By Bob Paulson, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Jesus warned us about this. “You will be hated by all for my name’s sake,” He said in Matthew 10:22. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). And “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26).
No one wants to be hated, but the Bible is clear that it will happen when we seek to follow Christ. How should we respond to that reality?
According to Chelsen Vicari, many evangelicals—especially those of the so-called Millennial generation, born between 1982 and 2004—are responding in a dangerous and misguided way.
“They tend to be picking and choosing which Scripture verses that they want to abide by and which ones they don’t,” says Vicari, who serves as the evangelical program director for the Institute on Religion and Democracy. “I call it cafeteria-style Christianity.”
And so, even as they claim to follow Jesus Christ, they ignore or explicitly reject biblical teachings on homosexuality, fornication, marriage, abortion and salvation through Christ alone.
Why? Vicari says it stems from wanting to be accepted: “It’s our broken human nature that wants to appease the world.”