Do you feel comfortable with your own understanding of the culture around you? Do you assume that you can readily understand the meaning of statements made by other people in the normal course of your day? For much of my life I’ve had a quiet assurance that I understood the culture pretty well. But in the last two years, as I’ve spent more time talking with people outside my Christian circle of acquaintances. I’ve come to see that the culture is much, much farther gone than I had thought.

One event that helped to congeal this keener understanding was last summer’s presbytery camp near Laurelville, Pa. Andy McCracken, pastor of the Elkhart, Ind., RP Church, spoke on the theme of being “missionaries” to 21st Century America. His mes­sages were very well received. because they struck a deep chord. The world around us is significantly postmodern, looking at all morality as relative, and we need to be fervent workers if we expect to communicate to them.

No teacher would go into a Sunday school class of three-year-­olds and explain the Bible in the same way he would in addressing a class of seminarians. The eternal, unchanging Word is the same. but he would know his audience well enough to communicate to them in a way they could understand.

The importance of this principle was illustrated vividly by a videotape Pastor McCracken shared. He and a team of youth had visited a university neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where obviously most of the people on the street were young people. The team asked people questions about right and wrong. and about their founda­tion for determining right and wrong. The answers were mind boggling. Most of the people not only gave morally relativistic answers, they seem unfazed as they obviously contradicted them­selves. At least two of the people, when asked if they were sure there were no moral absolutes, answered, “absolutely sure!”

A gospel tract I’ve found effective in speaking with people “on the street” is by Dr. D. James Kennedy, a PCA pastor in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. The tract begins with an illustration about a professor who said confidently that we can know nothing for certain. Asked by a student if he was sure of that proposition, he answered. “I’m certain!” After finishing that presbytery confer­ence, it dawned on me that the reason the tract resonates with people is that it addresses the foundations of their own moral relativism.

The Scriptures teach that “The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). When I read that verse, I tend to want to highlight the word save. But the context demands that we also highlight the word seek. Seeking requires action, requires the fervent exercise of our mind and body, and means the sacrifice of our time and energy toward the goal. Jesus came to seek.

We can do no less. Pastor McCracken made it clear that no accommodation with the world is called for. We have what they need, nor vice-versa. The Reformed Presbyterian Church, being very careful to hold fervently to the eternal truth of God’s Word and to communicate it accurately, is in a particularly apt place to be of tremendous service to a world of people lost in relativism—including your neighbor, your hairstylist, your mechanic, and so on.