Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - What the Church Needs To Do Now

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

We witnessed a miracle as the 2024 election unfolded. In this podcast, Pastor Allen Jackson discusses the election results and our pathway forward. “The platforms represented two very different worldviews, and they would have shaped our future profoundly—whichever one was selected,” he said. “It really felt to me like only God could have brought about the outcome we had.” Though the election season is over, our assignment is not finished. It’s time to thank God for His mercy and grace, and to look to Him for our next steps. Our nation continues to face many issues including abortion, the redefinition of marriage, gender confusion, and human trafficking. These all have a spiritual root, and they require a spiritual response from God's people. What do we do now? Everything we were doing before—seek God, read His Word, pray, fast, and choose to do what’s difficult. God has extended our opportunity to reach more people. He hears our cries, and He is answering our prayers!__It’s up to us to bring God’s truth back into our culture. It may feel like an impossible assignment, but there’s much we can do. Join Pastor Allen Jackson as he discusses today’s issues from a biblical perspective. Find thought-provoking insight from Pastor Allen and his guests, equipping you to lead with your faith in your home, your school, your community, and wherever God takes you. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3JsyO6ysUVGOIV70xAjtcm?si=6805fe488cf64a6d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/culture-christianity-the-allen-jackson-podcast/id1729435597

All right, welcome to culture and Christianity. This is a bit of an unusual day for us, not our typical time to record the next episode of our podcast. But this is Wednesday following a late night election that has drafted a different future for our country, at least for the short season in front of us, it seems. And we wanted to take the opportunity to talk about that a little bit. I did. I'm a little sleep deprived, so if I ramble a bit, be patient. But typically after an election, no matter what the outcomes have been, we'll have a disproportionately large crowd at church after that to hear perspective.

And I thought before I got to the congregation and the sanctuaries, I would take a minute and talk to you about what has happened. I think we had a historic night, whether you're satisfied with the outcome or not, the magnitude of the vote for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the way he did and win the electoral vote is certainly something that is distinguishing. My most honest answer to you of how I felt is I just had a very deep sense of gratitude to the Lord. More than any election in recent years, I felt like there were biblical worldview issues on the ballot,

apart from candidates and personalities and even parties candidly, the platforms represented two very different worldviews. And they would have shaped our future profoundly, whichever one was selected. And it really felt to me like only God could have brought about the outcome we had. And so I began my day with this just very deep-seated sense of gratitude to the Lord. I believe he's given us a season of opportunity for the sake of the gospel. I'm not really talking about political parties and economic policies, but I think we have a freedom to share the gospel, candidly,

that I don't think we would have had in the same way, had the outcomes been different. And so I want to start that by sharing that with you. If you haven't stopped to thank the Lord, I don't think there's any place in this for victory laps for those who prayed or interceded. I mean, we did all of those things around the church. We fasted and prayed for weeks and weeks. And we did some special prayer times and sessions. And we've engaged people on a variety of platforms. But through all of that, I have this sense of gratitude to the Lord. I think he looked

upon us with mercy and looked upon our children with mercy. And now I think there's a shift that comes back to us. I think we have a sense of opportunity. You know, as I stayed up late to watch the election returns. And they would, they had those maps that they show us with vote counts. And it was humbling to me to watch across the heartland of America, the small towns and the small counties where the populations were small. But the turnout of people to vote was high. And it really, it touched something in my heart because I, that's the part of America. that's typically described as flyover country. You know, it isn't particularly relevant to the coastal elites,

those that live on the California coast or on the Atlantic coast. And, you know, they kind of look at that middle America, hardworking people with a sense of disdain. We hear it leak out from time to time. You know, somebody will call them deplorables or they'll call them garbage. And as I watched those votes coming in, And I thought those people made the sacrifice to go stand up and say that the direction in which our nation is traveling is not good and we need a change. And it truly touched my heart.

I think it reminded me that I believe there still is within the fabric of the American people, at least an awareness of a biblical worldview, of a Judeo-Christian worldview. that we understand somehow fundamentally that men shouldn't be competing with women in sporting activities, that budgets really do have to be balanced, that you can't just forever keep spending more money than you have, that biological sex really isn't confusing, that there is such a thing as sexual morality and sexual immorality. It doesn't mean that we all always measure up to those ideals, but that they still exist in the hearts of people. And I thought, as I watched it, my takeaway was that it was something of a referendum on that. I would submit to you that an election doesn't fix us.

