Stop Trying to Protect Your Gospel Witness!

Why Maintaining Gospel Witness Is the Wrong Goal

In this video, I'm going to show you why trying to maintain your gospel witness is probably not a very good idea, not a winning strategy at all. Before we begin today, I just wanted to point out the shirt that I'm wearing, No Despair.

That is what I'm all about here in 2020. No Despair at all, because regardless of how things seem to be falling apart, the evangelical movement seems to be tearing itself apart at the seams. Even the reformed, sort of traditionally conservative aspects of evangelicalism, there's problems.

There's no question about it. And even in the country at large, I saw a video today that Caitlyn Bennett, that libertarian girl, getting attacked at a university. Just absolutely preposterous things. I mean, people are getting pretty crazy out there.

But even despite all that insanity, the nations will rage, but for God's people, there is no despair. We have the ultimate hope, and we can keep our nose to the grindstone. I think that's the phrase. I don't know.

We keep our heads down, and we stay focused on our families and doing what God says we ought to be doing. In other words, being fruitful and multiplying, teaching our children what to do and how to follow God and how to love God and love each other and things like that.

That's why there's no despair, because God will always have his remnant. God doesn't leave himself without a witness. And the reality is that the marching orders for us are very simple, and the promises for us are very great.

So there's no despair in 2020. Check out Confessional Wear. I'll put a link in the description of this video. And if you want to support me, but you want to get something tangible in return, maybe a conversation starter or something like that, this shirt is a good way to do it.

There's also another one for No Despair 2020 for our political season. Anyway, maintaining your gospel witness. People talk about this a lot, how evangelicals ruin their gospel witness by voting for Trump, or a variety of different ways you can ruin your witness.

You get seen at the bar, you might ruin your witness and stuff like that. I've got to be honest with you. I've never understood this obsession with trying to maintain this gospel witness, whatever it is.

A lot of times people don't explain that stuff. And I really hate Christian-ese, where we just kind of assume the definition. We don't really know what the heck they're talking about. But this idea of maintaining your witness is sort of like, you need to kind of keep a certain amount of respectability in order for people to give you the time of day, in order for people to even take you seriously at all.

And if you don't have that, if you vote for Trump, for example, people are going to be like, oh, you're just a fanatic. You're just a lunatic. You're not respectable in any way. They're not going to hear you.

They're not going to take you seriously when you talk to them about the gospel. And to be perfectly honest, I didn't see the apostles really worried so much about their gospel witness. Now, of course, as Christ followers, as someone that cares about others, that wants to spread that gospel, I want to be as convincing as possible.

And so whatever I have to do to be as convincing as possible to get a hearing, I'll do it, so long as it doesn't compromise the message. Because the message that I'm supposed to be preaching, the message that I'm supposed to be spreading, the truth that I'm devoted to, is not negotiable.

Like, it's not my truth. You know, in the old days, one of the things that we're doing at my church in Sunday school is we're going through the major and minor prophets. And one of the images that you typically see is God says, I'm going to put my words into your mouth to his prophets.

And he makes the prophets eat the scrolls. You know what I mean? So the prophets are speaking, but they're not speaking their own words. They're speaking God's words. So you dare not edit that. We can't edit that.

God Created Man Male and Female

And we're in such a time where people are in such rebellion against God, such abject, God-hating rebellion against anything that God says, that even believing simple things will, quote unquote, ruin your gospel witness.

And so the reality is that if you just believe the Bible, you know, simple things like, this is one that my kids know, God created man male and female after his own image. Like, that's how God created man.

He created the male and female after his own. That's a very simple thing. Anyone who looks down and sees their own private parts and is married to a person of the opposite sex and sees their private parts, they know that there's only two of those, right?

That simple thing is enough to ruin your gospel witness. People won't hear you out. Look at Doug Wilson, you know, talking to universities about sexuality and stuff like that. These are things that are very basic.

He's not coming up with anything new. This is not complicated stuff. And people just rage. It's just insane. People lose their mind. It reminds me of the scene in Sodom and Gomorrah when the men that wanted to rape the angels and have sex with the angels that had come, you know, they lose their minds when somebody just says something simple like, hey, you know, you probably shouldn't rape these guys.

How about that? I don't know. It's wicked. They lose their minds. And so believing the Bible will absolutely ruin your gospel witness. People won't respect you. People will think you're a Neanderthal.

I mean, think about it. Like the Bible says very easy things to understand about homosexuality, right? Homosexuality is a sin. It's not natural for a man to lust after other men. It's not natural for a woman to lust after other women.

And it doesn't mean that you're the worst person in the world if you do it, but it's not natural. It's something you ought to fight against. That's a simple thing that people believed ever since the beginning of time.

And this is this has been common knowledge for so long. But if you say that today, people will rage and you'll ruin your gospel witness. Here's another one. You know, you shouldn't be partial to people.

You shouldn't be partial to rich people. You shouldn't be partial to poor people. No partiality, no matter what, no matter if you put them in the oppressor class or the oppressed class. It doesn't matter.

You should still do justice, not partiality. You shouldn't tip the scale on one side or the other. The poor side or the rich side, the black side or the white side, all that kind of stuff. The police officer or the citizen, like you shouldn't tip the scale in either case.

