What are the ways Christians fail to engage effectively in cultural issues? How can Christians avoid the temptation to be selective, and instead remain consistent? In this video, David Platt challenges his audience to faithfully engage cultural issues with consistency and boldness. In today’s religious and political climate, many Christians choose what is easy and convenient to fight for, such as poverty and sex trafficking. However, many Christians refuse to stand just as boldly for heterosexual marriage and the rights of the unborn, thus causing a selective social injustice, where Christians fail to be a Gospel witness to their culture because they don’t want to speak on costly issues. Thus, David Platt encourages Christians to stand firm on the gospel as their foundation, consistently standing for biblical truth in the midst of a culture that despises the Gospel.
- Refuse to Choose the Convenient
- Avoid Selective Social Injustice
- Gospel as the Foundation for Consistency
Engaging in Cultural Issues
I see a trend in the church among evangelical Christians, particularly younger evangelicals, but really broader. We have this tendency to pick and choose which cultural issues we’re going to stand up and speak out on, and then some we’re going to sit down and be quiet on, usually based on those issues that are most comfortable and least costly for us to speak out on.
So it is right for us to speak out against poverty and sex trafficking, and I’m thankful for increased awareness of issues like that and the way people are speaking out on those issues. The danger though is if we speak boldly on issues like that, but then when it comes to issues like abortion or so-called same sex marriage, issues that are much more likely to bring us into contention with the culture around us, we’re much more likely to be quiet.
Fighting Against Social Issues
Before we know it, our supposed social justice actually becomes a selective social injustice where we’re picking and choosing which ones we are going to speak out on based on what’s least costly to us in the culture around us. We’ve got to make sure to avoid that.
The same gospel that compels us to combat poverty, compels us to defend marriage. The same gospel that compels us to war against sex trafficking, compels us to war against sexual immorality in all of its forms. To see that the gospel is the foundation for why we approach all issues with consistency based on the truths of the gospel is something I think we need to hear and heed in our day.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
