worldview

The percentage of Americans who believe in God, heaven and angels hit a record low in a new Gallup survey that also found belief in hell and the devil reaching a record low, too.

In 1563, historian John Foxe told many of the earliest stories in a book that would become one of the most widely read works in the English language. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs chronicles hundreds of Christians who gave their lives or were persecuted for their faith from the New Testament all the way to his day. Through generations of expansions and editions, it became an indispensable classic.  

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was written from a Protestant perspective and, almost 50 years older than the King James Bible, is a challenging read. Recently, a pair of daring authors took up Foxe’s mantle to tell the stories of the martyrs afresh for modern readers. In The New Book of Christian Martyrs, Johnnie Moore and Dr. Jerry Pattengale of Indiana Wesleyan University offer accounts of heroes of the faith from the first to the 21st centuries. 

Jesus was clear: “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The same is true for women who look lustfully at men. According to Jesus, Oppenheimer caused millions of people to commit adultery over the weekend.

Once again, scientific research substantiates his point. Studies conclusively show that viewing pornography (which is what the sex scenes in Oppenheimer constitute) changes our brains in damaging ways, quickly leads to stress, addiction, and escalating behavior, fuels mental illness, and negatively impacts love, marriage, and intimacy.

A few months ago, kidney specialist Dr. Stanley Goldfarb was fired from UpToDate, a digital research tool for physicians. Last year, the president of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where Dr. Goldfarb served as an associate dean, wrote a public letter accusing him of racism while students and colleagues circulated a petition calling for his title as professor emeritus to be stripped.

Dr. Goldfarb’s purported crimes had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with his public opposition to DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) in medicine.

This brave new world of hostility is familiar for our brothers and sisters elsewhere, in places like Nigeria, India, and China. Ours are more experiences of a series of horrible moments, such as earlier this year in Nashville. Christians in the West do not fear for their lives. Even so, something has clearly shifted. Calls to tolerate the views of others are about as 1990s these days as talking about abortion being “safe, legal, and rare.” As we’ve seen in Nashville, it’s a perilously small step from the rhetorical games of wanting to punch “literal Nazis” to literally punching those who dare stray from the cultural narrative.

The only way forward for the Christ follower is to commit again to knowing what is true, to commit again to saying and living what is true even if there is a cost, and to say and live what is true in a way that is pleasing to Christ. In other words, faithfulness will involve both the what we believe and the how we’ll live it out.

Anxiety is the most common mental disorder in the US. In my wife’s excellent recent blog on anxiety and thankfulness, she notes that “experiences of high psychological distress are especially widespread among young adults.” This is a problem for the rest of us as well: in a recent survey, 62 percent of respondents reported experiencing some degree of anxiety.

However, as we continue our emphasis this week on the urgency of spiritual renewal for America’s future, I’d like to shift from the negative to the positive, albeit in a way that may not seem obvious at first.

The core dynamic of evangelism is investing and inviting. Let’s start off with the invest part. Investing in someone is simply about building a relationship: getting to know them, spending time with them, entering into community with them.

God puts us in deeper waters through many different aspects of our lives. Maybe it’s a new job that requires way more than you feel capable of, and you lose your bearings on who you are and what you can do. Maybe you lost a relationship that was a stabilizing force in your life, and you don’t know who you are without them. Maybe your life felt like it had a single direction that everything you were doing was working towards, but now you’re questioning if it’s all worth it.

And when these situations happen, God feels far away. Our sense of connection and grounding feels compromised. We just end up feeling…off. And we’re not sure why. So how do we navigate through these deeper waters? Start by asking yourself these questions and see what God reveals to you.

The Scottish theologian Sinclair Ferguson is right: “We cannot reach our destination if we are traveling in the wrong direction.” But the post-Christian, even anti-Christian trajectory of our culture does not have to be ours. Speaking in a very decadent age, Jesus nonetheless promised us: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

Don't let your past failures make you think you've caused irreparable damage. Don't lose heart; you will be amazed at what God will do with humility, brokenness, and repentance. You may not be able to change your circumstances immediately, but God can reposition you back into the center of His will: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." (Psalm 30:5). Take this opportunity now to turn to him, completely, unconditionally, and without delay. Even in this chaos, He is still the King!