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by
Andy Stanley
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August 7 - August 19, 2023
Uncertainty doesn’t alter our value system. It exposes it. Without any effort on our part, what’s really most important surfaces immediately. In seasons of uncertainty, we discover what we value most. Uncertainty and the fear that follows close behind strip away the veneer and reveal what’s hidden beneath the surface.
Our response to the events of 2020 simply confirmed their suspicions—namely, that once you scratch off the veneer of our sermons and songs, we value what everybody else does. And what does the evangelical church in America value most? Winning. What do we fear? Losing. Not winning or losing souls. We systematically alienated more than half the souls in America through our un-Christlike rhetoric and fear-based posturing.
Christians were viewed as threats to the state not because of what they believed. Christians were viewed as threats to the state because of who they chose to obey.
When a local church becomes preoccupied with saving America at the expense of saving Americans, it has forsaken its mission.
Saving America is not the mission of the church. The moment our love or concern for country takes precedence over our love for the people in our country, we are off mission. When saving America diverts energy, focus, and reputation away from saving Americans, we no longer qualify as the ekklesia of Jesus. We’re merely political tools. A manipulated voting demographic. A photo op. Again, we lose our elevated position as the conscience of the nation. We give up the moral and ethical high ground.
fear entices us to place our faith in the person, party, or platform that promises to protect us from whatever they’ve convinced us we should fear.
“Any admonition that declares that we must rule should be checked with the immediate reminder that Christ did not. It is the cross—not the boardroom, not the Oval Office, and not the box office—that is the absolute center of the Kingdom of God.”
But the dirty little secret of culture war advocates, both religious and nonreligious, is that they cannot afford to claim victory, or they lose followers and funding. So both sides claim to be losing. That’s how they win.
Both sides of any culture war conflict need an enemy to survive. They need an enemy to exist.
Jesus knew what we can’t seem to get our heads around: that when the church chooses a side, as defined by any political party, we’ve sided against people on the other side. In that moment, we elevate our potentially flawed views over people. For Jesus, a you always took precedence over a view.
Our faith is not an ornament. It’s not an adjective. There are no Christian Republicans. There are no Christian Democrats. You can’t have two masters. Having two masters didn’t work in the first century. And it doesn’t work now.
Are you more concerned about your kid’s political views or their faith?
The moment we become so myopic as to allow a single moment to cancel the work and accomplishments of a lifetime, we have embraced a standard to which we hope never to be held accountable ourselves. Which makes us hypocrites. We expect grace and forgiveness for our indiscretions while having predecided not to extend the same to others.
Both sides quote Jesus when it serves their purposes. But neither side is committed to the purposes of Jesus.
Jesus is not a footnote in a political platform. He did not come to support or refine an existing political system or world order. He came to replace what was in place. He came to cancel sin and to restore men and women of all nations and all political persuasions to himself. When we reimagine Jesus to fit our partisan agendas, we rob the world of the message that changed the world. We cancel the message that canceled our sin.
In 2018, Bart Ehrman published The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World.
The Roman legions were efficient and merciless in their role as peacekeepers. Jesus would instruct his followers to be peacemakers.18 In the end, he would serve as the ultimate peacemaker by making peace between the Father and his rebel race. His prodigal sons and daughters. His lost sheep. His misplaced coins. His enemies.
How we treat, talk about, respond to, and care for one another is the identifying mark of a genuine Jesus follower. Not what we believe.
The litmus test for being a card-carrying Jesus follower involved nothing even remotely religious. It was relational. It had nothing to do with how one treated God. It had everything to do with how one treated others.
Apparently second-century Jesus followers understood how to mind their own business in a way that made people curious about the business they were minding. They were so curious, they eventually embraced this new “superstition.”
Fundamental attribution error describes our tendency to attribute people’s behavior to their character, while attributing our behavior to our circumstances.
Fundamental attribution error happens when we assume someone’s actions reflect the kind of person they are rather than circumstances they’re navigating.
Are you willing to follow Jesus if doing so requires you to reject portions of your party’s platform? To take it a step further, are you willing to speak up when following Jesus puts you at odds with the views, the tone, or the decisions of your party or your party’s candidate of choice? Locally or nationally?
But follow Jesus though the Gospels and you’ll discover that the kingdom he introduced and invited us to participate in is a kingdom characterized by public behavior, not private belief.
The world will know whose we are and whose kingdom we represent by how we treat, respond to, serve, forgive, and talk about one another. Do you know how many times the term faith appears in the Sermon on the Mount? Exactly one time. The Sermon on the Mount is not a treatise on what Jesus followers should believe. It’s a vision cast for how we should behave, how we should respond, and what to expect along the way.
