I spoke with a wise woman about why she’s still using the spiritual language that so many people think is “churchy” “outdated” “confusing” and too “Christian.”
She’s talking about words like saved, lost, salvation, sanctification, justification, eternal life, sin, repentance, the flesh, or any other word you see in scripture that helps explain the gospel and the Christian life. It’s not Christian jargon to her.
She exclaims, “Those words were given to us by God! It is Kingdom Language!”
It is indeed a foreign language these days, a tongue from a distant kingdom that’s slowly slipping away. But my friend argues that we should keep using these words and revive them, not change them or use different and more relevant words.
She’s right. We have kingdom language given to us by the King we serve. So it’s not only OK to speak the language, but we might expect outsiders to need the translation. That’s normal, too. But we don’t stop speaking simply because the words sound strange in an increasingly biblically illiterate culture.