Our time needs witnessing churches that fulfill their calling as Christ's lampstands in this dark and sin-filled world. Faithful churches serve as light to the world pointing everyone to direct their gaze upon the one and only Light of the world.
We also need true disciples of Jesus Christ who take His lordship in every aspect of life seriously. Today we need Christians who take their servanthood sincerely living as salt of the earth and light of the world in this deteriorating sinful world.
There are many 'lords' in the world but few are true servants who are committed to Christ-like humility and service. God is seeking for believers who are willing and ready to deny themselves and to take up their crosses daily for the sake of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.
The late R. C. Sproul Sr. once wrote, "The times in which we live are times that are exceedingly challenging to the church of Jesus Christ. The great tragedy of the church in the post-1960s revolution is that the face of the church has changed along with the face of the secular culture.”
This is sad. When the church tries to imitate the world or conform to the world to become relevant or acceptable to the world, it has ceased to be the church in the world. “In a fatal pursuit of relevance,” observed Sproul, “the church has often become merely an echo of the secular culture in which it lives, having a desperate desire to be ‘with it’ and acceptable to the contemporary world. The church itself has adopted the very relativism it seeks to overcome.”
If the church of Jesus Christ will not self-consciously fulfill and pursue its role and calling as ‘the salt of the earth and light of the world’ we can expect a very worldly and ‘good-for-nothing’ body of professing believers who may have an appearance of being godly but in reality spiritually powerless.
Sproul continued, “What is demanded by times such as ours is a church that addresses the temporal while at the same time remaining tethered to the eternal — a church that speaks, comforts, and heals all things mortal and secular without itself abandoning the eternal and the holy. The church must always face the question of whether its commitment is to sanctity or profanity.
"We need churches filled with Christians who are not enslaved by the culture, churches that seek more than anything to please God and His only begotten Son, rather than to attract the applause of dying men and women.”
Sproul then asks, “Where is that church?” He immediately gives his own answer saying, “That is the church Christ established. That is the church whose mission is to minister redemption to a dying world, and that is the church we are called to be. God help us and our culture if our ears become deaf to that call" (From his ‘Right Now Counts Forever’ article "The Times, They are Changing," Tabletalk, April 2010).
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