“The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down” by David Bercot

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

This is Strength to Strength, and a special welcome to our attendees here on this call from all around the world. What a blessing to have you here, and also welcome to our listeners. We have these talks get put up on many different platforms, from YouTube to being uploaded on phone lines or like a call center where people can call in. If you don't have the internet, they can call in and listen.

And then, of course, to this platform, we have people here from all over. So it's a special privilege to live in this era where we can do things like this. I was reading a book here recently, To Change the World, by James Hunter, and he said there's been three kind of paradigm shifts in the world. One was the writing system. The second was the printing press, you know, 600 years ago. And then the third is the advent of the internet. And so we're really, in many ways, just 15 years into this experiment with access to the internet really becoming a global phenomenon. I recently was in the Amazon jungle, and there they're using Starlink, thanks to Elon Musk, that enables them to have good connection even out in the middle of nowhere.

So we live in quite the times. And so we're together here this morning, though, to, in particular, think about a phenomenon that's been happening in our world. And that could, I mean, there's many of them, but maybe the part that we're looking at here this morning is the idea of nationalism. And is that for the Christian? Our theme title is, Would Jesus Be a Christian Nationalist?

And this morning, at the beginning of our call with Brother Zach, I read out of 2 Peter 3, or is it 1 Peter 3, where Peter is talking about how that we are a chosen people, a chosen nation. And I said, well, maybe Jesus would be a nationalist, but in a different way than what we think of in our day today. And so we live in a time where the glory days of globalism have faded.

That's a pipe dream. And most of the people who are involved in the political scene, the global scene, realize that we no longer have a desire globally that maybe we had 50, 75 years ago to try to work together.

You know, there's been a lot of those dreams have disappeared quickly. And now we have regional countries pulling together, you know, kind of on the big scale, you have the West against China and Russia, and even just an increase in nationalism within these countries as people realize, whoa, I care about my rights and my little world, my people group, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to protect me. And so there's this ritual, divisive speech and xenophobia that has really spread around the globe. And those things can affect us, and they pull us in. And then, of course, today in Canada, where Justin is, and where Sam's heading to, and where some of probably some of our college listeners will find, it's called Canada Day, right, Justin, or Canadian Canada Day.

So celebrating, I'm not sure what you guys celebrate on Canada Day up there. But July 4th, coming right up here next week, is definitely, we know what we celebrate here in the US. And so there's the political fervor and stoked. And so we thought, wouldn't it be a now would be a good time to kind of dig into the subject a little bit, particularly looking at this book, The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down, that Brother David labored over over 20 years ago now. And it was the first edition came out in 2003.

And so here we are in 2023, 20 years later, and this book has impacted so many people. I mean, I just had impacted my own life. I grew up in a conservative Mennonite home. I was around these teachings in part.

But I know that when I was in my early 20s is when I was more introduced to this kingdom theology, this two kingdom idea. And it was like a light bulb moment for me. All of a sudden, who I was and why my tradition did the things they did made so much more sense in light of this. And this book was part of that. And so it's such a blessing to be here this morning with you, Brother David, on this call to dig into this book and some of the concepts in this book and to have an interview. So Brother Sam is here with us. He's going to be helping out with this interview.

So Sam is welcome, Sam. Sam's in a camper in Nebraska, right? So pulled off the interstate and is on the call here. He's heading from Boston back to Calgary, Alberta, to be part of getting a church plant started there. So thank you for your dedication, Sam, and joining us here. Sam will be telling a little bit about his story, their story, he and his wife, and how this book impacted them towards the end of the call and just helping with the interview. But before we get started, I'd like to have prayer and Brother Micah Hosan from Oregon. Could you—I'm sorry, I did not give you a heads up. Can you unmute, Justin? Could you enable him to unmute there?

And while that's happening, we're going to be—so this is people have submitted questions already to us for this talk. So for events, we often ask for questions ahead of time and try to kind of compel those and for efficiency and time management. And so we won't be opening it up for actual people to give live questions, but you can submit them to the chat button here on the chat. Or if you're on a phone, you can email us too. We're watching your email as well during the call here. So feel free to put your questions in, and we'll try to kind of compel them as we go on the roll here and lob those at Brother David.

