King Jesus

When we accept Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our lives and are born again, we have a new identity, as new creatures in Christ, and a new loyalty - to Jesus as our King. Paul highlights this in 1st Timothy chapter 1:
17 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
18 This charge I commit to you, son Timothy, according to the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you may wage the good warfare,
19 having faith and a good conscience, which some having rejected, concerning the faith have suffered shipwreck...

The enemy is looking for opportunities to shipwreck our faith - it can be through a variety of forms of sin, including misplaced priorities.  We can become so distracted in pursuing the philosophies of this world that we lose sight of how God's Word should govern all the decisions we make and create within us a view of the world, a worldview, which becomes the standard for our thoughts and actions as we relate to the world around us.  We are here to glorify the King, the One true King, ruler of all!

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Paul wrote to Timothy about keeping the proper perspective on the preeminence of our Savior. In 1st 
Timothy 6, he wrote:
13 I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate,
14 that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ's appearing,
15 which He will manifest in His own time, He who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords,
16 who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen.

There seems to be no shortage of material online that examines trends concerning evangelicalism in America.  And, I think it's good to look at ourselves in the Church - but for the sake of actually doing better by better representing Christ.

The journalist and op-ed writer tends to link Christianity to political involvement, but in a reverse way from the way that it not only should be, but that it may actually be.  The journalist and editorialist sees politics as a corrupting force on the Church, whereas the Biblical view is that all we participate in should be in submission to Christ.  Some see evangelical support for certain political candidates as being detrimental to the cause - but you have to wonder, is it that way because people declare it to be or because, in reality, it is?  

This leads to a nice summary piece by Richard Ostling, who has written for a number of publications, including GetReligion.org, where I saw this article.  He has acquired the moniker of "The Religion Guy." At the Get Religion website, Ostling highlighted a recent Meet the Press segment excerpted from a half-hour piece streaming on the Peacock channel about one of the media's seemingly favorite subjects: evangelicals and politics and the connection between them.

As Ostling describes it, the piece visited two churches in Knoxville, Tennessee - one of the churches was portrayed as being more "politically active" than the other, with one pastor stating, "we're trying to not fight the culture wars from the pulpit."

Ostling contends that this sort of posturing is playing out throughout the evangelical world, as evidenced by recent articles that have been written on major websites. He referred to a couple of pieces he had written exploring "...evangelicalism's growing internal rancor and the breach between grassroots populists and the 'elite' leadership's neutrality or hostility on the Trump phenomenon," a reference to the support that the former President received from evangelicals. Ostling, the self-styled Religion Guy noted that recently, an "odd new dispute has broken out in elite ranks that involves opinion pieces from two evangelical Trump critics."  He also linked those two pieces to an op-ed at The American Conservative, in which the authors said, "over the last year, the division between evangelicals and their leadership has only grown, raising the question of who is driving the movement..." This, according to the Guy, has produced "an identity 'crisis.'"

The division, as highlighted in these stories, seems to be centered on, as one group of writers said, "cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion." In other words, as the former editor of a major Christian publication wrote recently, the publication was "all too anxious to win accolades from opinion-makers in a secularizing American culture who are anything but friendly toward conservative Christianity."  Can you say "people-pleasers?"

One of those indicted "people-pleasers," according to Ostling, has ramped up the rhetoric, writing about "reactionary politics and intolerant anti-woke militancy" within the Church, declaring, "A godless and hateful movement is taking root in all too many pews, often (and perversely) spread in the name of Christ."

We certainly have to be careful that we are not replacing Biblical fidelity with unhealthy political fealty.  Our political allegiances should be submitted to the Lordship, or Kingship of Christ.  Some would say that Christians should possess no political loyalties; I would contend that our loyalty should be to the truth - and those in the public square who uphold it, as long as they uphold it.

But, we ignore the cultural trends that are undermining our society at our peril.  As long as there is a spiritual battle going on, it will be expressed through what is commonly termed the "culture war." A big question is whether or not we are going to be so busy fighting each other as believers and over-analyzing political choices to the point that we do not discern and counter the activity of the true enemy who is infiltrating hearts and minds with ideas that do not line up with a Biblical perspective. 

But we have to learn to fight well, using Biblical methods.  We are not called to be so combative in our culture that we undermine the power of the message.  We are called, as Ephesians 4 directs us, to speak truth, but to speak truth with love.  Love is not compromising, love is not virtue-signaling, and it's certainly not staking out ground that marginalizes those that do not agree.  The gospel grows in soil that is tendered by compassion and conviction - we can declare Jesus in a manner that welcomes others to experience His love and truth.