My Servants Would Be Fighting: A Meditation on the Gospel and the Kingdoms of the World

By Storm Bailey

The way the servants of Jesus fight is evidence for the kind of kingdom we profess to serve.

How should Jesus' servants, his church, be fighting in the political realm?

How can the people of God, being in the world but not of the world, relate faithfully to the nations

where they live?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leadership Books
• Release date: Jul 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954618176

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Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

Quotations from Augustine are from The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vols. 12, 14, 18, 20, 24, 30. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955).

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Table of Contents

Preface

I. My Servants Would Be Fighting

II. Who made me a judge?

III. Lessons from St. Augustine

IV. A Nation for God

V. Exiles on Main Street

VI. Christian Witness and Political Action

Postscript: A lamb, standing as if slain

Preface

I know that most of us—left, right, and center—are deeply invested in our approach to politics: in the positions we have taken, and in the causes that strike us as most essential. Let’s take a step back from all that. I’m not going to try and tell you who to vote for, or who you should’ve voted for, or what political parties you should be for or against. But I do want to offer you something . . . otherwise, why should you bother to read this book? What will that be? A vision. A meditation on the scriptures, with particular attention to what the Bible seems to say about the church, the kingdom of God, and the gospel. My hope is that a fresh look at the implications of that will, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, inform and infuse our deepest attitudes toward politics and the nations of the world. The goal is not that we get politics right, but that—whatever we do in politics—we portray the gospel with power and accuracy, in our individual testimonies and lives and in our collective life as the body of Christ on earth.

There is an implicit judgment in all of this: I don’t think that we are accurately representing the gospel all the time. If there is a tendency or theme in that misrepresentation, it’s that we make it look as if the gospel and the kingdom of God are only about this world. On trial before Pilate, Jesus told him, My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.

I’ll tell you plainly that I think sometimes it looks today as if the servants of Jesus are fighting—just as if his kingdom was of this realm. If this is true, it is true of Christians all along the political spectrum—not just the left and not just the right. So, again, I’m not taking sides on that. And I’m also not claiming that the gospel and the kingdom of God have no application in this world—in fact, the opposite is true. If we truly serve Christ, then love for our neighbor may well demand more of us in hard daily service to the world than many of us—including me—are doing now. I want to be open to that as we study the scripture, and I want to be sensitive to the way that self-interest (loving my own life, comfort, and reputation) can distort my thinking and shape my interpretation of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in this time and this place. For the sake of the gospel, my prayer is that the Holy Spirit enlighten and guide me as the writer and you as the reader.

A little bit of truth in advertising:

The cords of death encompassed me

And the terrors of the nether world came upon me;

I found distress and sorrow.

Then I called upon the name of the Lord:

O Lord, I beseech You, save my life! (Psalm 116)

When I became a Christian, I was eighteen years old, on the road, with not much to lose. It was 1975, and I had grown up watching the counterculture loudly reject the inherited patterns of American life. I thought they were right about the emptiness of consumer culture, about the lack of reasons offered for moral rules, and about the poverty of cultural conformity. I still think so. I also thought they were right that drugs, lawlessness, and thoughtless anti-authoritarianism were the key features of a new and better social order. I could not have been more wrong. I went from an idealistic ten-year-old watching news clips of the summer of love to a broken eighteen-year-old, kicked out of school, meaningful relationships eroded, and a slave to drugs that were destroying my mind and body . . . and that I spent every waking minute using or seeking.

Like I said, I had nothing to lose.

The Lord preserves the simple;

I was brought low, and He saved me.

When the gospel of Jesus Christ came to me—suddenly, unlooked for—I was transformed by an encounter with the living truth. Awakened to the horror of my moral depravity, I cried out to God to be saved and, against all hope or reason, I was. Guided by providence, I found my way across the country and into a group of souls like me—mostly drug people, young outsiders, trying to learn to live survivable lives as followers of Jesus.

Here’s where the truth in advertising comes in. It was, in one sense, easy for us to take the radical message of Jesus in the New Testament at face value. Leave everything and follow Me? Hey, we already left everything . . . for nothing. The Son of Man has no place to lay his head? I slept on the ground hitchhiking to get here. For us, the church became a community of outcasts, committed to each other and to Jesus all the time, every day. This isn’t to say we didn’t have stuff to forsake—sex, drugs, and lawlessness—and not all of us managed to keep our hands to the plow. But, for the aforementioned really stupid reasons, my life as a Christian has never really been caught up in social and cultural expectations about what Christianity is supposed to be. That makes it relatively easy for me to embrace and proclaim the radical