Public Faith - Independence Day 2026 (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

In this message from Jeremiah 29, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores how followers of Jesus are called to engage public life without withdrawing from culture or being absorbed by it. Instead of placing hope in politics or protest, real change starts with a transformed heart, a timely word for anyone wrestling with faith's place in today's world.

Message Blog Post & Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2026/7/6/public-faith-independence-day-2026

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Transcript

Opening Prayer

Let's pray together. God, we thank You for the country that we get to live in, for the freedom that it affords, and the opportunities that are present. God, we recognize that being born into a nation is a lot like being born into a family. We didn't do anything that secured our place in the nation or in the family, and yet we share in the blessings and the goodness that come from being part of it.

And we also share in some of the things that are not so wonderful, and our role in it grows and contributes to future generations' experience of it. So today, as we're gathered, I ask that You would help us think clearly about what it means to be part of a nation, especially having faith in You in the society in which we live. I pray that my words would reflect Your Word in content, in tone, and in emphasis. We pray this today, in Jesus' name. Amen.

Message

One of the things you'll hear often this time of year, but really at any time, is people talking about how the founding of the United States was based on Christian principles, and that therefore we're a Christian nation and should have laws and a society that reflect this kind of Christianity. Usually when somebody makes that case, what they're doing is saying, "I want our nation to be more Christian than it is." So they appeal to what we were at our founding and say, therefore we should be this way today. So let me ask you a question today: Is America a Christian nation? Was it Christian in its founding? Is it Christian today? Should it be Christian? What difference does that make?

I think it's not in dispute that a lot of Christian ideals have shaped some of the great things that exist in our nation. The love of education, or the universal right to education, was actually a Christian ideal that started in the early years, when it was churches that tried to educate students before it became fully public. Certainly some of the great institutions were founded on Christian ideals — higher education institutions, whether or not they've continued in that path. Think of Georgetown, Notre Dame, Villanova, Princeton, Harvard, Yale. These schools have that kind of founding. The ideals of healthcare come from a Christian ideal that says people should have a right to healthcare, especially those without it. So many of the hospitals that were formed, with names after a saint, are rooted in a Christian ideal that healthcare should be for all people. Certainly civil rights, labor rights, and the abolitionist movement are all things you could say Christian ideals played a big part in. The idea of being stewards of the environment also comes from Christianity.

But it would be disingenuous to stand here and simply say Christianity has had only a positive impact on our culture. If you look at the history of our nation, especially when it comes to slavery and civil rights, there's a sense in which, even though there were parts of the church instrumental in helping to end slavery and bring about civil rights, there were churches that fought to keep slavery. That's a blight on the church and on our society, and we could talk about some other things too. But the result of this question — was Christianity's impact positive or negative — has led many people, both inside and outside the church, to say faith should be personal, it should be private, it shouldn't be public. It should be something you practice on your own, but it doesn't have any place in public life.

What I'd like to do today is have us think together about how faith should interact with public life. My hope is that if you're a person who's a follower of Jesus, this will help you think about your role in society. And if you're a person who says, "One of my challenges with faith and Christianity is the way I see Christians trying to live out their faith in this world," then even as we talk about this, maybe you'll see the heart of Jesus for our society, and maybe it will be winsome and drawing for you.

To do this today, I want us to look at an Old Testament passage: Jeremiah, chapter 29. Jeremiah is a prophet who spoke when the Israelites, God's people in the Old Testament, had been taken into captivity, or exile, in Babylon. If you're familiar with the Old Testament, you'll know that when the Israelites had been disobedient to God, God allowed the Babylonians to come and take them into exile. If you recall, in Daniel chapter one, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego all went through being enculturated into Babylonian culture. One of the key issues in the book of Daniel was whether they would be assimilated, because it was as if the Babylonians came and took all the brightest young students right as they were graduating from high school and said, "We're going to take you to Babylon, and there you will live, you will be assimilated into our culture, you will be identified with our culture." Jeremiah writes about the people living in exile, and though we can't make a one-to-one correlation between Israel then and Christians living in our culture today, there are principles we can see about how faith impacts culture.

