So you get the idea here that every institution ordained by God, if it
stays in its lane, is most efficient and effective. Where we get into
problems to your question is when government thinks it does what it does best in
every area and it doesn't, it's woefully inefficient. Thank you for joining us
for another edition of the Capital Ministries Weekend with Ralph Drollinger. My name is
Frank Sante Ralph as president and founder of Capital Ministries and Ralph, it is
always good to see you. Well, you too, Frank, it's good
to see you you too. You weekly are responsible for teaching and sharing an
indepth Bible study for political leaders and for those of you watching. You can
always go to Kapman dot org and download the particular Bible study that we will
make reference true today, or any other Bible studies that are up on the
website. So let's talk a little bit about God's institutions and the roles on
Earth. Yeah, so I think what you said. In order to follow
on with the depth of what we're going to discuss, it is important that
our listeners go to catmen dot org and right there on the homepage you can
click for this week's Bible study, which this week's study God's institutions and their
roles on Earth. That's it. And I have two fancy words that my
editors take off of my Bible studies. Are you a tritutionalist or a pentitutionalist?
And those are words I've made up. Frank, I'm guilty of that.
I could share some stories some other time about that, but suffice to
say, historically, Sunday school classes have taught what I'd call a tritutionalist viewpoint
that there's three ordained by God institutions in the world. Today, I'm a
pensitutionalist, meaning I believe that there's five that He's ordained, and I'll get
into the reasons for that, but suffice to say, what we're talking about
today has to do with what theologians would call the mediatorial reign of Christ.
How does God mediate his sovereign reign, his omnipotence, his omnitions in a
fallen world minus his physical presence through the second member of the Trinity, Jesus
Christ. In other words, between the First and second advent of Christ.
How does God keep this place somewhat organized in a fallen world when he himself
is is absent physically. Now he's here in the Holy Spirit, residing and
dwelling the believer. But we don't have like after the Second Coming, when
Jesus reigns from Jerusalem in his sovereignty, And so how does God mediate his
reign today in the church age in a fallen world? Before you go on,
my simple mind goes to and some listeners probably go to, Oh,
so, what Ralph saying is God's not missing anything today and He's got a
plan today for the mess that we've created for ourselves. Yeah. Well,
basically, in a fallen world, you've got people that are at the head
of these institutions that aren't perfect. That doesn't occur until Christ comes back,
but at the five institutions he has ordained. We're given evidence of this construct
in First Peter, Chapter two, verses thirteen and fourteen, where Peter is
saying in his epistle, submit yourself for the Lord's sake to every human institution.
Now, in the Greek the word for institution human institution is more specific,
and it lends us to understand and examine that word to basically have a
better understanding of the whole idea we're talking about, and that is human institution
in the Greek is anthropinos catsis, and anthropinos is pretty easy to transliterate into
English, because that's the word we get anthropology from, or the study of
man Catsi is a little more difficult. It means to create. So the
literality the way it should read, I think in the English if you had
an expanded, amplified Bible is submit yourself for the Lord's sake to every four
man created is the literality. And so the word submit is hohupo tasso.
Now, if you follow me on this, every time the word hupo tasso
occurs in the scripture could be evidencing the existence of an anthropenosketisist because the passage
says, submit yourself for the Lord's sake to every human institution. So follow
me on this. If hohupo tasso occurs when it relates to the child to
the parent, then you might have evidence, which you do, of the
institution of the family, which is one of the five that's right. Or
if the employee is told to submit himself to the employer, which scripture does
say, then you have the institution of commerce. If the wife is to
submit herself to the husband, you have the institution marriage, and if the
congregant is to submit him or herself to the elders of the church, then
you have the institution of the church. And that's why I'm a pentitutionalist versus
a tritutionalist. And so we can take it a step further in ascertaining what
this all means by looking at what each institution ordained by God is supposed to
do that would do better than another institution. Let me jump in, I
may have missed it. You mentioned four. State is the fifth, Well,
yes, but the church, the church would be Oh yeah, I
guess I did miss the state that the citizen is to submit himself to the
governing authorities Romans thirteen one, Peter two. And so my thought went too,
not that we have time in this context to get deep. That's why
you do the Bible studies. We make them for people online to access.
