i know i’ve been pushing Os Guinness’s book “Prophetic Untimeliness” a lot, and the reason i’ve not posted under one thread alone is the parts I’m posting address different arenas that may appeal to some, and not others … Hopefully gaining your attention to one thread will cause you to click on the link to the others, and may even inspire you to get the book …What this book has done for me is answer how, and why the Western Church is “sick”, and it’s remedy if one is prone to lots pf “prayer” and calling out error as error … Bottom line to me tho is only a fresh infusion of the power of Holy Spirit can fix what’s wrong with the ailing Church today and since it doesn’t seem that we’re gonna voluntarily get on our faces before Him begging His power afresh, it leaves me wondering just how drastic things will have to become before we’re forced there … But as usual, I digress …Check out the excerpt from the book regarding how (we) the Western Protestant/Evangelical Church got lured off God’s straight and narrow by a satanically inspired “detour” … Rom.12:2 – “And be not conformed to this world”When the Church pursues relevance to the “world” at the expense of our integrity to Christ and the Word the next thing we know we’ve become “conformed” to the world ... Impure! ... No purity, no Power ...QUOTE:The crying need of the Western church today is for reformation and revival, and for a decisive liberation from the Babylonian captivity of modernity. In other words, what followers of Jesus need is the freedom from the forces of the modern world that prevent independent thinking and living with integrity. Our deepest necessity is to be shaped by our faith rather than by the pushes and pulls of the world. In particular, we must resist three forces of cultural captivity today. Closely related and overlapping, they form a large part of the Babylonian captivity from which we Christians in the modern world must be freed. The third force, which grows from the heart of our modern view of time, is the particulaar focus of this book, but al require resisting.The Lure of OthersThe first siren call toward cultural captivity is conformity, the power a danger in human thinking, the lure of conformity to others ideas and practices is greatly increased in the age of democracy. Our opinions and our ethics all too easily become a matter of consensus that are shaped by our awareness of others rather than by a compass planted in us by our parents, our upbringing, and our own conscious convictions.Whereas our grandfathers and grandmothers lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed Gallup polls. Our thinking is all too easily group thinking, that which is shaped by a desire for concurrence rather than by critical thought. Conformity; of course, is not necessarily bad. It all depends what we are conforming to. A closely related term to conformity is respectability. Thus morality (the practice of virtue because we know it is right) is preferable to respectability (the practice of virtue because we are seen. But respectability in turn is preferable to hypocrisy (the practice of virtue because we are afraid of being seen to be bad), just as hypocrisy is preferable to wickedness (the complete abandonment of any pretense to virtue of any kind). Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. But while hypocrisy is preferable to wickedness, and respectability to hypocrisy, genuine virtue is the best of all. Independent thinking, of course, is a key part of genuine virtue. In fact, independent thinking is what prevents the corruption of concurrence-thinking from collapsing into conformity, and thus stops the slide from respectability to hypocrisy to wickedness. The Power of ApprovalThe second siren call toward cultural captivity is popularity, the power of the pull of approval. John Lukacs has described our position today as moving from the danger of the tyranny of the majority to the equal danger of the rule of the minority in the name of the majority. The power of popularity and approval are strong forces in this development, so much so that democratic elections have increasingly become popularity contests and, worse still, publicity contests.All that we examined about the lure of conformity comes in here again, but there are other factors at work too. For instance, one is the triumph of the therapeutic revolution and its emphasis on self-esteem that so easily becomes a voracious hunger for approval.The desire for approval, then, is a major driving force in modern Society, a lust for approval is never far from our thinking and our actions as modern people. And instead of looking for approval to the one audience the Audience of One, we look for it in the shifting sands of public opinion.The Seduction of TimelinessThe third siren call toward cultural captivity is fashionability, the power of the pull of corrupt timeliness or distorted relevance. As I stressed in the introduction, relevance is not the problem but rathera distorted relevance that slips into trendiness, triviality and trance. Here the lure of our modern sense of time is most powerful and damaging.Future MadnessThe nineteenth century was a century of astonishing change. It may even have experienced the greatest and most significant changes in all human history, outstripping even the twentieth century. But whereasthe major nineteenth-century response was, in Tennyson's phrase, the passion of the past, the twentieth-century response to change has been what novelist Milan Kundera has called the fascination with the future.Our current passion for the future has been called future fixation, or future madness. For those caught up in this frenzy, the past is dry, dusty, and remote, an albatross around our necks. By contrast, the future rushes toward us gleaming and bright, breathlessly desirable and technologically as alluring as it is inevitable. The future is history, we are told with the gushing enthusiasm of the PR junkie. Tomorrow just happened. Join us or be left behind. With slogans like these expressing the mentality of the times, Lukacs comments dryly that our supreme purpose as humans is to be reception committees to welcome the purported glories of the coming future. The Christian church has been taken over by this frenzy as deeply as anyone (The past is seen as beside the point, outdated, reactionary, stagnant. In a word that is today’s supreme term of dismissal, the past is irrelevant. Everything Christian from worship to evangelism must be fresh, new, up-to-date, attuned, appealing, seeker-sensitive audience-friendly, and relentlessly relevant, relevant, relevant. #1 - This Is Exactly How i Feel SI! ...https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5518&forum=35&8This#2 - This Is Exactly How i Feel SI! ...https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5526&forum=35