I've been saying this for some weeks that in my imagination, an election is a little bit like going to the doctor for a physical. You know, you go there to have your health evaluated, and it's not uncommon at this point in my life where they want me to take a stress test. So they put you on a treadmill and hook you up to an EKGs so they can monitor your heart. heart and they check your oxygen intakes and output. The stress test and the physical doesn't make you healthier or less so. It's just a snapshot of your physical condition at that moment in time. And then I have to make a decision if I want to adapt my lifestyle to be healthier or less so. Well, I feel like an election is a snapshot on the spiritual health of our nation. and does it make us healthier to have the election?

It lets us know that there's still enough residual awareness of a biblical worldview, a Judeo-Christian worldview, that we will stand up for that. And so what I do feel following that is a tremendous sense of responsibility. I don't imagine that the people we sent to Washington, D.C., to the halls of Congress or the White House, or the people that we will send to our state houses, or whoever was elected, I don't think we can go back and sit in our lazy boy chairs and fold our arms and say, you have to fix this problem. I think we have to accept the responsibility. We have to accept the mandate for change that we went and voted for. We have to become the change.

Maybe I said it a little differently. We can no longer continue to accept the momentum away from God that we have been watching in our nation. It feels to me like we have been plummeting down a cliff. you know, headed towards the abyss, taking values that have shaped us, our ideas around marriage and family. We've just been throwing them overboard, recklessly. And at least for the moment, it seems like there's a hesitation. And the question is, will we have the will now? Well, we have the courage to see those biblical values reintroduced into our homes and our family systems.

but we bring them back to our communities. There were two or three kind of big ideas that as I sat and watched and prayed and thought about what we were hearing. One is I have at least a glimmer of hope that the dismantling of American strength to foster a globalization of authority at least has been temporarily challenged. For the past months, several years, we've been watching American strength be diminished purposefully, intentionally. I don't believe there's any other way to understand that. To move us from being an energy independent nation to an energy dependent nation weakens us as a nation to submit our nation to climate accords that we will abide by that have an enormous economic cost when the nations that we're competing with,

like China or Russia, have no intention of abiding by those same climate commitments cripples us. And the list is a lengthy list if we wanted to cite all of these places. And I felt like a part of what was expressed in this election was the recognition that for our nation to stay strong and healthy, we'll have to have that aspiration, that we can't continue to just dismantle our strength. That simple things like energy independence would be good for us. It makes no sense that we will buy petroleum from Venezuela, but we don't want to pump it out of our own ground. Our oil is not worse for the environment than Venezuelan oil or oil from the Middle East is not better for the environment than oil that we pump from our own nation.

We have been addled. You know, a part of that dismantling America has been a military that has been depleted. and in many respects in disarray, and I have tremendous respect and admiration for our military, but they have been greatly depleted by the current administration. I can tell you with Mr. Trump's election and his anticipation of returning to the White House, today Taiwan is less threatened by China than they were yesterday. I can tell you from long experience in the Middle East, Israel is less threatened today by Iran and Iranian proxies than,

than they were yesterday. Ukraine today is more likely to find a solution to the conflict they've been embroiled in, which has more than a million casualties than they were a day ago. I mean, we have been on a course that was not only dismantling our weakness, but because of the weakness we were projecting around the world,

it made every place in the world less safe. There were Americans taken hostage by Hamas that were in Israel more than a year ago, and we don't know their whereabouts. That is unbelievable to me. It's just unacceptable policy. So I think there is at least a glimmer of hope that perhaps we would begin to return to an idea

that our nation should flourish and that we wouldn't apologize for that, that American exceptionalism isn't evil. You know, Christian nationalist is a term that gets interjected into this in a very derogatory, critical way. I'm not confused. I know God's not an American. I know in the elevators of heaven they're not going to play this Star-Spangled banner. But I believe wherever God places us with our journey through time, we have to be advocates for that nation, that there be a biblical worldview expressed in those places where there's authority over us.

And so I think we have an assignment to pray for our nation. The question that's on the table for me today is, do we have the, as Christ followers, do we have the courage and determination to do the difficult things necessary for our nation to regain strength? Mr. Trump or his cabinet or the people that we're going to send to Congress or the Senate or that we elect as governors or whatever other offices we may have participated in an election for this week, those people alone aren't going to change our nation. We don't have fundamentally a political problem. We have a spiritual problem.

So the question again, and I'm going to pose it again, because I think we have to live with this, is as Christ followers, do we have the courage and the determination to do the difficult things necessary for our nation to regain strength? God is the one who gives strength to a nation, not our military, not our economy, not the wisdom of our political class. God brings that strength.

So it centers on some fundamental things, moral perspectives. The Bible brings us a moral perspective. The Bible introduces to us concepts like sexual morality and sexual immorality. Those aren't cultural issues. Those are biblical issues. They're not political issues. They're biblical issues. I mean, in this election, abortion was front and center.

