Love is the final measure of our faith. It’s the closest we can come to the heart of God. It’s the best way we can communicate the Logos—the Lord Jesus Christ—to the world around us. That’s the greatest trademark secret of all. We are known by our love.
In its most recent term, the United States Supreme Court strengthened free speech by ruling that business owners cannot be punished for expression consistent with their deeply held beliefs and by ruling that affirmative action practices in college admissions violates the constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination. All this on the heels of the landmark decision in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the issue of abortion law to the states. Again, unsurprisingly, the Court is being accused of replacing justice and the Constitution with partisan politics by pundits who decry the Court’s conservative bias.
What is our hope for a more moral future?
Let’s conduct a brief thought experiment centered on this maxim: When we love someone, we love what they love and hate what they hate.
If I love my friend who has cancer, I must love his children and hate his disease. However, this principle is not entirely true for everyone in every circumstance. For example, if I love my alcoholic friend, I must hate the alcohol he loves and love the sobriety he hates. Thus, our maxim unconditionally applies only to our sinless Lord (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus is the only Person who perfectly loves what I should love and hates what I should hate. In short, to live a moral life, I should love Jesus like he loves me and then love others like he loves them.
A new Christian AI app on Apple platforms claims to reveal what Jesus would do in a modern context, but its answers on hot-button topics often stray from the historical, traditional teachings of the faith.
Let me be blunt: Western culture, with its insistence on individual status and achievement, is lying to you. Its roots lie in ancient Greek philosophy, not biblical revelation. In the words of the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre, one of existentialism’s most famous proponents: “Things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them ... there is nothing.” (We should not be surprised that the novel in which these words appear is titled Nausea.)
It takes no work to get people to lament the state of America. Gather a group of liberals, and they will wring their hands over the impending theocratic patriarchy that will create a dystopia that rivals The Handmaid’s Tale. Conservatives remain convinced that a cabal of elites is conspiring to destroy America as we know it with high taxes, mass immigration, liberal indoctrination and sexual deviancy.
Too often, we complain infinitely more than we pray. Think about this, though, if the state of our country causes us anxiety, shouldn’t prayer be our first recourse?
Tailah Scroggins felt dead inside. After growing up in a Christian home, she somehow fell into the occult, embracing astrology, witchcraft, and the New Age. But after embarking on a dark journey and losing the will to live, she had an incredible interaction with Jesus that changed everything.
Today, Scroggins is an online evangelist, writer, and truth-teller on a mission to help others escape evil. She recently shared her story with “Billy Hallowell’s Playing With Fire Podcast,” explaining how she was raised in a Christian home and believed in God before stumbling into the occult.
Twice as many Americans say they believe in heaven and the power of prayer as believe in reincarnation and astrology, according to a new survey.
Despite having three daughters, I can’t say I ever expected to discuss the theological implications of a movie based on Barbie dolls. And yet, Barbie is dominating headlines, not only for bringing in a whopping 155 million dollars on its opening weekend, but also for garnering thought-pieces on the deeper meaning of its plot and for its cultural implications about the identity and value of women. A Vox article, for example, compared its plot to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, with a primal couple living in a paradise before newly discovered knowledge about good and evil taints the world with corruption.
Avoiding sin today (Ephesians 4:27) to avoid God’s judgment one day (2 Corinthians 5:10) is the best way to live today (cf. John 10:10). Doing what God will reward in heaven builds with “gold, silver, precious stones” on earth; refusing what he will condemn in the next life is refusing “wood, hay, straw” in this life (1 Corinthians 3:12).
If you knew you had only today to use the temporal for the eternal, what would you change? I cannot promise you that this is your last day on this planet, but I cannot promise you that it is not.
