(upbeat music) - Hello, July, and welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. And before we jump into today's episode, I have a programming note for you to pass on. Pastor John and I will be taking next week off from the podcast, so there's gonna be no episodes all of next week.

We've been at this for a little over 180 consecutive weeks nonstop, and we're nearing episode number 900. So many of you listen every day to the podcast, and if that's you, thank you. It's been a great run, and we have no intention of stopping, but we are taking one week off.

We'll return on July 11th with all new episodes. Well, we are just days away from July 4th in the States, Pastor John, Independence Day is what we call it, and the ABJ inbox is loaded with political questions for you. Christians in America, of course, find themselves in the midst of a bizarre political season, as you know, and there's an overall heightened partisan angst, I guess you could call it, that's dividing both major parties, and even with it, there's new levels of nationalism that we have not seen in this country for a while.

But as Christians, as we approach July 4th, we're called to live in this world as strangers and exiles and aliens and sojourners and pilgrims on this earth. So, Pastor John, we've talked about this before on the podcast, but tell us again about the place and the role of patriotism in the Christian life.

- Well, we talked about this a couple of years ago, and most of what I was thinking then, as I reviewed it, still needs to be said, I think, but there are a few additional thoughts that I'll weave in and put at the end in view of the heightened awareness today of possible conflicts, at least this is the way I feel it, possible conflicts between patriotism and Christian commitment.

So let me just jump in. We are pilgrims. We are exiles, sojourners, refugees ourselves, in a very refugee-heightened culture. 1 Peter 2, "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles," and Philippians 3, "Our citizenship is in heaven." So the question, I think, is being framed rightly. We are citizens of heaven.

We are sojourners and pilgrims on the earth, and that is owing to the fact that this world is fallen, not the fact that it's created. We're going to spend eternity in a created world. So we're not aliens because earth is a bad thing, but Satan won't be the god of that world anymore like he's the god of this world.

And that's what makes us feel so alien here is that the god of this world is Satan, and he holds such extensive sway in the systems of this world that the world is permeated with sin, and it makes us feel like we're not at home. We're aching that we would be done with sin and at home with Jesus in the presence of his holiness, his holiness is the native air a Christian wants to breathe.

So when I say we are aliens and exiles and sojourners and pilgrims, I don't mean that the earth is a place we despise. I mean that the structures we find ourselves in are so permeated with sin that we want something new. However, I think God means for us to be enmeshed in the world in various ways.

We're not to go out of the world. We're in the world. We're not supposed to be of the world. We are in a city. We're in a state. We're in a country and a continent. There are all kinds of these geographical and cultural allegiances or identifications that we have.

And if I ask now, what is patriotism in this kind of paradoxical enmeshment? My answer is that patriotism is a special love or affection, endearment for fatherland. It could be a city. It could be a state, a neighborhood. It could be a tribe. It could be an ethnicity. And that love is different from the general love that Christians have for everybody or for the whole world.

And the reason I think that's true, and there are several reasons, one is that there are these special affections indicated in the Bible in various ways. For example, in Galatians 6, it says, "As you have opportunity to do good to everyone, "especially to those who are of the household of faith," especially to those who are of the household of faith.

It's as though there is this specialness about those who are close to you, have a similar deep bond to you, a kind of affection for them that's different from the world. Or 1 Timothy 5, 8, "If anyone does not provide for his relatives "and especially for the members of his household, "then he's denied the faith." So it seems like it's right not only to have this general love for everybody that covers the world, covers our neighbors, covers our enemies, but also, and especially, and especially for our families or those near to us.

And Paul himself said in Romans 9 that he had a special burden for my brothers, my kinsmen, according to the flesh. It doesn't seem to me that he would have written like that if it weren't appropriate for him to feel some kind of special affection for his fellow Jews, a kind of patriotism for his ethnicity of Jewishness.

So there's something about this flesh, this close identity that being bound together in a family way or a cultural way that makes us love them with an unusual kind or a special kind of affection. And as I was trying to think through, now, is this legitimate? I mean, I'm pointing out that it exists, that it's got pointers in the Bible, but it was C.S.

Lewis who helped me with some categories in his book, "The Four Loves." He said that there's the love of philos, which is friendship, the love of eros, which is sex, and the love of agape, which is the love of God. And then he added, there's this love called storge, which I found to be the most interesting one.

And storge is a kind of affection that you feel for a pair of slippers that you've worn way too many years, and your wife wants to throw them out, and you'd commit hairy carry if she, no way you're gonna throw these slippers out. They fit like a glove, or for me, and Noel, it's sweaters that I wear until the elbows are gone, 'cause I sit here at my desk and rubbing my elbows all the time, and she wants to toss them out, and I say, no, I love this sweater.