Some of these ideas were first popularized by a man named H. Richard Niebuhr, and others have since taken them and applied them to Jeremiah 29, as I'm doing here today. Richard Niebuhr wrote a book in the 1950s. He had a brother, Reinhold Niebuhr — which is more information than you probably care about — but Reinhold was the person who gave us the Serenity Prayer, and he argued persuasively that Christians needed to meet power with power. His brother Richard, who was more the academic, was a professor at Yale and wrote a book, Christ and Culture, published in the 1950s, which has influenced a generation of thinkers about how Christianity should impact culture. He offered several approaches. I'll use different words than he did, words that make more sense to me.

Here's the first approach. I'll call it withdrawal. Withdrawal is the idea that if you live in a culture hostile to the things of God, the best thing to do is step back from the culture to protect yourself and your family from all the influences around you. Here's how we see this in Jeremiah 29. After the people have been taken into exile, the prophet Jeremiah says: "This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon" — so now he's giving God's direct word — "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce." Verse 6: "Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease." The idea here is that rather than simply withdrawing from culture, God wants them to establish homes, establish families, and be part of the fabric of society even in exile.

Now, you may say, "Okay, that was then. Are we sure it still works that way?" Well, in 1 Peter chapter one, among other places in the New Testament, we see God calls His people exiles — "you live as strangers, as exiles." This is a metaphor the New Testament uses, taking Old Testament exile language to say we're living as if in exile, in a culture that can be hostile to the very things of faith. What happens sometimes is that people of faith say, "I need to step back from culture to protect myself and my family," and it can start with the simple choice of not wanting your kids to be influenced. So it becomes Christian school, homeschool, and then Christian sports, Christian this, Christian that, until soon everything other than maybe your work life is in a Christian environment. Now, don't get me wrong — those can be great choices for your family. But if we're not careful, we can develop a mindset that says, "I just withdraw. I'm not part of the fabric of the community in which I live." The call to the people living in exile was to be part of the fabric of the community, not simply to withdraw.

I've noticed recently that in the New Testament, there are groups that often pass by our thinking other than the Pharisees. Sometimes you'll read about a group called the Zealots, or the Sadducees, or the Pharisees, and wonder what they're all about. These were groups with different ideas about how faith should be integrated into culture. One group corresponds to this idea of withdrawal: the Essenes. Their idea was to step out of culture and form communes in the desert, where they could honor God without any outside cultural influence. The withdrawal mindset can still look like that today.

The second approach is assimilation. If you're tracking with the New Testament groups, this was the Sadducees. The Sadducees prized education, power, and wealth, and didn't want anything that would take away their power or their voice in the culture, so they sought not to offend the culture. In Jeremiah 29, we see that part of the prophet's call to the people is not just that they be part of the fabric of the culture, but that they not assimilate into it so completely that they lose their distinctiveness. Verse 10: "This is what the Lord says: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill My good promise to bring you back to this place." So God says, this is temporary; there's coming a day when your identity as an Israelite will matter more than your participation in Babylon.

Verse 11: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Have you ever heard that verse read out of context — maybe at a wedding? Next time you hear it at a wedding, you can be one of those people who thinks, "It's not about a wedding" — though you probably shouldn't say that out loud, since it would be a little rude. But that verse was written for the people in captivity, not for the couple getting married. It was a plan in which God says, "I have a plan for you," and it isn't that you simply become assimilated into the culture — it's that you become something distinct within it, and that you do have a future.

Jesus echoed this same idea at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew chapter 5. He said, "You, verse 13, are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." So Jesus tells His followers, "You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world." You are to be part of the world, but also to maintain a distinction within it.

What happens sometimes in our culture is that people of faith get the idea, "I don't want to be identified with faith." A movement in our day reflects this: people say, "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious." Have you ever heard that? What they're usually saying is, "I want to believe in God, but a God that I choose to believe in, without any of the trappings of church or religion," because that way they don't actually have to commit to anything. It's a God they keep in their own sphere. The problem is that what's often happening is a full-blown assimilation into the culture, which says, "I don't actually want to be part of any individual church, because if I'm part of a church and they ever take a stand on something I don't care for, I can't just distance myself and say, well, that's just them — I'm spiritual, not religious."

