Listening In preview: Tim Goeglein

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: finding hope in the nation’s capital.

Tim Goeglein has served in Washington for 30 years. He was President George W. Bush’s liaison between the White House and the evangelicals.

Today he works for Focus on the Family as vice president for external and government relations. He’s seen a lot in his three decades in Washington, but he’s not cynical. He’s hopeful. 

He says Christians can and should engage the current culture. He believes the best days are yet to come.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Listening In host Warren Smith talked with him at his office on Capitol Hill. In this excerpt of their conversation, they talk about God’s sovereignty over the affairs of men.

WARREN SMITH: I always struggle with this idea that Christians are such doomsdayers when they look at our culture. They don’t realize among other things that in Acts 17, for example, Paul says on Mars Hill: “God has, has appointed the times for us to live and he has circumscribed the boundaries of our dwelling place.” In other words, if we say to ourselves, “oh, it was so much better 25 years ago, or I wish I had lived 50 years ago.” I mean, that is really an affront to the sovereignty of God in many, many ways. God put us here right now to be about this work of restoration that you’re describing. 

TIM GOEGLEIN: It is so routine today in America for people of goodwill on both sides of the aisle to despair and to be discouraged. But discouragement and despair, said St Augustine, is a sin. Why? Because it negates the hope of Jesus Christ in the life of a great nation and in the life of an individual. Renewal. Redemption. The way forward is possible. And so we have to have a national dialogue, right now, not 10 years from now, but right now, and that dialogue between people of goodwill who hold competing worldviews—back to Chuck Colson, right?—we have to find a way to say: “What kind of a country do we want and what are going to be the components in the way forward?” And American restoration is designed to contribute to that conversation and national dialogue.

(Photo/The King’s College)

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