That's partiality. God is not partial, so we shouldn't be partial. You say that and people lose their ever-loving minds. You ruin your gospel witness. You say something like, well, you know, God blesses certain people with more money than other people.

And then these inequalities are not necessarily a problem to be solved. This is something. Wealth is a gift from God. God blesses his people in many ways, and wealth is one of those ways. I mean, it even says that the treasure of the sinner is laid up, is stored up for the righteous.

Like these inequalities, they're always going to exist. And we shouldn't steal from people just because some people have more than others. That's actually a sin that breaks one of the commandments. People lose their mind.

How could you say that? See, these things will ruin your gospel witness. These days, believing the Bible, believing that a wife should be focused on the home and raising her kids and supporting and helping her husband, that's what she was designed for.

It was the woman that was created for the man, not the man for the woman. Those are simple things that any Christian can understand, but they will ruin your gospel witness. And here's what we need to be willing to do.

We need to be willing to give up that gospel witness. Because you don't need to earn respectability points to talk to anybody. You don't need to earn a certain amount of acceptability in our culture in order to speak and preach that gospel to them.

Because that gospel message is powerful in and of itself. God empowers it. That's how God changes hearts. That's why you can see in the Bible, people get enraged when they hear the gospel, but still people are saved through that.

It's like, we don't have to be palatable to the culture. And I think, to be honest, I've talked to a lot of people about this, people that are in the know, people that go to these meetings and these secret, you know, here's the direction we're going to go with the social justice stuff.

I happen to know that a lot of this is out of a sense of self-preservation. The idea being that if we don't appeal to these people clamoring for social justice and clamoring for wealth equality and income equality, then we're going to be irrelevant to the millennials.

We're going to be irrelevant. They're not going to be interested at all. In fact, you can see the numbers were dwindling and stuff like that. We've got to do something. If the evangelical movement isn't going to fail, we need to do something.

We need to maybe change the emphases that we have a little bit and stuff like that. And it's just this pragmatic thing. Well, we need to figure out a way to let the church survive. And maybe this is a way that we can do it.

You know, we've lost the millennials on the homosexuality debate. So maybe we'll, you know, it's maybe not a sin to be gay, but maybe to act on it's a sin and you'll see them go further and further along.

And this social justice stuff is big time that. It's a way to be seeker sensitive in a way that sounds biblical. Because we can all see that that stupid clown church where they do the stormtroopers dancing around the Victoria's Secret stuff.

We can all laugh and joke about that. It's so stupid. It's seeker sensitive. It's not in the Bible. It's it's not it's against the regular principle. Yeah, we all can see it when it's a circus like that.

But there's low key ways to do that, too. And this social justice thing is a low key way to be seeker sensitive and as a way to sort of maintain your gospel witness. You can even see some of the rhetoric that people are so ashamed of Christians voting for Donald Trump because it's ruined our respectability, our gospel witness.

Christians need to be willing to be completely unrespected in this culture. Christians need to be willing to be completely irrelevant in the eyes of the power structures in our culture. Because God's power is not in how respectable his church is to pagans.

That's not where God's power is. God's power is not in how how many articles you can write for Washington Post or how many times CNN will call you to oppose Trump's policy. That's like that's not how God's that's not God's power.

God's power is in that gospel message. And so while you say, look, you know, dudes can't be girls, girls can't be boys. And there's a way out of this slavery to always want to be in control of your sexuality and your and your identity and stuff like that.

There's a way it's called submission to the Lord of Glory and doing what he says, being who he says you is and submitting your life to him in every way. That's that gospel. He's the king of kings. He sits on the throne.

He says what's what. And the only way you're going to find that fulfillment that you want is by repenting of your idolatry, repenting of your sin. And what repentance means is that I'm changing my mind.

I'm it's not my way anymore. It's your way. It's your way. God, I'm going to follow what you say. It's going to be hard, but I'm going to try to untangle this selfishness, this this self-worship that I've gotten all mixed up in.

I'm going to turn away from that and follow you and start doing what you say. That's that's that that's where the power it's that gospel message that Christ died on the cross for your sins of your all the idolatry that you're mixed up in all of that.

He took that penalty so that you could have a new life so that you could have a new life. You don't have to be a slave anymore. That's that gospel, man. That's that God. That's where the power of God is.

And so people are going to hate you for it. They're going to think, oh, that's barbarian talk. That's that's a bunch of rantings and ravings of goat herders back in the ancient times. What are you, a psychopath?

And they're going to they're going to disrespect you. And there's going to be simple things that you're going to say that they're going to be like this. This is not acceptable for civilized society. You need to be willing to be irrelevant.

You need to be willing to have to not have the huge campus with all of the amenities and stuff like that. All the money flowing in to have that amazing huge seminary. Look, I want you to have a huge seminary, too, but not when blood money is attached to it.

Not when there's money that has strings attached that you need to change that message even just a little bit, because that's not your message to change. It's not your message to change. That's God's message.

The prophets of old had to say what God had to say. They couldn't edit it, and neither can we. And so that's the reality. Be prepared to have your gospel witness ruined when you believe the Bible and seek to act like it.

Anyway, I hope that video was helpful. I hope it was encouraging. God bless.