Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.
In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin, and forgiveness, death and life.
God made man small and the universe big to say something about Himself…The disproportion between us and the universe is a parable about the disproportion between us and God. And it is an understatement. But the point is not to nullify us but to glorify Him.
It is impossible to forgive someone if you feel superior to him or her.
It’s great to be reminded of how much is packed into two verses you might otherwise glaze over. How often do we do any of these?
“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.”—1 Corinthians 15:1-2
Thanks to Justin Taylor for posting this.
[I originally wrote this for another blog in February 2010]
Last week the PEW Forum released a study on religion among the Millenials (those aged 18-29). Here are some of the findings.
While 86% of of young evangelicals are certain in their belief in God, more than half believe that people can go to heaven without Jesus.
The results also show that Millenials are more apt to believe in heaven than hell.
The Root
A couple things that we can say about these findings are that we see a continued decline in orthodox Christian belief that is more than likely the effect of our culture’s pluralism and moralistic therapeutic deism (as diagnosed by Christian Smith from Notre Dame). Here are the traits he associates with that worldview.
Less Compelling Than Flattery
“It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness.”
–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 88.
Not only are those who don’t know Jesus lost, it’s clear that a growing number within the church are lost as well.
… Where Christian faith is offered as a means of finding personal wholeness rather than holiness, the church has become worldly.
There are many other forms of worldliness that are comfortably at home in the evangelical church today. Where it substitutes intuition and feelings for biblical truth, it is being worldly. Where its appetite for the Word has been lost in favor of light discourses and entertainment, it is being worldly. Where it has restructured what it is and what it offers around the rhythms of consumption, it is being worldly, for customers are actually sinners whose place in the church is not to be explained by a quest for self-satisfaction but by a need for repentance. Where it cares more about success than about faithfulness, more about size than spiritual health, it is being worldly. Where the centrality of God to worship is lost amidst the need to be distracted and to have fun, the church is being worldly because it is simply accommodating itself to the preeminent entertainment culture in the world. Is it not odd that in so many church services each Sunday, services that are ostensibly about worshiping God, those in attendance may not be obliged to think even once about his greatness, grace, and commands? Worship in such contexts often has little or nothing to do with God.
