How can the church remain faithful in this current cultural climate? Dr. Ligon Duncan offers advice on how Christians can faithfully stand on the truth and show love in an increasingly antagonistic culture.

It’s so vital for the church to remain faithful in this current cultural climate. The culture is actually pulling us in a couple of different directions.

Faithful in the Truth

Christians must plant our feet firmly on the Word of God and refuse to yield with worldly thinking.One thing that the culture is trying to do is erode our confidence in Christian truth. This is especially seen, for instance, in what the world thinks about gender and identity and sexuality. We live in a day in time when there is a culture being animated by something that I think we can fairly call paganism, that is wanting to completely rethink what humans are, what sexuality is, what gender is, what our identity ought to be. And the world is trying to disciple the church in those areas. Christians must plant our feet firmly on the Word of God and refuse to yield with worldly thinking. This is part of what Jesus was saying when he said, “Do not love the world.” We should not love the things of the world, the thought systems of the world. We should not try and go after them and copy them. And we should certainly not to try and mold biblical truth into what is acceptable to the world.

Faithful in Love

At the same time, because the world is becoming more antagonistic towards Christians, we often find the church in a reactionary stance, angry with the world, provoked by what the world is doing. Well, there’s of course such a thing as righteous indignation, but we should be very careful about that stance, because Jesus also tells us that he wants us to be salt and light in this world. We must stand on the truth, and we must faithfully minister that truth in love.He wants us to be moral preservative and moral testimony to godliness in a way that actually serves the benefit of the world around them by keeping the breakdown of of truth and morality from proceeding at the pace that it possibly could.

And so we ought to have an attitude to the world that we want to bless the world with the truth. We’re going to stand fast on the truth, and we’re going to take that truth in the world to bless the world, not to curse the world, so that the world will know the one true and living God through Jesus Christ, not because we hate the world. And so these things have to be held together by the church as we face this particular culture. We must stand on the truth, and we must faithfully minister that truth in love.

  • 1
    Share

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III

Ligon Duncan (MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary; PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the Chancellor & CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary, the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology, and the President of RTS Jackson. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or contributed to numerous books. You can follow him on Twitter.