Not Ashamed | Sunday, January 26, 2025

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, "The just shall live by faith." (Romans 1:16–17)

We live in consequential times—and the gospel remains the only message that is tangibly transcendent.

Living in Consequential Times

I think you would probably agree that we are living in interesting times. Someone fifty or a hundred years ago would say the same, and they were probably right. But looking at what has been happening in our world and culture over the better part of the last two decades, it seems to me that we are living in what I would call consequential times.

In the early 2000s, following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, there was a clear groundswell of anti-religious rhetoric in our culture. Several things converged at once. The new revolution in information technology made it possible for individuals to promote their ideas to large groups of people quickly and inexpensively. The attacks of 9/11 were religiously motivated by an extreme form of jihadist Islam, and that event broke the dam on rhetoric that had been building for years.

The Four Horsemen of New Atheism

This combination gave a platform to a group of what I would call very evangelical atheists, four of whom came to be known as the Four Horsemen of New Atheism—a term, interestingly, taken from the Book of Revelation. They were Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. From about 2002 to 2008, especially Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris became enormous, debating Christians, Jews, and Muslims, writing books, and doing interviews right as podcasting was becoming a thing. They had a dramatic impact.

Fast forward to today. Recent research found that about a third of American adults now identify as not religiously affiliated—a group sociologists call the "nones" (n-o-n-e-s). It is even higher on the West Coast. Nearly twenty-five years after 9/11, two of the Four Horsemen are dead: Hitchens of throat cancer, Dennett of old age about six months ago. Sam Harris is off somewhere in Malibu high on mushrooms and meditation.

When Atheists Change Their Tune

The most interesting one is Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. I often meet men my age and younger who have moved away from Christianity because they read that book. Yet in the last six months Dawkins has publicly called himself a "cultural Christian." He is clear that he does not believe the doctrine, but he would much rather live in a culture influenced by Christianity than the alternative—a position I suspect you'd agree with.

Add to this Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was connected to those four in the early days. Somali-born, she fled radical Islam, immigrated to the West, and became a vocal atheist—less public only because radical Islamists were trying to kill her. In the last two years she has converted to believing Christianity and now attends church with her husband. About six months ago, in a conversation before thousands, she said plainly that she believes Christ rose from the dead. These are phenomenal things to witness.

Jordan Peterson and a Cultural Shift

You have heard me mention Jordan Peterson before. He came onto the scene around 2016, speaking things with clear biblical undertones, then giving talks on Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels, and writing a book called We Who Wrestle with God. As a pastor, I have watched him with great interest. In 2017 he rented out a theater in Toronto where thousands paid money to hear two-hour lectures on the Book of Genesis. I listened to those lectures, sometimes multiple times. Many things he said I disagreed with—but what fascinated me most was the audience.

These were the same young men, ages twenty to fifty, who would have cited Hitchens or Dawkins as their permission to say, "I don't believe in God." Suddenly, because of Peterson, they had permission to say, "Maybe the God thing might be true." When Peterson was repeatedly asked whether he believed in God, his answers always frustrated the pastor in me. But recently he was asked again:

He said, "I think that the claim that Christ is the embodiment of the prophet and the laws—I think that's true." Pressed further—"So you believe that Jesus was God?"—he answered, "Yeah." Complicated, as everything Peterson says is, but he said it.

A New Series for Such a Time as This

You may not think these things are a big deal, but they are huge for our wider culture. For twenty-five years Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris gave people permission to walk away from Christianity and join the "nones." For the last eight years, Jordan Peterson has given that same group permission to look into Christianity and even consider going to church. It is no longer abnormal for me to meet someone who tells me, "I don't believe in the Bible, but I was listening to Jordan Peterson, started watching your messages online, and thought I'd come check out the church."

This is why we are starting a new series today in the Gospel of Luke. I confess that since I took over this church in April of 2008, we have not gone through any of the gospels—we covered the rest of the New Testament and then the Old Testament. But for such a time as this, I think it is vital that we get into the gospel.

A Move of the Spirit—and Our Part in It

What is causing this? It is not just Peterson, though he plays a part. It is not only the cultural destabilization we have lived through, acutely in the last twenty to twenty-five years. Here in liberally progressive Southern California, I meet people who call themselves classical liberals or progressives who suddenly feel uncomfortable with the extreme direction things have moved, and so they think, "Maybe I should go to church." I am convinced this is a move of the Spirit of God. And we Christians will only see a truly profound movement if we align ourselves with what God is doing.

So here is point number one: every great movement of God requires the active participation of God's people. Within the church there are two dangers in doctrine. One is a determinist mindset that says everything is meticulously made to happen by God and man has nothing to do with it. The other is a man-centered view that God does nothing and we must do it all—the spring of that unbiblical saying, "God helps those who help themselves." That is not in the Bible, and it is false.

