The Gospel Coalition

Tim Keller answered questions from 20/20′s Martin Bashir on the issue of God’s existence in general and the truth claims of Christianity in particular. The discussion was part of a Veritas Forum held at Columbia University in NY. You can read about it here.

(note: The linked post says that Bashir is an atheist. He’s actually a Christian who goes to Redeemer, the church Tim pastors.)

About once a month, my friend John Seel sends me a thoughtful note on Christ and culture. The one I recieved today was especially insightful, challenging, and convicting–an absolute must read. He wrote: 

The dynamics of cultural change are complex, but not unknown. They are gradual and often taken-for-granted, but not undetectable. They are more like the tides than a tidal wave.

There are requirements for effective Christ-centered cultural leadership.

First, individuals must be appropriately transformed and trained: theologically grounded, spiritually empowered, and culturally discerning. Second, individuals must be members of local churches that assist them in maintaining a kingdom perspective and hold them personally accountable in their public and private callings. Third, individuals must be strategically located within the reality-defining institutions of society — the academy, art, media, advertising, and entertainment. And finally, individuals must seek to winsomely mobilize their professional strategic institutional networks for kingdom purposes — serving human flourishing more than sectarian interests.

Sociologist Michael Lindsay in his book, “Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite,” assesses evangelical social location without assessing their preparation or accountability. What are the potential results when individuals who refer to themselves as evangelicals secure positions of national influence, but are not theologically grounded, spiritually empowered, or culturally discerning? What happens when their influence is used with the best of intentions for narrow evangelical ends rather than the common good?

Dallas Willard warns, “The real presence of Christ as a world-governing force will come solely as his called out people occupy their stations in the holiness and power characteristic of him, as they demonstrate to the world the way to live that is best in every respect.”

Sustained cultural change is impossible unless there is real character change. An evangelical church that focuses on evangelism rather than discipleship does not create character change. We consistently produce self-righteous Pharisees, not apprentices of Jesus. We have the results that our system is designed to produce. When noted evangelical leaders go off the rails, we lament their personal failure without taking stock of the theologically superficial, therapeutically grounded, celebrity-oriented, consumer-driven religious movement that they lead. The American Dream and Republican politics are not the contours of the kingdom of God. They may fill churches and sell books — telling us what we want to hear — but they do not further the work of Jesus or cultural renewal. Poet Steven Phillips writes,

Woe, woe! to those who placidly suspire
Drowned in security, remote from fire;
Who under the dim sky and whispering trees
By peaceful slopes and passing streams have ease.
No sacred pang disturbs their secular life,
Eluding splendor and escaping strife;
They die not, for they lived not…
To those whom he doth love God hath not sent
Such dread security, such sad content…
But he hath branded on such souls his name.
And he will know them by the scars of flame.
So fear not grief, fear not the anguished, thou,
The paining heart, the clasped and prostrate brow;
This is the emblem, and this is the sign
By which God singles thee for fields divine.

Evangelicals are coming out of the shadows. But are we ready for prime time? We need the right people in the right places with the right stuff. It’s show time and I fear we are not ready.

In this short video (based on the new book A Quest For More), Paul Tripp reveals Satan’s very effective strategy. Seriously, this is excellent!

Watch this CBN interview  (aired today) where Lee Webb talks with Tim about life, ministry and A Reason For God.

You can also watch a Sunday morning sermon entitled “Miserable Comforters” here.

While we’re on the subject of “heaven” I thought I’d mention an interesting article I recently read by J. Richard Middleton entitled A New Heaven and a New Earth: The Case for a Holistic Reading of the Biblical Story of Redemption.  In the article, he makes a very compelling case that the word “heaven” is never used in Scripture for the eternal destiny of the redeemed. He ends the essay, in fact, by saying, “For reasons exegetical, theological, and ethical, I have come to repent of using the term ‘heaven’ to describe the future God has in store for the faithful. It is my hope that all readers of this essay would–after thoughtful consideration–join me in this repentance.” Anyway, you have to read it for yourself and then get back to me with your thoughts.

