Is Christianity Dying?

good morning welcome to our forum in the village church Institute is Christianity dying with dr. Russell Moore my name is JT English and the pastor of training here at the village church so whether you're here at Flower Mound in Denton and Dallas in Plano or in Fort Worth or perhaps you been watching online thank you for being here we're really grateful that you're here we think this is going to be a great morning for our church to be taught and equipped and trained on the question is Christianity dying by Russell Moore I'm excited about this forum for a few reasons first I'm excited about forums for a lot of reasons so let me explain what a forum is a forum is an opportunity for the village church to train and equip you on a topic that we think has particular importance in today's world so we did the is Christianity or is God anti-gay forum several months ago with Sam Albury it was a huge success because a lot of people a village church were trained and equipped on a topic that we thought had particular importance for you so again I'm excited about this morning I think it's going to be great we'll have two sessions and then eventually a Q&A at the end and then we'll be dismissed at 12:00 but but as we do that please join me in welcoming dr. Russell Moore [Applause] well thank you it is a joy to be here the village church I have such affection for this congregation and for what the Spirit is doing among all of you and I'd like to call your attention before we begin to second Kings chapter six second Kings chapter six pastor scripture that I think is pivotal for the sort of conversations that we're having today second Kings chapter six let's start reading in verse eight once when the king of syria was warring against israel he took counsel with his servants saying at such and such a place shall be my camp but the man of god sent word to the king of israel beware that you do not pass this place but the syrians are going down there and the king of israel sent to the place about which the man of God told him thus he used to warn him so that he saved himself there more than once or twice and the mind of the king of Syria was greatly troubled because of this thing and he called his servants and said to them will you not show me who is who of us is for the king of Israel and one of the servants said none my lord o king but Elisha the prophet who is in Israel tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom and he said we'll go and see where he is that I may send and seize him and it was told the holdy is in Dothan so he sent their horses and chariots and a great army and they came by night and surrounded the city and when the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out behold an army with horses and chariots was all around the city and the servant said alas my master what shall we do he said do not be afraid for those who are with us are more than those who are with them then Elisha prayed and said o Lord please open his eyes that he may see so the Lord opened his eyes of the young man and he saw and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha god bless his word to us I'm originally from Mississippi and several years ago I had a student of mine at the time had never been in the South before he was he was from he was from an urban area in the north and he went with me on a trip down to the deep south to Mississippian when he was there with me was an intern of mine and we were talking with a pastor in Mississippi who was trying to make conversation and he assumed that this guy was from somewhere in Mississippi so he asked the natural sort of Mississippi in question so who's your daddy well my student had no idea what this question meant and just assumed this is some sort of southern thing that's going on and so he's trying on the fly to try to think of what's the appropriate response to this and so he just says you are and the guy what are you talking about this is awkward awkward conversation because it didn't make sense in his context that question but it made perfect sense in the context of Mississippi because when you meet someone you want to know do I know somebody that this person is related to and there's a pretty good likelihood that you just might I was talking to a guy not long ago who was from Portland Oregon and went from Portland to work in Washington DC and then went from Washington DC to work for the corporate offices of Walmart in Bentonville Arkansas and he said the questions that people would ask when their first meeting you in Portland they would say what's your thing what do you do what do you like you know do you like hiking do you like biking do you do you do you like swimming what is it that's kind of your hobby that was the first question that people would ask to try to figure out who you were in Washington the first question is who do you work for and he said then when he moved to Bentonville Arkansas the first question that people would ask him is have you found a church home they didn't even have a context for this at all well when we're thinking about American culture right now we're thinking about some of the changes that are going on in American culture those sorts of questions are really relevant that question have you found a church home that was a very common question in the Bible Belt of the south and the Midwest for a long time in American culture is increasingly incomprehensible in American culture and increasingly incomprehensible even in the Bible Belt itself and so as this is starting to happen in American culture there are many people who are suggesting that this means that Christianity is dying Christianity is dying out and there's a there's a kind of narrative that expects that to happen because in a progressive secularist vision of history religion and religious conviction is a kind of superstition and so as things progress educationally scientifically technologically then you ought to expect to see fewer and fewer people who are religious who are motivated by religious conviction who gather together for religious services and so the future in this view ought to be secular and not not ultimately theist or at least not theist in any meaningful sort of way and so as that narrative is starting to go on there are a lot of Christians in this country who are becoming nervous and even panicked as they see that sort of narrative being played out around them and what I want to suggest you is in order to understand kind of what the future of Christianity ought to be we have to first ask what's going on and why is that going on for a long time in American culture it would do you some good a great deal of good to be affiliated somehow with Christianity in a nominal cultural sense now when I was in college I had an atheist friend that I would spend a lot of time debating the existence of God and talking about the gospel with him and then one one morning we were having coffee and he said hey can you uh can you recommend a Southern Baptist Church for me to join but one that's not - you know Southern Baptist II and my immediate thought was he's become a Christian and and then I have to admit that in my fleshly pride even before I was kind of rejoicing with him I was thinking wonder what I said that clinched the argument you know and he he identified the existence of God and came to faith in Christ I said you so you've become a Christian he said I don't believe in stuff he said I want to run for office someday and I'm never going to be elected anything in this state if I'm not a member of a church and as I look demographically they're more Baptist than anything else so I want to join a church where I can kind of fit in there but not one that's too freaky if they're handling snakes or something on out of there but just a normal Baptist Church that I can join now this guy was especially blunt but he was not unusual in Bible Belt America because Bible Belt America expected people to have an affiliation with Christianity but the kind of affiliation that is going to enable you to make it in American life to be able to advance in your job to be able to be seen as a good citizen to be able to be seen as a good neighbor it would take a lot of courage in most places in the United States to say I'm an atheist or I'm an agnostic and for a long time in the United States not only would you be weird if you had no religious conviction you would even be dangerous remember the context of most of the 20th century was a cold war with the Soviet Union with an atheistic system in the Soviet Union and so part of what distinguished the American Way from the Communist way was God God and country and so in the middle of all of that you had an idea that some Christians came to internalize that we were part of a moral majority in this country that most people in the country share with us our basic values and and we often even use that kind of language a judeo-christian values traditional family values the things that as a country we prize and the things as a country that we value and then as cultural shifts and changes started to happen in ways that were more noticeable coming out of all of the tumult of the 1960s with the counterculture starting to emerge that became even more pronounced because what you have going on at that time is really two visions of what the good life is in American life and and that shows up even artistically I mean think about the sort of music that was coming out of the counterculture of the 1960s in many ways the music that's coming out of the 1960s was good and right and exactly on target think of for instance the adopting by many parts of the counterculture of we shall overcome power full moral truth involved in that an a a calling down of those old oppressive structures but with that came the sort of music that celebrated almost a prophecy chart of secular progressivism think of John Lennon's Imagine there's no heaven think of the way that Bob Dylan is singing the times they are a-changin which means if you don't get on board you're going to sink like a stone this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and so there were a lot of Americans including a lot of religious Americans that when they saw all of this being shaken up they responded by saying you people don't represent the real America with sexual liberation and the drug culture and the tearing down of these structures of family you don't represent the real America we represent the real America and we're part of a a silent majority in American