Neither extreme is fully true, though both can be supported from Scripture. God is sovereign, and man has responsibility. When you study the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, you see that wherever God's sovereignty is uplifted, it is almost always connected within a few sentences to man's responsibility. My favorite passage, Philippians 2:12–13, says, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure." Who is working—man or God? Yes. And sometimes God uses very interesting methods, even men like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, whose podcast of 7 to 10 million listeners recently hosted a Christian apologist for a three-hour conversation, complete with online "wow counters" of how many times Rogan said "wow."

Engaging the Culture: Ethos, Pathos, Logos

How is Peterson, who is not a theologian, reaching people we ought to be reaching but aren't? Partly because he has cultural credibility. This is point number two: God's people must engage the world in a cultural, contextual, and relevant manner. Any missionary understands this. Our friend Bill Davis and his wife Donna spent years translating the Bible into the Cebuano language in the Philippines. Isaiah 1 says, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." How do you translate that for islanders who have never seen snow? He rendered it, "They shall be as the white inside a coconut." Some people freak out—that's not what the Hebrew says, you've ruined the text. But you are speaking to a culture in a way that is contextual and relevant to them.

Our culture has changed so dramatically over the last hundred years that people no longer have the same cultural sense of the Bible. Peterson has credibility because he is perceived as an authentic authority—an educated expert who speaks with competency about things that matter—just as Dawkins, a professor of evolutionary science at Oxford, carries credibility, even when much of what he says is nonsense.

This connects to what Aristotle wrote 2,500 years ago in his Rhetoric about the art of persuasion. To be persuasive you need three things. First, ethos—connected to our word "ethics"—the character of the speaker, that he is perceived as credible and worth listening to. Second, pathos—that the speaker addresses the emotions, concerns, and questions of the hearer. Third, logos—the content of the message, used in John 1: "In the beginning was the Word." The logos is the message whose argument is clear. Together these create persuasion.

Commissioned to Persuade

Why does this matter at Cross Connection Church on a Sunday morning? Because as Christians we have been commissioned to persuasively speak to a culture in a contextualized, relevant manner that they might believe what we believe. The apostles did exactly this. The word apostle means "one sent with a message." Paul, a monotheist from Judaism who came to believe Jesus is God, left Judea and went to polytheistic, pluralistic, pagan Greece.

In Acts 18:4 in carnal Corinth—first Corinthians could just as well be first Californians—he "reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and persuaded both Jews and Greeks." The word reasoned is the Greek dialegomai, from which we get "dialogue." In Ephesus (Acts 19:8) he "spoke boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading concerning the things of the kingdom," and verse 10 says this continued for two years. It was so effective that the idol-makers rioted, complaining this was the man who turned the world upside down. Later, arrested and standing before King Agrippa (Acts 26), Paul heard the king say, "You almost persuade me to become a Christian." Paul replied that he wished not only Agrippa but everyone listening would be persuaded.

This is point number three: our task is to persuade, convince, and win converts. I know that is politically incorrect in the liberal West, but it is biblically correct. It requires logos—a clear, comprehensible message; ethos—credibility, that the speaker's life matches the message; and pathos—addressing the cares, concerns, and questions of the hearer.

The Church's Logos, Ethos, and Pathos Problem

I will make a claim: for most of my lifetime the church in America has not done this well. Our message has not been clear—we talk about many things that are not the message and get sidetracked by things that are not bad but are not the gospel. We have an ethos problem through scandal after scandal, Catholic and Protestant alike. And we have a pathos problem, often failing to address the real cares and questions of people in our culture.

But these problems are not insurmountable. I have discovered there are more than a few "almost persuaded" people in our culture. As they look at our consequential times, they are desperately searching for something that sounds paradoxical: something tangibly transcendent—something you can sense and touch that is also supernatural and beyond us. That is precisely the message of the gospel. Theologians have spoken for 2,000 years of God's transcendence and immanence. In Christ, the intangibility of the supernatural became tangible in humanity—God became a man. That is the good news.

A Message Centered on Grace, Truth, and Love

The transcendent God came to earth as a man to address humanity's greatest problem: sin and death, the source of all brokenness. Christians and non-Christians alike are trying to address brokenness—politicians you disagree with are usually attempting to fix something they see as broken, often making it worse with their best human wisdom. But there is only one true answer to the brokenness: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is point number four: our message is centered around God's grace, truth, and love in Christ. The whole Bible—sixty-six books, at least forty authors, 1,500 years, three languages, three continents—speaks to this with a cohesive message. The clearest articulation is in the four gospels, which is why we will focus this year on Luke.

