What happens when the church trades spiritual authority for political power? This episode of Seek Go Create dives deep into the historic and ongoing tension between religion, politics, and the true nature of God’s kingdom. Explore why merging faith with worldly structures often leads to confusion, disappointment, and spiritual decline—and discover what Jesus and the early church can teach us about living out the kingdom, no matter who holds the power. If you’re questioning the role of faith in today’s polarized landscape, this conversation will challenge and inspire you.

"Religion is not the kingdom. Politics, that's not God's kingdom either." - Tim Winders

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Episode Resources & Action Steps:

• NT90 Hub – This is the central website for the 90-day New Testament reading plan, with downloadable, printable plans, background information, and links to all episodes and resources.

Episode Highlights:

00:00 Spirit Power Not Empire

00:55 NT90 Reading Journey

03:12 Religion And Rome Rebuilt

05:11 My Political Past

07:43 Rise Of Religious Right

13:25 2016 Gods Candidate

20:00 Kingdom Religion Rome Defined

25:35 Scoreboards And Confusion

29:10 Three Operating Systems

33:25 Why Power Cant Produce Fruit

39:02 Constantine And Christendom

41:53 Imperialized Christianity

42:54 Violence in Jesus Name

43:39 Growth Then Nominal Faith

45:54 Why Power Keeps Calling

46:15 Become What You Fight

48:03 Suffering Versus Self Reliance

50:05 American Religious Right Results

53:18 Jesus Refused Political Power

58:12 Eschatology Trap Today

01:00:37 Kingdom Without Access

01:03:55 Three Moves To Wrap Up

01:07:53 Kingdom Transforms All

01:10:41 Tangled Signal To Outsiders

01:14:12 Final Challenge And Next

The early church had no worldly power, no political leverage, no

legal protection, no seat at Rome's table, and yet it grew through

Holy Spirit-empowered kingdom life.

The modern church has spent decades reaching for worldly

power, and even when that power is gained, it cannot be sustained.

It is eventually lost or it fails to produce the righteous society that

it reached for or that it promised.

So maybe the problem is not that we have not gotten enough power.

Maybe the problem is that we keep asking the wrong kind of power

to do what only the Spirit can do

welcome to Seek Go Create.

I am Tim Winders, and I keep saying this, but boy, this is the foundation

for all that we're doing here.

Recently went through a reading of the New Testament, compressed it, did it

in 90 days, and did it in order and in as much context as I possibly could.

And, it's not-- I didn't do it in the order that you see in your Bible.

I, I actually worked on redoing the order so that I could read it in the

order that it was written, the order that the letters actually went out.

And what I found was incredible.

It helped me so much with the story, with the context.

It challenged me.

It made me look at topics that I had plucked out and made them my own or made

them apply to 2,000 years later so often, and I just saw them in a different light.

I just understood the scripture so much more.

This series, or what we're doing now, is just spin-off or a continuation

of what I discovered or what I found or things that made me think deeper

as I was going through that process.

So I'm just kinda sharing these discoveries.

And I recommend, if you haven't already, try to do what I did.

Try to grab that reading plan.

You can get it at k2m.foundation/nt90, k2m.foundation/nt90.

Go get it, download it, read along.

It's free.

You can grab it.

It's, I was telling someone yesterday, a friend of mine from Bible school

that I was talking to, he kinda said, "Hey, I've been seeing that NT90.

What's up with that?

Where'd you find it?" I said, his name's Dorn, I said, "Dorn, I didn't find it.

I wrote it." I was looking for something like that, and I spent about

a year working on that, doing the research so that I could have that

plan, and I'm sharing it with you.

So if you wanna experience the New Testament just in a different way,

very different than I can almost guarantee you have in the past, go

download it, k2m.foundation/nt90, and, start going through the plan.

I designed it to be done in 90 days, but I'll tell you, that's pretty aggressive.

Some people are taking a little bit longer, but if you could do it

in 90 days, it will be powerful.

I can guarantee you that.

So, listen, this episode's kind of interesting, kind of been building to

something here, and its title is Religion Is Not God's Kingdom, Neither Is Rome.

Over the last two episodes, we walked through what God left behind

and what got rebuilt, kinda talked about new wine and old wineskins.

Hebrews told us that Jesus sat down because the work was finished.

It made a specific point to tell us that that work was finished.

And then we looked at what the church over the last few thousand years have

just started to bring back anyway.

Sabbath as Sunday, buildings as temples, pastors as priests,

tithing as an obligation.

The institutional muscle memory of the old system kept creeping back into the new.

Today, we're gonna look at the other half of that same rebuild, not the

religious face, the political machine.

Because while the church was reassembling the temple system on the

inside, the church was also trying to influence or reassemble Rome on the

outside again, and again, and again.

When the church reaches for worldly power to do kingdom work, it seems

to pay a spiritual price, or worse, it repels people away from the

gospel instead of attracting them The pattern is old, and it is the same

instinct underneath both rebuilds.

The kingdom does not feel like it's enough, so we reach for what the empire

offers, or institutions, and ask it to do what only the Spirit can do.

So let's dive in and let's get into it.

This is gonna be a fun episode, you can tell.

This is gonna be some deep stuff.

All right, so this is kind of where I wanna get into some personal

stuff, and this is something that was just welling around in my

head as I started working on this.

I wanna tell you why this question and this topic is a

little bit personal for me.

And for those of you watching this on the video, for those of you

that know me, you know I've got a little bit of age on me now.

at the time of recording this, I'm 62 years old, so I've been

around for a little while, so I've got a little bit of history.

And I'm not standing outside this pattern I'm about to describe.

I lived inside it, and so I wanna tell you a little bit about that.

In the mid-'80s, yeah, we're gonna go back to the '80s here, I was in

my 20s, just started dating Glory, I was going through college, starting

to do a lot in my community, and I grew up in Conyers, Georgia, and

I still lived there at the time.

When our-- We had our early married life, got married in the late '80s,

we still lived in Conyers, Georgia.

It was a small suburb east of Atlanta, for people that don't know.

At one point it was a small town growing up, and then Atlanta just swallowed it

up like some of these big cities do.

I was very active in the Republican Party politics early on.

I would have been a Reagan conservative.

I was involved with local committees, precinct work, the kind of

involvement that most people never see and never really think about.

