How to Engage with a Hostile Culture: Part One (Titus 3:1-2)

If you've got a Bible, go ahead and get that open to the book of

Titus that's in the New Testament.

If you can't find it, that's OK. There should be an index on the

inside of your Bible. If you don't have one of those,

that's OK. We'll have all the relevant

words on the screen for you. We are in Titus chapter 3.

Titus 3 · chapter mention

We're only looking at verses one through 2.

We've got a handful of Titus sermons left before the Advent

series, and this morning we find ourselves in the last, the third

of three, the last chapter of the small book of Titus that

we're army crawling through. As you do, let me ask you a

question. How do, how should, how are

Christians to engage with the culture?

Christianity has a gentleness problem.

It's partly theological. Christians have the tendency to

elevate one of God's attributes over the other.

Some Christians have the tendency to emphasize Jesus's

lion, like nature, and neglect his lamb, like nature.

Some Christians do the opposite. But Christians have a gentleness

problem, partly theological. It's also partly practical.

Sometimes it feels in a hostile world, like gentleness is

ineffective, and if we're honest, hostility, anger,

vitriol are all very effective. In fact, the science teaches us

that. I don't know if you know this.

The science actually teaches us that human beings bond more

deeply over shared hatreds than shared loves.

And so one of the most natural human postures possible is the

desire to be around people who hate all the same things that

you hate. And so hatred, hostility,

vitriol is really effective. If Christians are known, if a

denomination is known, if a church is known, if a leader is

known for a long list of all the things that he hates, he will

tend to draw a very large crowd around him.

So it's effective, partly theological, partly practical,

but certainly pervasive. The problem or lack of

gentleness is pervasive. There was one famous Christian

author who wrote a book on the necessity for gentleness in the

modern world. He called it a gentle answer.

It was one of my favorite books of that year.

Later that year, he got removed from leadership because of his

domineering and abusive leadership style.

He wrote the book on gentleness. In fact, things got so bad in

the culture a couple years ago, not necessarily within our

church, but the surrounding culture, the Christian culture

at large. Even the city of Des Moines

where there were so many pastors being fired for domineering,

abusive leadership styles, so many churches that were falling

apart because of that, that as an elder team we had to take one

of our meetings and just ask ourselves the question, as a

pastoral team, are we known for our gentleness?

That might be a good question for you to ask about yourself

this morning. Are you known for your

gentleness? I'm not talking about a

personality trait. You can be extroverted and be

gentle. You can be introverted and not

be gentle. You can be an ENTJ.

You can be an IDK and you can be gentle or not, but would you say

that gentleness is a top five quality of yours?

Or to phrase it a little bit differently, if you asked your

closest friends, which I think you should, maybe it's a fighter

group. Maybe it's your community group,

maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's a friend you asked your

friend. Am I known for my gentleness?

Would they laugh at you? It's worth thinking about.

Amen. If you're able, let's go ahead

and stand for the reading of God's Word.

If you have missed all of our Titus sermon series, we're

psyched you here. I can catch you up.

We're in chapter 3 this morning. So far, what Paul has been

doing, the author of Titus, is this short book is really all it

is, is it's an instruction manual on how to be a church.

That's why we're calling it how to be a church.

These little churches have sprouted up in the ancient world

on this little island called Crete.

And so Paul's unpacking, hey, here's what it looks like to be

a church. And so he greets the churches

almost immediately after that. He warns the Church of false

teachers and wolves, and he gives explicit instructions for

what pastors should be, how to find them and what qualities

they should have. After that, what Paul does is he

starts to blast through all the various people groups within the

church. He says, hey, older men be like

this, older women do this, younger kids be like this.

And then after he blasts through all of those instructions, he

says, OK, now when you gather together, this is what your

central message should be. Preachers, this is what you

proclaim. Church members, this is what you

proclaim. The central message of the

church must be the gospel. He works through all of those

things. And then when he gets to chapter

3, he starts to unpack this question.

What should the churches in Crete be known for as they

engage with the surrounding culture, the leaders, the

governors, the political authorities, the cultural norms?

And Paul says this. Remind them, that's you, That's

the Church, to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be

obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no

one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle and to show perfect

courtesy towards the people that you like and agree with you.

Perfect courtesy toward all people.

Heavenly Father, I have been so challenged this week.

