Friday, November 26, 2010
Unchanging
Mark Daniels while discussing the issue of homosexual ordination in his own denomination:
Here's what really concerns me - it's not about making church, the Bible, God's Word relevant to us today - it's about us making ourselves relevant to God. Our entire approach to this whole thing is backward - at its root is the ultimate sin - the assumption that God exists to serve us when in fact we were created to serve Him.
I wonder often if we do not do things in precisely the wrong order when we seek to bring people to Christ through an appeal to self-interest. Indeed, coming to Christ may be the most self-interested thing any person can do, but the motivation in the end is not self-interest - it's coming back into the created order.
We have developed such a perverse sense of our own self-interest that the appeal is no longer useful. And therein I think lies the the real crux of the culture question. We formerly had a cultural in which self-interest was subject to something larger than ourselves. Such is no longer true; therefore, no one gets the gospel as we present it becasue it does not serve a self-interest that simply has no vision of something greater than itself.
This situation is not new in history. As Mark points out, it was all but the Hebraic world for eons. We need to learn to appeal to a different thing in people than we ever have in our lifetimes.
When we can help people understand that they are not the center of the universe, then we will have become truly relevant.
Be that as it may, the reliability of God's physical universe and our certainty about when this convergence will next happen, reminds us of the complete reliability of God and of His Word, which does not change,...It is so easy to confuse "relevance" with change. So subtlety do we alter God's Word when we seek to make it relevant to today.
Here's what really concerns me - it's not about making church, the Bible, God's Word relevant to us today - it's about us making ourselves relevant to God. Our entire approach to this whole thing is backward - at its root is the ultimate sin - the assumption that God exists to serve us when in fact we were created to serve Him.
I wonder often if we do not do things in precisely the wrong order when we seek to bring people to Christ through an appeal to self-interest. Indeed, coming to Christ may be the most self-interested thing any person can do, but the motivation in the end is not self-interest - it's coming back into the created order.
We have developed such a perverse sense of our own self-interest that the appeal is no longer useful. And therein I think lies the the real crux of the culture question. We formerly had a cultural in which self-interest was subject to something larger than ourselves. Such is no longer true; therefore, no one gets the gospel as we present it becasue it does not serve a self-interest that simply has no vision of something greater than itself.
This situation is not new in history. As Mark points out, it was all but the Hebraic world for eons. We need to learn to appeal to a different thing in people than we ever have in our lifetimes.
When we can help people understand that they are not the center of the universe, then we will have become truly relevant.
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