I eventually held the position of local head of the Board of Elections.

I was not at the edge of the party.

I was deep into politics at the time.

I was inside the machine, and that was the, the go, go, go Reagan

years, and it was-- At the time, I thought it was a fun time.

And I was in a county where the Republican Party was being

rebuilt one precinct at a time.

They, they owned and dominated that, that community, the suburbs

of Atlanta during the '80s.

I was even considering running for office and pursuing a political career.

I was doing a lot of things with the Jaycees and just sorta like leadership

at a fairly young age, in my mid-20s.

And I was thinking big.

I was gonna run for either a House of Representative seat or kinda even

eyeing governor, and looking back on it, that all seems sorta silly now,

but I'm just kinda telling you what was going through my head at the time.

Now, in 1988, the election that was-- Reagan had served his two terms,

and they were getting prepared for the next presidential election.

I watched something happen up close that most Americans only learned about later.

Pat Robertson, an evangelical broadcaster that was running on

an explicitly religious platform, ran in the Republican primaries.

Now, he lost, but he had some influence.

The evangelical grassroots network his campaign mobilized became the

foundation of what was later called the Christian Coalition, which

he launched the very next year.

The fights that occurred inside the Republican Party that year between

the establishment Republicans and the new evangelical wing was the founding

moment of what would become the modern religious right as a political force.

I was there.

I sat in those rooms.

I saw it.

I saw the ugly, nasty conversations that went on between conservatives,

somewhat they would say they were good people, and Christians that

would also say they're good people.

I saw the mess.

Here is what-- Here's what I learned from that.

The political process on every side is shaped by the people who show up

in those small precinct rooms, and the people who show up to local committees,

precinct meetings, and primary contests are almost never the moderates.

They are the most ideologically committed, the most intense, the most

willing to spend nights and weekends, Saturdays, I think I spent a lot of

Saturdays in these meetings, fighting for a faction, for what they believe

is right and what will impact their country at the biggest, biggest level.

That is true on the Republican side, and I happen to know that

it's true on the Democratic side.

For those outside the United States, we just have two sides, two parties.

That's it.

It is structurally true of party politics in any system.

The fringe drives the machine because the fringe is the part that just shows up.

Now, once the church entered that machine, the same dynamic took over.

The Christians who got the loudest voice inside the Republican Party

were not the Christians doing quiet kingdom work in their neighborhoods.

They were the Christians most willing to spend their lives on political organizing.

So the face of American Christianity in politics became the face of a particular

intensity of Christian political activist.

That face is now the picture most non-Christians, unfortunately

or maybe fortunately, but I would say unfortunately,

have of what a Christian is.

And over the last forty years, it has magnified and become bigger, and I

would venture to say most likely uglier.

And it is the picture that most young people grew up with, the people that

are in the generations after mine.

I at least somewhat have a perspective of what it was like before Most people

that are younger than me, in their 40s, 30s, 20s, all they've seen is that ugly

fringe, we'll call it political Christian activist, and that is what many of them

consider to be the face of Christianity.

I, in the late '80s and early '90s, walked away from party politics in those years,

partially to start some things in business and my career and things like that.

It wasn't really because I had changed my mind about the values I held.

I'm still sort of conservative-natured.

there was real overlap between the values I cared about and the platform

the Republicans were running on.

I walked away because I could not reconcile the methods that I saw with

what I read about in the New Testament and in the descriptions of Jesus.

The way the movement organized, the way it talked about opponents,

the way it weaponized faith for political effect did not look like

anything I read in the New Testament.

The values had overlap with the kingdom.

The method and application had almost none.

That was 40 years ago.

I've spent the four decades since watching the same pattern repeat in

larger and more sophisticated form.

Every election cycle, every news cycle, every primary, every social media

post, the moral majority, so to speak, gave way to the Christian coalition.

Christian coalition gave way to the broader evangelical voting bloc.

The evangelical voting bloc became one of the most reliable

political forces in America.

And during that same 40 years, many of the visible measures of American Christian

health really have declined sharply.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

It is the pattern I'm about to describe playing out in slow motion, in real time,

in my own lifetime, in front of all of us.

Let me bring this all the way up to today, because the bookend matters.

In 2015 and 2016, I was in Bible school in Colorado.

I was studying scripture almost full time during that season, and I watched in real

time evangelical leaders begin to call a real estate developer turned reality

television host God's candidate Prophecies were issued, anointings were declared,

Cyrus comparisons were everywhere.

I wanna be honest about where I sat politically.

I definitely lean that direction, and there was a lot

of that I was excited about.

I liked the fact that a businessman might be president.

I liked the fact that a real estate-- I have got a background in real estate.

I said, "Oh, that's pretty cool." So, and for the most part, my political

leanings were some of those things that were being communicated, even though in

reality, I probably lean more libertarian than conservative, but conservative kind

of fits into that, most of the time.

I liked a lot of what Trump was running on as a, you know, political thing, but I

did not like the God's candidate framing.

I saw that that was probably gonna lead down to an ugly path.

I'm not one that typically says I was right, but 10-plus years later, I can

now look back and say I was right.

Others were right too.

I just did not believe it, and I did not like that God's candidate kind of

messaging, not because I was on the other team necessarily, because I had

spent the previous 27 years going back to the mid-'80s watching exactly how this

move played from exactly this playbook.

The names have changed, the pattern does not, and here's what I watched

happen next in real time, exactly the way the pattern always plays.

People who needed to hear the gospel walked away from it because

it had been welded to a political brand that they did not trust.

People who were already inside the church got harder, harsher.

The way they spoke didn't have love laced with it.

It was just more political, more partisan, and truthfully less Christ-like.

The Americanized religious right version of Christianity, the version

that had confused itself with a party platform, got smaller and meaner

and louder all at the same time.

None of that was good for the kingdom, in my opinion.

Some of it may have been good for the politics.

It might've been a good fit for the political message, but

the two are not the same thing.

The last 10 years have only magnified the confusion.

I want to really be careful with what I'm about to say, not that I'm always

careful with what I say, but I'm gonna try to be careful here because

it's easy for some people to hear it wrong I do not think that faith

and politics need to be separated.

I do not think that Christians should pretend to have no opinions about

how a society should be run, even though I will say that over the last

five to eight years, I've pretty much checked out from the political system.

I pay attention to it.

