Christian Civic Duty (Jeremiah 29:4-11)

R. Dwain Minor   -   October 26, 2024

Election day is coming up and I do believe that, as a pastor, I am to shepherd the people toward faithfulness to the Lord in their lives. And when something comes up that is completely front of mind for almost everyone, then I feel there is a need to talk about it.

Obviously, I am discussing the upcoming election.

Sometimes decisions are difficult because they are truly difficult. But sometimes decisions are difficult because you simply don’t have the grid to discuss these decisions.

I was in Chaplain training last week and we discussed this very thing. Sometimes you must walk into the room and help someone with medical decisions that they simply can’t wrap their minds around. They freeze and sometimes it’s because there is no framework for making this sort of decision.

If you don’t have a way of making the decision, then it is difficult to figure out if you’d like to live for 4 years on chemo or 3 months with no chemotherapy. Decisions like that one are not uncommon in a hospital and it is also not uncommon for someone to lament over the fact that they just can’t make the decision.

I tend to think that something similar to that happens to Christians during the election cycle. And so, they just don’t go vote.

A recent Barna Research poll came out that stated most Christians are not projected to vote this year.[1] Most of these said that they would vote if they were convinced that they had a Christian responsibility to go and vote.

Today, I want to attempt to convince you that you do have a Christian responsibility to vote, and vote responsibly. But that is not the end of our responsibility to our society. As Christians, we are to work to build a culture that is righteous and prosperous.

What I say today should come as no surprise to folks that have been Southern Baptist for a while. In fact, it is what we have believed for a long time.

XV. The Christian and the Social Order

All Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human society. Means and methods used for the improvement of society and the establishment of righteousness among men can be truly and permanently helpful only when they are rooted in the regeneration of the individual by the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. In the spirit of Christ, Christians should oppose racism, every form of greed, selfishness, and vice, and all forms of sexual immorality, including adultery, homosexuality, and pornography. We should work to provide for the orphaned, the needy, the abused, the aged, the helpless, and the sick. We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death. Every Christian should seek to bring industry, government, and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness, truth, and brotherly love. In order to promote these ends Christians should be ready to work with all men of good will in any good cause, always being careful to act in the spirit of love without compromising their loyalty to Christ and His truth.

We live in the United States of America, and because of that we have the ability to determine the direction of our country by voting and speaking out concerning different topics. As Southern Baptists we believe that we are to

  • Oppose
    • racism
    • greed
    • selfish
    • vice
    • all forms of sexual immorality
    • adultery
    • homosexuality
    • pornography
  • Work to provide for orphaned
  • Work to provide for needy
  • Work to provide for abused
  • Work to provide for aged
  • Work to provide for helpless
  • Work to provide for sick
  • We are to speak against abortion and contend for the lives of the unborn.
  • We are to fight for natural death and not physician assisted suicide.
  • “We seek to bring industry, government, and society as a whole under the sway of principles of righteousness, truth, and brotherly love.”

Within this section of our statement of faith, it should be obvious that we are talking about two different things. One is what we do with our personal lives, and the life of our church. The second is how we interact with social issues in the political and governmental sphere.

I will say, as a sort of aside, that how we provide for the impoverished in society looks very different depending on who you talk to. There are different methods for helping the poor. But there is one issue on here that is direct and straight forward and that is the discussion on abortion and physician assisted suicide.

The Democrat Party has decided to advocate for abortion with tremendous fervor and are attempting to make it legal at the national level once again. And if you are a Southern Baptist and hold to the confession of faith that our church says that it holds to, then you will defy those that attempt to do such things. It seems to me that this is a black and white issue when it comes to elections.

We will see much of this in today’s text. The text is Jeremiah 29:4-11.

As Christians, we are to work for the welfare of the place we live. This will involve the things we do within our family and church family, but it also involves us working for the good of our society as a whole.

The passage is not directly about us today. It is about the people of Israel and instructions for their captivity. How were they to live as sojourners in a land that was not their own? The Lord called them “exiles”. It is the same thing that Christians are called in 1 Peter 2:11.

