1 Peter 2:4 As you come to him, the living Stone--rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him-- 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says: "See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame." 7 Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, "The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone, 8 and, "A stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall." They stumble because they disobey the message--which is also what they were destined for. 9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Introduction: We Need to Know our Identity to Know our Task
Review
We have now completed the first two major sections of 1 Peter. The first section had no commands – just a big celebration of our salvation and promised inheritance. Then the second section was full of commands. Live in hope. Live in holiness. Live in fear of God. Love one another with undying love. Crave pure, spiritual milk. Now, starting in verse 4 of chapter 2, we begin the third section, and this one is just like the first – no commands. From verse 4 all the way to the end of the section in verse 10 there is not a single command. Then, in the next section, a bunch of commands again. So Peter is alternating between telling us wonderful truths about our salvation, and then calling us to respond. Before we can ever properly obey the commands we need to understand exactly who we are and what has happened to us.
In the first section the focus was on our salvation as individuals. Each one of us was chosen, born again, and given a wonderful inheritance. Now in this section the focus is on what we are corporately, as a church. Peter has a lot to tell us about our identity as a church.
Identity and Mission
And I hope that is something you are eager to study. It is crucially important that you understand what the church is supposed to be because you are the church! You cannot live the life God wants you to live without understanding what the mission of the church is, and what your role in that mission is. And you cannot understand the mission of the church until you understand the identity of the church. I think one of the mistakes churches tend to make when they are writing their mission statement is to focus only on their task, and not enough on their identity. There is a whole lot of, “We exist to DO this…,” but not much of, “We exist to BE this…” But your conception about what a church is supposed to be will color your understanding of our task.
Many times I have heard people say, “The church is a hospital.” People come here with spiritual sickness, and we provide healing and restoration.
Other people have said, “No, we shouldn’t think of the church as a hospital…; we should think of it as a training center, where you come to get educated about God.” Those people come to learn, and if they learn some great stuff then coming to church was a success – even if nothing else happened.
For others the church is mainly a social club. It is a place where you can meet people, make friends, and enjoy interaction with some nice folks. Those people drive away after church and their whole assessment of whether it went well or did not go well is based completely on the kinds of social interactions they had or did not have with people.
Can you see how your conception of what the church is will have a huge impact on what you do at church and how you do it? And if we all have different ideas of what the church is supposed to be, we will all be working toward different goals and we will lack unity, and we will get frustrated with each other because we will be pulling in different directions.
One of the leading conceptions of the church that is getting more and more popular in our time is that the only purpose of the church is to evangelize. The catchword for this movement is “missional.” By that they mean everything we do should relate to God’s mission, which is one thing – conversion of lost people. They argue that everything else we could do better in heaven. The only reason God has left us on earth after we are converted is to reach the lost. So everything is geared toward that. They believe that the church exists mainly to transform the culture. One of the leaders of that movement is Tim Keller, who is a great preacher, but I cannot go along with him when he says this: “A missional church gears absolutely every single part of its life–its worship, community, public discourse and preaching education–for the presence of non-believers from the culture surrounding it.” So everything the church does is for evangelism. If we have a Bible study, it is only so we can be trained for evangelism. Even our worship is done not mainly to honor God, but mainly to reach the lost. Honoring God is just a means to a higher end.
And the method they use for reaching the lost is what they call “contextualization” – reaching the lost in their own cultural context. So you dress like them and talk like them and go to the places where they like to hang out – whatever it takes to make them comfortable so they can receive the gospel message.
One of the results of that whole missional approach is a lower and lower view of the importance of the church. What they say is this – in our day and age, we cannot expect people to be attracted to the church anymore. They call that the attractional approach rather than the missional approach. And they say the attractional approach might work if there isn’t any big cultural difference between the world and the church, but in our day there is so much cultural difference – unbelievers have to make so much of a cultural shift to come into the church, that it is just not going to happen. So the church is kind of passé. Here is what one missional writer said: “Many times we wrongly assume that the primary activity of God is in the church rather than recognizing that God’s primary activity is in the world … we can no longer see the church as the starting point when thinking about mission. … it is not so much that God has a mission for his church in the world, but that God has a church for his mission in the world.” The idea is the church does not even have a task. We are just the result of the task. And the things we do within these walls – that is not what God is interested in. He is mainly concerned about what we do as individuals out there.