I don't live, eat, and breathe it like I once did.

It just ebbs and flows, and I just watch it from the outside,

and I just kind of shake my head.

But if you're all into it, that's fine.

I'm just not.

What I think Is that we should just not confuse the two.

Religion is not the kingdom.

Politics, that's not God's kingdom either.

The American flag, waving it, that's not God's kingdom.

And calling any of them the kingdom does not make them the kingdom.

It just makes the kingdom harder for everyone else to

see, and it confuses the issue.

So this episode is not a thoughtful outsider's analysis.

It is a reckoning from someone who held the keys, walked away, and watched it all

happen again, and again, and again from inside Bible school, from inside churches,

from inside that political structure, and I've been watching it ever since.

Now, here's the data point that I wanna kinda jump back to.

So we talked about current.

Let's go back a little bit.

I think many of you know that I've been spending a ton of time in the

first century, and I'm doing that because I truly believe we can

understand current and now if we learn some things about the past.

So here's something that I want us to jump back to.

From AD 30 to about AD 313, so we're going back literally 2,000 years, the

early church grew as an outsider movement.

No buildings, no legal status, no political power, no seat at Rome's table.

And you know what?

The church grew anyway.

Then Constantine legalized Christianity in the early 300s, and the outsider

movement became part of the establishment.

Now, run the same pattern forward.

Many American Christians have tied the emotional life of the church

to the American election cycle.

If our side wins, God is blessing us.

If our side loses, the devil is winning.

But the New Testament never gives the church that framework, Ever.

That is not biblical.

Paul did not tell the churches to measure the kingdom by who sat on Caesar's throne.

Jesus did not announce the kingdom by organizing a campaign to take Rome, or to

see who the next emperor could be, or try to promote things within the Roman Empire.

Never happened.

So the question is not whether Christians can gain political power.

Clearly, they can.

The question is whether political power can produce what it keeps promising

Now, this is what we keep confusing.

Before I get into why this keeps happening, I want to put three different

things on the table because most of the confusion in this conversation

comes from collapsing them together.

They're not the same thing.

One, the Kingdom of God.

That is the message of the New Testament, what Jesus actually preached.

The mustard seed, the leaven, the treasure hidden in a field, a way of life

that runs on love, mercy, forgiveness, peacemaking, loving your enemy, caring

for the least, and quiet faithfulness.

It does not show up on the empire's instruments.

It does not run on the empire's scorecard.

Jesus said it himself.

His kingdom is not of this world.

Now, the next thing we need to look at, let's look at religion, and religion and

the kingdom are not one and the same.

The institutional, doctrinal, ritual, cultural systems we have built over

2,000 years, and we call it the Church.

Buildings, denominations, programs, theologies, liturgies, hierarchies,

brand identities, the visible religious infrastructure of Christianity.

Some of it is good, but I'll be truthful, some of it is bad.

Most of it is neutral, but none of it is by itself the Kingdom of God.

The kingdom can grow inside of religion.

The kingdom can grow outside of religion.

It doesn't need it.

The kingdom can grow despite religion.

Much of religion sometimes hinders the kingdom.

Religion is not the kingdom.

It might contain the kingdom.

It is not the same as the kingdom.

And then the next thing, number three, Rome And that's kind of something

that we're gonna use as the political power structures of the world.

At some point, sometimes I call it Babylon.

We're looking at Rome because I'm immersed in the first century.

Rome represented that power.

If we fast-forward to today, the Americanized culture, the first world

culture would be how we describe it.

Empires, governments, parties, political coalitions, cultural

influence, money, law, coercion.

Whether it is the Roman Empire in the first century, Christendom in

the medieval period, or the American political machine today, Rome is whatever

the empire of your time happens to be.

Rome is not the kingdom either.

Rome cannot become the kingdom by being called Christian

or using a few scriptures.

Christianity does not become the kingdom by getting access to Rome.

Here is where most of the confusion happens.

Because religion sometimes looks like the kingdom, we conclude

that religion is the kingdom.

Because Rome sometimes appears to support religion, we conclude that

Rome plus religion is the kingdom.

and so when a Christian gets elected or a law passes that lines up with

what the church wanted or the political coalition wins an election, we say

the kingdom is advancing It is not.

That sounds pretty definitive.

I could say it probably is not.

Something is advancing, and it may even be a good thing, but it is not the kingdom.

The kingdom is its own thing.

The kingdom is not advanced or hindered by which empire is in power.

The kingdom grows underneath every empire in every century on its own terms.

Historically, it has.

We can look back and see that.

It advances on its own terms by the Spirit on its own timetable.

Just because the church has political clout does not mean kingdom

principles are coming into play.

The two are different categories of things.

Keep them separate, and the rest of this episode makes sense.

Collapse them, and you'll misread the entire history of Christianity.

The kingdom of God is real, but it is not always easy to see, so we

try to make it visible by forcing it into religion and politics.

We build institutions.

We chase influence.

We seek power.

We try to give the kingdom a microphone, a platform, a party, a building,

a brand, a court ruling, a law.

But the more we force the kingdom into the world's systems so it can be seen

and heard, the more those systems start shaping what people actually see and hear.

Instead of magnifying the kingdom, we end up magnifying the machinery or something

of the world, the fear, the anger, the control, the competition, the need to win.

The junk of the world's system starts drowning out the voice of Jesus.

I don't think it can do that permanently But it creates confusion for people that

really need to hear the voice of Jesus.

Now, let's talk about how that confusion can show up.

And let me be honest with you, I run into this confusion too.

It's not as if I've got this figured out.

In fact, part of the reason I'm spending time in this is because I'm

attempting to sort through it myself.

If it's hard for you to hold the distinction between religion,

Rome, and the kingdom, it is hard for me to do it too.

But here's kind of how it shows up.

When a church grows, we say things like, "The kingdom is growing."

It may be, or it may not be.

A- attendance can mean discipleship.

It can also mean marketing, charisma, habit, or could just

be a good religious product.

The attendance number does not tell you which one it is.

When a Christian candidate wins an election, we say, "God is

moving." He may be, he may not be.

I love how people say, "God is in control," and that is sort of accurate.

I've covered that in other episodes.

I'm not gonna do it here, and I don't wanna go down that path, but I don't

necessarily say that's the case.