We are not living in a land that is our own. We are living as sojourners and strangers longing for that land that is our own. This is where the instruction found in Jeremiah helps us greatly. How do we live within society today?

We see the answer to that in Jeremiah 29:4-11.

Build A Family

Building your family should be the priority when thinking about our duty to our civilization. It starts within your own home. When we read that we are to build a house, live in it, plant gardens and eat from them, we are talking about building something. This is not just about building a house and a place to gather food. This is the language of prosperity.

As much as you have the ability to do so, build a prosperous family. This is not just about financial well-being, but that is certainly part of it. You need to have a place to live, food to eat, and you should be attempting to have something to hand down to your family when you are gone.

Well, what does this look like?

Get married and have children. In other words, fulfill the mandate to multiply and fill the earth. Have children, adopt children, and make spiritual children through evangelism. Multiply.

Implied in this idea is that you will raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4 ESV)

Having children is not just about making sure that they live. It’s about raising them up in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord”.

I have often discussed what this meant to Paul’s original listeners. The word Paul used here was παιδεία. It can mean “discipline”, but most often it has to do with the education of the whole person. It had to do with the cultivation of the mind.

In Paul’s day Roman parents were obligated to bring their children up in the παιδεία of Rome. That child was to get a full education in what it meant to be a citizen of Rome. And Paul uses that word on purpose here to tell us what our obligation is to our children. They are to be given a full education in what it means to be one of God’s people. They are to get a full education in the Kingdom of God so that they will be faithful citizens of it as they get older.

And when they do get older, we are to help our own children get married. And we are to help them to fulfill the mandate to multiply and fill the earth. Now, there is only so much we can do in this regard. But our job is to move them, with that full education we’ve given them, to see that they need to get married to a good Christian man and multiply.

As people that are sojourners and strangers in America, we are to multiply and not shrink.

As a Christian reading this today, I believe that we can easily apply this to evangelism. The Gospel brings people into God’s family. It is a form of multiplication, as one person proclaims the gospel to another and by the power of the Holy Spirit there are now 2 Christians.

The gospel, that message of our salvation. That message of Jesus’s perfect life, His sacrificial death, and His resurrection is the message of our redemption. We have all rebelled against God. We have all earned God’s judgment. And we have all begun our lives outside of God’s Kingdom. It is only through the finished work of Jesus Christ that we are saved and brought into His family. So we go forth and multiply ourselves by declaring that message.

We start here because this is far more important than anything you will do in the election booth. You begin by building your house, your family, your own personal prosperity, the prosperity of your children, and the Church.

We believe that it starts here. It starts with your marriage, your children, your family, and your church family. It is in these places that your biggest impact will be seen and will carry on for generations to come.

We start here. It seems boring, but to honor the Lord you start here. You start by having a family, raising your children in the fear and the admonition of the Lord, and building wealth for yours and your children’s future.

I would like to illustrate this by looking at the news.

How often have you looked around and seen people that haven’t done anything in life advocating with all their heart for some very dangerous social position?

A bunch of single men decide to get together and take over a city block inside Portland in rebellion against the police. The Portland Autonomous Zone looked like it was made up of a bunch of single men with nothing better to do, but I think they actually believed they were doing something significant. The problem is they didn’t actually know what a significant thing looked like. They had opted out of the most significant thing they could do in this life: get married, have children, raise them in the Lord, and encourage this to happen to the next generation.

This happens all the time. I’ve known a few people that were Antifa friendly. None of them seemed all that focused on their own lives and their families. They think that all their trouble comes from outside of them and they do not seem to understand that they are to be building something themselves.

I believe that if you are old enough to die for the country then you are old enough to go and vote. And I think that an unmarried 18-year-old should go vote. But that 18-year-old should go vote with the building of a home and family in mind. They should go vote understanding that their first responsibility and task is going to be to the building of a home, family, and church and that should be the priority when they walk in that voting booth or when they interact with society at large. These first priority things, Christ, family, and church should be their first priority as well.

This is almost completely missing within our society. People don’t seem to focus on the things that they can work on and control. They believe they can’t do anything about it because of the massive amount of chaos outside.