But I wanted to get Mike Wittmer’s (author of the excellent book Heaven is a Place on Earth) thoughts on Middleton’s essay and this is what he wrote (printed with his permission, of course):

I haven’t seen the article, but Brian Walsh said something similar to me, and I think he’s right. I usually avoid using the word “heaven” because it carries so many Platonic connotations. Instead, I almost always replace it with “the new earth,” which I find startles people enough that it shakes them from their default view of heaven, and as Middleton reminds, is actually the biblical term.

Many people who understand our Reformed worldview tend to “backdoor it” when communicating it with others. They start off saying they are talking about heaven and then sort of slide into a “and by the way, heaven is really going to be a lot like earth….” This approach is too mushy for me, and I fear that people who hear this presentation will go on and continue to sing the same Platonic stuff they always did. So I have decided to be a bit more confrontational. A few people get really upset with me (roughly 3% in any given congregation), but at least everyone gets the point, and sees the difference between what the Bible is talking about and what they had previously been taught.

Very interesting. I agree with Mike. I heard a lot about heaven growing up but what I heard about and what the Bible actually says regarding the eternal destiny of the redeemed, were two different things. Perhaps Sola Scriptura requires us to stop using the word wrongly.

(Here is part 2 of my post the other day, taken from the last chapter of my book Do I Know God?)

 The apostle Peter said, “According to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). And the apostle John described this new heaven and earth: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:1–3)

This means that one day all God’s children will live in a new, sin-free, physical world with new, sin-free, physical bodies.

Still need proof? It rests in Christ’s resurrection. “The central significance of Jesus’s resurrection lies in the fact that it is just the beginning of the saving, renewing, resurrecting work of God that will have its climax in the restoration of the entire cosmos,” wrote K. Scott Oliphant and Sinclair Ferguson. And John Stott said the bodily resurrection of Jesus “was the first bit of material order to be redeemed and transfigured. It is the divine pledge that the rest will be redeemed and transfigured one day.”

When the Bible speaks about Jesus being the firstfruits of the harvest and the firstborn from the dead (Romans 8:29; 1 Corinthians 15:20, 23; Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5), it’s speaking about the fact that Christ was the first to rise, and all his people will follow him someday. When the Apostles’ Creed says, “We believe in the resurrection of the body,” that’s what it’s talking about. It’s talking about that day when Christ will return and place our sinless souls inside new sinless bodies so that we’ll live forever, like him, in a perfect physical state.

And what will our brand-new, perfect, sinless bodies be like? The Bible doesn’t give us specific details, but Paul said our bodies will be like Christ’s resurrected body (Philippians 3:21) and they’ll be imperishable, glorious, and powerful (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). We can be sure that these bodies will be able to do things our present bodies can’t. We’ll possess new and undreamed-of abilities.

I think I can also say with certainty that you’re going to like the way you look. I’m sure that most of us have issues with our bodies and how we look on the outside. But Paul said that our perfect God will personally choose the perfect body for each one of his children (1 Corinthians 15:38).

Christ’s resurrection not only guarantees us that perfect, new, disease-free bodies are on the way, but a new, sin-free world is on the way as well. Jesus said that when he returns, he will not only raise the dead, but he will also heal and restore the entire universe (Matthew 19:28), “making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). In this new creation, the Bible says, we’ll see trees that dance, colors we’ve never seen, and places we’ve never been. But at the same time, we’ll rediscover things we have seen and places we have been. “We will meet all kinds of new people and see all kinds of new places,” says Randy Alcorn. “But we will also see familiar people and familiar places, because we will be with resurrected people we love on the resurrected Earth we love.”

But if God is creating a new heaven and a new earth, what will he do with our present earth? Some Bible scholars interpret verses such as 2 Peter 3:7 and Luke 21:33 to mean that God plans to destroy our present world—all of it—and start over, creating a new world from scratch. The Bible, however, also talks about creation waiting for its ultimate redemption and renewal.

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:19–21). In other words, God doesn’t plan to build a brand-new world from scratch. Instead, he plans a radical renovation project of the world we live in today.