The election result by itself does not tell you whether

kingdom fruit was produced.

When abortion laws change, we covered abortion recently, we say, "The kingdom

is advancing." It may be, it may not be.

The law changed.

Hearts may or may not have changed.

The political wind produced a political outcome.

Whether it produced a kingdom outcome is a separate question.

When the church wins a culture war battle, the Ten Commandments placed on a stone

out in front of courthouses all over, we say, "The kingdom won. Yay, we put a rock

out front of courthouses with some words on it." It may have, it may not have.

Culture war fights at the level of public symbols.

The kingdom works at the level of hearts The war and slavery episode and the sex

and abortion episode that we recently released, those were case studies in

this confusion, and then also actually going back to what the New Testament

actually said about those challenging issues that we try to make a huge, a huge

emphasis of in our modern-day culture.

In both, the Church repeatedly tried to use Rome's operating system to

change moral outcomes, while the deeper kingdom work usually came

from people living faithfully outside that system, outside that machinery.

That is the temptation.

We read the empire scoreboard and announce a kingdom win, yay,

kingdom, but the scoreboard does not really measure the kingdom.

In many ways, the kingdom can't really be measured with a scoreboard.

So when something good happens in religion or in Rome, we have to

really ask the harder question: Did it produce kingdom outcomes?

Did we use kingdom principles to get to that place?

Things like repentance, reconciliation, love, holiness, discipleship and

discipling, care for the least.

If not, then whatever we won was a religion win or a Rome win,

not necessarily a kingdom win.

Let's talk a little bit about these operating systems.

As I was kinda laying this out, I kept thinking about toolboxes, but

that didn't really describe it well.

It really is different operating system.

Here's the structure that helped me make sense of this,

at least a little more sense.

The kingdom, religion, and Rome are not just using different

tools, they are really running different operating systems.

Religion has an operating system.

It tends to measure faith through visibility, structure,

ritual, authority, boundaries, buildings, titles, and belonging.

Rome has an operating system.

It measures power through law, money, force, influence, elections, courts,

armies, markets, and public control.

Then Jesus shows up in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount, and reveals

the operating system of the kingdom, and it flipped all of those things Just

turned them around 180-plus degrees.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are the meek.

Love your enemies.

Give in secret.

Pray in secret.

Forgive.

Do not perform your righteousness for applause.

Do not be anxious.

Seek first the kingdom.

That is not religion with better behavior.

That is not Rome with softer language.

That is another operating system entirely.

And this is why the Sermon on the Mount shook both systems.

I think it's why it's such a significant part of what Matthew

wrote, and, you know, we don't know if that was all in one sermon.

I think we've pictured it, maybe him standing on a mount and delivering

all that, and maybe he did.

I'm not gonna argue that.

But I think that Matthew five, six, and seven is so powerful in that it puts

the operating system all in one place, and it messes with the Pharisees, it

messes with anyone who's looking at Rome, and it says to the people, to

the sheep, to those that are listening, "Something different has arrived.

The Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven is here, and it has a different operating

system." It challenged the religious system because it exposed public

righteousness without transformed hearts.

It challenged the empire system because it rejected coercion, dominance,

retaliation, and visible power.

These systems can sometimes touch.

There can be some overlap.

They can sometimes interface.

A government can restrain evil.

A church structure can help people gather.

A business can serve people well.

There are places where the systems seem to integrate.

I think we might say they have APIs.

They're, they're overlapping, and they're, they're, they're kind of

integrating, I guess, in a better way than-- They're not separate, I

guess, might be the way of saying it.

But the deeper logic cannot be merged.

Rome says defeat your enemy.

Jesus says love your enemy.

Religion says be seen as righteous.

Let everyone see you.

Jesus says go into the secret place.

Rome says power comes through control.

Jesus says blessed are the meek.

Religion says protect the system at all cost.

Jesus says seek first the kingdom.

That is the core category or operating era.

We keep asking one operating system to produce the fruit of another.

Rome can produce Rome outcomes.

Religion produces religious outcomes.

Only the Spirit can produce kingdom life.

So here's the problem.

Once the church starts running on Rome's operating system, and

that's what's happened for the last few thousand years, kingdom life

starts to look weak by comparison.

Why preach for years when you can pass a law in months?

Why disciple one person when you can elect a candidate who reaches millions?

Why suffer patiently when you can fight back with money and lawyers?

So the church starts speaking kingdom language using scriptures and all

while running Rome's code underneath its operating system, not because it

stopped believing the kingdom matters, but it sort of sets the kingdom aside.

The kingdom operating system feels slow.

You can't really see it.

It's not visible.

It doesn't fit a marketing plan or a program.

And the empire operating system feels fast.

An election cycle in the United States, it's every two years

or definitely every four years.

Every generation makes the same trade, speed over depth, reach over

conversion, influence over discipleship.

The trade always looks reasonable, and it's somewhat justified.

Compromise might be a better word.

But it always loses.

I mean, always loses.

I mentioned at the beginning the history I've seen.

It never gets a foothold and becomes the dominating force.

It ebbs and flows and goes up and down because the kingdom cannot be

advanced by an operating system that contradicts it or compromises it.

You cannot legislate revival.

You cannot appoint repentance.

You cannot pass a bill that creates disciples.

You cannot win a court case that produces holiness.

The operating system and the output do not match.

Imagine trying to fix a broken marriage by running it through a courtroom.

The court can produce certain outcomes.

It can legalize a divorce or something like that, a separation

agreement, a contract, a property settlement, a custody arrangement.

What the court cannot produce is reconciliation, reconciled love, because

the legal system cannot reach the place where the problem actually lives.

Marriage repair happens at the level of the heart, not at the contractual level.

The church reaching for political power to do kingdom work is the

same kind of category error.

This is not theoretical.

Again, we've seen this happen.

And if you're intellectually honest and you've been around for a few

years, especially the last ten years, you would have to admit this.

And if you didn't, you know, let's get a cup of coffee and talk it through because

we're ignoring some things that are pretty obvious Christianity, government.

Government, Christianity, it's repelling people.

It doesn't really matter how much political power you accumulate,

the system cannot reach the place where the kingdom actually grows.

It just can't.

Jesus actually said it.

He told us this in John 18.

His kingdom is not of this world.

Most people read that as a statement about geography.

It is not.

He was making a category statement.

