Christians, Politics, and Prayer

Well, I hope you had a good extra hour's sleep last night.

So I know you're gonna be ready for this sermon.

You're gonna be so excited, and I hope you had a good Halloween.

The best costume I saw last night was a friend of ours that dressed up as year 2020.

She was in all black, she had a black eye, her teeth were all messed up, her hair had grayed, she had a hunchback, she had a broken foot, she had a crutch, uh, she had looked like she had just walked through hell, which is what this year has sort of felt like.

Um, has it felt like the most wonderful year, right?

It has felt like can like can we get through the pandemic?

Um, can we get through the election?

Uh right, that's Tuesday, by the way, in case you forgot that, if that's not on your mind.

Uh, this was actually a very official news report after the first presidential debate.

Very official news report, old man yells at old man, which is what it sort of felt like.

If you're watching that, even if you love one of them, it is kind of what it felt like to all of us.

Now that I've offended a few of you, we will look at what the Bible has to say about how we as Christians relate with political leaders and politics.

So, 1 Timothy chapter 2, verses 1 through 4.

1 Timothy 2:1–4

First of all, then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God, our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Point number one is this we are called to pray for all of our leaders.

The context here is Paul is writing to a young pastor Timothy, and their context is a pagan government.

It's the Roman Empire, it's emperors who claim to be divine and they did horrific things.

And yet Paul says, even while the church stands in resistance to emperor worship and emperor bad character and bad behavior and bad policies, even then pray for that leader.

There's no qualifications given.

If they are a leader, we pray for them.

We are called to pray for all leaders, no matter their character or their policies or their behavior or their rhetoric.

The question this morning for us to ponder, by the way, this sermon I can calm you down right now, is not like me trying to get you to vote a certain way.

All right, I don't believe that's my pastoral role.

Uh the question this morning in contemplation for us is how does a church, or even a family or a group of friends, but how does a church live in unity and love while holding different opinions?

Psychiatrist and author Scott Peck, Dr.

Peck, he's written a few different books and he wrote four stages of forming community.

Stage number one is this pseudo-community.

In pseudo-community, the essential dynamic is conflict avoidance.

So this is very common in the neighborhood, in the country club, at work.

Sadly, in families, this is common.

And this is people acting to avoid hurting feelings.

Right?

So differences are minimized in this situation.

And the group appears to function smoothly, but they're functioning smoothly because there's no honesty or intimacy.

So honesty and intimacy are crushed, and there's no real community.

For community to happen, we must move into the next stage.

And stage two is chaos.

Chaos occurs because people approach the differences, but they're approaching the differences adds to change the other person.

Right?

This is why your uncle or your cousin or your sister sent you 17 articles about who to vote for.

This is why you're already maybe a little nervous about the Thanksgiving table coming up, right?

Because you just know there's gonna be some chaos there because there'll be differences, but the differences are there as one person is trying to convert another person.

Right?

So the drive in chaos is a drive of control, it's a drive to rid the differences.

And that's why we argue as to convert.

And the falsehood is that we think that community is found by majority dominance and conversion of the other opinion to my opinion.

And true community is found by something else, and that is an emptying of the self, a death of the self.

So stage three is emptiness.

And this means people in the community they empty themselves of barriers causing the conflict.

Now, it doesn't mean you don't have an opinion, it doesn't mean you don't have a conviction, and it doesn't mean you don't have the right to communicate it.

It does mean that you empty yourself of the need to fix someone else or convert them to your opinion.

It means that you can understand their opinion even while you don't hold it.

You can understand their view even while you don't hold their view.

This is a humbling, it's an emptying of the self to share in the thing that we actually do have in common.

And that's our brokenness.

In order to be in community, we have to have something in common, and the thing that we all have in common is our brokenness.

Our mistakes, our shame, our loneliness, our loss, our heartache, our anxiety, our fear.

And this is what we can hold together.

And this is where we enter stage four, true community.

True community comes when people know they don't have it all together, even in their opinions and convictions.

And this is this emotional humility that we get equipped with in the gospel.

Dr.

Peck's point of view is that true community doesn't come by not having differences or ignoring our differences.

His insight is that community comes by millions of small deaths in ourselves as we have differences.

And see, once here in true community, we can just call it church.

Let's just call it church.

This is what church should look like.

We can share our deepest selves, our deepest opinions, our deepest convictions, our political opinions, our child rearing opinions, our Netflix opinions, we can share all of these, right?

And we can listen to each other.

We can be in community.

This is what the gospel church has to offer.

People holding different opinions while united in Jesus.

If we jump back to 1 Timothy chapter 2, Paul calls us to pray for our leaders, and then midway through verse 2, he jumps into why we might be praying for this.

1 Timothy 2 · chapter mention

He says, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God, our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Point number two is this we pray for leaders, right?

That's point one.

We pray for leaders in the goal of peaceful and quiet lives and salvation for others.

