4 Biblical Foundations and their Cultural Implications

The following is a lightly edited transcript provided by a transcription service. Please check the video before quoting.

David Platt on Genesis 1-3

I want to preach the word of God. A word I believe is from God to you this morning out of the overflow of a personal and pastoral burden that is particularly heavy on my heart pertaining to social issues in our culture. So in one sense, my heart is encouraged, particularly among younger evangelicals, I sense opposition to injustice regarding the poor the orphaned, and the enslaved.

I am grateful for increased awareness of issues like sex trafficking and starvation in the world. I am zealous to see the power of the gospel and the lives of Christians fueling long-term commitments to address these issues in a world of sin sorrow and suffering.

So I’m encouraged. Yet at the same time, I’m concerned by a lack of zeal, again, particularly but not exclusively among younger evangelicals on social issues that are just as if not in many ways more important like abortion and sexual immorality.

And so-called Same-Sex Marriage on some of these issues, younger evangelical Christians and prominent church leaders are strangely quiet. And our supposed social justice seems like a selective social injustice. We are passionate in our stand against poverty and slavery injustice that we should stand against, but issues that don’t really bring us into conflict with the culture around us.

Yet issues like abortion or so-called Same-Sex Marriage issues are much more contentious in the culture around us. Instead of being passionate, we are much more likely to be passive. And I’m zealous to show that followers of Christ do not have that option in our culture.

I’m zealous to show that the same gospel that compels us to combat poverty compels us to defend marriage and the same heart of God that moves us to war against sex trafficking, moves us to war against sexual immorality.

And if we fail to see this as the church in our culture, we may actually miss the very heart of the God we claim to worship and we may inadvertently deny the very gospel we claim to defend brothers and sisters.

There are battles raging rapidly on the front lines of our culture and we do not have the option of deciding which battles we are going to fight and which battles we are going to flout. Martin Luther said, if I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition of every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, then I am not confessing Christ or the battle rages.

The loyalty of the soldier is proven and to be steady on all the battlefronts besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches. At that point, if we are going to lead the church in our culture, we must engage in the battles that are being fought.

Prophetic Words

And for far too long we have flinched on a multiplicity of battle fronts. Francis Schaeffer wrote these prophetic words years ago that are surely all the more applicable today. He said we must ask where we as evangelicals have been in the battle for truth and morality in our culture. Have we as evangelicals been on the front lines contending for the faith and confronting the moral breakdown over the last 40 to 60 years?

Most of the evangelical world, Schaeffer said, has not been active in the battle or even been able to see that we are in a battle the last 60 years of giving birth to a moral disaster. And what have we done? Sadly, we must say that the evangelical world has been part of the disaster more than this. The evangelical response itself has been a disaster. Where is the clear voice speaking to the crucial issues of the day with distinctly biblical Christian answers with tears?

We must say it’s not there in a large segment of the evangelical world that has become seduced by the world spirit of this present age. And more than this, we can expect the future to be a further disaster if the evangelical world does not take a stand for biblical truth and morality in the full spectrum of life.

So I want to call you this morning to contrite, compassionate, courageous battle on the front lines of our culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I want to do that by taking us back to the beginning, to the start of scripture where I want to remind us of four biblical foundations or gospel foundations that we all know and then having reminded us of these foundations from the word I want to call us to engagement with the world based upon these four biblical foundations.

And I want to put before you the cultural implications for the church today. And in the end, my aim is to call you as a member of Christ’s church more importantly as leaders inChrist’st Church, to depend on God’s authority to declare God’s word and to display God’s grace in a culture that is desperately in need of God’s gospel.

So let’s start by reading Genesis 1:26. We pick up on the sixth day of creation when God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image and the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them and God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit.

God Created Us as a Demonstration of His Glory

You shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens and everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

And it was so and God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good and there was evening and there was morning the sixth day, okay, four biblical foundations. Number one, God created us as a demonstration of his glory. God created us as a demonstration of his glory.