His kingdom does not run on the operating system of worldly kingdoms.

It produces different fruit.

It forms different people.

It moves by a different spirit entirely And so let's now kinda dive in a

little bit more and look at what I love talking about, which is history.

Before I get to Constantine, I wanna circle back to that.

I wanna point out that this pattern did really-- didn't really start with him.

It was already visible inside the New Testament itself.

In fact, we kinda saw it from the disciples at times.

Look at the religious leadership that Jesus walked into.

The Pharisees shaped much of the religious life of the people.

The Sadducees and priestly leaders held much of the temple power and

worked closely with Roman occupation.

Their access to Rome was close enough that they could press

the governor for an execution.

We saw that time and time again.

Religion and Rome were already tangled together, and the people closest to that

arrangement thought their access meant that they were doing God's work, that

they were operating under God's favor.

Much of Jesus' public conflict was with that system.

He called leaders whitewashed tombs.

I don't think that's a compliment.

He overturned their tables.

He told them they had taken away the key of knowledge.

They believed proximity to Rome protected their religious legitimacy.

Jesus exposed something deeper.

Their proximity to Rome showed how far they had moved from the kingdom.

The pattern this episode is naming begins right there before Constantine,

inside the Gospels themselves.

religion leaning on Rome and calling it faithfulness.

Three hundred years later, the same pattern shows up again, but

this time the church embraces it.

The year is 312 AD. A Roman general named Constantine is preparing

for a battle at the Milvian Bridge against his rival, Maxentius.

According to the historian Eusebius, sometime before the battle,

Constantine sees a cross of light in the sky with the words, "Conquer by

this." There's a Greek word for it.

I'm not gonna try to pronounce it, but it is later Latin.

It says, "In hoc signo vinces." I may have mispronounced that because I

don't speak Latin, but stop and think about that sentence for a second.

Three words that would change in the next seventeen hundred

years of churched history.

In this sign, conquer.

The cross, the instrument of Roman execution, the symbol of a crucified

Messiah who refused political power, now repurposed as a battle banner for

an army on its way to seize an empire.

Constantine wins the battle.

He becomes emperor.

He issues the Edict of Milan in 313, legalizing Christianity.

Less than 70 years later, under Theodosius in 380 AD, Christianity now, it's not

just legal, it becomes the official state religion of the Roman Empire.

The persecuted minority is now the establishment.

Almost immediately, the church starts running on the empire's operating system.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 is called by the emperor.

The emperor enforces orthodoxy.

Bishops gain civic influence and, in some cases, kind of

a quasi-political authority.

Church wealth explodes.

Church buildings get imperial subsidy.

Within a few decades, refusing to be Christian becomes a

political and legal problem.

By Augustine in the early 400s, the theological justifications are in place.

Augustine writes that the state can coerce heretics for the good of their souls.

the same logic Rome used on the early Christians is now used by

the church against everyone else.

The persecuted have become the persecutors, and it

took less than a century.

Here's what's striking.

After Constantine, growth becomes harder to measure because Christian identity

becomes increasingly civic and nominal.

What clearly grows is the cultural footprint.

The church becomes visible, protected, funded, eventually expected.

And as Christianity becomes part of the civic order, its

distinctiveness becomes harder to see.

The thing that made it dangerous to Rome, its strange, subversive identity,

it's weird, it's different, it really gets absorbed into Rome and sort of

weakened and watered down in many ways.

The pattern in one sentence: We did not Christianize the empire,

we imperialized Christianity.

That's not my line originally.

It's a summary of what historians like Will Durant, who I've read a good bit

of recently, Rodney Stark, and Peter Brown have been documenting for decades.

The cross went on the shields.

They put it on the T-shirts.

They put it on the battle armor, and the Church became part of the world system.

the Crusades are downstream of Constantine.

We know how awesome those were.

Killing, murdering, taking land, all in the name of Scripture and Christ.

So is the Inquisition.

So are the wars of religion that killed millions of Europeans

in the 16th and 17th century.

So is the Doctrine of Discovery, which we covered in that war and

slavery episode we recently did.

So are the centuries of state churches using legal power against dissenters.

Every one of those is what happens when the Church runs Rome's operating

system and calls it kingdom work.

Let's talk a little bit about kinda some impacts on growth

or the perception of growth.

Let me give you some data, 'cause this is where the pattern becomes visible.

So let's look at the first three centuries.

The Church grows from about 1,000, these numbers are tough, but to

roughly 6 million people across an empire where they had no seat at

the table and often faced hostility.

That was in the first century up until about the year 300.

No buildings, no legal status, no political power.

The growth rate is roughly 40% per decade, sustained for almost 300 years.

Then after Constantine, the growth becomes more nominal.

People are baptized because they live in a Christian empire.

It's just sorta automatic, not really a decision.

It's just an automatic thing, not necessarily because they have

encountered the risen Christ.

They're just expected to do it.

The Church really becomes civic.

Religious identity and political identity merge.

By the time of the Reformation, the question is no longer whether

you are Christian, it is which Christian state you are loyal to.

Now, let's move forward China and Iran today both show the same

uncomfortable pattern in different ways.

The church can grow under hostility underground without

state approval and without running the empire's operating system.

Really, it's interesting, the American church under, you know, Jim Crow and,

and some real oppression that occurred, the Black church in the American

South produced really one of the most prophetic, biblically grounded movements

in American religious history from a position of political exclusion.

They did not have a seat at the table, obviously, and they experienced

incredible growth, incredible strength.

Here's the pattern in one line.

The kingdom often grows in the places we keep refusing to look because

they do not match our assumption that influence equals impact.

Influence is the empire metric.

The kingdom does not run on that.

So why does this keep happening?

Why does the church keep reaching for power?

If the pattern is this clear, it seems clear, I mean, it's

easy to look at, truthfully.

Why do we keep making the same trade in every generation, and really doing it in

a magnified way in the last 50-plus years?

Two reasons Reason number one, you become what you fight.

This is kind of a weird dynamic.

When you organize a movement to defeat a political enemy, you

unfortunately adopt the enemy's methods.

You have to.

Politics is a contest with rules, and the rules reward certain behaviors.

Tribalism, strategic dishonesty, some call that lying, demonization, anger

as fuel, compromise as currency.

By the time you win the political contest, you have spent 20 years

training your people in those behaviors.

