CULTURE
The church at
Ephesus faced a culture characterized by immorality. We, too, live in a culture
tolerant of sexual immorality. It is popular to be open-minded to many types of
sin, calling them personal choices or alternative lifestyles. But when the body
of believers begins to tolerate sin in the church, it is lowering the church's
standards and compromising its witness. Remember that God's approval is
infinitely more important than the world's. Use God's Word, not what people
around you are willing to accept, to set the standards for what is right or
wrong.
Is it our
task to force the biblical doctrine of God to answer to modern culture, or (is
it our task) to address modern culture with the biblical doctrine of God? If
modern culture-or any culture-establishes the baseline for the doctrine of God,
such a doctrine will certainly bear little resemblance to the God of the Bible.
Albert Mohler
Reform is no answer for a culture like ours.
Redemption is what is needed, and that occurs at the individual, not
societal level. The church needs to get back to the real task to which we are
called: evangelizing the lost. Only when multitudes of individuals in our
society turn to Christ will society itself experience any significant
transformation.
John MacArthur,
Successful Christian Parenting, 1998, p. 10.
We must
repudiate our confused loyalties and concerns for the passing world and put
aside our misguided efforts to change culture externally. To allow our
thoughts, plans, time, money, and energy to be spent trying to make a
superficially Christian America, or to put a veneer of morality over the world,
is to distort the gospel, misconstrue our divine
calling, and squander our God-given resources. We must not weaken our spiritual
mission, obscure our priority of proclaiming the gospel of salvation, or become
confused about our spiritual citizenship, loyalties and obligations. We are to
change society, but by faithfully proclaiming the gospel, which changes lives on the inside.
John MacArthur
Titus, Moody, 1996, p. 138.
Here is the
great evangelical disaster – the failure of the evangelical world to stand for
truth as truth. There is only one word for this – namely accommodation. The
evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First,
there has been accommodation on Scripture, so that many who call themselves
evangelicals hold a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth
of all the Bible teaches – truth not only in religious
matters but in the areas of science and history and morality… This
accommodation has been costly, first in destroying the power of the Scriptures
to confront the spirit of our age; second, in allowing the further slide of our
culture. Thus we must say with tears that it is the evangelical accommodation
to the world spirit around us, to the wisdom of this age, which removes the
evangelical church from standing against the breakdown of our culture.
Francis A. Schaeffer
The Great Evangelical Disaster,
Crossway, 1984, p. 37, 38.
False ideas
are the greatest obstacles to the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of
a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we
permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be
controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent
Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless
delusion.
J. Gresham Machen
True
Christianity…resists cultural captivity. It posits a transcendent moral law
that is above and beyond human laws and customs, giving a framework by which
cultures can be judged. In doing so, trans-cultural Christianity has managed to
shape and transform human cultures.
Gene
Edward Veith
Spontaneous Compassion, Tabletalk, November,
2008, p. 82. Used by Permission.