So GenesiOnene is a glorious tribute to the greatness of God as our creator. You just consider the wonder, even that first verse in the Bible that we all know in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That sentence alone is breathtaking and we could just pause and consider its wonder our entire time together. In the beginning, God was in the beginning. He has no creator. God was and is and always will be and he speaks. And when he speaks, things happen.

All he has to do is say, let there be and creation comes into let there be light. And light exists. Let there be land and water and land and water exist over and over again. In chapter one, all creation comes about simply because God said this is the world literally being fashioned by the word of God and sustained by the power of God.

The stars are held in their place by his sovereign strength. The oceans stop and are held at bay by his omnipotent hand. The sun and moon rise and fall according to his divine command. Animals eat according to the gracious providence of God.

This is not natural selection, this is supernatural provision. If God were to withdraw his power from creation for a split second, the universe and all that is in it, including you and me, would cease to exist in that split second because he sustains it all and it’s all good.

God Makes It Good

After every day he saw that it was good, he saw that it was good. All ended up on the sixth day when God said, let us make man. And at the end of that day, God saw that it was very good. So what was so special about man?

Man was created as the image of God with a unique capacity to relate to God unlike anything else in all creation, man was created to know God, to walk with God, to worship God as a unique reflection of God, not identical to God by any means, yet bearing the likeness of God in a way that nothing else in all creation does. Oh, you think of it when people look at my blonde-haired five-year-old son and say to me, he’s your spitting image to think that I am. You are in some sense the spitting image of God himself.

And in this way, we are created as a demonstration of his glory. The first command man is given is to be fruitful and to fill the earth with the image of God for the glory of God. God wants his image, the reflection of his glory multiplied throughout the earth.

This is why God created us, how God created us as a demonstration of his glory. Remember his words to his people in Isaiah 43, fear not I have redeemed you, I’ve called you by name, you are mine when you pass through the waters, I will be with you when you pass through the rivers.

They will not sweep over you when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned because I am the Lord your God. You are precious and honored in my sight and I love you, the people whom I have created for my glory.

God Created Us for the Display of His Gospel

God created us as a demonstration of his glory and and, biblical foundation. Number two, God designs us for the display of his gospel. God designs us for the display of his gospel so it’s not just man in general that God creates for Genesis 1 27 tells us that male and female, he created them.

And so we turn the page to chapter two where the story behind that reality is told starting in verse 18, the Lord God said it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to man, see what he would call them.

And whenever the man called every living creature that was its name, the man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and every beast of the field.

But for Adam, there was not a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused the deep sleep to fall upon the man and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with fle, sh and the rib that the Lord had, God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. A man and his wife are both naked and we’re not ashamed. So here we have both man and woman, both created with equal dignity, equal value, equal importance before God and each other, both made in the image of God, both made to resemble God to relate to God, yet clearly designed with different roles.

Genesis two goes out of the way to show us that God has made man and woman in a way that compliments one another in wonderfully beautiful harmony, physically man and woman were designed by God to complement one another, literally to fit together sexually to find their deepest unity with one another at the point where they are most different. If you want to know more about this, just talk to the distinguished president of this institution.

Whose favorite book in the Bible is EveryoneWhoo Knows HimKnowss is the song of Solomon. Out of all the canon of holy scripture, from the plentitude to the Psalms, to the gospels, to the majesty of Romans in Revelation, your president loves the one about sex the most. It’s true.

God Designs Us

Got here last night, that was the first book you started talking to me about and it’s true. Alright, we’ll talk later. But it’s more than just physical complementarity here though, right? God designs man as the head of woman and I’m using head here in the way that Paul uses it.

In one Corinthians chapter 11 when he says the head of every man is Christ and the head of a wife is her husband and the head of Christ is God. In that chapter in One Corinthians 11, Paul points back to this chapter in Genesis two and says, for man was not made from woman but woman for man.

Now this clearly is not male domination or superiority, female subjugation or inferiority. No, the Bible is not addressing dignity or value here, but the role of man created to be the head woman created to be the helper.

A word that is used two times in Genesis 2, verse 18, I’ll make him a helper fit for him. Verse 20, there was not a helper fit for him and that was not good. After everything else in all creation has been called good. This is the only thing that’s called not good before sin enters the world, man in need of a helper that would be like him made in the image of God but different from him. And God designed these differences for a reason.

