Redundant Innovation

The wise teacher Solomon write in Ecclesiastes, "There is no new thing under the sun." This is true. Yet, so many young people my age, younger, and older are striving to make a name for themselves by being "innovative for Jesus" so to speak. Why is it that we are so naive to believe that if the wisest man to ever live said that there is nothing to be done that is not going to be a repeat of something else already done we can still find some kind of "new thing" to discuss that will bring the fame. 

The truth is there is no new thing under the sun. So our fight to be innovative should not be to find new things to say, but rather new innovative ways to say them. Therefore, the principles never change, but the methods in which we portray and communicate these principles should be ever evolving with our culture. 

With a culture as fast-paced as ours, a person can easily fall prey to doing the old way because the old way works and neglecting the fact that the old way works for the  old crowd but the old crowd is gone. We must conserve the timeless message of Jesus, on the cross, in our place, for our sins. We must contend for the ancient text. We must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience and proclaim it from the rooftops. Yet, we must never let our message die with our methods. Methods grow old. The message of the gospel never grows old. It is always relevant. Always cutting edge.

In an attempt to stay innovative and create ingenuity, many young men and women have strayed from faithful, foundational truth and began to compromise the message for the sake of contextualization. Rather than standing behind the text and proclaiming it boldly, they have succumbed to culture and appeased the desires of our guilty consciences by either avoiding the cold, hard truth of the gospel all together, or simply denying basic tenants of the truth in the name of tolerance, acceptance, and love. Blatantly denying the gravity and severity of sin and God's hatred towards it and sometimes even meriting that sin and condoning it as acceptable all under the excuse of not wanting to be judgmental or the idea of relative truth.

The harsh reality is that we are slowly but surely abandoning orthodoxy and sound teaching. The fact that doctrine and theology are like curse words to many young Christians today scares me. Why have we become so indignant towards these things. When did we become so arrogant to believe that we have the answers and it just so happens that we are the first to ever know the right ones. As if God was upset with the last 2,000 years and he has just recently become pleased with our righteousness. So much so, that he has given us personal revelation beyond that of scripture. Or we simply use the scripture as a means to get our point across, while never allowing scripture to get its point across to us.

We must realize that there truly is no new thing under the sun. We must preach and proclaim the old truths. The ancient truths. The truths that have withstood time. The gospel must be preached. The more we realize that this message was not given to us to revise and rewrite, but rather to simply deliver, the easier it will be to flee from the temptation to become redundant although we feel innovative.