Dallas is a city without walls. I am thankful and take comfort in the fact that if America dissolved tomorrow, and Texas was no more, and Dallas ceased to exist, that Christ is still building His Church, and He will continue building it. Yet, I can’t help but believe that Dallas…that America is the way it is because we have let it become this way. We have let the our city and nation become effectively spiritually defenseless. We have done this through our own laziness and complacency. Through anti-intellectualism and through legalism and moral relativism. Through our quest to make the gospel and the people of God culturally relevant. Through our attempts to emulate the world, we have allowed the church to lose its effectiveness. We have allowed Christianity to become shallow and mocked in the name of looking “cool.”
Now, I don’t have anything against a light show and quality sound. In fact, if God graces a church with such abilities, then be good stewards and use them as appropriate. But if that’s all that is, if it’s all attractional and not incarnational. If it’s all “Come see how cool we are” and not “See how differently we live” then we have lost the essence of what it means to follow Christ. If we boil Christianity down to a church service once a week and a youth/college group hang out on Wednesday, then we have diluted the power of the gospel.
We have GOT to get back to the roots of the gospel. Paul teaches that the gospel is the very power of God (Rom. 1:16-17). The Greek word for “power” is the root word for “dynamite.” It’s explosive! Not only that, but the Greek indicates a new type of power, a kind the world has never seen. It is relevant in and of itself because it has the power to pervade culture and change lives, without any additives. It doesn’t need to be dressed up to look “cool” to bring people to Christ and to sustain them. It needs to be preached and taught as the unfiltered, explicit gospel. YES, it needs to be preached and taught with WORDS. It NEEDS to be SPOKEN. It also needs to be LIVED. It needs to be reflected in our lives and spoken by our lips.
The world doesn’t need relevance. It needs to see Christ as most beautiful. It doesn’t need to see the Church as “cool,” it needs to see the Church being transformed by the power of the gospel. It needs to see the body of Christ being reconciled to God and to each other. It needs to see true, authentic community bearing one another’s burdens instead of people who flake out at the first sign of trouble. It needs to see husbands and wives devoting themselves to Christ, each other, their family, and their church. It needs to see fathers investing in the lives of their children on every level, especially spiritually.
The world needs to see us combat our own sin and idolatry. The world needs to see Christ as the uppermost of our affections. It needs to see the gospel proclaimed and defended with love and grace.
Soli Deo Gloria