Ephesians five, Paul tells us again the husband is the head of the wife and he goes on to say Justice Christ is head of the church. Then Paul quotes from Genesis 2 24 to describe marriage, the one-flesh union of a man and woman coming together as head and helper in loving authority and glad submission. Paul says this is referring to Christ and his church.

Oh the design of God for man and woman in marriage is not haphazard or happenstance. It is purposeful. God designed man and woman equally valuable yet sexually different so that through their union and marriage with one another, he might show the world the relationship between Christ and his church so that he might show Christ as the loving authority who lays down his life for his bride the church and he might show the church in glad submission to the groom who died to save her.

Our creation as a man and woman is part of an overarching drama unfolding on the pages of human history. We are uniquely designed for men and women to come together in marriages that display the gospel throughout the world. God literally physically designs us for the display of his gospel. God created us as a demonstration of his glory. God designs us for the display of his gospel.

God Judges Us By His Righteous Law

Third biblical foundation, God judges us by his righteous law. God judges us by his righteous law. And so we come to chapter three and the man and the woman created for the glory of God to display the gospel of God, turn from the grace of God.

The serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field the Lord God had made. Genesis three tells us and he said to the woman, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden. Neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw the tree was good for food that it was a delight to the eyes and the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate and she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate and the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they showed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths and they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and the man and his wife hid from the presence of the Lord God, the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said I heard the sound of you in the garden. I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

They go on in this conversation that unfolds in the cursing of a man leading all the way down to verse 22, where the Lord God said, behold the man has become like one of us and knowing good and evil now lest he reaches out his hand and takes also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

Therefore, the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man at the east of the garden of Eden. He placed the cherubim in a flaming sword that turned in every way to guard the way to the Tree of life.

What Happens When You Question God’s Word?

Men and women questioning God’s word, the very first question that ever appears in the Bible in Genesis three, as Satan asked, did God actually say for the first time the most deadly spiritual force on earth was covertly smuggled into the world?

The assumption is that what God has said is subject to human judgment. Eve, let’s talk about what God said and how we feel about it. After all, you are a better arbiter of truth than God and certainly, you know what is better for your life than he does. And so questioning God’s word leads to doubt in God’s character.

Eve subtly transfers her trust from God to herself as she stops believing that God is good, which leads to spurning God’s authority in sin. She and her husband who passively sits by abdicating his responsibility to lead together, eat a piece of fruit and assert their independence from God only to immediately find themselves in condemnation before God, full of shame, full of guilt, full of fear.

The woman and man now covering themselves as the cower before their creator whom they know is their judge whom they know has made his righteous law resolutely clear. GenesisTwoo 16 and 17, the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

You shall not eat from the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. And so by the end of chapter three, men and women are cast out of God’s presence now slaves to sin, destined for death. And it’s not just them, it’s all of us.

Romans five makes clear that from this one, sin came condemnation to all men for all have sinned. And so this is where we find ourselves in the story. All of us in this room have questioned God’s word and doubted God’s character, and we all in this room have spurned God’s authority.

We have rebelled against him and we all experience the consequences of that rebellion around us in a world of sin and suffering, disease and death, and injustice abounding at every level, economically, ethnically, socially, and most of all spiritually.

Every single one of our hearts is prone to center around ourselves instead of others in need. And instead of the God who we most need one day, we will all stand before this God to be judged by him according to his righteous law and we will all be guilty in and of ourselves. God judges us by his righteous law.

Thankfully, however, that is not the end of the story for the stage is now set for the God of the universe to do the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the shocking, and the scandalous. He comes to the man and the woman not waiting for them to take the initiative but taking the initiative himself.

God seeks the guilty. He does what he will do throughout scripture seeking after an idolater named Abraham, a deceiver named Jacob, a fugitive in Midian named Moses, and scores of other sinful men and women, Arthur Pink writes, oh, that we might appreciate more deeply the marvelous condescension of deity and swooping so low as to care for and seek out such poor worms of the dust.

