The Kingdom

For days I thought of nothing but Amendment One. The only thing that really was a factor in my vote was separation of Church and State. Here’s the thing. I hold God’s law and the order God set about in creation as the highest law and the highest order – the highest of which stated by Jesus,”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Yet I know my proper place in that law and order. I am to live in obedience and love. I am to plead for the blood of Jesus to cover my failure to obey his law in every minute and every breath of my live. I am to live in the joy of redemption and seek to bring that to others. That is all. I am not to champion the Law but Jesus who is the fulfillment of the law. When we look into the eyes of Jesus and read his words and life, we are faced with his perfection and the broken condition of our hearts.

Observing the political field and the role Christian leaders have played in it, it appears that they faultily believe that the United States of America is the Kingdom of God and it is their role to preserve the shred of morality that remains. It is clear in Romans that there is absolutely nothing redeeming about us. Note that this verse isn’t talking about those other sinners but about mankind – about all of us.

Romans 8: 28-32
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

We fight culture wars and do battle on sin forgetting that Jesus has already won the battle on the Cross. God’s Kingdom is ushered in by the Gospel of Jesus, by that smaller-than-a-mustard seed of faith he plants in our hearts. His Kingdom is here now, and yet it is coming. It is coming to a broken world, to a lost people, to the heartsick, broken and lonely. To those of us who’ve lived life shaking our fists at the sky in irreverent malice claiming our ways are better than God’s, claiming to be higher than God. It comes to us who in our own perceived enlightenment spit in the faces of those we find ignorant. It comes to our own hypocritical, judgmental, moral yet completely hateful hearts. It comes to those of us who call on the name of Jesus yet live every day still trying to earn our own salvation.

And when that Kingdom comes, we fall on our faces. There is no other recourse. We weep for those we’ve hated. We weep for the lost. We weep for the injustices done to ourselves and others. We weep for his sweet salvation, his precious pure life that exchanges itself for ours. And then the Lord says, “Pick up your mat and walk. I have told you, child, what is good; and what do I require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with with Me, your God?”