Culture vs. Chick Tracts

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

All right, so I have entitled our talk, this is session two, our talk, Culture versus Chick Tracks. Raise your hand if you know what a Chick Track is. You haven’t used enough public restrooms then, because they’re always in the stalls, right? Never you find them? Yeah. Or getting people saved by changing the community. Or I’ve added an additional subtitle, The Barbecue Life. Hopefully you’ll know what that means here in a little while. But first, let’s begin with Abraham Kuyper. Abraham Kuyper was born in 1837. He died in 1920 at the ripe old age of 83. He was something of a Dutch Renaissance man who was born some 200 years after the Renaissance was over.

He was helpfully committed to the notion of sphere sovereignty. And that is, cultures function optimally when the spheres, for instance, the state, the church, the family, commerce, enjoy sovereignty without interference from one another. He was also deeply committed to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord of all those spheres. He is Lord over all of it. He stated this succinctly in his address at the opening of the free University of Amsterdam when he said, there’s not one thumbs width, or sometimes translated, square inch, in the whole domain of human existence over which Jesus Christ, who is sovereign overall, does not cry, mine.

And if Jesus is Lord over all the spheres, then what does this mean for Christians involvement in politics and the arts and education, the sciences and everything else? Well, though we disagree with Kuyper in some areas, the elders of Trinity Evangel Church cheerfully agree with his application of the sovereignty of God across all the spheres, namely, if Christ is Lord over it all, And if all those things are good, then Christians ought to have cares that go as far as Christ’s cares go, that is, they’re pervasive.

The elders of Trinity Evangel Church are also convinced dispensationalists. We believe that there remains a future for Israel and that Christ will return in bodily form to the earth where he will reign physically for 1,000 years. We believe that he will remove the church from the earth beforehand in what is commonly known as the rapture. We also believe that the rapture is imminent. That means that nothing else needs to happen first. Nothing further needs to happen before Christ’s dramatic removal of the church from the earth. It also happens that this eschatological position is consistent with the larger doctrinal statement of Trinity Evangel Church.

We also believe it’s a very good thing to make unbelievers jealous of what they can have in Christ. That is not a sinful jealousy, that is a righteous jealousy. We support Paul’s notion that it is actually necessary for the Jews to be jealous of what the Gentiles are receiving through Christ.

That that is a good thing. And this view of the end times has inspired a lot of really reactionary Christian living. Because this eschatology also happens to be the most prevalent in America, the Church’s bad application of it has made Christians the object of ridicule and mockery. Some of it is completely fair. And some of it makes about as much sense as calling Christ a glutton and a drunkard. What sorts of things am I talking about? What have dramatic reactions to dispensationalism yielded? Well, I’ll offer a few hallmarks. For instance, rapture fiction. If the wild popularity of the Left Behind series is any indicator, people love to imagine what sort of drama will unfold once the churches were moved from the earth.

What will happen if the pilot and the co-pilot both are Christians and they’re taken up in the air even further? And when that jet is 40,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, what will happen with little babies? Will they be raptured too? Who will emerge as the world leaders when the salty presence of the believers is eliminated? will their clothes be raptured with them? Or will they just be changed in that way too? Christian and secular writers and producers have gotten rich by imaginatively examining questions like these. What other hallmarks? The bunker mentality. According to the Bible, there are, things are bad and they’re going to get worse before the end.

Addison’s approaching the bottom of the decline of Splash Mountain and man is that terrifying. She only knew it awaited her. People are going to abandon the truth for lies. Does that sound familiar? Bad to worse, truth for lies. The bunker crowd often calls for cultural withdrawal. At best we can, they say, the best we can do is to protect our families, hunker down, get lots of bottled water, canned goods, abandoned recycling. Get lots of ammunition, wait it out. The world is a lost cause and there’s no point trying to influence it or flavor the culture, rather we should remove ourselves from the culture lest we be tainted by our association with it.

