This is so urgent. If you think your husband, your wife, your child, yes, even your parent, your Christian companion, your colleague, your friend is wandering away, ‘Exhort one another daily’. Don’t do it in a bossy way, but in a pleading, loving, sympathetic way. Sin lies to us and tells us, ‘Ah but this is different; your circumstances are unreasonable; you have every right to be bitter. You have every right to resent your treatment or your situation.’ No, it is a lie. Sin lies in all kinds of ways to Christians. As we hear the word of God taught sin says to us, ‘Do not listen to this preacher; God doesn't mean us to be entirely spiritual. You can have your worldly pleasures too. It is an extreme position to say that the world is a desert place and we are to come out of it and live for God. That is not necessary: you can listen to the world’s music; you can have its delights; you can watch all it shows; you can filter out all the smut. God doesn't mind. We can have both the world and the church. We can have our life in the world, and we can still have a kind of insurance policy for heaven and love God.’ But no, you cannot have both of these. If you try it, your heart will be hardened, and all those moments you spend in worldly pursuits will have taken away the sensitivity and the feeling of your spiritual nature, and your heart your soul is hardened.
Should Christians try to reconstruct society and rebuild it with Christian values? There is something which is very worrying today. It is an old heresy which is coming back on a major scale into Bible believing circles. It goes by various names, one of which is Restoration, or Restorationism. It teaches that Christ's purpose and his work is to remake society through his people before the coming of the end. Christ came, they're telling us, in order to restore the world, so the task of Christian people is to restore the world and God will help them. We are not simply to spread the word and to do good works as private Christian individuals and churches as opportunity arises, but we are to reform the world and to restore it. We’re to get into culture, immerse ourselves in it, improve it, sanctify it, reshape it, beautify it, because the purpose of Christ’s coming was not just to die on Calvary for sinners, but to restore the world; he came to restore it even before the final consummation of all things. Now that is a heresy; that is wrong. There is an enormous difference between Christian good works, and the theory of Christ restoring society and the world. Christians of course believe in good works, but our primary task is to preach the gospel and to see people brought into the kingdom of Christ. As Christian people we are to be concerned with good works and there are altogether, something like fifteen very powerful exhortations to churches and Christian individuals in the New Testament to do good works. What's the difference between this and the idea that we are here to also restore society and work towards the reconstruction of the world? When Christ came into the world he did many good works, and he did them for a number of reasons. When he healed the sick, those healings were visual aids which help us to see how he would heal the soul. Just as he healed various sicknesses in the body, so he had the power to heal the soul and to raise the soul from the dead and give spiritual sight to the spiritually blind. But they were also acts of pure compassion which demonstrated his goodness. Was he reconstructing the society of his time? No, he was not! He was simply doing good, and showing compassion to needy people. Because he was holy and good and the embodiment of infinite kindness, he helped everybody around him, and it is the same with us. As you look through the New Testament, where do you see one single command or scheme or effort to improve society? The apostle Paul did nothing, politically or socially, to improve any of the nations in which he evangelised. He preached the gospel. He brought sinners to the Saviour and they became in each country a minority of despised people very often. Why do the members of an active church engage every week in rounding up youngsters in their community? Why do they teach them, but also help them giving them recreational things to do, useful positive things also. Well, there are two reasons. The great reason is that young people should know the truth and the gospel and be persuaded, through the work of the Spirit, to know Christ and to walk with him. But then there's another reason – this is a massive good work. Young people are taught moral values and good behaviour and shown how they can enjoy things and without spitting and cursing and fighting and taking drugs and joining gangs. Young people are delivered from what the world would do to them. This is a wonderful positive social operation in itself. But we are not trying to reform society socially. We reject the idea that Christ’s purpose is with his people to rebuild and restore society.