culture and the issues that we care about the things that we care about include a commitment to God and a commitment to a commitment to Christianity but it was a Christianity that was defined in really really lowest-common-denominator forms and so and so you have you have an illusion that was happening of a majority of people who were committed to Christ in this country that helped Christians to be numb to some of the ways that they were adopting the culture right along with everyone else not in terms of the things that were being so hotly debated at the time but in all sorts of other ways where there were not controversies going on with just as much danger taking place and that's true even at the level of sexuality one of the issues that was being hotly debated in so many ways but evangelical Christians were often adapting to the sexual revolution itself even while believing themselves to be sexual counter-revolutionaries I was preaching at a church one time and preaching through 1st Corinthians they wanted me to come in and just do an overview of 1st Corinthians in that church so I went in I'm preaching through 1st Corinthians I'm coming through 1st Corinthians 7 where the Apostle Paul says if if a man does not know how to act toward his betrothed he does not have self-control let them marry it is better to marry than to burn with passion and so I'm explaining that and walking through that and I was giving just a point of application I said so for instance is that your your task and your purpose in in dating is to find someone if God's called you to marry to marry and so you don't want to put yourself in a situation where you have these endlessly long dating relationships and engagements that go on forever in a place is going to put you in a point of temptation and vulnerability that's Paul's point get married it's it's better to marry than to burn with passion as soon as the service was over I had a middle-aged couple who came up to me and they had with them their son Chad and his fiancee Tina and the middle-aged couple they were mad as could be and he said we we don't really appreciate what you said because our son Chad and his fiancee Tina Tina have been engaged for four years and they've been dating all through high school before that and we think that that's a good thing because we want to make sure that Chad gets through with this graduate program and gets settled in a job we want Tina to finish her graduate program get settled in a job so that they're they're financially stable they're able to buy a place and then after that they get married I said well I wasn't giving a universal rule I'm just I'm just explaining a possible application of the text I said in this case I think we just ought to thank God that by the grace of God he has he has empowered Chad and Tina to resist the sin of sexual immorality right Chad and we just had this awkward awkward moment that happened there and then you know everyone says it's really late we need to go home now so we did now what was happening there is that it was not that this middle aged couple were a group of people who were embracing fornication but they were not people who were rejecting in any cognitive way a biblical understanding of sexuality it was that for them the biggest worry that they had was that their son would not be an economic success in America and it was a greater fear for them that their son might be a failure than it was that their son might be a fornicator now that wasn't a conscious decision that was something that is happening across the culture of America in a way that the issue isn't that we are debating this issue the issue is that we're not debating these things because those questions don't even come up now when that's happening across American culture there was a time when it took a lot of courage to stand up and say I have no religious affiliation I am an atheist or I'm an agnostic what you had to do when you said that was to say I am essentially becoming a kind of stranger and in exile in American life that is no longer the case increasingly no longer the case when you look at these studies that will show you the increase in nuns people who have no religious affiliation or people who will identify themselves as atheists or agnostics that does not mean that we have more atheists in America it means that we have more honest atheists in America we have fewer incognito atheists in America that is not bad news now one of the things that is happening is that as this as this is starting to change in American life there are some who are suggesting well what the church needs to do if the church is going to be able to survive is that the church needs to figure out how to reach younger generations and the way the church figures out how to reach younger generations is to find out where the scandal is where the problem that these younger generations have with Christianity is and whatever that is toss it overboard now there are a lot of ways in which that is true when you have cultural accretions on Christianity and on churches in which the churches are alienating a new generation simply because they're a subculture of something else but typically what people mean when they say that is in our context right now issues of sexuality so if the church will reach the next generation the church has to give up a Christian sexual ethic in order to do that now what I would suggest you is that is not a new argument at all this is the exact same argument that was taking place in the late 19th and early 20th century over the issue of miracles people were saying we live in a scientific culture we live in an advanced post-enlightenment culture and people can't believe in virgin births and empty tombs and and these sorts of things so what we need to do is to get rid of the miraculous and talk about the ethics of Christianity let's let's just talk about love of neighbor let's talk about reliance upon God but let's not talk about those things that contemporary scientific people can't accept now the problem with that is that you can't get the miraculous out of Christianity without getting rid of Christianity it also was mistaken because it assumes that the scandal of the miraculous suddenly happened in an electrified age the miraculous has always been scandalous when Mary comes to Joseph and says I'm pregnant his response is not well it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas right his response is to say I'm going to put her away quietly break off this betrothal quietly why because Joseph knows how babies are conceived ancient people are not idiots they know how babies are conceived so he assumes that she's been cheating on him a virgin birth was a startling thing in the first century resurrections from the dead were startling things in the first century so the scandal wasn't new and it also wasn't true that if you threw that overboard that then people would be attracted to Christianity and into the church what the people who adopted that kind of Christianity found is that people who don't want Christianity don't want almost Christianity either and so the churches that embrace this withered away there are no great unitarian church planting movements across the world right now and so what's happening now is the same thing except focused in on the question of sexuality if the church will give up a Christian sexual ethic and younger people will be drawn to it that assumes that the way that you make Christianity attractive is to make Christianity normal and that is not what the New Testament teaches moreover once you get rid of the miraculous and once you get rid of a Christian sexual ethic that is rooted in the lordship of Christ and the the Creator God who is who is patterning the universe after Jesus Christ you don't have Christianity left and that's one of the reasons why many of the people who assume if we just put enough pressure of social marginalization or even state power then you're going to see Christians getting over views of sexuality that the rest of the culture sees as restrictive or bigoted the problem is the people within so-called evangelical Christianity who are making the case that a Christian sexual ethic has to change aren't just interpreters what they're doing is to say that the Apostle Paul when he is teaching an understanding of sexuality is limited by ancient understandings of sexuality and he doesn't know what we know now some are even being more courageous to say Jesus himself when he teaches from the beginning he created them male and female and what God has joined together let no man put asunder if Jesus knew then what we know now Jesus would have corrected his bad understanding of science and theology now this is from people who would call themselves evangelical Christians it takes some kind of Messiah Complex to correct the actual Messiah while saying that you are following him if you're correcting Jesus about his faulty understanding of anything then your idea of Jesus is following you you are not following him and so Christianity if it is going to continue and it is is going to continue as an authentic Christianity that is increasingly strange in American culture that means that we have to get rid of the idea that we are any sort of majority moral or otherwise in American life that is not anything to panic about the New Testament teaches that we are always a minority in every culture and in every place at every time and I'm saying that not in terms of numbers I'm saying that in terms of viewpoint Romans 12 do not be conformed to the pattern of the world but transformed by the renewing of your mind that is not specific to Rome that is the message that is coming to Christians in every culture every place all the time we are a minority viewpoint in American life it is not that we have become a minority viewpoint we have always been a minority viewpoint in American life the question is what kind of minority are we going to be and I think the call is for us to be a prophetic minority by prophetic I do not mean what some people mean when they say prophetic I find that sometimes in churches when people start thinking through spiritual gifts sometimes you will have people who will identify themselves as well I'm kind of a prosit and nine times out of ten that's a jerk you know who just says I just tell it like it is and this is just me being a prophet that is not what a prophetic word means what what it means to be prophetic is not that we are cranky it is not that we are railing at the culture around us it