What else? Turner Burn Evangelism. In my notes, that’s trademarked. And this is the complete opposite of the bunker mentality, but it is actually strangely born of the same theology. if Jesus may just remove the Christians from the earth at any moment, then what on earth are we sitting around for when we should be out there getting people saved while we still can?

Alarmism and scare tactics make it hard for the world to take us seriously, and it’s little surprise why. We keep freaking out and telling others that they should probably be freaking out too in between their gospel presentations, and then we wonder why the world doesn’t want what we have.

Ironically, this sort of gospel presentation is neither compelling nor is it effective. And really these are only a few of the hallmarks, though these dispensationalists may mean well, there’s nothing compelling about a fear-driven life. Manipulating unbelievers into a decision as a mere escape from the fires of hell only requires the love of self on the part of the unbeliever, not a love of Christ. Yeah, Chick tracts are fine for presenting the message of salvation, but they do little to help the believer with what to do next. They do little to direct the Christian in a life spent for others. They don’t tell the convert what to do when he wakes up, a believer, tomorrow.

Beyond this, in practice, a refusal to live for this world often looks like austerity and deprivation, but rather than merely depriving themselves of earthly pleasures, they also deprive God of the joy of bestowing certain blessings on his children. Paul called this teaching demonic.

In 1 Timothy 4, verses one through five, He said, now the Spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything God created is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. So to be clear, a refusal to receive the good gifts that God gives, the good gifts of say food and marriage is a demonic doctrine.

And when Christians do it in the name of refusing to fall in love with the world, our life’s attractiveness, That’s, its attractiveness factor is more like steaming sewage than barbecue. Now am I saying then that we are to cast off all fetters of restraint and become hedonists in Jesus’ name? Well, sort of. Like in a word, yes, but with some qualifications. This is where John Piper helpfully put the pet the evangelical cat backwards some 25 years ago when he brought to the fore the idea of Christian hedonism.

Piper’s thesis is pretty simple. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. The Spirit-filled Christian will pursue God’s greatest glory because that will be that Christians greatest pleasure. This makes plenty of Christians nervous because they believe that our love of God must be completely disinterested. If you have any interest in pursuing your own happiness it must be wrong and sinful. That all we are allowed to get out of it is God’s glory. Well for as helpful as Piper has been here some of us don’t believe that he went far enough. Piper’s disciple Joe Rigney went further than his mentor and his helpful book The Things of Earth, one of the recommendations in your pamphlets. Rigney teaches that Christians are not only allowed to enjoy good gifts from God but that we ought to do so as a means of properly honoring him.

He says this, the heavenly mindset is profoundly earthly. Sorry, profoundly earthy. So it is earthy, but it is fundamentally oriented by the glory of Christ. He also says, faithful gospel proclamation must include a robust theology of the goodness of God’s gifts in creation. So that’s Rigney, this is me. ribeye steaks, pea-did scotch, the crackling fire on the hearth, love making, the giggling of a child, the purr of a kitten, sunsets, and watching the squirrels play in your backyard. Those are all fine in that they’re lawful, but more than this, our proper enjoyment of them brings us closer to God.

Still, some fear that enjoying them might just bring you perilously close to idolatry. That is, you might just end up loving those more than God. So you’d best be very leery of them. What if we regard these things as the gifts that they actually are? Gifts, as good gifts given by a loving Father who wishes for us to delight in Him, but who also loves to give us good gifts. The joy that an earthly father enjoys in giving a donut to his child is a mere shadow of the joy that our heavenly Father enjoys when he gives us something good and we receive it properly. But if I gave my daughter a donut, and she rejected it in order to prevent from loving the donut more than she loves me, isn’t she sort of missing the point?

Isn’t she also at the same time depriving both herself and me of the enjoyment that would come from her joyful receiving of the gift? So although God has countless ways to draw the elect to himself, Very few Christians come to faith in Christ because they’re compelled by the presentation of a really gifted street evangelist.