It's just, it's got associations. And I mean, so this is what he means by storge, a little kid who has a rag doll that's just rags is what it is, and they wouldn't part with it for anything. That's a little kind of patriotism that is probably very, very good, very admissible.

At least C.S. Lewis makes the case that it is. There's an old tree that Noel and I carved our initials in. In fact, it's gone now. It made me so mad. For decades, for about three and a half decades, we went back to Wheaton, and we walked to that tree, and we could actually find, 30 years later, those initials just barely discernible as the bark was gnarling over.

Well, we liked that tree. We liked that tree more than other trees, and so on. You get the idea that there's this kind of affection for a tree or a city or a fatherland or a language or a culture, and it's because it fits you. When you leave it, you get on a plane, you go to another country, yeah, there's an excitement and a challenge and a stimulation of going another place, but there's something inside that when you come home, it just feels wonderful to eat the food and lie in your own bed and be in your own living room and walk your own streets, and hear your own language.

All that seems to be something that God puts his approval on. So I think, yes, yes, there is such a thing, a good thing is patriotism, and with regard to nations, it seems like Romans 13, in calling us to be subject to the powers that wield the sword, implies that in some sense, a country identity or a nation state identity has the right to use that sword to defend itself against aggression, and thus in some sense, preserve its right to exist and exist as it exists.

And so I think that implies that there is a proper place for patriotism at the national level. So maybe we should wrap it up by saying whatever form your patriotism takes, let it be a deep sense that we are more closely bound to brothers and sisters in Christ, in other countries, other cultures, than we are to our closest unbelieving compatriot or family member in the fatherland or in the neighborhood.

That's really crucial to feel that, I think. Otherwise, I think then our patriotism is drifting over into idolatry. God is our King, not man. His kingdom is our final allegiance. But under that banner, it's right to be thankful that God gave us our land freely. I'm thinking now particularly of America.

He gave this to us freely. I didn't deserve to be born here. It wasn't my choice. We don't deserve this place any more than I deserve any other common grace or special grace. It's right to be thankful that people paid a high price to preserve our land with its freedoms and its cultural distinctives.

And it's right to be thankful that we have all these cultural slippers to put on that we don't want to throw away. But I have to come back in closing to our alien exile sojourner status as the main thing. We are citizens of heaven before we are earthly patriots, which means that there are bound to be conflicts between the way Christ our King calls us to live and the ways our beloved homeland expects us to live from time to time.

And the other reminder that the culture and ethos of the earthly homeland we love, the other reminder that I have to give is it's not static. That is the thing I love about America. It's not static. It's changing. It's always changing. It always has been changing. America today is not the America of the '50s, which means that there is a sense of conflict not only between our earthly homeland and other cultures, but also between what our earthly homeland was and what it is becoming.

And so how do you do patriotism when what you regard as your own culture is in a process of transformation? And in both of those kinds of conflicts, the one from outside, the one from inside, our stance, I think, should be not primarily as earthly culture preservers. That's my main job.

I mean, my main mentality is to produce a preservation of my pure culture, 'cause I think that produced the horrors of Nazi Germany, where the Aryan race was the Germanic race and prized so highly and preserved so intensely, it resulted in the slaughter of other people. So we gotta be very careful about exalting our racial or ethnic or cultural patriotism or at-homeness, our slippers, to the point where we begin to demonize and actually hurt others.

Our stance should be we are Christians first, and as challenges come to our culture from within and from without, we bring kingdom values to bear on these challenges, not just earthly preferences. I think C.S. Lewis might say, "Agape," the love of God, "orders storge." It orders phylos. It orders eros.

In other words, these earthly loves of friend and sex and affections for country and for our favorite slippers are ordered and kept in their proper place by a superior allegiance to God. Our love for God is primary. Only the value of our King, God, Jesus, can bring a right ordering of the value of our earthly loves.

Only our Heavenly Father, our heavenly patriotism, can order our earthly patriotism. - Amen to that. Thank you, Pastor John. And that book mentioned earlier was "The Four Loves" by C.S. Lewis. And with that, we are gonna break for the weekend and we're gonna break for the week. As I mentioned, we have released about 900 episodes so far in the APJ Archive.

I know a few of you have listened to every single episode and that's amazing to me. If you need to catch up on some of them, I would encourage you to take some time over the next week to scan or search through all the episodes we've released over the years.

And of course, you can scan those episodes really easily in the APJ app that we made for Apple and Android devices, or you can go to our web home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host Tony Renke, and I will see you back here on July 11th in about a week.

We'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)