Matt Chandler - God's Glory as Our Courage

Well, how are we doing? Well, excellent! If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those; we’ll be in Romans chapter 11. If you don’t have a Bible with you, why don’t you grab one of those hardback black ones somewhere around you? As always, I want you to see that I’m not making any of this up; we’re actually just reading it out of the Bible. I’m glad to be with you today! You have had seven days now to sit on the source of idols if you were here last week. So, how many of you are comfortable? If you’re willing to confess, you can go ahead and raise your hands; I know this is uncomfortable for you. Okay, how many of you would say, «No, no, no, it’s not comfort for me; I’m more about control»? Okay, how many of you want to control the comfort? Yeah, okay. And what about power? How many of you would lean toward power? And then lastly, how many of you would say, «No, no, no, definitely approval»? Oh, how many of you would say, «Gosh, yes» on all four? Right, okay. So, this is a fun exercise to keep teasing it out and considering it again. If you weren’t here last week, you can listen online.

I want to start today a three-week series on Christian courage, and I want to explain why I want to address this subject and why I think it’s time for us to have this conversation. You and I are in the twilight, or what appears to be the twilight, of a most unusual period in human history. What I mean by that is if you consider the people of God throughout the history of humanity, we have rarely been at the center of cultural and political power; we have almost always been at the margins of society. In fact, our very roots in the first through third centuries were almost stomped out by the Roman Empire; we were fed to lions, put in prison, crucified upside down, and boiled alive. If you consider the people of God in the Old Testament and then the people of God right up until around 380 A.D., we have been on the margins, imprisoned, and killed; our stuff has been plundered. This is our story until 380 A.D.

In 380 A.D., Theodosius I, the first emperor of Rome, named Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion. Then, just twelve years later, in 392, Theodosius I outlawed all pagan religions and effectively set up a marriage between the church and the state. Historians would call this period of time, starting at around 380 and going up until just a couple of decades ago, Christendom. When you think about the Western world, you are thinking about Christendom. As Christendom formed, some things started happening progressively as generations moved forward; you began to get what was at least considered a Christianized civilization. The world began to be broken into categories: there was Christendom, and then there were the heathens.

You began to see things happen that had never happened before and honestly ran contrary to the word of God. I’ll just name some of those to lay before you what all happened and maybe give us a sense of what we’re currently in the twilight of. By the way, as I say this, I am not mourning the loss of Christendom; I am welcoming its death. There’s way too much wrong with it; so much of it is unbiblical. One of the primary things that happened when Christendom was established, around probably 400 A.D., is that the church moved from the margins and became the center of political and cultural power. The church that had always been marginalized now sits at the center and decides the ethics for the country; it is now the church that decides the political temperature and unpacks the weight we bear on culture in a profound and powerful way. In fact, even political power was seen as divinely authenticated.

This is the weight of the church being placed at the center. Some other things that started happening that hadn’t happened before include Sunday becoming an official day of rest and mandatory church attendance, with repercussions if you didn’t go to church. If you’re thinking I’m talking about police officers kicking open your door and arresting you if you weren’t at Sunday school, I’m saying there were cultural ramifications for not belonging to a church. In the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, and some of you were there, if you were a businessman, smart business practice was to be a member of the First Baptist Church or the First Methodist Church. You wanted to be a good businessman; in your community, it was seen as upright and outstanding for you to belong to a church. If you didn’t belong to a church, you might belong to the heathens, and I’m not going to let you fix my muffler. That was kind of the air we breathed.

As the church became more centralized in political and cultural power, we saw a dividing of what we’ll call lay and professional ministers, which did not exist in the first century. In the first few centuries, what made Christianity spread so rapidly…