BreakPoint

Today launches our annual Wilberforce Weekend. Ten years ago, Chuck Colson gave what would be his final message, at a Wilberforce Weekend event. His message that day was that the world needed the Church to be the Church. His call that day remains the central purpose of the Wilberforce Weekend. This weekend, we will be looking at salvation and redemption from every possible angle we can, in order to better live a life that is redeemed.

Chuck’s life was a wonderful redemption story. Today on Breakpoint, I wanted you to hear Chuck Colson, in his own voice and his own words, tell his own redemption story.

What we cannot do is reduce people down, as a naturalistic worldview tends to do, to only their brains. When we treat them as if they aren’t moral creatures, with the freedom to act, we don’t merely dehumanize them … we fail to adequately help them. The problem with poverty, especially in the first world, is rarely just a lack of money. People are not reducible to their material selves: their brains, their traits, even their circumstances. Real treatment requires moral commitment and a strong network of spiritual and relational support.

Russians, like in so many other European nations, simply aren’t having enough babies. The country’s population is shrinking by more than a hundred thousand people a year, with no clear end in sight. Some parts of the country are simply becoming devoid of people. According to West, about 20,000 Russian villages have been abandoned in recent years, with tens of thousands closely following. This is a factor that could ultimately affect the outcome of the war.

Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves.

A new paper poses one of the strongest challenges yet to the idea that all life shares common chemistry.

Modern culture, the same modern culture so scandalized by football field prayers and so put off by Christian sexual ethics, must reckon with what Christianity has given the world, non-believing author Tim DeRoche argued.

If this leaked draft opinion overturning Roe is indeed reflective of what the final decision will be, then we must do two things. First, we must thank God that this decades-long legal nightmare is over. Our efforts to protect babies and care for vulnerable women will no longer be pre-empted by an evil masquerading as an invented “right.” Second, the Court has done its job. It cannot do our job. State legislatures now have very important jobs to do, but they cannot do the jobs that we are called to: to speak the truth in love and to create a culture of life and care.

When our suspicion about truth-telling becomes suspicion that there isn’t truth, we’ve become postmodernists. Christian writer Samuel James calls this bad habit “negative epistemology.” This is the idea that we don’t need to figure out what’s true, we only need to believe the opposite of whatever our political enemies say.