Get Your Pretense On!

Chapter 3: ”There’s Plenty Good Room” • 59

than being a member of the Democratic Party makes you a liberal wing nut.

Being in a right relationship with God and His people is what matters. Scripture teaches us that devoting your life to loving God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul is what honors Him. Being part of a local church may facilitate that. Or it might not. 11 I believe we cannot get our pretense on truly without a revival of our understanding of the centrality of the church in God’s kingdom work, and the implications of that in our every day lives. Only if we understand and embrace the centrality of the church in God’s sovereign purpose can we truly live out our true role in his great Story of the Kingdom of God today. Even a cursory reading of the Bible reveals God’s determination to save a people for himself out of the fallen human race. The voluntary rebellion of Adam and Eve, the first human pair, did not result in God’s final rejection of humanity. Rather, through God’s promise to them in the Garden of Eden, the Lord assured them he would send a glorious conqueror who would crush the skull (up-end the reign and dominion) of the serpent who caused our first parents to fall. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3.15). This divine promise to bring into the world that “offspring of the woman” in many ways constitutes the center of God’s cosmic drama, and the story of salvation narrated so carefully in the pages of Scripture. From the garden to Noah to the Tower of The Church Is Central in God’s Sovereign Purpose to Redeem His Creation