We serve Christ. Our Lord and Master rules the Kingdom of Heaven, and we are His subjects.
Jesus once stated the principle, "No man can serve two masters." In the context, it was about giving your allegiance to the Spirit, or to material wealth and what it can buy. Everyone on this earth who does not actively serve the King of Heaven is by default actively serving something else, and that something is inside Satan's Kingdom of Darkness. There's no neutral ground. You can call it anything you like, but if you aren't working with Jesus to build up His Kingdom, you are automatically working for Satan's. This is true simply by default, as we all begin in the Kingdom of Darkness from birth. We are all bound for Hell, and by His grace, the Lord rescues some of us.
It seems so odd we have to restate such things so often. Does that not lend proof? Our entire world system is designed to make you ignore such fundamental truth. It's so easy to forget.
If you depart from the Kingdom of Darkness, you are war with it. That Kingdom owns all the governments of mankind. Saying they are granted by God must remain in the proper context, as with all biblical principles. Remember the Covenant of Noah: It has nothing to do with spiritual salvation, but only a matter of sinners keeping other sinners in check. Sinners by definition sin. While some actions may bring benign results, as they stand before God, nothing they do is righteous. No action can be called "good" by the Kingdom spiritual standard because they stand outside the Kingdom. You are either in or out. When you come to Christ, you are rejecting the world and its ways.
Christians by definition are rebels. Everything Christ commanded puts us at odds with human government.
It doesn't have to be an armed revolt, but it is certainly a conscious rejection of all this world holds dear. We have with Christ nailed this life to the Cross. Everything we could have gained before coming to the Cross is now on the altar. All our worldly wealth, all our actions and plans, all our hopes and dreams in this life are forfeit to the Kingdom of Heaven. We gladly suffer poverty, misery, even death, because in Christ, they are all mere circumstances of service. Do you not know court judges in our land have condemned that openly? There is legal precedent for calling a sincere Christian conscience "insanity" in need of remediation. If you have a genuine other-worldly, spiritual mindset, you are in violation of American cultural and civil standards. Why do we suffer such great spiritual weakness in our land? We have found too many ways to compromise with the demands of our government, and not been willing to resist sin until our blood was shed.
I won't pretend I have it all figured out. What follows is certainly open to comment and suggestion, not so much the basic assumptions, but the implementation. The Word calls us out of this world, to rebel and give ourselves to a course of action which cannot avoid provoking a response. How we react to that response is our witness. Some of it we can predict; some will surprise us. Tribulation is the native environment of professing Christians in this world. Let's examine what we might do in concrete terms, where we live today, to be more firmly in the rebel camp of Christ.
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer me living in this body alone, but Christ lives in me. This new existence in my old body is fully committed to God's Son. He is worthy because He loved me enough to give Himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)
The whole point of a rebellion is getting from some bad place to a good place. The rebellion is over when the bad is removed. In a biblical rebellion, what is the end point? Death.
If we have not yet passed through His death, we cannot claim any part in His Kingdom. If He has not been granted authority to rearrange all things in your world to His liking, and make every decision for you, He is not your Lord. The whole of our lives is the process of surrendering ever more of ourselves to Him. When it gets to the point you are quite literally ready to face death, you might prove useful.
In our case, the rebellion begins when our flesh is dead and our spirits alive. In the real world, there is overlap, but getting from here to there requires seeing the goal. A war without an objective can never see victory. Victory for us is an end to sin. We know we cannot end it so long as we exist in fallen flesh, so the war is to carry the battle to our own flesh, because that is the enemy's greatest ally. In other words, we can't have victory over the world until we have victory over ourselves.
However, I am calling for a realization we are supposed to meet a very human defeat, a very human death. Look forward to it, not in the sense of suicide, but in the sense there's nothing you won't do to obey the Lord. Pass out the hammers and nails to your world. Until that battle is won, you can't really do much in this world with the time left until you are physically dead. You are dead weight on the rest of the Kingdom until you are dead in the flesh. You pull your weight when you have that dead flesh to carry around. That's what it means to be with Jesus in this world. At some point, the symbolism becomes reality, and you are with Jesus in another world.
Our defeat of the sinful Kingdom of Darkness is chiefly in our own flesh. Our rebellion is against our natural inclinations to go along and get along. Until we reject this world's values, ways and demands, we cannot hope to rebel against it, we cannot hope to make the gospel message heard. Our warfare is revealing Him. We have a fight on our hands just making it clear He is not what the human mind imagines of Him.
