3 temptations of the church: ”temptation #1: to be relevant”

June 16, 2024

Lead Pastor Dr. Dan Acker

Not all testing is bad  

 

Matthew 4:1-4

Deuteronomy 8:2-3

 

Testing reveals who you really are

 

Testing prepares you for your life as a Christ-follower. 

 

“We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers. Insofar as we acquiesce in that replacement, we gradually but surely regress in our identity, for we end up thinking of ourselves and dealing with others in marketplace terms: everyone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling; or we ourselves are the potential recruits and consumers. Neither we nor our friends have any dignity just as we are, only in terms of how we or they can be used."  -Eugene Peterson  

 

"By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful, but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant." -OS Guinness 

“A primary task of the community of Jesus is to maintain this lifelong cultivation of love in all the messiness of its families, neighborhoods, congregations, and missions. Love is intricate, demanding, glorious, deeply human, and God-honoring, but — and here’s the thing — never a finished product, never an accomplishment, always flawed in some degree or other.” -Eugene Peterson