Ethics and Religious Liberty President Russell Moore addressed northern Illinois church leaders at an October meeting at Hillcrest Baptist Church in Country Club Hills. Moore was the featured speaker at the Friday evening session of the annual All Church Equipping Conference, sponsored by the Chicago Metro Association and the association’s African American Pastors’ Fellowship.
“This conference was the brainchild of Pastor Donald Sharp of Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church, who had a desire for the pastors in the Chicagoland area to come together to equip our members in the various aspects of ministry,” said Adron Robinson, pastor of Hillcrest Baptist and president of IBSA. In addition to Moore’s address, the conference also included a ministers’ roundtable dinner and discussion, and 18 workshops taught by local, state, and national SBC leaders.
Speaking on Friday evening, Moore preached from Luke 4 on the kingdom of God, and how Jesus’s words ought to guide how Christians today interact with the culture.
In a world where more and more people are surprised or shocked or hostile to the gospel, Moore said, the post-Christian culture is actually good for the church. “Can the gospel of Jesus Christ move forward in a world like that?” Moore asked. “Of course it can! That’s the kind of world the gospel of Jesus Christ came into.”
In Luke 4, Moore preached, Jesus reminds believers what their hope is in—the kingdom of God. It’s not what they expected, but it’s here.
“There is a kingdom that smashes to pieces all of the other kingdoms of the world,” Moore said. “But that kingdom is found not in pomp and glory and glitz, but found in Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
The reminder has relevance for us today, he said, because the people of God ought to have a different vision of what matters, and who matters. Where it is our natural bent to defend ourselves against attacks on Christianity, Moore said, Jesus actually spoke very gently to the culture outside the church. It was his followers for whom he reserved his most direct counsel.
And throughout history, the people most hostile to the gospel have made the biggest impact for the gospel, Moore said, referencing the apostle Paul and St. Augustine. Jesus’s teaching in Luke 4 reminds believers now to view every person through the lens of their own sin and subsequent rescue by Christ.
“The gospel doesn’t change the culture in spite of its strangeness,” Moore said, “but because of its strangeness.”