means that we have an authority and we have a word that has been given to us handed down to us from prophets and apostles and it is a word that creates life when we bear witness we are not just giving information that people then take and weigh the way that they weigh political arguments we are speaking on behalf of Jesus Christ which means that when his word is rightly spoken the Holy Spirit is present with it and when God speaks things happen let there be light Genesis chapter 1 and the exact same thing is happening second Corinthians chapter four the God who said let there be light and there was light has shone light into our hearts and freed us from deceiving power we have been given that word that we are to bear into the culture which means that the primary thing that we must avoid right now is fear Christianity is not dying and the only reason why some people would believe that it is is because they think that they are losing a Christian America and so they will speak of a difficult time living in a post-christian America we are not living in a post-christian America that assumes that we have ever had a Christian America we are living in at best a pre-christian America but God does not need America first of all Church of Jesus Christ is much much bigger than America and we don't have the full view of what is happening around us in our personal lives in our cultural lives and in the advance of the church in the passage that we read at the beginning of our time here you have a very difficult situation taking place the the the suta nation of Syria the ruler there finds out that there's a prophet who is essentially spying on him he has a kind of NSA technology of the time to be able to know whatever the plans are that the king is making and so he sends the Syrian army to surround this little prophet and his servant that's a massive amount firepower and the servant of the Prophet starts to panic and says what are we going to do he is looking at the two of them and then he is looking at all of these Syrian chariots armed to the teeth and he says we are about to be executed Elijah does not respond with panic he does not respond with hand wringing Elijah responds exactly the way our Lord Jesus does repeatedly when everyone is panicking around it Jesus is remarkably uncaf innate 'add in the New Testament when everyone else is saying don't you care that this ship is about to go down don't you care that these people are rejecting our message Jesus is never worried about this stuff and then Jesus gets all worked up at moments that nobody else has worked up you're taking cords whips to these people who are making change in the temple they're always here you've been here since you were 12 years old you're upset because this big tree doesn't have bigs and it's not season time for bigs we're asleep in the garden and you're screaming and your blood vessels are bursting you're in such agony doesn't make sense it's because Jesus knows what is going on Elijah too knows what's going on he prays and says Lord open his eyes so that he can see and when he does he looks and he sees the mountains are filled with armies and chariots of fire all around the only reason why Christians panic is because we do not have confidence in the kingdom of God that we can see only by faith what we see in this passage of Scripture and what we see later on in Jesus's Transfiguration is not a bringing of a new reality it is not that Elijah says God send all of these chariots it's that God enables him to see what is already present we tend to think of heaven as somewhere up there some where and that somehow God can send messengers and gellick beings back and forth from way out there as though heaven were a different planet one of the things that we're starting to even hear from atheist scientists is that the more that we know about the universe the more that we know what we don't know about the universe and there is so much that makes the universe work dark energy dark matter that no one even knows what it is or how to define it the spiritual realities that are around us are around us all the time and we are not able to see them except by receiving the Word of God and believing the Word of God and what does that do once you know the sort of reality that is present around you that gives you courage Alijah isn't scared and you shouldn't be scared either you have more atheists in your neighborhood more Muslims and Sikhs and Buddhists in your neighborhood thank God that he has put you in this mission field it is much easier to stand and to talk to a Buddhist about the claims of Christ than it is to speak to someone who has grown up with a casing of nominal Christianity where the first thing that you have to do is to convince that person that he is not right with God through the death burial and resurrection of Christ than it is to speak to someone who responds to you when you announce the message that Jesus Christ is alive and is coming to judge the living and the dead exactly the way that the New Testament audiences do that sounds crazy it also though enables us not just to have courage but also to have kindness when Elijah says to a servant says to God let the servant see he then turns around and says let the Syrian army's nazi blinds them and then elijah leads the syrian army blind right into the people of israel's camp and what the rulers of israel want to do is to say we've got them captured let's kill them Elijah says why would you kill them we've won let's get them something to eat let's give them some water it's losers who react with a sense of desperation and and a striking out if we're winners then we have the confidence to give them something to eat something to drink and to move them right on through if we see ourselves as a majority in America then what we will end up worshiping is not God through Jesus Christ but America if we see ourselves as simply a minority in America then we're going to be tempted to go into a siege mentality where our response to the culture around us is paranoia and fear but if we see ourselves as what we are as a number too numerous to be numbered when you count us not in opinion polls but in the redeemed of all of the ages in heaven and on earth and if we see ourselves as bearing the sort of powerful witness that is able to change into transformed hearts then our response is not fear our response is faith encourage pray Lord pray that you would help us to think through these things or to pray that you would enable us to call one another away from fear and into faith and career and we ask this in Jesus name Amen I was seeing some Christians who were becoming worried and frantic about the culture around them I've heard a lot of apocalyptic talk about well everything's falling apart - the church is in trouble all of that kind of language so that the collapse of the Bible Belt is bad for America in some ways but it's really good news for the advance of the gospel Jesus didn't give us the gospel to get America in line with the church Jesus gave us the gospel to get the church out of step with America that means reclaiming Christianity and all of its strangeness of bloody crosses urgent burns and empty tombs that's what really changes minds and hearts sometimes people assume that engaging the culture is what people who have cultural platforms - people are talking heads on TV at people who write books or those sorts of things every Christian is engaging the culture all the time you're having to decide how do I deal with that drug addicted neighbor of mine or how do I respond on social media to people who are saying things that make me angry that's the calling that Jesus has given to us to remain true to convictions not to negotiate that away but to be on mission with kindness and with gentleness but with the gospel in you whether you're you know talking on television or whether you're talking with your neighbor and a coffee shop the end goal is not to win an argument end goal is reconciliation to see people reconciled to God and reconciled to one and that that takes a a constant reminding of ourselves of what our mission is [Music] as we talk about the issues of where we are as a culture the the next question that we need to answer is where where do we go how do we move forward from here and I think we ought to look at a pastor scripture in the Gospel of Luke that is increasingly important in my own life something that God keeps driving me back to consistently that's in Luke 4 starting with verse 14 this is right after the temptation of Jesus by the devil in the wilderness and the Bible says this and Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee and a report about him went out through all the surrounding country and he taught in their synagogues being glorified by all and he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and as was his custom he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day and he stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given him he had rolled the scroll and found the place where it was written the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor he has sent me to proclaim Liberty to the captives and recovering of the sight of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and he sat down and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him and he began to say to them today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing and all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth and they said is not this Joseph's son and he said to them doubtless you will quote to me this proverb physician heal yourself what we've heard you did at Capernaum do here in your hometown as well and he said truly I say to you no prophet is acceptable in his hometown but in truth I tell you there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens were shut out three years and six months and a great famine came over all the land and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath than the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow and there were many lepers in Israel at the time of the Prophet Elisha and none of them was cleansed but only naman the Syrian and when they heard these things all in the synagogue were filled with wrath and they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill in which their town was built so that they could throw him down the cliff but passing through their midst he went away few years ago I found myself watching one of these prosperity gospel teachers on television and it was a