Never Let Go of the Gospel

This is a rant.  Consider yourself warned.

We live in what may be the most opulent, gluttonous, self-aggrandizing, selfish, arrogant civilization on the face of the earth.  We bear children not as the natural fruit of loving covenant and an expression of God’s providence, but because we decide we’re “ready” and we “want” them.  We have unfettered access to stores of knowledge beyond our remotest sense of comprehension.  We set aside a decade for “adolescence” in which we grant almost-unfettered economic freedom with near-total liberty from legal, moral, and cultural responsibility, and consider it destructive to impede the total moral free-agency of these formless and void wanderers. All but a sliver of the severely destitute live with conveniences and luxuries beyond the imaginations of millennia of the world’s wealthiest men, and many of the world’s people even today.

Living in that kind of world, I can’t see how anyone can open their Bible, stand up in front of hundreds (or thousands) of gathered believers on a Sunday morning, keep a straight face, and tell them how to have an even more comfortable, fulfilling future.  I don’t see how someone can look at himself in the mirror after telling an eager flock of God’s people that the Apostle Paul, writing to them from a prison cell, clothed in rags, and nearing the end of his life at the hands of a pagan government, wants them to be “winners” according to the exact same measure of “success” used by that pagan government (money, influence, popularity, power).  I am dumbfounded at the rush to remove from Christian believing every burden which might actually mark us as “Christian”, and their replacement with burdens of trend-chasing, status hoarding, and cultural conformity.

I say all of these things as a guy who loves churches that “understand the times”, that engage with culture in their forms and language and structure and outreach, that minister to practical needs, that produce well-balanced intelligible influential Christians to the glory of God.  I’m just getting quite fed up with the ease with which the unnegotiable first things are “swept under the rug” or treated as of “secondary importance” to those things which, frankly, are passing away.

Never, ever, ever let go of the gospel.  Never, ever, ever stop preaching the goodness of God, the awfulness of our sin, the awesomness of God’s judgement, the sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion, the power of Christ’s resurrection, or the responsibility we bear as His representatives and body here on the earth.  Never, ever, ever think there’s anything more important than that to put in front of your people.

Okay, end of rant.  I feel better.  Don’t you?