The Kingdom Perspective

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! As chaos grows in our world, increasingly people look for someone to blame. We cry out: “It’s the government’s fault!” “It’s the public schools that have caused our problems!” “It’s the church’s fault for why my family life is a mess!” “It’s society or the culture’s fault!” Now, social forces “out...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! In a Christian way of thinking, government authority is not a necessary evil. It was established by God as a necessary good to facilitate a safe, functioning, and flourishing society. However, just because government is a necessary good doesn’t mean that it is the most foundational of social instit...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! Perhaps no more famous articulation of the limits of human government in recent memory than that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, he responded to mainline White clergy who had criticized his tactics in fighting the “unjust laws” of the Jim Crow Sou...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! The biblical and Christian understanding of the limited nature of human authority has been nowhere better and succinctly stated than by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In April of 1963, he had been imprisoned for protesting his opposition to the overreach of government in their laws mandating t...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! Human government is to be essentially limited, for it is a delegated authority from a higher power. As the Apostle Paul put it in Romans “there is no authority except from God” (Romans 13:1). God made it! So, it is legitimate only to the degree that it is functioning according to God’s designated p...

Transcript: Hello! This is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective! In Romans 13 the early church leader the Apostle Paul, issued a radical statement to the Christians in Rome. He said: Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. In times of great political division, our thinking tends to become what some sociologists have dubbed “apocalyptic”. We begin to believe that what takes place at this moment—in the next election, during the next session of Congress or the next ruling from the Supreme Court—is going to determine the...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. In the midst of the Nazi crisis, English Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “A pessimist sees calamity in every opportunity, but an optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity.” Though Churchill was the leader of a country that overtly proclaimed itself “Christian”, Churchill himself was...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. Representative John Lewis was a legend in his time and one of the most important civil rights leaders of ours. As a young man, he led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group responsible for organizing the numerous student-led sit-ins against racial segregation. At just 23 years-of-...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. As Americans we love our freedom. However, ill-defined freedom can lead us to a very insidious form of slavery. What do I mean? As Americans, we tend to define freedom as the ability to do whatever we want without external interference. However, this makes no sense, for it pits God’s law against my...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. Science is God’s gift to humanity. It is a particular form of knowledge that is intuitive to us as those made in the image of God. That’s why, historically, modern science blossomed in a context suffused with a Christian imagination—a context where it was acknowledged that we live in an orderly uni...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to the Kingdom Perspective. Classical Christianity provides the basic framework for scientific investigation. On the one hand it acknowledges that there is such a thing as truth. We live in an orderly universe created by intelligent God, and so can know certain things about our world. But on the other hand, it tells us that w...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome the Kingdom Perspective. Science, by its very nature, is reasonably skeptical. It always considers any claim to knowledge with a “can-you-prove-it” attitude. It doesn’t just accept what we know or what a supposed expert says; it wants to verify how we know what we know. It is driven by a posture of skepticism. But it is a rea...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to “The Kingdom Perspective”. What is our purpose as human beings? God designed us to glorify and enjoy Him. We do this by faithfully obeying His commandments. God designed us for Himself and only to the degree we are obeying His commandments are we actually free. Therefore, when we are lovingly obeying the commands of God, we...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to “The Kingdom Perspective”. God designed us for love and only to the degree we obey that commandment are we truly free. But this requires work. Loving God and others does not come naturally to our selfish hearts. To become a loving person will mean perseverance, discipline, and training. Think of it in terms of a musical ins...

Transcript: Hello this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to “The Kingdom Perspective”. What is freedom? Biblically speaking, freedom is defined by our ability to fulfill our design. In other words, we were made for a specific purpose and to the degree that we are fulfilling that purpose, and only to that degree, we are free. A fish is designed for water and to the degree that it rem...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to “The Kingdom Perspective”. As modern Americans we tend to think of freedom in what the philosophers call “negative” terms. By “negative” they mean, the freedom to do what we want without (i.e. negating the presence of) interference from others, especially from some authority (e.g. governmental, parental, cultural, religiou...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible calls us to lean into both our freedom in Christ and our obligation to love. Now, putting “obligation” and “freedom” together may sound strange, but not if you are thinking in a truly Christian manner. In Romans 13 St. Paul is explaining our responsibility as Christians to others, particu...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible suggests to us that our freedom in Christ is a kind of paradox. Perhaps, no one articulated this paradox better that the great Martin Luther. In one of his most famous works, “The Freedom of a Christian” (1520), he begins his piece with two seemingly contradictory statements: • A Christia...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. It is especially critical at our cultural moment not to be driven by a selfish understanding of freedom, but by how the Bible defines freedom—which is, loving obedience to God’s commandments, especially the command to love one’s neighbor. Biblically speaking, freedom is not defined by “my rights” (...

Hello! This is Pastor Don Willeman of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to a special edition of The Kingdom Perspective. I want to let you know about something very exciting coming up for you and your family this Christmas Eve on the Lebanon Green. Last year, during the middle of the pandemic, we did something very special. We held our annual Christmas Eve service outdoors on the Lebanon Green. We d...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The church by its very nature is a gathered community. We meet regularly, because we are called to be together as one. The Bible tells us that we are embodied, communal creatures. God made us flesh and bone, and He made us in community with other flesh and bone creatures. At the creation of Adam, G...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. What is the cure for anxiety? The cure is not necessarily to change our circumstances. Great if you can do that! But you’ll probably then just find something else to worry about. In this world, trouble is unavoidable. The absolute cure is to fix our mind on the character and promises of God. Listen...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. The Bible tells us that not everything is a matter of absolute truth and morality. As a matter of fact, biblically speaking, one could argue that very little is. When God wanted to summarize Israel’s moral obligation, He did so in just 10 commandments. Jesus further summarized this to two: Love God...

Transcript: Hello, this is Pastor Don of Christ Redeemer Church. Welcome to The Kingdom Perspective. We should take inspiration from reports of our fellow Chinese brothers and sisters in Christ. Back in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, reports of Christian courage began to leak out of Wuhan. Listen to the following from early February 2020: Nothing stopped [the Christians]…from proclaim...