David Wolpe, a man of Jewish faith who wrote an article about American spirituality, said this about temples and churches: spirituality is generally about how one feels, and religion is what one does with that feeling. Americans have not become secular; they have become spiritual in exactly the way that costs nothing and is reinforced by empty gurus and by bestsellers overstuffed with ideas that don't actually give any sustenance. What he's saying is that our era isn't one where people are necessarily walking away from anything spiritual. Rather, they want spirituality, but in a way that has no definition other than the one they choose to give it.

Let me push on this a little. One of the things rising in our culture is sports gambling. If you know a young man, there's a good chance he's at least dabbled in this. Now, I tend to be fairly libertarian in my political views — all I mean by that is that generally less government is better. So I'm not one who says we should make laws banning gambling. I'm not convinced gambling itself is sinful; you'd be hard-pressed to make that case from the Bible. But what you can find is that it's not wise to chase financial returns you haven't worked for — read the book of Proverbs, it's clear. So what happens for some people is that instead of it being a mode of entertainment — "let's bet a milkshake on this," or "I'll bet a little money on this because it's entertainment" — it becomes, "Well, if I hit this, maybe I won't have to work hard." When you start down that road without being informed by Scripture, you've assimilated into the culture and taken on its values instead of Scripture's values. You're no longer distinct — you're not salt and light.

Or take the issue of entertainment. There are so many options today. Let me ask: if you name Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, does your entertainment diet look any different than it would if you weren't a follower of Jesus? Do you watch different things, or is everything you watch nearly identical to what someone who doesn't name Jesus Christ watches? What about your money — do you spend it differently, do you give differently, than people who don't name Christ? This assimilation idea is easy to fall into.

Again, the idea here is simple: this is not the path God calls His people living in exile to. It's not withdrawal, like the Essenes. It's not assimilation, like the Sadducees. But there's another approach, which I'll call prevail. Richard Niebuhr called this "Christ against culture." In the New Testament you had two other groups: the Zealots, who wanted to bring about a Jewish kingdom by force through revolution, and the Pharisees, by far the most common group in the New Testament. The Pharisees wanted to bring about the kingdom of God through religious conformity — rules everyone had to live by — believing that if they could get everyone to live by the rules, they could usher in the kingdom of God. Today this kind of thinking is sometimes represented by people who might call themselves, or be called, Dominionists, saying, "We're trying to bring the dominion of Christ to bear here and now."

In Jeremiah 29 you might even feel there's some warrant for this. Verse 7: "Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper." The ESV translates "peace and prosperity" as "welfare," because it's the same word in Hebrew: shalom. It means peace, well-being, wholeness. So some will say this is a cultural mandate to help bring wholeness to all of culture, and therefore to use whatever means necessary — power, or whatever — to bring this about.

But one of the things Jesus said is inconvenient for this view. In John 18:36 He said, "My kingdom is not of this world," speaking to Pilate. "If My kingdom were of this world, My disciples would fight for Me, but My kingdom is from another place." You can argue whether Jesus was referring only to that moment, or to when He comes back, or whether the kingdom is coming now. But Jesus, at least on the surface, was saying, "If you think you're going to bring the kingdom by force, you're misguided, at a minimum."

Now, the Pharisees weren't like the Zealots — they didn't try to bring the kingdom by physical force. Instead, they used social conditioning and religious rules, temple rules and restrictions, to get people to conform to how things should be in their minds, believing that if they got enough things to be as they should be, sooner or later everyone would be as they should be. Here's an example, from Luke chapter 5, where Jesus calls Levi. Levi later became Matthew, the author of the Gospel of Matthew. Levi was a tax collector, which meant that as a child he would have gone to Torah school, learned the Torah, probably learned to recite it, and at some point failed to advance to the next level — or perhaps he did advance, and still needed to find a job afterward. He found work as a tax collector. People hated tax collectors because they took money from others. The best students, by contrast, would have gone on to follow a rabbi.

