In Revelation 5:9 we’re told that by his blood, Jesus “ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” But do our churches reflect this amazing truth, or does Sunday morning continue to be the most racially segregated hour of the week? On this program, Michael Horton talks with Lance Lewis and Adriel Sanchez about multi-ethnic church planting and pastoring, seeing it not as a special kind of outreach, but rather as the fulfillment of the Great Commission.
SHOW QUOTE
“We have this group narcissism where we just get together with our other narcissists and we begin to live comfortably with our sin. What the Scriptures are clearly telling us is you can’t live with sin. We can’t live with the comfortable narcissism that says we’re just going to go on disregarding the Great Commission. Multiethnic evangelism and missions in church planting is not a deal we can take or leave. It is the Great Commission.
“In Ephesians 2 Paul says, ‘Remember, you Gentiles were once strangers to the commonwealth of Israel but have been now brought near by the blood of Christ into one new man with Christ.’”
Michael Horton
TERM TO LEARN
“Sin as Condition”
Sin is first of all a condition that is simultaneously judicial and moral, legal and relational. Accordingly, we sin because we are sinners rather than vice versa. Standing before God as transgressors in Adam, we exhibit our guilt and corruption in actual thoughts and actions.
Furthermore, we are both victims and perpetrators. There is no human being since the fall who is only victim; yet it is also true that every sinner is also sinned against. A particular act of sin may be (or include) the fault of someone else, but the sinful condition and the web of sinful actions and relationships that flow from it implicate us as well. It is true that we do not simply choose our vices, but are conditioned by the sinful structures to which our particular socio-cultural or familial contexts tend. Yet it is also true that we yield ourselves to these vices and are responsible for our own actions.
(Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way, pp. 427–28)
