An update and a reflection…
Update: I wrote most of this yesterday (09/24/2024) on a flight from Portland, OR, to Dallas, TX, my final destination, Cancun, Mexico. It’s a 10-day visit for family and ministry opportunities. I arrived here hours before Tropical Storm Helene stopped by. She turned into a hurricane on her way past us, which we enjoyed without electricity and lots of flooding.
Reflection: From age 26 to 68, I lived outside the nation of my birth—almost all of my adult life. The purpose was vision-driven. I was already bent toward attaining a better grasp of the big picture. It was the age-old struggle to find a cause more meaningful than self-aggrandizement… something worth living and dying for, if such a thing existed.
What started as a search—desperate at times—evolved into a quest. We found the good news. Or did it find us? Now, where would we take it? How would we approach people with it?
I felt even more compelled to search deeper for the essential… the universal truths… things that supersede the distinguishing marks we use to divide into tribes and nations.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ celebrates humanity with an offer that transcends. It sees us all as lost and needy. It invites us all to see our need, repent, and believe the Gospel. No one is more lost than anyone else. No one is harder for God to find than anyone else. He doesn’t love me more than he loves anyone else. How do we measure infinite love?
Back to the quest… the Word of God clarified and refined our vision. It felt like a mandate. Yes, it should be received as such. But when you come from nothingness and hopelessness, by the time you read 2 Corinthians 5 as a young discoverer of Christ, it doesn’t feel like a mandate anymore. It was now our joyful privilege to share this fantastic news with others.
Regardless of where or when we live, the Apostle Paul’s words apply to all of us:
“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation;" (2 Corinthians 5:18 ESV)
Just saying the words out loud compels us to check our posture. How do we approach our world in a way that points people to this amazing life of being reconciled to God?
Selling our witness to anything less than this compromises the integrity and effectiveness of our God-given ministry. Would we repel people we disapprove of before they even get a chance to hear from us about the eternal hope and salvation offered to them?
So, building on this, I’ll risk sharing the following quote from my book:
As a believer in Jesus Christ and a student of the Bible, I question the appropriateness of a politicized Christianity, whether it be the year 2024 in the United States or any year in any country, from the time of Christ to the end of the age.
The essential role of Christians in secular society is to actively carry out the ministry of reconciliation with which we have been so clearly charged. Any admixture of political agenda is detrimental to our task:
It threatens the clearest possible presentation of the message of the Gospel.
It narrows the potential audience for the Christian message to people predisposed to the political views being represented.
It distracts and debilitates the Christian in the pursuit of his life mission.
My agenda? I wish only to foster reflection and healthy conversation. Our Christianity needs to be appropriately aligned with history and fully prepared for any contingency the future may hold… including the decline and demise of the nation we live in.
Kingdom living is not subject to mood swings, grievances, or fear-mongering. It affords no space for mockery of political candidates we despise or for being drawn to a particular personality cult some are peddling.
Kingdom living is exciting. Darkness and evil are on every side. Those people we see as enemies? Well, we walked among them before Christ ruled our hearts. We get to shine a light in the darkness… souls awakened and reconciled to God, coming out of obscurity to walk in the light with us.
It’s a worthy quest. It’s the best of all quests. Second place is so far beneath it that we should be embarrassed to have taken the bait to chase after so much less.
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. (Daniel 2:44)
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” (John 18:36)