And in many ways, that's what you've attracted.

Anger has become normal.

Demonizing the other side has become normal.

Lying for the team has become normal.

The behaviors that built the political coalition are now the spiritual

habits of the people inside it.

the Apostle Paul writes about this.

In Galatians 5, he lists the works of the flesh.

Listen to this.

Anger, strife, dissension, factionalism, hatred.

Then, as a contrast, he lists the fruit of the spirit.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control.

Look honestly at the contemporary American Christian political coalition.

Just go to social media and take a look.

Which list does it more resemble?

It's not a partisan question.

That is a Galatians 5 question.

And the answer should disturb us and bother us at our core.

All right, reason number two.

this is a tough one here.

Suffering produces dependence.

Had someone once say, "We need to get back to some basic foundational

Christian values." I said, "I don't know.

Historically, you may not want that to happen because historically, the only

time that happens is when persecution is at its maximum." And I'm not sure

that as Christians we really want that.

Power produces self-reliance.

The early church had nothing.

No buildings, no legal protection, no political access, no money.

The only thing the early church had was each other and the Spirit.

And apparently, that was enough.

So they prayed.

They depended.

They shared.

They formed deep communities.

They built relationships of utter trust because they were the

only safety net any of them had.

Power Changes that.

Once you have buildings, you have insurance.

Once you have legal protection, you have lawyers.

Once you have political access, you have allies in government.

Once you have money, you have programs.

And the more of those you have, the less you actually need each other,

the less you need the Spirit, the less you need to pray with the kind of

desperation the early church prayed with.

Power does not just corrupt morally, it corrupts the spiritual operating system.

It teaches you to depend on what you have built instead of who you are following.

And when the day comes that the buildings burn or the laws change or the money runs

out, the church discovers what it actually had was infrastructure, not faith.

That is what we see happening to the American church right

now, and we see it in real time.

Now, let's kind of bring this into the American experiment,

recent American history.

I told you at the top that I was inside this machine in

Conyers, Georgia, in the '80s.

So I'm not describing it as an outsider.

The moral majority, the religious right, the Christian coalition, all those

things, the evangelical voting bloc, decades of effective political organizing,

presidents elected, courts shaped, party platforms influenced by political metrics.

It worked, or it seems as if it may have worked.

But political Christianity often seems clearest, unfortunately,

when it is out of power.

It has a villain.

It has a grievance.

It can say, "If only we win, things will change." Then the election

occurs, the power tilts, it gains power, and the illusion gets exposed.

The problems do not disappear.

They're still there.

The culture does not become holy.

The people do not become more Christ-like.

So the promise keeps moving.

One more election, one more court appointment, one more law.

The kingdom keeps asking a different question: Where is the fruit?

Unfortunately, we look around now and some of the measurements, which

I've said measurements aren't a great thing, but church attendance is down.

Church membership has fallen in most areas.

Church identification has dropped sharply.

The unaffiliated have grown massively.

That does not let us measure the true spiritual state of America.

Only God can do that.

We don't know if those measurements are right, but it does show that decades

of political influence overlapped with decades of visible institutional decline

Roe versus Wade was overturned.

That was a political outcome, but the country really did not

suddenly become more Christian.

Church attendance did not climb.

Conversions did not spike.

The same pattern shows up around prayer in schools.

We gotta force prayer in schools, Bible reading, Pledge of Allegiance,

Ten Commandments, like I said earlier, and religious liberty fights.

Some wins, some losses.

None of it has produced revival.

I'm not making a partisan point here.

Same thing happens whenever the church merges with a political project.

Different parties, different countries, different centuries, same pattern.

The church starts running the political system, and eventually

It gets absorbed by it.

The leaven of the kingdom doesn't impact that other system.

The impact of that other system seems to overtake the church.

Let's talk a little bit about … I think we need to bring Jesus into this.

Here's the part that I think modern American church has just forgotten.

Jesus was offered political power three different times in the New Testament.

He turned it down every single time, not because he could not have taken it,

he could have obviously, because taking it would've ended his actual mission.

In Matthew 4, the wilderness temptation, Satan takes Jesus to a high mountain and

shows him all the kingdoms of the world, representing Rome and Babylon, and if

it were today, it would be America and some of the other first world countries.

All the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

Then Satan offers him the deal.

"All these I will give you if you will fall down and worship

me." Read that carefully.

The temptation presents the kingdoms of the world as the offer.

Jesus refuses the offer outright, says, "You shall worship the Lord your

God, and Him only shall you serve."

The first political offer refused.

Unfortunately, many of us today have fallen down and worshiped that

world system and bowed to the altar of that political operating system.

Jesus' example, he refused it.

Let's go to John 6.

Jesus feeds the 5,000.

Great miracle.

The crowd recognizes him as a prophet.

They want to make him king.

They want a king so bad.

They're ready to start a movement, organize a coalition, march on Jerusalem,

and put him on the throne by force.

15 records what Jesus does.

He sees what is happening, and he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

He literally runs from the crowd that wants to make him king.

The second political offer refused.

John 18, the night before his execution, Pilate asks him directly, "Are you

the king of the Jews?" Jesus answers, "My kingdom is not of this world.

If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I

might not be delivered over to the Jews.

But my kingdom is not from this world."

Pilate hears him say it- Pilate writes the charge.

Anyway, Jesus dies under a sign that names him king.

Kind of an announcement to all of the empires and kingdoms of the

world and religions, Jesus is king.

But he refuses to defend it himself.

He refuses to participate in the operating system of political power.

The third confrontation with political power refused.

I love how threes show up in, in the scriptures.

Three refusals in three different settings from three different sources.

Satan offers, crowds, and Caesar's representative offers.

Every offer rejected.

The pattern is consistent.

The Son of God came into a world full of political power, was offered access

to that power repeatedly, and refused it every time because the mission could

not be accomplished by political power.

It can only be accomplished by the cross.

Now, think about what the modern American church has been doing for 45 years,

back to the mid-'80s, probably longer, saying yes to every political offer.

Mostly every offer.

Mobilizing for every election I'll also say this, being manipulated and

used by the politicians that recognize what a dependable voting bloc American

Christianity, American Christians can be.

Aligning with every party that promised access, mostly one

party in the United States.

