TLDR: At the Kidzmatter 2023 Conference, I shared for a few minutes about the posture we need to take with our upside-down culture. Here, Larry Osborne takes more time to say it better than I can.
What a privilege it was to share with the Kidzmatter Conference attendees from the main stage and talk about a subject that is dear to me: how to engage a culture that seems to be losing its mind. I have a heavy heart in how I see so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ take a combative approach. I just cannot see the love or the biblical warrant to throw “holy haymakers” at the lost. I didn’t see Jesus do that. Why should we?
In my brief message, I drew from 1 Corinthians 16:13–14.
13 Stay alert, stand firm in the faith, show courage, be strong. 14 Everything you do should be done in love.
NET1
From this, we can heed Paul’s admonishment to stand firm together on the gospel of Jesus Christ. We need to stop dividing ourselves and attacking each other because we disagree on secondary or tertiary issues, or worse, because we differ on non-theological issues. We need to stand as one bride of Christ.
But what of our arms and hands? I see the answer in v. 14. We must refuse to ball our hands into fists; we need to keep our hands open with our arms open wide, beckoning our culture to come to Christ. Come to the truth. Stand with us on the gospel.
I have known what I was going to share for some time, but in an act of God’s kind providence, our church began a new series on how to engage with the culture this past Sunday. As I sat listening to our guest Larry Osborne (author of Sticky Teams, one of my recommended reading books) preach that morning at New Vision , I couldn’t help but think I should change my text to Daniel 1. But alas, I wouldn’t have enough time to flesh this chapter out, and I knew I could just post the video anyway. Plus, I learned a long time ago (a) to trust the Holy Spirit and (b) never to imitate someone else’s preaching.
So, friends, I want to encourage you to take some time and listen to Larry Osborne do a wonderful job of showing four principles of how we are to engage with our culture drawn out from Daniel. It’s a message that is unashamed of the gospel but one that’s also saturated with compassion and kindness.
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brian dembowczyk 