So we take for granted symbolic death with the expectation of a literal death in service to the Kingdom of Heaven. Note it does not matter whether the pendulum swings toward persecution, as it has these days. This radical commitment to death is also highly objectionable to most of those who claim our Savior. It matters not whether these are spiritually dead impostors or those actually born-again but deceived. Their zeal for shutting us up will be the same in the short run. In other words, seeking to work within the current organized religious structure is risky business. Not pointless, but risky, because far too many still believe as did the Pharisees that God's primary mark of favor is measurable success in this life. For the same reason the Pharisees saw no problem with executing Christ, today's church members may not react well to your other-worldly focus.
Spiritual logic escapes all but a precious few in this world. The fundamental element of spiritual logic is revealing God. All things point back to that one paramount purpose. God can be known only in the presence of His own Spirit, simply because nothing in human nature is capable of grasping Him. He places His Presence where He chooses, invariably in individual humans. While there is a lifelong process of coming to accommodate that Presence, including learning to think on a different level, we can safely assume those who have His Spirit will somehow recognize an action which reveals Him. They may not get it right away, but that's not our problem -- it's His problem. We operate in our best understanding, with impressions hard to quantify or explain, bubbling up into our conscious minds in all manner of manifestations. The purpose of these impressions is to impel action, any action which extends that revelation further. All of this will of necessity escape those limited to human logical operations.
We never ask the question whether someone is truly a member of the Kingdom. We cannot know. Questions of being, even of mere doing, are never an issue in our minds. The question is always whether we can work alongside that while serving Christ. We give little thought to the time frame of any such association, because we think eternally. While we may, on occasion, be granted some insight into the spiritual mechanism of events in which we are immersed, the idea is to remain centered on what we must do in each given context. Everything is contextual. The only absolute is God Himself, and precious few actions can be singled out as always wrong. Would anyone be surprised most of those have to do with violating another person? We never coerce unless it's necessary to prevent a greater violation of His Kingdom. The question at every moment of our association with others is not their status or their actions, but whether we can find in our convictions room to continue.
Convictions are the primary means of knowing God's will in the process of revealing Him. They are the body of commitments gripping us, from which we cannot depart without a sense of violating ourselves before God. I can't watch someone suffer without a powerful pull to help in some way. I can't avoid teaching what I understand of the Kingdom regardless of whatever else I'm doing. If those actions bring me into conflict with some earthly authority, that's not my problem. Surely, such conflict will affect my course of action, but nothing any earthly entity can do or say will change that wordless drive to act. My convictions are those impulses which will not be silent, from which I could never walk away. They are the core of what defines my service in the Kingdom. Their existence is a miracle of grace. While the content of my convictions yield to His nurturing hand, my only contribution is seeking to clarify them, so that I can obey them.
People whose spirits remain dead cannot reach higher than human logic. While our calling in the Kingdom requires we understand such logic, we clearly hitch it to the service of spiritual logic. Thus, we can be fully aware of human logic's failures to grasp things eternal. Spiritual logic is much higher, and takes precedence in all things. To those rooted in this life, such is most certainly illogic, but that is their problem. As long as that's the best they can do, they aren't an ally. Human logic is their god, their highest standard, and "different" equals "failure" when they compare. This is not but a masquerade which makes man his own god.
We dare not give serious allegiance to anything rooted in this earth. All such allegiances will unfailingly demand compromise on convictions. God is higher than all things in Creation, and demands unqualified allegiance to Himself. His Kingdom interests are too obviously the best interests to all life. Everything within the bounds of Creation is a tool for the Kingdom. That includes all human authority. It's possible to be respectful in holy dissent against any earthly power, but we find throughout human history, all powers on earth eventually make room for no other power. Every government seeks to be god, however limited they may see their domain. When any government crosses that line, it is time to rebel.
Where is that line? At what point does human government march or stumble into the free-fire zone?
The first step in any rebellion is renunciation of the things which formerly held you. Whether you are just starting out in your Kingdom life, or waking up from that long sleep of delayed transition to full enjoyment of your Kingdom citizenship, the time is now for you to lay hold of the higher truth. Indeed, our biggest task is not realizing a radical theology, but a radical application of the theology already expressed by many in the past. If Jesus is my Savior, from what has He saved me? The question has been too often feebly answered. Get out that hammer and nails again and pin your old self to the Cross. The Kingdom of Heaven does not reach its highest realization in a peaceful middle-class existence in good old republican USA. That's but an exchange of one fallen culture for another. Walk away from the whole thing in your hearts.
