Political Gospel -- Navigating the Tension

Well, good morning. Thanks for being here this morning on this beautiful day.

I'm going to say it's beautiful, and I will believe it, and I'm thankful for

it. It's good. It's beautiful.

It's like the day that the Lord has made, so I will rejoice and be glad in it. It's great.

Oh, and I need to rejoice because I'm doing something, of course, that's really dumb.

We're talking about politics, right? And every pastor knows you don't talk about

politics, but we're going to do a whole series on it.

We're in week two of a series called Political Gospel.

And here's what I'm trying to do. In this series, I'm just trying to attempt

to think through the relationship between the gospel,

what Jesus Christ taught us, and politics in our particular moment,

as much as I think as we can get there.

And this is week two of a series, okay?

And I'm not going to recap everything each time, but the thing is,

the reason that Pastors Do series is because it takes a long time to present

complex ideas, and so ideas sort of tend to build on each other.

So I don't want to recap everything, but I do want you to understand kind of

where we've come from and where we're going.

Last week, we talked about the primary commitment that we have as political

people, that is people who are committed to a vision of the good,

that we have an idea of what it would look like for society and people within

a society in in our culture in general, to flourish, to live the good life.

Being a political person is having clear and concrete ideas and being someone

who's committed to bringing about that kind of shape of life within our culture, right?

So we're going to be people who are setting out to enact our political vision.

That's part of being a human.

Everyone is doing this all the time. But what we have as Christians is we have

this commitment to do things in a certain way, to do things in a way that is

consistent with what Jesus taught us, to do things in a way that is consistent

with the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And what we talked about this past week was that we as Christians,

we have this unique commitment to what Jesus taught us and what Jesus taught

us, the most important thing,

the thing without which we will just be doomed to fail in all of our endeavors,

be it political or otherwise,

is that we have to have a commitment to love.

And I made the statement that Christian politics is the politics of love.

Now, you know, we could take that a lot of different ways.

But I think when we say that, we take that from Jesus because he affirms and

the scriptures consistently affirm the importance of love, but we also have

to understand what love is and it's also defined by Jesus.

And so like that Christian commitment to love, it implies two things.

And again, this is just recap from last week. If you want to know more, go back and listen.

That's first that we are, we're called to engage politically as Christians and

we're called to be doing so in a loving way which keeps us from it,

excludes us from the politics of contempt.

And maybe it's a little bit of an oversimplification, but if I looked at the

way partisan politics plays out in the United States in 2024,

I would say that it is full of contempt, right?

It's not so much about painting the picture of the good and pursuing that.

It's about painting a picture of how bad the other people are.

And so what I'm saying, what I'm suggesting is that that isn't really an option

for you as a Christian, to the extent that you're committed to what Jesus teaches,

you have to hold fast to love, which excludes the possibility of contempt.

So we can have political adversaries. I'm not saying by loving,

we just say, oh, everybody's fine.

Everybody's fine. I don't really need to care. That's called indifference. That's not love.

We can have political adversaries, but we owe them love.

And we have to hold ourselves to account to that if we're going going to call ourselves Christians.

And secondly, the politics of love requires that we engage the world to bring

about that goodness and create the conditions for human flourishing to pursue

that good and to have it be enacted in the world.

That calls us to really a kind of activism that cares about the world and that

cares about being a witness to what Jesus calls people to,

which specifically comes against some of our postmodern ideas about what it

means to be a people, a person.

And what we've kind of convinced ourselves of is that what people need is just

to be told that they're okay, no matter what they're doing, no matter what's

going on, that everybody's okay all the time.

But I would say to enact a political vision of Christian love actually requires

a confrontation with that particular attitude. We talked about that last week.

I'm sure as you think through this, and you've had a week to think about that,

you probably get the sense that that focus on love is somewhat helpful,

but you probably get the sense that to get really practical,

to get really real, to figure out, okay, well, what does that look like Monday

through Sunday in my everyday kind of life?

You probably need a little bit more, and you're right. I think we do need a

little bit more meat on the bones there.

Because I can tell you that Jesus calls you to love and that love should guide

and propel you into the world and motivate your politics, be kind of the animating

force behind it. But what does that look like, right?

Because of course, there's many versions of what love might look like.

And that question is all the more urgent when we consider the times that we live in.

Not only do we live in a time of great polarization, that is,

where the extreme ends of our political parties are just pitted against each other.

But because we've lived in a time of such crazy cultural change,

particularly the last 20 or 30 years, and we live in a time where alternative

political ideas and theories and what some people call conspiracy theories,

right, where those have become part of the mainstream of American life.

I was just thinking I was just like Googling around a little,

Googling, does anyone do that anymore?

I do, I'm committed to Googling. I was Googling around a little bit,

and I was like thinking about, what was life like in the 1960s?

And some of you guys lived in the 1960s, right?

Which became a pretty tumultuous time, but in the 1960s, there were three television channels? I'm told.