Or a colorful piece of rapture fiction. Does he use those? Absolutely, is there a place for them? Sure, absolutely. But to most unbelievers, this lifestyle is not alluring. When a life of vibrant worship, feasting and intentional obedience is more like the barbecue across the neighbor’s fence. It is enticing, it is alluring, it is compelling. So a brief pause in time out here and then I’ll recap. The point of this seminar is to help you understand what makes us tick. What sort of principles drive our decision making, what sort of weightiness ballasts our little evangelical ship. And as a convinced dispensationalist who has seen way more people get saved as a product of the culture they’ve been in rather than in cold call evangelistic efforts, I believe right down to the marrow of my bones that shaping culture is a more effective evangelistic weapon than a lot of the evangelistic efforts of most dispensationalists today.

And so if we really want to get as many people saved as fast as possible, let’s employ the things I’m talking about here, which are cultural. So to review, whereas, I don’t know if you can read this, but I’ll read it nice and loud. Whereas Jesus is Lord over the whole of creation, even if his millennial reign on the earth is still to come. And whereas the rapture will only happen when all the chosen race is brought into Christ’s fold. And whereas the Jews must be grafted back into the vine, which will happen when they are made jealous by God’s outpouring of blessings on the Gentiles. And whereas the Jews will be made jealous by witnessing God’s grace to the Gentiles, that’s us.

And whereas Christ’s infiltration and influence In culture is a compelling, Christian infiltration and influence, in culture is a compelling means of exhibiting the grace of God. And whereas this infiltration and influence will change culture unto the salvation of the nations, we labor in joy to cultivate a Trinitarian community of worshiping, maturing disciples who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord over all the world. That’s the TEC mission statement and it is fundamentally cultural. I’d be remiss if I didn’t give the two more where ass. Where as, we embrace Abraham Kuyper’s view that Christians should be applying the lordship of Christ in every sphere, and whereas we are dispensationalists who don’t see any need for or benefit of, alarmist or fearful dread of the future, or who wish to scare others into the kingdom, we’ve nicknamed our idea of faithful Christian living, Kuyperian dispensationalism.

Now, if there were anything that could disturb the felicity that a Kuiper’s enjoying in heaven right now. It would be those two things being yoked together. But hopefully, if he were to give the benefit of the doubt and to consider it charitably, he would say, okay, well, I’ll allow it.

With the time that remains, I wanna suggest some ideas as to what Kuyperian dispensationalism looks like day by day. As we try to walk it out in our local church here at TEC, and as we live in such a way as to provoke the unbelieving world around us to jealousy and repentance.

What does the barbecue life look like? How can we live in such a way as to showcase our blessedness in Christ as well as His Lordship? I have a very meandering list of things that I will encourage Christians to do whenever I have the opportunity and it happens that I have a captive audience right now. So I’m gonna give you a principle followed by a few example applications of that principle. You’ve got three big principles. In the interest of time, I’ll basically teleport through the second, but I’ll spend a little longer time on one and three. The first is to lead compelling lives. Simple enough. There you go, just live in such a way as to provoke the unbelievers around you to want what you have in Christ.

How do we do that in our own cultural context? Well, like I said, I’ll offer a few examples. And first up is by worshiping, by worshiping. And we begin with worship, and of course, in worship I mean faithful evangelical worship. All men cannot avoid worshiping any more than they can avoid breathing. We begin with worship because our identity in Christ is our chief distinctive and what distinguishes us from the world. When we prioritize corporate worship, we do a few things. For one thing, first we show ourselves that we are not our own. That’s a really good thing. We submit to God in what he has said, renewing weekly the reality that we don’t answer to men or the world or human intellect or reason or our bank accounts, but rather we answer to God.

We don’t do this perfectly and it can become routine if we’re not careful or if we do become lazy, but the practice of weekly corporate worship orients us. If nothing else, church, going to church on Sundays, represents a couple of hours a week And we can be sure that we’ll at least have the opportunity to take our focus off of ourselves, and off of our problems, and to behold Christ.