husband and his wife and and they were sitting on these golden Thrones here teaching this prosperity gospel stuff and at one point the woman said you know the more I think of it even if Christianity were proven to be untrue I would still want to be a Christian because it's the best way to live now you can't translate that into Sudanese nobody who is facing the penalty of literal crucifixion for confessing the name of Christ would be able to say even if the bones of Jesus are still in the grave it's still the best way to live if Jesus is not risen that is a terrible way to live nobody would be able to understand that in China we're confessing Christ means that you are likely to lose your family ties and your marketability in the marketplace nobody would be able to confess that in order to understand what is happening with Christianity we have to free ourselves from the sort of came manageable nominal cultural Christianity that many of us have been accustomed to and to grow more familiar with the strangeness and freakishness of the gospel in the New Testament itself and the way that we see this is exactly with what's happening as Jesus is giving this inaugural sermon where he's summing up what what his message is going to be all about and that that's three facets that I think are going to be necessary for the church in the next generation the first is Kingdom Jesus stands up he reads the scroll from the prophet Isaiah and he says what matters to God he says God has sent me to proclaim good news God has anointed me with the spirit God is God has given me a word of freedom for those who are captive he has given me a recovery of sight to the blind he is proclaiming and he is teaching the kingdom of God everybody in that room is familiar with what he's talking about because they've been learning it for a long time because they've been taught to yearn for a coming kingdom that is easy to do when you're under Roman occupation and when you're in a place of great economic distress it is much harder to do if you're in an American context where there is little visible cost to following Christ part of the mission of what we have to do as the church in the next generation is to properly contextualize and I do not simply mean contextualizing to the present I mean contextualizing to the future when I was a kid watching Sesame Street one of the things is happening on Sesame Street is not just puppets teaching you letters you have a picture that was designed by the the the producers of Sesame Street in the 1970s of a neighborhood block that is made up of white people african-american people Hispanic people all together on the same city block all getting along and and responding to one another as equals on that city block most of the kids watching Sesame Street when that first came out never could have imagined that sort of a city block Sesame Street was not contextualizing two city blocks as they actually existed at the time Sesame Street said we want to reach the imaginations of children and show them something that they don't know right now so that they will be able to know what to what to want what to hope for that's exactly what we have been given as the church is not simply to contextualise to people as they are right now but to show them a picture of what the universe is meant to be in the kingdom of God we live in a world right now where the problem is we don't know what normal is because all we've ever known is a fallen universe in which the wicked one holds sway first John five and so our situation is kind of like that of an abused child who has to be told the situation that you're living in and that you have always lived in is not the way it's supposed to be until that child can understand that then that child is going to likely just repeat the errors that that child has seen because they'll assume this is just the way everybody lives this is just the way you're supposed to live we have a message of the kingdom that is coming in and as the Apostle Paul teaches in Romans groans at the wreckage all around us groans at the wreckage inside of us and longs for something different and explains what that difference is and the way Jesus does this here is not simply to talk about the kingdom he rolls up the scroll he hands it over and he says this has been fulfilled today in your hearing where is the kingdom of God the kingdom of God is in person in the person of Jesus Christ we have received the firstfruits of the kingdom because we have been united to and we have been joined to Jesus Christ so where is the kingdom right now the kingdom right now is where Jesus is ruling that is not over the entire world now God is sovereign over the entire world but when we're talking about the kingdom of God we're talking about the rule of God your kingdom come your what your will be done on earth as it is in heaven Jesus has not yet assumed that sort of lordship that sort of kingship over the outside world that's why the Apostle Paul teaches us in 1st Corinthians you are not yet Kings you do not have coercive power over those who are on the outside so where is Jesus now ruling it is within the church Ephesians chapter 1 he has given him as head over all things to the church the church is not just a gathering of people to come and receive instruction and to be discipled and to pool our money and our gifts together to do missions the church is an embassy a colony of the kingdom of God so that the outside world ought to see within the church a picture of what the kingdom of God will be like see it in multiple ways see it in terms of the makeup of the church people who are repentant sinners people who have experienced the new birth people who are reconciled to God every member of the church is an announcement to the outside world if you want to know what the kingdom of God is like this person is a future king or queen of the universe and that's also true in terms of the church taking on the characteristics of the kingdom in ways that are often at odds with the outside culture that's why the Apostle Paul is talking about in Ephesians and enrollments and in Galatians about the importance of having Jews and Gentiles reconciled to one another in the same body now if all you're wanting to do is to advance the message of Christianity that's kind of a counterproductive thing to do Jewish people and Gentile people don't Co hear very well in local congregations it would be much easier to have Jewish Christian congregations and Antiochian Gentile to a Christian congregations but the New Testament keeps insisting the dividing wall is down and the two are reconciled together within the church and why is that the case Ephesians chapter 3 because the church is a sign to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places if our churches are groups of people who are gathered together with the same racial ethnic political economic sameness that would be the case in the outside culture we are not testifying and announcing to the kingdom of God if we are gathered together with the same people we would be gathered together with even if Jesus were still dead we are not announcing the kingdom of God Jesus says the kingdom has come in person and where do you see the kingdom you see the Kingdom taking place when Jesus is calling together people and he is creating an outpost of the future kingdom of God so that when we gather together for worship what is happening is not just that we're kind of charging one another up for the week to come what is happening is that we're gathering together where two or three are gathered in my name I am there among you we are connecting ourselves Hebrews twelve and thirteen with an already existing worship service in the heavenly places we are coming to the Mount Zion and we are connecting not just with the people who are around us in the building we are connecting to the entire body of Christ to the entire kingdom of Christ it's not just one little gathering it is a massive cosmic gathering that we cannot see myriads and Myriad's of angels and the redeemed of all ages when we are exercising our gifts in the church this is not just things have to get done so Jesus equips people to do them Ephesians 4 tells us that it is spoi of war Jesus is demonstrating his kingship by granting gifts within the body of Christ so that as you are using your gifts you are learning what a little taste of what it means for you to ultimately rule and reign with Christ in the resurrection kingdom of God what that means is that we can't have the same priorities and the same leadership that we would have if the kingdom of God did not exist the church will be effective in the next generation not if we are assuring the rest of the world how much we are like the world but if we are demonstrating something distinctive not only in our doctrine but also in the way that we operate James is talking about this in James chapter 2 when he says with all the things going on in the culture around the church at the time you have coming persecution you have you have false teachers that are in the church James turns around and talks about seating arrangements and fashion that does not make sense and it certainly doesn't make sense because the problem that he's identifying seems like just common sense if you're planting a church in Seattle and you've got your little gathering of believers and you're putting up the chairs every Sunday morning and Bill Gates happens to walk in one Sunday morning and you're not going to say we're already full go sit in the overflow room and watch this on the video feed you're going to think to yourself if Bill Gates gets saved what an influence he is going to have over the rest of the world if Bill Gates gets saved and starts tithing think about the mission impact of all of that that only makes sense there they're identifying people because they're dressed in fine apparel they're people who have influence in the outside world and so it's only natural to say you come and sit right here James says don't you know that God has chosen the poor not just the economically poor the those who are powerless those who are vulnerable don't you know that God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith and what heirs of the kingdom he says if you if you only deal with people in terms of the power that they have right now you are short-sighted and if we really are transformed by the kingdom of God the way that is going to show up is not simply in the way that we talk about the kingdom of God though when we see for instance