How to be Christians Under Corrupt Government. Romans 13

How Christians Carry Authority in a Broken World? Being a Christian under corrupt government isn't easy.

Paul wrote the letter to the Romans before he had ever been there. He was writing to a church that was trying to figure out, in real time, how to be one community made up of people who had spent their entire lives being told to stay completely separate from each other. Jewish believers and Gentile believers, in the same room, trying to worship the same God. That was not a small ask. That was a culture collision. Being a Christian under corrupt government wasn't easy then, and it isn't now.

How can we live as Christ Followers under corrupt governments? Where is our power and authority?

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By the time we get to Romans 13, Paul has already walked them through dealing with their internal world. Romans 8 deals with how to handle guilt, shame, and the condemnation loop in your own head. He talks about the internal battle between the flesh and the spirit, and how the flesh wants to be in the driver seat but we need to learn how to allow the spirit to put to death the deeds of the flesh so we can live. Paul talks about mindsets and freedom, learning how to suffer and living as coheirs with Christ.

Romans 12 talks about how to live in community with other believers, no matter their background, their giftings or their callings. We are called to love one another, prefer one another, outdo one another in showing honor, be persistent in prayer. In Romans 12 verse 13, there is a shift from how to live in community with one another to how to live as a community with strangers and people outside the faith.

Share with the saints in their needs, and pursue hospitality (share with strangers). He tells us to do all these things that are impossible to do without the strength, grace, and power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 13 is the next level: how the body of Christ functions inside a governmental structure.

For Paul's original audience, that governmental structure was Rome. Roman emperors who, in the later years of the empire, were setting Christians on fire in the streets to use as torches. That is the world he was writing into when he said "let every person be subject to the governing authorities."

When we read this passage and feel the friction of it, we are at least in good company.

The Structure Is the Point, Not the Person

The Greek word Paul uses for authority in this passage is exousia. It is the same word used in Ephesians when Paul talks about the powers and principalities in the spiritual realm. It does not mean "government" in the modern political sense. It means governmental structure, which is the framework of authority itself, independent of whoever happens to be sitting in the seat.

This distinction matters more than almost anything else in the passage. Paul is not telling the Roman believers that Nero is a good man who deserves their loyalty. Nero was actively killing Christians. Paul is saying that the structure of governing authority is something God put in place, and when we resist the structure, we are resisting the ordering of God — which is a different and more serious thing than just disagreeing with a policy or a person.

The position and the person are two separate conversations.

That means we can be completely honest with God about how we feel about specific leaders. Completely honest. He already knows anyway. What it means practically is that underneath that honest conversation, the call is still to pray for the people in those positions, because the offices they occupy are something God ordained. Praying for Gavin Newsom if you cannot stand his politics is not an endorsement of his policies. Praying for Donald Trump if you are on the other side is not a betrayal of your convictions. It is a recognition that we are followers of Christ before we are anything else, and that means both sides of the political aisle can be in the same room together, which, in this society, is a miracle in itself.

Governed From the Inside Out

Kris Vallotton puts it this way: "God wants us to be governed by love for one another. But if we refuse, the governmental authorities are there with a sword." God's preference is for human beings to be governed from the inside out. His design is that we do not harm each other because we genuinely value human life, not because we are afraid of consequences. That we do not steal because we actually care about our neighbor, not because we calculated the risk and decided it was too high.

Governing authorities exist for the gap where love has not taken hold yet. The law is the floor, not the ceiling. Paul says it plainly in Galatians: if you walk habitually in the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. He is not giving anyone a loophole. He is pointing at a life lived so far above the floor that the floor simply does not apply to where you are living.

My friend Fran has said for years that the devil is a legalist. He wants you anxious about the lines, worried about whether you crossed one, calculating your distance from the boundary. Being led by the Spirit moves you out of that territory entirely.

