“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” —Psalm 11:3

After 34 years of pastoral ministry, building three places of worship and watching thousands of people accept Christ as personal Savior, the present state of our nation has led me to ask, “What can the righteous do (those who follow God’s law)? This question has become personal as I ask myself what can I do to help a sinful nation, my community, church and people return toward godly moral values. It appears living sinful has become the acceptable way of life for the majority of our nation. What can the righteous do when immorality has become a civil rights issue, when a nation whose foundations were built on the principles of the Holy Bible rejects its authority and refuses to be guided by the laws of nature and Scripture? If the foundations of society are overthrown, what can the righteous do? These foundations, in Psalm 11, refer to the Law and the order of society based on the Lord’s rule.

The Psalmist David is bewildered by the moral state of the people. He sees the movement of the ungodly and their effect on a society that he has been annointed to eventually rule over as king. “The Bible Knowledge Commentary” states: “The wicked were out to destroy the righteous, including David. The wicked bend their bows to fasten the strings on them, and then place their arrows on the strings to shoot in secrecy at the upright. It may be that a literal attack is in view, but more likely the bows and arrows denote slanderous words that destroy, as is often true in the Psalms.” Those who desire to live righteous lives face this exact intimidation today. The righteous should be encouraged to know the Christian is the enemy of intimidation, and we can say like David, “In the Lord I put my trust.”

In our postmodern era, when the righteous speak against the sinful ways of society they are called homophobic, hateful, bigots, etc. The power of words to change the tide of public opinion has never been more evident as it is in this era of American history. Anyone who maintains biblical principles is said to be on the wrong side of history by the proponents of our changing society. However, the question must be asked, “How can the Bible and a righteous God be on the wrong side of history?”

As preachers and laypersons of the gospel living in days when preaching against sin is unpopular, should we throw in the towel and say we can do nothing because the world is changing for the worse? Should an individual conclude: “I am only one voice when so many others are silent?”

Don’t allow the immorality of others keep you from worshiping and serving the Lord. “How can you say to my soul, ‘Flee as a bird to your mountain?’”

What can the righteous do? The righteous must remember to celebrate God for the foundations he has developed. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are times when the righteous can celebrate God’s original order for marriage, motherhood and fatherhood. The righteous can celebrate the sanctity of life by saying thanks to their parents for allowing them to be born and not aborted. Celebrate the traditional marriages of your parents and all marriages that procreate through becoming one flesh. Finally, celebrate the motherhood and fatherhood of parents who loved the institution of parenting enough to adopt children. Honor God for the foundations of life in spite of the ways of the ungodly.

Remember, just as David did, that God is in his temple—he lives in the heart of the Christian in the person of the Holy Spirit. God sees and knows all the works of mankind, and has the last word in respect to our eternal destination. The wicked will suffer for their works and the righteous will be blessed for their works. Please be encouraged to stay the course as you read and meditate on Psalm 11:

1 In the Lord I put my trust; How can you say to my soul, “Flee as a bird to your mountain”? 2 For look! The wicked bend their bow, They make ready their arrow on the string, That they may shoot secretly at the upright in heart. 3 If the foundations are destroyed, What can the righteous do? 4 The Lord is in His holy temple, The Lord’s throne is in heaven; His eyes behold, His eyelids test the sons of men. 5 The Lord tests the righteous, But the wicked and the one who loves violence His soul hates. 6 Upon the wicked He will rain coals; Fire and brimstone and a burning wind Shall be the portion of their cup. 7 For the Lord is righteous, He loves righteousness; His countenance beholds the upright.

In conclusion, allow me to share the parable of the wise and foolish builders as told by our Lord, the foundation of the Christian faith. Jesus ends his Sermon on the Plain with a story about two builders. One takes care to build a house with its foundation securely on a rock. The other builds without a foundation at all. When the flood comes, the house without a foundation collapses. Jesus says those who build their lives on His teaching will withstand the storms of life. “He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock. But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell. And the ruin of that house was great.” (Luke 6:48-49)

Lord Jesus, please forgive us of our sins. Touch the minds of our national leaders that they will honor the foundations that have made America a great society. Lord, write your word on their hearts and let them return to live by Scripture and serve you. Let lost sinners come to know you, that they may be reconciled to you, and converted. Give us boldness to face the issues of our day with you by our side. May we be witnesses to a lost world. Amen.

This week Pastor Saeed Abedini celebrated his 33^rd birthday from a prison cell deep in Iran, reportedly clinging to the promised hope from Romans 8 that persecution and death cannot separate a believer from God’s love.

Abedini, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen and Muslim-turned-Jesus follower, has been repeatedly beaten, tortured and just last month denied medical care, reportedly for internal injuries, for refusing to deny Christ. Arrested last September on one of his trips back to Iran, he’s faced death threats from authorities and recently from fellow prisoners, all while enduring separation from his wife and two sons in Idaho.