God won’t destroy everything that now exists, but he will destroy all the corruption, brokenness, and chaos we see in our world, purging from it everything that is impure and sinful. He did something like this once before. Remember the Flood in Genesis 6–9? God flooded his creation and washed away everything that was perverse and wicked. But he did not obliterate everything. In the same way, when it comes to the new heaven and new earth, God won’t annihilate our present world; he’ll renew, redeem, and resurrect it. “We will be the same people made new and we will live on the same Earth made new,” Alcorn wrote.

Right now we live in what C. S. Lewis called “the shadowlands.” Everything in this earth is a pale reflection of what things will one day be like. But in God’s new world, we’ll rediscover all the places we used to enjoy, minus the sin, brokenness, and corruption. There will be no more death, no more decay.

I so look forward to that day, returning to God’s remade world to see what he’s done to all my favorite places. It’s hard to imagine how God could possibly improve on the Grand Canyon, the Swiss Alps, a desert sunset, or a clear night with diamonds twinkling in the sky. But I think what I most want to see again is the ocean.

I love the ocean and the beach. I love everything about them: the warm Florida water, the calming sound of the waves, the soft sand, the hot sun on my skin. My family and I live just fifteen minutes from the beach, and we go almost every Saturday to surf and play in the sand. I can’t wait to see how my new body will respond as I surf with my boys again on God’s perfect new ocean. I can’t even imagine a more perfect sun, warming perfect water, and me riding perfect waves in God’s new world.

Like an unborn child in the womb, God’s new world is waiting to be born. And like a pregnant woman, nature groans with labor pains like tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now,” Paul wrote in Romans 8:22. But those labor pains promise the birth of a new world. Amazing!

I know what labor pains look like. When my wife gave birth to our three children, I stayed in the delivery room with her each time. I agonized over the pain she endured, but she says that each painful contraction carried the promise that new life was on the way. Despite the agony she went through each time, what we gained was worth it all—the miraculous birth of a beautiful child.

It’s a wonderful picture, isn’t it? We’re all living in God’s delivery room, watching all of creation groaning in labor. Paul said in Romans 8:20–23 that each chaotic act of nature is another painful contraction promising the birth of a brand-new world where we will one day spend eternity with God our Father. New bodies in a new world—this is the ultimate destination for those who know God.

Yesterday New City celebrated the Lord’s Supper. We do this once a month but yesterday’s celebration was especially meaningful to me because it was the first time my son Nathan partook of the elements.

Each year at our church, fifth and sixth grade students are lead by our Director of Student Ministries through a twelve-week “Communicants Class” where students of our members learn the basics of the Christian faith and are encouraged, if they have not already, to profess faith in Christ as their Lord and Savior. At the conclusion of the class, each student is interviewed by our elders and asked to give their testimony. If they give a credible profession of faith and the elders truly believe (as far as they are able to tell) that the student is regenerate, then they are invited to take communion. The amount of time between their “interview” and their public reception as communing members of New City is about three weeks so that we have time to baptise any of the students who had not been baptised before.

So yesterday, I not only had the privilege of presenting these students before the congregation but than, at the conclusion of our service, I had the joy of serving my son communion for the first time.

And even though we are a Presbyterian church, there are many in our congregation who come from various theological backgrounds. So, before we take the Lord’s Supper, I always explain what we’re about to do and why it’s so important. I don’t say all of this when we take communion together as a church, but this is our official statement regarding what the Lord’s Supper is all about (I wrote it about 9 months ago): 

When the Lord’s Supper was being hotly debated during the time of the Reformation, the conversation revolved around the way in which Christ is present when the Church celebrates communion. And as a result, three Protestant views emerged: the Lutheran view, the Anabaptist view, and the Reformed (or Calvinistic) view.

The Lutheran view maintained that Christ is “physically present” when we take communion. This view came to be known as “consubstantiation”, which means that the “substance” of bread and wine are literally “mixed in” with the physical body and blood of our Lord.

The Anabaptist view maintained that Christ, having ascended into heaven following his resurrection, is now seated at the right hand of God the Father and is not present in any way when we take communion. According to the Anabaptist view, the Church simply “remembers” the work of Christ when they take the Lord’s Supper. This view came to be known as the “memorial” view.