that hotel maid who's an immigrant who can barely speak English who is de cycling a corporate CEO because the hotel maid is a future Queen of the universe just as that Christian CEO is joint-heirs not only with one another but joint heirs with Christ and the maturity that this hotel maid has in Christ is is greater along than the CEO so the priorities and the values of the outside world are not what matters what matters is the future when we treat that child with Down syndrome in the congregation not as a charity project but as an intern for the kingdom of God as a future king of the universe then we are going to treat him with a dignity and we are going to signal to the outside world a long-term vision of the future now what that's going to mean is that often our congregations are not going to be very slickly packaged to the outside world because if the kingdom of God is made up of ex drug addicts and homeless people and people who are struggling with cognitive disabilities and people who are coming out of prostitution and every other situation that you can imagine then unpredictable things are going to happen and the outside world is often going to say why did you put this person here and why aren't you taking in our values that the supermodel shall inherit the kingdom the point Jesus comes in and announces the kingdom and everybody in the room assumes good the kingdom is coming to us which means we're poor we're oppressed we're captive and finally you're going to free us from Rome and Jesus says I want you to remember that there were all sorts of widows in the land and God went outside of the people of God to someone who was a Gentile there were all sorts of lepers in the land and God went to a Syrian the culture that God creates within the church is a culture that contradicts the priorities of the outside and it is a culture that is made up of unlikely people and unlikely situations Christianity is not genetic and if we understand that if we start seeing that that culture around us and if we start becoming patterned and we have our priorities shaped by that culture around us then what that's going to mean is that we're then going to have a better understanding of mission Jesus stands there and he keeps talking until he provokes a crisis which is what Jesus typically does whenever anyone agrees with what Jesus is saying it seems as though he cannot take yes for an answer he keeps going sell everything that you have and give it to the poor unless you eat my skin and drink my blood you can have nothing to do with me he keeps going until there's this point of this sounds freakish and weird and dangerous and I don't like it and that's what he does in his hometown he says you want me to be the hometown guy who comes in and rescues you and what I want to say to you is that that's not the way that God works and that God has a future for his kingdom and for his people and it might not be with you and that's the central problem for a lot of American Christians who are scared and frightened they believe that the future of the church must be quite suburban American Christianity and the kingdom of God says most of the body of Christ is not white is not suburban has never spoken English and that's just on earth much less in heaven Jesus says I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it but Jesus never says any particular Church will survive or thrive or any particular subculture will survive or thrive he says I will build I search once we get that understanding and once we start having this this cultural change within the body then we move forward and we move outward at the end of this Jesus after he provokes the crisis the people become so angry that they want to take him up and throw him off of the the precipice of the hill over the town and the text says but passing away he went out of their midst that's not the way I want that to end if I'm writing this and you've got a group of villagers trying to mob kill Jesus Christ I want to end it with him levitating off of the ground in a burst of light you know saying how do you like me now but he doesn't he just silently goes away why that looks kind of cowardly it's not cowardly Jesus is not running away from something Jesus is running towards something Jesus is going to the cross he is on a mission and what Jesus has said is that the mission that he already has he has now included us as the church in it which means that our engagement with the outside culture must be mission defined that that means that it includes what we say but it also includes how we say it I saw a study a few years ago about road rage it was done at Colorado State University and they were they were looking at how do you predict whether or not someone is going to be more susceptible to violence on the road road rage and they figured out you cannot predict that on the basis of the age of the driver the sex of the driver the ethnicity of the driver the economic status of the driver you can't predict that based on the kind of vehicle pickup trucks and not more likely to have road rage than Priuses are you can't judge that on the basis of how run now in the car is none of those things the only predictor is the presence of bumper stickers and it doesn't matter what the bumper sticker says it doesn't matter if it's practice random acts of kindness or my kid can beat up your honor student Jesus Saves or question authority it doesn't matter what the bumper sticker says is just if there are bumper stickers and the more bumper stickers there are the more likely that car is to have a driver who's involved in road rage now they said we don't know why but we can speculate that it's because nobody puts a bumper sticker on a car in order to persuade people there that's not a dialogue there's probably none of us in this room who have ever changed our minds on any issue on the basis of a bumper sticker all a bumper sticker does is to express oneself I want you to know that I'm the sort of person who is so irritated with Christianity that I'm going to taunt you and troll you by putting that Jesus fish with some little legs coming out of it and put Darwin on it and then the Christian guy who says I want you to know that I'm the kind of person who is so hacked off by your Darwin fish bumper sticker that I'm making another bumper sticker that has the Jesus fish eating the Darwin fish so I'm just going to out Darwin you with survival of the fittest its self expression and self identity that is precisely why we are living in a time when so much of what goes on around us is conflict and anger that's true in interpersonal relationships and it is true within churches and it is true within cultures because the issue especially when you think about the issue of Christians interacting with non-christians on the outside especially with non-christians who disagree with us vehemently and who disagree with us sometimes with with hatred the issue isn't about Jesus Jesus doesn't need us to defend him he's feeling fine the issue is that we become angry because you're saying I'm stupid or you're saying I'm evil and we then arm ourselves to the teeth in order to defend ourselves and yet the New Testament is consistently warning us the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome that does not mean the Lord servant must not fight Jesus Pike's Paul fights Peter fights it means the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome the Lord's servant must not love to fight the Lord's servant must not fight in order to fight with ignorant controversies as Paul says it means that the Lord's servant must correct opponents second Timothy chapter two but correct opponents how with kindness and with gentleness why because of the kingdom of God because of the mission of seeing people reconciled to God if you are a joint heir with Christ and if you have waiting for you and inheritance and a rule and a reign with Jesus over the entire universe in a way that you cannot understand right now Jesus does not reveal it to you because it would not make sense to you right now because you are not in a stage of development where you can understand it yet if that is true then what do you have to be afraid of and backed up in a siege mentality about the angriest Christians in American culture right now our Christians who have lost confidence in the gospel they believe and they've internalized the narrative of the opponents of Christianity who say that Christianity is being left behind and that you're on the wrong side of history and that you're ultimately going to be done away with and what happens when you feel pinned in the devil is the one who rages all the more because he knows his time is short you've got a kid in kindergarten and he wins kindergarten class president it's great to bring him in and congratulate him give him a take and if you've got a kid in kindergarten who wants to be elected in that little class president thing and he's not it's okay to bring him in and you'll hug him and tell him it's going to be okay but at that same kid when he's 45 is introducing himself hey I'm Todd Blankenship president of the learning play kindergarten class of 20 whatever he's a loser and if that 45 he is still railing about how that thing was rigged back there at the learn and play kindergarten class he's a loser your future is not the next 30 40 50 60 70 80 a hundred years you have trillions and trillions and trillions of years in front of you and you are on the winning side of the universe so that ought to give us the kind of confidence to enable us to speak with kindness and gentleness because we do not have anything to be threatened by and it also means that if we're on a mission if our goal is the goal of Jesus who did not come into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved then our engagement with the outside world needs to ultimately be moving toward reconciliation reconciliation with God reconciliation with one another we are not here to condemn we are here to call to repentance and to call to repentance through faith in Jesus Christ how does that happen that does not happen by winning an argument that does not happen by having massive amounts of information there are very few people probably in this room who came to Christ the first time that you ever heard the gospel and they're probably even fewer of you in this room who came to Christ because you learned a new piece of information oh so there were 500 witnesses to the resurrection see I didn't know that I thought it was just those two women