Should Christians dive into culture to change it, or pull back to stay pure? Kevin Swanson tackles that tension head-on in this chapter from The Tattooed Jesus, warning against both the compromise of chasing relevance and the faithlessness of total retreat. Drawing on Augustine's city of God, the parable of the wheat and tares, and examples from Hollywood to global corruption rankings, he makes the case for a faith bold enough to actually shape the world around it.

What does it take to stand firm when the culture around you turns openly hostile to the church? Kevin Swanson walks through Romans 1 and the brutal backdrop of Nero's Rome to show how the early church survived seven persecutions over three centuries — through holiness, prayer, and a settled confidence in the love of God.

Film and television shape a generation's worldview more powerfully than most Christian parents realize. Often, the average teenager retains more from a movie night than Sunday's sermon. In this audiobook chapter from The Tattooed Jesus, he offers a method for analyzing movies on multiple levels, from genre and zeitgeist to the metaphysical worldview hidden beneath the story. Using examples from Star Wars, Man of Steel, The Lion King, and the horror genre, Swanson shows families how to discern what a film is really teaching.

When Hannah finally holds the son she prayed for, her prayer of praise reaches far beyond her own story - it reaches straight into God's pattern of humbling the proud and exalting the humble. In this message from Reformation Church of Elizabeth, Pastor Joshua Schwisow traces that pattern through Scripture and history, from the Tower of Babel to Hitler's Third Reich, showing how it points forward to Christ Himself.

America stands out as a rare exception among history's tyrannies and empires — but why? In this chapter from Under God, Kevin Swanson examines the Christian heritage behind America's founding documents, laws, and Bill of Rights, and traces how Enlightenment humanism gradually displaced the nation's covenantal foundations. He walks through the founders' own words — Madison, Henry, Franklin, and Washington — to show just how far that first covenant has drifted.

Nice doesn't get you into heaven. Kevin Swanson preaches through Romans 1:1–7 at Reformation Church of Elizabeth, contrasting the thin moralism of the world's religions with the gospel's power to raise the spiritually dead and produce real, faith-fueled obedience in families and nations. Real obedience to God was never meant to be pushed uphill on willpower. Instead, it runs on grace.

Sodom and Gomorrah. Babylon. Rome. And now the modern West. This week's Passing on the Faith features a chapter from Kevin Swanson's audiobook Under God, surveying history's clearest cases of divine judgment on nations. If the process has begun for the West, is the conclusion inevitable?

God doesn't wait for the strong, the successful, or the significant to do his greatest work — he works through the weak, the barren, and the desperate. Listen to Joshua Schwisow's sermon on a woman who has nothing to offer, and what happens when she has faith in an Almighty God.