(upbeat music) We're back with guest Trip Lee. Trip, in your new book Rise, you write this, quote, "I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorizing "doomsday prophet with canned food "stacked ceiling high in my basement. "I assure you I only keep enough canned food "in the house for the week ahead of me.

"But we do need to think about what it means "to be faithful to Christ in a culture "where our presence is less and less appreciated." End quote. Yes, we do need to think about this and we all wanna be liked and accepted, but faithfulness to Christ means we won't be liked by the world ultimately.

So how do we live in the world seeking to influence the world positively, but without living for the approval of the world? How do you personally find balance in this? Yeah, that is tricky. And something I had to think a lot about even while writing this book Rise because I'm writing to a generation that's growing up with that really decrease in appreciation for serious Christians.

And I think scripture really gives us lots of ways to kind of think about this and navigate this because it's not like after Jesus and the apostles and the early church, everybody always loved Christians and was excited for them to be around. And then just recently, people have started not to like them.

Peter writes to young Christians in 1 Peter, he says, "Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you as evil doers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation." You know, Peter's really clear, hey, live such good lives among them that they'll see your good deeds and glorify God.

He's saying, they are gonna speak against you as evil doers, that will happen, but you should live such a good life. Even when they try to do that, they'll look into your life and they'll see so many good deeds that it's gonna lead to glory for God himself. And I think that's what we're really seeking to do is to live these really faithful lives in public that show the goodness of God.

And so it's not as if while living in the world, we just say, hey, we're gonna do what we do. We don't care what anybody thinks about anything. No, no, no. We do absolutely care about the way we live our lives because it does say something very, very clearly about the God that we serve.

But when people still don't even like us, even though we're trying to do what Peter's calling us to here, there are a few things I talk about in the book that I think we should do. And one of them is we should stop being so surprised. We should stop getting shocked when people are annoyed that we're serious about Jesus, because it's not like Jesus said, hey, follow me, everyone will love you for.

Jesus says, others will hate you for my name's sake. So we should stop being so surprised. And we have to fall out of love with being cool and being liked by everybody. Because at the end of the day, it's not gonna be cool to really pursue Jesus with everything you have.

And so we have to be okay with the fact that we won't be the ones that the culture looks to as the coolest, or even in our day and age, the nicest. They're gonna really speak against a lot of the things that we do. But we also have to be compassionate and not combative, because the temptation is gonna be, they're fighting me, let me fight back.

Or we have some Christians who the only way they can think of to really fight for the glory of Jesus is to yell at people for everything they do that they don't personally like or that they don't see in scripture. And instead, we wanna be very compassionate. It doesn't mean we don't say hard things to people, but we wanna do it in a very loving and gentle way.

So the gospel itself is already offensive enough. We don't need to add offense to it by being jerks about everything. We don't need to add offense to it by being very condemning and self-righteous. We don't need to add offense to it by being incapable of actually loving and being in relationship with people.

We really wanna show people the compassion of Jesus, even as we say very hard things. I've seen it, it's easy to say hard things to people when they can tell that you care about 'em and love 'em, when they don't feel like your project. And when there's a track record that you have with somebody of genuinely loving them and caring for them and taking interest in their life and serving them, when you say a hard thing, it may still be hard, but it fits into a different context.

They can't just say, well, it's just 'cause this person is hateful. They say, well, nah, it is something much deeper than that. And we have to stand firm. People are really gonna wanna kinda push us off what we stand on. They are gonna try to evangelize us and proselytize and push us off of faith in Jesus, but we are gonna really have to stand firm.

And that's only gonna happen when we have a very deep faith in the gospel. And we can't be afraid to tell people very clearly about Jesus. We can't, with our desire for approval, decide that the gospel's offensive, therefore I won't share it. That's the thing that makes us distinct.

That's the incredible message that we have for everybody. And we wanna share it freely and pray that the Lord will give us grace. It'll be hard, but I am very curious to see the way that it impacts our evangelism and the way that it impacts this next generation. - Outstanding, thank you, Trip.

Jesus never said, "Follow me, "and people will love you for it." That's a brilliant line, very true. Thank you, Trip Lee. I was earlier quoting from the new book titled "Rise" from Trip Lee, and you can find it in the new album by the same title at amazon.com. Well, what's the key to being insecure for the rest of your life?

Trip Lee will explain how tomorrow. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. (whooshing) (whooshing)