Kingdom Principles

Kingdom Principles

our culture. None of us are born with a culture. We are born into a culture, but we are not born with a culture. Culture may also be defined as the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. From a sociological perspective, culture is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. In the business world, culture defines the set of shared atti tudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize a company or corporation. As for a scientific definition, culture means to grow in a prepared medium . That’s a powerful image. Each of us arrived on earth in a prepared medium—the country and culture of our birth. Immediately we began to grow in that medium, shaped and influ enced by the customs, values, moral code, and social norms of our parents, community, and society. We learned the language and the laws. This growth medium is also where we learned our prejudices and our hatreds, our jealousy and our greed and our pride. Then one day we discovered the Kingdom of Heaven. We were born again and became citizens of God’s Kingdom. And that’s where the challenge really began. After spending 20, 30 or 40 years in a cer tain medium that trained us to think a certain way, we suddenly find ourselves in a whole new culture—a new growth medium—with a whole lot of new things to learn and a whole lot of old things to unlearn. And therein lies the problem: How do we get rid of the old culture in our hearts and minds to live in the new one? That’s the universal challenge for every dual citizenship believer. For you see, culture is also what lies at the very center of the great cosmic conflict between the Kingdom of God and the king dom of darkness. And earth is the battleground. The battle for earth is the battle for culture. And culture is the manifestation of the collective thinking of a people. In other words, whatever the people as a whole think collectively—their beliefs, values, ideals,

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