We talk about changing culture. This sort of practice is very potent. Second, we show the world, when we worship, we show the world that we are not our own. We belong to another. Our decision making and our compelling lives come from some place, from some worldview that is cultivated in worship. Third, we participate in the building up of the body of Christ. God uses these means of grace to grow us and He uses us to help other members of the body to grow as well. When we gather together to sing God’s praises, when we gather together to hear the Word taught, we take communion, we exercise church discipline, we practice submission to God’s Word and give power to our very lives. Our corporate worship lays a bedrock for all of life and without it our lives lose power. That was on tragic display in the spring and the summer of 2020 when many Christians just stopped going to church.

Whether it was their own fear or someone else’s fear that drove that consumeristic withdrawal from cultural battle, the testimony of the church suffered violence and we lost much influence. And when many of these Christians return to their churches, they demonstrated that their chief allegiance was not to an elected official, but rather to King Jesus. How else can we lead compelling lives? I think it’s on there already by singing. Yeah, that’s where we are. That’s the six-pack and sing. This is not the same thing as worship, but it, so it gets its own heading, but it does belong right there on the heels of it. Most people can’t sing.

They could if they wanted to, but they haven’t learned how or they don’t want to. My wife always says, if you can speak, you can sing. And so they have something of an infatuation with those who can sing, even if the substance of those singers, songs, is generally speaking, godless rubbish.

A staple of Christian worship is singing. If you’ve been at TEC for any length of time, you’ll know that we have a great time singing together and we take it seriously. Psalm 33 verse three reminds us of the value of practicing skill in our musical worship. And cultivating this will show the world that we are different. It’s not to say that all of our worshipers are excellent vocalists, but we do our part and produce something together that is far greater than what we can produce on our own. Further, singing orients us, and it provides a potent means of memorizing scripture and its truths. For instance, this could totally backfire, or it could be awesome, but finish the following lines for me.

Thou shalt see thy children’s children. I do this right now, be free. Or encompassing that table around, but you got the idea. How about, God shall arise and by his might. Would I? Okay, that was at least a B plus. The first one was a C plus. How about, they Jehovah crush your people. Right, I think that’s verse 3, so good job. How about, long my imprisoned spirit lay. Found, some cast out, but hey, pretty good. How about one more from the same Wesleyan hymn, my chains fell off, my heart was free. All right, good job. So now you’ve been practicing or you’ve been shaped. Well done. There is very much a place for singing in the compelling Christian life. But what else can we do? We can leave compelling lives by feasting. I like to think of feasting as the grateful and deliberate receiving of God’s good gifts. A hallmark of feasting is gratefulness rather than abundance.

Feasting is more of a mindset than it is an event and it is very good. When we purpose to feast we position ourselves to receive. God is the pitcher, the ball is blessing, and we’re the catcher, squat of a hand home plate with a glove of gratefulness. And when we think of feasting as receiving what God is giving, we do well. We are not the initiators, we are not the providers of the blessing, we don’t even deserve it, we are the recipients. This attitude also helps us to remember, which was much the point of the prescribed feasts of the Old Testament, whether Passover or the Feast of Booths or any other, carving it out on the calendar and planning for it, helped to ensure that the Israelites would bring to their conscience the faithfulness of God, and that they would also have the opportunity to answer their children when they asked what do these things mean.

It also means the feasting should be planned. We should be oriented toward grateful receiving as a habit, but we should carve out time to remember and to receive. And feasting is so much better than hedonistic partying. That the world does so well and so frequently because there’s actually a point to it. We aren’t simply celebrating occasions, we’re celebrating and thanking the one who gave us those occasions and the gifts that accompany them. So there may be wine and beer and cider and coffee and tea, but there may not be drunkenness that would dull the senses, that would hinder our thankfulness. There may be steak and pizza and mashed potatoes and ice cream, but there may not be gluttony or selfishness that would suggest that the filling of the stomach were the point.

