God's Revelation Rejected

Have you ever felt like you needed to modify what the Bible says just a little bit and then a certain person would come to Christ? Doesn't it seem like there's a new standard emerging where churches have to put on a cutting-edge entertainment program to have good "worship," or to reach people? The church is often tempted to try to make themselves and Jesus look as cool and appealing to the world as possible. This is usually done with good intentions. We want to see people come to faith in Jesus. The problem is that this will tend to lead us to compromise in some way- whether in how we worship corporately, what we share from God's Word, or in the way we conduct ourselves in daily life before the watching world.

Eugene Peterson speaks to this issue in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. He calls it trying to "catch the admiring eye of the world." "The World is a seductive place, " he says. "Once we begin to cater to its interests, appeal to its curiosities, shape our language to its idioms and syntax, embrace its criteria of relevance, we abandon our basic orientation." He reminds us that the scriptures and history are full of the reality that far more people in the world have rejected God's revelation of Himself than have accepted it. Consider what Jesus said about this,

"If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also." (John 15:19-20)

So it's safe to infer from this that gaining the worlds approval in any significant way probably means that we're straying from our Master. Peterson says that if we want to be in on what God is doing and be a faithful witness for Him, "we will have to give up pretensions of shaping an organization that the world will think is wonderful..." We've already been warned in so many ways that we will be rejected, so let's come to terms with that so that we won't be at risk of belonging to the world and leading people to rest their faith on something other than the truth and power of God.

"My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power." (1 Cor. 2:4-5)