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Culture Changers - The Tattooed Jesus Chapter 2 · Passing On The Faith

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: To negate the influence of thousands of years of Christianity upon the world, even within nations that are professedly non-Christian, is to minimize the work of Christ.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thus, we must acknowledge that God's common grace sends its tentacles into every field of art, music, science, literature, and humanity.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Every week, audio bug.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 2 Culture Changers.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: But if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and to be trodden underfoot of men.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 5, verse 13.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: We have already argued for the Great Commission and its impact on culture.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, the question of Christian involvement is not cut and dried.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The decision to engage or disengage in culture will result in either separatism or Puritanism.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: The Puritans of the 17th century faced the same question, as did the early church fathers.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: While some Christians rush into Hollywood to make a difference, others produce their own films and participate in Christian independent film festivals held around the country.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Take, for example, the Christian young men who gets his four-year degree in graphic arts and hires on with a film company in Hollywood.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: His first project involves a slasher film in which all the characters break God's commandments with impunity and there is no meaningful distinction between good and evil, the good guys and the bad guys.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, our Christian friend still, quote, makes an impact, unquote, for Jesus when he gets to add AD after the copyright date at the end of the credits in the last few frames of the film.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: This, I am afraid, is the cultural contribution of far too many Christians in the entertainment world.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: They want to dedicate their lives to make an impact, but their participation in ungodly forms of media simply furthers the cause of an ungodly culture, year in and year out.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Could the young man have produced more talents for the kingdom of God and his righteousness outside Hollywood rather than inside Hollywood?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: There is a point at which our efforts towards cultural transformation reduced to something like spraying a little perfume over a cesspool in a futile effort to quote make a difference.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: As a young man, I remember my mother telling me before I left the home quote, if more of them is rubbing off on you than you on them, you have probably placed yourself in the wrong context in relation to the world.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Unquote.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We each have one life to live, and we each make individual choices concerning how we will use our time and resources.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Our primary measure for success in life is not money and fame, but the knowledge of God and his righteousness.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 6, verse 33.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Where righteousness prevails in our lives and in the institutions with which we have some contact, where our obedience is perfected, and the disobedience of the nations corrected, 2 Corinthians 10, verses 5 through 6, we have made good use of our talents.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: People want to think of fame as relating directly to impact, although there is little correlative relationship between them.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: A great number of obscure saints have performed great and noble deeds, although they are hardly recognized for their accomplishments.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: In other instances, promising Christians obtained a little influence in politics and culture, and then promptly compromised their faith and used their influence for the cause of the wrong kingdom, the kingdom of darkness.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: This scenario may be more the rule than the exception today.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like Carrie Underwood, they begin their career singing Jesus take the wheel and spend the rest of their lives advocating homosexual marriage.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: When many Christian teachers enter the public schools, instead of teaching the fear of God as the beginning of knowledge, they do just the opposite.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: They teach children not to fear God.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: In so doing, they contribute to the ongoing demise of the Christian faith in academics, politics, and the marketplace.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: In the present age of rampant apostasy, Christians in the West struggle for some relevance.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: We elbow into the conversation because we want to be heard.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: We instinctively act so as to impact the culture.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: We want to be salt and light within the culture around us.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: But there are serious temptations and stumbling blocks that would present themselves to us in the venture.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: On one hand, we are tempted to pessimism, especially when humanist secularism is on the rise.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: This often ends in retreat and total isolation.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yet we are also tempted to blur the line between the antithesis and the thesis by synthesizing with the culture under the banner of relevance.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Often, this happens incrementally over a lifetime of work.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: An artist may begin with a strong Christian testimony, but then proceed to trade his principles for fame, money, and impact, which in the end produces less for the kingdom of God, no obedience matured, no disobedience avenged, and no thoughts brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: 2 Corinthians 10 verses 4 through 6.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: This story is far too common among Christians in the ongoing saga of Western apostasy.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, it is a different kind of faithlessness that retreats into total isolation.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is faithlessness that refuses to maintain God's ethical standard against the antithesis of the day and resorts to a pattern of compromise with the world.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: It is faithlessness that settles for a pessimistic eschatological outlook.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sadly, too much of this faithlessness has characterized conservative Christianity generation after generation since the eighteen hundreds.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is simply another mark of apostasy.
