This Sunday we're excited to be diving into a verse by verse study of Paul's letter to Titus entiled "Courage and Conviction in an Age of Compromise". G.K. Chesterton commented on the present state of thinking in our age with prophet-like clarity,
"What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1957], pp. 31-32)
It seems that the only sin left to commit in our world today is being sure about what you believe. The relativistic worldview that surrounds us has seeped into the evangelical church such that speaking with authority and demonstrating biblical humility are presently understood to be at odds with one another. Anyone who claims to believe something strongly about doctrine or morality is immediately considered to be arrogant, intolerant, closed-minded and even un-Christian. But this is not the mentality of the New Testament church. They model for us brokenness and boldness, humility and authority.
The apostle said he built his entire life on “the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness” (Titus 1:1). The New Testament believers had a faith that was based on knowing objective truth and that resulted in radical life-transformation (godliness). In this series we’re going be humbly seeking God for the courage needed to live with conviction in an age of compromise.