In a social context where Christian orthodoxy can seem bigoted, dehumanizing, and grotesque, and where people have no shortage of ways to make their criticisms heard, believers are tempted to mimic the response of animals faced with danger: fight or flight. The former feels like humility, but risks timidity and cowardice. The latter feels like courage, but risks slander and pride. However, the faithful option is humble courage. If we mistakenly think in terms of a spectrum with humility and timidity at one end and pride and boldness at the other, then we will end up justifying vices as virtues. The way of Jesus, by contrast, combines exemplary humility with astonishing courage, most powerfully as Christ goes to the cross.

The West is not as post-Christian as many imagine. No doubt there are places on earth, including Middle America, where it might feel like the wider culture is currently rejecting Christianity at an unprecedented rate. But the milieu that characterizes post-Christendom is still (despite itself) irreducibly Christian.
Imagine a cryogenically frozen Viking waking up in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, or a Mayan exploring contemporary Mexico, or Asterix and Obelix encountering German social democracy, or French laïcité. As “secular” as those places might feel to many of us, their values would seem deeply Christian to anyone who had not experienced them before.
Nevertheless, living in the world of late modernity obviously presents plenty of challenges for orthodox believers.
Is Christianity Losing?
Whatever we call the religious outlook of our societies — secularism, post-secularism, post-Christianity, or something else entirely — people are still skeptical toward Christianity and in some cases downright hostile.
The pagan gods of Mammon, Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Gaia, and Dionysus still trouble modernity in varying levels of disguise. Renouncing them to follow Christ is still costly. It is still harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:23–24). The church still bears many flaws, and the cultural influence of Christianity has often served to magnify those flaws to those outside her doors.
An internal, psychological challenge compounds those external, cultural ones: some Christians feel like they are losing. In some countries, this is a question of sheer numbers. For a variety of reasons, including prosperity, fertility, and the privatization of postwar life, the percentage of people in church on Sundays has steadily fallen in many Western nations since the Second World War (while rising substantially in parts of the Majority World over the same period). Even in America (often seen as an outlier), over two-thirds of churches are in numerical decline. At the same time, there is a widely held perception that Christian convictions have become increasingly marginal in public life, which in many cases is clearly true.
Five Responses of Faith
That decline in numbers and of perceived relevance has met with varied responses from the Western church. Some of those responses (repentance, prayer, a renewed commitment to discipleship) are certainly positive. Others (fear, hostility, and the pursuit of influence or power by compromising morally or theologically) are plainly negative.
Some observers remain optimistic and argue that things are not as bad as they seem; others think they are a good deal worse. Some argue the church needs a radical change in strategy; others claim the challenge is not really a methodological one at all, and the church should essentially hunker down, get used to life on the margins, prepare to suffer for what she believes, pray, and trust that the God who brings life to the dead will do something new.
So, how do we live by faith in a culture losing its faith? In my book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, I consider how the church responded to a similar crisis nearly 250 years ago — in particular the celebration of grace, the pursuit of freedom, and an articulation of Christian truth — and I suggest the last two centuries have only served to elevate the importance of these three responses. In this piece, I’ll mention five additional responses which, though perhaps obvious, are nevertheless vital for believers in an age like ours.
1. We Suffer Well
It’s hard to overstate the role that suffering has played in the expansion of Christianity.
Read More
Related Posts:

But all is not lost if you will trust Christ for your salvation. Turning from the control of your life, you may depend or rest entirely on Him and what He has done on the cross to save sinful people like you. The first part of the verse we began with is as true as the second part. At this moment, God’s wrath abides or rests on you. But you may place your trust in Christ now for “everlasting life.” 

