Advancing the Kingdom

Advancing the Kingdom

God designed the church to operate in three aspects. The hospital, the family, and the army.

Every Christian understands the church as a hospital, a place for the broken to be saved, healed, and delivered. Most understand the church as a family too, somewhere to be born into, supported, loved, helped.

But many modern Christians cannot reconcile the third aspect. That the church is an army, advancing the Kingdom of God in the earth. The early church understood this in a way we have lost. And that loss is losing nations today.

Because Christians don't see the army, they have no need for the whole armor of God. They have no desire to stand like a good soldier for Christ. They don't understand their mission in the earth.

The Christians who came before us toppled empires and won entire continents to Jesus Christ. Modern Christians can fill big buildings in growing cities, with rising numbers of believers across whole nations, and still hand that same city and that same nation over to the enemy without a fight.

The reality is many communities, cities, and even entire states in America, and certain nations across the world, went from 80 to 90 percent professing Christian, with relative safety and prosperity, to what we see today. 

The answer isn't the percentage of believers. It's the theology they were handed. Somewhere along the way, sincere Christians were taught, without anyone saying it out loud, that Jesus Christ has no authority over government, law, culture, or public life. 

That King Jesus only rules hearts, not lives or nations. That is not what the church has believed for two thousand years.

The believers who took the gospel into a hostile pagan empire, who ended infanticide, who broke slavery again and again, did not believe Christ's authority stopped at the church door. 

Go back and read the actual accounts. Missionaries walked into cannibalism, child sacrifice, child marriage, and demon worship, and they said something almost nobody says today: "We love you but you cannot continue." 

Not forced conversion. Not a sword to the throat. 

➡️ The gospel doing what the gospel has always done, protecting the weak and confronting evil, while still leaving every man free to bow his own knee to Christ, or not.

Here's what we've lost. The believers of old didn't just ask how many got saved. They asked what people were required to leave behind. 

They didn't stop at addition. They demanded transformation. We've traded that for a service on Sunday and called it ministry, when the service was only ever meant to equip the saints to go be sent, like the seventy in Luke 10, out to actually confront what's devouring our own age.

The percentage of professing believers was never the real measure of a healthy church. The fruit was. 

Preach it freely. Force no one. But never again let the King's name be used over a people while His authority is quietly kept out of everything that actually governs them.

Christ Is King. Live Like It.

#ChristIsKingLiveLikeIt #CiKM