Bereft of any worldly concerns, you stand truly free of the chains of this world. If your government can control you by threatening loss of your retirement plan, then money is your god. If the loss of your home causes fear, then wealth is your god. If the possibility of starvation can drive you to obey, then your stomach is your god. If the loss of physical liberty is all that keeps you in check, then comfort is your god. If none of those things can deflect your service to the Kingdom, then you are truly free.
The battlefield will always be your own flesh. When you have conquered that, and it becomes occupied territory under the flag of Christ, you can begin considering how you might carry that victory into your world. You can begin to see just what it means for government to have crossed that invisible line in the spirit.
You will also know instinctively the most effective tactics for fighting back. Fighting back is not stopping the enemy advance, per se. A far better symbol is removing anything which obscures the clear revelation of the King. Most often, it is our very lack of interest in goods, liberty, comfort or life which projects that revelation. In a few rare cases, it could mean killing someone. For example, I've written repeatedly we will never stand in Christ if we do not fight government interference in child-rearing. How you work out the implications of your duty to resist is between you and the Lord, but violent resistance is an option.
The problem with resorting to violent resistance is it usually represents a failure to prepare beforehand. This assumes you had a chance to to work it out and failed. Now you have a mess on your hands and you must act. There are, of course, tactical ambushes, as it were, when earthly authorities will act by deception and spring a trap. Since we already know this, we should never, ever trust any earthly authority to be truthful. That doesn't mean a paranoid hiding in the woods for everyone, but a realization in the middle of peaceful coexistence the Devil is still at work in their hearts. Again, it won't matter if a bureaucrat claims Christ; the assumption any government policy can carry out the demands of holiness is inherently wrong. When we start out with the expectation it will eventually turn evil, we are mentally prepared to deal with human government.
While it's impossible to prescribe tactics for every eventuality in this conflict, there are a set of habits we can develop which serve to set trip-wires and provide early warning for the need to act in specific ways. We intentionally remain cheerfully vulnerable to losses of the sort we nailed to the Cross, but build a lifestyle which rejects government control of God's affairs in our world. A general outline is provided in Making Noah Work. Here we will examine contextual specifics for our current tribulation.
Before we dive into current specifics, it's necessary to pass through one last portal. Having already examined a couple of parables to describe a victorious rebellion from the smaller end of the scale, it's necessary to put them in context of Kingdom scale. The ultimate end of this fallen world comes when the Bride of Christ is ready for Her Lord to return. That is, Scripture declares she must be clad in holiness "without any spot or wrinkle."
If we dig backward through the cultural layers, we find a recurring emphasis in the New Testament of the old Hebraic notion of unity. When John's Revelation refers to the Bride's garments, he speaks from his Spirit-driven renewal of the ancient biblical perspective, of faith from the cultural background in which God revealed Himself. If we are to emphasize His revelation, it should be obvious some part of our efforts will go toward revealing Him according to the character of the cultural background He purposefully chose as the best setting for making things clear.
The parabolic image of such a Bridal gown teaches us to regard "perfection" in terms of unity. Since we have seen unity tested in every way possible on the level of human organization, and found it remains human regardless of divine purpose, it should be obvious the unity referred to is purely spiritual in scope. While it should manifest in some behavioral unity in the flesh, the focus remains on the spiritual union. We can argue and debate and maintain a raucous gathering while still observing the spiritual compulsion to love each other more than life itself. Indeed, the only reason we can justify such passionate expressions of differing viewpoints is because we have a passionate commitment to the eternal welfare of our brothers and sisters. Unity need not satisfy human conceptions of unity, but those of the Spirit.
That unity returns us to the fundamental logic of the Spirit: It's not about being unified, nor about doing unity, but about serving united -- neither state nor action, but character of process. Not only that, but it's not about results nor methods. It's about desire. Were the Lord to hold us accountable for methods and results, we'd all be doomed. Only His power can grant the merest glimmer of what holiness of ways and means ought to appear in our eyes. We remain in the fallen flesh, only by grace able to go about things correctly, never mind get appropriate results. So we leave performance in His hands where it belongs, and focus on the one thing He allows us to exercise consistently: desire to please Him. For us, in our proper place in the Kingdom operations, we think of holiness in terms of desire. If I can detect a holy desire in you, I am required to make all effort to work alongside you.