And there are a hundred ways to pervert feasting and we invent new ones every day, but they can nearly all be mitigated by orienting ourselves as grateful recipients. This is something that the world just doesn’t understand and they may just ask you about it. You know, that is funny. I’ve never seen that many people have such a great time and go so crazy and have the wine so freely and it be completely sober. Help me understand that. They may just ask you about it, but what else? How else can we lead compelling lives? By practicing hospitality. This goes hand in glove with feasting. Do you know two more hospitable people?

Yeah. If we believe that we are recipients, we can also understand that we are stewards of what we’ve been given. God owns the baseball, remember that. We just catch it, then play ball with others. As stewards of what God has given, we do well when we share with others. Whether a meal or a bed or a few bucks, when we are generous with what we have been given, we better image the one who really owns all that we enjoy, but who chooses to share it with us. A qualified elder is supposed to be hospitable, and many of our people have been working to grow in this area quite hard. But it’s exciting to think about the allure of a church community that is collectively hospitable.

We’re totally growing that direction. But when hospitality is normal and free and gracious for our church community, others will want in. We are getting better, sadly the ancients. We’re better at this than we moderns tend to be, but they were also more aware than we are, that they might just be entertaining gods. They were often incredibly hospitable out of fear of offending Zeus. Not out of real love for their neighbors. That’s the next one. We lead compelling lives by loving our neighbors. We know that loving our neighbors has a broader application than simply our next door neighbors, but it definitely includes them.

And the cultivating good relations with our neighbors is a good thing, Proverbs 27.10. Our love for those who live next to us is never truly disinterested, like it’s a good thing to have good neighbors. We know that it means loving Christ. Matthew 25, 31 to 46. It’s also harder to fool your neighbors year after year than the folks in your bowling leaguer at the country club or even at school. If they’re paying attention, they’re apt to see you with your guard down. They’re apt to witness who you really are. It happens that God has blessed the Sarr family with really great, unbelieving neighbors. Our next door neighbors are actually Jews and enthusiastic supporters of Bernie Sanders, which adds a bit of ironical humor to our intention to provoke them to a biblical jealousy.

So they hear us snapping at our kids loudly, they hear us singing Psalms loudly, and everything in between. And we love them and they come to us now and again to discuss politics and religion. And we part amicably. And our kids are instructed to go to them if we’re ever not at home and they have some kind of emergency. That’s all by God’s design. If we live for others, it will go well with us.

If you wish to serve Christ, you must love your neighbors. This will last for the moment. We lead compelling lives by working hard. Oh, I don’t have this one on here. If I did, I would have had a picture of Ryan busting down a fence at my house. That was pretty awesome. I just thought about that, make a moment of inspiration. But you just have to envision Ryan busting down a fence. If you want to stand out in the world, work like you are not your own. Work as though you are a steward of someone else’s time and resources because you are. And work as though you are interested first in pleasing Christ and soon you’ll be indispensable in your place of employment and an enigma to the world.

If you work as though you wish to honor Christ, your boss will be blown away and your platform of influence will mushroom from a two by four to a dance floor in a moment. So those are a few ways that we can work to lead compelling lives. The next one, I’ll go really quickly through this, is to live for the next generation.

And one of the first ways I would suggest we do this is by starting businesses. Many Christians think that building for the future is a waste of time or even wrong, but if we believe that Christians frequently spring from Christian cultural contexts, remember I said that before, Christians frequently spring forth from Christian cultural contexts. We ought to be working to turn our culture into a thoroughly Christian one unto the salvation of all the elect. How can we do this? How can we live for the next generation? Well, again, starting businesses is one way. Christians should look to offer the best and most useful service as we do so in Jesus’ name.

Turn a profit and use biblical business principles. Give employees an opportunity to thrive and to provide for their families, and build it so as to keep it around for a long, long time, even though the rapture might be tonight. What else? Starting schools. If there aren’t any good training grounds for your children, start one. There’s an old picture and a recent picture of Evangel classical school. I didn’t have handy any comfort college pictures, but there aren’t any old ones. They’re all new. Or, what about voting? There’s Mark James and Nate Nearing. Pray for your political leaders. Leave an inheritance. Today, it is counter-cultural to marry young and to buy a home before the age 30.