I'm told I wasn't there that Google tells me that there are three like national

news networks that were always broadcasting.

And maybe you had a local regional thing, but, but, but that was sort of,

if you wanted to know what was happening in the world, you had three options.

And I, for the most part, it sounds like they just told you the exact same things, right?

And now if I want to find out what go, what's going on in the world,

I've got, I've got books. They had books then, Right.

I've got books, but I've got at my fingertips media and not only media,

media that will adapt to whatever political leanings I have in English.

I can find that I can find media that will adapt to my political leanings from

other countries, looking at things from other perspectives.

I can find media that will spin the news and interpret what the world is like

from different perspectives, from, you know, free market capitalists to Christian nationalism.

And I can find stuff that's going to be, you know, focusing in from a Marxist point of view.

Like my point is that at your fingertips right now, we live in a culture where

you can find absolutely anyone interpreting the events of life and history from any given perspective.

And all of that is available and all of it's really well polished and all of

it's constantly being presented to you.

And it's a little disconcerting. Like it's a little confusing, right?

It was a different time when in the 1960s, you could just turn on the TV and

it's like, man, well, maybe there was a little bit of variety,

but it was really all within this kind of very narrow mainstream to where we

live in now, where there's so much coming at us.

I think we live in a time of information overload.

I don't think I'm saying anything that's at all novel that anyone would disagree with.

You can, because of the access to media and information,

you can curate your reality to the point where we can sit in a room or you can

walk in downtown Seattle and you have all these people who are looking at the

exact same things, the exact same events, and yet they have a totally different

take on what they all mean.

You can curate your reality in this information age.

And the traditional authority structures, the Walter Cronkites and the people

who are telling us what to believe and what's the significance of world events,

those authority structures have all been taken out and we are left to figure out what to believe.

We have to sift through and decide who's telling me the truth,

who is correctly representing what's happening in world events and what's at stake.

And it's kind of exhausting place to live in.

I have ADHD, so I love it. So I just go down. I'm going to go over here and

I go here, but it's tiring.

So what can we do? How can we go from understanding a call to love,

saying, okay, we decided we're gonna be Christians, we're gonna commit to love.

To loving people, but how do we go from that commitment to figuring out how

that looks practically in the world where there are just so many options and

so many visions of the good,

and they can sort of fit in with this idea of Christian love?

How do we assess? How do we go through this? How do we figure out how to engage in the world?

Well, last week I suggested that it might be helpful to consider historically

how Christians have engaged with the world in the past. And I gave you this list.

This is developed by a theological ethicist. His name is David Zach Naringi,

just to give credit where credit is due.

He presents four options, and I think I have a slide for it.

Yeah, four historic Christian political postures.

So, granted, we live in different times, but if we were to look at the near

history of Christianity in the modern world,

the ways that Christians have engaged and figured out how do we go from this

commitment to love to enacting that in the world, we've typically taken one of these four postures.

And this is by no means an exhausted list.

I'm sure that we could figure out a few things, but I think it's a helpful way

for us to sort of think through our options.

So how do we decide among them, right? If these are the ways that we could respond

to politics in the world, how do we decide which is best? Because the fact is.

The fact is that these four words, I'm not sure if you noticed,

they're not in Scripture. You can't find them in Scripture.

Scripture does not give us a ton of direct information on how to discern the

best way to enact our political vision in the world. It is not a playbook for politics.

And it has no, scripture does not anticipate modern democracy in any way.

In fact, when scripture talks about politics, he's usually talking about emperor

Nero and how do we engage with him.

And some of you guys sort of feel like we live in an empire where there's an

emperor right now. And I respect, and I'm not trying to dissuade you of that, right?

So maybe there's some application there, but there is not a lot that gets immediately

to our particular situation.

And so there isn't this convenient thing that we can normally do when it comes

to very clear cut ethical issues. And we can say, no, I have a clear command from scripture.

And so this is just a no for me. I mean, like we did with the love thing, right?

I think love, the call to love in scripture is so consistently clear that it

precludes us from the possibility of believing that we could enact hate or contempt

for people because it's just so clear.

It's so underlined. But when it comes to these political posturings,

right? We know we have a call to love the world, and to live that out.

But what about the best way to go about it? Well, we don't have clear texts

that can just give us a clear understanding.

So what can we do? Are we just left to just decide?

Just left kind of wavering in the wind.

Despite the fact that we don't have clear scriptural indicators about the right

prescribed political, way to engage politically.

I do think we have some resources in scripture that can help us think through

these decisions and get some clear understandings of ways that we can engage

and love the world and be political people.

And that is, to use some shorthand, is what we have in the scriptures is that

we have the gospel. We have the gospel.

The gospel, I would argue, can help us navigate the world.

It can help us see our way to understanding how we as individual people is like

act in the world to bring about God's love in the world and to organize society

in such a way and to use our influence to bring that about.

So what is the gospel then? I mean, that's the big question.

