Engage or Ignore

I have been spending some time reading Acts 17 and 1 Corinthians 9 and I feel like I am being stretched and inspired so much in the area of marketplace ministry. Someone shared a quote with me from John Piper a couple of weeks ago that has really stuck with me and caused me to really search God's Word on the matter of engaging culture with the TRUTH: "Don't pursue culture and find truth to interject, rather, find truth and then find culture to interject into the truth." Over the past couple of weeks I have had some time to really meditate on the 2 passages from Acts and 1 Corinthians and the more I think and pray on this, I feel such a tug on my heart to do something...go out to the edge and ledge, think outside of the box.

The reality of it all is that we have culture and it will exist until the day Jesus returns, now what we do with that is up to us...we could choose to ignore it, which by the way doesn't make it go away, we could choose to fight it (definitely an uphill battle) or we could choose to study it and leverage it to make the name of Jesus famous. Missionaries spend a great deal of time studying the culture of a foreign country before they begin work there,why is it we call that culture exploration STUDYING and call it COMPROMISE here on our turf if the church steps out and does a "secular" song or does something ATYPICAL??? God did not send Jesus into this world to condemn the world and He most certainly did not call us to condemn non-christians for acting like non-christians. This topic is so overwhelming in thought but is something I feel that God's Word is so clear...my prayer is that God would open our eyes, minds, and hearts to see the culture around us and do all we can to leverage it so that people far from God may come to know Jesus!