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  SPEAKER_00: The mandate for real Christians, therefore, must be faith.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Faith not compromise, faith not retreat, and faith to attempt the impossible.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line If the whole duty of man is to fear God, love God, and keep his commandments, then this is also the basis for all Christian culture.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Any culture reflecting some standard of righteousness will be a Christian culture, assuming that Christians derive their worldview outlook from divine truth as revealed through Scripture.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine draws the clear distinction between the city of God and the city of man on this very point.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: For so hostile is this vice to pious faith, if the love of glory be greater in the heart than the fear or love of God, that the Lord said, How can ye believe who look for glory from one another, and do not seek the glory which is from God alone?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where there is some fear of God and obedience to God's standards of righteousness, there will be a good culture.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: All else will pass away with the world and its lusts.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: We should always consider where the influence of the fear of God has penetrated the world's cultures.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: For example, it is possible that the Jews influenced Japanese Shintoism thousands of years ago, given the many parallels between the Shinto temple and the worship in the Old Testament temple, however perverted it became over the centuries.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Buddhist moralisms render some shadowy reflections of Old Testament law at points.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Muslim religion is a weak spin-off of seventh century Judaism and Christianity.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: To negate the influence of thousands of years of Christianity upon the world, even within nations that are professedly non-Christian, is to minimize the work of Christ.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thus we must acknowledge that God's common grace sends its tentacles into every field of art, music, science, literature, and human endeavor.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Where there was advancement in human culture, there were traceable roots of biblical law and Christian faith at work.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Where human culture devolved, there was apostasy from the faith and subsequent corruption of demonic deceptions.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: The world versus Christ There is some confusion among Christians concerning the nature of the kingdom of God in the world.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I believe the parable of the wheat and the tares is helpful in understanding this relationship.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 13, verses 24 through 30.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' parable, the wheat and the tares grow together in the field until the end of the world.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus specifically defines the field as being the world, verse 38, and forbids a Christian jihad, verse 29.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: It is important to realize that the field is the world, not the church.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yet by the end of the parable, the angels reap the wheat and the tares out of the kingdom, verse 41.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Evidently, the field, the world, has become the kingdom of God by the end of the parable.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are two uses for the word world in the New Testament.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: While God loves the world, John 3, verse 16, we are also told love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: The world of lust and pride is to be eschewed by Christians.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, there is nothing wrong with loving and appreciating God's created cosmos made up of human beings, animals, civil magistrates, and economies.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, we battle in the field of the world, the cosmos, against the influence of lust and pride.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: This battle is everywhere, and it continues without respite.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: We engage this battle when we bring the fear of God and the principles of righteousness into the civil magistrate, media, art, culture, and family life.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: We are at all times and everywhere battling the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when the lust of the flesh and the pride of life dominate 98% of the institution?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Would a Christian work for Playboy magazine or with some other element of the pornography industry, for example?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: When Hollywood or a political institution is consumed in flesh and pride, this may limit a Christian's ability to function therein.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases, he may exert influence over a smaller, more obscure division of the larger system.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: He may be pressed to man the emergency life rafts centers while the Titanic is scraping the iceberg.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: He may be pressed to abandon the task of pumping out the engine rooms and move on to saving a few lives in the emergency rafts.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the case, he is still active and involved.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: These two opposing allegiances battle over every square inch of the world, cosmos.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: The one is human pride, and the other is Christ.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It is impossible to avoid the battle in every home, church, business, and cultural institution.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: These two allegiances are, as Augustine puts it, quote, in this present world commingled, and as it were, entangled together.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Some will work towards the end of ultimate separation, but this is impossible and strictly forbidden in the parable of Christ, Matthew 13, verse 29.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, the wheat is still to be planted in the field, such that the field becomes identified as the kingdom of God by the end.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: The wheat will inevitably dominate the field of the world by the principle of the wheat, Christ, and not by the principle of the tear, human pride.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thus the field is defined relative to the varying levels of tarishness or wheatishness contained in the field.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because human society is, by definition, a connection among its various members, it is impossible for Christians not to influence the culture.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Corruption's Perception Index, for example, lays out the spectrum from the most honest to the most corrupt nations on earth.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: There is a reason that thirteen out of the sixteen most honest nations on earth have a Protestant heritage.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Of the 21 most corrupt nations, five are Muslim, five are animist, seven are Roman Catholic, and four are communist slash atheist.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is not that Christians currently make up 99% of the population of those nations with a Protestant heritage, but that Christian heritage and culture lingers through the generations.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Even a minority can exert a strong influence upon the direction of a nation.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Should a Christian look at the sales receipt and realize that he did not pay the full price for a product or service after the fact, he returns to the cash register and acknowledges the discrepancy.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Each time this happens, his honesty bears salt and light influence upon the entire economy and culture of the field of the world.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: There is no escaping this reality.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, as Christians exert an influence on culture, they often face strong persecution.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, the persecution of God's people will result in the formation of a Christian ghetto of sorts, whether in the catacombs of Rome, the diaspora of the Mennonites, the Slavic Christians, or the Chinese Christians.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Towards the end of the world, the camp of the saints appears separated and surrounded by the nations of the world.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Revelation 20, verse 9.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: An example of this in the Bible is found during the Israelites' sojourn in Goshen, when there was a sharp economic separation from Egypt.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Long Term Project.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: If the Great Commission was merely referring to a curtailed gospel message and an emotional conversion experience, then the modern evangelical method would suffice.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: However, the Great Commission requires the missionary to instruct an indigenous people to observe whatsoever is commanded in the Word.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 28, verses 18 through 20.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: This includes teaching the testimonies, the laws of God, and the book of the Proverbs, all of that contained in the Old and New Testaments.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Christians must be prepared to work for hundreds of years with the pagan tribes in order to inculcate the life and law of Christ into the very fiber of the peoples.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, any cultural advancement for God's kingdom will take a long time to come about.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: We ought never to think that the perfection is our goal.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: No individual and no human institution will be perfected this side of glory.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Utopian intentions are always dangerous.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Christian life comes about through fits and starts and proceeds by ebbs and flow.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Moreover, every new believer rescued from a pagan culture begins with the cultural tools of his early education and upbringing.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: He has to start somewhere.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: But as his worldview is transformed by the renewing of the mind and the discernment of the will of God, Romans 12, verses 1 through 2, that new believer begins to reform his culture, literature, art, architecture, and economy.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is a picture of the transformation from pagan life to that of a Christian.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when a Christian society is in apostasy?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is the wild card played by the present Western culture.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: We discover that we are a culture in regression.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: How does our current regressive culture form a baseline for Christian culture in the next generation?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: This question is worthy of consideration.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: For more information, go to generations.org slash media.