Not Ashamed of the Gospel

Another reason is found in Romans 1. Paul wrote to Christians living in one of the most carnal, pagan, polytheistic cultures of the day. They were tempted to be ashamed of their message. In fact, early Christians were called atheists because they did not believe in Artemis, Apollo, or Jupiter—only in one God, a God who became a man and died by crucifixion, which the surrounding culture considered utter foolishness. Maybe you, too, living in a pluralistic, pagan, liberally minded culture, are tempted to be ashamed.

But Paul says, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, 'The just shall live by faith'" (Romans 1:16–17).

The Saving and Sanctifying Power of God

This is point number five: the gospel is the saving and sanctifying power of God. The message does not merely speak about God's power or reveal it—by its very nature it is the power of God that saves and transforms individuals and cultures. Two thousand years of church history demonstrate this. I have witnessed it firsthand here: people come in skeptical and broken, dragged by a friend, afraid they might be struck dead at the door, and then the power of the gospel completely transforms their lives, both practically and eternally.

And individual lives transform whole cultures. Why does the foremost atheist of our time say he is a cultural Christian? Because that culture is demonstrably better than the alternatives. Would you rather live in Saudi Arabia? I have been there and watched wives walk five feet behind their husbands in head-to-toe black burkas in 110-degree heat—that is a culture shaped by a worldview. The culture influenced by Christianity is demonstrably better, yet for the last twenty years we Americans have had a hard time saying so, unless we want to fight against truth, including even the truth of gender. That is a losing battle.

Becoming All Things to Win Some

The gospel is the power of God, and it is for everyone—Jews and Greeks, theists and pagans. This is why Paul committed his life to proclaiming it until his martyrdom. In 1 Corinthians 9 he writes, "To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews... to those without the law, as without the law, that I might win those without the law... I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." He switches the word from "win" to "save." Saved from what? From the wrath that is to come—for the very next verse after "I am not ashamed of the gospel" tells us the wrath of God is revealed against all who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

The church's logos, ethos, and pathos problems are not insurmountable, but we must know the logos—the message—and know Christ who is its embodiment. We must allow the gospel to challenge, change, and transform us, so that our character genuinely represents it. If those who belong to Christ are being transformed into His likeness—more joy, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control—then being a jerk to your neighbor is not a good demonstration of the message. We work it out because God is working in us, both to will and to do His good pleasure.

Always Ready to Give a Defense

We must know the message, represent the message, and articulate it in a way that recognizes the real concerns and questions of the person we are speaking to. Peter gives the answer in 1 Peter 3: "But in your hearts revere Christ Jesus as Lord, and always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is within you—and do this with gentleness and respect." That word defense is the Greek apologia, from which we get apologetics.

What Will You Do?

Let me wrap up with a personal word. I came into ministry at nineteen, drawn by men like Christian and Pastor Tony, my youth pastors, because I had seen lives transformed and I wanted to do that. But around 2011 I realized I had a problem: every week people came up after the service saying, "That was your best message yet, better than last week." I was essentially preaching for a grade from Christians. My friend David Guzik's words echoed in my mind—he had told me one of his discoveries pastoring was that a church can become a "sermon appreciation society."

So I made an intentional change to reach people who don't know God. And yes, my message changed. Some people left this church and told me in my office, "You don't teach the Bible anymore, Pastor," because I was intentionally trying to reach those who don't know God—which is exactly what Jesus told me to do. By 2016, watching Peterson reach people without giving them the message they truly need, I realized I knew the logos but had to strengthen my credibility and my ability to answer people's questions. Our culture highly values credentials, so I went and earned a master's degree, then a doctor of ministry, and now a PhD—not because I enjoy them, but so I might reach people who think letters after your name make you credible.

I say this to challenge you. It does not mean you need a degree—I have a specific calling as a mouthpiece for this message. But what do you need to do to be a better ethical demonstration of the gospel to your coworkers, family, and neighbors? What do you need to learn so you can articulate the message in a way that answers their questions? It is probably something. I want to hear Christ say, "Well done, good and faithful servant"—and I want that for you, too. I will do everything in my power to equip you to know the message, but you will be challenged to emulate it, to imitate Christ before this culture.

In the process, this is a great place to invite your skeptical friend—the person you are afraid might ask you a question about the Bible tomorrow—that they might hear the message. Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks a reason for the hope within you, with gentleness and respect.

Closing Prayer

Father God, we do need Your help. We need Your grace, we need the empowering of Your Spirit. Would You fill us with Your grace, fill us with Your Spirit for this moment? There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people within a short distance of this place who are in desperate need of Your grace, Your truth, and Your love—and we are the messengers You have chosen to use. Lord, help us to engage this world in a cultural, contextual, and relevant manner, and to participate with You in the work You have called us to. We ask this in Jesus' name, and all those who agreed said, Amen.