When the Democratic National Committee had their convention, they put in an abortion van in bus in front of the convention hall and gave daily updates on how many children's lives were terminated that day to the cheers of the crowd. That's a pagan response. And we can't expect that God will bless it. The abortion was on the ballot in multiple states. And in 7 of 10, they extended abortion rights up to the point of viability. So we haven't won this.

We still think that the privilege of murdering our children is something that should be celebrated. I've got a video clip where they talk about Vice President Harris's determination that abortion would be at the centerpiece of the campaign. That's a political calculation. They just think that the numbers are such, that that's such a pervasive desire in the hearts of the American people, that if you'll push that desire forward, you can consolidate power. Look at that clip. I think it'll highlight this for you. It is a fight for the future.

Ours is a fight for freedom. The fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do. You know, the hypocrisy in that is stunning to me. when they were forcing vaccine mandates on all of us, they had no hesitation whatsoever with telling us the government was going to force us what to do with our bodies. People lost their jobs, their careers were ended. Some of our most decorated military personnel who'd spent their lives serving our country were dismissed because they wouldn't accept the vaccine mandate.

It's just bizarre. So the question again, and I'm going to keep asking it because I think it's relevant, but I'm going to ask it a lot in the weeks and the months ahead. Are we going to have the courage and the determination to do the difficult things for our nation to gain the strength that comes from a desire to honor God? How long will we continue to capitulate to ungodliness? There's a couple of arenas where I think we have to make significant changes. As I listen to the election results, the one category, they kept saying that college-educated people were the ones that were most likely to embrace this progressive, pathway forward. I would submit that our American educational system has to change. The values

which we have allowed to be promoted is enlightened and reflect that a proper or significant education, they're just not acceptable. D-E-I and CRT are not essential preparation for our students in elementary and high school. You see, you can't separate education from worldview. It's a myth that suggests we can. how you understand the world influences how you think and a Judeo-Christian worldview has to be welcomed once again into our educational systems. We've spent decades carving that out, saying it had no place there.

We would teach about every other religion in the world. We will teach about the religions of ancient Egypt. We will teach about almost any other worldview, but we've banned this Judeo-Christian worldview. And so now we have a group of people that are educated, sophisticated, with a stacked up degrees, but are opposed to these Judeo-Christian principles. We have to change it. Our colleges and universities have to become more than indoctrination centers for far-left

ideologies. It doesn't make you enlightened to throw off the boundaries that God gave to us to enable us to flourish. And we're going to have to have the courage to say that and to see our schools change. How dare they? How dare they take our children and sexualize them and groom them for immorality and ungodliness and tell us that we have to tolerate it? We don't have to tolerate it, but we're going to have to be involved and have the courage to raise our voices in a new way. I think there's another arena that we're going to have to be willing to navigate change, and that's the media. We rather naively say, well, maybe with a change of administration, the media will return.

to being fair. Really? Maybe if I decide that I want to lose a little bit of weight, chocolate will stop making me fat. I mean, we're ignoring the facts on the ground and not paying attention to reality because we don't want to have to engage in the difficulty of establishing other ways for information.

The legacy media has capitulated. They have, how often do we have to see it before we can acknowledge what we're watching? They have forfeited their role as the fourth estate. Journalism in the classic sense has morphed into propaganda. And it isn't a healthy place for our culture. We have to develop trust in new sources of information and new means of communication. And the reason for that is we cannot afford to surrender free speech.

Terms like misinformation and disinformation should no longer be accepted as reasons for censorship. For real. Disagreement is survivable. Often it's even helpful, but censorship is not survivable. Censorship is a very significant step forward towards authoritarian rule or authoritarian domination. And the church, tragically, has self-censored. We have censored ourselves with this insistence that we don't talk about current events or our faith in polite settings. we've hit the mute button because we didn't want to risk offending anyone.

We didn't want to forfeit a business opportunity. We didn't want to be left out of some social setting where we preferred to be included. So we have had this mythical imagination that we don't talk about our faith or the culture in which we live. And we have abandoned our assignment. Faith is not just personal. It's cultural. I promise you, if you live in Saudi Arabia, under a Muslim worldview, you would understand that faith influences every decision.

Well, we have lived in a nation where there has been historically a Judeo-Christian worldview. We saw a flicker of it in the heartland of America in this election cycle. So we have the courage to learn new patterns for gleaning information. We'll have to put effort into that. It will require resources on our part. Rather than wish that the legacy media will change and become godly, I believe we're going to have to find ways to communicate so that we can see a godly perspective on what's happening in our world.

