Faithful Christian Living Takes Courage


What does faithful Christian living require today?

Faithfulness takes courage in a postmodern age.

  • While it costs nothing to call oneself a Protestant, living by historic Protestant truths—
  • Scripture’s authority, Christ’s centrality, and the gospel’s objective claims—
  • requires real courage in today’s culture.

God is transcendent, not a projection of the self.

  • A key spiritual corrective is that modern culture has “privatized” God and made truth a matter of personal preference. 
  • The biblical picture, by contrast, presents God as standing outside human experience—
  • the holy, sovereign Creator who summons sinners to repentance and belief, regardless of their self-image.
Truth is given, not constructed.
  • A “truthless spirituality” is one in which the self becomes the sole arbiter of truth. 
  • The spiritual lesson is that Christian faith rests on revealed truth (especially Scripture), 
  • not on what feels relevant or consumer-friendly.
The church is God’s community, not a business or brand.
  •  “Classical evangelicals” in contrast to “marketers” and “emergents,”: 
  • Much of contemporary evangelicalism has drifted toward sola cultura (culture alone) rather than sola Scriptura. 
  • The spiritual implication: 
  • the church must be a truth-loving community under God’s Word,
  • not a product to be sold or an experiment in relevance.
Doctrinal fidelity and the local church matter.
  • The weaknesses of contemporary evangelicalism are a shrinking doctrine and a vanishing church and stronger drifts in the other groups. 
  • The takeaway: robust doctrine and committed participation in a local church are spiritually vital, not optional extras.
Hope lies in returning to historic Protestant convictions.
  • Rather than capitulating to market-driven or emergent models, 
  • I am called to “the courage to be faithful to what Christianity in its biblical forms has always stood for across the ages.” 
  • This is the key to the church’s future.
My Notes from David Wells' book The Courage to be Protestant


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