So Brother Micah, could you give you some prayer, please? Sure. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we bless you, Lord. Thank you for your Son, Jesus. Thank you for the kingdom and for so great salvation and for bringing us into your people.

Lord, it's very timely here in Canada Day and the 4th of July, and especially those of us who are here in North America, there's a lot about nationalism happening. Help us as we think about these things to just reflect on Jesus as Lord and as King and your nation, Father, your heavenly nation. So I pray you'd be with us this morning. Be with Brother David, Father.

Guide his words and his own thoughts, Father, that they would be your thoughts. We bless you, Lord, and we thank you in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Thank you, brother. Amen.

Thank you, Brother Micah. And we'll get Brother David. This discussion today is, as Brother Bryant so well introduced to us, is about nationalism, but a different kind of nationalism. And the reason we want to talk about this book is writing a book is a feat, and it is something to be remembered 20 years later. But we would like to discuss the core of this, the message of this book today, and the impact that this message can have. There's a question that we didn't actually discuss, Brother David, but I would be curious to hear a little bit about your journey to becoming a kingdom Christian.

What was your journey leading up to writing this book? Where was the—maybe tell us about the paradigm shift that you experienced in understanding the kingdom.

Okay. So, wow, it would have been a long journey. Started largely with reading the early Christian writings. And I actually grew up with an understanding of the two kingdoms and the importance of the kingdom of God.

I grew up with Jehovah's Witnesses, many of you know, and for all of the errors that they have, that's one of the things they actually have right, is they teach the two kingdoms. They don't call it; they have a different name for it. And they also teach non-resistance. So I would have grown up with some of these concepts. But then I left Jehovah's Witnesses when I was 26. And then those convictions kind of—I didn't lose them completely, but they definitely drifted into the background. And I was in an evangelical church that was very patriotic, the typical religious right kind of atmosphere.

A lot of things I really appreciated about the church was blessed in many ways there. But there were a number of things I struggled with, was particularly their, wow, gung-ho attitude towards war and all of that. And of course, I wasn't sure, well, maybe I'm wrong. It's just maybe it's my JW background affecting me. So when I was 35, I decided I would just read all of the writings of the Christians right after the apostles, the pre-Nicene Christians. What did they believe back there when they were just a few generations removed from the apostles? So reading them, then I saw, okay, the two kingdoms, this is actually right. And war is not the way of Christians.

So then I started sharing that with other people, what I had found. And that led to my writing, my first book, Well, the Real Heretics, Please Stand Up.

And that was written in 1989. So then there was quite a gap there where I was on a journey of where do I fellowship? I've seen these truths, but now where do I fit in? And I had had a lot of contacts with the Anabaptists and the Brethren, the German Baptists, and looked seriously at those options. But there had been some opposition that came up to my book, Common Sense. And I felt like maybe this isn't where I'm the most welcome. And so I had kind of shelved that idea for the time. So anyway, forward ahead, 10 or 11 years, we had had a house church there in Texas. Well, we were meeting at a church building at some point.

And that had gone on 10 years. Dean Taylor and his family, they were the first ones who had joined it. And we were still meeting together. But after 10 years, we kind of realized we'd come to the end of our vision. We didn't have a clear vision. And we decided just to amicably dissolve while we were all still friends. And we could all kind of search where we wanted to go from there. So Dean and his family, they moved up to Pennsylvania and joined a charity Christian fellowship. My family, I decided to take another look at the Anabaptists. So we had an Eastern Conference Mennonite Church that was about an hour and a half drive from our house.

And we started attending there every other week. It was a bit of a drive every Sunday. So we would attend there every Sunday. Every other Sunday, we would have church at home. Just my wife and I and our young son, he would have been what, about 11, 12 years old. And we were enjoying the house, the home church. You get to do what you want. You don't have to submit to anybody.

