Faith, Politics, and the Power of the Gospel

Why settle for a lesser kingdom? The only power to change a life is the gospel of Jesus Christ. We all know stories about people whose worldview is changed after they've been transformed by the renewing of their minds, and the best person to do that is Jesus of Nazareth, not Limbaugh of West Palm Beach, who I love, who I love, and I listen to, or Hannity of New York, or Levin of Leesburg, Virginia, but, Jesus of Nazareth. He's the only one who can really transform. [00:58:37]

However – however – there is a dimension that we get from Scripture where the church is called not to be the state, but is to be involved from time to time in prophetic criticism. We see it in the case of the Old Testament prophets, where they had to – they had to criticize the king in the case of Naboth’s vineyard that was taken by Ahab and the prophet rebuked him. We see it in the beginning of New Testament when John the Baptist loses his head because he publicly criticizes the immorality of the king. [02:13:59]

And there’re times when the application of Scripture demands that we say something to our congregations. That our congregations might understand the ethical issues that’re involved in certain political environments. I’m the last guy that's involved in the political realm as you all know. But there are times, I mean, we have to say something about abortion. We have to say – call the state to be the state, that the state’s very raison d'être in the first place is to protect, sustain, and maintain the sanctity of human life. [03:26:70]

The disastrous thing that sometimes happens is when we make the responsibility of the ministers of God in the realm of politics the hermeneutic by which we expound Scripture. There are bound to be times, as R.C. has said, when simply in the course of feeding our people from the Word of God, the Word of God impinges not just on our church life, but on our life in the world. And it's appropriate then, I think, for the Scriptures to be expounded. [05:29:36]

The right context for civil disobedience is civil obedience. I'm not suggesting this questioner is coming from this point of view, but often that question is asked from a very different heart perspective, from the perspective of civil obedience, that as a Christian my responsibility and privilege is to yield to the powers that be. And I mean to do that because I want to yield to Jesus Christ. [13:16:48]

The early church was exceedingly scrupulous on this matter. Justin Martyr’s “Apologia” in the second century – an appeal to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius – pointed to this exceptional level of civil obedience that the Christian community gave, except at those places where the government required the Christian to do something that God did not allow them to do. [11:13:54]

Revival is about His church not the world. You can go and apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a corpse, your technique may be perfect, but the guy is still going to be dead. So, if you go back and read the “History of Revivals in America” by J. Edwin Orr, a magnificent book – each of the three or four – if you want to count the one before 1776. The major one was 1857, I think – they all began in what he called a “Concert of Prayer.” [17:10:30]

Now, we all give lip service to prayer, and we've heard about prayer, and Jesus went away and prayed for extended periods of time, and if He needed to pray for extended periods of time considering who He was, and He – you’d have to say direct link He had with the Father, unique relationship, then why don’t we do more of that? You hear somebody who’s ill, and you'll hear someone else respond: “All I can do is pray,” as if it was a last resort and not a first resource. [17:46:11]

1 John also speaks of an external witness, that, there in 1 John, are eight or nine evidences of the new birth. This is not a multiple choice that three out of the nine would be seen in your life, but that across the board there would be a dramatic change, progressively, yet nevertheless decisively in a person's life. If anyone be in Christ, he’s a new creature. The old things passed away, behold new things have come. [45:14:94]

And of course, there is the confidence in the Word of God that says “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved,” and have I truly repented of my sins and believed upon the Lord Jesus Christ with an understanding that He died in the place of sinners and the finality of His death to be the perfect atonement for all who put their trust and faith in Him. [46:43:03]

So, I think that that is the foundation of how I can know – have the assurance of salvation. But last sentence, I do want to underscore that it's an inside work of the Holy Spirit of God in the heart. It doesn’t really, at the end of the day, matter if the evangelist signed the back of your Bible and you put the date in it. It doesn't really matter what mom and dad had to say. I mean, in your heart of hearts and in your soul of souls, does the Holy Spirit indwell me and does He persuade me that I belong to Christ? [47:44:86]

If we understand what happens in our salvation, you know that if you're unregenerate, you not only have no affection for the biblical Christ, but you can't possibly have any affection for the biblical Christ. So, if you have any real affection for the biblical Jesus, that is an indication that God the Holy Spirit has changed the disposition of your heart. And if you understand that only the Holy Spirit changes the disposition of the human heart – and He only does that in the case of the elect – and if you're a Calvinist, you have every – and you have a sound theology of salvation, then it’s easy to come to a clear, biblical understanding of the assurance of it. [49:50:58]