What makes Thanksgiving difficult for you this year? Are you dealing with grief over the loss of a loved one? Challenges in your health, family, or finances? Guilt over the past or fear of the future? In collating gratitude with suffering, we have four logical options we can view as a Thanksgiving spectrum.
Fear is the greatest barrier to us fulfilling God's plan for our lives. But God hasn't given us a spirit of fear, because "perfect love casts out all fear" (1 John 4:18).
As the Wall Street Journal notes, quoting historian Tom Holland, “What’s happening with #MeToo is essentially an attempt to reimpose…Christian sexual morality.” Having witnessed the destruction of unrestrained sexual impulses, many are now more open to the idea that sex belongs within boundaries. The boundaries Christianity proposes, such as lifelong marriage and chastity, will seem quaint, traditional, and unrealistic. But short of these crisp, solid lines, are bad ideas bound to have victims—victims who will be asking, like Ratajkowski, “Why am I so unhappy?”
As our society continues its post-Christian slide into secularism, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas have become secularized as well. One can go the entire Christmas season without seeing a mention of Christ’s birth in secular culture; Thanksgiving has become far less about gratitude to God and far more about football and feasting. Thus we should not be surprised when even gratitude becomes generically secularized. But we should not overlook the illogic of this trajectory nor the power of thanksgiving when it is properly directed.
Christians have historically stood against an official state religion, especially those of the Baptist tradition, which is my denominational home. Leaving aside the obvious Constitutional issues with this, Christians should oppose the idea of a state religion because it is at odds with what the New Testament teaches about conversion and the nature of the church.
Please join me in praying that this same faith will encourage and uplift Ernie Johnson, his wife, as they grieve the loss of one of their sons.
The more we experience God’s transforming love, the more we will be empowered and motivated to share it with every person we can. And the more we will love them as we are loved. Imagine the difference it would make in the world if Christians were known for loving others as God loves us.
What should be the Christian witness to a watching world when we are addressing serious issues? Here are four strategies:
It is conventional wisdom today that all truth is personal and subjective. As a result, sharing Christ in public is viewed as the imposition of our beliefs on others. This view of truth extends especially to the claim that non-Christians need to trust Christ to escape hell for heaven (Acts 4:12). Such a claim is increasingly seen as intolerant in the extreme, a view that is affecting and infecting Christians as well as the larger secular culture.
For example, among the attempts to explain the Big Bang and account for our shockingly life-friendly cosmos were complicated ideas with fancy names such as vacuum fluctuation, cyclic contraction and expansion, the anthropic principle, string theory, and the multiverse. However, as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer argues, each of these explanations comes with significant baggage. In his book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer shows how these theories either require prior mathematical fine-tuning, or involve serious category errors, or else undermine the reliability of science.
