I am reading Christopher J. H. Wright's masterpiece, The Mission of God. This book has radically challenged how I think about missions, evangelism, and most importantly, why God is doing what He does with humanity from the beginning of time on into eternity future. 

Here is the most challenging thought I've encountered: The Bible is not a book that has some missions stuff in it, but it was written because God is on a mission. Missions came first, then the Bible. The Bible is the product of a God with a missions heart instead of missions being the product of a few select texts of Scripture. I'm still working through the ramification of this as I interpret Scripture. What Wright is really calling for is a missional hermeneutic.

In the meantime, I was feasted with this quote that addresses the gravest threat to the entire foundation of apologetics, ethics, social justice, ministry, and worship all in one simple but profound diagnosis: 

Idolatry dethrones God and enthrones creation. Idolatry is the attempt to limit, reduce and control God by refusing his authority, constraining or manipulating his power to act, having him available to serve our interests. At the same time, paradoxically, idolatry exalts things within the created order (whether natural objects in the heavens or on earth, or created spirits, or the products of our own hands or imaginations). Creation is then credited with a potency that belongs only to God; it is sacralized, worshiped and treated as that from which ultimate meaning can be derived. A great reversal happens: God, who should be worshiped, becomes an object to be used; creation, which is for our use and blessing, becomes the object of our worship.

Once this fundamental distinction is blurred, once this reversal takes place, then devastating personal and social consequences follow. Creation, which derives its own meaning from God, cannot give us in itself the ultimate meaning we crave, so idolatry is doomed to disappointment (to put it at its mildest). Worship of the self eventually implodes in narcissism, nihilism or sheer amoral selfishness. If nature itself is treated as divine, then all other distinctions begin to be dissolved. There is no difference between human life and all other forms of life. There is no difference between good and evil since all is ultimately one. So any objective reference point for moral discrimination becomes impossible.

In the light of such confusion the mission of God is ultimately to restore his whole creation to what it was intended to be—God's creation, ruled over by redeemed humanity, giving glory and praise to its Creator. Our mission, in participation with that divine mission, and in anticipation of its final accomplishment, is to work with God in exposing the idols that continue to blur the distinction, and to liberate men and women form the destructive delusions they foster.

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2006), 164-165.