And not only does he swoop to seek sinners, but he covers them in their shame. God takes an innocent animal guilty of nothing and uses its sacrificial death to provide a covering for his guilty creation. And on this day, literally the worst day in all the world, God gives the greatest news in all the world saying right in the heart of Genesis chapter three, verse 15, I will put enmity between you and the woman serpent in between your offspring and her offspring.

God Pursues Us with His Redeeming Love

He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. The proto and gallian, the first gospel of which Martin Luther said this one verse embraces and comprehends within itself everything noble and glorious that can be found anywhere in the scriptures.

For God promises to send a man born a woman Christ himself, clothed in human flesh to conquer sin and defeat the serpent through his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave so that through faith in the promised Son who will crush the evil serpent, all who stand condemned before God as judge can be acquitted before God as savior fourth biblical foundation.

Yes, God judges us by his righteous law, yet God pursues us with his redeeming love. God pursues us with his redeeming love. And these four truths together now form the essence of the gospel. The holy God who has created us as a demonstration of his glory designed us as a display of his grace.

We have rebelled against him, sinned against him turned away from him and he will judge all of us according to his righteous law. And in our sin, we stand condemned before God but God, but God stoops to seek us. God bends to bless us and through the sacrifice of his one and only son on a cross, he pursues us with his redeeming love.

I don’t want to assume even in this place that every one of you has believed these truths and applied them to your heart. And so I invite you today, this morning to see yourself in this story created by God, designed by God, yet a sinner against God and in desperate need of salvation from God.

And to see this God in loving pursuit of you, to see this God bringing you even to this place at this time on this day for you to hear this good news of his love for you so that today, right now where you are sitting, you might turn from your sin and yourself and put your trust and your hope in this God that today you might be spared his righteous judgment and saved by his redeeming love.

We Fight Abortion

And then so when you do, and for all who have, for all who hold to these biblical foundations, these gospel truths form a bedrock for our faith and change the way we live in this culture, consider the massive ramifications of these truths applied to the battlefronts of our day. God created us as a demonstration of his glory. And so what do we do? Here is what we must do. We do not have a choice.

We are compelled by the gospel to fight abortion as an assault on God’s creation and as an affront to God’s glory. The cultural implication, number one, is based on a biblical foundation. Number one, we fight abortion as an assault on God’s creation and an affront to God’s glory. Live in a country where a million babies are aborted every year, 3000 every day.

That’s one baby being aborted every 20 to 25 seconds. And that’s just our country. We live in a world where 130,000 abortions occur every day. 130,000 Babies. We’re watching Syria right now or upwards of a hundred thousand Syrians have been tragically and mercilessly killed in violent ways in that country.

Moral Disaster

And yet every single day a moral disaster of even greater proportions is taking place. 130,000 helpless babies are being dismembered and destroyed and we hardly even notice it. I do not believe it is an overstatement to call abortion a modern holocaust.

I believe that is an understatement. Every month we surpass that number of people systematically slaughtered in the world. And just as German Christians did not need to hide from the reality of what was happening in concentration camps, we in this room cannot hide, must not hide from the reality of what is happening in abortion clinics all around our country and all around the world. Why not?

Why can’t we hide because of the gospel? Because of the biblical foundations, we have just seen. Abortion is a clear affront to God’s glory as our creator. He is our creator. He alone has the power and authority to give life and he alone has the power and authority to take life.

We do not decide when someone lives or dies. God decides when someone lives or dies. Abortion is an affront to his glory as our creator and an attack on assault on his work and creation. Remember David’s words in Psalm 1 39 For you from my N-word parts, you knitted me together, my mother’s womb.

I praise you for fearfully and wonderfully making wonderful works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. David says, the way you form my inward parts, the way you knit me together in my mother’s womb, this work of creation is a demonstration of your glory. And it is, isn’t it? It’s a glorious demonstration of how God, David didn’t even know what we know how God takes a little egg and sperm and brings ’em together.

And how two weeks later a human heart is beating, circulating its own blood, then a few more weeks, fingers forming on hands, brainwaves, detectable after just six and a half weeks. Inward parts moving two weeks later, discernible fingerprints, discernible sexuality, kidneys forming and functioning, then a gallbladder.