The word gospel, I mean, it just means good news, or at least that's the Greek

word for gospel. It means good news.

The Bible is a book that tells us about the good news of who Jesus is and what he's done.

That is the, if I were to summarize the message of the entire Bible,

not just the Old Testament, it is a Bible that points us to the good news about

what God is going to do, is doing, has done, depending on what time period you're living in, right?

In the time period that we were living, it's what he has done in Jesus Christ

to bring about his purpose and to bring about life and to bring about and organize

the world and to renew the world.

The gospel is the good news that is the focal point of scripture.

And this good news ends up helping us to navigate our way through real life

and make decisions about real life ways of engaging in the world.

I like how Leslie Newbegin explains the gospel. Of course, I do.

You know, I like Leslie Newbegin. I talk about him all the time.

And I think I've used this quote before.

He says this, the gospel is a factual statement.

Namely that at a certain point in history, the history of this world,

God, who is the author, the sustainer, the goal of all that exists of all being

and all meeting and all truth has become present in our human history as the man Jesus,

whom we can now know and whom we can love and serve.

And that by his incarnation, his ministry, his death and resurrection,

he's finally broken the powers that oppress us.

And he's created a space and time in which we who are unholy can nevertheless

live in fellowship with God who is holy.

You'll notice that New Begin is going to great pains to illustrate that the gospel is something,

bigger and more robust and maybe a little bit more surprising than the way we

typically talk about it in modern contemporary evangelical circles.

If you hang around church people, and I love church people, and I talk this

way too, usually when we discuss the gospel, what we're talking about are the

personal elements of the gospel, which are really important.

I'm not trying to tell you that that is not the gospel. I'm saying that is one part of the gospel.

We talk about the beautiful fact that we have this good news that Jesus Christ

makes clear is that he died on our behalf to take away our sins so that we can

trust in him and have life, peace, joy.

Everlasting relationship with the God who made us.

And that is absolutely a truth that is at at the very heart of the gospel,

the personal aspects of the gospel, the relevance to you personally,

it really matters. You can talk about the gospel.

You can't talk about the gospel without talking about Jesus's mercy and his

grace, the offer of salvation.

It is absolutely at the heart. It is the individual message that each of us

must respond to in order to be participants in this reality of the gospel.

But what Newbigin is saying is that the gospel,

because of what it is, this personal invitation to be reconciled to God by faith

through the sacrifice and atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross,

not because of your greatness, but because of his greatness,

not because of anything you've done, but simply on the basis of saying, I surrender to you, God.

I want to be a part of what you have. And I don't come trying to impress you,

but I come standing on your love and your mercy.

And I come walking the way that you've paved in Jesus Christ.

What Newbegin is saying, that that gospel, that personal aspect of the gospel

also implies some other things, really important things.

Indeed, Jesus can forgive sin.

Indeed, he has come, his death and resurrection has resulted in a state of affairs,

in a reality in this world where we can, by faith, have eternal life.

But all of that means that, and all that comes from from the fact that God himself,

the creator of the whole world, has come down from heaven,

entered into his creation for the purpose of renewing and restoring it.

The gospel, this personal work that Jesus does, that you and I are called to,

and that we're called to proclaim to all people, it shows us that God is doing something.

He's got this master plan to save the world,

to redeem everything and all of purpose and all of creation and God's whole

plan for everything that goes on here is about reconciling things through Jesus Christ.

The implications of the gospel are so relevant to me.

I need to respond to it. I need to understand that it is a message for me.

I need to understand it's a message for my neighbors, but it is not only a message for me.

The gospel is not only personal good news for me. The gospel is universal history.

It's universal significance.

It's a proclamation of what the whole world is for and what its ends is and why God has created it.

He's created us, his creation to glorify him.

And we've rebelled against him.

And then he says, but I'm going to make a way for you to come back into relationship

and I'm going to restore what has been lost.

And the whole purpose of this world, everything you Every breath you take is about this.

Everything gets situated in this bigger picture of what God is doing in the

world. It has implications far beyond me and my personal life.

It has implications for the whole world, for all of history.

For all of eternal history after the world ends and after time ends,

it's all revealing the fact that God's whole purpose is being fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

And everything we do is tied up in that.

And so our little goals and our little objectives and our little moment in history,

which is just a blip on the whole span of things, all of that is properly contextualized

by God's big purpose and plan and what he's doing in the gospel.

The gospel is a set of facts about Jesus. And if they are true,

then everything in the world and all of history and everything in my life gets

reinterpreted in light of that big truth.

We do not have a small gospel that's just about me being right with Jesus.

That's a part of it, but that's not the end of it.

It's about me finding my place in this big plan of God.

The gospel helps us make sense of the world. It helps us understand what our

role is and how we should act and how we should think.

And this is my first point here.

The gospel is the starting point of all Christian activity and thinking.

That big gospel, it properly helps us understand and contextualize what we do

on our day-to-day basis.

