God Our Vision, Culture Our Context
The American church is on the forefront of encountering this modernized world. How it should manage this engagement, though, has become its most perplexing dilemma. And it is also its most urgent challenge. Clearly, it has often been tempted to adapt Christian faith to this context, rather than to confront the context where that is required. Instead of becoming an alternative view of life, Christian faith has often become an echo, in many ways, of what is happening in this kind of modernized culture.
Jesus would be surprised to see how easy the kingdom of God has become as we have made ourselves relevant to the culture.
There are, in fact, gut-wrenching changes taking place in our western societies. Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoes might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.
That is why we must come back to our first principles. And the most basic of these is the fact that God is there and that he is objective to us. He is not there to conform to us; we must conform to him. He summons us from outside of ourselves to know him. We do not go inside of ourselves to find him.
We are summoned to know him only on his terms. He is not known on our terms. This summons is heard in and through his Word. It is not heard throu our intuitions.
God in the Whirlwind
by: David F. Wells
mclainbill.com 