By the 12th week, all the organs of a baby’s body are functional and the baby can cry. All of this within three months, one trimester, heart, organs, brain, sexuality, movement, reaction. And God on high is doing every single detail as a demonstration of his glory.

So imagine at that moment, during that time period, inserting a tool, taking a pill, undergoing an operation that takes the life God is designing and destroying. This is without question an assault on God’s glorious work in creating a person in his image. And that is the crux of the debate, isn’t it?

What is really going on in that womb? And the Bible is clear that God is forming a person in his image in that womb and that gospel reality changes everything you think about it. If the unborn, it’s not a person, it’s not human, then no justification for abortion is even necessary.

People say the unborn is not a human person, it’s just a nonviable tissue mass merely a part of a woman’s body. Others say it’s a potential human or a human that’s not yet a person. And the reality is if that’s true, then the argument over no justification for abortion is necessary.

However, if the unborn is human, then no justification for abortion is adequate. No justification. This is where I’m indebted to Gregory Gel who wrote a little booklet called Precious Unborn Human Persons Great little resource. People say abortion is such a complex issue. There’s no easy answer.

But if that which is in the womb is a person formed by God, this issue is not complex at all. Think about it. If it’s true that what is in the womb is a person, then every single justification for abortion falls apart.

People say, well women have a right to privacy with their doctors. Certainly, we all have a right to a measure of privacy. But no privacy argument is a cover for doing serious harm to another innocent human being. We have laws that invade our privacy all the time when we start hurting others’ human welfare. Privacy is not the issue here, but women should have the freedom to choose some things. Sure, but not all things.

Yes, we have the freedom to choose whether or not to have children. We don’t have the freedom to simply eliminate toddlers or teenagers who are inconvenient to us. No woman has the freedom to kill her child if it’s a child, right? When making abortions illegal force women into the back alleys with coat hangers. If it’s dangerous to kill a person, should we make it easier for them?

Children are Invaluable

But more children will create a drain on the economy. When human beings get expensive, do we eliminate them? This makes no sense. It’s utterly ludicrous if the person, if what is going on in the womb is the person created in the image of God.

Everything. Everything in the abortion debate revolves around what’s happening in that womb. In scripture it is clear. God is creating a person as a demonstration of his glory. You cannot believe the word of God and deny this, and you cannot believe the word of God and stay silent on this.

And yet so many Christians and pastors, we sit back and say hardly anything. Well, Christians and churches say I wouldn’t have an abortion, but I don’t think that we should take someone else’s right to choose away from them. That’s not our place, and that’s not the government’s place, but that’s a sham argument and we all know it is.

The government exists under the authority of God for the good of the people. And part of that good is accomplished by limiting people’s right to choose. People can’t just choose to steal whenever they want, drive as fast as they want, and do whatever they want with no consequences if that were the case. We live in anarchy.

It’s moral silliness and cultural suicide to say that everyone should have the right to do whatever they choose to do. Thankfully we take people’s right to choose evil away from them every day as a society. And that’s good for all of us.

Oh, Christian this’s, where I want to call you out of the muddled middle road that is masking the magnitude of what kind of choice we’re talking about to say you’re a pro-choice, pro-choice about what? Whether you have Mexican or Chinese food, where you live, what kind of car you drive, of course.

But are you pro-choice about rape? Are you pro-choice about kidnapping? Are you pro-choice about burglary? Then why are you pro-choice about killing children, brothers, and sisters? Moral or political neutrality here is not an option for those who believe this gospel. There is a battle raging in our culture.

And if you and I sit idly by while millions of children, individuals in the image of God all around us are dismembered and destroyed, then we are denying basic biblical truth that forms the foundation for the very gospel. We claim to believe in the words of Randy Alcorn. To endorse or even be neutral about killing innocent children.

Created in God’s image is unthinkable in the scriptures, was unthinkable to Christians in church history, and should be unthinkable to Christians. Today we fight abortion as an assault on God’s creation and as an affront to God’s glory. The second cultural implication is linked to the second biblical foundation.