So what are Christ followers to do following an election? It's a very important question. And my answer is not complicated, but I don't believe it's overly simplistic. We have to serve the king. We have to decide to serve the king. We've had a broken theology that said if we were born again or saved or converted or whatever labeled you use for your initiation into the kingdom of God, that there really was very little left for us to do. And I believe that is a misuse of Scripture. We were birthed into the kingdom of God so that we can grow up in our faith.

And to grow up in our faith means we have an assignment to influence the world in which we live. that is repeated throughout scripture. Jesus, when he met with his disciples, after his resurrection, 40 days, he had 40 days with the disciples after the resurrection. I think that's a period of heightened significance. Could we agree on that? You watch him die on a Roman cross, buried in a tomb, raised to life again, and then you've got a 40-day seminar on the kingdom of God with Jesus.

I'm thinking they listened with a whole new kind of attention. But in Acts chapter one, his last instructions to his best friends, the people who spent three years with him, they've seen him walk on water, raise the dead, be raised from the dead. He gives them a commandment not to leave Jerusalem until they're baptized in the Holy Spirit. Because he says, when you are, you'll be empowered to be witnesses for me in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. Their assignment wasn't just to go back home now and be better people. Go back home and pray that Pilate will govern us with.

with more integrity. No, he said, you've got to go into the world with this message. And I believe that's our assignment. If we want our children and grandchildren and the generations who come after them to have freedom and liberty, we're going to have to take the service of the king with a much greater sense of seriousness. We've had personal salvation, but the culture and the world around us was somebody else's problem. It was a political party problem. It was a politician's problem.

It was somebody else's problem. Folks, we can't tolerate vile books in the libraries, our school libraries, where our small children have access to material that we wouldn't read when we were together. We've got to have the courage. It's not about the banning of books. It's about age-appropriate learning. I don't think we're really confused on the issues. I don't think we want to invest the energy to say, you need to stop that.

I think we have winked at ungodliness and immorality and all sorts of things. And we were standing on the precipice of the judgment of God. And I believe because he's a God of grace and mercy, he's looked upon us with that mercy. And we have an opportunity to choose a different course. And my sense is, if God's given us the opportunity, he would help us if we will respond to him. So here's my invitation, I guess, today.

With humility, let's say to the Lord, you have given us a window of opportunity that we don't deserve. You've done it through perhaps the most improbable character in the most unlikely of circumstances. At a time and a season where judgment would have been most appropriate, you have given us the privilege of extending the gospel of Jesus Christ to the people around us. I can't think of a greater gift we could have had from the Lord.

And so let's take this season with a soberness beyond what we've had before. Let's just begin to quietly say to the Lord, Lord, we need your help in our schools. We need your help so that the truth can be told in the public square again. That we will no longer accept lies and manipulation and deceit as standard operating procedure. That we won't be silent. We won't sit in the midst of ungodliness and stay quiet. We'll raise our voices. We can do it with respect for everyone involved.

We don't need to be angry or belligerent. We certainly don't need to be violent. But we've got to have the courage to bring our worldview back into bear. God has given us an opportunity. I don't know all that the future holds. But I have tremendous hope tonight because Almighty God, an expression of tremendous grace and mercy has spared us from a future where censorship and the limiting of our freedoms would have increased exponentially.

Now it's up to us. Will we choose to honor the Lord? Every generation has to make a choice for themselves. And we can't depend any longer on the choices and the sacrifices of the generations who preceded us. If we will choose the Lord, we will see His blessings. I don't think we can separate culture and Christianity. I think our culture is a reflection of the health and the vitality of the Christianity in our midst.

And if our culture continues to grow more secular and more godless, it's because the salt and the light is dim and ineffective. I think we can change that. I have great hope, and I pray that you do as well. God is the author and the completer of our story, and I look forward to the chapter. he's going to write next. And we're going to continue to work on this topic of culture and Christianity together. Thank you.

You know, I've heard it said that Jesus wasn't involved in culture that he was a theologian. Well, I'm quite certain the devil wants us to believe that. We have to take our faith outside the walls of the church and live it out in the world in which we find ourselves. I've written a new book, Jesus, his followers, and politics. It helps us take our biblical worldview into the culture

and be difference makers. Folks, we can't hide in the churches and preach sermons. We've got to make an impact in this world with the good news of Jesus Christ. This book will give you a template, a roadmap for doing just that. I believe it'll be a blessing to you. So many things that our culture calls political are actually biblical. Let's focus on following God and he'll provide all we need to take his truth to the people around us. Request your copy of Pastor Allen's new book, Jesus, his followers, and politics.

When you donate $25 or more today, just to do you just to do that. Just go to Alan Jackson.com or call 8008805102. Hey, thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe to Alan Jackson Ministries YouTube channel and follow the Culture and Christianity podcast

on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith and change our culture. See you next time.