I was up late last night praying and asking you why I struggle so

much with gentleness. Why when I get caught, I tend to

not bleed out gentleness, but I tend to bleed out anger on one

side, or equally worse, cowardiceness on the other side.

And Lord, you call us to be people who bleed gentleness.

Are we known for that? How do we, how do we even do

that? I'm not so sure I've got a great

answer to that question, Lord. So you must work this morning

and send your Holy Spirit powerfully to bring about

answers in every human heart here this morning that are

effective and help us live out the gentleness of Christ.

Would you do that, Lord, do that in the precious name of Jesus,

all God's people prayed Amen. You can have a seat OK, I

already showed my hands there I. These couple verses are Paul's

explicit instructions on how do we engage with the surrounding

culture as Christians how do we engage with pop culture?

How do we agree with the political culture?

How do we, how do we engage with the cultural norms around us,

the, the cultural leaders, the social norms, the decisions that

they make? And I'll exegete the text a

little bit more in a bit. I'm going to do what I don't

usually do, which is before I look at the text more closely,

what I'm going to do is I'm going to take just 5 minutes and

I'm going to give us a framework that I find really, really

helpful. It's a framework for engaging

with culture. This isn't my own.

I don't, I didn't develop this. I don't even know who to

attribute this to. It's pretty common.

But if you've never engaged with this cultural framework, I think

this will be really helpful for you because there's a lot of

aspects about our culture like what music or movies am I

allowed to watch or engage with? Or what parenting decisions do I

make? Or what are the social norms

that I can embrace? Or what are the social norms I

can reject? Or what are the social

inventions I can embrace and which ones must I reject?

And parenting decisions and even holidays, like what do I do

about Halloween? This framework can be helpful

for everything in that question. So when it comes to an engaging

with culture, Christians have three options.

Receive on the other end, reject or in the middle, redeem.

We're going to start on the bulletin point to the right

reject. There are some things in culture

this needs to be said. There are some things in culture

that Christians simply cannot redeem or receive.

No matter how hard they try, no matter whether or not they try

to stick a Christian label on it.

There are things in a culture that Christians must boldly

reject. For instance, if you are an

entrepreneur, I don't care how effective or spiritual you are,

you cannot as an entrepreneur start a Christian strip club.

That must be rejected. That's an element of culture

that you cannot baptize, you can't partner or try to redeem

lust. There's no such thing as

Christian porn. Porn must be rejected outright

by Christians. The institution of slavery.

You cannot justify that evil with an economic argument and

then say, well, we're just practicing Christian slavery.

No, those things must be rejected.

There are aspects and culture that must outright be rejected

by Christians. No compromise.

And on the other end, the four end, that left end is the

bulletin point of receive. There are things in culture that

Christians can just outright receive.

They can embrace these things without using a ton of

discernment over cultural inventions like lawn mowers.

Like you don't need to like sit in front of your lawn mower on a

Sunday afternoon and pray. Like, Lord, is it OK for me to

embrace it? Just mow your lawn.

You can just receive some things as Christians or cars or

transportations. I think most of the time, even

fashion styles tend to be like, can Christians wear skinny

jeans? Can they wear baggy jeans?

Like there are just cultural norms.

This is fine. Just embrace them or not.

Christians can just receive these elements without wondering

whether they're compromising their faith.

Let me give you here's one way of I like the way this pastor

says that. He says, quote, you may sit down

one day and do some historical work and figure out that the guy

who invented air conditioning was a godless Pagan and you can

still say I'm for air conditioning.

Amen. Like you, people could still

love Jesus while using their air conditioners, even if you

discover through a lot of historical exegesis that air

conditioners have Pagan roots. Use the AC is completely,

completely a morally neutral thing.

Christians can just receive those things.

But in the middle is this trickier option that is redeem.

Look at that on the screen there.

If on one side there are things that are inherently sinful in

culture that must be outright rejected, and on the other end,

there are things in culture that Christians can just outright

embrace and receive them, there are the grey things in the

middle. These are the morally ambiguous

elements of culture that Christians can choose to

participate in if they redeem them for Jesus or they can

reject them. I'll give you an example that's

really near and dear to me. OK, Death metal music.

