Friends, we live in a world and in a part of that world that is increasingly hostile to Christianity. We need to understand that as we make this decision to follow Jesus.

The recent NEXT conference in Baltimore was outstanding. I had the privilege to sit in the front row for the whole thing and I benefitted big time from the worship and the excellent teaching.

For the next couple of weeks I want to return to my notes from those teaching sessions to stress a few points that I think are especially important. Of course I cannot cover every important detail from each session—you had to be there! But I do want to highlight three of the messages.

The first is Mark Dever’s message titled “The Doctrine of Christ’s Work Accomplished and Applied.” In it, Mark opened by asking “What’s new about the new atheism?” He began his message with a quote from atheist Christopher Hitchens:

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”

That is Christopher Hitchens from a book he wrote recently called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (McClelland & Stewart, 2007; page 56)….From Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion to Sam Harris’s book The Letters to a Christian Nation, the bookstores these days are just full of irreligion. I saw one even faintly religious irreligious book, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality.

Are books like these selling? Well, several days this week, I typed “God” at Amazon.com. What is the first thing that pops up? Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. That is like typing “Maryland” into Google and getting “Duke.”

People call this the New Atheism. But they only call it the New Atheism because they want to sell books, newspapers, and magazines. There is nothing new about this.

Two hundred years ago Thomas Paine was making these same assaults on Christianity: “Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death and religious wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called revealed religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man?” (The Age of Reason).

So, Christian, you and I know that the message we see in the Bible is universally true, but we also know that it is not universally accepted. And it never has been. Don’t be surprised by this new wave of criticisms. I want you to understand. There is nothing new in these new criticisms. These new criticisms are as old as Christianity itself.

This hostility towards Christianity is true today, and increasingly so in locations not previously as hostile to the gospel, as evidenced by Mark’s recent experience.

I was stopped this past February in Heathrow airport when I was trying to go over to London to speak. I had been invited to preach there by Church of England Church, an established church in the UK in the middle of London. When I got to Heathrow, new laws had been passed. They wouldn’t let me in. I waited 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, while they asked me more and more questions. What exactly would I be saying? Finally they let me in, but with cautions…

Friends, I wasn’t talking about anything politically charged in one sense. I had no plans to make any remarks on sexuality or homosexuality. I was just preaching expositionally. But I was a Christian preacher.

This is in the United Kingdom, a place that is not known for religious oppression.

Friends, we live in a world and in a part of that world that is increasingly hostile to Christianity. We need to understand that as we make this decision to follow Jesus.

In light of this introduction, Mark taught us about the Savior and about the Christian life from 1 Peter 2:21–25.

To download and listen to this message—or any of the conference messages—visit thisisnext.org.

C. J. Mahaney is the President of Sovereign Grace Ministries. This article is taken from his blog, view from the cheap seats & other stuff and is used with his permission. Source: http://www.sovereigngraceministries.org/Blog/

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]