That detection of desire is itself only possible by the work of the Holy Spirit. The next question is whether I can work alongside you closely, or whether it must be from a distance. In the mix of this, I am expected to voice my concerns if I see a failure of desire. That is, if your desires look to me like they are on the wrong thing, I should say so, in accordance with my gifts. You are under no obligation to act on my voiced critique, but you might do well to listen until you are certain God doesn't want you to hear me. Notice there is nothing here about exercising authority over each other. Nobody on earth is in charge unless everyone involved can find a compelling spiritual desire to be under that authority.
From a standpoint of human organization, this is a train-wreck. And so it will always be, except where the Lord makes it work. Behold, back where we started: results are in God's hands. If we can't trust Him to make it happen, we can't trust Him at all. We've already seen what happens when we give emphasis to the necessities of human organization -- every institution on earth grows old and dies, except when it's kept alive artificially, by making the organization god. When we get to the place where the most deeply wise human organizational efforts are mere tools, to be cast aside the moment the job changes, we will have spiritually reasonable priorities.
Therefore, we find the whole thing paints the picture of the Bride of Christ unified in the Spirit. When we come to the place where the Sons of Light consciously set aside the institutions as mere tools, and can cross every human barrier, in divine power and love serving as one Kingdom force on earth, then the Bride will be ready. Until then, it can be said we are keeping Him from returning to earth.
Tactical victories day-to-day should reflect the ultimate strategic victory of Our Lord's Return. What we aim for in short term objectives in our biblical rebellion should be part and parcel of revealing Him through our power to fellowship against the grain of human failings. Don't miss this: Engaging fellowship in the Spirit is the primary object of every measure we take against human government. How hard is it to realize a fundamental element in government's campaign to rule all things is isolating each of us from the other? In isolation we are powerless to resist forced conglomeration. By taking a competing path to unity, we form a de facto alternative government. The primary nature of our rebellion is counteracting that shift of power from the local to the central authority.
In political theory, it is widely recognized the definition of government is a monopoly of violent force. Every government is merely a conspiracy of folks seizing power over others, whether by actual violence or only threatening it. While a strong civil culture helps, at the bottom of every ruling power is the threat of force. When any entity, external or internal, threatens that power by exercising a competing violent force, that entity becomes a de facto government of sorts. It need not seek immediately the total control exercised by the official government, only a measure of control over certain elements of the circumstances. It's competing for control, nothing more. A criminal gang is a localized competing government in effect. They seek to wrest from the official government a certain measure of control over the situation on the ground, generally using violent force.
Violent force is not necessary, particularly when, in the local situation, people willingly offer their loyalty to the alternative nascent government. It's always easy to find dissenters who feel they aren't getting a fair shake from the official government, so every rebellion is likely to draw some participants, regardless how futile. In our case, we seek to serve a competing government of Heaven, and worldly futility is hardly an issue. I've already hinted the element of force in our rebellion will remain a possibility, but only as we leave to God all options to choose. Given God's record of using His own miraculous violent force against enemies in the Old Testament, we are bound to wait until He makes it clear His intention is to use us as the agent of such force. The precedent of seeking God to know whether He desires us to go against our enemies is fully established and applicable.
Violent death of the enemy is not our literal desires, but symbolic. We want their fleshly selves to die so the Spirit can be born in them. God knows when His plans are otherwise, and may not tell us, but we can certainly rely on Him to make painfully clear when literal violence is the game plan. That is, at some point the efforts of human government to hinder our fellowship may cross some invisible line in our convictions, and we will be forced to act. We realize the tension in hoping and praying it not happen, even while we half expect it sooner or later. Since our conceptual tactics depend on fellowship, we have a hard time justifying preparing ourselves like an armed camp of rebels, when our primary weapons are those of the Spirit.
To recap: We are rebels against this world, and against every human government by default. While we may be granted the occasional strategic insight here and there, our part in this is to focus on the tactics, the process, the service. While human governments are clearly a necessity in God's long-term plans, they are never our allies, but mere tools, as well. Individual people are not the enemy, but are made tools and weapons we will often capture from the real Enemy. When the Lord captures them, He sets them free from their dehumanizing condition, and they become rebels with us. How well our rebellion goes is measured by the spiritual power of our fellowship, not by attaining any measurable goals. Our primary means of warfare is building the fellowship, first by removing our own internal barriers to love, then laying that love sacrificially against the barriers erected by others. Our greatest power is the ability to sacrifice anything in this world, including our very lives. These are things against which no human government can defend.