It gives meaning to my work, gives meaning to my family life.

It gives meaning to my political life. It gives meaning to my waking up and

my lying down, that I can understand that all of this is part of this big story

that God is enacting through Jesus Christ.

And if we're going to be Christians, then I think we have to understand that

we need to subject our thinking and our acting to the truth revealed in the gospel.

If we're going to be Christians, then we let the gospel and what it is and what

it reveals about the world and what it means about God's action for the world

and his intentions for the world guide our thinking and our behavior and particularly

our bringing about his purposes.

It has to be guided by his purposes as they're revealed in scripture.

Just one side point. I think this is, I'm going to move quickly.

I'm sorry. I think I'm only on page two.

As a side point, think about the good news that you have, particularly in light of this world.

As the world gets crazier. And there's more people just like take the wide variety

of options of ways to interpret what's going on in the world.

And some of us like are a little bit disconcerted by that.

Like some of us find it exhausting to look at the world and like,

man, like what feels like people hate each other.

And it feels like people are blown apart and nobody can agree about what's real.

Do you understand what a gift you have, you potentially have to give people

who live in this world where they're constantly being bombarded by.

Messaging and news that isn't particularly good.

And you can just say, hey, look, I see all of this wildness and the gospel explains it all.

The gospel is this good news that God's doing this greater thing in the world

that he understands that the world is a sinful, broken place.

The gospel helps people make sense of the world and people desperately are trying

to make sense of the world.

That's why we spend hours going YouTube, down YouTube rabbit holes or on Twitter

or on, you know, Discord.

I've lost my coolness. I don't know what I'm talking about.

I think you guys spend time on Discord, you tech people, learning things.

I don't know what you do there.

But you go in down these places and what people are looking for is they're looking for meaning.

They're trying to figure out why does the world seem so crazy?

Why have things changed so much?

Who's behind it? Who is my enemy? Who are my friends?

What is all of this about? What

is the meaning of life? And the world is offering so many false options.

You have truth, truth that is time-tested.

Thousands of years, Christians have stood on this truth.

And that's, you know, honestly, that's my invitation as we get into to be being

political people that we would root ourselves down into this gospel because

if we just want to call ourselves Christians but be into all the things of the world,

I don't think we're going to be able to have a lasting impact and I don't think

we're going to be able to stay sure and true to the gospel.

We have to be people who are just saying, no, man, I take this as what's real, as what's ultimate.

I take what God has told me in scriptures is to be what's real and ultimate.

And I might find insight in things of the world.

I might appreciate alternative ways of looking at things like we can do that.

But all of that stuff needs to find its context in scripture.

And we need to be people who are offering this good and good news to people

because because people desperately need it. Okay, getting back to politics.

Here's just an essential thing. We need to let the gospel guide our thinking

activity in the world, right?

And when we fail to do that, if we fail to hold ourselves accountable to that,

to thinking and acting in accordance with the gospel, then I think what's going

to happen is that we're going to slip into one of the two ways,

political postures that I think are just ruts, okay?

So I gave you that list of four political postures. We're only going to get to these two today.

I tried to do all four, but it was going to be like way too long and you're

too hungry for that. So I'm not going to do that to you.

There's two political ruts. They are co-optation and disengagement.

These are, these are ways that Christians have oftentimes been,

I think I have a slide for that, oftentimes been involved in the world,

but they are, they're, they're, they're, they're not, uh,

no, No, there should be one that just says the words.

Go back. Oh, all right. I don't know.

I forgot something. No one is surprised.

Cooptation and disengagement, okay? So these are these two things.

And again, these are kind of the ruts that we can fall into.

The first one, I would argue, is extremely common in our day and in every day.

This is the common swing and a miss of trying to be political in the world.

And that is that we are co-opted. That means that as Christians,

what we end up doing is we just adopt the values and the norms of whatever group

or whatever culture or whatever was popular in our day.

And in fact, in co-optation, what we end up doing is we end up identifying the

gospel, Jesus's kingdom, his ministry, his purpose, his calling with worldly

institutions, political parties, or cultural trends.

I like how Christopher Watkins says this. He describes this common thing that

we've been dealing with in Christianity for so long.

He says, this is how we ended up with the Marxist Christ of the 1960s,

the hippie Christ of the 1970s, the postmodern Christ of the 1990s.

What our culture needs is not a model of Christ made in its own image.

It has shelves full of those already, but the real Christ who comes in grace

and truth to comfort, complete, and console every culture for its good and his glory.

Christ should not fit comfortably in any culture. And if he nestles snugly into

our own, then we have almost certainly lost sight of the biblical Christ.

We should maintain what C.S. Lewis called, and I love this little quote,

the scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from our own ideas.

I like that a lot. Christians have historically, and everyone has historically,

I would argue, been co-opted in their political engagement.

It happens on the left and it happens on the right.

If you're on the left, you're thinking, yeah, they do, those people over there.

