The Breakdown of Society
When you see a culture thats deteriorating look closer and you will probably see a people of God who have withdrawn from the culture and turned it over to the unrighteous to rule. Consider: when Christians began abandoning inner-city and urban neighborhoos, taking their skills, resources, and moral influences with them those neighborhoods deteriorated.
When Christians left the public school system, moral values were systematically erased until they became almost illegal to teach. When Christians vacated the media, then a spiritual approach to defining everything we hold dear went with them. When Christians decided they ought to get out of politics then righteous political decisions left with them. These realities are magnified in minority communities one of the beauties of integration is that minorities won the right to live anywhere they want, but one downside has been that much of the expertise and moral consciousness of the minority community left the inner city leaving behind an absence of the models who are desperately needed to give a community vision and stability. God's people have been called to penetrate society. Don't get me wrong, evangelism is always first because without forgiveness of sins, anything else we give a person is temporary. We have been called first and foremost to win people to Christ. But having given a person Christ for eternity , we must also give him Christ in history. We must give him hope in time. The absence of righteousness in our culture has everything to do with the absence of God's people penetrating th culture. When there is no yeast the bread stays flat, and when there is no Christian influence the culture stays flat.
taken from the best selling book, "Are Christians Destroying America" by Pastor Tony Evans
II Corinthians 4:6-10
ReplyDelete6For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness,"[a]made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
7But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.
If our bodies are not present in the world then how are those around us to see this wonder spoken of here? We must not remove ourselves from the workings of the world but we must be sure that we are showing the light within us while we are there.