There is an analogy I used on Sunday that I think holds up: if you are doing eighty in a fifty-five zone and a patrol car appears behind you, something happens in your body immediately. Your stomach drops. But if you are driving the speed limit, you wave and keep going. The governing authority only has leverage in the space where you are playing close to a line. Get far enough from the lines and it loses its grip on your nervous system completely.

Where Your Authority Actually Lives

Here is where I think a lot of us get stuck. We look at the state of our cities and our government and we feel like one person in thirty million with no real voice and no real leverage. Some people have stopped voting because it feels hopeless. Some people stay angry and rehearse everything that is going wrong. Neither of those is where our actual power is located.

Our authority is in the spirit.

I was in Uganda once, in a prayer meeting with about five hundred people, when a man I did not know grabbed the mic and started doing something on the stage that shifted the whole atmosphere in a way that was immediately wrong. People in the crowd started responding to it, getting frightened, the whole room was moving toward chaos. What brought it back was not arguing with the man or removing him physically. It was the worship team stepping into their position of authority, taking the mic, and leading the room in worship. The deliverance that had been happening continued — but it became orderly, gentle, and safe. The atmosphere changed because someone took authority from the right position.

That is a picture of what the church is supposed to do in a community. We are not called to fight in the natural realm the way the world fights. We are called to take authority in the spirit so that what is supposed to happen in the natural realm actually happens. When we pray together in agreement, when we bind what needs to be bound and loose what needs to be loosed, things move. That is not poetic language. That is the actual mechanism Paul is describing throughout this whole section of Romans.

So yes, vote. Show up in your community. Care about your city. But do not confuse political participation for your primary source of leverage, because it is not. Your prayers, especially in agreement with other believers, carry weight that a single vote in millions simply cannot.

You Are a Gate

I come back to this image a lot because I think it captures something about our actual situation that most Christians have never been taught to think about. You are partly flesh and partly spirit. You are sitting in a chair in your living room and you are also seated with Christ in heavenly places with access to every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm. Both of those things are true at the same time. You carry a dual citizenship and a dual presence.

That changes how you speak. It changes what you say about your city, your family, your finances, your health, your neighborhood. When you understand that you are a gate between these two realms, you start to realize that what you rehearse with your mouth has weight. Talking about how bad your downtown is getting does something. Speaking life over it does something different. This is not denial of reality. It is choosing which reality to give your voice to, and understanding that your voice has reach into a realm you cannot see.

Paul closes this section of Romans 13 with something straightforward: pay what you owe. Taxes, respect, honor. Give it because that is who you are in Christ, not because a law requires it and not because you have decided the person deserves it. The way we treat authorities, even unjust ones, says something about what is actually governing our interior life. If we only give honor when we have determined it is earned, we are still being governed by our own judgment. If we give it because that is who Jesus made us to be, we are operating from somewhere else entirely.

I will be honest: I am a good rule follower when I agree with the rule. I am considerably less disciplined when I think the rule is dumb. That is a western mindset and it is something I am still working on. But that is exactly the kind of person Paul was writing to. Not people who have arrived, but people on a journey who need to understand that God set up structures for a reason, that authority in the spirit realm is real, and that our job is to learn how to operate with genuine authority in the spirit while holding a posture of submission in the natural.

That combination is genuinely difficult. It requires the Holy Spirit. It will likely take most of your life to get good at it.

But it is the call.

Let's stop surrendering our voice to the enemy.

I pray for a generation to rise up and understand they have been given a unique assignment, and they don't shy away. Paul writes in Romans 6, "Don't surrender any part of yourself as an instrument of unrighteousness," and I believe that includes our voices. Our voices build the kingdom of darkness or the Kingdom of God. Surrender your voice to God. Surrender your right to speak anything over your city, your nation, or your family that God isn't saying. I believe we will bind and loose with authority when we realize the power of our voices.

I'm calling for the church today to take ownership of our cities and regions as we learn how to function in the authority Jesus conferred upon us. We are not stuck under corrupt governments. We are the solution. Prayer is the solution.

If you want to watch the message, you can find it here.

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