So the trend now is that the best place for ministry is in the bars. I read one church website that was describing its bar ministry and they said this: “most good theological discussion has historically been done in pubs and drinking places.” All those sermons and Bible studies and lectures in seminaries and counsels and conferences – none of that really amounts to much. Most good theological discussion has historically taken place in places where people drink alcohol. People in that movement would look at what we do and say we are way too inwardly focused, way too ingrown – way to concerned about ministry to ourselves. They would see what we do and call us a Christian ghetto.
So what is the Church supposed to be? What does the Bible say? It does not use the hospital metaphor or the school metaphor; what metaphor does the Bible use? Is our only purpose to win the lost? Or is there more to it? The Bible uses a number of metaphors to teach us about our identity. The purpose of the Church is so vast and so rich and so complex and so profound that it cannot be boiled down to a single slogan or sentence. Scripture describes the Church as…
• a field (1 Cor.3:6-9)
• a tree (Mt.13:31-32)
• yeast (Mt.13:33)
• lampstands (Rev.1:20)
• a nation (1 Pe.2:9)
• a banquet (Lk.14:16-24)
• workers in a vineyard (Mt.21:41)
• a flock (1 Pe.5:1)
• a kingdom (1 Pe.2:9)
• a priesthood (1 Pe.2:9)
• a pillar (1 Tim.3:15)
• a foundation (1 Tim.3:15)
• a bride/wife (Eph.5:32)
• a body (1 Cor.12:12-27)
• a household (1 Pe.4:17)
• a temple (1 Cor.3:17)
And no doubt there are others – I just jotted down the ones that came to mind. Why so many metaphors? Because the identity and purpose of the church is too complex to be reduced to one, single metaphor. I believe one of the major failures of the church in our culture is that there is such a shallow understanding of what the church is supposed to be. And I do not mean to indict everybody – many churches are doing a fantastic job and I could learn a lot from them. But all too often churches will come up with mission statements that are so reductionistic that they end up being unfaithful in some areas of our responsibility simply because they do not even realize they have responsibility in those areas.
If you ask the average Christian, “What did Christ die to make you as an individual? What are you supposed to be?” they would easily give you a nice, full answer.
“I am to be like Christ, holy, righteous, loving, humble, wise, joyful. God wants me to minister to my family as a wife or husband or father. I need to seek nearness to God, to bring Him glory in my life. I need to crave the Word of God…”
People have good understanding about the responsibility of an individual, but what about a church? Why are we here? What, exactly, are we supposed to be doing corporately?
We do so many things – we made a list of all the various ministries at Agape and we found there are fifty-five different ministries. Why are we doing all that? What exactly is it that we are trying to accomplish with all those ministries? If we do not know the answer to that question, would you agree that we probably won’t do a very good job? If we do not know what we are supposed to be accomplishing, it probably is not going to be accomplished very well. And we are certainly not going to have unity.
So whenever we come to a section of Scripture like this one that tells us what the church is supposed to be, it should cause our ears to perk up.
1 Peter 2:4 As you come to him, the living Stone--rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him-- 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood…
A spiritual house and holy priesthood – that is our identity. That is what Jesus died to make the church. We will just look at the first half of that today.
I. Our Identity: House of God
God’s House: The Temple
What does it mean that God is building us up to be His spiritual house? And what are the implications for our mission? The phrase “House of God” or “House of the LORD” appears over one hundred times in the Bible. And every time it refers to the same thing – the temple. We are being built up to become the temple of the living God.
What does that mean? If Jesus died to make us a temple, and our Lord and Master and King and God expects us to fulfill that function – if that is our identity – we had better understand what a temple is supposed to be. This is not the only place where the Lord uses the temple metaphor.
Ephesians 2:21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.
1 Corinthians 3:9 you are … God's building. … 16 Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you? 17 If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple.
2 Corinthians 6:16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God.
That is a lot of times to repeat the same metaphor. I think we would be safe to say that any church mission statement that ignored our temple responsibility would be incomplete.
What is a temple?
Locus of the Presence of God
If you want to know the purpose of a temple, the simplest answer is this: the temple is the dwelling place of God on earth. That is where His presence “lives.” (Remember, God exists everywhere, but His presence is not everywhere because when the Bible speaks of God’s presence it refers to the place where God turns His face toward you with favor.) And the place where that happens – the headquarters for the favorable presence of God in the world – is called “the temple.”
