Different/Same

Sometimes I am a little slow on the uptake. I'm just now getting around to listening to some of the sermons from the Resurgence Conference 2006. Actually, in 2006 that conference wasn't even on my radar. But one of my friends recently sent me a link to a couple of messages from that year and I listened to one while I mowed the yard yesterday.

The message was titled "Being the Church in Our Culture," by Tim Keller. If you've got an hour in the car or at the gym, it's absolutely worth a listen.

Among other things, Keller talks about how the challenge of the Christian life is to be radically different from the world while being radically the same.

The idea he comes up with is this: people need to be able to look at our lives and picture how they might look if they were Christians. If we don't inhabit the same world, think about the same things or fight some of the same battles as unbelievers, our witness is lost. On the other hand, if our lives are not radically different from theirs, they have no perceived need to turn to Christ.

Keller bases his sermon on an eschatology (theology of where everything is headed in the future) which is different from mine, but you can get to the same conclusions from a different starting point. I really love the things he says in this message and think it's worth checking out.