Cool

At Scriptorium, Matt Jenson on "The Heresy of Cool."

Coolness is heretical. Or at least the pursuit of it is. This is because an inverse relationship exists between our attempts at being cool and our faith in Jesus Christ. The one struts, confident in his ability to do and say all the right things. The other limps, just as confident in his ineptitude, his missed cues and bad timing. ....

... ‘cool’ is shorthand for ‘liked’. Most of us work ourselves into exhaustion trying to be this kind of cool. It’s an ‘if only’ issue. ‘If only they like me, everything will be okay.’ And there’s the heresy. We continually face a choice: will we seek to establish ourselves by being cool, or we trust that God has established us in Christ? It really is that simple. In John 12, we learn that there are a group of synagogue leaders who were believing Jesus, but they stayed quiet, as they loved the approval of people rather than that of God. Again, not a question of degrees. It’s an either-or. In Christ, God has revealed his death-defying love for sinners. When I prefer to be cool, I nonchalantly let him know that I’d prefer the love of a fickle mass of opinion jockeys instead. [read it all]

The Heresy of Cool | Scriptorium Daily