You get to follow your own interpretations of things, your own standards. Our family lived; our standards would have maybe been somewhat similar to charity Christian fellowship. My wife wore a head covering. I mean, we would have followed a lot of Anabaptist standards. But certainly, we weren't where the Eastern Conference Mennonites are.

So we had attended there for some time, maybe a year and a half. And I realized I was at a crisis in my life for myself and to—I'm sorry, the little chat note distracted me. My apologies there. So I realized we needed to make a decision as a family. Were we just going to be a one church family? I didn't want to really start a house church again. After 10 years of that, I didn't want to go down that road.

And it was a real conflict because we were very happy with just having church as a family and living a Christian life, trying to live by the Sermon on the Mount. I wondered, worried about who would my children marry.

And I realized if we do this for very long, we're not going to be able to fit into any church. We're going to get so spoiled on having everything our own way, we will never fit in another church.

And so we really wrestled. It would have been easier if the closest church to us hadn't been Eastern Conference. They're a great group of people, but it's a considerable bridge to cross with their standards. And so we wrestled. We had a lot of talks as a family. And I felt, as the head of the family, I needed to give us some direction. So I spent, I don't know, several months of intense prayer, intense Bible reading, intense meditation on just where we should go as a family. And I started reading the Gospels over and over again. I had read them hundreds of times, I'm sure, in my life. But I really, really started pouring over them again, particularly Matthew.

And I saw that Jesus, he said, "It's always called the Gospel of the kingdom," that the kingdom of God was his focus. And I mean, these weren't new truths to me. I had known this in the background, but it was like a reawakening to, okay, the kingdom of God is the central thing, not just in the whole world, but in my own life, in my family's life.

And so I thought, what would be the kingdom thing to do? If the kingdom is first in my life, it's got to affect where I go to church, what I do as far as fellowship. And I was convinced the answer could not be, "I'm going to have my own family church and not fellowship with anyone else except every other week. I've got to commit to a body, submit to a body of Christians."

And so the wrestling was with all the different standards of joining the Eastern Church. It was going to require a number of changes in our family. And I thought about, are any of these things we have to give up? How do they weigh in relation to the kingdom of God? They're insignificant versus being a full participant in the kingdom of God, not as an isolated radical individual, but as part of the church. And I came to the conviction personally we needed to be part of the Anabaptist world. They came the closest that I could find of any church that fit the teachings of the early Christians and the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospel of the kingdom that Jesus preached.

They came closest to it. I wasn't blind to the imperfections. And I didn't like the cultural barriers. But I felt this is the direction we needed to go as a family. So when I wrote that book, it was largely my own reflections of what I needed to do in my life. And I wrote it partly in mind for my wife, Deborah, that, "Look, this is the road we need to go on. And here is my apologetic presentation, my defense for that." And so it was an intense personal journey behind writing the book.

I realized I was at a spiritual crisis. Something had to change. And I felt like the answer was in the kingdom of God, of realizing that every decision in life had to be relegated, submitted to the kingdom of God, not to what was my own personal preferences, my likes or dislikes, but the kingdom of God coming first. So yeah, I started writing.

And as I wrote, it grew up in me. I mean, that book impacted me probably more than readers. The experience of writing that, I came to such a deep, overwhelming conviction of, "Wow, I have got to surrender my life completely to Jesus and to his kingdom," and more than I had done. Not that I—I mean, I had been a Christian a long time. But yeah, this was a new dedication, a new greater submission in my life. And so anyway, so that was the impetus as I was writing. And I wrote the whole book in eight weeks. I mean, I was so—I mean, just totally excited. And this just grasped every fiber of my body. I mean, I got up early in the morning, and I would write till late at night.

And I kept telling Deborah, "She'd ask, 'What is this?'" And just wait. I want you to see the manuscript when I'm done. But right now, it is just flowing. I don't want to stop. And so having made the personal decision, I was going to have to convince my family, obviously, that I wanted to join the Anabaptist world. And I'm using that in a broad perspective. I'm including the German Baptists, a lot of groups under that umbrella when I say Anabaptists.

