8/6/2025

I’ve had two conversations recently that began with a question like, “can you tell me something good to make me believe the USA isn’t on fire and going to hell in a hand basket?” 

And my answer? “As a matter of fact, I can. The church is still the church, planting little colonies of heaven wherever they live. That’s the good news.” 

I can’t do much about what’s happening on the national scene, much less on the greater world stage. I can vote, but what’s my vote among the 156,302,317 other votes cast? 

Don’t get me wrong! I absolutely believe it is important for an American to exercise their right to vote. At the same time, it’s important to remember that as a Christian American (notice the word order - that’s important! We are Christians who happen to be Americans) voting is not the end of our contributions! 

You might be thrilled with what the current occupant in the White House is doing or you might be appalled. 

Fine. 

Either way, what are YOU doing to make a difference?

A question I’ve asked several times over the past year is, “Why did God save us?” Of course, the first answer is God saves us because God loves us. But there’s another part as well: God saves us because he has a job for us to do. God is reclaiming and rebuilding this fallen world — this world that has been trashed by the Dragon and has been cluttered up and marred by the likes of the Beast and his followers — and God is recruiting us in this rebuilding program. And this is true no matter what country we live in. 

The good news of the gospel is that the kingdom of God has come near (Mark 1:15). One of the problems of those who speculate about Revelation is they look forward to a future antichrist (a word, I remind you, that doesn’t appear in the book of Revelation), or a future Babylon, and they fail to see the signs of Babylon and the Dragon’s works right before their eyes. 

The same is true with the kingdom of God. We can look for a future kingdom when God’s kingdom is right here and has been since Jesus walked the earth. 

Jesus didn’t just preach the gospel; Jesus embodied it. Wherever Jesus went, the kingdom of God went. The clearest way to see that is the way Jesus ate with sinners (and I’ll be preaching on this later this month and in September). Jesus invited to his table all sorts of people that the religious leaders of his day would have shut out. But that’s why Jesus came: to seek and save the lost. 

Another way Jesus embodied the kingdom was through his miracles.

Everytime Jesus healed a cripple or a blind person, it was a sign of the inbreaking kingdom of God — all these things (including eating with the deplorables of his day) were things the prophets said would happen when the kingdom of God arrived. 

The German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann argued that miracles were not an intrusion into the natural order, but the healing of it. Living in Babylon like we do, we’ve become so used to sin and sickness and injustice and chaos, that we think THAT is the normal order of life — we forget that sin, sickness and all the rest are the intruders into God’s good world. Moltmann wrote, “When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God to which the healings witness, restores creation to health. Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly "natural" thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.” 

Our task, as citizens of the God’s kingdom — and remember Paul’s words in Philippians, “our citizenship is in heaven” — is to do the same. Just as Jesus embodied the kingdom of God, we too embody it.

We might not be able to make a difference on the national stage, but thank the good Lord, my influence on the future of the country (and of the world) is not limited to my one vote. I vote, yes, but more importantly (and more lastingly . . . my vote’s only good for 4 years!) I also work to colonize my world for heaven. 

What does that look like? It’s going to be different for everyone. We give to LCCI, and that’s a great way to make a difference for the kingdom. If you have time, you can actually volunteer there, which gives you an opportunity to make a personal contact with those in need. There are other opportunities in our community. Several of us volunteer or have volunteered at Learn to Read, and there are many opportunities there. For any of you men who are free and interested, I lead a men’s Bible study for some former prisoners, and I’d be glad to talk to you about it. 

But making a difference doesn’t have to be any of those. Invite someone over for dinner (or take them out). Be a Christian friend to a difficult neighbor (that’s the one I’m struggling with). 

My point is that despite what appears to be going on in the world around us, we can put our heads down and plow forward, taking the good news of the kingdom into the world around us by actually being the kingdom. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry