We have lost kingdom culture, and we do not know we have lost it.
Daniel saw visions that revealed history from the captivity of God’s representative culture to the restoration of Messiah’s culture. The images represent actual cultures of history that are continuing to influence the world. The cultures Daniel saw in his visions influence today’s media, and only experience confrontation from the kingdom of God mountain Daniel saw in the vision.
Babylon. Persia. Greece. Rome. Those spiritual conditions produced by cosmic dominators, controlled by satan in his role as prince of the power of the air, did not fade as cultural influences. They continue today.
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We have this schematic limitation on Daniel and the Revelation that carves off the essential edges of the framework in favor of various views of end-time ultimates. For the most part, this is a big distraction from the actual reason John receives the visions. (They are visions, not visits to Heaven.) We even blow the seven churches into near-madness with the oddest of all ideas: “these represent epochs of history.” As if that makes even one grain of salt’s worthy of sense just because some guy wrote some novel concept in a book without a shred of proof or rational thought to support his theory.
We keep on teaching these distractions because the actual messaging makes sense only when we make kingdom and kingdom culture priorities instead of hammering the Bible into our warped church-growthism and modern christianism. (Listen to me digress because of distraction myself!)
Kingdom culture is the mountain that rises higher, expands wider, and confronts all the others in Daniel vision.
The Great Commission
Jesus assigned representatives of the kingdom and kingdom culture to expand this mountain. From this culture, He assembles matured kingdom citizens into a legislative, judicial, and administrative ekklesia (what we rejected in favor of church-growthism) so that His mountain replaces the influence of these previously installed demonic ones.
- Disciple cultures by spiritual influence since the representative culture of Israel is judged a failure and Messiah resets the kingdom of God.
- Establish personal life-change for individual kingdom culture lifestyle based upon spiritual transformation and grace flow instead of written-code cultural expectations and anticipations (law and prophets).
- Training those that have life-change to obey all I commanded you, establishing kingdom cultural principles, processes, and protocols that Messiah the King taught you.
- Representing Me in My involved intercession, through apostolic order, kingdom ekklesia, and kingdom culture so that Providence marks the kingdom of God on Earth until the process reaches ultimate.
Four parts of the Great Commission: 1. disciple cultures; 2. baptize into new life; 3. train people in culture; 4. function as representatives of Providence and Priesthood.
There is zero church-growthism in the Great Commission. Not one word about cultural relevance, cross-cultural messaging, “How To Pull Off Some Popular Events,” and “Ice-breakers for Small Group Dynamics.” Nope.
Apostolic order. Kingdom
We cannot have the ekklesia Jesus builds until we have the kingdom He reset and the kingdom culture He designed.
A cultural confrontation occurs only when and where the culture of the kingdom of God exists. Without it, we are in yikkety-yak discussions hollowed out by good intentions and fabrications of fantasy. Just a waste of our time and money to talk cultural influence if we do not have the kingdom and kingdom culture in operation with an apostolic order for the function of kingdom leadership dynamics at the foundational level.
PIcture this presentation of humanism we call “church” on display for the King: “Hello Jesus, cool that You stopped by. If You can find any way – any way at all – to fit this schematic, let us know. We know you are thrilled with our design and definition of ‘church.’ Yours didn’t work well for us, so we improved it and destroying Your blueprints. Impressive, huh?”
“Many shall say in that day (when ultimates change history), ‘Lord, Lord, did we not do great things?’ But I will say, “Not so much. There was never one moment I was involved in your ridiculous big stuff distractions. I involved Myself only where and when you were doing what Father’s wants to be done, which wasn’t that much, by the way.’ So, you and all that distraction can go to hell unless you’d like to join the actual, authentic kingdom of God agenda.'”
“Dr. Don, are you suggesting that most of what modern church-anity does has little to do with what Jesus is doing?”
No, I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you that most of what modern church-growthism does is entirely beside the point of the purposes of the Father, and this is obvious when the existing culture ignores the influence of the kingdom of God and its culture. We should either be influencing the current culture toward the kingdom culture or getting killed for what we have to say about it.
No, Bigger Ain’t Necessarily Better
Building bigger and bigger church-anity events have not done one thing to fulfill the Great Commission. Not one thing. All the people baptized could be baptized without the thing in place. Nearly nothing is ever done to “train them to obey what Jesus commanded” in the predominate self-help the Bible teaching. (People should continue with this in the present situation because it does offer Jesus opportunities to insert minor demonstrations of the Spirit’s power. The real thing would blow up the modern mind and make 98% of church-growthism obsolete in six months.)
Evangelism has nearly nothing to do with the event-based church-anity complex. Every study in history shows that people are not born again because of lights, camera, action, and big crowds. Kingdom would be massive beyond what our present event-driven and real estate-owning could begin to
Church-anity is not hurting anything that much, but it is a massive distraction to the proper investment of kingdom assets. It isn’t working. It isn’t confronting the current culture enough to change it or get us all killed, the two things Jesus designed it to do.
In other words, if what we have now were functioning as Jesus designed and defined ekklesia, the present “church-anity” would be something the world has never seen before. It would be a mountain so big and influential that the historical context of cultural influence would be blasted into tiny slivers and forgotten while the most violent confrontation between hell and Heaven would occur in many nations. Both significant kingdom advances and horrifying martyrdom would result. Both generational inheritance and hellish genocides would happen because of the threat of the kingdom of God to every existing expression of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.
