Let God Arise!

22

LET GOD AR I SE!

continue to swell from immigrant populations and mind-numbing ethnic and racial diversity. Perhaps the greatest liability of all, America’s inner cities suffer from discouragement and nihilistic despair; everyone seems to live in fear and dread, with a keen sense of hopelessness. Tragically, you can even find Scripture-quoting Christians prophesying alongside the chorus of liberal and conservative nay-sayers who lament the tragedy and demise of the city. Some missiologists suggest that America is already won, and that ethnic and urban churches can finish the job in America’s inner cities. Others even doubt whether the city is worth winning, giving a kind of grotesque judgment that those who suffer there are merely reaping what they deliberately have sown. In the face of such physical poverty, broken families, sub-par schools, inferior social services, and general spiritual darkness, most expect little from the city. Their words and demeanor give their deepest beliefs away: they truly wonder if anything good can really come out of our inner cities, arguably our 21st-century Nazareths. Despite such low levels of belief, I am convinced that the biblical record is correct when it asserts that nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1.37). Nothing is too hard for God (Jer. 32.26), and he through his power