegrates, it is leaving a spiritual vacuum in the West. Their extreme form of Islam is already rushing in to fill that void. They predict that Western civilization will, like Rome, continue its steady, gradual decline until it reaches a tipping point of sudden, catastrophic downfall.

One Muslim scholar told me, Islam spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa by the sword. But Western culture will be handed to us on a platter. The people of the West are led about by their feelings and sentimentality. Their passions rule them. Soft and undisciplined, they are no match for the determined soldiers of Islam. The West will fall into our hands like overripe fruit.

Is there no hope? Are our children and grandchildren condemned to watch our civilization collapse around their ears?

No; there is hope. As the late social critic Charles Krauthammer once observed, The assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.