Spiritual Interactions (15) Kingdom Come

When Jesus was teaching his disciples to pray, he taught them how to pray in the Kingdom of God.

Your will be done in the earthly realms,
as it is done in the spiritual realms (Matt 6:10).

In the spiritual realms, the angels rush to do the Father’s will (Ps 103:20). The kingdom comes on earth when people rush to do his bidding in the same way as the angel in the spiritual realms. When the Holy Spirit prompts and people follow his guidance, the kingdom will come.

Paul said the same thing in a different way when he explained that God’s goal for history is for there to be unity between the spiritual and physical realms.

He made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfilment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ (Eph 1:9-10).

When the times are fulfilled, things in both the spiritual and the physical realms will come into unity by being submitted to Jesus. His kingdom will have come when all authority in heaven and on earth has been brought back under him.

I often hear Christians say that they are going to change, because God has released angel of victory, or has opened the windows of heaven. Yet nothing really changes. These voices are confused, because they do not understand that God does not have a free hand to do what he likes on earth. He has given authority on earth to humans. He has provided everything we need through the cross and the Spirit. He needs humans with authority to release him to deliver what Jesus established.

I will explain some of the Big Authority Shifts in the next few posts. I will show have humans gave God authority to carry out his will on earth.

To Change the World (3)

Hunter suggests that Christians hold a flawed theology of power.

The politicisation of everything is an indirect measure of the loss of a common culture and, in turn, the competition among factions to dominate others on their own terms. Our times amply demonstrate that is far easier to force one’s will on others though legal and political means or to threatened to do so than it is to persuade them or negotiate compromise with them (p.107).

World changing implies power and the implicit theories of power that have long guided their exercise of power is still influenced by Constantinian tendencies towards conquest and domination…. Thus it is not surprising that, in conformity to the spirit of the modern age, Christians conceive of power as political power. Christians, like most modern people, have politicized every aspect of public life and private life as well-from church/state issues, education, the media, entertainment and the arts, and the environment to family values, sexuality, and parenting. In this, they mistakenly imagine that to pass a referendum, elect a candidate, pass a law, or change a policy is to change culture. (p.275)

We need a new language for how the church engages the culture. It is essential to abandon altogether talk of “redeeming the culture”, “advancing the kingdom” “building the kingdom,” “transforming the world” “reclaiming the culture,” “reforming the culture” and “changing the world”. Christians need to leave such language behind them, because it carries too much weight. It implies conquest, takeover, or dominion, which in my view is precisely what God does not call us to pursue—at least not in any conventional, twentieth-or twenty-first century way of understanding these terms.

It isn’t just the Constantinian temptation the church must repudiate, but more significantly, the orientation towards power that underwrites it. The proclivity towards domination and toward the politicization of everything leads Christianity today to bizarre turns; turns that, in my view, transform much of the Christian public witness into the very opposite of the witness Christianity is supposed to offer. (p.280).

Jesus had a different approach to power (Matt 5:42-44).We need a new philosophy of power.

To Change the World (2)

Hunter also challenges the idea that politics are the key to change. He actually suggests that politicization of the whole of life is a significant part of the problem.

Politics has become so central in our time that institutions, groups and issues are now defined relative to the state, its laws and procedures… In short, the state has increasingly become the incarnation of the public weal. Its laws, policies and procedures have become the predominant framework by which we understand collective life, its members, its leading organisations, its problem and its issues.

There are other forces that frame common life as well—most notably the ubiquitous market—but these are not autonomous from the state, but linked integrally with its extensive instrumentalities. This is the heart of politicisation and it has gone far as to affect our language, imagination, and expectations. The language of politics (and economy) comes to frame progressively more of our understanding of our common life, our public purposes, and ourselves individually and collectively.

Given this turn, it is hardly surprising that the language of partisan politics has come to shape how we understand others. …..Taken to extreme, identity becomes so tightly linked with ideology, that partisan commitment becomes a measure of their moral significance, of whether a person is judged good or bad. This is the face of identity politics (p.103).

If Hunter's view is correct, most of the efforts to bring change through the political process are wasted.

