3 Unchanging Truths for a ‘Post-Truth’ World by JARED C. WILSON for The Gospel Coalition
This is adapted from a message I preached last year on Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2.
The first thing we should note is that a post-Christian age is not a problem for God.
And while this may seem counterintuitive, in many ways post-Christianity is an advantage to the church, because it’s an opportunity to see what only the gospel can do.
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In a “post-everything” world, we can no longer appeal to religious sensibilities. We can no longer market an improved version to people of what they already kind of believe in. In a morally confused, philosophically complex, theologically vacuous culture, we now get to see how much we’ve always needed the supernaturality of Christianity.
We minister in confusing times. Difficult days. Moral confusion. Gender confusion. Political division.
And the way the American church has gone about trying to navigate the complexity and chaos has been combative or consumeristic. In this spiritually confused—often hostile when not ambivalent—post-everything world, the best thing the church can be is herself.
There are three things we can draw from Peter’s sermon in Acts 2:14-41 that the world will never be “post”—three unchanging truths in a changing world:
1. The World Will Never Be ‘Post’—The Saltiness of the Church
One of the reasons God has ordained the gospel of Jesus to create a new covenant people is to provide to a divided, confused world, a living, breathing witness to the reality of his united, coherent kingdom. In other words, the church is meant to be a signpost to a lost world that the beauty and peace of heaven is true.
This is why the mission of the church begins with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit makes such a stark difference between the people of God and business as usual that it is non-ignorable by the outside world (Acts 2:13-15). The first outside observances to the witness of the church surmised they were drunk!
