Well, hello. What I want to chat about today is the idea of kingdoms in conflict. This is Kingdom Offerings. This is the podcast environment of One Hundred-Fold Ministries. I’m Dave Scherrer. I’m the president of One Hundred Fold and talking about kingdoms in conflict really is kind of what we do here.

Maybe you remember Charles Colson. Chuck Colson wrote a book with that title, Kingdoms in Conflict. It was published back in 1989 – 35 years ago. You’ll remember that Charles Colson was one of the so-called “Watergate Seven”, the participants that scandalized the political world of the early 1970s.

And while he was serving time in federal prison, he was given a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and he converted from being a political henchman to being a radical servant of Jesus Christ. His conversion and his subsequent lifestyle overhaul really caught the imagination of not only dedicated Christians of the day, but also of the political conversations of the day.

And that book, Kingdoms in Conflict, was primarily his reflections about Christianity and politics, and how these disciplines often see the world from profoundly different lenses of right and wrong. And the use of power and control in the political arena that he was so used to before he became a Christian came into conflict as a kingdom with the axioms of service and humility and love that are the trademarks of authentic faith in Christ and the Kingdom of God.

So here’s my first point for the day – that the Kingdom of God is supposed to be undiluted, undistracted from the values and principles of the world. When we mix the political power principles with the Christian servant principles, it starts to get messy really fast.

At this point, I’ve got to go back in time because we’ve been actually doing this political kingdoms in conflict with Christianity for some time. Maybe you remember from your college sophomore year, something like that, your Western Civ class, something called the Holy Roman Empire. This was a powerful, nearly 1,000-year quasi-religious political framework that ruled Europe until actually the early 1800s.

It was the Napoleonic Wars in about 1805 that brought to the end the Holy Roman Empire. It all started in 800 AD — it was on December 25th, actually. It was on Christmas morning, 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish King, Charlemagne, as the new Roman Emperor.

They revived the Western European title that had been gone for more than 300 years after the fall of ancient Western Roman Empire. And so, the historians described the intentions of Pope Leo III as a desire to establish a secular or a political arm of the Roman church of that time. And in so doing, power politics and church influence somehow became really strange bedfellows.

And that kind of thing has been going on in various forms since then. So, fast forward a couple hundred years now and to the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, and we’re still doing this. In the 1980s, maybe you remember Jerry Falwell. He was the senior pastor of the largest Baptist Church in America, in Virginia. And he formed something called the Moral Majority.

It was a conservative Christian voice that sought to influence politics and law by voting in candidates that professed a certain Christian value set, and then various laws to codify these values into our legal system. And maybe you remember, at that time, a term that we use called “culture wars” was part of the rhetoric of the day.

It pitted family values, I guess you would say on one side, and the moral values of things like feminism and liberalism on the other side. Kingdoms in conflict, for sure. And what really started this whole thing for me is just this past weekend, I saw an Associated Press headline that spoke of white evangelicals. Somehow today, in this politically charged narrative of 2024, the evangelical message has become, at least in some people’s eyes, one and the same. It has merged with messages of gun control and military readiness. The idea that evangelicalism and Americanism or patriotism are largely the same thing.

Okay, so I’m a little disturbed by that, or at least I am made wary by that. And right now, I need you to follow my train of thought. I need you to hear me well, because my thoughts today are not about left- or right-wing politics. I’m not indifferent to left- and right-wing politics — it’s just not the point. The point is, is that it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous when we start merging any worldly philosophy or paradigm with an otherwise orthodox Christian worldview. They are not the same, and they cannot be bedfellows without compromising the integrity of the life and the teaching and the priorities of the Kingdom of God and Jesus Christ the King. The politics of this world are not the policies of the kingdom of God. So my point isn’t about an allegiance to a red or blue political kingdom, it’s about an allegiance to the Kingdom of God, and the head of that state, who is Jesus Christ, the King.

And as I said, when we merge or confuse the value sets of this world that are ruled by the enemy of God — he’s our adversary, the devil — when we merge those value sets and priorities with the priorities of the Christian faith, we are losing our Christian footing. We are more than on a slippery slope — we are failing.

And in case you think this is only about kingdoms and conflict in, say, politics, or finance, or education, or commerce (and indeed, there are kingdoms and conflicts in each of these disciplines), but I’m actually talking about the kingdoms and conflict in my own head. The most important and consequential conflict of right or wrong, good and bad, holy and unholy, is not the battle that’s out there in the world — it’s the battle for my soul that’s inside of me.