Adopting worldly means will only compromise the mission. There are no Lone Rangers in the Kingdom, because the whole point is breaking the barriers to fellowship and being one in the Spirit. The nature of our rebellion is conceptually a matter of fighting division, isolation, and every human reason for not extending love to another. We must make clear love is the primary weapon. As such, it is utterly impossible to cling to the false perception love is a feeling, or some uncontrollable force. The Kingdom defines love as the choice to extend oneself, to take risks and make sacrifices, in pursuing the welfare of another. Not just what makes them feel better, but their genuine best interest, as defined by the Kingdom.
You could find writings reflecting this over a wide range of devotional materials from all sorts of religious backgrounds. The problem is that vast disconnect between the nice words of truth and a pattern of action -- a mission of service -- which arises from those words. This can only be explained by that lingering desire to maintain a rather comfortable status quo, of conforming everyone to the suburban middle class lifestyle. We in the Western churches have betrayed the Kingdom because we can't quite uproot the false assumptions growing from the lies about whether we really must sacrifice this or that human desire.
In the end, we have a jillion churches which look, sound, and act just like any secular business. We have our sales pitches memorized, our presentation factors honed to perfection, and our target markets to optimize growth and profits. And quite by accident, a few folks actually stumble into the grace of God, but never have a clue what changes that grace demands from their lives. That's because God exercises His sovereign grace often in spite of churches. Meanwhile, churches have so utterly compromised with the human governments, the Kingdom message has been diluted by so much regulation, it's dubious any church can claim to be more than a self-help social club.
For many of us, a great deal of our energy will be spent rebelling against the churches, as they have become a prime agent for enforcing human rejection of God's radical calling. An honest biblical rebellion puts us in conflict with just about everyone around us who isn't actively involved in our camp. It should therefore surprise no one the primary manifestation of our spiritual fellowship puts us in competition with institutional religion. We should not expect to see very many of them reshape themselves into a truly spiritual body unless and until Western governments openly attack churches and take away all those privileges. It doesn't require a prophet to see the Lord will be shaking His Body free of worldly restraints, and a lot of people leaving because they have no power to take the heat. We need not wait for that.
The paradox of this is we are actually not the rebels. Everything falling short of God's Word is the rebellion. Fallen human government does have a firm pattern revealed in Scripture, but every government has firmly rejected that pattern. To the degree they stray from that pattern, they have surrendered their legitimacy. So it is with any human organization of any size, type and form. But we are marked as rebels because that illegitimacy is the mainstream, the dominant form of human organization in this world. Since labels aren't that important, we adopt the rebel identity enthusiastically, because it's not a matter of what we are, or what we do, but Whom we serve.
In Scripture, all things are contextual. The context as I write this includes a rather frightening economic slump which seems to be affecting the entire world. This comes at the same time governments are becoming increasingly oppressive on all levels. While it would be interesting to analyze what is behind all this -- whether it be the result of planning, converging incompetence, or a combination of things -- it would have little effect on our discussion here. We are not aiming to bring down any governing agency, but refusing to be bound by them. We know what we are supposed to be doing, and will adjust our response based more on tactics than strategy, which God reserves for Himself. Even if we factor in anticipation of moves against us, we can only do the best we know at any given time. Where the governments do not seem to interfere with our mission, we have no reason to provoke their agents, nor concern ourselves with their activities.
The likelihood of interference increases rapidly as conditions worsen, and our implementation of fellowship improves. Currently, we would expect our greatest chance of trouble will come from existing regulation prohibiting what we know we must do. The level and methods of enforcement figure into this. There is nothing inherently sinful about stealth in dodging bad law, since enforcement failures can contribute to change in policy. Just as force can become too expensive, so can cloaking. No one can hand you a plan which will work in every case. As in all things, each servant of God, and each local fellowship, must pray for wisdom to obey regardless of concrete results. For the most part, we can expect confrontation will come more frequently fairly soon.
