The King must trump Trump

At the risk of friendships and potential backlash (and that, my friends, is no small thing for a 9 on the Enneagram!), can I ask a simple question?

Am I the only one who sees the disconnect between fighting as a mob to keep a political leader in office while claiming to follow a spiritual leader who said, “Put away your sword” when facing a mob who was trying to keep Him from “office?”

I’m sure you’ll read that as political, but it isn’t intended to be. It’s spiritual. And honest. And messy. And real.

I know that not everyone who was in the nation’s capital on January 6 was a follower of Jesus and that not every follower of Jesus who was there went there to breach the Capitol. But for people who only saw signs with the name of Jesus in the same frame as angry and hate-filled faces, the two can so quickly become the same.

But they aren’t.

The ways of the Kingdom are not the ways of the world (or even, for that matter, the ways of the country).

There is a better way forward from this, but it won’t be found by following mobs bent on trying to hold on to power. It will be found by a remnant on bent knees as they follow a King who never saw power as something to be grasped.

There are times when the political life of a country seems compatible with the spiritual life of a country. But when those paths diverge from one another, a choice has to be made about which path we will follow because if we don’t, we’ll find ourselves swept up in frenzied crowds that will take us places that we never intended to go in the first place. I feel sure that many well-meaning believers experienced that very thing last week in our nation’s capital.

Will there be times to stand boldly and courageously in the face of opposition? For sure. But as Jesus followers, it is precisely in those moments that we must be sure that the stand we take — and the way we take it — accurately represents the King we serve.

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