The coziness between church and state may be good for the state; it is bad for the church. Herein lies the chief danger to grace: the state, which runs by the rules of ungrace, gradually drowns out the church’s sublime message of grace. Insatiable for power, the state may well decide that the church could prove even more useful if the state controlled it. The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state. The cozier it gets with government, the more watered down the message and absolute quality of Jesus’ commands becomes. Then the state will turn them into a form of external morality and they will precisely become the opposite of the gospel of grace.
A state government can shut down stores and theaters on Sunday, but it cannot compel worship. It can arrest and punish KKK murderers but cannot cure their hatred, much less teach them love. It can pass laws making divorce more difficult but cannot force husbands to love their wives and wives their husbands. It can give subsidies to the poor but cannot force the rich to show them compassion and justice. It can ban adultery but not lust, theft but not covetousness, cheating but not pride. It can encourage virtue but not holiness.
All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.
The world's great economic crisis is not the result of the rich oppressing the poor. A much better case can be made that it's the result of the world turning its back on God. The cure for the world's woes is not government handouts, bailouts and entitlements. It should be obvious the world's governments are too bankrupt to expand or even continue this destructive behavior. You cannot collect enough wealth from the rich to provide middle-class luxuries to everyone on earth – especially when the media is encouraging greater and greater immorality.
The path to sanity and prosperity is paved with righteousness. It's paved with workers and employers who put God first and have a servant's heart. It's paved by giving up the "modern family" and reestablishing the family as God intended it to be. It's paved with real compassion and generosity – not forced redistribution of wealth. It's paved with redemption of the media.
The subtlety of projecting Christianity in being incorporated into state functions and laws and thinking that is the true function of the church and the gospel is not the true gospel of grace. No matter what our influence is to the state we cannot legislate morality or have state run Christianity. Why? The state cannot change the heart, that is God’s job. You cannot change your own heart nor the heart of someone else. Yes, you and the state have influence, but not the power over the will. The church has been using external means to change an internal problem. We do not need a change of our country. We do not need a change of politicians. We do not need change of laws. What we need is a change of hearts, for when the heart changes the politicians change, the laws change, and the country changes. The changes do not occur from the outside in, but from the insides out.
As a church we should be focusing on the internal and not the external that is why the church has become impotent. The church has taken God out of the equation and makes emphasis on external political means. Jesus Christ did not use political means to accomplish His goals, nor did He teach His disciples to use them. Jesus used grassroots, the basis of a country is underlayed by the people. If the people are no longer following Jesus Christ, then the country will be proceded by whatever belief system that is in place. If we as a church would spend our time on dealing with the internal issues and grassroots that Jesus advocated, we would not as a country be in the moral decay that we find ourselves in. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King: "The ends don't justify the means, for the means represent the seed and ends represent the tree."
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