Allen Jackson - Develop a Strategy - Part 1
We’re working on a little study called «When Kingdoms Collide», really built around this idea that there are multiple kingdoms that the Bible invites us to be aware of that exist simultaneously. You know, we tend to think in terms of the nation states or the realms of authority in this present age, and that’s legitimate they exist, they’re real. But the Bible asks us to take a step beyond that and understand there’s another dimension that isn’t understood in the way that we understand the dimension we’re in that’s defined by matter, things that occupy space. But in the other dimension, there’s a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of God, an eternal kingdom. In opposition to that, there’s a kingdom of darkness, we’ve talked a good bit about those.
There’s a third kingdom that you should be aware of because it has tremendous influence in your life, and that’s the kingdom of self, that’s the kingdom that’s defined by me and what I think and what I feel and what I want. And if you don’t purposefully address that, you’ll occupy that throne and you will push God out of your life. The prescription the Bible gives for dealing with the kingdom of self is that we have to execute the king. We have to take that old nature within us, that carnal nature, that Adamic nature, they’re all phrases the Bible uses, and we have to crucify it. We have to say, you know, «I appreciate that you have an opinion, but it’s not going to dominate every thought process or every conversation».
One of the great values in reading the Word of God is it helps you understand the nature of God, and you’ll see more clearly where your selfish nature deviates from the nature of God and then you can make a choice. Without the awareness of the Word of God, you are highly susceptible to think that you are «the master of your fate, the captain of your soul, and the master of your fate». Anybody remember that poem, I had to learn it in high school, I’m sure they don’t teach it any longer. When I went to high school, we had chalkboards, we did have electricity, but the poem was «Invictus», what is it? «Out of the», I will not quote you a poem that would be scary, but it concludes with, «I am the captain of my fate,» and «I am the master of my soul».
No, I don’t think so; but that has to be addressed or that spirit will dominate your life and it will write a future for you that will rob you of God’s best. And you can sit in church, you can make a profession of faith, you can serve and do many religious things and still be dominated by the kingdom of self. So we’ll talk a bit more about that, but I felt like I needed to start. We talked a bit about the Theater of the Absurd, and the corresponding releases of truth, and I’m telling you both places are cranking out releases on a daily basis. For me, one of the highlights in the last couple of days, it probably came through DOGE, this Department of Government Efficiency, which feels like a bit paradoxical anyway, but with Elon Musk leading that initiative and they moved into USAID, which has been responsible for the distribution of billions, tens of billions of dollars on an annual basis for about 60 years.
And they started going through their distribution list and the reason I think it’s relevant for us, I mean, if you ever heard the idea that: we should pay very careful attention to the separation of church and state, you heard that? I suspect you have, it occupies almost any conversation in the public arena where faith is introduced. Somebody that may not like the idea, begins to shout that we have to separate church and state. And I would remind you, while that idea has made its way into the body of our law, it did not originate in our Constitution.
The phrase was first used in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of churches and he was assuring them in the letter that the state would not involve themselves in the business of the church, there would be no limits. Because what our Constitution does provide for is that Congress shall make no law abridging or interfering or limiting with the free exercise of religion. It’s in the same paragraph where we have freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So if the press shouldn’t be separated from the state, then neither should the church.
Now I understand there’s some legal issues that have come since then, but it isn’t constitutional. But the way it’s used in the public square is so narrow and the church has paid so little attention, we haven’t been watching and listening and thinking, that it’s used almost exclusively to talk about those of us who sit in a church building and read Bibles and profess Jesus is Lord. But if you’re going to apply that notion the way they want to, it really has to do with something that is a religion, which really is defined by a worldview, and dogmatic adherence to that worldview. And I would submit to you that our government for a long season now has been very enthusiastically engaged in the promotion of a religion. Far from being separated, they have been silencing traditional historical Orthodox Christianity, and they have been promoting a worldview that is diametrically opposed, spending multiplied billions of dollars, tax dollars, promoting that.
Well, they told us they wanted the church to be separate from the government. And we have either been so frightened, so disinterested, so distracted, or so uninformed that we’ve said nothing, it’s time to use our voices. But I thought this release, I’m not sure they intended it to be released, it’s really a truth bomb that got pushed into the public square, but I’m just gonna read you a few of the dollars that have been spent by USAID.
These are our tax dollars: just under $8 million went to the Sri Lankan journalist on how to avoid binary-gendered language; $20 million went for a new Sesame Street show in Iraq, $4 and a half million to combat disinformation in Kazakhstan, $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala; $6 million to transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles; $25 million to Deloitte to promote green transportation in the country of Georgia; $2 and a half million to promote inclusion in Vietnam; $16 and a half million for a separate inclusion group in Vietnam, apparently they’re not included very much over there and they need millions of dollars.