I couldn't see myself just going in as an individual or as a family. If I was going to come in, I wanted the whole world to come in. Now, I knew that wasn't going to happen. I mean, I knew the road was too narrow. It was going to be difficult. But I wanted the book beyond my own heart being poured out. I wanted to write a book that an Anabaptist could share with his neighbor, with somebody at work, whomever, to explain the kingdom to them. And I felt like this was the bridge that no one—not too many people. Some people are all enamored with Anabaptists getting back to canning and gardening and that kind of thing, but not most people.

I felt like if we're going to convince people to come down this road, it's got to be because they grasp the kingdom of God. So that is the other part of the book then was to give the Anabaptists something that would enable them to witness to others, to give me something that I could witness to other people, say, "Here, this is why I live the way I do. This is why I attend the church I do. It's all about the kingdom of God."

And so I wanted to cover some of the more difficult points like the two kingdoms: war, divorce and remarriage, swearing, not accumulating riches here on the earth, but devoting our resources, our time to the kingdom of God. So I wanted the book to be an apologetic book that would help a non-Anabaptist to grasp these things, to help them see the importance of them. And of course, if you're going to be part of the kingdom of God, you've got to understand the two kingdoms. As Bryant was talking about, it doesn't work to think you can embrace the kingdom of God and also the kingdoms of this world. And I'm going to be America first and then, yeah, the kingdom of God also.

I mean, it's one or the other. I mean, we're loyal to the government we live under. We obey Caesar. But our ultimate allegiance has got to be to one of those kingdoms. And it's going to have to be the kingdom of God if we're going to be a Christian. So that was one of the central messages.

And then the other thing—and stop me if you need to ask other questions. I'm doing kind of a monologue here. But I realized it was always difficult as a believer in the kingdom of God, as an Anabaptist. It was always difficult. Okay, how do you share the Gospel with others? And of course, evangelicals have a nice little formula, say this prayer, invite Jesus in your heart, now you're saved. And that we didn't have anything like that really as Anabaptists. A lot of Anabaptists just adopt the evangelical, and it doesn't really fit.

And so I wanted to share in there from reading John 15, I felt like, okay, this is maybe the clue I have been looking for. It's not really a parable. Well, I guess you'd call it it's a metaphor of the vine.

Yeah, we have to get on the vine. There is that step we take to give our life to Christ. We've got to get on the vine. But once we are on the vine, it's not a once-and-done thing, which is the evangelical message. Now, not that they stop there. I mean, if you love Jesus as an evangelical, you're going to spend a lot of time in discipleship and all that. But for a lot of people, it is. They hear the message, and then they get saved, and they don't really surrender their life to Christ. Their life is still centered on this world.

And so I felt like there's two stages to salvation. We have to get on the vine. And we do have to make that decision to surrender our life to Christ, to be baptized. But then it's an obedient, love, faith relationship that carries us through to the day we die. And it's maintaining that relationship that will end up ultimately in our salvation. So I wanted to get that in there again as a way, as Anabaptists, that we could witness to other people. Now, you want me to keep going, or you've got—I would say that's excellent. Amazing to hear your journey to the core message of this book. And I have to say, it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that you were extremely passionate when you wrote this book.

Because in reading it, I would say that that passion came through. And I think that that's probably why it's been so impactful in people's lives, is you were being moved. You were inspired. And I would say that message, that inspiration that you had came through loud and clear in that book. I love the fact that you were writing this book for your wife. I mean, not specifically, but part of it to work through your own understanding, but also to teach your family. I think that's a beautiful motivation for authoring a book. And I love to hear about the passion that you had.

I understand that you were a lawyer or were a lawyer or are a lawyer. I'm not sure how that works. I don't practice, but yes, I still am, yeah. Okay. What's the transition from being a lawyer to an author look like? Because you've written numerous books. How many books have you written? 10. 10. 10 books. Wow. You didn't write them all in eight or what's the average length of time in writing one of them?

It varies. The last book I wrote was a commentary on Matthew, the first half of Matthew, and that was several years.