The Reformed (or the Calvinistic) view maintained that Christ is physically seated at the right hand of God the Father, but when we take the Lord’s Supper the Holy Spirit mediates Christ’s presence spiritually. So Christ is “really present” but he is so spiritually not physically. The Reformed view is the view held at New City.

We believe that communion is a ‘means of grace’ through which the Lord richly blesses us. We believe it is not just a remembering of the work of Christ, but a present communion with Christ himself (I Cor 10:16), where we find strength, renewal, and spiritual nourishment. The Westminster Confession of Faith affirms that communion actually “seals” all the benefits of Christ’s redemption to believers and enhances “their spiritual nourishment and growth in him, their further engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto him; and, to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other, as members of his mystical body.”

Communion stirs up our faith, shows us Jesus and helps us experientially understand his teaching (Luke 24:30-32). It opens our eyes so that the rational truths of the sermon are experientially known in the person of Jesus. Communion makes the heart cry out: “Oh, how delicious is the gospel!” as we “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8).  In communion, we are able to hear, see, touch, taste and smell the good news of Christ’s redeeming love and work for sinners.

What a joy it was for me to embrace Christ’s promise to my son yesterday that through these elements, He would strengthen, renew, and spiritually nourish Nathan’s soul. Thank God that his blessings are “for [us] and [our] children.”

For a long time now, I have been absolutely convinced that the way most Christians think about their final destination is influenced more by ancient Greek philosophy than it is the Bible: we think of ultimate salvation as being salvation from the body, not salvation of the body; salvation from the world, not salvation of the world.

One of the reasons this is so important to consider is because our eschatology dramatically effects our missiology. In other words, if we don’t have a clear understanding of where we are headed, our journey will lack focus, direction, and purpose. We won’t know what to do or where to go. Our confusion in this area may be the main reason we are not having a greater effect in the world. 

The following is an excerpt from the final chapter in my book Do I Know God? entitled “The Best Is Yet To Come.”

When I was boy, I was more interested in avoiding hell than in attaining heaven. I knew the Bible described hell as a place of pain and misery, so I knew I didn’t want to go there. But to be honest, the alternative of heaven sounded boring. I thought heaven sounded a lot like a typical church service—a really long church service. We’d spend all day, every day, for all eternity, singing hymns, praying prayers, and listening to sermons. Come to think of it, my idea of heaven sounded a lot like hell to me.

I think that’s one of the reasons I decided not to follow God when I was young. The opportunities in this world seemed a lot more exciting than anything heaven had to offer. Don’t get me wrong: I still didn’t want to go to hell. Heaven might be boring, but I knew hell was a lot worse. So I set out to gain the best of both worlds. I decided that I would go out and get all the excitement I could from this world, and when I’d had enough, I’d get serious with God again so I wouldn’t go to hell when I died.

The problem is, I totally misunderstood what heaven is all about. Contrary to what I thought, heaven is not the ultimate destination for those who know God.

What?

That’s right. I’ll say it again: if you know God, heaven is not your ultimate destination.

Now, before you charge me with heresy, let me explain. Those who know God are destined to go to heaven. But it’s not our ultimate destination. This is what I mean.

When you die, your body (the physical part of you) goes into the ground while your soul (the nonphysical part of you) goes to be with the Lord. Jesus made that clear when he told the thief on the cross next to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). And in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul taught that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. For now, let’s call this place where our souls go when we die “heaven.” We continue to live a conscious existence there as disembodied spirits awaiting the final resurrection.

In other words, heaven is our intermediate home.

To be sure, this heaven is better than our present earth. After all, heaven is where God is. Heaven is where the angels are. Heaven is without sin and pain and temptation and pressure. But believe it or not, as I said, God has better plans for us. So our stay in heaven is only temporary as we wait for the final resurrection. What’s the final resurrection?

When Jesus returns to earth someday, everybody who knows God—including all who have been living in heaven as disembodied spirits—will receive brand-new bodies. God will take our sinless souls and place them in perfect, sinless bodies. God will put us back together so we can enter our ultimate destination.