Jesus comes and says to Levi, sitting at his tax booth, in Luke 5:27, "Follow Me." This was coded language, meaning, "I want you to be My disciple." This was an honor for Levi, especially since he was so far outside the social norms of the Pharisees. Scripture says, "Levi got up, left everything, and followed Him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to His disciples, 'Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?'" This was coded language too, because for the Pharisees, eating with a tax collector or a sinner broke the table-fellowship rules of the day. Jesus was breaking that rule, marking a distinction between the path of the Pharisees and the path of Jesus.

The Pharisees were essentially saying, "If we can get everyone to conform to our standards — rules about rules — we can bring in the kingdom of God." Jesus instead said, "I'm going to eat with tax collectors and sinners, and invite them to follow Me without condition, without necessarily changing the standards first. In fact, I'm going to challenge the standards, because I'm going to eat with them." Jesus goes on to say, "I've come to call sinners." That was His mission.

Here's my concern for the broader church: so many people have come to believe that if we can bring about some change in laws, get the right candidates elected, we can bring about a change in culture. Don't get me wrong — I think voting is good, changing laws is good, getting good candidates into office is good. But it's a misplaced hope if you believe that alone will change culture, and here's why: politics is coercive. It doesn't change the heart; it changes rules. If somebody tells you a rule you don't like, you may follow it, but unless your heart changes, it doesn't accomplish long-term what a changed heart does.

Sometimes people say things like, "The next election is the most important election of our lifetime." You know why it seems that way — because it's the next election. Or, "If your pastor doesn't talk about this issue this week, go to a different church." Someone once sent me a list of issues before an election and asked, "Where does the church stand? You need to tell everybody where to stand." It was coded language for, "You need to tell people how to vote." My response was that over the previous four years, we had taught on every one of those issues except immigration, which we hadn't addressed. So I didn't feel a need to tell people how to vote, because voting is a misplaced hope in the sense that it doesn't address the heart. I'm not saying it's irrelevant — I'm saying it's misplaced. Those are two different things.

When I say it's misplaced, I mean there's a coercive power to politics that makes you think, "If I just get the right person elected," or "If I believe the right thing, then I'm doing right," rather than actually living the standards of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that laws can keep his neighbor from killing him, but they can't cause his neighbor to love him — somewhat ironic, coming from him, but his point was that laws can be good and serve a purpose, but they don't address the heart.

I don't know if you've seen the case in Texas where the courts have now mandated that public schools teach the Bible as part of the curriculum. Those on the right, holding to the prevailing theory — the Dominionists — see this as a huge win, a spectacular win. Again, I think teaching the Bible to kids in school is probably a good thing, since it's a great piece of literature that has informed our society. But if you believe our culture is going to change because some twenty-three-year-old agnostic teacher in Texas teaches kids the Bible, you have a misplaced hope about how God changes culture. Here's how I know that: if you asked me to teach Judaism to a group of students, I could teach it intellectually, but not with conviction, and I might do more damage to those who actually want to believe it than good. That's my point — it's a misplaced hope.

Now, you may ask, does that mean there's no hope? I'm glad you asked — there is. Dallas Willard, addressing this, said: the revolution of Jesus is first and always a revolution of the human heart. His revolution does not proceed through social institutions and laws — the outer forms of existence — intending that those would then impose a good order of life on people who come under their power. Rather, it is a revolution of character.

So how does that happen? That's the fourth approach, which I'll call transformation. This is the idea of shalom in verse 7: "Seek the peace and prosperity," the shalom, "of the city to which I've carried you. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper." What is he saying? If God's people work for the good of the city or culture in which they live, they will help it prosper, and then they too will prosper.

Dallas Willard put it this way: the Christian faith is publicly available, credible, and fit for public instruction and decision-making. In other words, it isn't simply that you seek transformation by being a person of character where you are — it's that your hope isn't placed in laws and politics, but in the power of God.