I love death metal music I it just speaks to a place in my

heart that CCM music can't hit. I don't know, that feeling of

being locked in, the intensity of it, blasting it in my

headphones in the gym. I just love it now.

Death metal is historically and notoriously anti God.

It was. It was not cultivated and

developed by people who are like, hey, how do we invent a

new Sonic sound that really praises Jesus now?

It's historically anti God, but it played a huge role in my

faith because I grew up a metalhead before I knew Jesus.

I was the type of kid who on Sundays I would rather be in a

mosh pit than at a church on Sundays.

I grew up in the pit. I loved it.

The amazing thing about growing up in the 2000s is that there

was this phenomenon in music where a bunch of Christian

artists decided that what they were going to do is they were

going to redeem death metal and Melacore and punk and all these

different genres. And what they did is they took a

notoriously anti God music genre, brought it before the

Lord, redeemed it with Christian lyrics, and then ended up using

death metal to evangelize to kids like me and the mosh pits

and help us scream about the Lord.

And it shaped me big time. They took that element of

culture and redeemed it. Saint Augustine, a long, long

time ago, was a big advocate for redeeming the elements of

culture that could be redeemed. He used to look at the book of

Exodus and he saw a type of this in the Tabernacle.

Augustine noticed how the Tabernacle was famously built by

God's people with the gold that the Egyptians had used to build

their idols that they would worship as false gods.

What Christians did is they plundered the Egyptians.

They use that gold that was for idol idols, and they use that to

build God a temple. Augustine's point was that

Christians should plunder Pharaoh's gold in order to build

God's temples in the world. There are elements of culture

that we can redeem, like music genres famously.

Here's the famous one, the early church.

You can read about this in almost every New Testament

letter. Almost every church in the

historical world in the in the, in the, in the distant history

of the church was faced with this problem of what the heck do

we do with meat that was sacrificed to idols?

They really struggle with that. That person has a clean

conscience and can do it. That person doesn't have a clean

conscience and they don't want to do it.

And the New Testament is actually really clear in its

lack of clarity. The New Testament instructions

are, if you can't do it, if you can't eat that meat with a clean

conscience, don't do it. But if you can eat that meat and

praise Jesus, go for it. Like, I don't know if you know

it who in here like steak. See a show of hands?

Are there any godless people in here that like it well done

rather than rare or medium rare. Really Marine?

Oh my gosh. No communion for you today.

There is forgiveness in the name of Jesus.

That's right. Did you know that eating meat

has Pagan roots? That's in the Old Testament.

That's what the godless Pagan neighbors of Israel did.

Eating meat has Pagan roots. Do you know what you can do?

You can take that Pagan practice, choose to not worship

evil spirits, and instead you can eat your steak cooked medium

rare, and you can eat that medium rare steak for the glory

of Jesus. Amen.

You can redeem that, but we all have a tendency towards one of

these two options. Well, I think one of the extreme

options, some of us in the room, we have a tendency towards

rejecting that one on the far right.

If you have a tendency towards rejecting everything in culture,

what you'll tend towards is being a culture warrior.

You'll constantly talking about how you hate this or how you

hate that on major cultural issues, and you'll probably be

known more for what you hate than what you love.

But on the other hand, if you have a tendency on the other end

of thoughtlessly just receiving everything in culture, you'll

tend towards being worldly. You'll look like the world,

you'll smell like the world. You'll celebrate things in

culture that need to be criticized.

I think the key is being able to define, hey, I have a tendency

towards this direction, to define where you're at so that

you can have a healthy and biblical posture towards the

culture. But is this helpful?

Yeah. OK.

But here's the thing. The the point of these two

verses is not actually to teach you about what to reject,

receive or redeem in culture. I think that's helpful, but

that's not the point. What Paul wants to do is he

actually wants to shape the dominant posture that your heart

has towards a hostile culture that has the tendency to poke

you. And what should that dominant

posture be? Look at the text verse one.

What should the normative posture of Christians be in

culture? Here's Paul's actual

instructions about how to engage with the Cretan culture.

He says remind them again, that's you to be submissive to

rulers and authorities. This is why I say that these are

his instructions for engaging with culture.

This is a reference to their political authorities and

governors who are making the civic decisions within Crete

that will form the common culture.

And Paul says, remind them to be obedient, to be ready for every

good work, to speak evil of no one.

Why do you think Paul has to say that?

