Fix the World with One Simple Trick

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If you only knew the kind of difference we could make…

I’m trying something new with this one—taking a previous article and turning the perspective 180º. A few weeks ago I wrote arguing that the church isn’t coming under persecution, but discipline.

I argued that the decay we’re seeing in the world today is the result of a faithless church that allows weak, in-name-only Christians to remain comfortable. “And since we aren’t disciplining ourselves, God is doing it through external means,” I wrote.

Today, I’m going to turn that claim around and argue it from a positive angle:

If the church can get her act together, we can reverse the collapse of the West and bless all nations.

In Deuteronomy, as the Israelites prepared to enter the Promised Land, Moses left them with a reminder of their covenant with God and a series of blessings and curses that the Lord would enact depending on their faithfulness. In the subsequent books we see these play out just as predicted—when Israel is faithful, she thrives. When Israel is unfaithful, she is persecuted until her people turn back to God. As soon as they turn back, they are blessed again.

In the New Testament, the church is the spiritual Israel, marching forward under the command of the new Joshua (Yeshua/Jesus/Joshua, same name). He has been given all authority in heaven and on earth, and He is with us as we proclaim His name in every place.

As an amillennialist who rejects the idea that Jesus is coming back to reign on earth for 1,000 years, I see Revelation 20 saying that Jesus is reigning now. And it’s not just Jesus who’s reigning. He’s joined by His own, the martyrs who once cried out “How long, oh Lord” (Revelation 6:10) and all those who refused to identify with the beast (20:4).

Contrary to what so many Christians believe, Satan isn’t running the world. He’s bound from deceiving the nations in this time of Christ’s reign. He is powerless to stop the advance of the Gospel as the world is governed by Christ and those whom He has seated in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6).

Satan is the one who is bound, yet we act as though we are. Rather, we are capable of changing things. Capability means responsibility, and responsibility means capability.

What this means for us

This does not mean that everything will go perfectly smoothly. Persecution meets the church on every bit of new ground she gains, just as Israel ran into giants and all kinds of other opposition throughout Canaan.

And, we will always fight the temptation to stagnate and backslide. Like Israel, the church has to guard herself against laziness that will cost us the ground gained, which is exactly what has happened here in the West.

What this does mean, though, is that if we are faithful, success is assured in the long run. Souls will be saved, the church will grow, and the world will be a better place thanks to the Gospel’s leavening influence on culture. We have an eternal home to look forward to, of course, but there is also something here on earth that is very much worth working towards and fighting for.

How we apply it

The church can change the world simply by doing one of the main things she was created to do: make disciples. Real disciples. That’s the “one simple trick.”

This means we teach people how to be Christians, and we stop allowing counterfeits to claim to be Christians. The latter requires us to reestablish the practice of church discipline (the subject of this week’s Think Deeper Podcast episode). Disciple-making and church discipline are just two sides of the same coin, and they are the ways we enforce the church’s teaching among our members.

Judgment begins with the household of God (1 Peter 4:17). If we are faithless, what chance does the world have? By cultivating faithfulness among ourselves, we start to let the unstoppable Lordship of Christ continue marching forward.

Putting it all together

The way you act in a given situation is largely determined by what outcomes you think are possible. The effort level of a team in the 4th quarter of the last game of a losing season typically doesn’t look like the effort level of a team in the 4th quarter of a tied Super Bowl.

Similarly, the things we think can result from our faithfulness as Christians and as the church drive the way we live out our faith. Loser theology that expects the church to take continual setbacks and remain a microscopic, trampled minority until Jesus comes back to rescue us from a sinking ship of a planet typically becomes entirely heaven-focused, since that’s the only positive result it expects.

But if you think the church can grow as a force for good in the world, and even become the leaven that influences society from top to bottom, you will feel a duty to work toward that good.

It’s my argument that every ugly consequence of the West’s moral decay, down to the price of our exorbitant grocery bills, is a result of God’s discipline brought on a people who know better and are ignoring Him.

If that argument is true, and we as God’s people bear a good deal of responsibility for the society’s failings, then it logically follows that we also have it within our power to do something about it. That should excite and motivate you.

And our ability to drive change starts with the household of God. No more can we tolerate sin in the camp. No more can we allow people under our watch to call themselves Christians while living nothing like it. No more can we leave our people to find the answers for Monday-Saturday on their own. We must proclaim the full counsel of God (Acts 20:27), and we must let no one disregard us (Titus 2:15).

(To be clear, this is not in competition with external action. You don’t have to choose between cleaning up the church and being involved in the world. But our involvement with the world will be far more effective the more we clean up the church.)

I’m often accused of being critical of the church. To the degree that’s true, this right here is why—if this theory holds, every day the church spends in this comfortable status quo is another day under God’s discipline. Repentance for the church’s apathy and worldliness is the only path out, but there’s a bright future ahead if we take it.

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