But the reality is that we should have the completely opposite view. I can do something about what’s in here. I can help my family. I can help my church. I can do something about how my generation and other generations of my family are going to be raised. And we focus our efforts, first and foremost, here.

This circle close to us is what should take up most of our thoughts. It should be what takes up most of our efforts and planning. It should be what 99% of our prayers should be about.

I must admit, this is difficult. We have news organizations that make money by selling drama. Even organizations that are typically thought to be unbiased are pushing an agenda. For instance, even those old news shows have been shown in studies to be biased even if they are factual in their reporting. They are attempting to move you somewhere with the stories they report. They are attempting to take you somewhere, to make you an activist for their side. They are attempting to make you less focused on your home, your family, your children, and be constantly looking outside for answers.

Politicians make themselves out to be the answer to all your problems. When what we really need is for them to shut up and get out of the way. By acting as if they have the fix for everything that is ailing you, they make believers out of people. And whether they realize it or not, they make their selves out to be false messiahs that person after person thinks will fix their issues.

All of this leads us to focus where the focus should not be. Start with your relationship to Christ, your wife, your children, and then their children. Start there. Start right around you.

If you’re losing sleep at night over what’s happening in the election, then it is probably a good sign that your priorities are wrong.

But at the same time, you are not to have no concern for what is going on outside of this ring.

The people elected to office will make it easier or harder to be faithful to do these things. For instance, if inflation is high and taxes are high it is much more difficult to feed your family, let alone build wealth that is passed down to the next generation. Regulations make it difficult for businesses to function and for small businesses to be started. They make it more difficult for a father that owns a small business to make ends meet. Elections do have an impact on how our everyday lives will operate.

You really are to work toward building a better society.

What does the society that we are to build look like?

Well, it looks like a society that is doing all the things that we are supposed to be doing. Building a home, a family, raising them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, personal and generational prosperity.

Build A Society

I want you to notice that there is an outward view to our text today. We who are strangers and sojourners here in America are to seek the prosperity of America. We are talking about this today because, as Americans, voting is a big part of that.

So, what should we be trying to build?

We should be trying to build a society that builds homes, strong families, builds prosperity, and gives us the freedom to raise our children up in the fear and the admonition of the Lord.

We advocate for marriage. Not marriage as the State has redefined it to be, but real marriage. Same sex unions are not a marriage, they are a mirage. They are an evil cosplay of the real thing. And by calling this marriage, the State has committed a wicked evil against society and against God.

I say this to say, that we advocate for true marriage. We advocate for people to marry and remain married. We try to do things within our society that will move people out of singleness and into marriage and remain together.

Our children should not be taught that non-marriage is marriage. They should not be taught that it is good and right. And they should not be taught that divorce is a good thing to do if they fall out of love.

And we should vote for things that will encourage people to get married and strengthen marriages in this country. Financial concerns are often hindrances to marriage, and often remaining together. Inflation does a really good job of making it more difficult for people to marry and to not fight about money.

Advocate for people to marry and not live lives of singleness. Don’t act like marriage is something horrible. Don’t joke about “the ol’ ball and chain”. Encourage people to marry and remain married.

Ronald Reagan did a lot of great things. But as Governor of California, he signed a law that made it easier to divorce. It was called “No fault divorce”. This spread throughout the states and has made it easier than ever for a married couple to cut ties and break up families.

Don’t just walk around thinking that your political party got it right. Don’t just think you must pay attention to matters at the national level. You should give thought to what is happening locally and nationally. But, you should especially be concerned with what is happening right around you.

Encourage people to have children. And attempt to create a society around you that will have more children. I have already stated that, as Southern Baptists, we are strongly against abortion. But this is also about having children and raising children in homes with both biological parents. We want to build a society that will encourage people to get married, stay together, and have children.

I am going to give some summary and almost quote statements from recent years concerning the home. These come from America First Policy Institute. Almost 1 in 4 American children are raised without a father in the home. 80% of the single parent homes are led by single mothers. Children from single-parent families are twice as likely to suffer from mental health and behavior problems. One study found that 70% of youth in state operated facilities were from single-parent homes. Children with an actively engaged father perform much better in school, some data shows that they are 33% less likely to repeat a class and 43% more likely to get As in school. There was also a study of 56 school shootings done, only 10 were raised in a stable home with both biological parents.[2]

Strong families are necessary for a strong America. We should work for that, however we can. We should not vote for politicians that want to destroy the family.

