While on an airplane yesterday, I was reading David Platt’s new book Counter Culture. This quote wrecked me at 30,000 feet…
I listen to the way contemporary Christians talk (especially, though not exclusively, younger evangelicals), I perceive fierce opposition to injustice regarding the poor, the orphan, and the enslaved. I observe increased awareness of social issues: a plethora of books written, conferences organized, and movements started that revolve around fighting hunger, alleviating poverty, and ending sex trafficking…
On popular issues like poverty and slavery, where Christians are likely to be applauded for our social action, we are quick to stand up and speak out. Yet on controversial issues like homosexuality and abortion, where Christians are likely to be criticized for our involvement, we are content to sit down and stay quiet. It’s as if we’ve decided to pick and
choose which social issues we’ll contest and which we’ll concede. And our picking and choosing normally revolves around what is most comfortable — and least costly — for us in our culture.
Jesus called us to a cross (Luke 9:23), not a cozy a la carte of spiritualism where we can pick and choose which issues are most important to God and society. As believers, are we going to fully embrace Christ’s Gospel, or rummage through it for the “safer” and more “comfortable” issues that are politically correct in our culture and less threatening to our social status?
Jesus doesn’t call us to a place called “safe,” he calls us to take up a cross and be willing to die for him.
Platt goes on to say…
“…much of our supposed social justice is actually a selective social injustice. We may recognize that what we thought were separate social issues are in fact all intimately connected to our understanding of who God is and what God is doing in the world. In the process, we may find that the same heart of God that moves us to war against sex trafficking also moves us to war against sexual immorality. We may discover that the same gospel that compels us to combat poverty also compels us to defend marriage. And in the end, we may resolve to rearrange our lives, families, and churches around a more consistent, Christ-compelled, countercultural response to the most pressing social issues of our day.”
It sounds like David Platt’s Counter Culture is a very timely word of admonition for evangelicals in this hour and an urgent call to return to the “whole counsel of God” in our generation (Acts 20:27).