One of the difficult balances for Christians is holy bridge building. Holiness is God’s demand that we are separate, distinctive and different to the world around us. Bridge building is our exercise of reaching out to others with the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. To do either has its difficulties, but to do both at the same time is extraordinarily difficult. The easy and false way is to choose one or the other: to join the holy huddle or to become worldly.
The Bible is both world affirming and world denying. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16) is matched by “Do not love the world or the things of this world (1 John 2:15). This tension can be resolved by arguing that God’s love for the world shows the extent of his grace, and that the things of this world we are not to love are limited to “the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride in possessions”. For the world is God’s good creation: “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4) and it is the doctrine of demons to say otherwise. But just as we are to avoid the doctrine of the demons, we are also warned to not to think as the nations of the world do: “you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.” (Ephesians 4:17-18).
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