How should a godly man address the cultural clamor surrounding the vaccine? This is a challenging issue because it’s touching people at the level of conscience. When you deal with people at the level of conscience, you get a lot of heat emotionally that can rise up. Within the Church, it’s becoming an issue of division.  In this short video, I share my heart for how godly men can face this difficult issue in truly God-honoring way.  

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transcript

How should a godly man address the vaccine? This is a rather divisive and challenging issue because it’s touching people at the level of conscience. When you deal with people at the level of conscience, you get a lot of heat emotionally that can rise up. What’s interesting is within the Church, it’s also become an issue of division. As a result, when you get to the godly man response, it’s very, very important that you recognize the terrain you’re dealing with. That is, the devil is attempting to play a game to bring about division and fear. It doesn’t matter which way you go on the vaccine. It’s a game. The enemy has an end. Fear is always his end, and division is always his end. He’s playing this up for all it’s worth.

As an issue of conscience, just think, someone could say, “I feel it’s important that I get the vaccine so that I can play my role in helping stop this pandemic. If all of us did that, hey, then we would be doing our part, and we could flatten that curve. You could also have the other side, which feels like, “Hey, I can’t allow this foreign intruder into my body. I don’t know what it’s going to do. I don’t know the long-range effects. I don’t want to bring that into my family.” It can be an issue of conscience. For some Christians, they actually feel like it could be a mark or a symbol of submission to the world, just like the mark of the beast could be. As a result, you’re dealing with very high-level conscionable issues here, which, of course, is adding to the strife.

Here are some of the key things I think are significant for us. One is fear ought not to play any role in the life of a Christian. It doesn’t matter which way you land on this; you can still be controlled by fear. In fact, some people get the vaccine because they fear COVID-19. Some people don’t get the vaccine because they fear the vaccine. That’s the great irony of this, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter which way you go; you could be ruled by fear. That cannot be a part of any godly man’s response to the vaccine.

The other issue is division. Division is not something that we cater to or cultivate within the Body of Christ, so to the degree that we can, and holding our own conscience as sacred, to navigate forward in this without fear to actually be sensitive to those around us, to recognize that they may have a different landing point conscionably in regards to this. Some people, to get into a foreign country to actually do missions work, have needed to get the vaccine. That’s actually an important thing for us to weigh in this, especially on that one side that says, “How dare you? You cannot get this vaccine. It’s of the devil.” But as a result of getting it, they’re able to proclaim the Gospel. These tensions that exist in this are very real, which is why we, as godly men, do not allow fear to rule. We will not allow division to reign. We will not play the enemy’s game. That is a godly man’s response to this vaccine.

If you’d like to take these ideas deeper, join me for an eight-week course on honorable manhood.

resources

If you want to dive deeper into biblical principles for addressing the vaccine issue, check out Eric’s recent sermon series The Vaccine Dilemma.