Morning prayer:<\/p>\n
Teach us to proclaim with our lives : that we have no God but you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
—<\/p>\n
Athenagoras said of the early church, \u201cThey charge us on two points: that we do not sacrifice and that we do not believe in the same gods as the State.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s fascinating that the early church was not persecuted because the followed The Way, which some viewed as a cult (Acts 24:14), but because they chose not to worship and pledge allegiance to Caesar and the empire.<\/p>\n
After all, Rome was a very pluralistic and religious society (Acts 17) – as long as you recognized Caesar as Lord and the greatness of the empire.<\/p>\n
Rather than say “Caesar is Lord” or “Caesar is the Son of God” or “Caesar will save us” – the early Christians had the audacity to say “Jesus is Lord” and “Jesus is the Son of God” and “Jesus will save us.”<\/p>\n
Rather than say “Caesar will make Rome great”, they led a counter cultural revolution of loving neighbors and living lives that proclaimed Jesus will make the world great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Morning prayer: Teach us to proclaim with our lives : that we have no God but you. — Athenagoras said of the early church, \u201cThey charge us on two points: that we do not sacrifice and that we do not believe in the same gods as the State.\u201d It’s fascinating that the early church was … Continue reading Morning prayer: proclaim with our lives<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-3Fj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}