faith

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.

It’s not exactly news, but there are fewer people attending church now than before the pandemic. What we’re finding out now is just how big of a drop it was. According to a survey by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, the percentage of people ages 39 to 57 who attended a worship service during the week, either in person or online, fell to 28% in 2023. That is down from 41% in 2020.

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:

For over 30 years, my friend Greg Koukl has taught Christians how to engage with people across worldview lines by asking questions. His first book Tactics has equipped thousands of Christians to communicate with wisdom and passion. This month, Koukl is releasing a follow-up to that book, entitled Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity’s Toughest Challenges.

Yesterday we focused on the biblical priority of spiritual discernment and the urgency of “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Today, let’s step further in this direction by considering Jesus’ maxim: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

There are three ways we know everything we know (called “channels of epistemology” by philosophers): the rational, the practical, and the intuitive. You do math rationally, you start your car practically (unless you’re an automotive engineer, in which case you do so rationally), and you like someone intuitively. All three apply to our conversation today.

John Schneider of the film The Dukes of Hazzard recently shared how his faith helped him deal with grief after his wife, veteran producer and actress Alicia Allain Schneider, passed away.

I am convinced that the church’s greatest obstacle to influencing our culture is that our culture does not see the church as relevant to its greatest issues. Secular people know what we are against more than they know what we are for. In our defense of biblical morality, we can win arguments and lose souls.

The answer is not merely to try harder to do better.