The Established Path of Discipleship

I’ve enjoyed reading Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears That Divide Us by Michael Horton. Horton accurately describes a cultural climate where people “experience life as one giant catastrophe-about-to-happen.”[1] Fear seems to be our norm regardless of our political or theological leanings. Horton describes this new norm this way, “Indeed, many of us live each day in constant fear. And our smartphones are the headlights, freezing and immobilizing us.”[2]Throughout the book, Horton demonstrates how a proper fear of God sets us free from the doom peddlers in our culture.

One gem from the book speaks to an insanity in our current American political and evangelical culture. In the chapter “Religious Liberty,” Horton gives a penetrating corrective concerning our propensity to depend on the government (Caesar) to help us build the church.

Christ has done very well without Caesar’s assistance, and even with Caesar’s ferocious opposition, in building his church around the world…Caesar has profited by playing to fears of religious persecution. To the extent that evangelicals were willing to be exploited as a political base for short-term privileges, they have lost their cultural moral authority in the long term. But Christ is not ineffective and his gospel is not weak. Jesus came not to Make Israel Great Again, much less to be a mascot for either a Rainbow America or a Christian America. He came to bring forgiveness of sins and everlasting life, to die and rise again so that through faith in him we too can share in his new creation. This is the message that generations of past evangelicals were eager to share with the whole world. The gospel, after all, is for the whole world, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, black, brown, and white, and even Democrat and Republican. In his Great Commission Jesus gave authority to the church to make disciples, not citizens; to proclaim the gospel to all nations, not their own political opinions to their own base; to baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in the name of America or a political party; and to teach everything that he delivered, not whatever is on their mind.[3]

Church, may we heed this corrective going into yet another divisive election cycle fueled by the apocalyptic fear-mongers of our age. Be not crazy with fear, but sane with a spirit of “power and love and self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7).

     [1] Michael Horton, Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears That Divide Us (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022), 1.

      [2] Ibid., 1-2.

      [3] Ibid., 234-235.