What is Relevant?

As I journeyed through 5 years at UNC Chapel Hill, more times than I can count, I heard and took part in discussions concerning Campus outreach and relevance. "How can we make this event relevant to students at UNC?" "How can we make this appealing to non-believers?" "How can we attract liberally minded students and faculty to the gospel without repelling them at the same time?" As I participated in these conversations I found myself wooed by the hope of lightening the gospel just enough for it to be slightly more palatable to unbelieving hearts.

In our attempts to create a more palatable gospel we substitute truth for foolishness and create a worldly glaze to disguise the harsh reality of our need for a Savior. Brothers and sisters, relevance does not indicate that something is inherently non-offensive. Pauls says quite the opposite in 1 Corinthians 1:23 when he states that "we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."

Glossing over sin, skimming over hell, editing out the gore of the cross, postponing any mention of sacrifice and heartache for the sake of the gospel; all of these eliminations seem to make the gospel more relevant and palatable when presenting it to resistant hearts. The problem with this so called relevance is that when you remove the sickening reality of sin, the awful existence of hell, the necessity and importance of sacrifice and suffering for the sake of Christ and His gospel...then, piece by piece, you disassemble the gospel and weaken it to the point of utmost irrelevance.

Nothing is more relevant than the gospel itself. Than Jesus Christ, fully man/fully God, born of a virgin, who lived a perfect and sinless life, who suffered the crucifying death of murders and thieves, bled and struggled for breath to the point of death on our behalf, carried the weight of a world/a history of sin (murder, hate, racism, genocide, adultery, lies, slander, unforgiveness, bitterness, theft, violence...all of it) and all of the guilt that accompanied it, defeated sin and death through his perfect and sacrificial grace and love, rose from the dead after three days in the tomb so that we (sinners) could take hold of his gracious redemption, and through him have salvation and eternal life in the Glory of God our Creator, Father, Redeemer and Lord.

No, brothers and sisters, nothing is more relevant than the unashamed, unedited, unfiltered truth of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ.

Os Guiness discusses the matter of relevance in his book Prophetic Untimeliness in the following passage:

"Emphasize only the natural fit between the gospel and the spirit of our age and we will have an easy, comfortable gospel that is closer to our age than to the gospel—all answers to human aspirations, for example, and no mention of self-denial and sacrifice. But emphasize the difficult, the obscure, and even the repellent themes of the gospel, certain that they too are relevant even though we don’t know how, and we will remain true to the full gospel. And, surprisingly, we will be relevant not only to our own generation but also to the next, and the next, and the next."

Brothers and sisters, I implore you to cling to the relevance of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Love and rejoice in this glorious truth.

Here is a link to another discussion of relevance (which also references the passage from Os Guiness's book).