Tuesday, December 02, 2014

The Body - Quote

Today's passage is taken from Chuck Colson's and Ellen Santilli Vaughn's 1991 book The Body:  Being Light in Darkness. The passage, when I read it this weekend, spoke to me:

"    What would it take to free today's church from its own Babylonian captivity - the twentieth-century enculturation we described earlier?  Some of the very same things that characterized the Reformers.
     First of all, it would require a commitment to the truth  - the One who says He is the ultimate reality - and from this a renewed passion for what God has propositionally revealed, His inerrant Word, and the orthodox confession of faith by which the truth has been preserved and pass through the centuries.
     It would mean an awakening to the fact that the church is the people of God and the church must be the church.  Away with consumer religion, the edifice complex, slick marketing plans, and syrupy sermons.  Equip the people of God with spiritual weapons so they may serve the living God of the world.
     It would mean a healthy fear of God.    No trivializing of the sacred, but a sense of living in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute presence of the holy, majestic God.
     It would mean the realization that God is sovereign over all and we must, therefore, have a biblically informed view of all life.
     It would demand a passion for the blazing scarlet ribbon running through the whole of Scripture:  A commitment to be agents of God's justice in society at large and to see His whole world from the perspective of His truth.
     It would require us to have Luther's courage, to declare our independence from the culture and to take our stand.  To let truth infiltrate every area of life, to let God's righteousness roll down on societal structures and the people who live within them.
    And what if we did all this?.....The world would once again be turned upside down." (pages 266-267, italics author's)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are welcome (and necessary, for good conversation). If you could take the time to be kind and not practice profanity, it would be appreciated. Thanks for posting!