How Should Christians Engage With The World?

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Sermon Notes

Our question: Remember, the point of this series is not necessarily to answer Christian’s questions about daily life with Jesus but to answer apologetic questions, questions that people in the world are asking. We are trying to address obstacles that keep people from relationship with Jesus and His Church, and the way Christians behave in relation to the world is one of the primary obstacles that keep people from Jesus. This is, of course, a tragic irony. It’s supposed to be just the opposite:


Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. (1 Peter 2:11-12)


  1. Two wrong ways:

    1. The “Christian” way: some of the ways that Christians mess this up:

      1. Colonization

        1. Ghandi,

        2. African missionaries, etc.

        3. Conflation of political and “religious” motivations

      2. Ulterior motives in kindness/relationship (nothing wrong with people wanting to know Jesus, but do we really want to know them or are we just trying to check a box?)

        1. The onion article

        2. Evangelism, like Mike talked about last week, has to come out of a genuine love for Jesus and for people)

      3. Hyper-politicized faith (on both sides, protest Christianity: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t protest injustices, but are we becoming known primarily as protesters rather than as doers)

      4. Approaching the world oppositionally:

        1. Us against science

        2. Us against culture

        3. Us against them

        4. Leads to a cloistered existence

        5. And then we call it persecution when they’re suspicious of us.

    2. The world’s way. What the world thinks Christians should do: Keep it to yourself, meaning…

      1. Don’t force your beliefs on me (Norman Solomon story)

      2. Deep your beliefs out of the public

        1. Good for church, not much good for anything else

        2. Fascinating that many Christians buy this as well:

          1. The pastor who doesn’t want a President who follows the sermon on the mount

          2. The Christians who think that biblical teachings on money are good for church but not for the real world

          3. One more…

    3. Neither side is the right way:

      1. Christianity is, as Miroslav Volf reminds us, a prophetic faith that is both about engaging with God and engaging with the world.

        1. If we keep it to ourselves and not let it affect the way we think about life and the world, it is not the Christian faith.

        2. By definition, this is a public faith

        3. Norman Solomon’s rebuttal to my classmate: “If you believe you have the answer to the meaning of life, the hope of the world, and you don’t share it, you’re kind of a jerk.

        4. Jesus said it like this:


“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.


 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:13-16)


        1. Two problems:

  1. Losing saltiness

  2. Not shining

      1. But living a prophetic faith like this one that is both about ascent and return, deep engagement with God and with the world, is like walking a tightrope. There are plenty of ways that we can go wrong in ascent or return.

        1. We can fail to engage with God and just engage with the world on the world’s terms

        2. Or we can be so enthralled in the “things of God” that we never interact with the world

  1. How should Christians engage with the world? Live as exiles


But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. (1 Peter 2:9-12)


    1. Backstory: Babylonian Exile

      1. Explain

      2. The exile theme is an important one throughout the Bible.

      3. Babylonian Exile when God’s people found themselves displaced from their homeland and struggling to figure out how to live as the people of God outside of the Promised Land.


By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

    we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

    while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

    may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

    my highest joy. (Psalm 137:1-6)


        1. Exile presented two practical problems

          1. How do we live obedient to God?

            1. In a context where we move from place to place without a whole lot of thought, it may sound like a small thing, but the idea of relocating from the Promised Land created a theological problem for God’s people.

            2. Their identity as God’s people was tied to the land and there were certain things that they couldn’t do anywhere else.

          2. How do we maintain our unique identity?

        2. Can you relate with this tension?


    1. Peter’s exiles:

      1. When Peter addresses his letter to “exiles,” what’s interesting that many of the people he’s talking to are living in their own country.

      2. So, while he’s clearly playing with the same idea, there’s a different twist here.

        1. They were not taken geographically out of their home and displaced somewhere else. They were instead naturalized into a new Kingdom (adopted, grafted in). Notice the language of choosing: this exile is not about punishment for disobedience but reward for obedience (Jesus’, not ours)

        2. And then sent back to their country of origin as ambassadors.

          1. This exile is does not mean that we can’t do the things that God is asking us to do

          2. Instead, it is how we do what God is asking us to do.

        3. Not enslaved by a foreign power but set free from the tyranny of the powers so that we can live as free people in an enslaved place.

        4. Jesus is our paradigm, Jesus the obedient exile. As the Father has sent me…

  1. Three challenges of exiles:

    1. Forgetting where you came from…

      1. 90% of exiles never returned to Jerusalem. They became Babylonian.

      2. They thought about the world like and, therefore, acted like Babylonians to the point that there was no longer anything distinctive about them.

      3. And, when 70 years passed, they had lost an imagination for home.

      4. We become like the culture and so lose any capacity to speak prophetically into the culture.

        1. Qualitatively different. Unique worldview. Distinctly Christian perspective on…

          1. Relationships

          2. Money

          3. Politics (this is a discipleship issue)

          4. The News

          5. The meaning of life

      5. How do we get this unique perspective:

        1. Romans 12, we participate with the Holy Spirit in the renewing of our minds:


Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

        1. But how:

          1. Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego

          2. Tell the story, remain faithful to the story (Bible).

          3. Invest in Christian (inconvenient) community

          4. Different rhythms to reinforce the story.

    1. Forgetting where you are…

      1. On the other hand, exiles are not supposed to be a cloistered community.

      2. Christians are like manure scattered throughout the earth.

        1. The way Christians tend to interact with the Holy Land as a microcosm for the way Christians interact with the world

        2. We bound from “God-moment” to “God-moment” and miss all the moments in between (where God is doing His best work). We choose religion over people.

        3. Jeremiah 29


This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”


Notice, God does not tell His exiled people to rebel against their oppressors but rather to settle in and work alongside them for the common good of the Babylonian Empire. They were supposed to be known as people of peace in Babylon. Good people. Hard workers. Productive contributors to society. (Jeremiah 29:4-7)

        1. God’s people are not at war with the world.

          1. I’ve got to tell you: I’m completely fed up with military language in church. I grew up in a context where we talked like this all the time. Our favorite songs were: “Onward Christian soldiers,” and “I may never march in the infantry, but I’m in the Lord’s army.”

          2. I think I know where we got this idea because the Bible does talk about our armor and our weapons, but it also makes it clear that the battle we are fighting is not against people.


Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:10-12)


For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:4-5)


          1. We need to be clear on this. We are not fighting against the government, against the Democrats, the Republicans, or anyone else.

          2. The battle we are called to fight is happening in a space that we can’t see, so the way we fight it will be largely invisible. It is fought in the wee hours of the morning and late at night, in our homes as we pray for our families, our schools, our leaders, our churches, our workplaces and colleagues, our city, our neighbors.

      1. We have been blessed to be a blessing. We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. If we do not, our blessing stagnates and the world misses out on the full life that Jesus has come to bring.

      2. How do we do it? How do we work for the good of the city?

        1. Invest in a Church community that is serious about the city it’s in.

        2. Serve our schools

        3. Get involved in local government

        4. Walk more

        5. Bless local businesses

        6. More…

    1. Forgetting why you’re here

      1. To be a Spirit-empowered witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

      2. Jesus sent us out to announce a new Kingdom and invite people into it.

        1. There’s a lot more to that than the things I mentioned above.

        2. This is not a natural proposition; we can’t do this without the power of the Holy Spirit.

        3. But, He also won’t do this without us.

          1. What I mean by this is that He won’t always just bring people into our churches in spite of the way we behave.

          2. Do we really want that to be our strategy? Making the Holy Spirit work in spite of us?

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