Should Christians Be Involved In Politics?

Old Fashion Dad Podcast

This week we get fired up about politics. We talk social justice, the purpose of government, rail against the worldview of BLM and emphasize the importance of making God and scripture our highest authority, so He can inform our engagement with culture and not the other way around, where we are seeing a lot of Christian's trying to conform God into this world's image.

NOTES:

•This Weeks Whiskey: Don Julio Tequila

•What are politics and what is the purpose of Government?

•Politics are one aspect of our Culture... Culture drives politics and policies

•What is culture and why does God care about Culture? He established our calling to cultivate creation in Genesis, with Adam's mandate to have dominion over the garden, animals and all of God's creation - to take the untapped potential God created and cultivate it into something more.

•America's government and politics (self-governed by a constitutional republic & embrace of democracy) is very unique historically, when compared to the rest of the world

• People are corrupt and sinful, therefore government will be imperfect and corrupt (to an extent)

•As Christian's, politics will not save us through their policies or politicians who better represent our worldview.

•A decline in cultural morality and social norms will not be reversed through politics, because politics is down-stream from culture.

•America has historically been a light in the world when it came to foreign policy, standing up for what is right and getting involved in helping out other countries in times of need, both militarily and with food/financial aid.

•As Christian's, God calls us to create culture and cultivate God's creation.

•At a minimum, Christian's should be involved in politics by being informed voters. Voting for people and policies that are most in-line with what God loves, opposed to what God hates and will encourage for human flourishing.

•The first organization & structure that God created was the family and that is our primary calling in this world, the foundation for society and all else flows out of that. We are called to be good workers and stewards of God's creation and that includes some of us being called to love and glorify God in politics.

•We need to have and keep God's word as our highest authority and resist the temptation to engage the world on their terms. It should be deeply problematic for us if our churches (or us) spend more time talking about "social Justice" and cultural trends than they do about the Gospel. We need to understand that supporting or parroting talking points of organizations like Black Lives Matter (BLM), sets us against God because they are based on an alternative world view to how God has established his created order.

•When culture starts influencing us more than our relationship with Christ & we start bending scripture and our image of Jesus to better fit into what our culture says is acceptable... we are going down the wrong road.

•Scripture should be influencing our engagement with culture, not the other way around.

•You can't fight discrimination and racism with more discrimination and racism. You can't fight injustice with more injustice.

• 1 Timothy 4 talks about the sin of "Partiality", favoring one group of people over another. God has very strong words against those that show partiality towards others, no matter what the motive or wrong they claim they are trying to right.

•God created us to give Glory back to God and a large part of that is loving what God loves and hating what God hates... aligning ourselves with what God values.

•The "separation of church and state" is not in the constitution or in law. It was coined by Thomas Jefferson in reference to not having the US Government establish or endorse a specific religion because they had come from England, where the official religion was the Church of England and it had substantial sway over the government and they rightfully wanted to avoid that co-mingling.

•We all experience sin being committed against us (injustice, racism, prejudice, etc) and we have a choice with how we respond to that... either with bitterness and anger or forgiveness and moving on and above our struggles.

•We are all (as Christians) called to be representatives and "influencers" for Christ... through our work & interactions with others... and that includes politics.

•If we are God centered, we are working hard to bring God the glory... when we are self-focused, we are trying to bring ourselves glory.

•At the end of the day, we start with God and do what we do by working hard and joyfully for the Glory of God.

•Check out the "Just Thinking Podcast" (https://justthinking.me/podcast-home/) for some great deep dives into unpacking the underlying ideas of social justice and our cultural moment

•Check out "The Federalist Papers" to get some great insight into why the founding fathers wrote the United States Constitution the way they did and the ideas behind how they setup the US Government, as a Constitutional Republic and NOT as a Democracy, very much on purpose because they saw democracy as the tyranny of the majority.

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