2 Corinthians 6:16 … we are the temple of the living God. Just as God has said: "I will live with them and walk among them
Our being a temple means we are the location of His presence.
House of Prayer
It also means we are to be a house of prayer for all nations.
Isaiah 56:6 foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to serve him, to love the name of the Lord, and to worship him, all … who hold fast to my covenant--7 I will bring them to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer.
As the new temple, the church is to be the place where all the nations come to encounter God.
Go and tell them to come and see
I told you a while back that in the Old Testament it was more of a “come and see” religion, whereas now in the New Testament it is a “go and tell” religion. But the more I have studied this the more I am thinking that is kind of a misleading statement. People hear that and end up thinking the best place to carry out our mission is in the bars. I think a more accurate statement is this – rather than “come and see” or “go and tell,” what we are called to do is “Go and tell them to come and see.” We do need to go. Jesus commanded us to go and make disciples of all nations. But He went on to say that we make disciples by teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded. That happens in the church. We need to go out to the highways and byways and compel them to do what? To come in.
Luke 14:23 …Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.
So do we go and tell? Yes! Tell them what? Tell them to come and see.
See what? The Glory of God
And when we do that, what is it we are inviting them to come and see? Our building? Come and see the amazing little cement circles we have in front of our windows? Come and see how friendly our people are? Come and see our cool band? Come see how much free coffee we have? When we invite people in the world to come here, what are we inviting them to come and see? What do you come to the temple to see? The glory of God. As the headquarters for the presence of God in the world, the Church is the place you come to see God.
We want to be friendly to visitors, why? So they can see a glimpse of the heart of God and His kindness expressed through His people. We are not kind for the same reason the world is kind. We are kind to put on display the kindness of God. The purpose of our music is not to be just like a really cool concert. It is to showcase the glory of God and His attributes that we sing about. We preach not to help people out with their felt needs and scratch where they itch, but to show them the nature and will and heart of God.
Every new church planter is asking, “How can I make church so it’s not boring for people?” And so they move in the direction of amusement. They make it a rock concert or a comedy show or movie theater. If you want to solve the problem of church being boring, become a temple where the glory of God is present. People in the Bible who encountered the glory of God responded in a lot of different ways, but never once was the response boredom.
II. Our Goal: Growth
So, what is our identity? The temple of the living God. We are to function as the headquarters for His presence in the world – the place you go if you want an encounter with the living God. Now, here is the problem. Raise your hand if in your life you have ever been to a church where it was not easy to experience the presence of God. How do we explain that?
5 you also, like living stones, are being built…
The church is something that is in the process of being built. This part of our identity is a work in progress. Part of the reason we get so frustrated with churches, and why we have such a hard time finding a church we like, is because every church you ever visit is still under construction. And that should make you happy. Why? Because you are a brick!
5 you also, like living stones, are being built…
When you come to a church that is a few bricks shy of a full wall, that is good news for you if you are a brick – it is job security. It is ludicrous for a brick to complain about an unfinished wall. Every church you have ever been to is an unfinished structure that is in the process of being built – and that is by God’s design.
Outward Growth
So this passage is really all about church growth. Our identity: God’s House – the Temple. Our goal: Growth. But not the kind of church growth you normally hear about. Most of the time when people talk about a church growing, all they mean is it is increasing in numbers. And that is a valid kind of growth - there are a couple times Scripture talks about numerical increase.
Acts 2:47 the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Matthew 13:31 “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches." 33 He told them still another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."
God’s intention for the church was that it start small and then increase in numbers and influence and become more expansive and more pervasive.
Upward Growth
So outward, numerical growth – expanding our girth - is important, since our Lord commanded us to make disciples of all nations. However that is not the main emphasis when Scripture talks about church growth. The main emphasis is on upward growth – growing to spiritual maturity as a church. Ephesians 4 is an example. Starting in verse 11, Jesus gives gifted leaders to the church to prepare God’s people for works of service. Why? What is the purpose of all the works of service that go on in the church?
Ephesians 4:12 …so that the body of Christ may be built up
The body of Christ refers to believers, and the purpose of the work of the ministry is to build the body up to maturity. Listen to how many times Paul says that in just five verses.
