I get an e-mail sent to me everyday called the "Catch of the Day". I usually delete it, unless I have a few extra minutes or the title "reels" me in.....no pun intended.

Today I found what I read very interesting and refreshing, especially in light of all that has been going on lately with the election. 

Wrong ideas about Christians 

by John Fischer 
Thanks to Marc Drayer for this quote from one of my favorite writers, Dorothy Sayers (1893-1967), who has written on education, women, and Christianity, not to speak of her smashingly famous English mystery novels starring the aristocratic amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. 

"It is more startling to discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and despise Christianity without having the faintest notion of what it is. If you tell them, they cannot believe you. I do not mean that they cannot believe the doctrine; that would be understandable enough since it takes some believing. I mean they simply cannot believe that anything so interesting, so exciting and so dramatic can be the orthodox creed of the Church." ["The Dogma is the Drama," from Letters to a Diminished Church, by Dorothy Sayers.] 

In that the life and work of Dorothy Sayers spanned the first half of the 20th century, it tells you this thing about people rejecting Christianity for all the wrong reasons certainly isn't new. It could be that Satan knows he can keep people from hearing the good news of the gospel by sidetracking Christians into all kinds of diversions that then become how the world defines us. If so, it appears that it is an old trick of his. 

For years it was all the things we didn't do that had the world believing that a Christian was basically a killjoy. Then Satan got us fighting with each other over doctrine and the world got the idea that a Christian was a nitpicker. Then he got us looking for Satan everywhere (that's right, he diverted us with himself) and we boycotted Halloween and skewered Harry Potter, which caused the world to assume we were freaked out on fear. Then we got into politics and they thought Christians were all conservative Republicans trying to take over the country. 

See how valuable all these diversions are to forming the wrong idea about what a Christian is? The enemy will get people to believe anything about Christians but the truth, and the problem is, we cooperate too much by not staying focused on who we really are, merely sinners saved by grace. 

It's a diabolical strategy to keep the world sidetracked into thinking that Christianity isn't what it is, because what it is is simply too good to be true, and the story of how we came to be saved sinners is still the greatest story ever told. 

I pray that Christians would rise up during this time and not fall into these traps, but be lights and beautiful reflectors of Jesus Christ.