Day 60  

^“Be constantly alert, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God. ³ So remember what you have received and heard; and keep it, and repent. Then if you are not alert, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come to you.” Rev 3:2-3 NASB. 

For Christians, staying awake spiritually is the hardest when the world around you is asleep. Soon after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, 7000 of the 18,000 Lutheran pastors opposed the “Aryan clause” that forbade Christians of Jewish descent from working for the church. In protest, these pastors broke away from the state church and formed the Confessing Church. 

One of these pastors, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, protested by leaving a prestigious teaching post at the University of Berlin and moving to London. At the request of the Confessing Church, he courageously returned to Germany in 1935 to lead a Confessing seminary for young ministers. He was only 29 years old at the time himself. By 1936 he was banned from further lecturing at the University of Berlin and the seminary went more and more “underground.” 

Hitler turned his charm on the Confessing Church. He allowed them to keep some of their distinctives. He offered them legitimacy in exchange for overall support of his plans for the country (at least the ones he was willing to share at that time). 

Bonhoeffer fought this compromise, believing that good and evil could not live together. His position became more and more isolated as the Confessing Church felt that its precarious situation required limited co-operation with the state. Bonhoeffer claimed that “The failure of German Christians to resist the Nazi rise to power stemmed from their lack of moral clarity.” 

In 1939 he accepted a lecture tour in the United States. While there, American theologians pressed him to stay in America and continue his work of protest in safety. But his conscience did not allow him to choose a life of relative ease. When it became clear that war was about to break out, he took one of the last ships to leave for Germany. After several years of harassment from the Gestapo, he was arrested. On April 9, 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, he paid the ultimate penalty for his resistance at a concentration camp called Flossenbürg. 

Whether we seek to convert the lost or fight for social justice, it is easy to grow weary in well-doing and follow the crowd as Sardis did. This is particularly true when the church itself has become part of the crowd. The only people who can stand at such times are those whose moral compass is not based on reason or conscience alone but on the clear teachings of God’s Word.