To make matters worse, the housing market is making first-time home-buying cost prohibitive. What if we were building now so as to have something to hand to our children that would make Christian community alluring? In fact, let’s focus on kids for the last principle. I’ll say invest in your children. So this is the last principle and then I have a, like I said, a few examples. How can we do this? By fleeing hypocrisy in the home. Any of you omnibus students have a guess what that’s supposed to be a picture of. What is it, Ellie? No, it’s not actually. That’s not Zeus eating his children. What is it, Grant? It’s Chronos. You know what it actually is? That’s Satan gnawing on Judas.

And that’s Minferno. When I thought of hypocrisy, I thought of Judas and I… Yeah, there you go. So you see he’s an angel. He’s a very angry angel.

So flea hypocrisy in the home. I plead with you to do this. And while you read it, hypocrisy everywhere else as well. They say that kids can see through hypocrisy. I think it’s true even if they’re not sophisticated in how they articulate their perception or in how they respond to it. Most children who grow up witnessing hypocrisy, they follow suit with hypocrisy of their own for a little while. Then as soon as they have the opportunity they distance themselves from it and often far from it. Many of us have seen it. A family lives one day on Sundays going to to church, looking the part and all the rest. Then they live a different way the rest of the week. Well, the kids from that family walk away from the church and from the faith as soon as they can, more often than not. If Christian parents wish to avoid this for their children, they must prioritize the fleeing of hypocrisy. That’s an awkward mandate and I realize that. Prioritize the fleeing of hypocrisy. Call it honesty, call it integrity,

of faithfulness or whatever you like, just do it. Don’t be a hypocrite. Repent, then call your children to repentance. You go first, don’t hold your children, oh sorry, yeah, don’t hold your children to a higher standard than you hold yourself. It is often the case that our children surpass us, but we shouldn’t count on it. Not morally, expecting something of them that we do not expect of ourselves.

Neither should we expect for holiness to surpass ours. Some of our children are more holier than we are. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. Besides, not being a hypocrite is actually easier than trying to keep up behavioral lies. So flee hypocrisy in your own. You can also invest in your children by schooling with intentionality. This is just a list of a bunch of Greek tragedians. Home or private, not public. With apologies, I’ll step onto the soapbox in just a moment and some of you are thinking, did you ever get off? Too many Christian parents today, the figure that being a part of a Christian family is enough to ensure that your children will enjoy a Christian upbringing.

Well, the data and our own eyes tell us that this is just not true. If we drop our children into a fast flowing river, they can have a life jacket on and still wind up downstream. Surviving is not the same thing as thriving. And make no mistake, they are in a current. Also, it has to be said, the fact that you’re a product of public schools and that you turned out okay, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for your kids any more than you’re surviving a car wreck means you should arrange one for your children. I must say at this point that the public school system is bankrupt and antithetical to Christianity. I did not use to be the naysayer that I am now, but the mask is off, people.

It presupposes wrongly that the state should be involved in the training of children for whom God has made the parents responsible. It also requires the employment of a secular curriculum for this education so there’s no fixed standard for anything at all. It teaches that the humans in the seats are accidents. It does this all with four times the money that we collect per pupil at Evangel Classical School. Just as a for instance. This agenda is advanced with tax dollars that are paid by the citizenry, whether or not we want to use the system. I do believe, however, that there is a place for Christian teachers and staff members in public schools as it presents quite a mission field.

But those educators do need to be ready to adhere to their biblical convictions and be fired for doing so at a moment’s notice. And I don’t believe that these schools are any place for Christian kids. There is absolutely a time to go to battle and it’s not in the basic training of grammar and secondary schools. And having our children trained in a secular, but far from neutral training ground is a bad strategy for cultural influence, which is what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about getting people saved by changing the community, right? Homeschooling is the model of schooling that actually requires the degree of parental involvement that God seems to expect in Deuteronomy 6.