Like I say, the kingdom book, that was eight weeks. I mean, I was just, wow, that was passion. It just flowed. Other books have taken longer. The hymnics book, I spent a year in writing it. So yeah, they've each one have been a little bit different depending on the situation.

So I never intended to be an author. I mean, it had never been a dream. And how the first book got written was when I shared with my friends what I was discovering in the early church. They were all saying, "David, you ought to write a book about this." And at first, I just laughed them off. Yeah, right. Yeah, sure. Because yeah, I couldn't picture myself as an author.

And then I got to thinking, if I go to my grave, I've seen all of these things of what Christianity was like in the first decades after the apostle, the first century, the couple of centuries. And if I don't tell anyone, but just a few friends, what am I going to say to Jesus on Judgment Day? I mean, is he going to hold me accountable for never having shared this with the greater world? And not that I had any forum to share it with the greater world. This was before internet and everything, back in the '80s. Or if it was around, I mean, most people didn't have it. And so yeah, a book was the only way I could think of.

And yet no one had heard of me. I mean, I had no connections. But I thought I gave a lot of prayer to it. We talked a lot, Deborah and I. And I thought, "All I can do is write the book. And then if this is a message God wants out there, then he's going to have to open the door." Because obviously, I can't do that. And so I wrote the book and sent out review copies to a number of Christian magazines and a few places like that. And that, yeah, it just, wow, I kind of guessed I'd have a garage full of books. And the door's just open. I just could not believe how it spread so quickly, largely by word of mouth.

That was the heretics book. And so then I gave thought, "Well, should I quit law and maybe just write?" And so I started writing other books. But I soon saw that in Christian books, particularly if you're not writing what the mainstream churches want to hear, it was impractical to make a living that way. And I didn't want to compromise the message in order to sell books. So I was practicing title law at that point. Once I read the early church, I saw I couldn't with good conscience go to court, take people to court, and that sort of thing. So I just wanted title opinions. And so yeah, writing then in my—well, not my spare time.

I narrowed my legal work to two days a week. It gave me three days a week for writing and speaking, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's great. One thing you'd mentioned was that you were attracted to the Anabaptists. And I should ask the question, what was the greatest surprise that came out of the feedback from this book?

From the Anabaptists? Yeah. Yeah. The greatest one by far. I thought I was basically preaching to the choir. I mean, I didn't think anything in the book was new to the Anabaptists other than maybe some of the history and the concept of presenting the gospel using John 15. But yeah, I thought the two kingdoms and non-resistance, I mean, yeah, this is bread and butter of the Anabaptists. And so shortly after it was out, I was talking with one of my Mennonite friends, Chester Weaver. Probably most of you know him. He's everywhere. He's involved in every kind of ministry you can think of.

Major influence in my life, major blessing to my family. Anyway, he was telling me that the book was impacting Anabaptists, that so many had drifted away from the two kingdoms and were weakening on non-resistance. And he said, "Wow, this is creating an awakening within the Anabaptists." Now, that really surprised me because like I say, I thought I was preaching to the choir.

And so that was a big encouragement. I thought this was an unintended consequence, but I was delighted that, yeah, particularly the younger generation, if they were losing it, if this book could be a help. I was so blessed that I had written it, that God was using me in a way in the Anabaptist world that I hadn't foreseen.

Yeah. See, I can share a little bit about the impact that it had on my life. I grew up in a Mennonite home. And I lost my way. And when my wife and I came to Christ together, we ended up in a Protestant church. I had moved away from the community that I was in before. And many years had gone by. And we ended up in a Protestant church and were trying to find our way there. My wife actually listened to this book on Audible. And she kept telling me while she was listening to it, "You have to listen to this. This is incredible." So she had grown up without any understanding of the Bible at all.

She had never read the Bible. And this was probably six or eight months into our journey at the Protestant church. And she's listening to it and she's saying, "You have to listen to this. This is incredible." So I did. I finally took the time to listen to the book. And I had to agree with her. It was incredible.

