“Our government has now sent over £2.3 billion to prolong a war 1500 miles away while our pensioners face freezing to death this winter, 75% of pubs face closure and half the country faces entering fuel poverty.”
Paul Joseph Watson
Ukraine
The failure of lockdowns
Rishi is now ‘dishing the dirt’ on the calamity of lockdowns. It appears that the tide might turn and the truth start to seep out regarding the disastrous government lockdown policy as well as the coercion and manipulation that facilitated it.
“In the case of Omicron, if that very different perspective was right, then every single one of the 12 Sage scenarios provided to ministers was a vast exaggeration and Britain would be locked down needlessly.”
The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren’t told
This same government that orchestrated ‘lockdown’ is currently overseeing the meteoric rise in energy prices that are going to cripple millions of UK households this winter. This morning OFGEM announced a rise in the ‘price cap’ to £3549 (that’s around an 80% increase) that will directly affect households on variable rates.
These prices are in a country that gets over half its gas from the North Sea and hardly any (~4%) from Russia.
Whilst we look the other way…
“They may have stopped talking about Covid for now, but they got a good chunk of what they wanted out of it. And if they don’t get the rest of what they want out of the war in Ukraine, they’ll just bring Covid back.”
Kit Knightly, writing in Off Guardian
The ‘news’
“The news used to tell you that something happened, then you had to decide what you thought about it. Now the news tells you how to think about something, and you have to decide if it even happened.”
This well known quote is so apt for the world we now live in. Please don’t allow yourself to be solely informed about world events from MSM (Main Stream Media) as you will be misinformed if you do. MSM includes (but not limited to) BBC, Daily Mail, Sky, Channel 4, ITV, Guardian, Telegraph et al. Sadly, in war (whether that is physical conflict or ideological) truth is always the first casualty.
Be a Critical Thinker.
The virtue signalling church
The last two years have been an eye opener in many ways. One such way has been how much of the church has morphed into a virtue signalling entity. A definition of virtue signalling is “the popular modern habit of indicating that one has virtue merely by expressing disgust or favour for certain political ideas or cultural happenings.”
The Covid pandemic was an opportunity for the church to point people to the good news of Jesus Christ and whilst a few did do this very well, the majority of churches in the UK went along with the cultural narrative and largely missed this opportunity. From closing our doors all too easily, to not singing, to fastidious mask wearing, we unwittingly turned our churches into echo chambers for government health policy.
We complied at every turn.
We went to great lengths to indicate we were doing the ‘right thing’. For example, ensuring hand sanitizer was visible on the Sunday morning live stream or not shaking someone’s hand when welcoming them into membership. It all got a bit silly.
Now that COVID 19 has been replaced (literally overnight) by the conflict in Ukraine, we see the church falling again into the same virtue signalling trap. It seems we have this desire for solidarity with the world that lacks any kind of Biblical basis. An example of this is a message that recently did the rounds on Facebook and WhatsApp which said:
🇺🇦UKRAINE, Tonight at 7 p.m. the church bells will ring.🔔🔔🔔
Switch off the lights in your houses for the time being
Showing Putin that we’d rather sit in the dark 🌚 than buy his gas 💨 and oil.
This is an action that takes place across Europe🇪🇺 and at the same time in London (7 p.m.), Central Europe (8 p.m.), Kyiv (9 p.m.) and Moscow (10 p.m.).
Please forward this message.📧
This type of message sadly displays a level of naivety regarding world events with a substance little more than sentimentality. For churches to involve themselves in this type of thing is to devalue the gospel.
It’s this same sentimentality that propelled people to their doorsteps in early 2020 to ‘clap for carers’ in a bizarre display of virtue signalling that was meaningless.
Remember how quickly we moved from clapping to sacking.
The point is, the more the church falls into the virtue signalling trap, the less like the real church we look. Jesus modeled and the Bible clearly states that we are to be counter cultural, to live as aliens and strangers in this world, as we hold out this amazing hope in Jesus that the world needs to hear.
The truth is, our message is not the worlds message. We are tasked with pointing people to the cross and to eternity. So why has much of the church tried so hard to look like the world?
The solution, I believe, is to first of all pause and weigh up what we are told by the mainstream media in order to avoid being carried along with the narrative. We only have to look back over these last two years to understand how much we have been manipulated and how the truth has been suppressed. We then need to remind ourselves of our core mission given to us by Jesus in Matthew 28 and not let ourselves become sidetracked. By encouraging one another to view events through a Biblical worldview is what will enable us to consider what God would have us do in a Gospel focused response.
As the church, we have to regain our ability to think critically about what’s happening in the world. We cannot afford to get caught up in the virtue signalling narrative any longer. We have a much more important message to bring and we owe it to those around us to give this message our full attention.
This is how the West ends
With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights. So let’s resume our series of tweets to mark #LGBTHM2022
— Richard Moore (@ChiefMI6) February 25, 2022
This ‘tweet’ is from the Chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). It’s an insight into how the West has destroyed itself from the inside due to insidious ideologies that dismantle families and the social fabric. It will destroy what’s left of Ukraine as well, if it’s allowed to.