An X post rom January ’25:
Before Joshua could conquer the land of Canaan militarily, politically, and culturally, Abraham had to conquer it liturgically. Abraham toured the land of Canaan, building altars, places of worship, which laid the foundation for the conquest to come. Liturgy is the basis of dominion. The key to cultural transformation is liturgical reformation.
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A follow up:
It’s interesting how a tweet like this one above can trigger some people because they think it promotes political apathy at a time when political activism is needed. But this shows a failure to understand how the Bible should be interpreted. The Bible was written for us, but not to us. The reality is that for most people for most of history there was no such thing as direct political activism. The Bible was not written to people who lived modern Western republics, obviously. For most of history and indeed, even in much of the world today, there is absolutely nothing the ordinary citizen can do about his political situation. If you were a second century Christian living in the Roman empire, and you saw the need to change the political situation, literally, the only avenue open to you would be through the ministries of the church — prayer, evangelism, and perhaps faithful suffering, even martyrdom. The political situation in Rome changed over time precisely because early Christians were faithful in these ways. They served as priests (worshipping faithfully) before being granted kingly (political) dominion. There was no other way.
We live in a culture that has spread political power so thinly that the ordinary citizen really does have means available to him to bring about change. But in most societies talking about “fighting for your country” or “working to save your nation” or even “transforming the culture” through politics made absolutely no sense whatsoever. We have opportunities other people in other times and places did not have so the fact that the Bible would focus on prayer as a means of cultural change should not surprise us at all. The idea that change would come through the sanctuary rather than the ballot box made perfect sense because there was no ballot box. The sanctuary was all they had.
We can be grateful that the faithfulness of Christians in past generations has created a situation in which can fight politically to save our country in direct ways. But the lesson of the tweet below still holds, even if there need not be any chronological gap between liturgical action and political action as there was for Abraham and Joshua. The point is this: our political activism should be grounded in liturgical action; our political activism should flow out of prayer; our efforts at bringing about political change should be tied to the public ministries of the church.
My church prayed for years every Wednesday and Sunday for the overturning of Roe and the end of abortion in our land. While the latter has not happened, when the former took place, we saw it very much as an answer to prayer. Of course, we did other things all along the way – our members voted for pro-life candidates, worked at crisis pregnancy centers, etc. But prayer is politically powerful and Christians will be politically impotent if they neglect it. The enemy has a counter-measure for our political activism, but the other side has no counter-measure against prayer.
My congregation now regularly prays for the restoration of marriage and family law in our land. We want creational and biblical norms respected, and the marriage bed honored. Prayer is not all we do, but it’s at the heart of it. The church is a public/political presence in the world and she has tools and weapons that are politically powerful. Liturgical warfare is real. God really does use the prayers of his people to change the world.
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“The war and the years afterwards confirmed the doubts I always had had about the ideas I was brought up on….[I judged] that liberalism, feminism, nationalism, socialism, pacifism, would not work, because they refused to consider human nature as it really is. Instead, they presupposed that mankind was to “progress” into something else—towards their own ideas of what people ought to be.”
— Sigrid Unset in the 1930s
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Another old X post:
Far too many modern American evangelicals:
“Of the increase of Satan’s government there will be no end.”
The prophet Isaiah:
“Of the increase of Messiah’s government there will be no end.”
Both visions can’t be true. Whose kingdom will grow? Which kingdom wins in history?
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An X post from October ’24:
Satan is *always* attacking the sanctuary (that is, worship) – liturgy is always spiritually contested, and therefore always a site of warfare.
Further, prayer and psalm-singing are always weapons at the church’s disposal per Ephesians 6, 2 Chronicles 20, Revelation 8, and elsewhere.
Liturgical warfare is not the only kind of warfare we are to wage, and it’s not a substitute for other forms of warfare when they are called for.
But it is a permanent and perpetual aspect of the church’s life. The church is always the church militant until the last day.
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“It is often asserted that the church needs a social strategy. But the church is a social strategy. The great dilemma of our day is that the church has left off actually being the church.”
— J.I. Packer
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