And the ultimate destination for those who truly know God is a new heaven and a new earth. Let me explain further.

(To be continued…)

Eric Metaxas’ brief review of Keller’s book on Amazon is priceless:

Those who have had the privilege of listening to Keller’s sermons over the years will not be at all surprised that this book about Christian faith is charming, entertaining, profound, edifying, humble, generous, cheerful, and powerfully compelling. But those who have been unfamiliar with Keller might be shocked. Note to Mssrs. Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris: Be afraid. Be very very afraid.

John Piper once said, when asked what books have influenced him the most, “Before I answer that question, let me make one important observation: books don’t change people; sentences do.” Well, as much of a book lover as I am, I totally agree with Piper.

There have been a number of sentences that God has used in my life to mold and shape the way I think about Him, me, and this world we live in. One of those key sentences come from a little known booklet entitled The Devil’s Gauntlet, by Os Guinness (you’d be thanking me until Jesus came back if you bought it and read it).

On the last page he sums up the necessary strategy that the church must employ if we are ever going to faithfully engage our culture for the glory of God. He says, “The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society is the church’s engagement with God.”

It is this sentence which led me to write this years later for a book entitled The Younger Evangelicals, by Robert Webber:

I was blessed to grow up in a solid Christian home. The middle of seven children (4 brothers and 2 sisters), I was raised in an environment where authentic faith was lived out before my very eyes. I have always known who God is and I have always known that He sent His Son to die on a cross for sinners like me. As far back as I can trace, strong Christian conviction and devotion to Jesus Christ have been defining marks of my family heritage. My dad, who was born and reared in Switzerland, is a well-known and respected psychologist who has always put his family before anybody or anything. My mom, the eldest daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham, is an award-winning author and speaker whose commitment to discipling her children surpassed any other competing ambition. Growing up, my other brothers and sisters walked the straight and narrow, for the most part, rarely giving my parents any real trouble. Then there was me… different story!

It’s certainly not an excuse, but I found it difficult growing up as a middle child. At times I was bunched with the “older ones”, and at other times I was bunched with the “younger ones”. I ended up, it seemed, bearing the responsibilities of both and enjoying the privileges of neither. I wasn’t sure where I fit in (still don’t at times), and I wanted to be heard, to be distinct. But instead of  “casting all of my anxiety on Him”, I turned to the world. At sixteen I dropped out of high school, was kicked out of my house (actually escorted off of our property by the police), and began living in a manner I thought would satisfy. I craved freedom more than anything. So, committing myself to a lifestyle with “no boundaries”, I became a promiscuous, drug-using, club-hopper living in South Florida, who pursued pleasure harder than most. It wasn’t, however, until after I had lived this way for six years that I began to realize my so-called freedom had made me a slave to desires and habits that were quickly destroying me. I had been seeking satisfaction so vigorously that I was unconscious of just how unsatisfied I had become. I was hungrier for meaning at 21 than I had been as a teenager. I found that while the modern world offers so much “this side of the ceiling”, it could not offer me what I longed for the most, namely, purpose. The world had not satisfied me the way it had promised, the way I had anticipated. The world’s message and the world’s methods had hung me out to dry. I hungered desperately for something, Someone, “out of this world.” Broken and longing for something transcendent, I began going back to church with my parents.

I was very thankful that I walked into a church that was different : A church where the distinctiveness of God was sensed immediately. In the music, in the message, and in the mingling afterward, it was clear that God was the guest of honor there, not I. I had suffered the consequences of the modern world’s emphasis on the individual, and I was unbelievably refreshed to discover a place that took the focus off me and put it on Him. He was the one being “lifted up for all men to see”, not the pastor or the musicians. He was the difference I longed for, not some carefully orchestrated performance that, believe me, I would have been able to see right through. He was not communicated in the distasteful ways, whether stylistically or otherwise, of which I had grown weary. Whether or not I understood everything the preacher said that morning didn’t matter. I was the recipient of something more powerful, more dynamic, more jolting, than a “user-friendly” service with its “seeker-sensitive” sermon. I was observing the people of God honoring God as God, and I was drawn in by the glorious mystery of it all. I was being evangelized, not by a man-centered show, but by a God-centered atmosphere. I was experiencing what Dr. Ed Clowney calls “Doxological Evangelism”. It was, quite literally, out of this world!