And if you tend to lean more conservative, you're thinking, yeah,

they're doing that all the time. And I'm just saying, I'm sure I'm not as impartial

as I think I am or whatever.

I'm maybe a bit more of a centrist. And you know what? I do too.

So just gonna put that out there. It's not a left, right. It's all across the spectrum.

We are all susceptible to being co-opted into a culture,

into just having the distinctly Christian message, this call of Jesus to engage

the world with love, love which is a little bit direct and yet also it has no

enemies, there's no one to hate.

We all get co-opted and this happens as watkin points out when we fail to hold

on to the gospel that there's the christian message the truth that what's revealed

in scripture as the ultimate truth which is definitive of our reality into which

we must subject our all of our thinking and action.

We never can make the mistake of thinking, well, I'm a Christian.

And so whatever occurs to me, that must be the truth.

What we do as Christians is we have this understanding is that we have the word of God.

We have the gospel, we have the truth. And it's this thing, it's this standard

to which I'm always aspiring and yet rarely measuring up.

By faith, I'm putting my hope and all my frailty and all my failings and all

my sinful broken mind, I'm putting it, my hope in the gospel as something outside of myself.

I'm saying, no, I'm just going to be committed to continuing to press in and

to aim for the truth revealed in scriptures to what it could look like to be

a person who's not relying on their own selves, but relying on the word of God.

And this is like, this is a tension that we always feel in our spiritual lives.

It's something that we always need to be aspiring to.

We feel this not only in our political lives, but inclusive of our political lives.

Like we want to be people who are comfortable in our own skin.

And yet here's the reality.

I think being a Christian, it makes you comfortable in your skin in that Jesus

says, because I've forgiven you, I'm adopting you and your family and you're accepted.

But the gospel is never, you're doing great. You're doing perfect.

I didn't think anybody could actually do the right way to be engaged politically.

I didn't think anyone could think all the right thoughts, but you've managed

it. Congratulations. That's not the gospel.

The gospel is, I love you. I've forgiven you. I'm inviting you in through the

way of faith to have a relationship with me.

And you're probably going to keep messing up.

And when you do, you just need to come back. You need to understand that you're

called to something outside of yourself.

Look, in John 17, we read what is commonly referred to as Jesus' high priestly prayer.

And as Jesus, in the book of John, the way this falls in the narratives,

it's right before Jesus is arrested, crucified, tried, killed, and resurrected.

And what he's doing is he's gathered his disciples in a private place and he's

basically saying, this is it.

I need to give them the last word.

So he gives them some teaching and then he prays. He prays to God.

He prays to the father interceding on the disciples behalf.

And he makes clear, this is not just for those disciples right here,

but all those who would believe through their message to you and me.

And he gathers them together and he prays this in preparation for them to be

the people who are like faithful in the world. This is his prayer.

They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

Sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth.

And as you sent me into the world, I've also sent them into the world.

I sanctify myself for them so that they also may be sanctified by the truth.

So Jesus's prayer for his disciples, as they're gonna be sent out into the world,

as they're gonna be like having to stand on their own two feet as people of

faith, following after the ways of God,

occupying, like being firmly planted in the gospel, his prayer is that we would

be people who live in this weird and uncomfortable tension. Thanks, Jesus.

This weird and uncomfortable tension. He affirms two things.

He affirms that those who follow after him have to live in this tension of being

in this world, but not of this world.

The common phrase, he says, they're not of this world just as I'm not of this world.

And yet he also sends them into this world.

To be a Christian sent into this world is full of tension.

He sends them in the world, but he tells them, man, that they are holy and sanctified.

They're going to be pursuing the things of God, not because of themselves or

because they're so great, but because of God's word is at work in them.

This word that comes from outside of themselves, God's speaking through scripture,

through the Holy Spirit, through Jesus himself, revealing his truth and his

ways. He says, that's what's going to make you holy.

You want to measure up. You want to be a person who is acting in a way that's

consistent with me. You don't need to just be like standing on your own merits.

You need to be a person who has been sanctified by the word.

The invitation, the instruction, the filling of the spirit, the thing that's

constantly bearing fruit in your life. It's not of yourself.

It's of his word coming down into your life. And so we have this tension because

I would love to be enough in and of myself.

I would love that. That would make my life so much easier than I could stop.

I could just relax. I could just sit by the pool and drink daiquiris.

It would be great, right?

But the Christian life is to say, no, you're called to sanctity.

You're called to this ongoing relationship with God and his word.

You're called to constantly be taking your life and just saying,

Lord, teach Teach me to live faithfully, not by my own standards,

but by the ones that you've set. In that, I find sanctity.

In that, I find this cleansing and renewal.

And amazingly enough, in that, I find my joy and my completion.

And I find myself, my life gets filled with meaning to the extent that I'm doing

that, that I'm living into that tension.

And to be a Christian and a political person.

Means that we might be able to engage in politics. And I actually think it does

mean that we can engage in politics.

