Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.
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The sermon featured below was preached by the Rev. Clint Poppe at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Lincoln, NE, on Rogate Sunday (Sixth Sunday of Easter), May 14, 2023.
Thank you for your service, Pastor Poppe. The Church needs more men of your caliber — in the pews and in the pulpits.
Grace and peace, love and mercy from God our Father through Jesus Christ our risen Savior and Lord. Amen.
The text for our meditation on this sixth Sunday of Easter, also Mother’s Day, the epistle reading that we heard a few moments ago, 1 Timothy 2:1-6, especially these words:
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.
So far our text.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, it is quite common for Christians to talk about “two kingdoms.” Christians live in two kingdoms. Maybe you’ve heard that before; maybe you haven’t. All throughout this season of Easter our gospel readings have been teaching us that Christians are in the world, but we are not to be of the world. We live in the right-hand kingdom, and we also live in the left-hand kingdom.
What do we mean when we talk about this “left-hand” “right-hand” kingdom stuff? Well, generally speaking, the right-hand kingdom refers to the Church. This is how God rules, works, and serves in the Church. The power and the authority is in the Word of God. The Law, which shows us our sin, and primarily the Gospel which sets us free; the Gospel that delivers the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. This is how things work in the Church. This is how they’re supposed to work in the Church. God’s Word reigns supreme. That’s the right-hand kingdom.
The left-hand kingdom is pretty much everything else. The left-hand kingdom, the world that we live in, society in general, rulers, governments, laws. This is the left-hand kingdom, and we know we live in this left-hand kingdom. What we fail to realize far too often, that when God uses this kind of talk—left-hand, right-hand kingdom—we are talking not about some hard-core separation of church and state. We are talking about the left-hand and right-hand kingdom of God. We are talking about the left hand and right hand of Jesus Himself. Jesus rules the Church. Jesus rules the world, society, governments. He establishes these rules and governments for us and for our good, so that we can live godly and peaceable lives, so that the Word of God would flourish among us.
Somewhere along the line, Christians, especially Lutheran Christians, were fed the lie that since we are in the right-hand kingdom—we’re Christians, we belong to the Church—that we would have nothing to do or say with things in the left-hand kingdom. Throughout the pages of history, some pastors have taught that it would be a sin to work for the government or to serve in the military. My friends, this is nonsense.
Today, it takes on a little bit different flavor. Christians are to keep quiet. Christians are to stay in their own little domain. They have nothing to say with regard to what goes on in our society, what goes on in our government, what goes on in our world. They are to keep quiet, keep their religion to themselves. After all, “separation of church and state.”
My friends, is this what God’s Word teaches us? I would submit to you today that the epistle reading before us is a beautiful place for us to start with regard to this two kingdom understanding of how we live and who we are as Christians. It lays it out quite beautifully. The right-hand kingdom, the second half of our text; very, very familiar to us. One of the most often quoted passages, not only from 1 Timothy, but in all Scripture. God wants all people to be saved. This is His will. This is His desire. Right here, right here in God’s Word, Who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
What is this truth? There is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We have offended this one God. We sin daily. We sin much. We know God’s holy Law and we break it, sometimes willingly, sometimes unknowingly, but we break it nonetheless. Our sinfulness, that we inherited from our parents, our sin that we commit each and every day, puts us at enmity with God. And we can’t save ourselves. We are lost in the trespasses of our sins. And so God, in His love and His mercy, sends us a Savior, a mediator, a go-between. He sends us His Son, the god man, Jesus. True God, begotten of the Father from all eternity. True man, born of the Virgin Mary. This is our Savior. He was under the same holy law that convicts and condemns each one of us. He fulfilled it. He fulfilled it completely. He never sinned, not once. Jesus, who fulfilled all law, takes our sin, our violation of God’s law onto Himself and into Himself all the way to Calvary’s cross. He bleeds and dies for your sin and mine, for the sin of the whole world. This is God’s truth. This is the good news of the gospel.
During this Easter season we have a special focus and a special emphasis on the fact that Christ is risen. He is risen indeed, alleluia amen! Death could not hold the sinless Son of God. Jesus conquers our greatest enemy, our greatest fear: death itself. Jesus, risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. He reigns. We’re not talking about R-A-I-N rain, but R-E-I-G-N reign. You know, like a king, like they’re celebrating over in England right now.
King of what? Wednesday evening, we’ll celebrate the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, where He ascends to the right hand of the Father and He rules over all things. His right-hand kingdom, the Church. His left-hand kingdom, the world, the governments, the nations of the world. Christ reigns. This is the truth and God wants all people to come to a knowledge, a saving knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ and to know God for who He is.
The right-hand kingdom, we Lutherans get pretty well. The left-hand kingdom, not so much. It was a few years ago when I first heard the term Christian Nationalism. You’ve probably heard it. If you watch the news or read the newspaper, you’ve heard the term. I have to admit I had never heard the term before. I didn’t know what it meant. I’m not a racist. I’m not a Nazi. I’m not a White supremacist. I’m not a homophobe. So I must not be a Christian Nationalist, right? Because that’s what the world says a Christian Nationalist is.
Then it was about six months ago, I came across an article, an article by the name of George Gonzalez. And maybe it’s Jorge Gonzalez, I’m not sure. [He is a] famous author. You can Google him and you can Google the article if you like. But the title of the article is “The Christian Nationalist Label is Being Used to Silence People of Faith.” Hear that title again: “The Christian Nationalist Label is Being Used to Silence People of Faith.” People who love God and their country are vilified. They are demonized. They are held up as terrorists. You’ve heard it. You know it. A radical separation of church and state, something that is not found in our founding documents by the way, is used as a hammer to club Christians into submission so that they will not confess their faith, so they will not confess the truth of God’s Word.