12 …so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. 14 Then we will no longer be infants… 15 speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
The modern church growth movement has focused almost exclusively on numbers of bodies who attend, and maturity is secondary. And the result is that many of the fastest “growing” churches in the United States are not growing at all spiritually. In fact they are declining. If you go from having one hundred people, and ninety of them are spiritually mature, and you triple in size to three hundred, but now only half the people are mature, that is not growth in New Testament – it is decline. The church growth movement should be called the church decline movement, because they are filling up the seats with more and more people who are Christians in name only. We are called to feed the sheep, not gather the goats.
So, what does all this growing and maturing and building up look like? In what ways are we to make progress? One area where we need to keep growing and progressing and advancing is in becoming more temple-like. If you visit Agape today, and then you leave and come back a year from now, we should be farther along in the building process. You should come back and say, “Wow, this place is much more of a temple of God now than last time I was here. It is easier to see the glory of God, easier to worship God, and easier to experience the presence of God now.”
A Corporate Goal
That is our goal. And it is a corporate goal. It requires a unified effort to get there because bricks are not a building unless they are built together. The church is not just a training institution to enable you to make progress as an individual in your personal walk with the Lord and then go out on your own to do ministry. Verse 3 talks about personal growth as an individual, but in verse 4 the idea turns to corporate progress – as a church.
I hope you feel that. It is so hard for us to get that in our world of individualism and privacy fences. We have so little concept in our culture of functioning as a community and making progress corporately. We look at every institution as just a tool for me to use or not use based on what I need. So many people come to church as non-participants, because they do not sense a personal need for participation. They do not see how it would benefit them, and so why do it? They do not have any sense that we need to get somewhere as an organization, because they see themselves as distinct from the organization.
You can always tell when a person does not understand the nature of the church when they use the term “they” to refer to their church instead of “we.”
“During the three years I attended that church, they weren’t very friendly.”
What do you mean, “they”? What are you, an unbeliever? Are you not part of the church? Weren’t you one of the stones in the structure at the church during that time? The correct way to say it would be, “During the three years I attended that church, we weren’t very friendly.” What would you think about me if I talked about my family in the third person?
“Those Fergusons, they were late for church today.”
If you heard me say that, you would say, “What Fergusons? Are you talking about your own family? Why not just say ‘we’ were late for church?” If I talked about my family in the third person without including myself, you would wonder about my attitude toward my family. That would make it sound like I do not consider myself part of them. And I wonder about people who talk about the church that way.
Built Together
I think part of the problem is we tend to think of the church as an establishment that we frequent as consumers. You stop at Starbucks and get coffee, you go to a theater to take in a movie, you visit a park for some relaxation or recreation, and you stop by church to get some teaching and fellowship and music. That kind of attitude will kill the church. If you attend here, you are not a consumer frequenting a business. You are not a customer. You are a body part. You are a major stone in a load-bearing wall.
It just pains me to think about all the important works that go undone because people have that detached, consumer mentality. If you all are a bunch of consumers gathered here on Sunday morning like a crowd gathered at a concert, what are we ever going to accomplish as a church? What does a crowd at a concert ever accomplish? Nothing. They make a mess and go home.
There are people who just skip around from church to church – one week they go here, another week there, another week there – like a consumer trying out a variety of restaurants. Or they just stay at one church like someone who has a favorite restaurant, but they come as non-participants. And I think the reason so many people think that is OK is because they have no sense of our corporate responsibility. Imagine if we all did that. Suppose everyone here went to a different church each week. What ministry could we do? There would be no music, no sound, no Sunday school, no nursery, no radio program, no youth group, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, no elders, no deacons, no meals ministry – no church. We would be nothing. Everything God is calling us to do requires a community of people. The tasks the Lord has given us cannot be done by a bunch of people coming and going or by a crowd of observers – no matter how big that crowd is. Especially the task of functioning as the house of God.
Ask yourself, “What is my role in this mandate we have been given? Am I doing my part, or am I a non-participant? Not helping with anything, not doing anything, not involved with anything, not giving – just a useless stone sitting in the back of the quarry with no connection at all to the other stones?”
“I want to do my part, but how do I know what that is? How do I find my place?”
We will plan on talking more about that next time, but for now I just want to make the point that every stone in the building has a role. That is why I titled the sermon “Rock and Role” – r-o-l-e. Your role in the church is based on the fact that you are a rock – one of the building stones. Which means your role only has significance in connection with the other stones.
