Denison Forum

While history may highlight the big movements and leaders that made an outsized difference, the most important work was often done by those who remain anonymous to everyone but the Lord.

Every day, you and I face a binary choice with eternal consequences: we can seek to be like God’s Son, or we can seek to be our own God. As fallen human beings, if we are not intentionally seeking the former, we are by default choosing the latter.

You may have seen the insurance commercials on television these days with the pitch, “Only pay for what you need.” This is a tempting way to relate to God in that it limits his activity in our lives to what we want him to do in our lives. When we need forgiveness for our sins or direction for our decisions, he’s waiting on the other side of our prayers, or so we think. But if he wants to point out sins we don’t want to stop committing or lead us in directions we don’t want to go, that’s another matter.

Here’s the problem: God knows our needs far better than we do. Limiting his benevolence to our ignorance is unwise for us and grieves our Father.

In God’s eyes, every person is valuable as a bearer of his image (Genesis 1:27), someone for whom Christ chose to die (Romans 5:8). As a result, I should be concerned for those who have VEXAS whether I have the syndrome or not. And I should be troubled about the global consequences of the next pandemic whether I can prevent it or not.

A basic fact of our fallen nature is that we all seek to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5), to be in charge of our lives so we can do as we wish. As a result, we resist authority of any kind that tries to tell us who we are or how we should live.

This has never been more true than today. Our “post-truth” culture assures us we can define truth however we wish, do with our bodies (including those carrying unborn babies) whatever we wish, define gender and marriage as we wish, and end our lives whenever and however we wish.

Ultimately, none of us are so good that we are beyond the need for God’s help or so bad that we are beyond his redemption. Every day brings the chance to be a hero or a villain in God’s story.

Western culture has clearly decided that any and all LGBTQ activity between consensual adults is to be tolerated and even affirmed. If secular media can quote religious leaders in ways that appear to support this agenda, many will do so. If they can construct their reporting in a way that makes the leader’s statement even more supportive of this agenda, some will apparently do this as well. Numerous other outlets have reported on the AP interview; most I have seen contain no reference whatever to the pope’s statement calling homosexuality a “sin.”

This strategy consequently makes it harder for Christians who support biblical morality to do so publicly. If the pope “supports” homosexuality, as the AP headline and 93 percent of its article suggest, who are we to disagree?

In our culture, religion is to be kept separate from public life. It is viewed as a personal hobby, nothing more. As such, it is to be given no more weight or warrant in public life than any other hobby. My purpose today is less to critique secular society for treating our faith like a hobby than it is to warn Christians that we must not follow suit.

Christians are not immune from Anaximander’s self-centric map drawing. Even though we sing, “I once was lost, but now I’m found / Was blind but now I see,” we are not yet home. There is much we do not know that we do not know about our Lord and his purpose for our lives.

However, like lost people who do not know they are lost, we can think that because we are “found,” we know all we need to know. The truth is, like a newborn baby, those who are “born again” (John 3:3) have only begun the journey before them. And when we walk our journey well, our changed lives attract the lost people we know to the One we follow.

As you and I know, the only One who can transform a sinful human heart is Jesus: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Why, then, don’t more people learn from tragedy to turn to him?