“The world”, says Richard John Neuhaus, “desperately needs the Church to be the Church”, not to do church differently.  The difference that people are longing for, in other words, is a difference in being, not doing. So while many church “strategists” are locating reformation and revival in structural renovation, we must remember that the deepest needs of the Church today are spiritual, not structural. And yet, we are told that the Church’s cultural relevance depends ultimately on its ability to keep up with the changing structures, on its ability to do church differently.

I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this type of pressure: We don’t have to keep up the way we think we do; the world doesn’t want us to! So how do we compete? We don’t! We must come to see that God has established His Church as an “alternative society”, not to compete with this world, but rather to offer a home to those who realize the homelessness of life in this world without Him. It is the calling and the privilege of the Church to be “against the world for the world”. We should be encouraged and challenged by the historical reminder that the Church has always served the world best when it has been most counter cultural, most distinctively different from the world.

My fear, however, is that the modern church’s emphasis on “structural renovation” and “doing church”, is inadvertently communicating to our culture that we have nothing unique to offer them, nothing that is deeply spiritual and profoundly otherworldly. And as a result, they are looking elsewhere. We are so busy emphasizing the modern notion of doing (techniques, methods, programs, marketing strategies, etc.), that we are missing the opportunity to be who we are called to be. “Bigger is better and newer is truer” seems to be the banner under which church-growth conferences all over the country are organized and advertised. We have mastered the program, while eclipsing altogether the Master Himself. Our focus on doing church has certainly overshadowed the biblical focus of being church, and this comes at a time when our culture is growing weary of slick production, while growing hungry for authentic presence. They do not want entertainment from the Church; they want engagement by the Church: engagement with historical and cultural solidity that facilitates meaningful interaction with transcendent reality. It is ironic that just when our culture is getting vertical, the Church is spending most of its time and energy getting horizontal. Just when our culture is yearning for difference from the world, the Church is looking for creative ways to develop similarities to the world. Just when our culture is looking to the past, the Church is pronouncing the “irrelevance” of the past.

In order for the Church to establish its voice in our postmodern culture we must remember who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We must avoid the modern tendency towards “chronological snobbery”, believing that our time is the most important time while expressing little regard for history, tradition, and all those who have gone before us. We must remember that we are the people of the future, formed by the past, and living in the present. We must remember that our citizenship lies in “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”, not man. We must remember that while “contemporary only” people operate with their heads fixed frontwards, never looking over their shoulder at the stock from which they have come, and “traditional only” people operate with their heads on backwards, romanticizing about the past and always wanting to go back, the Church, in contrast from both extremes, is called upon to be a people with swiveling heads: learning from the past, living in the present, and looking to the future. We must remember that it is our unique privilege and responsibility to remind our culture that this world is not all there is, and that they are not left to the resources of this world to satisfy their otherworldly longings. For, as Lauren Winner notes, “[People today] are not so much wary of institutions as they are wary of institutions that don’t do what they’re supposed to do.” 

As the Church, we are supposed to provide this world with that transcendent difference they long for because only the Christian Gospel offers a true spirituality, an otherworldliness, that is grounded in reality and history. It is only our story, the Christian story, that fuses past, present, and future with meaning from above and beyond, and we are supposed to tell it.

The old saying that we should “not be so heavenly-minded that we are of no earthly good” is true, as far as it goes. But it seems that in the modern world our earthly good depends on our heavenly-mindedness. In our present cultural climate, it becomes necessary for the Church to remember the words of C.S. Lewis who maintained that Christians who “did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought the most of the next” . Or as John Seel has put it, “The timeless is finally that which is most relevant, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance”.  All good and wise reminders that we have been entrusted with a timeless truth that can transform any weary culture and open their eyes to a world beyond their own: the story of a simple Jew who made a difference because He was different.