He probably has to say that because they're not doing that.

The Cretan church is probably speaking evil of everyone

everywhere and all the time. And Paul says remind them to

speak evil of no one to avoid quarreling.

And here's the big one. I think that this is the whole

summary statement of these two verses.

Remind them to be gentle and to show perfect courtesy towards

all people. I'm trying to guess what's going

on in your heart right now. My guess is that when you hear

those verses, you have the tendency to say, yeah, but that

was 2000 years ago in a culture that's must much, much, much,

much less hostile to Christianity towards ours.

And if that's you, what you need to know about these verses, that

is that these commandments were not written to people living in

a Leave it to Beaver 1950s. Everybody in their neighbors are

Christians. Culture.

This. These verses were not written to

a culture of people who lived in a Veggie Tales bubble.

Joseph. Now Veggie Tales is great.

I've heard I didn't grow up in a Christian culture.

But yeah, maybe we'll watch it sometime.

The culture that Paul's writing to entity us was actually far

more hostile towards Christianity than the one that

we live in. And what that means is that

there are no loopholes in this text that we can point at to

wiggle out of God's commandments and say, well, it was for them

and not for me. Now, of course, TuneIn for a

second, because I know this is going to be something that pops

up in conversation. There is one obvious exception,

and that obvious exception is that there are there is such a

thing as civil disobedience. Of course, if your culture or

its civic leaders are demanding that you renounce Christ or live

totally out of step with the gospel, you are called to rebel.

Don't just read the words of Paul, read the example of Paul.

See what he does in the book of Acts.

The dude is bold. The same guy who says be known

for your gentleness is the same guy who is also known for his

boldness. But your dominant posture

towards the culture should be 1 of gentleness.

Which begs the question, how could a person in this hostile

culture, this loud culture, this quarreling culture, how could a

person possibly cultivate a heart whose operating system,

let's say operating system, a heart whose operating system is

1 of gentleness? How does a person even do that?

And I'm going to answer that question with a Riddle.

It's my favorite Riddle. I think this is like the third

time I've preached on this in my 9 years of preaching just

because it's so darn good. OK, here's the Riddle.

You put water in a cup at work. OK, can you picture that?

You got a cup full of water. You're you're walking to your

office. You turn the corner.

Or maybe you're at home and you put water in your cup and you're

walking through your home and suddenly one of your kids comes

blitzing through the room at 100 miles an hour and bumps you.

Or maybe you're walking around the corner at work.

You're walking to your office and you got a Co worker blitzing

around the corner. You turn the corner, pop pops

right into you, bumps you right in the cup, bumps your cup.

Here's Here's the Riddle. What comes out of the cup?

You can say that water, water, water.

Why did water come out of the cup?

That's right. Most of us would have the

tendency to say, well water came out of the cup because my kid

ran into me. Water came out of the cup

because my coworker is an idiot, came around the corner 100 miles

an hour, bumped me, and that's why water came out of the cup.

And if you said water came out of my cup because someone bumped

into me, this person bumped into me, you would be wrong.

And the reason why you would be wrong, I can prove this.

I can, I can substantiate this claim.

The reason why you'd be wrong is because if you put wine in your

cup and your kid bumped into you, what would come out of the

cup? Wine.

So why did water come out of the cup?

Because you filled it with water.

Stick with me when you're interacting with culture.

Maybe you're on social media. Maybe you're watching the news.

Maybe a decision that a leader made comes down to you.

Maybe it's just somebody who's hostile towards Christianity,

who's sitting across from the table at you and poking you,

calling you names when you get bumped, when something in the

culture bumps you and anger comes out of your heart.

Why did anger come out of your heart?

Your temptation is going to be to say because he said this or

she said that, or they did this, or the culture this and the

culture that. And the culture sucks and I hate

our city. And they always do these things

and they always say these types of things.

And if you said that, you would be wrong.

When the culture bumps you and anger comes out of your cup, why

did anger come out of your cup? For the same reason that water

did and not whine. Anger came out of your cup

because you filled your cup with anger.

That means that if you are in a position right now where you're

like, man, I'm not gentle. I'm not known for my gentleness.

That means that you cannot develop or cultivate gentleness

by will of strength. You can't just look in the

mirror and say, Cole, you need to be more gentle this morning.

