We Are the Bus

One of the striking patterns in Scripture is that frequently as it goes with God’s people, so it goes with the world. When the people of God are idolatrous and wicked, they are frequently worse than the nations around them, teaching the nations wickedness and injustice. When Solomon is wise and righteous, the nations come from afar seeking his wisdom and glory. When worship is offered faithfully at the temple, the nations are blessed. And Jesus says that this center has shifted to His disciples in the New Covenant. You are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. As it goes with God’s people, so it goes with the world. So it’s not an accident that Christians began questioning the authority of God’s word and tinkering around with the definition of marriage and the roles of men and women, and now the world has followed suit. It’s no accident that when the Church ignored the poor and came up with pharisaical pro forma shows of sacrifice and compassion that the world followed suit with their parodies of our hypocrisy and injustice. The point is that in Christ, His body has been commissioned to serve the world, to lead the world. If the cross is the center of all history, and we have been incorporated into Christ by the working of the Spirit, we are the leaders of culture, of politics, of economics, of education, of every sphere. This is not a statement of pride; this is a statement of fact. The only question is how are we leading? A husband is the head of his wife and home, and if he has led them poorly it is no great compliment to point out the state of his family. And if our culture is full of hypocrisy and deceit, it is no compliment to insist that it is our fault. But the point is that we are called to lead, and the way we are called to lead is by humbling ourselves before God. When we turn in repentance to God, when we bow before the Lord Jesus, when we proclaim that Jesus is our Lord and King and we have no other, this is necessarily to submit to Him. And when we humble ourselves before Him, we are offering to lead like Him. There are many rooms in the Mansion of the King, there are many stations, many callings in His Kingdom, but the Church is not the cosmic bus stop. We’re not just sitting here waiting for the bus to arrive. We are the bus, and we are here for the world. We are here to serve and therefore to lead in every field: in medicine, in politics, in economics, in education, in all of culture. We can collaborate where others can provide tools and materials for this project. But we must not pretend that we are the servants of any other king or that we are building any other Kingdom but His.