Jay’s Blog – Time to Go to Work

As I spoke with most of my Christian friends who voted one way or another, I was encouraged to hear that most of them voted for people they believed most aligned with the direction they wanted our country, state, or community to go socially, morally, and spiritually. Whether or not the person they voted for represented those morals in their personal lives, most of my friends voted for policies they thought best represented the desired direction.

While I appreciate these sentiments, hopefully, most of us realize that the ability of any politician or government official to effectuate God’s kingdom—a society of perfect mercy, truth, justice, and love—is impossible. And even though prayerfully and thoughtfully exercising our voting rights is one of the important things good citizens of our society do, it’s only the tip of the iceberg in bringing about God’s kingdom.

It’s not that I don’t like or trust government or politics. I do, and I have several good friends who love Jesus and are officeholders. But expecting the political process, politicians, and government to regulate and further our culture’s moral or spiritual flourishing is like using a hammer to tighten a screw. It’s the wrong tool for the job, and we shouldn’t think we’ve “saved our country” for the good in this sense by electing the “correct” officials. We haven’t finished the job at the voting booth. We don’t even begin there.

As I was reading Scripture the other day in the wake of the election, God put Isaiah 61:1-4 on my heart. This is the famous passage that Jesus reads from in the synagogue as he begins his earthly ministry, saying, “Today this passage has been fulfilled in your hearing,” meaning, “I’ve come to fulfill it.” Jesus reads:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to grant to those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.
They shall build up the ancient ruins;
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.

One remarkable thing about this passage is that this is the gospel as Jesus described it. Pastor and author John Mark Comer has noted that, so often, we reduce the gospel message to “invite Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior, and you will go to heaven when you die.” While this message is valid, it is only an extremely limited perspective of the wholeness of Christ’s restorative message through the gospel. The whole gospel is what we’ll sing here in a month or so when Handel’s Messiah begins playing in our homes and churches: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.” (Rev. 11).

As I meditated over Isaiah 61, what jumped out at me is that Christ the Messiah comes to heal and to restore—he comes to bring us “the oil of gladness instead of mourning” and “the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;—in other words, he comes to transform his people, to make them something other, something more than they were before. To transform them, as Isaiah says, into “oaks of righteousness” and “the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified—a people of freedom, comfort, fruitfulness, justice, and joy, firmly rooted in the Lord, restored in him, and loved by him. That is who we are and who we are becoming by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us. Christ brings the kingdom of God into our hearts, renewing us and pushing back what was broken and dead. We are made new.

But we don’t become these things for our own self-actualization, our own therapeutic health, or selfish gain. Instead, we are changed for a real, noble, and broader purpose. As Isaiah says, to “build up ancient ruins,” “raise up the former devastations,” “repair the ruined cities, the devastation of many generations; To make dead things new, restore the brokenness around us, and invite others into a new life in him.

God never set it up so that the moral and spiritual flourishing of our land and our people would come through government. On the contrary, as John Adams famously said in 1798, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” The successful operation of our system of government presupposes that its people will govern themselves according to moral and religious principles. It does not purport to establish or enforce those principles for them or to foster those principles in its people. Some public policies are more moral than others, but we make a grievous error when we think electing the right people is the way to make our country or our culture more moral.

Any of us who have been around long enough to have seen the attempts of government to limit and define marriage in the 1990s can attest to the difficulty and near futility of legislating morality. There are lots of reasons for this; many Americans aren’t followers of Jesus and aren’t governed by the Holy Spirit. Some (very few) don’t even ascribe to a Judeo-Christian sense of morality because they’re not from a culture steeped in that moral tradition. Fallible, broken human beings operate governments and, therefore, are broken themselves, always subject to the press of cultural and popular opinion. All human laws can do is act to restrain people from their evil instincts.

At the end of the day, God has worked so that the moral and spiritual flourishing of our society and its people is, frankly, up to us, empowered by the Spirit and God. The salvation and restoration of the world and its redemption is and has always come through Christ, working through his people. As Paul David Tripp says, “Being in a church or Christian community isn’t like attending a concert or a therapy group. God has not revealed his truth to us so that we can be the audience, a viewer of the work of redemption. God has called all his children to participate in the work of his kingdom. Everyone has been brought into relationship with Jesus Christ to be drafted into the ministry of Jesus. He means to employ all of us in the work of redemption.”

God has created, called, and gathered us to heal physical, spiritual, and emotional pain, deliverance from the power of evil, speak words of truth and life into the darkness, and effectuate justice—making wrong things right and crooked things straight. We do this every day, collectively, as the body of Christ, through the passions and power God has given us.

Fall in Tyler is banquet season; like you, I attend many of these events. They present opportunities to be reminded of the many ways God works in our community through his people and how he is using them to push back the darkness and transform lives dramatically. But he doesn’t only work through organizations; he probably doesn’t work primarily through them. God’s greatest kingdom work is through us and our daily callings, doing what he’s impassioned and created us to do. My work is educating his kids, equipping their leaders, and encouraging his people. Yours may also be educating people, creating new businesses, healing people, advocating for people navigating through the justice system, or helping them manage their finances so they can be wise stewards of what God has given them. Or maybe it’s creating a beautiful home and raising beautiful image- bearers of God.

No matter what God has called you to, when you do it with excellence, in his name, and with love, you push back the darkness and act as a signpost of righteousness, pointing a hurting world to the way things were created to be and will be again. Teresa of Avila reminds us: Christ has no body on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassionately on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

When we all get to work together as the body of Jesus, empowered by his Spirit and in his name, we’re the ones who make the world great again, the only ones who can. Because our Father is the Great Redeemer, and we are his children.