He’s not the first to suffer persecution of biblical proportions. According to the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, citing the International Journal of Missionary Research, 171,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2005 alone. How many do you know by name? I can’t name one.

Meanwhile, it seems persecution of the “soft” kind, as one website termed it, is on the rise domestically. Regularly, I get emails, fund-raising letters (often written in hyperbolic terms) and read news stories of a public school student or government employee denied his constitutional rights because some bumbling bureaucrat read a memo and got overzealous.

In most of these cases, someone forgot to tell them that the First Amendment also has something called the Free Exercise Clause.

We saw this type of politically correct overreaction in the Plano school district in the previous decade with confiscated candy cane pens and Christmas pencils, among other absurdities. There are a thousand other examples from coast to coast of such governmental clumsiness in the name of religious and ideological pluralism.

We are watching our own military to see what becomes of apparent tension over how “evangelism” is somehow distinguished from “proselytizing,” who can do either, when they can do it, how they can do it, etc.

When it comes to handling the religious aspects of the First Amendment, our government entities are the proverbial bull in the china closet, leaving a mess with the slightest provocation.

It’s maddening, head scratching. But is it persecution?

And if so, should I feel guilty for citing the candy cane pen case in the same breath as Pastor Saeed or the 171,000 aforementioned martyrs or the Sudanese Christians who were threatened of being “buried alive” by government interrogators?

Guilt is not needed here. Perspective is, though. Call it harassment. Call it pre-persecution or persecution light. It’s not always directed at Christians with malice, though it’s almost always Christians who are in the crosshairs.

Being perceived as the favored religion in a politically correct, hypersensitive climate has its drawbacks. More often than not, stupidity is the reason for First Amendment encroachments. But malice exists. And if history is an indicator, it could get more blatant.

A teacher asked to remove a Bible from her desk or a federal ruling that disallows religious symbolism at a war memorial is not exactly the same thing as what Saeed is going through.

On the other hand, the beneficiaries of American liberty live abroad as well. Human rights groups, missionary enterprises, and government diplomats exercise positive pressure around the world because human dignity and freedom of conscience are valued in America. We are still an exceptional influence, for now.

If we lose that distinctive, the world suffers. We are only a force for good abroad if we are a force for good at home also. This is the payoff when Christian lawyers go at it with government judges over constitutional encroachments of religious expression. The so-called first freedom undergirds all the others. Everyone, not just religious folks, benefits from this.

One definition of Christian persecution, from a missionary watchdog group called Release International, defines it as such: “A situation where Christians are repetitively, persistently and systematically inflicted with grave or serious suffering or harm and deprived of (or significantly threatened with deprival of) their basic human rights because of a difference that comes from being a Christian that the persecutor will not tolerate.”

Clearly, this definition has cases like Pastor Saeed’s in mind. And we’re not there just yet.

So let’s be measured in our talk about persecution, lest we find ourselves faced with public yawns when the fiery furnace really heats up. In the high-stakes contention for religious liberty, credibility is crucial.

I am many things—child of God, wife, mother, writer, and blogger. My role as a homemaker facilitates all of these priorities.

In fact, I come from a long line of homemakers. For generations, the women in my family have chosen to arrange their priorities around their families and their homes. It is a role of which I am very proud and grateful to those who preceded me for the sacrifice the homemaking priority required.

My great-grandmother’s introduction to homemaking began at the age of 9 when she willingly shouldered the responsibilities of caring for three siblings after the death of her mother. Standing as the true Proverbs 31 woman, my great-grandmother picked the cotton fields of Blossom, Texas, to buy a winter coat for her daughter. It was only after her daughter’s marriage that she took a dry cleaning job on Haskell Avenue in downtown Dallas.

My grandmother was a homemaker too. Before marrying, she worked in Dallas at the Murray Gin Company making bombs for World War II. When my mother entered college, my grandmother took a job outside the home, filling catalog orders for another Dallas-based company.

My mother graduated with a bachelor’s degree in library science at the height of the feminist movement in America. But when my oldest sister was born, Mom made the unpopular choice to quit her job as the general librarian at the Mesquite Public Library. At the time she earned more than my father, who was employed at a bank.

From our earliest memories, it is our mothers who teach us what ministry looks like—how to serve and orient our lives around others, and the painful sacrifices that are sometimes required.

Paul describes one ministry of motherhood in Titus 2:5 when he admonishes wives to be homemakers. Paul uses the Greek word oikourgos, which means “working at home” or “caring for the house.”

My own mother taught me what the ministry of working at home meant—cheerfully putting another’s interests before her own. Sadly, fewer mothers are passing along that generational vision to their daughters and those who do often pass down the logistics of home management without the keen eye for finding joy in everyday activities.

