moving from cultural christianity to biblical christianity

We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise. (2 Corinthians 10:12)

The operative question for those of us who are Christ followers is, “how am I doing in my journey of kingdom building?’ And the question for the church is, “how are we doing at helping people in that journey?”

The answer to these questions is seen in what we quantify. Our values are determined by what we measure. If you measure your self worth by your net worth, for instance, then you are attaching your emotions and your identity to your material wealth. If we say that our most important value is “to love all people to Christ and to help them on their journey with God and each other” then we need quantifiers in place that reflect that value. For years, churches have measured success by “buildings budgets and baptisms”. But do these things really tell us how people are moving toward life change?

Christ followers and Christ following churches have to deliberately evaluate their value systems and their measuring systems.

This is important because there is an essential difference between being ruled by self and being in Christ. It is the difference between the kingdom of me and the kingdom of God. The Christian journey is one that moves you from one kingdom to the other. It is what happens as you relinquish all other feelings of worth based on the pride of life, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes (1 John 2:15-17) and gain a new measure that compares self to Christ.

But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. (1 John 2:5-6 NIV)

So how do we do this? How do we put measures in place that reveal how God’s love is being made complete in us? The answer of course is that we major on the essentials and minor on the non-essentials. All of our measures must line up with the timeless teachings of scripture. In other words, we put less emphasis on cultural Christianity and more on genuine biblical Chrstianity.