A few days ago whilst listening to a radio broadcast I heard whilst driving something was triggered in my spirit. The speaker was speaking about ethnicity within the church.
It seems nearly every day as I hear things said that I hear from a Kingdom perspective and again my spirit is impacted.
Here is what I heard as I listened to His Spirit.
Father, because of the obedience unto death on the cross and the resurrection of His Son Jesus, is building one new nation, from out of many nations. But more than that, He wants us, out of our different ethnicities focused on developing one culture, which must be the Kingdom culture.
The problem with us as believers is we want to keep and live in our culture rather than change it, by improving it with the Kingdom at its center. It is important for us to understand that all culture is religious in nature. As such it determines how we live our life, how we govern, how we build families, how we develop our businesses and economics, etc. Every culture has good things and has many bad things because each culture comes out of a fallen world view.
As we have accepted the man-made idea of multiculturalism we have also accepted other gods and religions, and in doing so have built a confused nation that has lost its identity. Multiculturalism actually is used to destroy a nation’s identity and uniqueness, only to be controlled by a smaller and imported population. People want to speak only in the language of their birth, not the language of the land they want to live in. This is clearly demonstrated as other people come to a free country because it was built on the Christian faith, but still want to live according to their religious laws, yet if one actually did studies of nations and their religions one would find it is the very religion that kept them in bondage in the first place.
When people came into Israel they were to live according to the ways and rules of Israel 1 Peter 2:11. This verse has been so misinterpreted by many claiming that it is saying we are pilgrims and stranger on the earth, Peter is simply saying when you come into my land I am responsible to make sure you live according to the laws of our nation. In this vain how many have accepted the notion that God’s laws were only for the Jews, well there is a couple of problems with that idea, firstly the Jews were only one tribe eventually enveloping the tribe of Benjamin as well, but they were only part of the 12 tribe confederation known as Israel. Even a cursory reading of Deuteronomy 4:6 shows this a fallacy “Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people”. Rather it was to be an evangelistic tool to shed forth the fame of God among the nations. However, rather than doing so they lived not according to God’s ways and laws which Paul speaks of in Roman’s 1, where they changed the word of God into a lie and blasphemed His name among the nations. This is why Paul says “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ”, meaning He was going to live according to God’s standard, to honor God’s name. The gospel is not a statement of beliefs rather it is a way of life, the way of the victorious Kingdom.
It doesn’t matter whether the culture we have is American, Australian, African, British, or any other, our role is not to promote our culture, but His.
As Christ Jesus is King, reigning over all the earth now, it is our responsibility if we are truly citizens of the Kingdom, to first learn the principle then promote it, by manifesting it as the culture of the Kingdom.
Having said that, we have to realize that there are some things within what we consider the culture that are non-religious. Those things are what we need to do to live, for example, food, and most of us enjoy a diversity of food. Other things may include music and dress these things must be devoid of any religious ties that bring people under bondage.
The Kingdom culture embraces all ethnicities. There is only one race, ‘the human race’, inclusive of differences in skin color and facial types. God also separated man through language, creating an inability to communicate, because man tried to get to heaven his way, and be his own god. The Lord said that there would be nothing that man could not do but it was without God and His Kingdom is the center.
Here is a very important kingdom key; “When God builds He does so with the intent to decentralizes, but man on the other hand wants to centralize, as it makes his agenda to control easier.” God creates us to be ‘one’ in diversity.
The Kingdom works regardless of any language, its economy will function with the currency of any nation.
It’s time to build or rebuild the centrality of the Kingdom and culture, and show forth its culture to all.
John McDonald © 2009