Thread by @JonathanLeeman

An eleven-part two-handed thread:

On the one hand, Christians should care about God's purposes for genders, families, ethnicities, and nations. These common-grace groups nurture God-imagers and provide a platform for God's work of redemption.

If I fight for the church, I must not do so while neglecting biblical concerns for gender, family, ethnicity, or nation. We hurt ourselves if we do, like cutting the branch you're sitting on.

On the other hand, Christians must care more about the kingdom of God than one's gender, family, ethnicity or nation. If I fight for a common-grace group, I must do so ultimately in service to the kingdom of God and be careful to not sinfully divide Christians.

Jesus said, "Who are my mother and brother" and "let the sons of the kingdom be cast out" and "let the dead bury their dead" and "Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it."

At a conceptual level, we need to better understand the relationship between common-grace groupings and the special-grace people of God. What's the significance of the former? What role does each group play in serving the latter? What does it mean to prioritize the latter?

So much quarreling among the saints right now comes from either under-appreciating or over-emphasizing the place of common-grace groupings, which is the domain of politics--saints on the left often emphasizing gender and ethnicity, saints on the right family and nation.

Yet the quarreling also comes from the natural and reflexive disposition in each of our hearts to prioritize what we see (common-grace categories of gender, family, etc) over what must be beheld by faith (our special-grace, gospel responsibility for the whole church).

And so we reflexively, thoughtlessly, and proudly cut ourselves off from those who don't share our particular common-grace-category political burden. Our hearts harden.

The challenge of Christian maturity is asking God to help us learn how to simultaneously contend for our common-grace concerns while also fighting to affirm our love and unity with saints who fail to recognize those concerns.

I believe godly people can do both: fight for a political burden (whether involving gender/family/race/nation), while also loving Christians whom ones believes are in error.

"As I have loved you [forgivingly, forebearingly, in your sin], so you must love one another" (Jn 13:35).

Jesus even says our witness depends on it: "By this all will know you are my disciples."