The late Edith Schaeffer believed homemaking was a hidden art—an art form that satisfied and fulfilled oneself and others. Facebook’s female Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg believes homemaking is drudgery. One woman saw the miraculous in the mundane, the other inequality in the minutia.

In her recent book “Lean-in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” Sandberg urges women to “lean-in” to their careers for the betterment of all women.

Like feminists before her, Sandberg believes homemaking lowers the “expectations of what women can achieve.” And by choosing to focus on their families, women are not “demonstrating courage to reach for more opportunities, sit at more tables, and believe more in themselves.”

Not surprisingly, modern homemakers are being relieved of their duty, the cost of which is revealed in the meaning of the word itself.

In the Byzantine text, Titus 2:5’s rendering of homemaker is oikouros from the root “keeping watch.” The Alexandrian/Western text uses the aforementioned form oikourgos (“home worker” or “caring for the house.”)

The main difference between these two words is the absence of a gamma (the letter g), a variance that Southeastern Seminary’s Maurice Robinson, senior professor of New Testament, said offers no real theological differences.

“…Even if some people might want to draw a fine line between ‘staying at home’ and ‘working at home’; I think both seem to indicate ‘managing the affairs of the home,’” said Robinson, a co-editor of the 2005 Byzantine Text, in an interview with the TEXAN.

Taken together, both oikouros and oikourgos demonstrate the importance of the homemaking task—one as an industrious worker, the other as a guardian. Neither nuance sounds inconsequential to me.

Last month, feminists around the world were sent aflutter when Susan Patton (a feminist pioneer at Princeton) advised female students at the historic institution to get married young.

Keli Goff, among other like-minded feminists, responded to Patton in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce.” It ran with the subtitle: “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a full-time mother, but you don’t need an elite degree to do it.” Goff points an angry finger at educated women who choose to stay at home, calling their degrees a “wasted opportunity.”

“That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree,” she writes.

If Goff had her way the “next frontier of the admissions should revolve around asking people to declare what they actually plan to do with their degrees.” Her suggested admissions policy would bar some women from higher education—an odd move considering women like Susan Patton fought hard for admission to Ivy League schools not too long ago.

My mother wasn’t educated at an Ivy League school, but she poured her education into mothering her daughters nonetheless.

Before the dawn of Pinterest, my mother created her own card catalog out of a shoebox. Inside were hundreds of hand-written index cards bearing a variety of children’s book titles, their Dewey decimal numbers, and book summaries—organized by book genre. The shoebox, which was pulled out every summer to formulate reading lists for my two sisters and me, became a running joke in our family. Today, however, it is a family heirloom.

That shoebox represents to me a mother who put her classical education to creative use by educating her children on worldviews, cultures, and great literature long before the classical model of education ever became popular.

For my mother it would have been absurd for her to set about “advancing the cause of women” without first advancing the cause of the women living under her own roof.

In fact, most feminists would be surprised to discover that my mother opted out of the professional life not once but twice in her lifetime. When I was in high school, my father was laid off after a company merger. Because of the commitment my parents made to honor God’s prescription for wives to “guard their homes,” my mother chose not to pursue full-time work.

When I think of this sacrifice, the implications of which were financially serious, I get a painful lump in my throat. At the risk of her reputation as a “sensible” woman, she chose to cling fiercely to God’s promise of provision for our family.

While researching this piece, I asked my mother if she encountered any pushback over her decision to stay at home while my father looked for a new job. Yes, she said, but only from people in the church.

It is a sad day indeed when our nation’s guardians are being pushed from their watch posts on a regular basis. But it’s a catastrophic event when the family of God tears down those remaining women who are brave enough to run counter to the world for the sake of their families. There are, after all, very few left.

I pray that our churches find intentional ways to build up all mothers who are making tough sacrifices for their children—whether it’s the stay-at-home mom who puts her career on hold or the single/divorced mother who sacrifices luxuries the modern world declares as must-haves.

My great-grandmother was one such woman. When she found herself divorced at the end of the Great Depression, she made ends meet by watching children after school as well as keeping house and cooking for a family friend. My pride in my homemaking heritage is derived in part from my great-grandmother’s heroic response to difficult circumstances, but it also stems from the gracious posture she took against those who looked down their noses at her during a time when divorce carried a terrible stigma—inside the church and out.

When I see my great-grandmother, I do not see a woman who viewed her life situation as drudgery from which she needed emancipation. I see a woman who resolutely set her face toward the future by giving her heart to fully minister to loved ones in the present.

Last week my great-grandmother would have been 114 years old. Since her death, she has passed her post of “home guardian” to many mothers in my family. And while I often struggle to keep in step with her sacrificial spirit, I am forever grateful for the trenches she dug in preparation for my service.