But when we talk about the state, have we come to a place where
the state maybe has too much power, where when we talk about the five
different institutions there is a much more of an emphasis on the state versus commerce,
marriage, family, and church. Yeah, and the way God has
ordained those unique institutions do function. Great question I think in the secular worldview,
where you don't see this panoply of diversified power, and every institution ordained
by God does what it does best if it stays in its lane. The
secular worldview says that the state should have all the power, thank you,
and because of that, the state plays in the sandbox of the other ordained
by God institutions, thinking it can do what it does better. But the
problem is when you amalgamate the state with the church, you get theocracy.
History tells us and scripture tells us that's totally wrong. When the state plays
in the institution of commerce, you get socialism or communism. When the state
in the sandbox of marriage, you get a redefinition of marriage. When the
state plays in the sandbox of the family, you get a nanny state where
the state's telling you how much soda you can drink. In New York,
even an airline that I travel on now has a certain menu in their lounges.
They won't serve pork sausage. So all of a sudden, we have
a commerce that's eclipsing the family or the parents, trying to tell us what
we should eat. Every institution does what it does best. And in one
word, biblically, what the institution of the church does is to evangelize.
No other institution can't evangelize the lost like the institution of the church. What
the state does, in one word, is to moralize. It in a
fallen world basically says you do this, you're going to get punished accordingly.
And without that form of punishment, we see that fallen man runs rampant if
there's no consequences for his error. When you look at the institution of the
family, in one word, it is to catechiz, bring up a child
and the way he should go, so when he's old, he won't depart
from it. If you don't catechize through the institution of the family, you're
going to end up with a police state tomorrow. Now, in one word,
what the institution of marriage does is to materialize. Amongst other biblical reasons,
it pro creates the next generation in the world. No other institution can
do that like the institution of marriage. And in one word, what the
institution of commerce does is to commercialize. It creates goods and services. Now,
to make my point even more clear, you can't expect the institution of
commerce let's say an automobile manufacturer in Detroit to go out and train up children
and how they should go. Nor can you expect the institution of the family
to create automobiles. You can't expect the institution of the state to really create
a viable goods and services like the institution of commerce can. Nor can you
expect the people who run the fortune five hundred companies to go out and police
the city during the day. So you get the idea here that every institution
ordained by God, if it stays in its lane, is most efficient and
effective. Where we get into problems to your question is when government thinks it
does what it does best in every area and it doesn't, it's woefully inefficient.
With me is president and founder of Capital Ministries Ralph Drolinger. I want
to share this with the listeners and the viewers. Each and every week Bible
studies placed on the Capitol Ministries website caapman dot org. Ralph does a deep
dive into all of these topics. I was grateful before when I mentioned and
Ralph mentioned secularism. Amazing Bible studies on secularism. Use these resources. Well,
that's part of the reason why we're so excited to be now on radio
to share the Capital Ministries we can and something else we'll have called the Capmenminutes.
But go to capmin dot org and download the Bible Study now and let
us know how we can serve you. Here at Capital Ministries, we are
aggressively recruiting volunteer Bible teachers to start discipleship ministries in the forty thousand local city
and county governments across America. We provide the training, the Bible studies,
the credentialing, and the ongoing encouragement to those individuals whom God is raising up
for this overlooked but very important mission field. We need strong men who can
teach Bible studies to their city council members, Men who are disciple makers.
Is that you or possibly someone you know? Go to capmen dot org and
click on the ministry tab. Join a team of one thousands who want to
change the trajectory of America. Again, go to capmen dot org. As
in Capital Ministries, who do you know who can be trained to do this
in your city? Capmen dot org. Welcome back to the Capital Ministries Weekend
with Ralph Trolinger. My name is Frank Sontag. Ralph is president and founder
of Capital Ministries. Ralph, we see a state in the country right now.
In the previous segment, we talked about the five institutions that God has
ordained and the reason why they are on earth right here and right now,
and how they're being used or misused. Capital Ministries talk a little bit about
the mission statement and for listeners right now that may be listening to other parts
of the country, small towns, the importance not only of local government,
but maybe the listener right now there's a place for them in Capital Ministries to
get involved in helping to teach the Bible and understanding the role of law government
and the importance to be from a theological perspective. Yeah. Well, we've
got forty thousand incorporated cities and counties in America and virtually none of them have
an evangelist, disciple maker Bible teacher in their midst And yet that's where future
state capital leaders are birth is in local government. That's where our DC guys
come from, our state capitals. And so if we have our best evangelist
Bible teachers in every state capital, in every federal capital, in every local
government, not only in America, but throughout the world that's the vision of
cap men. Then we have, I think the manufacturing plant that's going to
pro create real change in our culture. Because what we evangelicals have done,
I think for the last fifty years, is we've missed it here. We've
tried to change the laws of the land rather than the hearts of the law
makers. And to change the laws of the land seems fun and competitive and
instantaneous, and it plays to our desires for power. But to make a
disciple takes a lot of years. It's a slow vote. But if you
are rubbing shoulders like I have the privilege in DC to teach the Senate member
and the House member and former Cabinet member and governors Bible studies. You see
men and women who are elected to office growing in Christ and you see how
that affects how they legislate or how they govern. And it really makes a
big difference in the country. Because if any man being Christ, he's a
new creature. Old things pass away, be whole, new things come.