know what happened what happened most of you heard the message of the gospel over and over over again and then one moment when you heard it somehow it was different and the response that you had was oh my god I'm undone this is me I'm a sinner have mercy on me that's the power of the Holy Spirit opening up hearts and shining into the darkness the message that you and I are carrying into the world right now brings with it that kind of power which means that we need to talk about the Justice of God and if we do not if we do not talk about the justice of God and the wrath of God if we do not define what sin is we are not loving people because we are not calling people to war repentance that leads to reconciliation but we never stop there we continue with the offer of mercy and it changes the way that we see people and the way that we talk to people because the person that you're talking to is not your ultimate opponent the person that you're talking to very well maybe your future brother or sister in Christ and not only that the reason that Christians fret about this issue of is Christianity dying is because they assume that Christianity is us and they don't understand the new birth how is the little persecuted church in Syria in the first century ever going to be able to thrive when it is dealing with persecution they're probably praying about that in that church in Syria in the first century they're probably wondering what's our future be they would have never dreamed the answer is going to be the persecute or who is coming to destroy you Saul of Tarsus never went to Vacation Bible School and yet he is turned in an instant by the power of the gospel and he becomes the missionary presence that sends the gospel forward into the future Augustine of Hippo in the early centuries of the church was a sexual revolutionary more experienced than most of the sexual revolutionaries you've ever seen and was a member of a cult and God used him to bring the gospel rocketing out of Africa all over the world if you went back in a time machine and met CS Lewis in the early part of his life he would have been the sort of person that probably would have made most American Christians so angry that they would have been you know posting Internet comments about it and yet God used him to be the great apologist of the 20th century if you really understand the mission of God and if you really understand that God does not divide the world up into moral people and immoral people he sees the world as sinners undone offered mercy through the blood of Christ and that everyone you're talking to is hiding behind something from the presence of God and they're just hiding behind different things but you have the power of God unto salvation then you're going to speak in a way that maintains both proof and grace both conviction and kindness and you're going to understand the next Billy Graham might be passed out drunk right now at the University of Texas you know the next the next great missionary leader of the church might be running an abortion clinic right now the person who will lead your grandchild to faith in Christ might be marching at the front of a gay pride parade right now the person that God uses to spark revival across the world might be the person driving in front of you right now with the born just right the first time bumper sticker if we see that and we recognize that then we do not give up on the call to repentance and we do not give up on speaking a word that ultimately leads to reconciliation and we do that without being fearful we're a minority sure we always have men but open your eyes that you can see hills filled with angels and chariots of fire all around Christianity is not dying Christianity is just getting started let's pray or I pray that you would give us hearts that love the world around us hearts that break for the people around us would you enable us to speak not only what Jesus has given us to speak but to speak it the way that he speaks it not just to speak Christian truths but to speak with a Christian accent and we asked this Lord in Jesus name Amen we're coming in with a few quick things before we start our question-and-answer if you have a device with you a phone an iPad whatever pull it out because I want you to have the opportunity to participate in this QA I want you to pull it out go to your Safari or whatever it might be SLI dot do SLI do and as soon as that screen pops up you can type in TVC as soon as you type in TVC that will connect you to our forum where we're asking questions and you're going to see there's already a lot of good questions that have been asked but there's I want you to ask more Steven asked more as we're going through the questions and you can also vote you'll see that a lot of the questions that are popular getting votes if you want to see a question asked please just like it that way we know that that a lot of you guys want it to be asked and we'll try to do that I also want to make a quick note if you asked a question that doesn't get answered it's not because we don't think it's a good question that might be it but it also might be it'll it also might be just because we don't have time to get to it we're trying to keep things in a certain kind of stream of thought so if you have a question that doesn't get answered please find one of the pastors either here or at your campus when this is done so that you can have your question answered we want to be available to answer those questions for you so go ahead and just find one of us afterwards we're not trying to neglect you we're not trying to to not answer your question so go ahead and ask us I should have said this in the intro but I'm going to go ahead and say it now if you were at the group leader conference last night you already know this if you weren't I guess this is for you this is a book that dr. Moore just wrote and it's actually releasing today when we were trying to plan this forum we knew that it was going to be coming out in August we wanted to try to coordinate it with released this book because first dr. Moore is one of the best writers I've ever read he writes with was kind of an articulation and style that's very readable and helpful but also as he was in the forms of its precise he doesn't mince words you know exactly where he stands on an issue if your palette was wet today at all in terms of how do we engage the culture without losing the gospel would encourage you to get this book because I think it's going to be helpful and it released today if you're if you were at the group's conference last night you receive this if you didn't we have a few extra just for group leaders but if not go ahead and pick this up if it's just releasing today so if we think dr. Moore one more time just for being with us we have about 25 minutes for some questions and answers so we're going to go ahead and jump right in first question I wanted to ask you dr. Moore it's just tell us a little bit more about the book what was the impetus and the heart behind the publication of writing this book well it was it was because I was encountering a lot of Christians who were either fearful and worried or Christians who assume that the the depth of your conviction is seen in how frantically you scream at the world around you and so that was as thinking about that I just was really trying to preach to myself first and then from that fantástico this is one of the first questions that came in from the audience says this if we're citizens of another Kingdom why try to legislate Christian morality in the kingdom of America if we're citizens of another Kingdom why try to legislate Christian morality in the kingdom of America to what degree should we try to do that and should we go as far as making sin illegal we should not make sin illegal we should make it we should make crimes illegal which is a distinction that the scripture makes Romans 13 says that we have a responsibility to make sure that evil doing is is punished and that public order is maintained so there is no there is no sense of wanting to legislate Christian morality as a matter of fact Apostle Paul tells us in 1st Corinthians chapter 5 we do not judge the outside world we judge those who are on the inside in within the church that does not mean though that we that we say we have no responsibility for love of neighbor for a public order for the common good as a matter of fact the scripture says if we don't we're held accountable for that because people in the United States of America in a Democratic Republic are Caesar the ultimate ground of authority Caesar is given a sword to use rightly so if what Christians do is to come in and say we're going to we're going to use the law in order to make people into pretend Christians we have no authority to do that on the other hand we also have no authority to say that those those issues of common good that God's embedded in the consciences of all people that we shouldn't care about those things and we should simply say let let public order descend into chaos yeah interesting I think that's exactly right here a lot of people often saying you can't legislate morality and there's a sense in which that's true yeah but you also can to legislate you over you're always legislating from yeah that's exactly right all legislation is based in some kind of understanding of what's true what's good and how humans are going to flourish and sometimes sometimes we're building alliances on on issues of public good with people who are motivated from different reasons but we're motivated toward the same thing so for instance I will work often with radical feminists on issues of sex trafficking and pornography because now I come to it where the conscience is shaped informed by the gospel she comes to it with a conscience that is shaped informed by an understanding of a patriarchy that oppresses women we both agree that trafficking women degrades women harms women and that there's a responsibility to protect women from that but we have different we have different ultimate motivations as to how we get there that's a great point and I actually wanted to ask you a question about this so and that's a perfect example in some sense we can link arms with others who are legislating for morality who probably aren't exactly where we would be on a lot of other issues but it's right and good for us to link arms with them what might be some other examples of how evangelical Christians can be linking arms with other groups or people who are all working towards