Rediscovering Christ (Part 5): Sacrifice: Seeing Beyond Beyond Progressive and Conservative Lenses

One of the assumptions shaping American politics is this: power requires compromise.
If you want to win, you have to give something up.

What often gets given up first is ethics and integrity.

How Power Trains Us to Sacrifice the Wrong Things

On the progressive side, we’ve seen a willingness to bend truth or transparency in order to protect power or advance an agenda. Gerrymandering isn’t partisan, it’s practiced wherever it helps those in charge stay in charge. More recently, many progressives have been willing to look the other way when honesty felt politically inconvenient (see the Biden administration cover up of his decline).

The logic is familiar: The cause is too important to risk losing power.

On the conservative side, we see the same pattern. Gerrymandering again. Pressure campaigns. And perhaps most striking, a willingness to support leaders whose behavior clearly violates moral standards because policy outcomes matter more than character. Many of the same voices that once argued character was disqualifying (conservatives battle cries against Bill and then Hillary Clinton) now say, “I’m just about the economy,” or “I’m just about policy.”

Both sides end up in the same place: ethics and integrity are sacrificed to gain, keep, or protect power.

Jesus offers a completely different way.

Jesus Never Chased Power. He Gave Himself Away

Jesus did not try to gain power by compromising his values.
He didn’t protect his influence at all costs.
He didn’t make excuses for unethical behavior because the outcome was “worth it.”

Instead, Jesus talked openly about losing everything.

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”
(Matthew 16:24)

And elsewhere:

“Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
(Luke 14:27)

Jesus never suggested sacrificing ethics to gain power.
He invited people to sacrifice power itself in order to love.

What Jesus Means by Sacrifice (and What He Doesn’t)

Jesus is not asking us to sacrifice relationships for selfish desire.
Hurting others to get what you want is not the way of the cross.

The sacrifice Jesus invites us into is cruciform, cross-shaped.

It looks like:

• Choosing truth when it costs you influence

• Keeping integrity when it risks your job

• Loving enemies instead of leveraging them

• Refusing to dehumanize people for the sake of winning

This kind of sacrifice isn’t about self-destruction.
It’s about self-giving love.

The Cross Is Not a Strategy for Escape. It’s a Strategy for Renewal

Many of us were taught that the goal of faith is to endure this world and escape to heaven later.

Jesus teaches something much bigger.

When Jesus was raised from the dead, heaven didn’t wait. The Temple curtain was torn in two. The separation between God and humanity came to end. Heaven began spilling into earth.

The resurrection wasn’t just about Jesus’s victory over death.
It was the beginning of God’s renewal of the world.

That means the cross is not just about personal salvation.
It’s about communal transformation.

When communities choose the way of the cross, when they refuse to sacrifice ethics for power, something powerful happens. There is a kind of communal resurrection. New life emerges where fear once ruled. Truth creates freedom. Love outlasts manipulation.

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ACTUALLY CHANGES!

This Is the Policy of the Kingdom

Jesus never pursued a powerful political or cultural position.
He never passed legislation.
He never controlled an army.

And yet, no one has reshaped human history more than him.

The way of Christ produces a different kind of power…
not power over others,
but power for others.

When we live cruciform lives together, the kingdom of God becomes visible now. Not someday. Not after we die. Now.

That’s why Jesus taught us to pray:

“Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.”

This is not about left or right.
This is about the way of Christ.

And the way of Christ still costs everything, but it also brings resurrection with it.