And we should work for the prosperity of our city, state, and nation. This will, in a large degree, be affected by how well we educate our children. Education has gone downhill for years. And, to a large degree, American prosperity will be in the hands of those that are educated here.

Education, as we saw above with the idea of παιδεία, is about more than just teaching Math, English, Science, and History. Education is about forming the person. It’s about forming their character. What type of people are we producing in America? What type of people are you going to be surrounded by in a few years? What kind of people are being formed by our education system?

These things should concern us. And these are things we get a say in within our local community. Pay attention to who is running for school board. Pay attention to those that educate our children and how they plan to do it.

Financial prosperity is also part of this discussion. However, I am not talking about America’s prosperity. The country doesn’t need more money. Our government wastes more money in one year than I can even imagine.[3]

In last year’s waste report from Senator Rand Paul,

“This year, I am highlighting a whopping ~$900,000,000,000 of waste, including an NIH grant to study Russian cats walking on a treadmill, Barbies used as proof of ID for receiving COVID Paycheck Protection Program funds, $6 million to promote tourism in Egypt, and $200 million to ‘struggling artists’ like Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Lil Wayne. No matter how much money the government has already wasted, politicians keep demanding even more.”[4]

Our country doesn’t need more money. But the people in it do. This is about the prosperity of the people within the country. Here is the point, if America prospers then we all prosper. If the people within this large country of ours can financially prosper, then we will benefit from that.

Good governance allows people to prosper. People need to be safe from enemies. They need to be safe from criminals. And the people need to be able to prosper within it.

I think that America’s usage of credit cards can be used to illustrate this. The average American household is now $7951 in credit card debt. That’s not counting other spending.[5] That doesn’t count the other loans they are covering. These interest rate on these cards is now 28.7%.[6] Again, this doesn’t count money spent on home and vehicle. Almost 40% of divorces in America list finances as at least one of the reasons for divorce.[7]

Credit Card debt is an optional expense. Meaning, you chose to get into this debt. But charging high interest rates would be considered usury, which was forbidden in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 23:19). And these practices most certainly keep people in debt. If you get in debt, you need to figure out a way out and pay for it. Don’t do it again, for the borrower is slave to the lender (Proverbs 22:7). But not doing it is made incredibly difficult when everything costs so much that life is difficult to afford.

This is just one instance, where we can see how a prospering country will help a people to prosper. Now, a whole lot of that credit card debt comes as people say “yes” to things they should have said “no” to. But increasingly, we are seeing the rise of people paying their bills with a credit card as inflation makes it more and more difficult to make ends meet. Recent reporting has stated that around 1/3 of Americans were using credit cards to buy groceries and most of those are not paying off the balance at the end of the month.[8] I hope that all of this helps you to see that these really are things that we need to be thinking about.

We should expect our government to be concerned with justice. We need to live in a place where crime is not running rampant in the streets. Businesses have to flee cities where this is the case. Families have to leave areas of high crime for their own safety. Who you elect for governor, mayor, district judge, and sheriff matter a lot. These choices will probably affect you much more than those people that take up all the headlines on the national news stations. But we also want to see it at the national level. All sorts of problems arise when Federal Laws are ignored.

Righteousness should be rewarded as well. We want to be run by a government that seeks for its citizens to live righteously. The government should reward people for building families, working, and being law abiding citizens.

Government was instituted by God for this purpose. It is supposed to help us be a people that are safe from wrongdoers, safe from invasion, and free to live righteously.

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.” (Romans 13:1-7 ESV)

As Christians in America in this time period, we have the privilege of being part of the governance. And if you are told to make your country a better place and you refuse to vote, how are you not abdicating your responsibility?

Will there be a perfect choice? No. There’s always going to be a problem. But I’m voting, to the best of my ability, for the concepts that we discussed today to be achieved.

