Western Culture and the Church | Rapp Report Weekly Wrap-up 0022 | Striving for Eternity

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Welcome to the Wrap Up Daily Edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretations and applications.

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This is a ministry of striving for eternity. In this week's

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Wrap Up, we're looking at the way that the American and Western culture has influenced the church.

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The church used to be the thing that influenced the American culture and a lot of Western culture.

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It used to be Christianity that had such a big influence that some of our laws are based on the

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Bible. And now, we end up seeing that the culture has changed.

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What actually has happened is where many people would argue that they used to be in a closet. In other words, they were hiding and couldn't reveal themselves, and now they've come out.

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But what we're seeing is that that culture is now trying to shove Christians into, well, a sort of closet that they call the church.

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But not only are they shoving the Christians into the church and saying, we have to stay there, we're seeing that some of the effects of the culture still affect the church.

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The church doesn't even function the way it should, according to the scriptures. Western culture has been greatly influenced because of Christianity.

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However, now, unfortunately, the Western culture is starting to affect and influence the church and Christianity in a bad way.

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I want to talk about some of these things that we end up seeing. Now, when we look at Westernized culture, you see that it is very individualistic, and that has been something that has been viewed as a good thing.

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However, what you end up seeing now, and one of the ways that the culture is now affecting the church, is the fact that nowadays we see that individualistic nature so much so that people do not want

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God or anyone else telling them what to do. Why is it that so many people are against Christianity?

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Because within Christianity, it is the one absolute authority that says God has spoken, and therefore we must obey.

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And in a culture where no one wants to obey, where everyone wants to question authority, where everybody thinks that they should be entitled to whatever they think is right, and therefore it should be right, well, that flies in the face of an absolute standard of right and wrong.

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Many people in our culture do not like the Bible, and more specifically,

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God, because He says what should and should not be done, and when

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He says it, He's the final authority. Therefore, they want to remove that from culture.

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They want to remove God from culture completely, so that they can feel justified in doing whatever they want to do, even though they know it is wrong to do.

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How is the Western society affecting the church? Even though we see that Christianity had such a huge influence on Western culture, now we see

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Western culture influencing the church. And we see it sometimes in very subtle ways.

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Here's one that maybe you've been aware of in your church, or others possibly. But you know, there is a individualistic mindset of Western thinking that we are individuals, and everything becomes about us.

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Me, myself, and I. However, when you end up going to church, where everything should be about the worship of God, that means to be in awe of how great

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God is, and who God is. Everything we do in the church should be about Him first and foremost, and yet, think about much of the music that is sung in churches today.

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Who is the main character in most of the music? Me, myself, and I, and not

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God. That's right. If you think about it, many of the songs even that talk about God, talk about what

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God did for me, and how good God is to me, and how

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God has done things for me, not God. We should be leaving church going, how great is

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God, not how great am I. This is a way that we end up seeing that Western culture has influenced the church, where we've taken the minds and eyes off of Christ and God, and put it on self.

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That shouldn't happen. As we continue to look at some of the ways that the Western culture has been influencing the church, we can see this even in the reasons some people pick to go to which church.

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In the first century, people didn't have a choice of going to the Baptist church down the street, or the

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Baptist church up another block, or the Lutheran church, or Presbyterian church. No, in the first century, you went to the church of Ephesus, or the church of Corinth, because there was only one church in the town.

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Now, what we end up seeing as Western culture has changed and influenced the church, people come to church for what they can get out of it, and not what they can give to it.

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When you look at 1 Corinthians 12, you see that God gives us spiritual gifts for the explicit purpose of serving the church, not to try to get from the church.

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In other words, we should be going to church to serve others, not going to say, well, they've got a really good youth program, they've got a great children's program, they have a wanna, they have this, that program, whatever program, or that it fits into your schedule the best.

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The reality is people are going to church looking with a consumer mindset, which is not a biblical mindset.

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No, we should be going to church, maybe not even if we agree with everything they teach, but we go to church for the simple fact that we are commanded by God to assemble together and serve the body of Christ with the gifts that he has given us.

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As we see that the church has been affected by Western culture so much that the church now has people coming in with a consumer mindset, this has affected the way the church as a whole functions.

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Now, this is obviously not true for every church in America or Western culture, but it is, unfortunately, for a majority of them.

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People who come in with a consumer mindset are very easy to leave when they're not getting what they want and just go to the church up the street.

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The other thing that you end up seeing is that when everybody is focused on what they can get from church and their individuality in church, you're not seeing the church unity that is described in Scripture.

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What we see in 1 Corinthians 12 is that the church should be functioning as one body, many members, all having different gifts, serving in different ways, but all being part of one body.

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That is what you end up seeing in the Scriptures. That doesn't exactly model, unfortunately, the church that we see today, and a lot of it is because of the influence of Western culture.

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We have allowed the culture to influence the church. It is the church that should be making inroads into the culture and sharing the gospel and having an impact on culture.

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For the furthering of the gospel is the solution, but we have all too often allowed the culture to influence us because, quite frankly, it's more comfortable, it's easy, but it shouldn't be so.

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One thing you end up seeing in Western culture is the fact that everyone is so individualistic that people don't even know their neighbors.

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Many places around, at least in America, you can have people who go to work, they get in their car, sometimes even in their garage, pull out of their garage, drive to work, don't even talk to their neighbors, pull back in their garage.

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We have lost in the culture an identity with our community, with reaching out to our neighbors, getting to know them, spending time with them, and sharing the gospel with them.

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It is all too easy for us as American Christians to sit in our churches when we want to fellowship with our

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Christian friends, go to work, go home and be with family, and avoid those unbelievers around us.

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Oh, we may do an outreach where we go out and try to share the gospel in different ways with people we don't know at all, but it's a little bit different when you're rubbing shoulders with the people that live right next to you.

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It is all too easy for us to avoid our neighbors, because this is a way that the culture has really formed itself where everyone is behind their garages, fences, and locked into their homes.

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We need to reach out to our neighbors and those around us who know us and live among us.

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We have to be part of the culture, but not in a way where it influences us, but seeking to share the gospel with those so that they may come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ and that they may be believers.

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This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.