Ministry in the church to the church
Do you have a calling outside of this gathering? Absolutely! You are called to a certain role in your family, at work, in your circle of friends, in the culture. No question about that, but do not ever fall into the error of thinking all of your calling is outside the church. A lot of housewives fall into that. They think, “My calling is to be a mother and a wife and my ministry is in the home,” and they have no sense of urgency about their role in this building that God is putting together.
For every one statement in Scripture about your responsibility and calling outside the church there are dozens of statements about your responsibility and calling inside the church. The missional approach is wrong – the work that God is doing is primarily a work in the church, and nothing is more important (or even as important) as that. It is a corporate effort. Ephesians 2:21 says we are all being fitted together in Him and are growing into a holy sanctuary in the Lord, 22 in whom you also are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. The word “church” means gathering. In 1 Corinthians 11:18 we read this phrase: when you come together as a church… It is when we gather together that we are a church. And when we all come together into one place like this, Scripture has some amazing things to say about that. Remember when the ancient Hebrews approached Mt. Sinai when God gave the Ten Commandments? God descended upon that mountain with such a mighty manifestation of His presence that it shook the entire mountain to pieces. The sky went black, there were trumpet sounds blasting from out of nowhere, and the place was so holy that no one was even permitted to touch an animal that had touched the fence that was erected at the bottom of the mountain to keep people from getting too close to the presence of God. When you come to church you are coming to a more direct experience of God than that.
Hebrews 12:18-24 You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; 19 to a trumpet blast …
You have come this morning to something much greater than that.
22 you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, 23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, 24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Verse 23 sums it up best – when you came here this morning you came to God. The local church is the headquarters for the presence of God in this world.
“But I feel closer to God when I’m alone in the mountains.”
It is true that alone in the beauty of the creation it is easier to experience some of the more pleasant sensations of communion with God, but there is more to closeness with God than those feelings. God designed for your joy to be fullest when His grace is flowing through you to serve others – that does not happen when you are alone. God also designed you to need grace from Him that only comes through the spiritual gifts of all the people in the church – that does not happen when you are alone either. (Nor does it happen when you come to church but then isolate yourself from everybody.) People who do not immerse themselves in a church either do not understand or do not believe God’s promises about how He dispenses grace through the spiritual gifts. If you do not strongly desire that grace, then something is seriously wrong in your heart.
Beyond all that, there is also a joy that comes from hearing a large number of voices all singing His praises that you cannot get when you are by yourself. When we pray together in our small groups there are prayers that are said that you need to be a part of, but that you would not have thought to pray on your own. When you hear the Word of God expounded in person it is more powerful than listening to a tape. The Lord’s Supper would lose a great deal of its meaning if you did it privately.
Humbling and Exalting
This principle is both humbling and honoring – it humbles us and exalts us at the same time. It is humbling because a brick is not much by itself. In fact, it’s nothing. It is not a roof over your head, it is not a wall, it is not a floor, it is not something you can sit on or lie down on, it provides no shelter, no protection, no security, no privacy – apart from its relationship to the other bricks, one brick is nothing. Disconnected from the rest of the Church your spiritual gifts are useless. That is pretty humbling.
But on the other hand, when a brick building is being built, are bricks important? Without the bricks you have no building. The bricks are essential. So you as an individual are very, very important, but that importance only becomes a reality in your relationship to the other bricks sitting around you.
III. Our Method: Drawing Near
One final thought. If our goal is to be built up as a church so that a year from now we are more temple-like than we are right now, how do we pull that off? What is our method? The answer is in verse 4.
4 As you come to him, the living Stone … 5 you also … are being built into a spiritual house
Do you see the relationship between the verbs? Our being built into the spiritual house is a result of our coming to God. The word Peter uses for come is a technical term for drawing near to the presence of God. All through the book of Hebrews that word is translated “draw near” in worship. It refers to seeking intimacy and fellowship with Jesus Christ in worship – which is the whole purpose of our being called as Christians.
1 Corinthians 1:9 by Him you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
As each of us draws near to God and enjoys fellowship and communion with Him – the more we do that, the more we as a church will be built up by Him into a spiritual house.
So can you see the problem with the missional approach? They say, “I’m just going to go out into the world as an individual brick, and win the lost.” And they go out, and they have very limited success. Why? Because a brick is not a temple. By all means – go and tell. Go out there. Most people are never going to come here if you do not go share the gospel with them and compel them to come in to God’s house. But do not be content to just tell them about God – compel them to come in to the house of God where God Himself dwells. The invitation to come to Christ is an invitation to come to His body, the church.