To Change the World (1)

I have just finished reading To Change the World by James Davison Hunter. The subtitle of the book is The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the late Modern world. This is a really important book. I would urge anyone who is interested in making a difference in the world to read it.

Hunter challenges the common view among Christians that if we change the way people think then the world will be transformed. He explains why culture is difficult change and suggests that most Christian efforts to change the world will fail, because Christians do not understand the way that culture changes.

The first problem is that the implicit social theory that guides so much of their efforts is deeply flawed. Christians from many different traditions tend to believer that cultures are shaped from the cumulative values and beliefs that they hold. This is why Christians often pursue social change through evangelism, civic renewal through populist social moments, and democratic political action (where every vote reflects values.

The evidence of history and sociology demonstrates that this theory of culture and cultural change is simply wrong and for this reason, every initiative based on this perspective will fail to achieve the goals it hopes to meet. This is not to say that the hearts and minds of ordinary people are unimportant. To the contrary. Rather the hearts and minds of ordinary people are only relatively insignificant if the goal is to change cultures at their deepest levels.

Cultural change at its most profound level occurs through dense networks of elites operating in common purpose within institutions at the high prestige centres of culture production. In light of this, the cultural economy of contemporary Christianity is strongest, in the main, where cultural leverage is weakest on the social periphery, rather than the cultural center and in tastes that run to the lower middle and middle brow rather than the high brow. The idea that significant number of Christian are operating in the hall so power” in ways that thoughtful and strategic, then is simply ludicrous.

Christianity in North American and the West more generally is weak culture. Weak insofar as it is fragmented in its core beliefs and organisation, with a coherent collective identify and mission, and often divided within itself, often with unabated hostility. Thus for all the talk of world-changing and all of the good intentions that motivate it, the Christian community is not, on the whole, remotely close to a position where it could actually change the world in any significant way (pp.273-274).

Changing the World (3) - Locality by Locality

The Holy Spirit also works household by household. When Jesus commissioned his disciples, he sent them to a particular place, and urged them to focus on one household.

When you enter a house…. Stay in that house ... Do not move around from house to house (Luke 10:6,7).

The good news will spread from one household to the next.
When a group of Christians are established in a particular locality their effectiveness will be multiplied. They will form a community where the Kingdom God can be manifested.

• The stronger will encourage the weak
• The gifts of the Spirit will flow.
• Tens and Hundreds will form
• Justice will be administered
• Welfare will be provided
• People will be protected.
• A different lifestyle will be demonstrated
• The glory of God will be revealed.

The Kingdom of God will advance locality by locality.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough (Matt 13:33).

Each new locality will be a beachhead from which the Kingdom of God can be slowly expanded out into another neighbourhood.

Changing the World (2) - Bottom-up

Jesus changes the world from the bottom up, one person at a time.

God created a perfect world. Things went wrong when sin came into the world. All the problems of the world begin in human hearts. The only really effective way to change the world is to repair the hearts of the people who cause the problem. Jesus death and resurrection make this possible. The gospel is the good news that can change the world.

When a person believes in Jesus, three things are now possible.

• The Holy Spirit can work in their hearts

• The influence of evil spirits can be eliminated

• Emotional hurts can be healed.

• The mind of Christ can emerge

As human hearts are changed, the world will be improved from the bottom up.

Jesus said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the one who rules should be like the one who serves (Luke 22:25-26).

Changing the World (1)

Everybody wants to change the world. The world is not as good as we would like it to be, so we all want to make it better. This is an important question. How should the world be changed?

There are two ways to change the world.

1. From the top down
2. From the bottom up.

Top Down Change
Most modern attempts to improve the world use top-down change. Most modern attempts to change the world use political power in its various forms.

• Starting a new political party
• Changing the policies of the main political parties
• Elect a new president
• Elect better people to parliament
• Support the Christian Right
• Legislate better laws
• Pass more laws
• Stiffer penalties
• Three strikes and you are out
• Establish a new commission
• Establish a new department of state
• Develop new government programs
• Develop institutions for change
• Join the revolution
• Shoot the powerful people
• Overthrow the government
• Let the people size power

All of these solutions represent change from the top. All have been tried in different place at different times, and all have failed. People do not like be controlled, so they resist change imposed from the top.