The first thing you need to attend to is you have to stop

pouring anger into your cup. And if you want gentleness to

come out, it's not just a matter of trying harder.

If you want gentleness to come out, you have got to start

filling your cup with gentleness.

The first thing to attend to is the anger in your own heart and

making sure that you pour gentleness into your heart and

not anger. If you do not deal with that, it

doesn't matter how hard you try, whenever the culture bumps you,

anger is going to spill out because that's what you're

filled with. It's not flash cold, just beep.

Just be more gentle, bro. That's my tendency.

Can't do it that way, right? Not just trying harder.

The key is to fill your heart with gentleness.

Listen to this, listen to this. This is Thomas Watson, an old

Puritan. He says, quote, this is his

answer on how do you become more gentle?

Watson says, quote, a heart inflamed with the love of Christ

only will be made gentle. The sight of Christ's wounds

alone cures the swelling of wrath.

Oh my gosh, how good is that? Your heart needs to be inflamed

with the love of Christ. It needs to meditate on the

wounds of Christ here. For good measure, here's John

Owen, one of the later Puritans. He said almost an identical

thing. Owen said quote, Only when the

heart learns to die to its own exaltations and to rest in the

sweetness of Christ's humility, only then will it not boil in

wrath at every provocation. Be still my heart.

How good is that? How do I become more, more

gentle? Owen would say Your heart needs

to rest in the sweetness of Christ's humility.

Jesus, this conversation is useless unless we take it to the

darkest place that we can imagine.

And so this is going to be hard to come back from.

But I just want to take this to what is an honestly hostile

moment and see if even in that moment can we gaze upon the

wounds of Christ and rest in his sweetness and be made gentle

because we live. We live in a hostile culture.

We do. Ever.

The loudest voice wins. The most anxious voice wins.

So what ends up happening is hostility wins.

And hostility begets more hostility, which begets more

hostility until it creates a spiral of hostility so that we

live in a world where almost everybody is yelling at

everybody about everything all the time.

And what it creates is an in like an infinite hostility loop.

You get mad at me, I get mad at you, so you madder at me and I

get more hostile at you. And it creates an infinite

hostility loop that will continue to spiral and spiral

forever into eternity unless somebody has the divine

gentleness to absorb it and stop it within their own self.

So this is going to be dark. I'm just going to be I.

I just don't think it's helpful to give trivial examples.

So I've got a friend who she, she's awesome.

She she's recently become a lot more hostile and outspoken about

her political beliefs. I actually tend to agree with

most of her political beliefs. She's just become a lot more

outspoken and hostile and aggressive publicly about them.

And don't play the who's he talking about game because this

person is not in our church. You don't know her.

A friend of mine from college. So if you're thinking, oh, I

know it's, I know it's Chloe. It's not, it's not my wife.

She's like the most gentle person I know.

She's awesome. It's not.

And you can't guess her, so don't think about yourself here.

And she didn't always present this way.

And so I had a conversation with her I didn't like.

I wasn't mad. I wasn't mad about it.

I was just curious. And so I asked her.

I said, hey, I noticed that you've become a lot more

outspoken about some of your political beliefs, and we tend

to agree on most of our political beliefs, but you've

really turned the volume up. I'm just curious that

something's changing you. And she said, I thought this was

fascinating. She said, I can tell you exactly

when it changed. And I said, oh, do tell.

And so she said, well, I used to work in an environment, a

workplace environment that was really hostile towards

Christianity. I was like probably the only

Christian in this workplace. And and she said we used, but we

used to argue about politics and things all, all the time.

I'm going to say things are going to make you really

uncomfortable in just a second and that's OK, Just deal with

that. And and she said, you know, we

used to be able to have our disagreements over tons of

political issues and it was no problem.

We could be friends with it until one day.

And I said, tell me about one day.

And she said yeah, one day we started arguing about abortion

and I was advocating for the Christian view on abortion.

And I was like praise God. And she said all of my Co

workers disagreed with me. And the conversation got so

hostile that after like 5 or 10 minutes we just had to stop.

And I was fine. I pulled the plug on the

conversation. But she said oh gosh, this is

hard to I can't even say this. She said when I walked away from

the conversation though one of my Co workers grabbed me by the

arm and pulled me in close and she whispered in my ear, I hope

that when your daughter grows up she has an abortion.

