Although this picture comes from a generation earlier, it depicts the kind of setting in which my Dad began Christian ministry as a Wickliffe Preacher. Three young men, a caravan plastered with big texts and a drive from village to village and including market towns and occasionally urban centres with missions to teach the children about the Gospel.
Today's children see many more words than these. Why, as I write this they are busy tweeting them to one another, looking at them on endless websites and generally being bombarded by the messengers of the global village.
We smile at the change.
The quality of the media is vastly different but the message carried is vastly inferior. Windows 8 has introduced no new input that improves on THIS IS A FAITHFUL SAYING THAT CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS.
Sure, we can save documents, blogs, digital images, spreadsheets and the like. But is there a new, improved way to save sinners?
One way to look at this in the 21st century is to say that we no longer interpret behaviours as sin. That is to miss the point. Sin is not the human way of looking at human behaviour, it is the revealed divine way. Like the arrested bloke's, "Get yer 'ands off me. I ain't done nuthin' wrong." this self-described innocence needs some higher corroboration. The Bible makes it clear enough that we cannot change the way God looks at our sin. The Gospel declares that God has. He has sent a saving Messiah - Christ Jesus came to save.
Throughout his life my dad lived with people gently observing him as pleasantly quaint and earnestly unnecessary. It is the evangelist's lot. But they were wrong. He was witnessing to the only solution to the only long term problem we humans face.
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