Eric Bryant recently wrote Not Like Me and Ed Stetzer contributed the insights below. Learning humility before the world and engaging unbelievers as people in relationship and not objects to be won is our work.
The past few decades have seen American Christians going in two different directions. One group in the church regularly pits scorched-earth, "come out and be separate" teaching against another group proposing the "love your neighbor as yourself" command of Jesus as paramount. Some what to save America, while others want to save Americans. Many believers have been taught that we should shun nonbelievers, since any friendship with them might cause us to stumble and fall into sin ourselves. The response is to construct a protective boundary that keeps us at a safe distance from those "living in sin." It results in a subculture of churched people who are the equivalent of evangelical Amish.
While it is important for Christians to have and proclaim the moral standards as we have received them in God's Word, our challenge is to avoid arrogance. Becoming prideful of our standards can have the inadvertent side-effect of us thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think.
via edstetzer.com