We could be a member of a political party. We could be part of organizing efforts.

We could be deeply involved in trying to bring about work in this society.

But it also means this, that as we do that, we can never lose sight that our

first allegiance and our first obedience and our first calling is to be a person

who is sanctified by the word of God.

And we can cooperate in causes for the good of this world.

And we'll talk about that next week. We absolutely need to be.

We need to be people who are engaged in the world and fighting for the world

and engage in confrontation even with the powers of this world.

But we also need to be people who, as we do that, are living in this tension

of saying, okay, God, I'm gonna go out there.

I'm sent into the world, but I'm also struggling with the reality is that I

don't have enough within myself.

And my ideas about what's right and wrong always need to be subject to your word.

And I can't ever say, I know enough. I've got this, Jesus. Hold my beer.

I'm going to go ahead and be the person who gets out there and does the right things.

I put these on a graph. I like graphs every now and then, little charts and graphs.

I think we've got it. There it is. Okay, right? Right.

Because, again, if these if these two, I think, ruts or pitfalls of political

engagement are that we either get disengaged or if we get co-opted. All right.

So on the one of them accesses X or Y, I don't remember anymore.

I'm a long way out from high school.

We don't want to get co-opted, right? Which means that we want to ensure that

we are distinctly Christian.

And we don't want to be disengaged in the world, right?

We want to ensure that since Jesus sent us into the world, like he says here,

that we want to be interested in the world.

And I think that means that we have this calling, right? To hold both of those

two things at once, which is to live in that tension, right?

Typically, Christian political engagement has has gone awry when we haven't

done both of those things well.

We could be distinct as a people saying, oh, we're going to be distinct,

but we're not really committed to bringing the gospel into the world.

We're not really committed to going.

We're not really committed to being people who are bringing about change and

bringing about the good life.

And that would lead us to separatism, this kind of just, oh,

we're going to circle the wagons.

We're going to go back here. look at all those

sinners sucks to be them you know that kind

of attitude right i i think that just just

leads to to a failure to to walk into to what the gospel calls us to to be people

who are engaging the world who are witnessing to the world and likewise we could

be people who who get really engaged in the world engage in political call callings

but we lose our distinctly christian Christian flavor.

And that's how we get co-opted. But what we're called to is to do both of these

things, to go into the world, to care about the world, but to care about it

in a distinctly Christian way, to engage in a distinctly Christian way.

We're going to talk about those two other postures that I think that this tension

leads us to that kind of engagement in the world next week.

But it's this thing is that we need to be cautious as believers to hold both

of these things as very important.

We need our distinctiveness, our committedness to the word of God,

our understanding that, hey, no, we're called to a particular way of engaging

the world that's defined by Jesus, his message, his gospel.

And then likewise, we're called to be people who are just getting out there,

putting ourselves selves out there,

willing to engage with people who desperately need to hear the gospel,

desperately need to hear the true story of the world that is revealed in Scripture.

And that's, I mean, so in 1 Peter, Peter is speaking to a group of kind of disaffected Christians.

They're kind of on the outs. They're exiles and strangers, right?

And sometimes, times, honestly, when we live in tension, we start to feel a

little bit like that, right?

Because we're not of this world. And so we don't feel super comfortable in the world.

We're called to go into the world and yet we're not like able to get into deep

into the ways of understanding the world that people who don't know Jesus have.

And so what Peter does is he says, he tries to encourage the believers there in first Peter.

And he says this to them. He says, dear friends, I urge you as strangers and

exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against your soul.

And I would argue that what Peter is saying to them right there is he's saying, hey, look.

Be on guard, and live in the tension well.

If we're going to be people who are leaning into this tension to be sent and

yet distinct, not of this world, but engaging in the world, then I think that

we need to understand that in order to do that, we have to be people who understand

ourselves to be strangers,

exiles, people who aren't a part of this world, but who are watching out for

the sinful desires that wage war against our souls, that wage war against our

particular particular, distinctive way of understanding what it is to be a person in the world.

See, what Peter understood is that people who are called to live in the tension,

being in the world, but not of it, called to faithfulness to the word of God

and not to just the ways of men, people who live in the tension,

they need to take care because it is so easy to get co-opted.

It's so easy to be all about the things of Jesus and then find that,

oh no, No, I just ended up getting sunk into a lesser idea of what is true and

what is right and what is good.

And I think that actually, you know, he says, watch out for the sinful desires

that wage war against the soul.

And I don't have an exhaustive list of what those sinful desires are,

but I do think there are some tension killers.

There are some typical things that come into our lives as political people,

as people who are trying to be engaged in the world and bring about a vision

of what is good and right and consistent with the gospel.

And there are ways that we lose our distinctiveness and lose our sentness into the world.

And they are, I think, yes, these are just ways I think that typically we get co-opted.

They're instead of gospel witness, instead of being committed to this tension,

we end up settling for power and protection.