You mentioned in the book that there's a paradigm shift that can happen when your reality just changes completely or your view of reality can change completely. And I would say that this book was instrumental in creating that paradigm shift in my understanding of the Christian life. I mean, I grew up knowing a lot of things about Christianity.

And I've been trying to think about what's the flip. So if you're a Christian and you don't believe in the kingdom that turned the world upside down because it literally does turn everything upside down, what type of Christianity is that?

I'm not sure. I'm trying to think about how I viewed Christianity before. I think before I just viewed it as I need to check boxes or it's all about just being free from sin, which we know it is about being free from sin. Christ conquered sin. But Christianity without a perspective of the kingdom seems to lack the main drive. It's like you've pulled out the main chapter of the book. And I think that one of the most profound things that hit me in this book was when you asked, "What is the message of Jesus?"

What a simple question.

But your answer in the book startled me that Jesus preached the kingdom. I'm not sure what I would have said he preached before. So that was stopped me in my tracks to think about what was the message of Jesus Christ. It was the kingdom. And it also moved the kingdom of God from something mystical or out there or future or past or whatever the perspective might be. It moved the kingdom of God from that to right now, right here, something that we can pour our lives and hearts into. And you talked about evangelism, providing something to offer the nations around us or the people around us. I mean, there is no greater message than the kingdom.

And this is something that you can put your back into. I mean, you can sacrifice everything you have for this. And I think for me, it was the question, what was the message of Jesus, the kingdom? He went around preaching the kingdom. And to move the kingdom from a mystical into a practical something that I can invest everything I have into. It puts the main chapter back into the story of Christianity, I feel like.

Just to share the impact that the book has had on our lives and the change that has come. And it has put us on a totally different journey than we were on before as well. And that journey has high costs, is not an easy road, but it's what Christ has called us to.

But his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

For the bride and married. Amen. Yes. And much the same thing happened to me. So I grew up in the Eastern Mennonite, as David Brousseau was talking about earlier. And dispensationalism is very alive and well in that particular denomination. So almost if you're not a dispensationalist, then you're almost a heretic.

And I guess they should read your book there, David, that you wrote in 1989. Anyhow, but it always was this out there stuff. And it felt like nothing pertained to the here and now. And even give us answers for why we are Mennonite, for why we are part of the Anabaptist tradition. Just felt like everyone was closet Republicans.

We had to support Israel, all those things. And it was just this cognitive dissidence in my mind of like, "Why?" But when reading your book and being around some brothers who were kingdom Christians, it was just like light bulb. It just cut through that fog and it cleared things, really helped clear things up. So that's amazing that you were out to write—I did not know that. You were out to write a book for your dear wife, Deborah, and your family. That's beautiful. And also this idea too, like these Anabaptist people, they don't have many books. We need some more books. And is that still your heart today, David, to see more people writing books?

Oh, definitely. Definitely. I'm looking to the next generation. We need more writers for sure. Probably right now, Gary Miller is probably our best Anabaptist author would be my guess. We just need a bunch of people like him who are addressing issues from Anabaptist perspectives.

And yeah, I am, yeah, so eager to see the next generation and to see more people who can articulate the message well, approach it from different angles that maybe I haven't thought of or you or just God can use people in different ways. And we need that because we're having a small impact outside our own circles. It's growing. It's definitely growing. The internet has helped a lot. But most of the world, when they think of Mennonites or Anabaptists, they think of Amish. They think of quaint people, horse and buggy. They don't understand what we're about. And the kingdom of God is the big thing that they need to see.

Yes. Yeah. And I always keep a stack of these books with me. Literally, we have Metro Cafe. It's my go-to book. It's my go-to book every time. And I've seen so many people impacted by it and friendships with people that I just randomly met and gave a book. To this day, we're still interacting from other parts of the United States.

But maybe here shortly, we'll kind of dig into the book a little bit more and some of the content in the book, David. But I just wanted to acknowledge your journey that you've been on, that you have been on for years, obviously, and just for your love for truth. But also maybe the beauty of a marriage where you and your wife have worked together so well. And just at the Church Planters Forum two weeks ago, you were talking there. And you mentioned that you would have had your own faith crisis. Obviously, you left the JWs and joined up with the Protestants and then went to college. But you would have had your own faith crisis in that journey.

