Dealing with a Broken City

Much like Indianapolis, Ephesus was completely attached to it’s idols.  Followers of Jesus in that city were not looked at as loving, but as the enemy of the city itself.  How do we love people in Indy while being looked at as the problem?  How do we deal with a generation that doesn’t believein absolute truth?

The Relative Truth of Culture

Relative Truth: is the belief truth changes based on the individual’s understanding of it. With relative truth, there are no absolutes and what may be true for you is simply not true for me.

Relative truth says that I am God.

2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. 3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. 2 Timothy 4:2–4.

• Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
• "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth." 
• "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."
• "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."
• "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."
• "Good people go to heaven when they die."

24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. 25 For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. 1 Pe 2:24–25.

• Universalism
• The belief that everyone will be saved.
• The belief that everyone is already saved and we just have to tell people. 

He will render to each one according to his works: 7 to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; 8 but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury Ro 2:6–8.

• Wokeism
  • promotion of progressive ideology and policy as an expression of sensitivity to systemic injustices and prejudices

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Ga 3:28.

learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. Is 1:17.

The Absolute Truth of Christ

Absolute truth says that Jesus is Christ.

DISRUPTION: disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process.

What if we just replaced the word disruption with opportunity?

Truth is nerver a disturbance until a lie is discovered. 

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 9 Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. 10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. 1 Pe 5:8–10.

How do we respond?

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only James 1:22