My friends, God’s Word is clear, and the text before us today makes it crystal clear: faith and patriotism go together. Now we want to make sure we have the order right. We don’t worship our nation or our leaders and then God down here. It’s the other way around. We worship the one true God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we give thanks for and pray for the leaders that He has given us. Christians are to know what goes on in the world. They are to speak up concerning what goes on in the world. And when the evils of this world seem to be trumping the truth of God’s Word, Christians have a duty and a responsibility to speak up.
Paul writes to Pastor Timothy and he says, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people.” Don’t just pray for yourself. Think outside of yourself. Think outside of your box. Think outside even of your church. And then he gets more specific: “for kings and all who are in high positions.”
We don’t have a king here in America. But we have leaders. We have a president. We have Congress. We have a governor. We have state legislators. We have a mayor. We have city councilmen. These are our leaders. This is our government. God has given us this government. We are to pray for them. We are to offer up supplications, petitions for them. Every Sunday and nearly every Wednesday in the divine service, we do just that. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard over the last twenty-six years complaints from the members of this congregation, “I don’t like our president! I don’t like our governor! I don’t like our mayor! Why in the world are we praying for them?” Because God’s Word directs us to.
I would submit, dear friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, that far too often our prayers and supplications for our political leaders are too generic. We pray that God would bless them, we pray that God would uphold them, we pray that they would do God’s will, and then we stop. My friends, when our leaders, the left hand of Jesus Christ, when our leaders are standing in open opposition to the Word of God, when they are not only turning a blind eye to evil but promoting it, we need to speak up. We need to pray that their evil ways would be thwarted. We need to pray that they would be removed by the ballot box. We need to pray as we are taught in the Lord’s Prayer that God would break and hinder every evil that is contrary to the Word of God.
You don’t have to look very hard to see the evils that are going on in our world. A mother’s womb, which should be the safest place in the world, has now become a place of death. And when a minor setback happens here in our own state with regard to protecting the sanctity of human life, people dance and cheer in our state legislature. This is evil! When our leaders not only turn a blind eye, but actively promote a marriage that is contrary to God’s gift of one man and one woman for life, blurring the lines not only between husband and wife, but between what a man is and what a woman is. This is evil! This is contrary to God’s Word. Christians need to speak out. When our schools, our public schools, our government schools, will hand out birth control or gender-confusing materials without parental knowledge or consent. And then if a brave parent goes to a school board meeting, they’re labeled a domestic terrorist. This is evil! It must stop! And we must speak out.
My friends, there is nothing that is under attack more in our country right now than motherhood. Mother’s Day: send a card, make a phone call, send some flowers. If your mother is in Heaven like mine, rejoice with saints and archangels and all the company of Heaven at the communion rail. These are good and God-pleasing things, but make no doubt about it: motherhood is being attacked, and it has been for quite some time. It’s being attacked under the guise and lie of feminism.
Famous Christian author G. K. Chesterton once said, “Feminism is a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers, but slaves when they serve their husbands.” Much truth, much wisdom in that quote. The most despised thing for a woman right now is to be a mother. You’re even more despised if you’re a mother that stays at home. You’re even more despised if you’re a mother who speaks up for the sanctity of human life.
Earlier this week, a gentleman by the name of Eric Conn put out a series of tweets for Mother’s Day. I just want to share two of them with you. The first one, “The Left is perfectly happy to say that women should be able to do whatever they want to do so long as it isn’t devoting herself to to her husband, her household, and her children.” We know it’s true. And the a second one from Eric Conn, “It is moral insanity to think that a woman is free when she is exposing her body to millions of strange men, but oppressed when she is lovingly serving her husband, her household, and her children.”
My friends, mothers and motherhood is under attack and we have kept quiet far too long. We in the Church have sat idly by and what started out in the sixties as a “sexual revolution” has separated intimacy from marriage. And the results of that demanded that birth control and abortion happen, because marriage and motherhood [were] ripped apart.
We need to stand up and speak not only to society, but we need to speak to our families. We need to speak to our children. When men look lustfully at another woman like a child looks at candy in the candy store, that man is despising his mother and sinning against God. When a woman gives herself to another man without demanding and expecting lifelong faithfulness, she is not only despising her mother, she is despising herself.
My friends, God’s Word is clear. He has given us gift upon gift and upon gift. He’s given us life. For many of us, He’s given us a spouse or family, precious gifts from God. He’s given us a nation, a country that people have fought and died for. It is time for us to stop sitting quietly and idly by while Satan has a field day in our country, in our government, in our schools, in our homes. It’s time for us to be Christian. I can tell you I love my country. I love God even more. I am, by God’s definition, a Christian Nationalist and I would submit to you that all Bible-believing Christians are, as well.
My friends, there have been many times when we have kept quiet when we could have spoken out. There are many times when we have put our heads in the sand and pretended that things would take care of themselves. There have been many times when we have failed to pray for our elected officials because we didn’t like them or didn’t vote for them. And there have been times when we though we had a god and a savior in the elected official that we voted for or supported.
My friends, God’s Word today calls us to repent. To repent before our God and Savior, our mediator, the god man Jesus Christ, who has lived and died and risen again for you. Who covers over all our sins, even our sins of quietism, and apathy, and indifference. And pray that God would fill us with a knowledge and a courage. Convictions, not only to believe the truth of God’s Word, but to confess it with our lips and our lives. May God grant it to us, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Now may the peace of God, which far surpasses all understanding, keep our hearts, our minds, our nation in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.
The above biblical message, so vehemently denied by thousands of blind “Christian” preachers, teachers and their blind followers, must be distributed throughout the length and breadth of this nation in order that it might experience a new birth under God. Send this tract to all the members of your congregation and to all your loved ones everywhere.
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