Defending political figures that we never should have defended because they

promised us seats at the table, or worse, they really manipulated and used that

voting bloc because they're easy to use.

Trading the moral authority of the church for proximity to power.

Jesus refused, the modern-day church has accepted.

That is the inversion in one sentence.

The master refused political power, the disciples spent 50 years reaching

for it, and the result is what we're living through right now.

Now, one quick thing about what I call the eschatology trap.

There's one more variation of this pattern I have to name.

We've talked about it in the past here.

It's one of the original reasons I began studying this in the way I have.

Many modern American Christians live in this space.

It's the same false flag in a different costume.

People look around and see religion failing, politics corrupted, and Rome

and religion tangled together, and something just doesn't seem right.

They decide the kingdom must not be here, and it must mostly be something

in the future, something later, something that's way out there in

the future, something that arrives after the world gets bad enough.

I want to leave the timing mechanics of all that alone here.

That is not the point of this episode.

We've talked about that before.

The point is what this posture does to the kingdom now.

If the kingdom is mostly later, and we think it's something that's coming, then

the only kingdom work left is to wait, watch, warn, decode, and argue, or jump

into the system of the empire, politics, jump into the religious system, and try

to use those systems to make an impact.

That can sound biblical, but it can become the same mistake

wearing a different costume.

One version looks for the kingdom in political access now.

The other looks for the kingdom in a future intervention later.

Both can keep us from living the kingdom where Jesus said it actually is.

Look at what the first century New Testament writers did.

They lived under Rome at the height of its power, and they did not sit and wait.

They loved their neighbors, cared for widows and orphans, shared

resources, forgave each other, preached Jesus, suffered well at a

time when there was some suffering.

They lived as the kingdom alongside Rome.

The kingdom is not waiting for religion to be fixed later.

The kingdom is not waiting for Rome to be fixed later.

The kingdom is already here, growing wherever Jesus' way

is actually being lived.

Whatever someone believes about the future, the kingdom is not an

excuse to avoid faithfulness now.

That is the point.

If the church is not supposed to win politically, what is it supposed to do?

We already saw the answer earlier in this series.

Paul from prison is a great example.

Some of the most enduring documents in human history were written by a Jewish

man in chains in a Roman jail that was operating in and with God's kingdom.

He had no political authority.

He had no money.

He had no platform.

He had a Roman guard chained to his wrist for some of that time,

24 hours a day, and he wrote Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians,

and Philemon under those conditions.

Then he was released, wrote field manuals for the next generation.

Then he was arrested again and wrote his farewell from a dungeon.

Seven letters total from chains and from a death cell.

Those letters have outlasted Rome.

They've outlasted every empire that has risen and fallen since.

They are read every Sunday in churches across every continent.

They have shaped Western civilization more deeply than any law any Roman

emperor ever passed from a prison cell without political power.

That is the alternative.

Kingdom power exercised from a position of powerlessness, the exact pattern that

Jesus modeled all the way to the cross, the exact pattern that Paul lived all the

way to being martyred, the exact pattern the early church embodied for 300 years

We've already walked it together across this stretch of the series.

Paul in chains, Paul in a dungeon, two letters into one story, the old system

fulfilled, the institutional drift named.

Every one of those movements was a different angle on the same answer.

The kingdom does not need access.

The kingdom does not need elections.

It does not need favorable laws.

It does not need a Christian nation.

We don't even need to use that terminology.

It needs people who actually live like citizens of a different kingdom inside

whatever empire they happen to be in.

The early church did it under Rome.

The Chinese church is doing it under the Communist Party.

The Iranian church is doing it under the Ayatollahs.

The pattern works in every empire because it does not depend on the empire.

It just lives inside the empire and outlasts it.

For now, the question I want you to carry is this: What would change if

you stopped reaching for political access, started bowing down at

the political altar, and started living like the early church lived?

What would your priorities be?

Where would your energy go?

What would you stop arguing about on social media?

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

What would you start doing with your time?

Where would you spend your energy?

Could we really be anxious for nothing, as the scripture tells us to do?

Because many of us get way too anxious over that type of stuff

Let's look at three moves as we wrap up here.

Just kind of what it means.

The first hearers of the New Testament lived under Rome at the height of

its power, had zero political access, no legal protection, no platform,

no way to vote, lobby, or legislate.

The only life they had was kingdom life.

It was simple: prayer, hospitality, mercy, suffering, love, discipleship,

and that life was enough to outlast the empire that was killing them, literally

killing them, not because it was dramatic, because it moved through the right places,

hearts, souls, relationships, communities.

And then this is where we've kind of misread it.

Somewhere around Constantine, the church decided the kingdom would

advance faster by running on Rome's operating system, better laws, better

courts, better access, better influence.

The decision is the original sin, I believe, of Christian political theology.

It assumes the kingdom is the kind of thing that can be advanced by political

mechanisms or operating systems.

The New Testament writers would not recognize that assumption.

They'd be shocked.

They never made that assumption.

They were too busy being killed by political power to imagine

using it for the kingdom.

So what does that mean for us?

Stop seeing political opponents as enemies of the kingdom.

I know that's tough, but we gotta stop it, because that's what it says in the Bible.

They are not our enemies.

They are people the kingdom is for.

Love them, pray for them, disagree with them honestly, but do not

treat winning elections as more important than loving your neighbor

Stop measuring.

We've got to stop measuring church health by political clout, public

visibility, or cultural influence.

Measure it by the things the New Testament measures it by.

Are people loving each other?

Are people forgiving each other?

Are people growing?

Are the poor being cared for?

Are the lonely included?

Is the gospel being preached?

And of course, our politics.

Vote your conscience.

Vote what you think.

Engage where you can.

Restrain evil where you can.

But hold political outcomes very loosely.

They come and go.

They ebb and flow.

I've seen it for 50 years.

Many of you have too.

It really doesn't change much.

I know that's tough, but it doesn't.

Do not treat any election as the salvation or damnation of the church

or people or the world or the country.

The kingdom does not depend on the next vote.

It never has.

That is temporal ebbs and flows of the operating system of the

world, of Rome, of America.

How we work and live is important.

Stop assuming that influence equals impact.

Some of the most kingdom-advancing people in history have been

people no one has heard of.

The mother who prayed for her son for 40 years.

The neighbor who refused to leave a dying friend alone.

