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Love him or hate him, Mark Driscoll is reaching people for Christ. Although many think he is too harsh with is language and controversial preaching. I say, “No he’s right on track.” I myself listen to his podcast quite regularly. He is speaking out on topics that most pastors do not want to talk about whether out of fear of making people mad, losing members, or they are just plane cowards.
Pastors find themselves in a very strange place now days in the church world. In that nobody wants to hear about God getting angry at the sin in their lives. Rather what ten things can we do in our lives to have “our best life now.” What pastors have to realize (and I am one of them) is that preaching the gospel is not easy or pretty at times. We are supposed to tell the congregation what the consequences of sin are. We are to tell the people what God likes and dislikes in their lives and most importantly it is to be Christ centered. Since when did preaching the gospel ever become about succeeding in life, making everyone like you, gaining wealth, and so on?
I think what stumps most evangelicals concerning Mark Driscoll and others like him is we find it hard to believe that someone can be relevant in today’s culture and at the same time be biblically conservative. I think why this stumps so many is because we ourselves want to be just like that: being relevant to the ever changing world to reach them, while still holding on to our conservative biblical truths.
Instead of letting these two topics stump us we need to be asking ourselves, is there anything here that I can learn from? I don’t think Mark Driscoll is being culturally relevant just to be cool, but rather he is trying to answer the tuff questions that the cultural is asking – that other pastors don’t want to touch. Like sex & sexuality, alcohol, what it means to be a real godly man or godly woman and so on.
A lot of what Mark Driscoll is preaching is nothing new. Just a few generations before us we see men preaching hard against sin. Sadly, many pastor have gotten scared to look at someone in the eyes and tell them what they are doing is wrong and that it will send them to hell. They would rather tell their people what God could do for them. Over the next month, see how many times your pastor preaches a salvation message, it just might shock you. Shouldn’t we hear the salvation message preached every time a sermon is delivered, I say yes we should! For what other reason do we do church if it is not to bring in other lost people into God’s flock and to constantly remind the righteous what Christ did for us on the cross.
Sadly many churches need to wake up and listen to a culture that is crying out in search of truth. We need to realize that many of our programs and fuzzy warm sermons are not answering the questions that the culture is asking. The church would be better off if it could just let go of some of it’s “sacred cows” and get back to giving biblical truths to tough questions.
Next the church needs to move outside of its comfort zone if it has any hope in reaching today’s culture. We have become to “churchy” for our own sake. We have hidden in the four walls of the church for so long that we have disconnected from culture so much that we forgotten to go out and actually be the church. So we have become an elitist club that gets embarrassed when the culture asks us questions dealing with sex and the like.
This may or may not come as a shock to many of you, but the Bible has plenty to say on hard topics like sex. It also answers the hardest question of them all, what must a person do to be saved. So question to the church is, it willing to do what it takes to answer the culture in a way that is culturally relevant but also biblically conservative?
From time to time I need something to really grab my attention, to get me back on track. I was lucky enough this past weekend to experience one of those great Ahhh moments, when I went to an Acts 29 conference. An Acts 29 conference is where a couple thousand pastors and others that have an interest in rebuilding the church for God’s kingdom – come together to here some terrific speakers talk about theology and the church. Neither of which is what made me experience the Ahhh moment. Instead, it was the underlining theme to make preaching once again Christ centered, instead of this self-help crap we hear some much in our pulpits.
This got me to thinking whether or not I’ve really been centering my life on Christ, or have I been trying to make Christ fit around my life? If I’m honest with myself it has been the later for some while now. But to be a Christian, a Christ follower, I need to make my life revolve around the teaching and life of Christ. I am a fool, because I now when I have done this in the past, my life seems to go a lot better. I don’t seem so overwhelmed with life in general, but it is easy to get off track, isn’t it? I’m sure I will veer off course sometime in the near future. Although for now I have a new fervor for my Savior and I am taking steps to help keep it around a bit longer than usual.
· Reading my Bible 1st thing in the morning
· Praying right after my Bible reading
· Doing an in depth study on 1 Timothy
· Trying to look at people & things with the eyes of Christ
I know this is like a schedule. But we’ve got to start somewhere, until the heart desires more than anything to follow after – no viciously pressure Christ and His teachings. Then once we have the heart felt desire we do it out of love, we do it because we truly want to be more like Christ! I thank God that in my older years I have experienced more up times in my relationship with Him than the down times. I believe it is partly to do with all those years of following Him and with each attempt to follow Christ more closely – it seems to become more natural.
