Dr. Erwin Lutzer, senior pastor emeritus of The Moody Church in Chicago, was the keynote speaker at IFI’s 2021 annual banquet. Dr. Lutzer, a stalwart defender of biblical values and an outspoken champion of pro-life and pro-family causes, is the author of several award-winning books, including The Church in Babylon, When a Nation Forgets God, and Hitler’s Cross.
Dr. Lutzer’s address, titled “We Will Not Bow,” is a play on the title of his recent book We Will Not Remain Silent. Lutzer began his address with a story from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: after a Soviet state function, the audience began to applaud Stalin, continuing for over eleven minutes—they all knew that the first to stop applauding would be arrested and executed. As Solzhenitsyn recognized, freedom is lost when the will to dissent is quenched. Just as it was in Solzhenitsyn’s Russia, the American people now find themselves faced with the same question: will we courageously defy the ideologues of our age? Or will we simply keep clapping along?
Lutzer brought this point home with a familiar story from the book of Daniel: Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had the same choice to make. Would they bow to the idolatrous image of Nebuchadnezzar? These three Jews were captive in a foreign land with pagans worshiping false gods, yet they refused to bow; they refused to surrender, even under the threat of death. In our day, as Lutzer noted in his address, persecution of Christians—whether through marginalization, deplatforming, loss of employment, or lawsuits—will continue to get worse. We have no reason to assume that we will retain the freedoms we have grown accustomed to. Regardless, just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we must have absolute confidence in the power of our God to deliver us. And even if He does not deliver us, He is with us always, even unto the end of the age (Matt. 28:20). May God grant us the courage to risk everything in the face of persecution. As Lutzer puts it, “it is not necessary to win in this life to win in the life to come.”
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Every dollar donated to IFI in the month of December will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to $130,000.