Instead of tension, gospel witness being sent into the world,

yet not of the world, we end up settling for wealth and comfort.

Instead of living in this tension saying, oh, we're people called to be engaged in the world.

We're loving the world in the name of Jesus and in his way sent into the world.

And yet distinct from it, we end up taking that high calling instead settling

for a lesser purpose and a lesser identity.

I think what Peter is arguing here is that it's so easy for us to have sinful

desires that are waging war against our soul, and they end up robbing us of

our calling to be strangers, exiles, distinct people,

yet into this world, caring about the gospel and advocating for it.

And these tension killers, I mean, these are things that people struggle with

all the time and I struggle with them constantly because the gospel tells me this.

The gospel tells me that I live in a really broken world and every single day

I can wake up and I can read about death and I can read about war and I can

read about bad people who seem to have nuclear devices.

Fun, right? I can read about a culture which identifies Christians and says

those people are hateful, right?

I live in a world where it feels like, to a degree, people are trying to make it...

In different places, it's true. Like, you know, where it can easily be with

that we can perceive that it feels like the world is against us, right?

And so then I have to ask myself, okay, what does the gospel say to me in this moment?

Is the gospel, is it good news because it tells me that I won't ever have to

be persecuted and I won't ever have to feel like I'm on the outs and I won't

ever have to feel vulnerable?

Or is the gospel, does it tell me that I can entrust myself to a God who's at

work in history, who's over it all.

And this world is totally blind to his power and his sovereignty and his grace.

And he's absolutely going to bring about what he wants.

What I would say is, is that when I think about my state in the world,

and I think about the anxieties that I have, and I think about my desires,

my desire to have a comfortable life, to live in a country where I feel comfortable,

to live in a place where I feel I want to have my kids grow up. These are good desires.

These are great things. And what I have to do is I have to decide,

what am I going to do with that?

Am I going to live in the tension that's true of the gospel is that I don't

need to have a kingdom that's of this world because I'm called into a greater kingdom?

See, when I live in that tension, I'm confronting my own desires for power and protection.

And I'm reminding myself, who is God?

Is he powerful enough? Does he truly have the authority that he says he has over everything?

And can I sit in this tension? And can I trust him?

Or should I settle for power and protection?

And I understand that we can sometimes say that, I'm just going to trust God

and it can lead us to disengagement from political things.

But I'm saying, no, we trust God and yet we're also engaged. We're also engaged.

See, I also have this desire. I mean, I have it a lot, especially around here

in this place where, oh man, the most beautiful place in the world,

the most beautiful million dollar homes, like beautiful people, great jobs.

And I look at all the vacations people get, like we were so close to Hawaii.

It's so easy to get to Hawaii, right? And we can get into this way where we

start to believe that, well, what is my life for?

Is my life about getting the most money, having the most stuff,

being the most comfortable?

Because that's the story that the world tells itself. Or am I called to this strange tension?

Am I called actually to what the gospel reveals is that, you know,

there's a greater wealth.

There's a greater joy. There's a greater comfort in the world.

And that is to know the Lord, to trust in him, to walk with him.

To pursue the gospel in the midst of my desire for wealth and comfort,

it leads me into this place of tension.

But unless I press into this place of tension, I am going to be co-opted into

a lesser vision for what life is about.

We do not talk nearly enough about money.

The Bible talks about money a lot. And it doesn't condemn the fact of money,

but it does warn us over and over and over again, how wealth and comfort end up deceiving us.

That the love of money is the root of all evil.

That if we're wealthy in this world, then we're called to give generously in

keeping with the generous provision of God.

We're called to be people who don't just store up more and more and more.

Jesus actually says that when we do that, we're foolish.

We're foolish according to what's It's true.

And that's that God has called us to more.

And so like, it's a tension. It's a very real tension, right?

Because if you live in this area, you probably make a good salary.

And I'm not trying to say, tsk, tsk.

I'm not trying to say that. I mean, like there's just realities.

You get a lot of money coming in, but you got a lot of money going out.

I feel that. I feel that very much.

But of course, as we're engaged in work work.

And as we're looking around and seeing all these people and seeing how happy

they are, it's easy for us to say, I want that.

And what wealth does and what comfort does and the power that comes with great

money is it deceives us because it makes us think that that is what will make for our satisfaction.

If we have enough, if we have more, if we just had a little bit more,

I'd be happy. If we just had a little bit more, I wouldn't be stressed.

If we just had a little bit more. My career would be going good.

You know, my marriage would be worked out and all this stuff.

We can treat wealth as an idol.

It is the age old problem of man.

And when we do, we end up forsaking the gospel.

We end up pursuing wealth and comfort. And you know what? The reality is that

politics is largely about economics.

Most of our partisanship, I

mean, not about the debt. Nobody cares about that. Sorry, that was a joke.

For the most part, if I had to identify a top issue that tends to divide politics,

I mean, I guess there's some social stuff in there, but largely it's about different

economic perspectives, or it was about 10 years ago. I'm not sure if that's

true anymore now that I think about it.

