Modern Christians, in an age of spiffy and savvy political slogans, have a certain confidence about them. They believe we can bring back the happy days of pre-1960 America with a couple of sharp moves and tweets.
But there is a difference between a healthy optimism because Jesus is Lord and stupid optimism because of our strategy department or our tiny group of revolutionaries online.
Jesus is Lord! But this is not an enticement to utopianism but to incremental societal changes, just as we expect to see in our own sanctification.
James B. Jordan wrote a superb essay some decades ago entitled “Yuppie Postmillennialism,” criticizing those who thought victory would come without suffering and hard decisions. He observes:
If we are to have a true Christian renaissance in the United States, it will not be a superficial yuppiefied religion that brings it. True Christianity must have equal time for Ecclesiastes as for Proverbs in its One Year Bibles.
This is quite a sobering warning for us in the days and weeks ahead. We live in a fallen world, which means that if we think we can bring in the kingdom in our own way and through our own strength, and our own perfectionist tendencies, we are utopionizing history. But the right way to view history is by acknowledging that we live in Ecclesiastes, and therefore we need wisdom, discernment, and patience as we seek to make God’s blessings known far as the curse is found.
And this is why we gather this morning: God is preparing us with training wheels in worship. We think we are ready to march and conquer, and then God jumps in and says, “Wait, be patient, sit down for a meal first, and worship Me.”
