“I said at the outset that the Apostle Paul almost certainly faced a culture as wayward and difficult as our own.  That fact should surely give heart to any Christian weeping over the secular city of today.

Paul faced, first of all, a new and largely unformed church, riven with disputes between the Judaizers, who wished to impose old Hebraic rules, and the Hellenizers, whose message was more universal and whose understanding of human freedom was certainly more profound.  Paul faced a world with no agreed-upon scriptural canon to rely upon or even to argue about.  He confronted a world which, like ours, worshiped many gods – but one, moreover, in which monotheism, the powerful idea of One True God, had nothing of the reach and power it has attained today.  Paul faced conditions of moral and sexual libertinism at least as troubling as those of today – and they stared at him not just from within the general culture, but from within the church at Corinth.

If it is possible for Christians to follow Jesus, then surely we can follow Paul. And if Paul could succeed in setting in motion the transformation of a culture, then surely we face an exciting project, and one with at least some possibility of progress and success.”

James Montgomery Boice & Benjamin E. Sasse, Editors, “Here We Stand!: A Call From Confessing Evangelicals For A Modern Reformation.” (New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 1996), 56.