That statement is evil. I can't imagine.

I actually there's very few things I can imagine that are

more vile than wish you could bond somebody because of a

difference in opinion that their daughter would murder their

granddaughter. It's such a vile opinion.

And she said, when that person said that to me, it dawned on me

that these were not neighbors to love.

These were enemies to be defeated.

And I get it. I think the most natural thing

in the world in response to evil is to return evil with evil.

That's why Jesus has to say when people curse you bless them.

He has to say that because we don't do that, our flesh doesn't

do that. But when when she told me that

story, it's like I saw the world, the absolute truth of the

world for one of the first time. I recognize that at the bottom

of all the volume and all the yelling and all the hostility in

our culture, at the bottom of all of it, all the arguing and

anger that seeps through every square inch of our culture.

I recognized in one fell, one fell swoop that at the bottom of

all of that is pain and hurt and woundedness.

And there's like a light bulb that turned on in my mind where

I recognized for the first time that people who are hostile and

angry and finger pointers and name callers, they don't wake up

one day and look in the mirror and say, from today on, I'm

going to be a mean person about everything.

That's not how it happens. I recognize that the majority of

our world is operating out of woundedness, deep woundedness.

And the most human response is to lash out in response.

It's for hostility to bigot, hostility which begets more

hostility, which will always bigot, more hostility always,

unless divine gentleness intercedes and absorbs it.

So what I'm going to ask you to consider, you cannot do in the

flesh. But I want you to consider when

that person said that thing, that unimaginably evil thing.

I am not asking you to relinquish the truth.

That's not gentleness, that's cowardness.

But what if you took that wound and you brought that wound to

the cross instead of retaliating out of it?

And what if, when you brought that wound to the cross, what if

you compared your wound to the wounds of Christ?

And in comparing your wounds with the wounds of Christ, what

if you recognized that as much as that hurt?

What if you recognize that the wound of Christ was deeper and

your hostility towards Christ was actually greater than your

neighbor's hostility against you?

And then recognizing that, what if you recognize that when your

hostility provoked the Lord in your flesh, your sin, your

rejection of Him, the way you cursed Him, and because of His

gentleness and loneliness of heart?

What if you recognize that your hostility provoked not more

hostility from Christ, but provoked in Christ compassion

towards you rather than hatred? Sister, brother, if you could do

that, then out of your wound, rather than coming more

hostility, out of your wound might come a wellspring of life.

Gentleness, unbending gentleness.

Not a gentleness that forfeits truth, but a gentleness that I

think you know what I'm talking about.

You get in an argument that the temperature starts to raise and

all you want to do is raise your voice louder.

And if you do, you know it's just going to raise the volume

on that person. And there are these rare moments

where you, I feel anointed by a divine compassion instead.

And rather than meeting their hatred with more hatred, you

look at that person and you say, hey, are you OK?

That would change somebody. Those moments of compassion and

gentleness in the midst of hostility.

If you did that, wow, that would be one of those sweet moments in

life where you can see heaven Pierce the corpse of hell with

the blade of gentleness can see it.

But that posture requires that the Holy Spirit put to death

your flesh, and it's almost impossible.

It is impossible to be like that and to act like that in the

flesh. It's only possible with the

Spirit. A posture requires you to

partner with the Holy Spirit. But I don't know what to tell

you about a Jesus who commands you to bless those who curse

you. This needs to be our dominant

posture towards a hostile culture, Sacrificial, truthful

gentleness. I don't know that there are

objections to what I'm preaching this morning.

I think there are two main objections to what I'm preaching

this morning. So I'm just going to look at

both of them. Objection number one.

OK, this text, Cole says be gentle.

But it sounds to me like you're encouraging me to forfeit the

truth. If that's what you hear me say

this morning, you need to hear me loud and clear this morning.

Never forfeit the truth as a Christian again.

That's cowardice Ness. That's not gentleness.

A gentle posture and an unflinching conviction to the

truth are perfectly compatible. Read about the life of Jesus.

I'm saying that when you read Titus three, it should be

crystal clear that our dominant posture towards a hostile

culture cannot be hostility. Do not mean that we relinquish

the truth, right? Do not mean that we just go

along with love. And I certainly do not mean that

we don't want to win the culture to Jesus.