Over $1 million to an American LGBT group, $1 and a half million to promote LGBT advocacy in Jamaica; $2 million to promote LGBT equality through entrepreneurship in Latin America; almost $2 and a half million for artisanal and small scale gold mining in the Amazon; almost $4 million for LGBT causes in the Western Balkans; over $5 million for LGBT activism in Uganda; over $6 million for advancing LGBT issues in priority countries around the world; and over $6 million for men who have sex with men in South Africa, and the list goes on.
Sounds like the funding of a worldview to me, using the tax dollars and the authority of the American government to very clearly promote an agenda and a worldview globally. I’m not gonna vote to spend my dollars that way and I certainly don’t want somebody lecturing me that we need to pay more so they can have more to do that. Right, I was praying for that, I’ll share, I think we have been so asleep. I don’t understand, I feel like we have seen God shaking the earth now for about five years, and it comes in episodes. One was COVID, and when the shaking happens, there’s things that begin to become public knowledge, they break into the awareness of more people than had been true previously. COVID certainly caused that to happen in a number of arenas.
I believe the October 7th attack in Israel from Hamas brought anti-Semitism to the forefront in ways, in places that existed that I hadn’t been aware of that it had the roots that it did in some of the more celebrated, previously celebrated, universities in our nation. Their influence has begun to decline and it will precipitously decline. You can’t do, you can’t sponsor what they’ve sponsored without repenting and not forfeit your influence. Well, I really wasn’t prepared, but I believe the election last November, the evidence seems to be growing that it was another episode of shaking.
There are things that are becoming clear that just were just clear. I’ll give you one example and it hasn’t led in the news lately, but: we’ve sent a string of leaders to Washington DC for a long time now. And many of whom, when they got those appointments, they’ve spent decades and decades in Washington without any other jobs or means of employment. And they find themselves to have accumulated tremendous resources. I mean, they stack up some great wealth, which I’m not really opposed to that, but the organization they’re leading, they’re supposed to be leading our nation, they have led us beyond bankruptcy. We are teetering on the point of total financial collapse, what we’re doing is unsustainable and they lecture us that we should pay more, that there’s more deserved.
Well, in any other arena, if you were earning obscene amounts of money while you totally destroyed and dismantled the organization you’re leading, you wouldn’t be celebrated as a wonderful leader. You’d be ridiculed, mocked, removed, replaced, we would call that a whole host of things, but we wouldn’t bless it. Well, we have watched that happen for our lifetimes and we’ve just kept doing it. I’m grateful that it seems to me that the haze is beginning to clear and the smoke is beginning to lift. We need to look at what’s happening in our nation with a different perspective and a different set of views, and the church is equally guilty. We’ve done our best to keep the hazers running and we’re gonna have to have the courage to tell the truth.
No, you have to watch and listen and think. I got home last evening and we turned on the news for a minute and the President was standing there with the The Prime Minister of Israel. I know I’ve heard this news conference 700 times. The president looked at the camera and he said, «I have a solution». I still wasn’t paying much attention, I thought «blah, blah, blah,» I mean it’s like Charlie Brown’s teacher, you know, we’re gonna rebuild Gaza and invite Hamas back in. And he said, «We’re not going to do this again, everything that’s been done for 70 years has failed». And that is accurate, and he said, «Gaza is decimated,» and there’s thousands of mines there, it’s not a safe place for people. He said, «We will build new communities for the people of Gaza».
I’ve been talking to the leaders of the Middle East and there’s gonna be cooperation, and there’s a lot, I don’t know if it’ll happen or not; I just never heard the idea. And he said, «We’ll take the Gaza area and we will cause it to be as a productive zone for the whole region, with jobs and opportunities for all the people». And when you say it out loud, it’s like, well yeah, why not? You can’t rebuild it, the people that have been there have no ability to protect themselves from the terrorists funded by Iran and you can’t hand it back. And then I thought, «Well, what do I», I sat down with a piece of paper today, I said, «What do I know about the Middle East»?
Well, I know, I’m gonna do this outline, I promise. Somebody asked me in the lobby, they said, «Oh, we didn’t think you were here, the outlines so short». You all know me better than that; you could give me the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept, and I’d keep you long. But if you’ll think about what you know about the map of the Middle East, Lebanon to the north of Israel is a total wreck. I mean the the functioning government there has been Hezbollah, Iranian proxies. The leaders of Lebanon haven’t controlled that nation for a long time. Next door is Syria, which has been in a civil war for a long time. The dictator Assad, Bashar al-Assad, just left recently, that country is decimated. Iraq is a mess, Iran is the global sponsor of terrorism.