We talked a moment ago about Chuck Colson and his book, Kingdoms in Conflict. I want you to listen to this brief clip of Chuck Colson sharing a little bit about his history and the compromise of his personal, non-negotiable value sets, even before he was a Christian, when he was the advisor to President Nixon.

When President Nixon asked me to leave my law firm in Washington and come in and be his special counsel, the first thing I did was to be certain there’d be no conflicts of interest. I took everything I’d earned as a lawyer. I put in a blind trust. I told my law partners not to come visit me and they didn’t. I was certain that I would never be compromised. I was determined not to be. And I’d been raised this way. I’d been a Marine officer. I’d learned about duty and honor. I learned about integrity as a Marine. And as a kid growing up in the Depression, in tough economic times, my dad was going to school at night, starting to be a lawyer, and he was working days, but on the weekends, he’d spent some time with me.

He said, “Chuck, one thing, always tell the truth. And never lie. When you work, work as hard as you possibly can, no matter what it is.” Even use the example of cleaning toilets. He said, “Doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Do it well. Earn your pay. Do a hard day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Pay your bills.” I mean, I was steeped in what we then knew as the Puritan work ethic. And being honest, this was a big thing with me.

I would get gifts at Christmastime, for example, and I would take them down to the White House switchboard operators, the guys that drove my cars because I was never going to be compromised. And I was so determined, I ended up going to prison.

Why? I think you can be so self-righteous that you don’t see what’s really going on. You become oblivious to your own insensitivities because you’re sure nobody can compromise you. Human beings have the infinite capacity of self-rationalization, and that’s exactly what I did.

I was in a lot of meetings where there were high stakes, where the president of the United States would say national security depends on this. Kissinger came in, fulminating one day over some documents that had been stolen. And he said, this is going to compromise all of national security. I can think back on times I remember when the president, four or five of us in the office, and the president was exploding over something that had gotten out. It was in the hands of the Brookings Institution. And he turned to Bob Haldeman, he said, have we got a team in place that can go in and get those documents back? Remember, I’ve asked you for that.

Then I later realized that was a time when I should have stopped and said,”Wait a minute, Mr. President, think about the consequences of this.” But I did not.

Self-righteousness is believing you’re so good that you couldn’t be compromised. And that’s the kind of pride that’s fatal and was in my life because I was so sure of myself that I didn’t realize how vulnerable I was – as every human being is.

This battle, this conflict of kingdoms, is inside of us. The liar’s voice tempts us from the inside of our head. Our inclinations to sin taunt us. The world of false hope sings. It sings a message of compromise, and it’s a happy little tune – it’s just the tune of death.

So for those of us who call ourselves Christians, our charge is to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit, to recognize the demands of the Scriptures on our lives, and then to hear and obey, to courageously hold to the priorities and the practices as modeled by Jesus during His life on earth, and manifested in His kingdom teachings. He calls us to resist, even renounce, the empty and false, worldly kingdom values. Those are in conflict with the kingdom of God.

So if we go back in time even further, the writer of the book of Deuteronomy wrote of these Kingdom conflict issues. And he wrote so clearly when speaking for God to the young nation of Israel. This is a passage of mine that’s a huge favorite. I’ve referred to it before in these podcasts, and this is God talking, so we should pay attention.

This is from Deuteronomy chapter 30. Again, God speaking. “Now what I’m commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It’s not up in heaven so that you have to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven and get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?’ No, nor is it beyond the sea, so you have to ask ‘Who will cross the sea to get to it and proclaim it so that we may obey it?’ No, the Word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so you may obey it.”

God goes on to say, “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to Him and keep His commands, His decrees and laws, and then you will live and increase, and the Lord will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.”

But God says, “If your heart turns away, and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship, then I declare to you to this day, you will certainly be destroyed. I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses, that I have set before you life and death, blessings, and curses. So choose life.”

So today, let’s choose well. There are indeed kingdoms in conflict out there, but there’s also a kingdom conflict inside of me.

And so I pray today that you and I might have the strength of faith to choose blessings and life. This is Dave Scherrer, these are Kingdom Offerings. Please check out 100foldministries.org for some other resources. I look forward to having a Backyard Conversation with you on our blog format and maybe connecting with you by email. Y’all take care today. This is One Hundred-Fold Ministries. Peace to you.