THE IMPACT OF RELEVANCE (SOCIAL APPLICABILITY)

Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously and never have they been more irrelevant than today.  By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have courted irrelevance in our ministries.  By our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant as churches.  By our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling (i.e., seeker sensitive) to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we’ve lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance.  Our eagerness for relevance has not been matched with an equal determination to be faithful to the scriptures.  This pursuit of relevance is very commercially profitable in the short term, bigger churches are in reality just bigger barns, but at such a high spiritual cost... not to mention the foreordained “spewing” (Rev. 3:16).  Of all the cultures the church has lived in, the modern world is by far the most powerful, the most pervasive, and the most pressurizing.  It is good for us to remember that God Himself has broken into our silence; He has spoken and He has come down Himself.  Nothing else is finally relevant except in relationship to His truth and the eternal.  The urgent task for followers of Christ is to be truly relevant in this hostile environment.  But the gospel does not and will never fit the spirit of this age, and should never be shaped by the spirit of this age.  As twenty first century Christians we must constantly define ourselves by the gospel and remain faithful to Jesus Christ in the here and now.  Our crying need is to be faithful which produces relevance, for in itself the good news of Jesus is utterly relevant or it is not the good news it claims to be!  The secret of the churches power down through ages is that it is in fact the best news ever because it addresses our human condition appropriately, pertinently, and effectively as nothing else has, does or can - generation after generation, culture after culture, and life after life.  The world needs the full unadulterated gospel of Jesus Christ; they just don’t understand their need.  To give them anything less not only denies them the real reality of God but demonstrates our lack of faith in the process. 

BUT GOD HIMSELF

HAS BROKEN INTO OUR SILENCE

HE HAS COME DOWN HIMSELF

HE HAS SPOKEN

THIS IS THE ESSENCE OF RELEVANCE