the Great Commission

Martin Selbrede | heroinamerica

“We’re only passing through… The world is not my home… Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world…”

We’ve all heard the excuses: the bad theology that justifies Christian inaction, impotence, and irrelevance. We know all the cliches. Polishing the brass on the sinking ship, etc. City of God vs. City of Man. The result is a “retreatist theology” and a Christian, most likely a Protestant, “constantly ready to flee.”

Martin Selbrede finds a corrective in the work of Cornelius van der Waal, who died in 1980. In The World, Our Home, van der Waal analyzed all the bad theology–“surrender theology”–that has seeped into Christian churches since the Reformation.

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/healing-the-damage-caused-by-bad-theology

We are not called to hand the whole shooting match over to the devil and his servants! We are called to fulfill the Great Commission, to win ground for Christ’s Kingdom–we are called not to mourn, not to cower in the pews, but to work.

Over and over against we are called upon to straighten out the bad theology and put our churches back on course. Our home is the world: that’s why God put us there. The earth is the LORD’s. And we are His servants and His stewards.

Why that should be so hard to remember… well, I don’t know.

When this sort of thing starts making sense to you, it’s time to ease up on the movies.

You probably already know I’m going to say yes, of course it is. And pagan TV shows. And to read pagan books, etc. But not all Christians would agree with me.

In Acts 17, Paul delivers a sermon to the pagan know-it-alls of Athens, in which he quotes “your own poets.” Obviously Paul was familiar with pagan Greek literature, and used it to make his Christian message more understandable to his audience. Not that many of them listened, but that was hardly his fault.

How can we effectively carry out our mission, the Great Commission, if we don’t know what we’re up against? If we don’t know how to communicate with this world’s audience? If we have no idea of how they see things, no idea of how they think?

Popular culture can do much to educate us in these areas.

To be sure, you don’t want to be watching so many of those pagan movies and TV shows, if it’s gotten to the point that they’re starting to make sense to you. For instance, it’s useful to know how deeply the Evolutionary Myth has soaked into our culture. It is not useful to start believing in it yourself.

If you can learn how to decode the cultural messages buried in movies and TV programs, you can learn much. At the very least you can learn what to watch out for.

You don’t have to feel guilty for watching a movie.

Just don’t let the movies get to you.