Are We Combat Ineffective?

There was a brief silence on the battlefield as the firing ceased. The smoke of battle slowly cleared, exposing numerous casualties strewn across the field. You begin to hear the ragged sound of men screaming in pain as they lay on the ruined field. Two teams of medics crawl out of their holes and move toward the shattered bodies of soldiers; one moving slowly towards the fallen enemy, while the other slowly approaches their own wounded.

You stand and watch as the medics slowly work their way through the enemy wounded, applying medical care almost lovingly; pressure dressing to stop the bleeding, morphine for the pain... Slowly, the comforted enemies screams decline in severity and volume. 

That's when you notice the other team of medics. Like the first, they are moving from soldier to soldier taking care of your compatriots. Pausing briefly between each casualty, they end their screams of pain with a quick slash of a knife across the throat.

Wait, what?

This disturbing scene is horrible to consider, yet is played out in Churches across the United States on a weekly basis. Christians who will lovingly approach the lost with a gentle hand will not have a second thought about spiritually destroying a fallen Christian. They will rip a fallen Christian to shreds and walk away believing they have done the Lord’s work. The reason for this is simple; we have lost the love of the brethren. We see the Great Commission as the end all of Christianity, and have a desire to fulfill it, but have crippled ourselves to the point of ineffectuality with our Pharisaical attitudes.

When I was in the Army we learned a very scary term: Combat Ineffective… it reflected that a unit is at 50 to 69 percent troop strength. When a unit loses strength to that level, they cannot carry out the mission that they were tasked with. That is the Church in today’s society. We have lost significant troop strength, and as a result, cannot carry out our mission.

And the blame rests solely at our own feet.

The Bible tells us clearly, “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” (Galatians 6:1) Unfortunately, that is not our response. Instead, we are destroying those who have been overtaken and worse yet it is often in an attempt to raise ourselves in the eyes of others.

Think of how Jesus dealt with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11) We read that story and only focus on how Jesus ‘Put those Pharisees in their place,’ but miss the greater lesson on how to respond to someone who has fallen into sin. I think it was really a warning to us of how He views our spiritually arrogant attitudes, because the fact is that the Pharisees are not the only ones who are judgmental about other people’s failures to the point of destruction.

• We have too many walking wounded that we have spiritually killed instead of offering life sustaining aid to keep them in the fight.
• We do not have the troop strength to carry out the Great Commission to reach enough to replace the ones we have lost.
• As a result, we are not replacing soldiers at the rate that we are losing them.

As soldiers in the Army of the Lord, we are Combat Ineffective. The question we must ask ourselves is this: What are we going to do about it?