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LIFE Bite is a short-format Christian video podcast where Chet Lowe and guests dive into real-life issues with biblical truth—one bite at a time.
Each episode delivers practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and honest conversations to help you grow in faith and live with purpose.
If there's anything that we need to talk about today, it is war. And first, before I even go any further, I've lived through war. I've lived through war for many, many years.
And I have come to discover, after living through war in Africa, that there's one word that describes war. And I want to speak to all the warmongers out there and all the people excited about a potential war that's going to happen, because there is one word that describes war. And I know in the United States of America, war is like a video game.
It's not a reality. It happens somewhere else. And so, I think it's important that I speak to this particular subject, having had the experience of go through war.
And here's what that one word is. It's loss. You lose everything.
You lose your home. You lose your family. You lose your friends.
You lose your job. You lose your neighborhood. You lose your food.
You lose your hospital care. You lose your insurance. You lose everything, okay? So, before we start getting all excited about, these are the end times, and this is something that's going on, we need to stop for a minute, take a break, and we need to understand the reality of war.
People currently have lost their lives. They have entered into their eternity because of a war that's going on. Now, many have said that the nation of Israel is God's chosen nation.
And that is very, very true. But that doesn't make that everything that Israel does absolutely perfect. And it doesn't make everyone in Iran absolutely evil.
We've got a war between two governments that we really need to speak into spiritually, because the context that I've heard as of late, the emails where I've received and the texts that I've gotten are, is this a sign of the end of the times? Well, the answer to that is yes. We are approaching the seven-year tribulation. We're approaching the rapture of the church, simply because of the fact it has not happened now.
Do I believe it's going to happen today or tomorrow? It can happen any time that God so desires and has made it clear that it is going to happen. And so the fact that we are in the end times is simply for the fact that we're waiting for the events to come. Jesus said very, very clear in Matthew chapter 24 that we need to expect war and rumors of war.
So, not only for the feel, not only for the fact that war is going to happen, he's saying even have the understanding that there'll be rumors out there and the tension and the anxiety that comes with those rumors and rumors of war. But we also need to look at the context of where he's communicating. It's a sign of the times and the times that he's speaking about in Matthew 24.
If you take a look at Matthew 24, it really is an outline of the book of Revelation. It's basically a table of contents to what Paul what John later explains in the book of Revelation. You can go through Revelation chapter 6 all the way to the end and see that Jesus is speaking about the war and the rumors of war.
It's a sign we are in the seven year tribulation. And so, yes, we know these are the pregnancy pains. Yes, we know that Jesus Christ is coming.
Is this war in particular a sign that Jesus is coming tomorrow? We don't know that. You don't know that. And no theological scholar can absolutely say this is the sign that is coming because it's involved with the nation of Israel.
What we do know is that this is part of the pregnancy pain. But there's something that Jesus goes on to communicate that we think we need to focus on because the question is, how will we know the sign of time? This is what instigates the whole Matthew 24 monologue of Jesus when he's communicating some information to the disciples. But in verse 35 of Matthew chapter 24, he basically says, listen, because of all of these signs, stick to the word of God.
Now, that's very important because during Y2K, people forgot the word of God. Christians forgot the word of God. It was amazing to me during Y2K.
And for those of you that are old enough to remember, that was the year 2000 when everybody was terrified that the computers were going to roll over and the whole world was going to come to end. Christians, they left their states. They moved to Idaho.
They bought weapons. They bought chickens. They bought land because they were going to survive Y2K.
And actually, we began to look a little bit foolish because we lost something that we should always keep in our heart. Stick to the word. And what the word communicates, and if we endure with the word of God, then we're going to learn how to behave because what we believe is how we're going to behave.
I believe that this chair can hold me. I didn't test the chair. I didn't see if the chair could hold me.
I just sat down in it because I actually believe that this chair that you can see online was going to hold me because what I believe is how I'm going to behave. So if I stick to the word of God and what Jesus' exhortation is through these signs of the times, then I'm going to know how to behave in the midst of it. And I won't be running to Idaho and buying a weapon and some chickens so that you can survive the seven-year tribulation.