Because you know what? Actually, God cares about the poor, and God cares that

the poor would have enough.

Like, God cares about these things. He cares about the economic situation that

you live in. He cares that actually nations would be prosperous.

That's a good thing. That's a sign of God's blessing, that people would have

enough, that people would be able to provide for themselves.

It matters when we're engaging in political questions that we care about economics a little bit, right?

But it can be very easy to say, what I'm looking for is to create a world that's

fair, where the poor can be looked out for, and where people can provide for

themselves and have enough.

It's very easy to replace that with, what I'm looking for is that I would have

a ton, and to look out for your personal interests, because you've come to love

money and comfort more than you care about, man, what's good for the whole world.

It's easy to replace ultimacy with me and mine, as opposed to what God looks at.

He looks at the whole world and he says, I care about it all. I'm caring for it all.

I'm overseeing it all. And you get to be a part of my bringing about restoration

and beauty into the world.

It can be easy to stop living in that tension where we're called to something

more and look to just our own comfort and our own happiness.

And then the biggest thing that we're all constantly bombarded with is these

questions of purpose and identity.

The gospel tells you what you're for.

You are created for relationship with God. You maybe wake up in the morning,

you say, what's gonna make me happy?

What's gonna satisfy my longings?

Jesus came down and he says, I've come that they might have a life and have it to the fullest.

And he says, if you trust in me, you put your faith in me, you walk according

to my word, you walk in repentance, you press into me, says you're gonna get

the joy and the purpose and the identity that you've been seeking.

And it's in this counterintuitive way. It's not in all the ways that everybody

else is looking for. It's not by belonging to a party.

It's not by having people recognize you and thinking that you're great.

It says, we live in this tension where we hold out for something greater.

Which is God's love and affection and grace.

And we say, God, I'm gonna look past my desires, my immediate desire to be fulfilled

right here in the moment. and I'm going to press into what is ultimate and what is true.

I'm going to lay hold of an identity and a purpose that is greater than just my little world.

I'm going to care about the way that you care about the whole world.

And that's going to actually propel us into politics.

It's going to propel us to be

people who are acting in the world to bring about the good of all people.

It's going to propel us out of our own self-interested, kind of our own self-indulgence

and press us into something greater to be gospel people.

I'll remind you, you know, John 3.16, the worship team is gonna come up here.

John 3.16, we looked at this last year. I think we're just gonna come back to

this over and over and over again, all right?

Because we see this proclamation of the gospel. It's this, God loved the world in this way.

He gave his one and only son so that everyone who believes in him won't perish, but have eternal life.

For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world,

but to save the world through him. and anyone who believes in him is not condemned.

But anyone who does not believe is already condemned because he's not believed

in the name of the one and only son of God.

Every day I have to wake up and every day I have to take an account.

What's on my place? What's on my plate?

What's on my calendar? What are my urgent goals for this day?

And I'll do that tomorrow. And we'll do that the next day and the next day and the next day.

And what I find is this, and I think you probably find it too,

is that as I wake up every day, I let the stuff of this life kind of like grab

my attention, grab my focus, kind of be what defines me.

Unless I take great care to remind myself of the story that I'm actually living

in, this story, the story of God loving the world, sending his only son,

coming down to reveal himself so that people might believe and have have faith

in him and be saved through him to not walk in condemnation anymore,

but have life and peace and joy.

Unless I remind myself of this agenda that God has, because this is his agenda

for the world, to save it, then my agenda starts getting taken up with my priorities.

And so here's what I'm asking you guys to do. As we start to think about,

okay, engaging in the the world and being political.

And this is this is I'm not sure if you've noticed there's an election coming up.

We're right in the heart of it.

And it can be so easy to just get angry.

And it can be so easy to just get so consumed with how dumb the other people are.

It can be so easy to get so concerned and so anxious about the direction of

the world and everything that's going on and all the stuff and like concerned

about, well, are we gonna be okay? And is my family gonna be okay in the long run?

And how are we gonna be, where are we going? What's our future look like?

What is the whole purpose of all this stuff? We need to remind ourselves on

the regular that God has a purpose, that he's doing things in the world.

And so as we go into the world and as we consider how is it that I might engage,

we have to understand God has set the agenda. God has set the agenda.

He's redeeming the world. He's come into the world.

He has a purpose and we need to hold fast to that and watch our hearts because

it's because of this heart. It's like, it's our desires.

It's the things that get into the way of us of seeing and living into what we're called to.

So what I want us to do is we're just going to take some time.

We're going to worship and then I'm going to come back in a little bit.

We're just going to pray. We're just going to go before God.

We're going to take some time to confess.

That's a a really Christian thing to do. I'm not, I'm not going to like hear

your confession. Don't worry.

But God will. We're going to ask him to give us a greater vision,

a greater vision for how we can engage in the world. Okay.

So yeah, let's, let's take some time.