We do. I want to win all of culture to

Jesus. I want everybody to know Jesus.

But I am saying that we cannot fight God's battles with the

devil's weapons. You cannot fight God's battles

with the devil's weapons. Hostility, anger, hatred, all of

those things are ugly enough on their own.

But when people use Christianity to cloak them, when Christianity

is used to justify hostility, anger, and hatred, we make the

beautiful God of the cosmos appear ugly to our neighbor.

Our posture towards a hostile culture cannot be hostility, it

must be gentleness. Gentleness is how we win the

culture to Jesus. Objection #2 What about the

demands in the Bible to be bold? The Bible calls us to be bold.

Heck yes, 100% yes it does. There's a small percentage of

Christians though who might hear my sermon and be extremely

critical of it. They might protest saying, OK

Cole, you're just one of those wishy washy pastors who would

have rebuked King David and told him you just got to be nicer to

to Goliath. To which I would say Goliath was

a bloodthirsty giant clan Nephilim king who was violent.

He doesn't represent your grouchy neighbor, and to

misinterpret that massive portion of Scripture and its

types is deadly. Goliath is not a type of your

neighbor. He doesn't represent your

grouchy boss. He doesn't even represent the

unbelieving world. Goliath is a type of Satan.

David's defeat of Goliath is a shadow of Jesus's defeat of

Satan. To misinterpret that moment and

apply it to an argument with the school board member over whether

a certain poster should be on the school wall is a big swing

and a miss at Bible reading. One O 1 you should not kill the

school board members over the poster on the wall and chop his

head off like David did with Goliath.

Please don't apply. That's that portion of scripture

to that moment that was Jesus's defeat of Satan on the cross.

But still, you might argue the Bible calls us to be bold again.

Heck yes. I was talking to a pastor friend

about this once and he told me dude you can't be gentle all the

time. I agree.

That's true about parenting. That's true about being a

Christian. That's true about being a

leader. You can't be gentle all the

time. There are these moments in

cultural engagement when Christians must temporarily lay

aside their gentleness for the sake of boldness.

But here's what I would tell you.

Make sure that you are known for your gentleness.

So known for your gentleness. This is the way the Bible says

it. Let your gentleness be known to

all. So the key is to be so known for

your gentleness that when you have to lay aside your

gentleness, the check doesn't bounce.

So think of it, this one, be known for making so many gentle

deposits, so many gentleness deposits that when you have to

take a boldness withdrawal, the check doesn't bounce.

And people say, well, Kohl's always yelling about everything.

No, no, you want to cash the check.

Be so known for your gentleness that the boldness matters.

So is this helpful? So back to our original

question, Are you gentle? Are you known for your

gentleness, or do you boil in wrath at every provocation?

If that's you, sister, brother, remember the gospel and remember

it daily. Remember that when you were yet

a sin or hostile to God, God chose you and died for you.

Remember that Jesus absorbed your sins when you were hostile

to him. Remember that Christ clothed you

in his very own righteousness. Remember that God has

resurrected and promises to resurrect you in glory.

He did all of that for you. Do you think that?

Do you think that asking God to make you gentle is too big of an

ask like? Like God can take a dead body

and resurrect it into glory, but when he looks at my angry heart,

he's like, crap, I can't make that thing gentle.

That one's crap out of luck. I can do the dead body thing,

just not the hard heart thing. No, that's not too big of an

ask. It's not too big of an ask.

You probably just ask too little.

That's probably it. So ask.

Ask him often. Ask him daily.

Fill your heart with gentleness. Fill it with wine constantly.

And then examine yourself closely the next time culture

bumps into you. What spills out of your cup?

Is it water or is it wine? Water's regular, right?

You spill water, it dries up. You forget it ever even

happened. That's what anger is.

Anger spills out of people all the time.

Wine. Wine's rare.

When that spills out of somebody's cup, you know what it

does? It stains people.

They can't scrub it off. They can't stop looking at it.

They look at that stain and they think what was what's different

about that person? That's how the early church won

the entire culture to Jesus through gentleness.

The early church was a wine stain in a world that just

spilled water over each other. So Bee Weinsteins, my friends,

and this is Part 1 of the two-part secrets on how to

engage with culture. So come back next Sunday and

we'll explore verse 3, where Paul gives a very explicit

strategy for how to become more gentle.