And your wife was the one who really helped you through that time. And so I just found it interesting. You were telling that part of the story a couple of weeks ago, and now you're now telling us how you were really writing this for your wife and your family. So that's beautiful.

Yeah. I have liked that in our relationship that Deborah, she respects my headship enormously, but she's not just a puppet or lap dog.

I would have been the first of the two of us to realize we needed to leave Jehovah's Witnesses. But I wanted her to make her own decision. And I left. She stayed in for a while, not in defiance of me, but with my encouragement. I said, "Deborah, I want this when you come to the same conviction. And if you don't, okay. But I want this to be your decision. I don't want you just to follow me." And so, yeah, she did her own reasoning on it. And then she left a few months after I did. And yeah, the kingdom book, I think it hit her pretty hard because when she read it, I think she realized the implications of what it was saying.

And she was reading it as a manuscript. And yeah, we did a lot of talking. It wasn't an easy decision. But yeah, I think we both realized this is the direction we needed to go. And obviously, she's here with me in the Anabaptist world. We've made the journey together. But yeah, sometimes maybe I've taken the lead. And in times, yeah, when my faith was faltering, when I was in college, wow, she was the safety net that kept the flame going when I was ready to just throw in the towel. There are no real churches left. It's all over. And she didn't give up when I did. So yeah, I bless God that God brought her in my life.

And we've had that kind of interrelationship. Praise the Lord. What a blessing. Yeah. Well, we can go a bunch of different ways here. We've had some questions come in, but I feel like we should spend a little more time here on the book. You pretty much talked about why you wrote it. That's been discussed.

I mean, obviously, maybe it's somewhat rhetorical, but just talk a little bit about the central message of this book and then some of the implications of that. And maybe one of the questions that came in here is, would Jesus be a Christian nationalist? And so we have many conservative Christians on the right, Doug Wilson and Eric Matrix. And I mean, a lot of your fairly high-powered, the Pipers and the Platts, they are definitely proponents of a nuanced form of Christian nationalism. Maybe not what the right is characterizing or what the left is implying the right believes. But at the end of the day, they are Christian nationalists. They want to see America continue or get back to its Christian roots.

And they have quite a message. It's a message that can really pull at your heart. And so, yeah. So maybe kind of a couple of things here, but what is the central message? And then kind of how does that impact us today? What should that look like?

Yeah. So this was the big problem I saw as an evangelical. I mean, there were some theological issues, but this idea that America is God's country. And I'm not anti-American at all. I would be socially conservative as a Christian.

But it's like, I'm sorry, there is no country that is God's country except the kingdom of God. And it is a country that embraces every nationality, every people group in the world. And we have to think of ourselves, our citizenship, as Paul said, is in the heavens, but it's also a reality here on the earth. And so my loyalty to a fellow Christian in China is greater than my loyalty to the United States. I mean, not that I'm going to do something treasonous, but I can't go bomb somebody in Russia or China or something like that because the political interests of China are different than the political interests of the United States or between Russia and the United States, whatever.

I mean, either our kingdom, it's something so real that none of us are going to go to war killing each other because that would be like killing your fellow American. I mean, our ultimate allegiance is the kingdom of God that embraces everything. So the governments of this world are something we obey, we respect, we live under. But yeah, we don't look. Our hope isn't in them. And our loyalty, we're not going to kill somebody else for them. We're not going to get involved that, "Oh, if this person gets in office, it's going to solve all the problems." It doesn't matter who you put in office. It's not going to solve the problems. The answer to the world's problems is God's kingdom.

And so that's where our focus has got to be. And it transcends all these national boundaries. So yeah, in answer to your question, absolutely not. Jesus would not be a Christian nationalist. He wasn't a Jewish nationalist. I mean, here, wow, you had in his own day, the big issue was, "We want the Romans out of Judea, out of Palestine." And did Jesus get involved in that?

