Not since World War II has America seen all-out mobilization of the general population to support the cause of attaining victory over what was almost universally acknowledged to be a great evil.

Ralph Winter recalls his experience as one who lived through World War II.

He envisions what it might be like if Christians took the

Great Commission just as seriously as a prolonged spiritual war as many people did during that

great war. The Queen Mary, lying in repose in the harbor at Long Beach, California, is a fascinating museum of the past.

Used both as a luxury liner in peacetime and a troop transport during the Second World War,

its present status as a museum, the length of three football fields,

affords a stunning contrast between the

lifestyles appropriate in peace and war. On one side of a partition, you see the dining room

reconstructed to depict the peacetime table setting that was appropriate to the wealthy patrons

of high culture, for whom a dazzling array of knives and

forks and spoons held no mysteries. On the other side of the petition, the evidences of wartime

austerities are in sharp contrast. One metal tray with indentations replaces 15 plates and

saucers, bunks, not just double, but eight tiers high,

explain why the peacetime complement of 3,000 gave way to 15,000 people on board in wartime.

How repugnant to the peacetime masters this transformation must have been.

To do it took a national emergency, of course. The survival of a nation depended upon it.

The essence of the Great Commission today is that the survival of many millions of people

depends on its fulfillment. But obedience to the Great Commission has more consistently

been poisoned by affluence than by anything else. The antidote for affluence is re-consecration.

Consecration is, by definition, the setting apart of things for a holy use.

Affluence did not keep Borden of Yale from giving his life in Egypt. Affluence didn't stop Francis of

...