Mario Murillo: How Evil Can Politicize Tragedy

America should wrap her collective arms around those suffering families in Buffalo, New York. We should be grieving with them, helping them, comforting them and loving frightened children. Instead, they will be used. They will be dehumanized in a system that only wants to pretend to have compassion. It is the way we are now in America.

Loving and healing is what we would do if we were not so bitterly divided. We used to be that way, but that America is gone.

Every once in a while, a preacher should point out national sin. They should do it in a way that is fair and that transcends party affiliation. They should even risk alienating their own base. I shall try.

Mark my word — you can tell the degree of evil in a politician by how quickly consoling turns into propaganda. How quickly does this evil become a booster rocket for a pet bill in Congress? At what speed do they move to condemn a vast group of people who had nothing to do with this? How quickly do they ask for funds to supposedly fix this problem? And finally, do they provoke anger and violence instead of healing?

But the larger question is directed at these evildoers themselves: Do you even want a cure, since your grip on tyranny and your prosperity is based on keeping people angry, divided and afraid?

Will this tragedy change anyone’s mind in America? Without a miracle it will not. All this will do is harden preexisting opinions. Most will plug their ears and dig in their heels. We are now a nation of paramedics who are too busy arguing about how to treat the patient to close the wound.

In the past we would listen to the wisest, not the loudest. Wise leaders who disagreed could sit together and see the big picture and not the narrow grievance. It is how we won two World Wars. It is how we crawled out of the Great Depression.

It is how we healed after the Civil War.

It is a happy day when none of the politicians get what they want but Americans get what they need.

It will take the radical middle to save America — people who are fed up with both extremes and only care about doing what will work. It will take people, who may disagree, to sit down together because they realize that their differences don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the common threat.

We need to demonstrate unconditional love in Buffalo, New York.

1 Corinthians 13:4-5 (NKJV): “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil.”

What do we need the most? We need to pray and preach the gospel. The enemy of our soul loves to tell us that people are not open. In this time of despair and turmoil, souls are starved for the gospel. In every tent crusade we have only one critical shortage — a scarcity of workers. Imagine this: We rarely have enough counselors to pray with the souls who come forward to be born again.

The images we see on television are false flags. They do not tell the story of millions who — regardless of race — are ready to be saved if someone would just give them the good news.

Hope can rise out of this tragedy. The righteous must not give in, either to fear or doubt. Just because so many have failed and have given in to compromise and evil does not mean that God is without voices. In fact, this is an hour in which many who consider themselves to be nobodies will be a key to rescuing America.

May God convict us all to demonstrate His love, bring in the harvest and do what America needs, even if we get nothing in return. {eoa}

This article originally appeared at mariomurillo.org.

Mario Murillo rose from poverty in the Mission District of San Francisco. After being revolutionized by Christ, he felt a call to the University of California at Berkeley, where he shared his faith and saw healings result from his preaching. His international ministry was launched after a four-day conference in San Jose, California, extended for six months with a total attendance of nearly 250,000 people. Since then, his voice has been heard by millions around the world, bringing a message that zeroes in on the hurts of society. He presents Christ clearly and intelligently, openly declaring the power of Jesus to totally transform a life.

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