Then I'm going to go to verse 44 of the same chapter, and Jesus gives another exhortation about these signs of the times. Watch and be ready. Be ready.
In other words, be transformed. Be like me. Act like me.
Be like me. Learn about me. That's the whole point of Romans 12, verses 1 and 2, that we are transformed, that we are conformed into His image.
And so we want to watch. We want to be aware. We don't want to have our head in the sand.
But we also want to be ready. And the way that we're ready is that we're becoming more and more like Jesus. So what do I do with this whole whose side am I on? Well, both sides are sending people to their eternity.
And we as believers, we want to be on the side of God. And God so loved the world that He gave His Son that whosoever would believe should not perish but have everlasting life. Our desire as believers is that people get saved.
And so as we see people entering into their eternity, whether they're soldiers or whether they're civilians, I watched this through the course of war. And as I watched child soldiers enter into their eternity because they were fighting for warlords and they were fighting for something that they thought was right, I'll never forget, a young kid told me that he was fighting for five U.S. dollars and a pair of Levi jeans, and that was worth it to him. Now, I know that you might hear that and go, are you serious? But let me tell you something.
When someone is fighting for something that they believe, and it doesn't matter how ridiculous it might seem to you, they believe in it. And so they're going to go to the end with it. That's why we need to stop and we need to understand where do we stand in this? Well, there's four basic principles theologians have put out there about Christians and what we think about war.
The first is the non-resistance view. And this non-resistant view is there's no physical violence. I believe if I'm not mistaken, there's a movie called Hacksaw Ridge where there's a Christian and he was not going to be a part of any kind of violence at all.
And that's where he stood. And the Lord miraculously walked him through that. Then there's passivism.
I practiced the word before the podcast and it still came out wrong. This position holds to purposed peace, purposed peace at all costs. And it's a peace that isn't kind of like, oh, hey, peace comes at what may.
It's an active kind of peace where you are purposing to be a person of peace. You're armed with love. You have a lifestyle at all costs of laying down your life for the sake of peace.
The third view is a just war view. And this particular view, it believes that some war is justified because you are standing up for what is right. And then there's a fourth view, and I would call this the crusade view.
And this view is God's a warrior and Christians need to be warrior and we need to fight for what is right. And so I'm not sure where you stand on any one of these four issues. I'm just simply communicating.
There are four ways that collectively theologians have come to a place where they say, hey, this is one of four ways where Christians will find themselves. What I want to do today is I want to speak into what we should actively be doing. And there's two things that I think we should be doing.
The first is this. We need to pray for peace. We need to pray for peace.
There's a lot of anxious people out there and those people we need to, that have, are filled with anxiety about war. In Philippians chapter four, don't be anxious for anything but pray. And the Bible promises that when we pray, he'll give us a peace that passes understanding.
And here's why that's important. Because the very next context is that we're mentally stable to be able to make right decisions. And so what Paul is talking about is we need to pray and we need to pray God will give us a peace that passes understanding, and then we're able in that peaceful place to make good decisions and not emotional decisions.
We need to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. That is in Psalm chapter 122, verse 6. That is a command from Scripture to pray for a peace. But Jesus, when he's communicating about peace, he says this, I'm not going to give you a peace that the world over, won't come through a peace treaty.
I'm going to give you a peace that's inside. The kind of peace that I give is one that will pass understanding because it's an internal peace that no matter what's going on in the world, you'll know that I'm in you because of the peace that you have that's only found in Christ. So the first is we need to pray.
We need to go to God and we need to trust this battle belongs to the Lord and let the Lord intervene. But secondly, we've got to remember we are called to be ambassadors of Christ, not of our politics. We're called to be ambassadors of Christ.
And so we can't compromise our Christian position for the sake of a political agenda. And so I'm calling believers to be an ambassador of Christ. We are to bring the ministry of reconciliation.
It doesn't matter what side we're on. The ambassador of Christ wants all people to be saved. And so don't make a person, don't make a person a problem and don't make a nation of people the problem.
Purpose, purpose to pray for the peace in Iran, pray for the peace of Israel and ask that God would intervene in only a way that he can, because we can't legislate peace and we can't fight for peace. Peace will come through God alone. God bless you guys until next time.