A cartoon depicted Noah’s ark surrounded by desperate people drowning in the water, begging for help. The rains were coming down hard while Noah and his family were safe inside. On the outside of the ark was a “smiley face” with the words, “Smile, God Loves You.”
Are you sure God loves everybody? John the Baptist didn’t think so. He said, “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (Jn. 3:36). Why is God justified in having wrath toward you if you have not come to Christ on His terms?
Because you are a sinner by nature.
The Bible affirms that all people are “by nature children of wrath even as the rest” (Eph. 2:3). “There is none righteous, no not one” (Rom. 3:10). Like David, you were “brought forth in iniquity, and in sin [your] mother conceived [you]” (Ps. 51:5).
Because you have amassed a huge volume of sins.
If you were only to commit 1 sin every day for 10 years, your total sins would be 36,500. But if you sinned at that rate for 60 years, the number would be 219,000. Yet you commit far more than 10 sins each day. And remember how many sins Adam committed before God judged him worthy of death.
Because you have committed the greatest crime possible, against the highest existing authority.
The first and greatest command in the entire universe is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:30). The qualifier “all” speaks loudly in this command. Only perfection will satisfy these terms. And the authority behind this law is not earthly; it is God Himself—the highest authority in the universe.
Because of your persistence in sinning against God.
If a man steals once, he might be forgiven. But if he steals repeatedly and habitually over his lifetime, his crime attains a magnitude of offensiveness that demands far more punishment. You have been repeatedly and habitually committing a sin much worse than stealing, for your whole life!
Read More

Written by David T. Koyzis |
Sunday, June 26, 2022
On a weekly basis we sinners confess our transgressions before the God who has forgiven us through Jesus Christ. We live our lives in this age in anticipation of being raised to new life on that still-to-come seventh day. In this life in the meantime, when we gather to worship on each Lord’s day, we reenact liturgically the promise of redemption to which we look forward with hope, confident that healing will come with the sabbath.

The Gospels record seven instances of Jesus healing someone on the sabbath day.
The three Synoptic Gospels tell of his healing a man with a withered hand (Matt 12:9–13; Mark 3:1–6; Luke 6:6–11). All three again relate the very brief story of his healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law of her fever (Matt 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39). Two Gospels tell of Jesus casting an “unclean spirit,” or demon, out of a man (Mark 1:21–28; Luke 4:31–37). Luke alone relates the stories of Jesus curing a woman with “a spirit of infirmity” (13:10–17) and a man with dropsy (14:1–6). Finally, the Gospel of John relates two occasions when Jesus healed on the sabbath: the sick man at the pool of Bethzatha (5:1–18) and the man who had been born blind (9:1–41).
Each of these occasions saw Jesus incurring the wrath of the Jewish religious leaders because he had apparently violated the Torah’s prohibition against working on the seventh day (Exod 20:8–11; Deut 5:12–15). As the indignant ruler of one of the synagogues put it, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on the sabbath day” (Luke 13:14). The story continues with Jesus’ response:
You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger, and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day? (13:15–16)
This reply put the people to shame, we are told, yet it only stiffened the resolve of the authorities to put an end to Jesus’ ministry.
How shall we interpret Jesus’ actions? Was he deliberately healing on the sabbath to make a point? And, if so, what was that point? Might Jesus have been underscoring the negative effects of legalism?
There is something to this. After all, Paul wrote, “One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom 14:5). And, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath” (Col 2:16). In his letters to the believers of Rome and Colossae, Paul appears to relativize the importance of sabbath-keeping, along with other observances to which the ancient Jews were accustomed.
The notion that Jesus was combating legalism is one that we are likely to find deeply attractive, given the dominant metanarrative of expressive individualism to which Charles Taylor and others have called our attention. Enforcing the letter of the law may conflict with the spirit of the law, an insight that we find as early as Plato, who for that reason preferred the rule of the virtuous to the rule of law. We need not go that far, of course, to recognize that the law needs to be tempered by mercy and the good judgement that often comes of long personal experience.
Nevertheless, we ought not to assume that the principle of sabbath rest has been abrogated. Indeed, its importance can scarcely be overemphasized for the larger biblical redemptive story. In Genesis 2:2–3 we read that God rested on the seventh day after he had made heaven and earth, including his human image, the capstone of creation.
Read More
Related Posts: