I got the privilege a while ago of listening to Phil Johnson's message on the "pornification" of the pulpit, delivered at the 2009 Shepherds' Conference. I must say that Phil lived up to his alter ego as the "Pyromaniac" for his fiery exposition of Scripture, laying to ash the claims of many famous evangelical pastors/preachers to contextualization as the foundation of their blatant misuse of the tongue and their adoption of the culture's skewed value system. Phil made mention of other aberrant "ministries" but really honed in on Mark Driscoll as the chief object of his Scripture-reinforced rebuke. Armed with Titus 2:7-8, he ably demonstrated the perversity that the current trend in pastoring/preaching has mutated into and mainly attributed it to an infatuation with "coolness", "hipness", and what it really boils down to, WORLDLINESS, that has descended upon these younger batch of "modern" pastors/preachers. These ones want to look, smell, feel, and SOUND like the world in order to win the world. Of course, this type of fulfilling the Great Commission is actually an unfulfillment of it!
As I see it, only a wholehearted acceptance of the Christian's status as an underdog in the eyes of an anti-Christian world, and that as mandated by God, is the antidote to the pride that is at the root of all this unfaithfulness and compromise in modern evangelicalism.
Reality is founded on abstractions. A dog can't meow, and a cat can't bark. If you howl like the world, then perhaps you might be a wolf yourself.
1 John 2:15
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
"The sad fact is, we’ve come to believe that the best way to reach the world is to become just like the world. When in reality, we make a difference by being different. We don’t make a difference by being the same. We need to remember that it is the calling and the privilege of Christians to be against the world for the world. In fact, it is, in the words of theologian David Wells, “those who are cognitively and morally dislocated from worldly culture that alone carry the power to change it.” Christians should be encouraged and challenged by the historical reminder that the Church has always served the world best when it has been most counter cultural, most distinctively different from the world. I would love to see a radical commitment to being unfashionable." - Tullian Tchividjian
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