Maybe you've been out on a lake on a Saturday, like a really busy lake on a Saturday, and you're on a pontoon or a small little ski boat, and boats are zipping in front of you and behind you, and it's loud, and there's huge waves, and you're rocking, and then you're hearing them rock to their music and everybody else's music, and it's just sort of chaos, and then it's the end of the day, and you got to go back and pull into that harbor marina, and it's always tucked in in the cove, kind of back behind a little peninsula, and you round the corner of the chaos, and you turn into that harbor, and as soon as you pull in, it's calm waters.

And it's just this sort of like feeling of relief.

The chaos is gone.

That's this image here of a peaceful and quiet life that we should be living in Jesus, even while it roars out there, that we can live a peaceful and quiet life in the harbor of Jesus for us.

I had a moment this week in the midst of a chaos life, right?

I was in my office and I was just prayerfully sitting and I was listening to this new song by Sandra McCracken, and the name of the song is Patient Kingdom.

When's the last time you felt steady in the chaos?

Hear the sound when the seed falls to earth?

Is it time to give up your destination?

Slow me down, let love do its work, let my soul rise up to meet you.

Let that patient kingdom come.

See, we pray and hope for leaders who will create a peaceful society for its citizens.

So that we can move more in the pace of grace, slow and peaceful, quiet, godly, and dignified, so the gospel might go forth and people might hear about Jesus.

As for life application, what a gift we have here, right?

Because what this means is it means you don't have to be busy to be important.

Right?

Like in our culture, it's like, how are you?

How's it?

Oh, you know, I'm so busy, I've been so busy, lots of busy.

You know, it's like that's the means by which you you feel value or importance.

Like, no, we get the gift in the gospel to say, I, you know what, like really wonderfully slow week.

Man, it's been so slow.

I've had nothing going on.

Right?

Like this this is this gift of going, like, no, I am actually trying to form a peaceful and quiet life.

And we get that trend.

We get to set that trend of slowing down for the people around us to live contemplative lives with our hearts filled with the peace of God.

Point number three is this the gospel is not subservient to any leader, any politics, or any form of government.

Yet we pray for leaders and policies that create a peaceful society.

That was a lot.

Let me read it again.

The gospel is not subservient to any leader, any politics, or any form of government, yet we pray for leaders and policies that create a peaceful society.

There's no mistake, Jim's here this morning, and he shares about how the gospel is going forth in a government that is not democratic.

The gospel is still moving.

Paul and Timothy lived in more persecution than probably any of us will.

And yet the gospel was being propelled.

And then even within that society, when there was progress in society and stuff like roads are being built, the gospel is propelled through that progress.

So the peace of society serves the gospel, and then in the New Testament, even when Paul is imprisoned and beaten and arrested, he writes that this too is propelling the gospel.

Now, one's harder for us, right?

The gospel of being propelled by persecution is much harder for us.

So we pray and we plan against that, but the Christian faith in the church will never go away.

No leader, no party, no policies, no government that can stop the good news of Jesus and the church.

You don't have to worry about that.

We are not under threat.

We transcend leaders and parties and policies and government.

Point number four.

Our identity and heart's satisfaction is in Christ alone, not politics or leaders.

Verse 3 has this name proclaimed as a reminder to us in the midst of praying for our leaders, our king or president, and then it says, God our savior.

It's a reminder while talking about kings and leaders, where our saving is, who our savior is, that we are defined by something greater than who holds power or sets policies in our country.

Last week I listened to a wonderful sermon about politics by my friend, pastor down in Atlanta, Walter Hinneger, and is speaking about the danger of polarization and identity entrenching in political positions.

He quoted University of Virginia's sociological professor, James Davidson Hunter, from his book To Change the World.

Hunter argues this.

He says, one of the key features of the modern age is the politicalization of everything, which ends up reducing our very identities down to a political position.

That's a reduction of identity.

It's a belittling of us.

It's not true of identity.

And it creates polarization against somebody else and it erodes peace.

And both parties are bombarding us with messages to see ourselves this way.

And I'll take a little pastoral privilege here, not to tell you to vote for, but pastoral privilege has said this stand in resistance to that.

You are defined by God our Savior.

Period.

And then sent into issues, policies, politics, not defined by them.

Pastor and author David Platt, in his book, Before You Vote, released a book about a month ago, said this God's image is stamped on every human heart.

In other words, though Caesar may be worthy of a coin, God is worthy of our hearts.

It made me think about that woman at the well in John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

Remember, she's there.

And Jesus says to her, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.

But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.

The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Let's pray together.

Father, forgive us of our careless words and our ignorance when it comes to defending our positions without listening to somebody else.

Forgive us for our lack of prayer for our leaders and our lack of compassion to our friends and our lack of compassion to our enemies.

Forgive us.

Forgive me.

Forgive me for my tone, my apathy toward those who hold a different opinion.

Forgive us for claiming creature comforts and fallible gods as saviors.

Forgive us for our arrogance when we should listen.

Thank you, God, that you listen to us while we are sinners.

Thank you for the cross where you handled our sin and our guilt and you give to us your righteousness.

Create in us by the work of your spirit a compassionate, wise heart that can hold conviction and compassion.

May we be more astonished by your love for us than anything else around us.

And remind us this morning heading into this week that you are the king of kings.

In the powerful name of Jesus we pray.

Amen.