Preaching the Cross by Mark Dever

Author:Mark Dever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2017-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Elect Exiles

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind as we consider the idea of preaching with the culture in view is that we are in fact elect exiles. We are here. We have an address in this world. We have a phone number. We wear certain clothes and speak a certain language, and we come out of a certain culture in which certain things make sense and other things do not make sense. But all of that is passing. It is all missiologically important, but it is eternally insignificant. We are elect exiles. The temptation for evangelicals in America is to believe something else, and to feel ourselves very much at home. I think that many of the tensions in evangelicalism today are the tensions felt by a people who are just beginning to awaken to the fact that this culture just might not be the friendly place we thought it to be. All of our cultural optimism is coming into question as we begin to look at the deeper levels of what is happening all around us, and we are beginning to realize that there is no ground for such optimism.

We cannot simply withdraw. That would be to deny our commission. But we cannot feel at home either. That would be to deny our identity. We are a chosen race, by God’s grace, a royal priesthood, and so our task is to preach and teach the gospel in this City of Man until we see that eschatological vision of believers, the elect from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, standing before the throne of God. In that day, we will not be Americans, or Pontians, or Romans, or Cappadocians. We will be his.

1 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Perennial, 1956).

2 Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage, 1991), 177–80.

3 First used in Drucker’s Landmarks of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 1959).

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