Patriotism is God's design

“When people call on the telephone and ask for prayer, I tell them they don’t need our phone number,” Jordan said in a study the other week. “You don’t need a prayer line. You don’t need me to pray for you. Pray for yourself.

“You can pray directly to God on your own for yourself and get more benefit out of it than if I pray for you or someone else prays for you. When you begin to rightly divide the Word you begin to understand what prayer is in the dispensation of grace.

“Prayer’s not, ‘I’ll get someone over here to pray and if I get enough people to pray, then God will do something.’ That’s that old heathen thing.

“Paul writes to Timothy, ‘I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.’

“When he says ‘first of all,’ he means this is the first primary thing. You can go to church growth groups and hear people talk about how to build churches, and be involved in planting churches and the ministry in churches, etc., and seldom does that become the first issue. Most people when they think about prayer, they think, ‘Let’s have a prayer meeting.’

“I say on the TV and radio, so that people don’t call, ‘If you need prayer, don’t call our number; it’s not a prayer line. If you need prayer, pray. Pray for yourself. Learn how to talk to God directly.’

“All this stuff people usually think about with regard to, ‘Well, let’s set up a prayer group and a prayer chain and a prayer meeting and have an all-night prayer.’ That isn’t what he’s talking about. He’s talking about how prayer functions today and there’s a great lesson in that in Romans 13.

“Paul starts out in chapter 12 . . . If you want to see what an authentic Grace Believer looks like as far as their lifestyle’s concerned, Romans 12 is designed to show you that.

"It starts out with presenting your body a living sacrifice. It talks about renewing your mind, being transformed. It talks about the relationships you have and to think soberly. He talks about ‘let love be without dissimulation,’ and how you live among the brethren.

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“Adam is called ‘a son of God.’ Lucifer before he fell was called ‘the son of the morning.’ God designed to have His creation operated by sons. A son in the Bible is an adult who’s fully educated in what the Father is doing, understands the Father’s will and delightfully participates in it as though it were his own. Lucifer was created for that and he fell. Adam was commissioned in the same way.

“Every nation in the earth is patriotic. I’ve been in a dozen different nations and every nation is patriotic. You know what they’ll ask you? ‘How do you like our country?’ Because they’re naturally proud of their country. Why? That’s the way God designed it for them to be.

“Back in the mid-90s, when I was in Bulgaria and the communists had only been fallen for about two years, we sat at the table and talked to a man who’d been the No. 2 man in the communist government running the department of information. And he said to me, ‘You know, our country doesn’t look real good right now, but we’ve been in bad straits before and we’ll come back.’

“And in spite of all that had happened . . . of course he had about a 1,500-year track record for his country that he was right about, but for all of that, he still was committed to it. And I thought, ‘You know, that’s exactly what Genesis says will happen.’ And God did it that way on purpose.

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“To understand the structure of how nationalism works is essential to understanding how to function and minister in the dispensation of grace. Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles. He has a ministry for the nations; for every man.

“God isn’t operating today like He did through the nation Israel; one nation. So if we’re going to be able to go out and minister to the nations, we need an understanding of how the nations are designed by God to function.

“They’re not a homogenous thing. Acts 17:26, ‘And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.’

“We all came from Adam but we also all came through Noah’s sons Ham, Shem and Japheth. One of the reasons God scattered everyone in Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel is because the people were trying to have a one-world nation, one-world language and do exactly the opposite of what God told Noah to do; that is to scatter and replenish the earth.

“They’re trying to get it all together under one head and God says, ‘No, no, I’ve got a new structure now; nationalism.’ And so He scattered them and set the bounds of their habitation. Borders, language and culture.

“Here’s the reason in Acts 17:27: 'That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.’

“That’s an interesting way of saying it and what he’s saying there is it’s like groping around in the darkness after God. They’re in total darkness; they can’t find Him.

“He set up nationalism literally to enhance evangelism. He did it for the protection of people but also so He could divide up mankind into more reachable groups, if we can put it that way.

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“When we live in a culture, our first job is to understand what’s going on. So Paul brings up this issue of prayer for all men. We need to go understand how the nations work, and to the kings and those that are in authority that make the culture function in governmental units, nations, borders, languages and culture.

“We need to understand that so we can operate the local church, which lives in one of those nations in one of those cultures, and prayer is designed to be the catalyst that causes the sound doctrine that Romans 1 says we’re to maintain to work in the inner man.

“It’s to work in the conscience for conscience sake for the assembly to produce the godly attitude and actions in the culture, especially when injustice and Christ rejection is the norm.

“The whole culture, whatever they are, are set up to reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and our response is to be quiet and peaceable, to be the good works in all godliness and honesty. We’re going to live godly.

“Now somebody will say, ‘Well, what happens if the culture violates the Word of God?’ Then you obey the Word of God.

“You go all the way back to Exodus 1 when God first begins to create the nation Israel, and what do you have? Pharaoh says, ‘Go out and kill all the baby boys,’ and what do the Hebrew women do? They don’t go down and protest city hall. They just quietly don’t do it. They quietly disobey. And they have passive resistance.

“You go all through Scripture, you see you can’t obey one verse of Scripture by disobeying another verse. The problem with that is is you bring up that objection because you just don’t want to do what the verses say to start with and that’s to be subject.

“You say, ‘But I don’t like what the government. . . ’ There’s nothing in here that asks you to like it. Paul lived in a government far worse than anything you’ve got to deal with. You got to remember that.

“When he wrote these things, the emperor Nero eventually is going to kill him. He lived in a pagan world. The city of Ephesus was a godless place where Timothy went. Timothy’s job wasn’t to go down and protest the city government. Paul used the government; he appealed to Caesar. He used the rights he had as a citizen of Rome to do good, not evil.”