Kingdom Leaven
Kingdom Leaven
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough. Mt. 13:33
Can virtue become systemic? Can kindness or brotherly love, for instance, become the predominant characteristics of a community… of a city? Could the ways of God influence the rules that govern a state?
Of course, if… (read on).
Holy Subversion on a Dark Day
I recently heard from my friend, Harry, that today the fastest growing religion in the world is the worship of Self. You’ll notice its adherents as those who incessantly take selfies and then marvel with delight. That ritual is actually named after their god.
Paul prophesied this development in 2 Tim. 3:2,4 that in the last days “people will be lovers of self… rather than lovers of God.” Loving self rather than God is not just a sin. It is idolatry - worshiping, bowing down to a God substitute.
In much of contemporary culture, the god “Self” has become sovereign. “Self” instructs us to create our own reality, define our own identity. It gives permission to smaller selves to make up their own rules, to be totally autonomous. But, ironically, it requires absolute allegiance to its foolishness. The result: “terrible times” (2 Tim. 3:1 NIV).
Makes sense. You give 8 billion people the right to invent their own reality, and live by their own rules, and you have just created global chaos. And that’s all part of a plan. Some Satanic principality has been assigned the task to create global chaos, which prepares the way for global tyranny. That’s a dark picture.
But wait… there’s something else going on, some kind of holy subversion! Kingdom leaven is being mixed into the hearts of men. Its influence is secretly leavening segments of the world around it. Like a godly virus, its origins are in heaven itself!
Jesus taught us to pray “Your kingdom come, your will would be done,” and the corollary prayer, “Not my will but yours be done.” Self-denial is involved in this kind of praying. The god, “Self,” is not pleased. However, the beautiful mystery of self-denial is that we find our true selves as we lose our selves in God’s love (Mt. 10:39).
To help us pray with faith the kingdom’s coming, let’s learn from sociology how this works: folkways become sub-cultures, sub-cultures become cultures, and cultures influence institutions.
Folkways and Culture
A folkway is “a mode of thinking, feeling, or acting common to a given group of people.” A culture is an aggregation, or a cluster, of folkways. Within cultures are subcultures, smaller groups with some similarities and some distinguishing folkways from others within a larger culture.
For instance, you could speak of American culture - “Americans are like thus or such.” But then you’d have to distinguish between American sub-cultures - “Irish-Americans are different from Mexican-Americans.” Families, churches, communities and ethnicities all have clusters of folkways, some virtuous, some harmful.
Let’s look in Acts 17 at a cultural trait Jewish Bereans had in contrast to Jewish Thessalonians. Both were Jewish and both lived in Greece (about 50 miles from each other). But Paul said the Berean Jews were “more noble” than the those from Thessalonica. Their ways were different. The Bereans eagerly received Paul preaching and searched the Scriptures to confirm his message. The Thessalonians stirred up the crowds in violence against the preaching of the gospel.
The attitude of the Berean Jews even affected the non-Jewish Greeks in their town.
“Many of them (the Bereans) therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men” (vs. 12).
Somewhere in the past, there was probably a Berean family whose parents trained their children to welcome God’s messengers and to study the Scriptures - two of God’s ways. The children saw how valuable that was to their parents and adopted those ways themselves and taught them to their children. A subculture was formed which influenced the synagogue of which they were a part and the future of their city. (see footnote)
[Footnote: Interestingly, Jesus acknowledged that cities had certain traits, and that judgments and rewards came to cities, not just individuals. See Mt. 10:15, and 11:20-22, for instance.]
Rome and Rwanda
In the 3rd century, we find God’s yeast at work in the story of the Cyprian Plague. As many as 5,000 Romans were dying daily by an ebola-like plague. Much of the population fled their cities, but Christians, under the direction of Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, volunteered to care for the dying and bury the dead knowing that they would probably die in the process.
It was this demonstration of selfless service and sacrifice, even more than the Church’s apologetics of the day, that revealed the truth carried by Christ followers to be stronger than the competing pagan religions. God’s kingdom, God’s ways, God’s culture had come among them and the leavening effect won over a failing world empire!
A more recent example of the potency of kingdom leaven is the social repair that is happening in Rwanda. In 1994, there was a murderous reign of terror in Rwanda in which 800,000 Tutsis were killed in 10 days by the Hutus. Ten years later, the government, in cooperation with NGO’s (non-government organizations) like Prison Fellowship, began releasing some of the imprisoned perpetrators. Mediation procedures built around Biblical principles of repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation were employed. Beautiful stories of forgiven murderers building houses for the victims who forgave them for the murder of their husbands and children are recorded in the book As We Forgive by Catherine Larson. Systemic enmity is being conquered by the folkways of repentance and forgiveness.
By the way, the term systemic need a little cleaning up. Often associated with racism that has found its way into our social systems, systemic has taken on an inaccurate implication of being absolute and universal across multiple subcultures. It only has power until a people repudiate it and repent of it. And whenever wickedness finds its way into our institutions, we should do all possible to root it out, as did William Wilberforce (1759-1883), who spent most of his political career in England unraveling wicked laws that favored slave trading. Racial superiority and abuse of power did not have the last word!
Pray the Kingdom, Live the Kingdom
So we’ve learned that practicing God’s ways works like yeast, that it is potent to affect the world around it. We learned that the predominant god of this age is Self which encourages cultures to adopt folkways of radical autonomy in which we individually define our own reality and identity, and that where “Self” rules, chaos follows.
We learned that God’s kingdom is, among other things, the aggregation of his ways, and that to pray, as Jesus taught us, “Your kingdom come, your will be done,” we are counter-culturally calling on God’s rule and God’s ways to prevail in our lives.
So now, the big “if.” Virtue can become systemic “if” we pray the kingdom and live the kingdom!
Ordinary human beings empowered by the Holy Spirit, invoking God’s intervening power and presence, and adopting God’s ways as their own folkways, become dangerous to the powers of darkness.
Pray that his ways, which are higher than our ways, will begin to predominate our lives and our sub-cultures. Pray that your small groups and congregations would take on the traits of heaven… that God’s kingdom would come in you and through you and around you… that your attitudes, actions and relationships would look more and more like heaven itself.
Repudiate all sympathies with the god called Self. Pray “not my will, but God’s be done” as frequently as breathing. Break all alliances with self-serving vices, especially attitudes of superiority, hatred and revenge.
Discipleship is all about learning and practicing God’s ways, the ways that are pleasing to him.
Now, activate the leaven. Pray the kingdom. Live the kingdom.
Teach me your way, O LORD, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. (Ps. 86:11 - NIV 1984)
_________________________________
Click here to share Comments • Click here to receive Bits & Pieces.
Click here for a pdf version • Feel free to share with others • Come visit us
Musicians, click here for a song to accompany these thoughts