I mean you go right on around to North Africa, it’s not better Sudan, Libya, I mean all the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa have authoritarian forms of government. There isn’t liberty and freedom for all; they don’t welcome diversity. The only possible spot in the Middle East and North Africa where something close to democracy flourishes, is in the nation of Israel and the talking point in the United Nations and the international community is the root of the problem is Israel. So we want freedom and prosperity like Lebanon or Syria or Libya, we want that to flourish more broadly?
So what President Trump had to say about Gaza and being involved to help make a peaceful, fruitful, productive place for people to work and live is the most logical statement about how to resolve the conflict in Israel that I have heard in a long, long time. I don’t know what the outcome will be but I can tell you the releases of truth that are coming on a regular basis are startling. And to me the big question is will the church be able to process it? Reminds me a great deal of some of the people God raised up in the Bible, and I’m not suggesting that President Trump is occupying some biblical office any more than I’m not going there. But I do think what’s happening could only be orchestrated by expressions of the mercy and the grace of God directed by his Spirit.
I’ve had enough birthdays and participated in enough elections, they seldom change anything. It’s kind of like a Globetrotter’s game, they just changed jerseys and split the gate. And that’s not what’s happening right now, and I believe only God could have orchestrated that, so I think it’s incumbent upon us. What I do find in the Bible is when Josiah is a relatively young man, is confronted with the Bible that they had lost, he’s so grieved at the difference between how they’re living and what the Bible instructs, that he tears his clothes and he begins to go into mourning as if a family member had died. And he initiates a set of reforms that seemed, from a distance, to be rather straightforward, but I assure you they weren’t.
The temple was in such disrepair that the doors didn’t work. But what did work around the temple was all of the the quarters, the facilities that had been built for prostitution. So there’s priests presiding over prostitution, there’s people who are visiting the prostitutes, there are people who are profiting from that infrastructure. Idolatry has been included in the temple, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Josiah begins to take down the prostitution, to dismantle the systems that have supported it, to cut down the idols, to begin to restore to the nation an attention towards Almighty God.
Then I promise you there were multiplied thousands of people that were unhappy and there’s a priesthood and a whole group of people, they’re keeping kosher, they’re celebrating Passover, they’re celebrating Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles. They’re keeping all of the holidays while they worship pagan gods. Folks, it’s like a snapshot of our nation and God raised up this young man, most improbably, to begin to lead this transformation. Now the blessing is God said, «The judgment that I was about to visit upon you, I will withhold because of what you’ve done». I used to read that and think, «Oh that’s harsh». God didn’t say, «Because you’ve repented, I won’t bring the judgment,» he said, «I’m going to withhold it in your lifetime».
What I’ve come to realize is if when Josiah’s son who followed him to the throne had maintained the momentum, it’s the inference, I think it’s a logical appropriate one is that God would have said, «I’ll withhold the judgment there,» but you know what happened? His son became twice as wicked as it was when Josiah started. You know why I believe that happened? Not just because he was a wicked individual, because there was enormous pressure from the people. You don’t have to be a biblical scholar, when Moses went up on Mount Sinai and he was gone a little longer than the people liked, they came to Aaron, who Moses left in charge, remember what they said? We liked it better in Egypt, and so Aaron collected their jewelry and fashioned a golden calf and then they deteriorated into a pagan orgy.
These are the people that are eating manna, they drank water at Mara where it was too bitter to drink and God made it potable again. These are the people that walked through the Red Sea on dry ground and watch the Egyptian army drown. These are the people that have been sustained totally by the provision of Almighty God and delivered by the most remarkable expressions of his power, and with the slightest opportunity, they stepped right back into immorality and ungodliness. Folks, we have to pay attention to the story, the New Testament says it was written down as a warning for us, the ones on whom would come the end of the ages. So while we see truth making its way into the public square, let’s you and me be determined to become people of truth.
Don’t get pulled into this making it political, because I don’t understand it that way. Politicians are a reflection of our heart and there was enough of people raised their hand in an election and said we don’t think we’re going in the right direction. And so far, inexplicably, the people that have been given the assignment are actually trying to choose a new direction. Now we’re gonna have to have the courage to say we want to see a biblical worldview, a Judeo-Christian worldview implemented. This isn’t new stuff, this is the story of the book. You cannot have polite Bible studies and act like you don’t hear what’s happening outside the windows of the church. That’s the worst form of hypocrisy, it’s self-absorption. The point of learning the Word of God is so that we can be salt and light.
More than seven times God told Joshua to be strong and courageous. That was his commissioning, not go to theology school or read your Bible more or do a Greek word study: «Be strong and courageous». I think strength and courage are more necessary for you and me as Christ followers today than any other set of attributes I can think of, I wanna pray.
Father, I thank you that we have Bibles and churches and fellowship and community, but we need your help to be men and women of strength and courage. Holy Spirit, we ask you, let a boldness for God grow in us, in Jesus’s name, amen.