And when we do bring them in, we do not structure everything in the service to make them feel comfortable as unbelievers. The biggest favor we can do for unbelievers who come here is for us to worship God. We draw near to Christ in worship, God responds by building us into more of a temple which means a greater expression of His presence, and that is the ideal setting for the Word of God to penetrate the hearts of men so they can go from death to life. And even more importantly, Christ is glorified, we are edified, and God is thoroughly pleased as this building takes the shape that Christ died to make us.
Benediction: Hebrews 10:19-22 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus…21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.
1:25 Questions
1. When you think and talk about the church, do you tend to say “they” or “we”? What do you think is preventing you from seeing yourself as a vital organ in the body, rather than an outside observer? (If you don’t struggle in this area, what advice do you have for those who do?)
2. Do you feel a sense of urgency about the mission of Agape (“We MUST reach our goal!”) What could you do to increase this urgency?
3. Do you make a daily attempt to draw near to Christ? Is there anything in your life that hinders that that you could change?
Appendix
Contextualization vs. Compromise
Contextualization
We must become all things to all men (1 Cor.9:22). That means we must not needlessly offend by our (neutral) cultural traditions (the application in context has to do with Jewish, as opposed to Gentile, customs).
We must contextualize the Gospel, so that it is understandable to the interested and willing. We must not needlessly obscure what is not obscure in Scripture (Col.4:4).
We should be as shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves (Mt.10:16).
Common examples of failure to contextualize:
- Forcing western traditions that are unrelated to the Gospel upon a foreign culture
- Speaking in “Christianese” that is incomprehensible even to the interested unbeliever.
- Failing to preach the Gospel in such a way as to demonstrate its applicability and implications for the life of the average person.
- Having a snobbish, unloving, unwelcoming, inhospitable, exclusive or indifferent attitude toward the lost.
**********************
Compromise
We must never contextualize Jesus or the Gospel. Paul’s statements about contextualization have to do with Paul contextualizing himself (adjusting to the customs of those he was trying to reach). We must never alter or adjust the Gospel in any way, not even by omission or imbalance (2 Tim.1:14).
In our shrewdness, we must never contaminate God’s methods with human wisdom, as that would empty the Gospel of its power (1 Cor.1:17).
The message of the cross, if preached accurately, will be a stumbling block to all except for those being drawn and illumined by the Spirit (1 Cor.1:23). Preaching will not have a broad appeal to the masses of unbelievers unless crucial, offensive elements have been removed.
Contextualization of ourselves must only be in areas of morally neutral customs. Regarding moral issues we must “come out from among (the world) and be separate (from unbelievers)” (2 Cor.6:15-18) and “have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Eph.5:11).
There should be a stark, immediately noticeable contrast between us and the world in affections, motives, speech, and actions (Php.2:15) .
Our efforts to win their friendship and movement toward them must never occur in the areas of their vices (Jas.1:27). Accommodation is good in areas of tradition and culture that are completely neutral, but must never involve areas of morality and purity.
Common examples of compromise:
- Making entertainment the purpose of “worship” music (“Worship” that does not have God as its focus is detestable to God – Isa.29:13).
- Lifting human methods above expository preaching (Preaching was the method Jesus used – Mt.4:23, commissioned the Apostles to use – Mt.10:7, and that we are to use – 2 Tim.4:2).
- Moving the church from the center of God’s plan (Eph.1:22, 23, 3:10, Heb.12:22, 23)
- Making the main function of the church focus more on the lost than on the saved (Ministry is described in Scripture mostly in terms of ministry to the church, Eph.4:11-16, 1 Cor.12-14, see especially 14:26).
- Moving closer to the world in the area of vices (such as coarse language – Eph.5:4, use of alcohol designed to approximate the way the world sins with alcohol to win their favor – Jer.15:17, or excessive involvement in entertainment; particularly impure forms – Ps.101:3).
- Minimizing the offensive aspects of the Gospel such as sin and the evil of the human heart (Ro.3:10-18), culpability before God (Ro.3:19), judgment (Acts 17:31), wrath (Rev.16:19), hell (Mk.9:43), the need for repentance (Acts 17:30), the sovereignty of God (Acts 17:24-27), and Jesus’ calls to complete devotion (Lk.14:26-35).
- Developing a “church” in which those who love the Lord with all their hearts are in the minority (Heb.12:22, 23).