Reducing faith to a list of beliefs frees us to slander people we don’t align with politically. It gives us license to mock, jeer, and celebrate the failure of people whose views differ from ours. If your version of Christianity leaves the door open to those behaviors, you’re nothing like your Father in heaven. And you’re nothing like his Son.
If what was most important to Jesus is not most important, or at least somewhat important, to us . . . we’re probably not followers. Users perhaps. But not followers.
The enemy of the church is not the other political party. The enemy of the church is division.
Your party will win or lose based on voter turnout on a given Tuesday in November. The church will win or lose—our communities will win or lose—based on our response to Jesus’s new-covenant command and our refusal to let anything or anyone divide us.
Jesus was not at war with anyone. The church is his body. So it stands to reason that the church is not at war with anyone.
Bad church experiences are almost always related to somebody taking a stand that leaves them standing on someone. Most bad church experiences are the result of somebody prioritizing a view over a you—something Jesus never did and instructed us not to do either.
God played by the rules of the kingdoms of this world to usher in a kingdom not of this world through a covenant that stands as an invitation to everyone in the world. It’s what makes the story of the exodus epic. YHWH spoke and acted in a way Pharaoh could understand and used the only things an Egyptian pharaoh would understand—power and violence.
We should look for feet to wash, not a war to fight.
The self-serving, self-preserving, culture-warrior posture that characterizes certain streams of evangelicalism today stands in sharp and disappointing contrast with the new-covenant behavior that characterized the early church. Believing has become a substitute for following. We’ve been so focused on not substituting works for faith that many of us have quit working. Or in Paul’s words, we quit working out our faith.1 Authentic faith does stuff.
Faith that doesn’t do good is no good.
The division currently tearing churches, friends, and families apart isn't fueled by a lack of respect for our infallible text. Division begins with our less-than-infallible applications of the text.
Our actions and reactions undermine the credibility of our faith claims. Outsiders aren’t about to take our faith seriously as long as they wonder if we do. If Paul is correct, if we aren’t shining, we aren’t doing it right. We aren’t applying our faith right. We aren’t applying it as directed.
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and believe in me.” Nope. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.32
Much of Jesus’s teaching was actionable. But his action items were simply applications of his new-covenant command. For example, removing the log out of your eye before pointing out the speck in your brother’s eye is how you love your brother. Leaving your pigeon at the altar while you return home to make things right with your sister is how you love your sister. Loving your enemy is, well, loving your enemy.
What you stare at determines what you gravitate toward. Our division is proof that we’re not all staring—and thus not moving—in the same direction. Our eyes are fixed on something. But it ain’t what the author of Hebrews suggests. Our eyes have been fixed on winning. Winning fueled by fear of losing our freedom. Losing our rights. Losing our country. And if we continue moving in our current divided direction, our misplaced fear will fuel what we fear most. We could lose all the aforementioned. We have lost our fear of division, and consequently, we have lost our voice and our influence. Thus,
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Our responses to the world around us have been prescribed to us and modeled for us by our Savior. As followers, we have a responsibility. Left and Right. Black, Brown, and White. We, collectively, have a responsibility. The good news is, it’s not our responsibility to solve the world’s problems. We will never agree on how to solve the world’s problems. Or our nation’s problems. Let’s be honest. Some of us can’t solve our own problems.
Jesus refused to address the system because he came to address something else—the hearts behind the systems. The hearts that created, defended, and profited off the system.
Everything that disturbs you about America originated in the hearts of Americans.
Everything that disturbs you about the United States emanates from the sinful, selfish, self-centered, appetite-fueled, fear-driven condition of the human heart. Our government can protect us from it. But our government is powerless to do anything about it. No system of government, no political platform, no bill, law, or mandate can change a human heart.
Nothing highlights the garbage collecting in the recesses of our hearts faster than holding our actions and reactions up against Jesus’s command to love as he loved. Nothing clarifies where we are, where we aren’t, and where we should be with more precision than asking, What does Jesus’s love for me require of me?
Perhaps we should pause for a moment and let that sink in. Jesus got down on his knees in front of Judas and washed his feet.
You can’t wash feet from a distance. You can’t wash feet from an elevated position. You can’t even wash feet eye to eye.
We can—we must—wash one another’s feet knowing that they will, in fact, get dirty again. Washing feet doesn’t solve problems. But it keeps us close.
Jesus said we are the light of the world, not the US Congress. We are a city on a hill, not the United States of America. We are the salt of the earth. We are the body of Christ. The hands and feet of Jesus. Jesus, who did not come to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many. Jesus, who refused to be appropriated by a party so he could address the hearts of people in both parties. Jesus, who stopped to listen, paused to heal, and gave his life for the very men who took it.