This then becomes the grid for how I vote. No longer is the decision just something in my gut. No longer is it a pure emotional decision. It’s not really “the lesser of two evils”. It is a decision about who will make people in Conway, people in Faulkner County, in Arkansas, and in America better able to do these things.

A professor from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary took to Twitter and gave some words of wisdom in this regard.

“No Christian should ascribe eschatological hope to politics in any regard. Politics is, however, a vehicle to see creation order and natural law principles advanced. I don’t need my government to affirm my religion. I need my government to not kill the unborn, deny parental rights, undermine religious freedom, redefine the family, or perpetuate gender ideology.”[9]

And again, it is the Democrat Party that has chosen to stand on the side of abortion, undermining parental rights, undermining religious freedom, redefining the family, and perpetuating this transgender nonsense. Those people cannot have our votes.  They advocate for and push for the opposite of everything we’ve discussed today.

I don’t know a politician that I would say is perfect. But there are a lot out there that aren’t getting everything wrong. And when we work through this grid given to us in Jeremiah 29, we can walk into a voting booth and understand how best to cast our ballots.

This also means that just sitting out is not an option. You are obligated to be at work within society. And within this society, you have a role to play in its governance. You are to elect people from the local level to the federal level to do different jobs and represent you. You can’t just decide not to do it.

Pray For Your City

We are commanded to pray for the prosperity of our country because in its welfare we will find welfare. And this is an easy concept to understand. There’s a very easy illustration that I can make up on the fly concerning our own country.

As it stands, there seem to be two very different governing ideologies within our one country. And no matter what happens on election day, many people in the country are going to be very upset. I don’t know if you remember back to 2016, but protestors erupted in different cities in the country, some of those turned violent and became riots. People will probably be upset after the election.

Why?

All their hopes and dreams were wrapped up in the government. And it didn’t go their way.

As Christians, our hope is not in the results of election day 2024. Their not in any of the political candidates. And our hope is not in a political party or movement. Our hope and trust is in the Lord.

What we do here on Earth matters and the condition of the place we live matters. And we pray to the Lord for the welfare of the place we live because in its welfare is our welfare. As Conway, Arkansas prospers, we prosper. As Arkansas prospers, we prosper. And, to a lesser degree, as America prospers, we prosper. And that matters. So, we pray for the Lord’s direction and blessing.

God Is In Control

But, whether there is a good outcome to this election or a bad one, or a mediocre one…whatever happens. We understand that God is in control.

“In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will,” (Ephesians 1:11 ESV)

If we somehow manage to end up with good and righteous governance. And if we manage to wake up and see that God will continue to bless this country, then we should be exceedingly glad and thankful.

If the outcome is bad, God is no less in control.

Ultimately, we understand that God places leaders in their positions of authority (Romans 13:1).

If it be a wicked ruler or a civil war. It is God’s wrath and justice poured out upon us as a nation. And we would deserve it. We see this repeatedly in Scripture. God judges nations by giving them wicked rulers.

As human beings, we tend to see the people that cause the calamity and never look to the One that brought it.

“I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7 ESV)

And if God is bringing a calamity upon us after this election. Remember, we deserved it. And we need to repent. I pray that it would result in a national repentance.

 

R. Dwain Minor

[1] CRC-Release-Pre-Election-1-Oct-12-2024-Final.pdf

[2] ISSUE BRIEF: Fatherlessness and its effects on American society | Issues, accessed 10/23/2024, 2:27pm.

[3] 50 Examples of Government Waste | The Heritage Foundation

[4] Festivus-2023.pdf, accessed 10/24/2024

[5] Here’s how much credit card debt the average American has (and how to pay it off) – CBS News, accessed 10/23/2024, 1:56pm.

[6] What Is The Average Credit Card Interest Rate This Week? – Forbes Advisor, accessed 10/23/2024, 1:57pm.

[7] Revealing Divorce Statistics In 2024 – Forbes Advisor, accessed 10/23/2024, 2:00pm.

[8] Americans are going into debt to buy groceries, research finds, accessed 10/23/2024, 2:09pm.

[9] Andrew T. Walker, @andrewtwalk, 10/23/2024, 10:00 AM.