Quoting things I know
I always admire people who can quote from books or movies in conversation. Sometime it doesn’t matter if you have read the book or seen the movie, but other times you don’t get it – but nod agreeingly because they obviously know what they are talking about. When we read Matthew we will get so much depth and understanding if we take the time to study the books that he is quoting from.
This year has been insightful, eye-opening and challenging on multiple levels. This was a great book to end with – though I wish I wasn’t so busy getting my things packed to have spent more time wrestling with Jesus’ interpretation of the law.
Mark, who taught this book, challenged us to live the kingdom in our society. He challenged us to prove this generation wrong about what they think that Christians are like. Our generation has become “dechurched”: spent significant time around Christians and in our churches but have left them unimpressed. My general impression is that Christians respond the wrong way to this kinds of information. I usually find Christians are either pessimistic or optimistic about changing the minds of this generation. There are the pessimists who are content to keep things the way they are because they think that their efforts will not succeed. There are the optimists who have lots of energy and enthusiasm to fix the PR problem that Christians and the church have and try to be the most loving and accepting people in their neighborhoods. Then there are others who have tried to avoid calling themselves “Christians” in order to leave behind the baggage that comes with the term Christian.
Frankly, I think that all these ideas are not the right approach. The pessimists are partially right because they realize that Christianity will always have PR problem and the world will always hate us. The optimists are also partially right because the witness that Christians are giving to non-Christians generally is extremely lousy and fake. The “others” are partially right because they recognize that real Christians need to distinguish themselves.
Unbelievers however aren’t impressed for long with our clever ways of calling ourselves by names other than “Christian”. This doesn’t really do anything for us but confuse unbelievers. The best way to help the church be a witness have a godly witness to the world is to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:29) and the rest of Jesus’ teachings and live it out. If you are concerned with the church’s bad witness, then be concerned with your own bad witness… a bad witness is simply a witness that is other than the witness that Jesus calls us to have.