And so it follows that if we have our best intentional, deliberate, biblically
reliant disciple makers in the midst of our political leaders throughout America and the world
that those people who are mature in Christ you never have to tell them how
to vote. Yeah, I don't want to ask this question and spend a
lot of time on it, so I'll just make my observation and then more
direct you said, of the forty thousand local opportunities here, or we're a
little light in this area. Is part of that reason we're speculating, but
part of the reason why we as evangelicals, we hear politics and we're like,
oh no, we can't go there. So when you talk about being
an evangelist and local government, maybe because we're biblically illiterate, we think we're
not supposed to get into that area. We're not supposed to get involved.
Yeah, there's this pervading attitude in the American church to stay away from the
political arenas though it's dirty. But yet when you examine the roots of that,
America was founded pretty much by Puritan pastors who are also the political leaders.
But then when the social gospelers started to show up, and you had
a whole reimaging or a whole re manufacture of the major doctrines of Christianity,
and what's called more popularly the social Gospel, when those guys had to amalgamate
themselves with their heretical doctrines under the name of Christianity, quote unquote, in
order to manifest a social gospel understanding of the Bible, which is in error
to begin with, you had to tie yourself to political leaders and the political
arenas. So those social gospelers theological liberals moved into the political arena. In
that day, we were called fundamentalists. We moved out because we don't want
to be associated with those guys. We don't even want to be seen with
them. And so we've moved out of the political arena for the last one
hundred, one hundred and twenty years. And now in our attempts to get
back in the last fifty it's not been to go back with a discipleship biblical
missiology. It's been to go back with kind of this power mode of how
can we change the laws and how can we be powerful? That's so powerful,
And the way you said that night, I thank you for crystallizing that
thought so much, because just in myracles, there seems to be a miscommunication
or a misunderstanding about the core of what the gospel is and this idea of,
of course, what we want atheists running the government. I mean,
this is something that I think so many of us miss. Yeah, so
I was going to say that being said, continue your thought and also let's
get into the idea of appealing to those listening to get more involved in what
you have done in capital ministries where you can walk people through and share credentialing
and everything else. Yeah. So you've got this mass exodus by guys who
have good theology from the political arena, to the point where some even say
that politics is evil, politics is Satan's territory. You can't found that in
the scripture because Roman's thirteen says God created the institution of the state, and
so that doesn't hold water. But yet there's this overriding emotional sentiment by most
evangelicals that politics is dirty business. And most people you talk to them casually
have negative things about political leaders that they say, and we need to reverse
all that. We need to say, no, they're a mission field,
just like any other mission field, be it people that work in the automobile
plant or people that work in the local whatever social services branch of our culture.
We need to evangelize the lost in every institution, and that includes the
institution of government. Can you be more specific and appeal to the listeners about
how they can get involved locally? And this is part of the reason why
we're blessed to be back in a position. We're on the radio now talking
about the need. So at capital ministries, we're trying to recruit forty thousand
intentional, deliberate, biblically reliant disciple makers and send them into local government.
