Tag: Culture

Saturday Strands

On By BrianIn Saturday Strands

Here are some loose strands for our growth:

Living From Approval, Not For Approval – Dave Harvey
Let me ask you a question: What do you think God feels about you right now? Irritation over your flaws — that tendency towards gluttony, or your inconsistency to getting up each morning to pray? Does God want to withdraw due to our failures — the impatient word with a wife or child; the angry outburst provoked by someone cutting you off on the freeway? Does he look down with a cosmic frown of disapproval on you, so prone to wander and full of weakness?

Love (All) Your Neighbors: A Surprising Test of True Faith – Scott Hubbard (DG)
So, if you want to see someone’s spiritual sincerity more clearly, don’t mainly watch him in church. Watch him with his children. Watch him at work. Watch him in traffic. Watch him when offended. For you will know him by his neighbor-love.

Can We Forgive When the Offender Doesn’t Repent? – Mike Wittmer (TGC)
Forgiveness means to pardon an offender by paying/absorbing his moral debt. When an offender repents, it’s clear we should both pay and pardon. We absorb the moral cost of being sinned against and assure the offender of our forgiveness. When the offender doesn’t repent for whatever reason—perhaps he’s hard-hearted or has died—we must separate the payment from the pardon. We don’t pardon him (and gloss over his offenses), because he hasn’t repented, yet we still must absorb the moral cost.

The Desecration of Man – Carl Trueman (First Things)
Contra Nietzsche, God is not dead. But we moderns have used Nietzsche’s claim as an excuse for desecrating man, for turning ourselves and others into insignificant, sexualized, animate lumps of meat. Only a reclamation, and a proclamation, of the living God in the vital worship of the Church will consecrate man and bring him back from the brink of a nihilistic, dehumanized abyss.

Flashback: Gentle Discipline
Paul is weary of Corinthians, who are like wayward children, and yet he wants to treat them with gentleness. He doesn’t want to come with a rod, but with gentle love. Notice he doesn’t demand, command, or threaten. But clothed with the gentleness of Christ, he entreats, he urges, he beseechs, he appeals to them. His discipline is gentle.

Hope you have a great Lord’s Day worshiping God with your local church!

Saturday Strands

On By BrianIn Saturday Strands

Loose strands for our growth:

God Beckons Through Beauty: Where Our Deepest Longings Lead – Jon Bloom (DG)
We long to be in the place where — or more accurately, with the Person from whom — all the beauty, all the glory, comes from….

How to Reach Our Neighbors in a Post-Christian Culture? – Josh Butler (TGC)
For our neighbors to encounter Jesus and trust in him for salvation, the church must embody the reality of his kingdom in practical ways that bear witness to the good news of his reign. What would this look like in today’s post-Christian culture, where some have never heard Jesus’s gospel and most simply consider it irrelevant to modern life? Three themes are significant….

The Secret Of Contentment – Seth Lewis
Think about it: If you tie your contentment to anything in this world, then it will always be insecure. Everything we have and experience here on earth, no matter how wonderful, is temporary and fragile.

Understanding the Metamodern Mood – Brett McCracken (TGC)
Why, when we look at contemporary pop culture—movies, music, TV, campus protests, meme culture, and TikTok (especially TikTok)—does the word “incoherence” often come to mind? Why does so much today feel random, disconnected, contradictory, aimless, and altogether void of coherent logic and purpose?

Flashback: Gentle Words
Gentle words can diffuse an angry conflict and bring healing and life to the hurting. Harsh words can stir up conflict and break the spirit of the bruised and battered. God calls us to turn from harsh words and grow in gentleness.

Current Collection

On By BrianIn Current Collection

Here are some helpful posts on how Christians should interact with our culture:

4 Principles for Political Witness in our American Babylon – Bruce Ashford (TGC)

Are Christians Arrogant? Rethinking the Definition of Humility – Michael Kruger

Pessimistic About the Future? You Need “Gospel Bearings” – Trevin Wax

The Triumph of Personal Perception

On By BrianIn Idolatry

The Bible teaches that God created the world.  As the Creator, God defines what is real.  God alone determines reality.

But of course our culture has rejected God as Creator, and so rejects his claim to define what is real.  And so now we will define reality based on our own personal perceptions.  We will become mini-gods and define reality as we see fit.  Objective created reality doesn’t matter.  All that matters is what I perceive to be real.

And so as a recent video shows us, a short white man can think he is a tall Chinese woman, and we will accept him as such because his personal perception defines his reality regardless of what is really real.  If this same adult claims to be a seven-year-old, we will affirm him in his personal perception of himself, and even allow him to attend first grade. Personal perception determines reality – even if we must throw out mathematics (the man’s height), biology (the man’s gender), and history (the man’s ancestry).

If I think I am a penguin, then I am, and I should be able to swim with the penguins at the zoo.  Because personal perception determines reality.  That is the teaching of our culture.

And so our president’s recent directive, that every public school must allow their students to define their gender regardless of their biological sex, should not surprise us.  That each school must allow boys claiming to be girls to shower in the girls’ locker room should not surprise us.  That so many people are willing to go along with this should not surprise us.  This is merely one symptom of this false way of thinking – that my personal perception defines reality.

I recently attended one of my daughter’s soccer games, and the school hosting the game provided programs with the names and numbers of all the players.  And at the bottom of the program was this little gem: “If you believe it, you can do it.”  In other words, your perception determines reality.  So if I believe I can fly, I can jump off a cliff and fly away.  But will my personal perception really determine my reality?

The fact is that the hard rocks of real reality lie at bottom of the cliff.  Reality often won’t bend to my perception.  And this attempt to redefine reality based on our own perceptions will leave many bloody and hurting at the bottom of the cliff.  And as people grow weary of the carnage and wreckage that their own perceptions of reality will ultimately bring, the church needs to be ready to lovingly point them back to Jesus. We need to be ready to point them to the real Savior who died on a real cross to pay for their real sin of trying to become gods who determine reality for themselves.

God alone defines reality.  Instead of trying to bend reality to our own perceptions, we must bend our perceptions to reality as God has defined it, reality as God has created it, reality as it really is.

 

Current

On By BrianIn Current Collection

Here are some helpful posts to help us continue to think through the transgender issue – and more importantly to help us think through how our culture thinks and what it believes.

Watch: College Kids Can’t Explain Why a Short White Man Isn’t a Tall Asian Woman – David French (National Review)

Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme – Paul McHugh (Public Discourse)

7 Troubling Questions About Transgender Theories – Trevin Wax

Women’s Sanitary Bins & Bathroom Theology – Peter Jones (truthxchange)