We should hardly be surprised at resistance to our mission, beginning from inside ourselves. Rebellion starts with yourself, then your household, and expands to your community. Defining what "community" means for you may well be a major issue. Each of us have multiple identities based on our associations, and we should expect to spread the rebellion in every direction of our existence. No one can decide for you the methods you'll use in any given setting; it must flow from your own calling and convictions. Apparent resistance to our message means little, since the Holy Spirit seldom signals in advance to us whom He will turn, nor when. That's why we focus on the process, the service itself. We have enough to do discerning what to do with the things over which we can assert a measure control.
Since methods of building a faith community are covered elsewhere, we can focus here on persecution. This is a spiritual exercise, but plays out in real events. Following Jesus will get you in a heap of trouble, just as it did Him. The demands of the Word regarding accountability under the Covenant of Noah apply while we walk this earth, but for us that covenant is subsumed under the higher Covenant of Christ. We have additional responsibilities, but greater flexibility compared to those outside Christ. On the one hand, we generally do not resist aggression by the state -- we cheerfully volunteer for suffering in Christ's name. On the other hand, we cannot make that choice for others, since each must volunteer on his own terms for suffering to be an actual sacrifice on the Cross. For those unable to volunteer, we are obliged to shield them best we can.
We are here on earth to serve, to be a witness. God may choose to let our lives be extinguished in the small scale, but in the broader sense, we need to keep an eye on keeping our witness alive. The Early Church relied chiefly on escape and evasion, accepting by faith an overwhelming local force was a signal to carry the message to another location. Flee if you can, and carry your mission where you go. However, the gospel has gone to just about every geographic location on this earth. Pockets of darkness exist here and there, and governments occasionally try to create new ones, but the larger scene has changed in two millennia. The primary evasion now is stealth, staying below the radar. Even there, in a surveillance society, where our every move is measured and recorded, that is increasingly also denied us. We have come to the point where we have little else but to make ourselves a harder target. As long as we keep our focus on the mission to reveal Him, we can hope to avoid becoming lost in the details of defending that mission to keep our witness alive.
To the degree possible, disentangle your life from government control. There are huge number of ways we take for granted something largely voluntary which makes us an easy target. At the same time, there is the danger you can be so obsessive about this you limit your witness. Pray. Every time you submit a document for processing, pray that you discern the ways in which this binds you under government authority. We fail to realize all the things we gain from government protection have a bad side. This is more than just paranoia about the "Mark of the Beast" and your SSAN. These things open doors, but each privilege can become a prison cell. The whole point is to think about it, and surely to pray about just how much you can choose not to cooperate with your own confinement.
Start with the most fundamental points of surrender. How necessary is driving with a license? And when giving birth, do you really need to be in a hospital and have a birth certificate? The obvious point here is not to game the system, but find ways to reduce your exposure. All the more so when you realize it's not simply an exposure to malice, but to the dangers of incompetence, as well. Do you really have to have a bank account? When more banks close, you may not have a choice. After all, money is only a tool. God is the real supply of our needs. How much withdrawal from the system does your conviction and faith demand?
It's not just government itself, but anything with a corporate charter becomes a source of linkage. Your bank is required to collect a lot of data about you, and report it regularly upstream, which eventually gets into a government office. The same goes with every charge account you have. Need I mention your church membership profile? The laws are already in place. If any agency maintains a paper or electronic record, it takes only an order from a bureaucrat and government can demand it.
Again, this is not about paranoia, fear, fighting the system, etc. Consider the measures you can take to limit liability in things necessary for your service in the Kingdom. The primary weakness of government is high costs and incompetence. The only reason there is any success at all in government activity reflects merely the statistical inevitabilities attached to a massive level of activity by such a huge number of people. Most of them are decent enough, but the effectiveness of government activity hangs on dehumanizing all functions. Uniformity is a necessity. The less human judgment there is, and the more automated the process, the greater the level of success, such as it may be. In the Kingdom, everything is personal, with infinite probabilities reflecting the creativity of the Creator's people set free from dehumanizing traps. The aim in decoupling from the grid is to gain maximum freedom to obey the Lord.
The other half of getting off the grid is self-reliance. While there are no Lone Rangers in the Kingdom, we can't afford to neglect any measure within our grasp. Back in the days when it was pretty easy to get a high-paying job, it was simply good economic sense to outsource everything. Your time was so valuable in terms of dollars it was cheaper to hire someone to carry out the time-consuming grind. It became rare to cook at home, even to make a cup of coffee. All the regular tasks of household maintenance were farmed out to specialists who washed our windows, kept the garden and yard, replaced the roof, and just about anything except flush the toilet for us. When the nation itself began outsourcing, we ended up with a very thin layer of production, and just about everyone was engaged in simply doing each other's laundry, or building each other's websites. Now it's all crashed around our ears and we have no economy except what we make ourselves.
