New book helps us understand and respond to the phenomenon seeping into the Church.
New book helps us understand and respond to the phenomenon seeping into the Church.
While Christianity is personal, it is not private. It makes claims about all of reality, most notably that Christ is Lord of all. Christianity cannot be reduced to some therapeutic or pragmatic formula. It is to be lived, publicly.
Christian singer Olivia Lane Guyton shares her testimony of the moment she went from being an atheist to a Christ follower.
Pastors within America’s mainline churches are considerably more liberal and more likely to vote Democrat than the people in the pews.
A leaked Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) training video instructs staff to confirm that men can get pregnant and encourages them to refer to a pre-born baby as an “embryo” or “fetus,” to a “fetal heartbeat” as “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity,” and to a “mother” as a “veteran” or “person.”
When I saw the story, I then checked some other taxpayer-funded agencies for similar language. I found this statement on the National Institutes of Health website: “The term chestfeeding or bodyfeeding can be used alongside breastfeeding to be more inclusive” for “nonbinary or trans people.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website similarly includes COVID-19-related information for “pregnant and recently pregnant people” (not “women”). The website later refers to “people who are pregnant,” presumably in deference to pregnant biological women who do not identify as women.
The VA training video correctly states, “Language has a profound impact on what people hear and learn.” Therein lies my point today.
Yesterday, we focused on the urgency of sharing God’s word with a nation that is sliding ever further from biblical morality. Today, let’s discuss the necessity of living in ways that are so different from our fallen culture as to be both distinctive and attractive.
The good news of the gospel is still “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). Billy Graham was right: “One of the Bible’s greatest truths is that our lives can be different. No matter what our past has been, Christ stands ready to forgive and cleanse us—and then to make us new.”
This is because “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). This is not our work but God’s transforming miracle: “All this is from God, who through Christ has reconciled us to himself” (v. 18). Now we are “ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (v. 20).
To this end, let’s close by making John White Chadwick’s hymn our prayer: