In yesterday’s New York Times was a sobering article about people slowly starving to death in Japan because the government’s cut off their welfare benefits.

The story reported, “With no religious tradition of charity, Japan has few soup kitchens or other places for the indigent. Those that exist—run frequently by Christian missionaries from South Korea or Japan’s tiny Christian population—cater mostly to the homeless.”

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Just this morning, I attended an open house for the newly relocated Pacific Garden Mission in downtown Chicago, complete with a new neon sign carrying their same old message, “Christ Died for Our Sins.”

In a speech given by Mayor Richard Daley inside their huge new auditorium, he stressed that while government could do a lot of things to help the homeless and those with drug and alcohol problems, etc., it could not “change their souls.”

As he yelled for added emphasis, “You understand that, right?!” the overflow Christian-based crowd cheered and clapped loudly.

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What Bible-believers understand like no one else is that the political structure of our country and this world is controlled by ‘the prince of this world,’ i.e. Satan.

“The government isn’t going to save you; the government isn’t designed to save you,” says Jordan from a 2005 sermon. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate our country’s historic Christian influence—the overflow of the Reformation that came to our shores and sanitized and Christianized a pagan world so that you and I have lived in a very comfortable surrounding.

“But it’s gone today. The paganism has come in because the authority that the preaching of the gospel had—the entrance of the light of the gospel to put out the darkness—is gone. But I’m glad it was there.

“I’m glad I had the opportunity to live in the last days of it and enjoy those things. I understand the gospel has social impact—I’m for that—but you don’t have it by going out and trying to reclaim power structures and political parties and economic structures. You have it by purifying the hearts of the people in those structures.

“We live in a culture that’s running headlong into greater and greater evil, debauchery, violence, corruption, polluted by what (Robert) Bork calls modern barbarians. Just the indecency and the vulgarity and the lack of courtesy and respect for people . . .

“Then there’s the immorality, deceitfulness, self-indulgence and violence you pay to have pumped into your family room every day on the boob tube. Think about it, you pay to put it there because the 15 (locally broadcast) channels aren’t enough for you!

“You’re getting all that stuff coming in and the temptation for the Believer, frankly, is just to jump into the cultural fray and the cultural wars as a self-righteous social reformer.

“And you become a condescending moralizer who thinks your job is to go out and Christianize a pagan culture and reform a pagan society. But you don’t reform the world from the outside in; you reform it from the inside out.

“So when Paul says these things about being a good citizen, living in a society—Paul was in a culture that was every bit as pagan and as corrupt as ours is.

“You shouldn’t think that our world is the only one that ever had abortions. When Jesus Christ was born there was a wicked tyrant who ruled that land and sent out word, not to kill unborn babies, but to kill every child under two years old that happened to be born a male.

“People talk about the political and economic oppression of the government, but when the Lord Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem, His mom and dad had gone there because there was a decree from the government of His day that there would be a tax.

“And they went there, not to get out of paying their taxes; not to try to find a way they didn’t have to submit to the taxing; not saying, ‘Oh, it’s an unjust tax and were not going to pay it!’

“I mean, where could there ever been a more unjust government and taxing system than what they were under?! But they didn’t say, ‘We’re not going to go!’

“They lived in a day when slavery was institutionalized. Racial bigotry is an odious, nasty, ugly thing. But you read all through your Bible and you don’t find people decrying the Roman government; bemoaning the evil economic system or even the injustices.

“You’re not going to rid of those things, folks, by fighting the system. The way you become the conscience of a nation—the way you have an impact on the nation—

is that you go out and understand they need to be transformed internally. They need to have a change inside of them.

“That’s why in Philippians 2:14, Paul says, ‘Do all things without murmurings and disputings: That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world.’

“That’s how you do it and you see from the passage they lived ‘in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation.’ But Paul’s not telling them to go out and fight that by political means. He’s talking about fighting it by holding up some light that gives life. And that light, which is life, transforms the rest.

“By the way, the way you transform a culture is not by quoting II Chronicles 7:14: ‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.’

“You know what the problem with that is—go back and read the context, and the context is when he says, ‘If my people,’ the two verses before that tell you it’s the people of Israel!

“And it’s not going to be by I Chronicles 4 and the ‘Prayer of Jabez,’ where God says to ISRAEL—Jabez prays to the God of Israel that God would enlarge his tents!

“I don’t care how many millions of books were sold trying to propagate that stuff, that isn’t it! You say, ‘Well, it’s in Bible.’ Hey, folks, the Bible says, ‘Judas hung himself . . . go do thou likewise.’ Help yourself! If that’s the way you quote the Bible, have at it! But don’t expect somebody who thinks about what’s going on to trot along behind you!

“Paul says in Titus 3, ‘Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, To speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle, shewing all meekness unto all men.’

“The message is, ‘Go out and be good citizens in the world; go out and live in the culture as pagan, and wicked, and evil as it is, but go out there and live in it as a Believer. Go out and demonstrate in your life, individually and as an assembly, the transforming power of the gospel of the grace of God to change life and culture.’ ”