The Kingdom teaches us to be aware of human time-centered reflexes, but not keep ourselves tied to them. Sure, there is such a thing as emergencies, but attempts to control and measure time precisely and schedule human activity tightly is not a Christian virtue, but a worldly one. Effects of the spirit take precedence, and almost anything can be delayed in favor of letting God work in the moment. We can afford to let some things slip away; we need not fulfill anyone's performance goals by filling every moment with activity. Time is not money in the Kingdom, and a good economic depression can serve to make us stop and think. It is highly critical we recondition our minds to stop running like a stopwatch. A critical aspect of this reshaping and renewing of our minds is resurrecting the ancient habit of doing something right instead of quickly.
When time is more abundant than material resources, we can stop worrying about personal profit, and think in terms of Kingdom profit. Not only does a depression reduce our income, it reduces cheap imports. We no longer simply replace something which fails to function suitably; we have to fix it. We stop thinking about how cheaply we can get things, and consider whether they will endure, and how easily they can be maintained. We don't shirk spending time doing routine maintenance with our own hands. Suddenly, we come to the place we realize we never could have bought a remedy for spiritual needs, and it requires an investment of the self in a broader range of skills than was necessary when we all made big bucks focusing only on our compensated employment.
From there, it's only a short hop to realizing we possess the means to invest in other lives. In the process, we learn anyone can replace a worn water inlet valve on a washing machine, or reconnect a loose heating element in the toaster, or tack down loose weather seals around the back door. Take the time to study and understand the design and function of the things you must use. When you become competent at fixing a particular thing, offer that skill to others and become a walking solution for people in need. It is of a certainty none of us can fix everything for ourselves, and without that willing hand to share the load with others, you can't hope to find help for things you can't do yourself.
Once we have begun preparing our hearts to stand free of artificial supports, we are in a position to rebuild what support we must have to live. This is an implementation of the above mentioned alternative government. Since the objective is individuals standing on their own to the extent possible, such alternative government aims to reduce its power, and leadership is ever working itself out of a job. However, there will always be human needs, for which reason we fellowship in the Spirit. We are thus able to see clearly what those needs are from God's perspective. Regardless of expressed wishes, most often control is the last thing anyone needs from another. The character of the Kingdom fellowship is minimal leverage, because the greatest power on earth is voluntary sacrifice.
We thus build a highly decentralized community, a leaderless faith, in which human measures of success are of little value. The ultimate prize is the ability to plow through human weakness, differences, and barriers to offer love. Love is, again, defined as the extended consistent effort for the welfare of another. It is not the doing, but the manner. Success is simply not being like the rest of the world, and certainly not the existence typical government wishes for us. The escape from that evil pattern is the whole point.
The size, shape and character of your faith community depends on too many variables to offer detailed guidance. You must discern for yourself the part you play, as well. The greatest danger is following the dictates of human organizational habits. It is wholly artificial to propose a structure, then draft people to fill the slots. This works to some degree for militias, particularly if someone is well versed in military tactics, and may at times be appropriate. However, this is not the fundamental nature of a faith community, merely a possible emergency response. We have enough of human governments using false emergencies to maintain a tight regimentation and control. Our primary binding force is the Holy Spirit, which bypasses most human thinking. People of good conscience in the Lord will spontaneously organize their activities most of the time.
The largest task remains keeping love alive. This is the one thing no government can produce nor destroy. This is also the primary witness, not simply in the ability to love, but the improvement of implementation. Our witness is the change. As we become more like the Kingdom itself, we provide the single greatest threat to any human organization, particularly governments. Thus, what leadership exists in a faith community can justify your trust only by guiding and enhancing fellowship.
Tasks and operations within the group grow directly from the abilities and gifts of those present. While we should always expect to communicate needs, the substance of love is offering what we have. Plenty of routine work can be done by almost anyone. Unwillingness to share in such work is grounds, not for dismissal, but for extra attention for change. The routine work should get done anyway, but the biggest task remains coaxing those with inappropriate reflexes. It must always be a voluntary compliance. The only justification of force is in the presence of a genuine threat of harm. Otherwise, we keep applying the pressure of love in ways we each best know.
By Ed Hurst
November 2008
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