But very few are the parents who can actually do this well without additional assistance from a day school of some kind. So whether it’s homeschooling or Christian schooling, We have to be deliberate and intentional about the education of our children. Far too many parents, even Christian parents today, just let it happen and hope that everything turns out okay. We must be deliberate about the culture in which we immerse our children. What river are you going to toss yours into?

And last, I would say, invest in your children by immersing them in a Christian culture. Of course, we don’t want them to stay there exclusively. I mean, the point of all this is to compel unbelievers, right? but in the main, we want for our kids to think that being around their Christian community is completely normal, and ideally they would like it.

Then when they have kids, they’ll fold them into that culture and it gains gravity and momentum unto the salvation of the world. I hope it’s clear by now that this mentality has countless applications. In an apocryphal quote to Martin Luther, he said something to the effect of, again, reportedly, And whether or not he said it, it totally rings true and sounds like something Luther would say. Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to peace as I would still plant my apple tree, our job is to be faithful. We do not know how many elect souls remain unconverted, but we know the number will be completed through the faithfulness of the saints.

God ordains ends as well as means. But ironically, many Christians today have been well-intentioned in their abandonment of what I’ve been talking about here. They’re champions of the sacred secular divide. The things of earth are only seen rightly when they are strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. They may even say that we are wrong to enjoy these things, but at Trinity Evangel Church, we are counting on lifestyle and culture in the battle for souls, the battle for souls, as we work to see the full compliment of the elect bow the knee to King Jesus. And in the end, it’s a whole lot more fun than the alternative.

They’re actually having a great time. And it’s hard work. We are working hard. And we are trying to be intentional about our parenting, not just letting it happen. And we are singing and worshiping. And we are trying to flee hypocrisy and buy local and practice joyful and faithful hospitality.

It’s obvious that sometimes it’s clunky and we’re not great at it, but God is blessing our efforts, which takes me to my last thing, And that is this, don’t be afraid to boast. Many Christians today are not comfortable with boasting. This is understandable as we tend to boast in ourselves. Our own accomplishments and successes, our wisdom and so on. But Paul had no problem boasting when his boasting involved taking no credit. Paul’s boasting involved taking no credit. And so should we. Like Paul, we should boast in the Lord because that is alluring, that is compelling. I have no problem whatever, boasting and telling you all that God is blessing our church like crazy.

It is awesome. I have no problem, no hesitation to boast in what God is doing among us. And as I said, we’re trying to do these things, but it just simply cannot be true that the fruit that we’ve seen is because of us. From a human standpoint, yes, people are, somebody’s turning on the lights and turning down the heat in the morning. And Sean is putting in hours and hours during the week to prepare the liturgy for Sunday mornings and there are, the old AD team did a ton of work trying to get together the food for this afternoon. Yes, on a human level, people are doing work, but it doesn’t add up. It does it all, the fruit cannot possibly be owing to us.

And aside from the fact that God has provided the faith and the ability and the means to do any of these things, he’s also done the spiritual math with the yield of the crop we’ve sown. We sing a lot, for instance, in a world where so many young people roll their eyes at music. We have parents who are discipling their children and some children who actually like their parents.

We have a culture of hospitable feasting and God has given all of it as gift. These things are all blessings from the Lord that we did not earn or deserve. And that means that we are calling all believers to come and join us. And we’re calling all unbelievers to look at the blessed lives that we are leaving and repent because there’s plenty of God’s grace to go around. God’s grace is free and he gives it to all who ask him in faith. So let’s boast in the Lord and go forth in faith, applying his lordship unto the salvation of all the elect and amen. Let’s pray. Father, we pray that you would bring this about. We can’t do it, but we do want to be used by you and we pray that you would then bring the increase and we would happily point all credit and glory to you.

So help us not to try to be more holy than you or help us instead to follow the example of Paul and live our lives in such a way as promote the unbelievers among us and around us and near us and an eyesight and earshot to the right kind of jealousy that they may repent and you may be honored. We thank you, we pray these things in Christ’s name, amen.