the same goal and is there any even currently happening right now where that is well I mean one of the problems in in our contemporary context is that politics tends to make people crazy and one of the ways that it makes people crazy is that politics becomes kind of the equivalent of your sports team and so this is my team and they're they're always right and don't criticize them and so what we want to do is to kind of adopt political leaders as spiritual leaders or we want to adopt political ideologies as as equivalent to almost religions so if we if we have an idea of ourselves as being Kingdom citizens first then that means that we have a category for somebody who has wisdom and justice in the public order and I do not want to be instructed from him or her on theology and it also means that we're able to say people who we disagree with and we can agree on some things we can work with them on those some things as long as we're clear about where we disagree and even the people that we agree with if you if there is a politician or a political party that you agree with on everything without exception then it might be that you're simply being shaped and formed by that politician or political party and it might be that you have you have raised that to the level of inerrancy and authority in a way that that it shouldn't be so even the people that we agree with on most things disagree with on some things people we disagree with we can work with on various things for instance on issues of religious liberty and religious freedom that's been going on from the very beginning of this country where evangelical Christians were linking arms with for instance Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson would never be allowed to teach a small group Bible study at the village shirt nor should be and and these early evangelicals knew that but they said he's going to make sure that the state is not trying to legislate religious conviction out of existence so we're going to cooperate and we're going to work with him but we're not going to have any illusions that he's some sort of a spiritual mascot that's fantastic this has been a really popular question caleb has asked us to what level should we be verbal in our communication of sin for the political and social sphere of our country ie should be involved in social media blogs demonstrations etc how can we have should we engage you you should always be keeping in mind Romans chapter 3 where both justice and justification are together all the time so if if there are some people who would say well let's let's not address issues where we're going to be pointing out sin in other people if you're doing that you're not carrying out not only the great commission you're not carrying out love of neighbor you know when you're doing that but if all you're doing is pointing out sin and condemnation and you're not starting and ending with the gospel then then you're in a dangerous place I think you have to constantly be watching that and then you have to be asking yourself is this particular venue a dangerous place for me I was in you know restaurant the other day and I was thinking about a friend that I have who couldn't have been in that restaurant because he is an alcoholic and for him being in a place where he's going to see somebody walking by with it with a tray full of full of drinks is just it's it he knows he doesn't yet have the level of self control to be able to do this is I'm not going to go in a place where that's going to be happening doesn't doesn't bother me because that's not my particular point of weakness I've got other points that he doesn't have for some people they need to say social media is too great a temptation for me because it drives me into a quarrelsome sort of spirit and so I'm not the person to do that as of I saw a friend of mine say the other day on Twitter all God's children aren't supposed to be on Twitter I think there's some out of truth to that so you have to or in the comment section to blog well I don't think any of God's children are called to be in the comment section of all amen amen or to even read them surprised yes that's exactly right okay the plano campus has asked us this is there any hope and this is obviously a very pressing topic for our country right now with the release of some videos and kind of a movement to to defund Planned Parenthood is there a hope for ending abortion in our country what's the most effective way for Christians to advocate for change yes there's hope for ending abortion in this country in the same way that there was there was hope for the abolition of slavery which certainly seemed to be an impossible endeavor at the time but the way that we do it is with a multi-pronged approach where we're dealing both with the question of of justice why is it wrong to take the life of an innocent human being with an emphasis speaking to the conscience about human dignity and counteracting the idea that people are valuable based upon their usefulness I mean just just think about just think about the language that is being used often for unborn children well they're not viable yet meaning they can't live outside the womb none of us are viable an unborn child is living in an ecosystem of womb and always will be you cannot survive autonomously without air and water and food and so your your womb simply changes as you go through life we talk about what human dignity is then we address issues of issues of ministry speaking with and to pregnant women in crisis helping to deal with the situations that they face and as we do that we're speaking with a gospel priority that again has both justice and justification sometimes this is especially true when right now among certain age groups one out of every three women have had an abortion so sometimes Christian will say well then if we speak about what happens in abortion and the violence of abortion where we're going to be harming but the conscience is of those women but the problem for women who have had abortions and for men who paid for abortions is that there already is the conscience that is speaking to them the way that you free the conscience is not by driving it underground the way that you free the conscience is by saying everything that you're being accused of is true and it's right but if you are in Christ then you have already been indicted you have already been executed you have already been to hell and you've been raised to newness of life so that when God views you he does not see that woman who had the abortion or that man who paid for the abortion he sees you exactly as he sees Jesus Christ this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased we have to emphasize that at every point maybe just a follow-up question based upon that at the village church we work with several organizations that are actively trying to participate in in women's care and caring for those who might be considering those kinds of things but also as individuals how much individuals get involved in terms of maybe having family members who've paid for or had abortions or are thinking about it or getting involved in the community that means sometimes it feels like such a big issue how and we can maybe do some things as a church or as a home group or small group how can I get involved in participating in even ending abortion well the pro-life issue is essentially James 1:27 care for widows and orphans in their distress a widow is a vulnerable woman and what we're dealing with are vulnerable women in situations of crisis and an orphan is a fatherless child a defenseless child unborn children are orphans so what we have to say is how do we how do we use the diversity of gifts within within the body of Christ to minister in various areas so there are some people that God has equipped with being able to work in in the public square to be able to call for for justice and to work toward justice there are other people that God is called to be able to they have medical expertise and so they're able to work in Pregnancy Resource Centers and showing sonograms other people that God has equipped to be able to be counselors of women who are considering abortion on men who are or pressuring women into having abortion and sometimes it seems to me this isn't always the case but many times God will use women or men who have repented of abortion and have been cleansed to the sin of abortion to be able to then minister to those who are considering this so there's that other people God is is calling to welcome into their homes a pregnant young woman or God is calling them to adopt her to foster a child there are all sorts of ways that are there that's that's so I think you just have to ask God what are you calling me to do and then I think what God's calling the church to do is to speak truthfully and prophetically but also to make sure that within our own congregations we are sending the message to young women if you are pregnant we are not going to respond with a sense of shock and and sends you out in shame and disgust that's empowering Planned Parenthood when we do that and so we're standing up and talking about here's what happens but if we have pregnant young women our church and here's how we're going to care for you and to do that and when when other women in the community see that model it then becomes then become significant important great this is another popular question coming from our Dallas campus you've already addressed this to some extent but I think it's such an important question that a lot of us are asking probably more inputs at least sometimes in explicitly I want I want you to address it again they ask this what does it look like for the church to engage culture honestly but also lovingly as opposed to conforming so we conforming to it are we declaring all-out war against the culture because we're not doing either of this thing so what what can we do you follow Jesus and you you respond the way that he does which means kind of a good barometer for me is if we're engaging culture with kindness and with conviction that does not mean that we're going to avoid conflict it means it's going to double your conflict so there going to be some people who are going to hate the conviction and some people who are going to hate the kindness so if you're not kind of receiving criticism in stereo you ought to ask well maybe I'm not maybe I'm not I'm not bringing forward both grace and truth at the same time and so I think that's a pretty good barometer of what's of what's