The teacher who showed up for that one student.

The kingdom grows in the places we keep refusing to look.

When the church stops trying to win politically, it can start being

the church, the ecclesia again.

Rome's operating system does not have to run the church.

The kingdom operating system is enough.

It always has been.

It's got history on our side.

We can see it for the last 2,000 years.

The kingdom is not just another kingdom or system.

Before I close, I just wanna sharpen those three categories one more time.

Religion, Rome, the kingdom of God.

The whole episode has named these as three things we keep confusing and

trying to merge together, but there is one move I want to land before we're

done, because even the way I have framed this so far can be misunderstood.

The kingdom of God is not just a third option sitting next to religion and Rome.

It is not one more kingdom in the lineup It's not just a choice.

There are a lot of kingdoms in this world.

Religion is a kingdom.

The Pharisees ran one.

Rome was one.

American politics is one.

Sports, entertainment, the marketplace, every one of them is a system with

its own scoreboard, its own values, its own way of measuring success,

its own operating type system.

Every one of them will ask for your allegiance.

You can bow down to any of those.

The kingdom of God is something different from all of them.

It's not another kingdom on the list.

It's not just something to add to your activities, to your to-do list.

It is the thing that moves in and out and around all of them.

For those of you that might be Star Wars fans, it's sort of the Force.

That might be belittling it, actually.

But think of the Force.

It is everywhere.

It is all over the place, except unlike the Force, it is real

and personal and from the actual God and creator of the universe.

It is the thing that politicians cannot legislate, the thing that

religious leaders cannot certify, the thing the empire cannot conquer.

It was already there before Constantine.

It is still there after Constantine, and it will be there long after

the United States is a chapter in someone else's history book.

Here is where I really want this to land.

The kingdom of God does not conform to the other kingdoms.

The kingdom of God transforms them.

That is Romans 12: "Do not be conformed to this world. Be transformed by

the renewing of your mind." The same word applies to the whole project.

The kingdom does not become Republican.

It does not become Democrat.

It does not really even become American.

It does not become evangelical, does not become a state religion.

It does not become a sports franchise or an entertainment brand.

It moves through all of those and transform the people inside them one

heart at a time, one decision at a time, one act of love and mercy and

forgiveness at a time, and it doesn't always look the way expected to look.

It almost never does.

The sober part, people who claim to be inside the kingdom struggle

often to separate any of this.

We get morals from politics, the Bible from a voter guide.

We get church from religion, eschatology from political anxiety that we talked

about earlier, the need for a perfect world from the need for a perfect

country, Rome from the temple, the temple from the old covenant, the

old covenant from the new, personal hopes from God's actual promises.

All of that just starts running together, and we allow it to.

If you ask the average American Christian to draw a clean line between what Jesus

said and what their political coalition believes, many of them have trouble doing

that, and that line is extremely fuzzy.

For many of them, there is no line.

They're all merged together in one.

That should make us stop, because if the people who claim to be inside the

kingdom cannot separate the kingdom from religion, from Rome, from morals, from

America, from the old covenant, from eschatology, from politics, from their

preferred candidate, then maybe what we're really claiming is not the kingdom at all.

Maybe it is one of the other kingdoms that's just wearing kingdom

language, and here's the cost.

If people inside can't separate those things, then it's really tough

for people outside to separate.

Outsiders look at the church and can't tell the Bible from politics.

They cannot tell America from the church.

They cannot tell Christianity from a denomination.

They cannot tell Trump from Jesus.

That's not their fault.

That is what the inside has been broadcasting for decades.

We have not given a world a clean signal of the kingdom.

We have given them a tangled signal, religion plus Rome plus politics plus

our preferred political figures plus our preferred culture plus somewhere

underneath all of that, oh, here's some Jesus that we're gonna throw in the mix.

Then we wonder why people will not come to Jesus?

'cause they can't find him.

They don't know what he looks like.

And in many situations, it's our fault.

We did that, not them.

Us.

It's how we projected Jesus.

We painted Jesus on top of another worldly operating system or religion or politics.

So when I tell you religion is not the kingdom and Rome is not the kingdom, I'm

not telling you the kingdom is hiding somewhere else waiting to be found.

I'm telling you the kingdom is already here.

It's already moving.

It is already at work in people you would not expect, in places you would

not look, in ways you cannot measure.

The question is not where the kingdom is.

The question is whether we are living in it or just standing next to it, claiming

it while serving a different king.

I'm not telling anybody here to leave politics.

I'm not telling you to disengage.

I'm not telling you to stop voting.

I'm saying the church has spent decades putting its primary energy into a

strategy the New Testament never endorsed.

It's not biblical.

If it's something you feel like the Lord is leading you to do, go for

it, but don't claim it's biblical.

It is not.

And that strategy, truthfully, hasn't worked.

It hasn't worked for the last 50 years that I've seen, and it hasn't

worked for the previous 2,000.

It has not produced the fruit that it keeps promising.

What if Jesus meant it when he said his kingdom was not of this world?

What if Paul meant it when he wrote that the weapons of our

warfare are not of the flesh?

What if the apostles knew what they were doing when they refused

to organize a political movement?

If they were right, the path forward is not more political

access, jockeying for power.

It is more prayer, more hospitality, more discipleship, more mercy, more

presence with the people the empire keeps forgetting, Religion is not God's kingdom.

Neither is Rome.

America is not God's kingdom.

The election cycle is not God's kingdom.

The church can vote, the church can speak, the church can participate, but the

church cannot run Rome's operating system and expect spirit-formed kingdom life.

Maybe the question is not whether the church should have power.

Maybe the question is what kind of power Jesus actually gave the church.

That is where this whole conversation turns next.

Because if religion is not the kingdom and then Rome is not the kingdom, then

what actually gives the kingdom life?

That question has been bothering me, and I found the kingdom,

but did I miss the Spirit?

We'll cover that next time.

Go, go get the reading plan for all of this.

Man, this is what has spun off all of this.

Go to k2m.foundation/nt90.

Download the reading plan.

Uh, please don't start listening to me and make this all about me.

Go check things out yourself.

If what you're taught, if what you've heard, if what you believed

doesn't match up with what you're reading, trust the text.

I'm Tim Winders.

Thanks for joining me here.

It's been kinda long, but this is important stuff.

Keep seeking.

See you on the next one.