Here's how Jesus described His kingdom, in Luke 13:18. Jesus asked, "What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches." And again He asked, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough."

So Jesus said the kingdom is like a small seed that grows into a huge tree. What's true when a tree grows? Have you ever watched a tree grow? You see it over time, but if you sit and watch it, you don't actually see it growing — the growth is imperceptible, invisible, so much so that it doesn't seem like anything is happening in the moment. And yet over time you look and say, "Wow, look at that." And once the yeast was in the dough, it was inevitable it would work through the entire batch. Jesus' point is that the kingdom of God moves in a way you don't always see or understand, but it happens as you seek the well-being of the city, of the culture — as you live with different values, as your vision for the future is different. That's when you begin to see what God is doing.

Abraham Lincoln, in 1859, just before he ascended to the presidency, said, "I do not think myself fit for the presidency." How different is that from what we hear today? By all accounts, Abraham Lincoln was deeply driven by his faith. He didn't run from power or the political process, but he let his faith inform the decisions he made, and he believed that the practice of slavery in our country was not right. So he led our nation through political power toward change. One of the reasons our nation has thrived even in recent years is because people like Abraham Lincoln said, "We want this to be a different kind of place." He was born into a country, but he helped shape the country. That is, you live at this point in time, and if you will say, "Where God has placed me, I will live as salt and light and choose to be part of the transforming power of Jesus Christ," then you can be part of the solution in this world.

There's a well-known verse in 2 Chronicles, chapter 7, verse 14: "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land." This statement says the well-being of the nation, the land, is contingent on the people of God turning to Him and away from evil, and asking God to work. In just a moment, I want us to do that together here today.

But first, I want to ask: if you're a follower of Jesus, are you prone to withdrawing from culture, saying, "It's too hard out there, I don't need to be part of any of it, any of the dialogue, any of the conversation"? Are you prone to assimilation, to having nothing distinct about you? Or are you prone to a prevailing mindset that wants everyone else to hold the same standard, rather than addressing the heart?

In Matthew 5, where we get the salt-and-light imagery, Jesus goes on in the next few verses to talk about the power of anger. One telltale sign that you have a prevailing mindset instead of a transformation mindset is if you find yourself constantly angry at other groups of people who see things and want to do things differently, instead of saying, "I am for their well-being and their prosperity." That will bring some conflict with the culture. As a church, we want to be the kind of place that lives for transformation, that addresses the heart, and that isn't afraid to have conversations about where our faith intersects with culture — while understanding that if our hope is that some exercise of power will change culture, we have it backwards. Hearts are changed, and then culture changes.

Politics, as you've heard it said, is downstream from culture. It's true — politics doesn't lead culture, it reflects culture. What changes culture is a heart given to the ways of the God of the universe. When you and I — whether a longtime church person, a new church person, or someone who has never been around church — acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Savior, that we are sinful and need a Savior, and begin to live in the humility of that reality, our hearts begin to change. And like a little bit of yeast in the dough, we begin to bring about change in the culture. That, I believe, is God's vision for how faith impacts the culture in which we live.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray together. God, we come to You right now and acknowledge that the church — and by church we mean Christians of past generations, our generation, us — has been complicit in an overindulgence of materialism, complicit in some of the racial issues in our world, even slavery. The church has at times not been a defender of the marginalized, but instead a preserver of the status quo. God, we turn from that.

We ask You to heal our land. God, we do ask You to bless America. We don't ask You to bless America to the exclusion of other nations, but we unapologetically acknowledge that You are God, and that You bring blessing to people and to lands based on the way the people of faith interact with You. So we ask You to forgive our sins and to heal our land, because we come and offer ourselves, in this little corner of Your kingdom, to You. We ask that it would be true for the church as a whole. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks for being here. Have a great day.

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This transcript was generated and lightly edited with the assistance of AI (removal of filler words and minor grammar corrections) based on an audio recording of the message. While care has been taken to preserve the speaker's original words and meaning as closely as possible, minor inaccuracies may exist. For the definitive record, please refer to the original audio or video recording.