going on and also to recognize know you people that you're talking with who disagree with you are typically going to be a long-term project not a we're settling this today at the Starbucks and so you maintain those relationships you speak truthfully and honestly and recognize that most often the way that people change happens along the lines of what Jesus told us about with the prodigal son he goes away to the far country there's a famine that comes into the land and he comes to a point of crisis and then he comes to himself and he goes back to his to his father's house we have to recognize those times of crisis comes in people's lives they have to have somewhere to come back to and we have to be willing to receive repentance I was I've seen situations where there have been people who have repented and the immediate response is oh yeah really believe you now on that the father in the prodigal son narrative doesn't receive the son back and say oh yeah when the famine hits now you're ready for some fatted calf aren't you no it receives them back and we have to model that - that's right this question comes in this kind of deals with the myth of progression that you've talked about in terms of history this question asked this this generation our generation claims to be the most enlightened of all time it's kind of this idea that whichever age we're living in is really the best ever right he asks this but to disagree in any way with our culture is to be seen as hateful how do we approach this mentality of engaging the culture without being seen as hateful of well you know people ask that all the time how do we address issues particularly sexuality because we're living in a culture right now that is obsessed with sexuality the culture assumes the church is obsessed with sexuality it's the culture that's obsessed with sexuality and that's why that's why for instance oh I'll have journalists that will say why doesn't the church care about a broader range of issues we'll say well here's what we care about we care about helping the poor we care about conserving the creation we care about racial justice we care about others list through thing yeah but what about sex what about homosexuality what about whatever so you're you're going to receive that people will say how do we do that in a way that doesn't make us look bigoted I'm not worried about whether or not you look bigoted I'm worried about whether or not you are bigoted so if you hold to if you hold to a Christian message people are going to recoil from that they always have and they're going to recoil from that at the places where their consciences are the most tender Jesus says in John 3 the light comes into the world and people hate the light and love the darkness because their deeds are evil people are scared of a message that says there is ultimate accountability for that there is judgement because they know it it's embedded it so you're going to receive that you you can't though respond when people say you're hateful and a bigot by saying okay well then I'll act like one you keep a kind of tranquility that isn't worried so much about what you're labeled as but is still willing both to engage people honestly and to lovingly and to lovingly minister to I think the example the best example I think in Scripture is Jesus with the Samaritan woman where in John 4:16 he says woman go get your husband he knows what's going on he tells her what's going on she doesn't want to talk about the fact that she's had five husbands and the man she's living with right now is her husband Jesus goes there because he knows that in order to get to reconciliation he has to get at the issue of her sin but he doesn't stop there go get your husband and come here both of those two things have to be present all the time it's great I think we have time for at least one more perhaps to look into this one there's several examples I think of this culturally that were going to be faced with probably at an even increasing rapidity the question is this how should we as parents but I think this applies to much more than just parents deal with the evident rising popularity of people becoming transgender at an early age I mean we kind of we're walking through the normalization of homosexuality in our culture now there's kind of this normalization of trim transgenderism I can think of dozens of cultural examples right now - that would serve as test case in here how can parents deal with this issue that seems to be coming faster investors well I mean the first thing you have to recognize is that this is an alternative spirituality aborts anything else this is this is a theology that assumes that there is a there is a disconnect between the self and the body so the body is not me the body is is something that I am driving and I am I am using almost like a machine that's not new I mean that's what the early Gnostic teachers were teaching is they're trying to come into the church and the apostle john is is knocking that down so there's a mentality that that i'm alienated from my my biological sex because it is wrong and i can use technological mastery and in one way or the other in order to fix that so that my self corresponds but you have to understand that and know that and then to recognize that because that is happening in in the culture that there are going to be a lot of decisions that kids are going to feel like they have to make that they never had to make before so if if once sexual identity and then gender identity becomes central and core to who you are so you are your sexual desires and you are how you feel about your gender then you're going to have kids who are going to have to ask the question am i really a boy or a girl in the way that previous generations never did so a girl who in a previous generation just what it would have been considered a Tom girl you know a girl who doesn't like stereotypically feminine things she likes to she likes to do things that the more of the boys in her peer group like or a boy who's especially sensitive now the the question that they have to weigh is well does this mean that I'm really the opposite gender that's a that's a tragic situation for people to be and I think the way that we combat that is first of all with teaching about what the Bible teaches about what gender is you're created male and female also helping to undo stereotypical views of masculinity and femininity there's a there is a duplicate definition of masculinity and femininity but that does not not necessarily measure up with what the culture defines as masculinity and femininity so if you you've got that girl in your home and she doesn't like princesses you know and she doesn't like that but but she she wants to she wants to hike and fish and you know build a tree house that doesn't mean that she's not feminine affirm her in her femininity and you've got that you've got that boy in your home who doesn't like to play sports he sees into playing the piano and he's he's especially okay that doesn't mean that he's feminine that means he's masculine in in that way affirm that masculinity within him and then be ready to receive people you're transgender neighbors many of them really believe that this transformation is going to lead to happiness and it doesn't we have to be the people who are able to receive them when they come back and say is there something more than this which means we don't back down about what the scripture teaches about about gender it also means that we recognize all of us are sinners but none of us are freaks and one of the responses that I think that many people have towards gender persons is a kind of ridicule making fun of them you know those sorts of Bruce Jenner jokes and and those sorts of things that go on that is not consonant with the gospel when someone says that he or she is transgender what that person is saying to you is I feel alienated from some aspect of my creatureliness you know how to deal with that because you have the same issue that's right all of us are alienated from some aspect or other of our creatureliness because all of us are born in sin distanced from our Creator and so how do you address that you address that with the gospel and then you address that with a community of people in the church who are not afraid and who are willing to bear up one another and where the strong bearing up the weak so you have that man who believes himself to be a woman and is coming to you and says I want to follow Christ what you need are the men of the congregation to be with him and around him not freaked out by him and able to disciple him and the same thing with the women and I think that's that's the way forward and it's not ultimately sustainable the the problem with what's going on with the transgender thing is is freedom from limits which is exactly what was happening in Eden it's not sustainable and so we're going to have a lot of refugees from the sexual revolution and we just have to be ready for them that's right thank you that's so hopeful we've run out of time so I'm sorry if we didn't get to your question but will you join me in thanking dr. Moore for his time with us this morning thank you let me let me close this in a brief word prayer father we pause with hearts of gratitude and humility and thankfulness for this morning we're grateful that your spirit was amongst us convicting and teaching and guiding us into all truth we're grateful for the Ministry of dr. Moore the work that's being accomplished through the ER Elsie and his willingness to be with us I just pray again as I begun us that you would find the village church its pastors its ministers its homegroup leaders its members and even attendees who are faithful believers in Lord Jesus Christ be faithful gospel witnesses in these trying times in the days ahead I pray that you would give us convictional kindness as dr. Moore talks about while the same time recognizing were no longer and never probably were a moral majority but rather a prophetic minority give us a voice in this culture that speaks the words of Christ the words of life that have the ability to regenerate the soul and make dead people alive and we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord amen

Channel: The Village Church Resources

Views: 5,223

Rating: 3.8888888 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Chandler, The Village Church, Is Christianity Dying?, RUSSELL MOORE, Forums

Id: 1ZOkJcBKuhI

Length: 114min 17sec (6857 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2017