We Flee Sexual Immorality

Remember, God designs us for the display of his gospel. So then culturally we flee cultural implication numbers. We flee sexual immorality in our lives and we defend sexual complementarity in marriage for the sake of the gospel in the world.

We flee sexual immorality in our lives. We defend sexual complementarity in marriage for the sake of the gospel and the world. I’m running way out of time, so lemme make this quick. I’ve been so helped by Dr. Heimbach’s book on sexual immorality and I was particularly struck when I read these words that he wrote.

He said, the stakes in the current conflict over sex are more critical, more central, and more essential than in any controversy the church has ever known. This is a momentous statement, but I make it soberly without exaggeration. Conflict over sex these days is not just challenging tradition or orthodoxy and respect for authority in areas such as ordination, marriage, and gender roles.

The Sanctity of Human Life

And it doesn’t just affect critically important doctrines like the sanctity of human life. The authority entrusted with the worthiness of scripture, the trinity, and the incarnation of Christ, rather than war over sex among Christians is now raging over absolutely essential matters of faith without which no one can truly be a Christian in the first place. Matters such as sin, salvation, the gospel, and the identity of God himself. I agree.

You think about it among other things, many other things we have seen that God designs us sexually as men and women for a reason for the display of his gospel. The gospel is most clear in the world when a man and woman come together and the one-flesh union for marriage and unite their lives with one another and a picture of Christ’s love for his church.

So then if we want this gospel to be clear in our culture, then we must flee sexual immorality in our lives. We must do one Corinthians six 18. We must run from sexual immorality, not reason with it, not rationalize it, run from, oh, there’s so much sexual immorality in the culture and so much sexual immorality in the church.

I had another conversation with a ministry leader this week who didn’t run from, he didn’t run from it. Run from it. God and His grace have brought some of you to this place to hear this one word this morning. Flee. Flee the sexual immorality that you are toying with in your life, flirting within your life, engaging in your life, whether it is pornography for some potential adultery, single brothers and sisters, I would argue any sexual activity at all with someone who’s not your husband or wife. Flee it.

Flee any and all sexual looking, thinking, desiring, touching, watching, speaking, and acting outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Obviously, homosexual sin is a particularly pervasive topic today, and that’s obviously included here. But we must be careful not to be guilty of selective moral outrage when it comes to sexual sin in our culture.

The reality is I represent the class of people responsible for the most sexual wrongdoing in our culture today. Male heterosexuals and I and every other heterosexual person will be wise to look at the speck in others’ eyes only after looking at the log in our own eyes. If we roll our eyes and shake our heads at the Supreme Court’s decisions, yet we turn the channel to steer uncritically at adultery in a drama.

Watch the trivialization of sex in movies. Look at seductive images on reality TV shows or virtual prostitution and advertisements that sell by provoking sexual interest in us, then we have missed a whole point. Are these sins acceptable simply because they’re the sins of the majority? The reality is heterosexual and homosexual alike.

We are all sexual sinners and we all need a savior. And so we flee sexual immorality in our lives. We defend sexual complementarity in marriage, particularly in light of this current climate concerning so-called gay marriage. We defend sexual complementarity with God’s word.

We defend sexual commonality in our lives, with our marriages through pictures of husbands’ heads, wives as helpers, loving authority, and glad submission in the context of beautiful relationships. And we do this for the sake of the gospel and the world doesn’t miss it.

There is no question that today’s cultural climate presents a huge opportunity for gospel witness through marriage. As spiritual darkness engulfs the picture of marriage in our culture, spiritual light is going to shine all the brighter in the picture of a husband who lays down his life for his wife and a wife who joyfully follows her husband’s loving leadership.

God’s design for marriage is far more breathtaking and far more satisfying than anything our culture will ever create. So let’s give ourselves to his design. Let’s let this moment drive us to revive our marriages in the church so that the gospel of God might be put on display in marriage through us in the world.

We Work for Justice

Third cultural implication. Respond to the third biblical foundation because God judges us by his righteous law. We work for justice in the world as we speak about the judge of the world. Cultural implication.