That doesn't mean you have to go pound on the door of city hall,
but you might go to their meetings and begin to befriend some of your city
council members and start a Bible study with three or four city council members at
Denny's on Thursday morning. We provide you with all of the drilled down curriculus
called Oaks in Office at seventy seven of my favorite Bible studies that are not
only exegetically deep like we've been talking about on the radio program, but have
a custom application to the life of a political leader. So we give you
not only all the material, but we'll give you the credentialing, we'll give
you the training, we'll give you the ongoing encouragement every two weeks a zoom
call with you and your colleagues to keep you abreast of one another and encourage
one another. So we do it all in order to make you successful as
a ministry leader to your local government. And we're looking for thousands of people
who are good Bible teachers that see this as a passion that they like to
make disciples, they like to evangelize the loss and for the list that may
be taken aback and have maybe this epiphany, like I think Ralph may be
talking about me, here's the question. This isn't something that is going to
happen overnight, This isn't something that's going to happen immediately. Yeah, there's
something about the appeal of the political arena relative every two years as an election,
and we can try to get this guy thrown out of office, YadA,
YadA, yaday, and that has credence. I mean, I can
think of a lot of illustrations that they should be thrown out of office,
But I think the biblical mission, the biblical mission here is how can I
come alongside that person as a disciple maker and befriend them and meet with them
for breakfast once a week and mentor them in Christ. And then if they
don't see the light, maybe try to get someone in office who will.
But let's be maturing those that are in office or about to become an office
holder. Let's mature them in Christ, so that if any man being Christ,
he's a new creature. Behold, old things pass away, new things
come. You don't have to tell a political leader who's mature in Christ how
to vote. He's going to know it because he's captive to the Holy Spirit
who governs his life, and he knows the Word because of your ministry.
We have a couple of moments. I'm going to ask a question that would
probably elicit hours of response and conversation. I think the average listener, average
viewer right now looks at the state of the country, and most are really
concerned. Yeah, and yet, as we know, God's word never returns
void. He is here today right now, as he always will be.
And yet, what about the issue of hope, and especially when we look
to the political arena in the state of the country. Yeah, I can
answer that in several ways, But let me try this answer out on you,
Frank. If God's in the business of calling people to himself and maturing
them, because he's trying to create in the Book of Revelation a ride for
his son who went to the cross, and so the church is called the
bride of Christ. Then that means that God's in the business of maturing those
He's called out right yes, and it says in Philippians, Paul says,
I'm confident of this very thing. He says that He who began a good
work in you will perfect it. So Paul's basically putting the onus on the
fact that once a person comes to Christ, it's the Holy Spirit who's going
to lead them into all truth. I come alongside as a pastor teacher to
mature you and coach you and help you in that God gave some as pastor
teachers for the equipping of the saints. Right, so I'm an ambassador for
Christ. I'm a disciple maker. If I do that in the capital campus,
does it not make theological sense that if God's in the business of maturing
the saints, that it'll call more people to office. If there's a strong
outpost for Christ on the Capitol or City Hall campus, that changes the whole
way we look at this. That's to say this that rather than try to
invade city Hall with pickets and protesters in the name of Jesus and come across
wrong, should we not establish an outpost that God sees as faithful as a
maturation station to prepare a bride for his son. And that's how we look
at it at Capital Ministries. So I see that in DC for the last
twelve years, every election cycle there's more believers that are strong in Christ can
get elected to office. That's a lot better kind of magnetism to creating change
in DC than to just try to foist people into office through power politics.
Let's put our best disciple makers on those campuses and see if the Holy Spirit
doesn't honor that and elect people to office. Not only elect them in an
eternal sense, but elect them in a political sense to be at your outposts
so that they get matured for God's purposes. Amen. That's Ralph Drawlinger.
He's the president and founder of Capital Ministries. Caapmen dot org. Kapmin dot
org is the website. Each and every week Ralph does a weekly Bible study
in DC and is available to you online. Just go to capmendt org.
You can download the Bible studies wide and varied of all sorts of both past
and current. We're going to share more currently as it relates to today in
the situation in the country and the world. But I also want to appeal
to those that may be listening and you may think, can I be one
of those local representatives and government reach out to us at Capital Ministries, we
have a place for you. We're excited about this radio program each and every
week. Thank you for listening to this the Capital Ministries Weekend with Ralph Drawlinger.
Will you help support the ongoing work of Capital Ministries Today here at Capmen,
we think it's time for a biblically based missions strategy to change the trajectory
of America. For the past fifty years, we've worked to change the laws
of the land rather than the hearts of the lawmakers. What's resulted is a
country in continual decline. Rather than try and get politicians who reject the author
of Scripture to accept the precepts of his book, let us instead place our
best disciple makers and evangelists in the seats of governmental leaders who will start ministries
in city halls, state capitals, and federal capitals. In America and throughout
the world. Let us win and build public servants for Christ. Go to
capmen dot org today and give together. Let us make disciples of Jesus Christ
in the political arena here in America and throughout the world.