JR. Forasteros - November 13, 2011
TBA
In witnessing the collapse of institutions Western culture has put our faith in for the last 500 years, we are despairing more and more as a society. Christians who are choosing to live in this world as Exiles, however, know that this is actually Good News because God is doing something new. We can feel the despair our culture feels as we mourn for the loss of what used to give us safety and security. But we can't stay there. We must choose to live by faith, to believe God's promises that This is Not the End!
From Series: "This is Not the End"
We often look at the way our culture is headed and lament what we've lost. But God is preparing something new, something better. By listening to the voices of Israelites who lived after the Exile, we can learn how to hope in God's new thing. Because this is not the End!
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I was my high school biology teacher’s worst nightmare.
Not because I was good at biology – I really wasn’t. But because I walked in on the first day of class and warned him, “If you’re going to teach evolution, we’re going to have problems.”
And sure enough, on the day it came time to teach Evolution, I was locked and loaded.
My church had prepared me to go into my public school ready to defend my faith! It’s what Christians call ‘apologetics’, which for me growing up meant being able to out-argue all the atheists and scientists I encountered. I had to defend God’s honor.
The only minor complication was that my science teacher was also a Christian. I can still remember the pained look on his face as he taught biological evolution to our class as I sat loading my rhetorical clip with all the ammo my church had sent me with.
I saw myself as a righteous warrior.
I was preaching God’s Honest Truth to my class, holding back the tide of godless lies flooding out of our textbooks and off the chalkboard.
It never occurred to me to wonder why my classmates didn’t seem grateful, why none of them seemed even the least bit curious to meet this God I was so stridently defending.
It never occurred to me to wonder whether God found my defense particularly helpful.
I want to talk a little bit about apologetics, about how Christians go about defending our faith. Because if you look around, or listen to some of the loudest Church leaders, you’d think our sole mission is to stand against a sweeping tide of secularism and pluralism and fight back.
That approach is all wrong. God doesn’t now nor has God ever needed us to defend anything. And if there’s any account we are to offer the world, it’s a self-sacrificial, vulnerability that invites those outside the faith to come closer to God. Today, we’re going to find a vision for how we interact with our friends, neighbors, coworkers and family who don’t share our faith.