Number three, we work for justice in the world as we speak about the judges of the world. Justice is important to God and so justice must be important to us. God is the defender of the weak, the Father to the fatherless, the healer of the sick, the helper of the needy, the provider for those in poverty, and the rescuer of those in slavery. And so we must reflect his character in a world that is filled with the weak and the fatherless, the sick and the needy, the impoverished and the enslaved.

People say, well, you need to be careful not to lose sight of the gospel as you’re doing social ministry. And that’s a good warning. It’s a needed warning in light of theological liberalism that often comes on the wings of social ministry. However, I’m convinced that most of us as Christians in our culture have already lost sight of the gospel in our lack of social ministry.

We live in relative affluence that cares little for the poor. We give little fights to children like our own being sold and trafficked across state and national borders for sex. We can live our entire Christian lives in the confines of churches in the United States while turning a blind eye to brothers and sisters around the world who are literally starving.

And this must not be. The gospel compels us. The generous justice of God constrains us to do something. Micah six eight. To do justice and not to stop with only doing but to speak as we do to work for justice in the world as we speak about the judge of the world to give a cup of clean water, build a well with clean water while we proclaim the gospel of living water to provide a home for the earth orphan on earth while we declare the love of the Father in heaven.

As our church began taking on foster care and adoption needs all across our city, I’ll never forget the first informational meeting we had a room just filled up with people and this DHR representative was in the back tears just streaming down her face as all these people are coming in and saying, how can we help all these kids?

And she came up to me and she said, what made you decide to do this? Pastor? And I had the joy of looking back at her and saying, it wasn’t my initiative that brought this about. It was the initiative of God who cared for children in need. And this is simply a reflection of who he is. And I began to share with her the gospel as we work for justice in the world. We speak about the judgment of the world. Finally the fourth biblical foundation. So God pursues us with his redeeming love.

We Dedicate Our Lives to Reach the Unreached

It’s a fourth cultural implication. We must give our lives and lead our churches to pursue people still unreached by God’s redeeming love. We must give our lives and lead our churches to pursue people still unreached by God’s redeeming love.

Surely the greatest injustice in our day without question is the reality that 6,000 people groups spanning 2 billion people have yet to even hear of God’s redeeming love to think of it, 2 billion people who have sinned against God, who are living in the guilt, shame, and fear of sin, and they’ve never heard of God’s promise and provision of a savior they haven’t heard.

And it does not reflect the pursuing love of our God. If you and I sit back in a land that is filled with churches, keeping the gospel to ourselves just as God came after us, sought after us, we go to them, we seek after them.

We lead our churches to prioritize our resources, to pursue unreached people. We lead our church members to leave the comfortable confines of cultural Christianity to engage people who’ve never heard of Christ. And we give our lives, we lose them if necessary.

Why? Because Christ is worthy of glory from every single people group on the planet. And there is a battle that is raging in North America and among the nations among 6,000 of those people groups who up until this point, Satan has kept from hearing this good news. In this gospel brothers and sisters use Luther’s words or the battle is raging. The loyalty of the soldier is proven.

So based upon biblical foundations, gospel foundations are clearly laid in the opening pages of scripture. I challenge you today to engage in the battle on fronts in our culture, from abortion to poverty, slavery, to sexual immorality. Refuse to pick and choose which battles you’re going to stand up and speak out on, and which battles you’re going to sit down and be silent on. Obviously, each of us has limited time and limited resources.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to devote time or resources to one of these issues more than another, but in our belief, let us be consistent in our proclamation. Let us be complete. And in our leadership, let us be clear. The gospel of Christ compels contrite, compassionate, courageous action on a multiplicity of cultural issues.

And to engage with the gospel on battlefronts across our culture is to be faithful to the gospel in our day. In the end, when our time is done, may it be said of us that we loved our Lord and we led his church for the demonstration of his glory and the display of his gospel amidst the most pressing issues of our day. Let’s pray. God, we pray that it will be so.

We pray for grace and wisdom from your Word and your spirit to engage the front lines of our culture, compelled by grace, constrained by your gospel for the glory of your name, in Jesus’ prayer. Amen.