He didn't give it any attention. He showed ultimate respect to the Romans. Paul, I mean, he was a loyal Jew. He never even talks about all the political things happening in Judea in his letters. He couldn't care less. He cared about the kingdom of God and the king of that kingdom, Jesus Christ.

So anyway, that's my passion. Yeah. Amen. Now, something flashed on the screen I want to comment on. I just barely saw it. And so I didn't see the whole message. But yeah, because I talked about the Anabaptists. That was my point that forced me in writing the book. Do I join them or not? Now, in the course of the book, I talked about these other groups, the Waldensians and the Brethren and the Moravians and that sort of thing.

And I was trying to describe all of these groups because I didn't want it to be a book just about Anabaptists. They were the ultimate answer or the only answer. And so I was trying to figure out how do I describe all these groups who put the kingdom of God first. So in the original manuscript, I was calling them Sermon on the Mount Christians. And that was a little bit long. And so then I thought, "Okay, I'll call them kingdom Christians just as a shorthand way of describing these different groups." I didn't think that term anyone would pick up on it because I didn't give it that much significance. And after the book had come out, I was talking with Denny Kenniston, who was one of the leaders of Charity Christian Fellowship.

And he had called me because he really liked the book. He wanted to order several cases. And he was discussing it. He said, "Now, what was that term you used in there to describe people who like us?" "Oh, yeah, kingdom Christian," he said. I was surprised anyone even noticed that word. And then, yeah, I noticed a lot of people started using it. And you've used it, and Sam used it there. And so, yeah, the book no longer is about, "Oh, let's get everyone into the Anabaptists." Now, I'm still, that is my home. That's where I'm at. It's to get people in the kingdom. And so now I'm seeing there are kingdom Christians of a lot of stripes out there.

There's followers of the way. There's all kinds of just independent groups and flavors of groups. And that's wonderful. Yeah. My mission is no longer, "Oh, yeah, I want to get everyone in the Anabaptists." Again, that's where my ultimate—not my ultimate loyalty. That's one of my loyalties. But I mainly want to see people get in the kingdom, whatever flavor that may take on.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's been officially documented now for the David that you're the one to blame for that.

I've been told that David Berso was the one who came up with that. So yeah, I was going to ask you that. That's one of my questions that I saw at the end of the book. You end the book saying, "Are you going to join the present-day kingdom Christians?"

That's amazing. Yeah. Names can be helpful. They can be a hindrance. One thing that's clear when you understand the message of the kingdom, which you summarize in the book, but we find it in the message of Christ, obviously, is that the kingdom has a distinctive look because there is no—I mean, we could talk about the title of the book, The Upside Down Kingdom.

Why was it called that? Or the kingdom that turned the world upside down, cited it. Why did they call it that? Because it's doing the inverse to what the kingdoms of the earth are doing. And that is where we should be focusing our attention, is the kingdom, Anabaptist, whatever, non-denominational church, unaffiliated. Where do we represent the upside down, upside down to the kingdoms of the earth, culture or not culture, life, passion, vision, dreams, sacrifice that is laid out in the kingdom? I think there's the distinctive less in the name, but more in the practice and the message that goes out through the lives that we live, that upside down. It seems wrong to call it upside down because it is the kingdom of Christ.

It seems like this should be the kingdom and the kingdom that we live in here. The fleshly kingdom should be more of the upside down kingdom, but I understand where that comes from. Every time I run into that idea of the upside down kingdom, I think I stub my toe on it mentally a little bit because it is the kingdom of Christ. It is the kingdom, the eternal kingdom.

Yeah. One of the messages of the kingdom is to be the salt of the earth. And there's a lot of ways that that can happen. I have a question.

We understand that this kingdom is separate from the kingdoms of the world, but it's easy to blur the lines a little bit and think that in order to be the salt, in order to bring about some change, why don't we just go to the polls?

We understand that we're not a part of the kingdom of the earth. We understand that we serve Christ, but why don't we just go to the polls to be more salty in the communities that we're in?

You asked me. Okay. So I don't think you can get involved in the world without getting contaminated with it.