Denison Forum

Yesterday we discussed ways to use our resources and influence in voicing our disagreement with unbiblical immorality. Today let’s consider the positive side of this cultural coin. As MLB player Clayton Kershaw said in a recent statement, we can “show what we do support, as opposed to maybe what we don’t. And that was Jesus.”

When I served as a college missionary in East Malaysia, those I sought to reach were not my enemies. To the contrary, they were people for whom Jesus died and who deserved to know the One I knew. I was simply a beggar helping other beggars find bread.In the same way, in cultural conflicts, our opponents are not our enemies. Satan is the enemy; those who reject biblical truth are his victims.This is why “speaking the truth in love” should be our daily aspiration and mantra (Ephesians 4:15). Rather than fighting our opponents as cultural warriors, we should love them as cultural missionaries sharing God’s word and grace in the place and time he has assigned to us.

The same technology that threatens to make internal monologues a thing of the past has also been used to help a mute person speak and even enable a paralyzed person to walk, reminding us once again that the potential tradeoffs in these developments can be more complicated to weigh than they appear at first glance.

My call today is for us to renew our commitment to thinking and living biblically, whatever the consequences in our broken, post-Christian culture. To this end, let’s close with a reflection from Billy Graham: “Early in my life, I had some doubts about whether or not the Bible was really God’s word. But one night in 1949, I knelt before a stump in the woods of Forest Home, California, opened my Bible and said, ‘O God, there are many things in this book I do not understand. But by faith, I accept it—from Genesis to Revelation—as your word.’

You are a missionary to where you are and to when you are. It is by divine providence that you were not alive a century ago or a century from now (if the Lord tarries). Embracing your identity as the child of God and your calling to help others know God is the foundational decision you must make each day.

You may know that the United States has a “poet laureate” named Ada Limón. (She was actually featured in last night’s Jeopardy! Masters show.) But did you know that we also have our first “drag laureate”?

If we embrace our suffering as an opportunity to trust Christ with our pain and serve others in theirs, “the salvific meaning of suffering” will be revealed to us. We will testify with Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). We will experience an intimacy with our Lord and our fellow sufferers unavailable to others.And when our journey leads us from this world to the next, we can say what Tim Keller told his family before his homegoing: “I’m ready to see Jesus. I can’t wait to see Jesus. Send me home.” The old hymn was right: “The way of the cross leads home.”What cross is yours today?

From the moment the Dodgers chose to honor a group that so overtly dishonors core Christian principles and, more explicitly, the Catholic expression of those principles, they were headed down a difficult path. That they made the correct decision to turn back still opened them up to criticism and derision from those who believe that the Sisters deserved their place of honor in the Dodgers Pride Night event.The same principle applies to each of us as well.

As we noted yesterday, God’s judgment against our sins is certain. But sins also bring their own consequences. The “just penalty” for them “always pursues” those who commit them.Infidelity destroys marriages; pornography damages the brains of those who consume it. When we eat “forbidden fruit,” its inherent poison sickens us. You can mark it down as an inexorable law of the universe: sin “always pursues the transgression of the unrighteous.”

Here’s the reason: only Jesus Christ can change the human heart so that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).As a result, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Christians have the Holy Spirit living in us as his temple (1 Corinthians 3:16) and thus have the power to refuse temptation whenever it strikes: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). (This includes sexual sin, which we recently released a resource on, titled, “What does the Bible say about pornography? Can you break free from sexual temptation?”)

There is ultimately only one cure for the sickness of sin and the depravity of the human condition.Being religious is not enough—many churches and church leaders in Germany tragically and heretically supported Hitler’s regime. Trying harder to do better is not enough—despite the laudatory and courageous fight against anti-Semitism being waged by Yad Vashem and many others, this scourge continues to grow in America and Europe.But when Christ rules our heart, we love everyone he loves and hate everything he hates.

For many years, my Israeli friends have taught me the importance of resilience as they refuse to allow threats of violence to change their lives. They take shelter when necessary, but they choose not to live in fear because this gives the “terrorists” (“those who cause terror”) what they want.When violence does strike, they return to normal as quickly as possible. While Americans might turn the site of a terrorist attack into a memorial to those who died, Israelis typically do not. They do not want to memorialize the crime, believing that they pay tribute to their dead by living well.I witnessed such courage in Israel last week.

Throughout Scripture, we find people whose legacy changed from hero to villain or the other way around over the course of their story. David, for example, started out about as well as anyone could. He was a man after God’s own heart who slayed Goliath and retained such respect for God’s anointment of Saul as king that, even after the latter repeatedly tried to kill him, David refused to respond in kind. Yet, by the end of his story, he’d become a poor father, an impotent ruler, and his parting wisdom to Solomon was a list of people to kill—several of whom he had sworn to protect (1 Kings 2:1-9).

The Bible consistently assures us that living biblically is the best way for us to live (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16-17). However, I cannot prove to you that this is so. A relationship with God, like all other relationships, requires a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating. You cannot prove you should take a job until you accept it. You cannot prove you should get married or have children until you get married and have children.When you take God at his word, you discover that he always keeps his word. Conversely, as theologian J. V. Langmead Casserley noted, we do not break God’s word: we break ourselves onGod’s word. The choice is yours.

“We have become a nation that is more focused on the right to kill than the right to live.”This is how California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to the mass shooting in Allen, Texas, as he criticized Congress for not passing gun control reform. However, given his passionate support for elective abortion and efforts to bring women from other states to California’s abortion clinics, pro-life supporters like me find his statement tragically ironic.

Warren Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies. He has been extremely benevolent over the years, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable causes. Forbesestimates his net worth at $1141 billion. My net worth is several zeroes less.The ninety-two-year-old was recently asked at Berkshire’s recent annual shareholder meeting how to avoid mistakes in business and in life. His response: “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it. It’s not that complicated.”Rather than writing our own obituary and trying to live up to it, what if we allowed God to define our life mission and then partnered with him in fulfilling it? How would we do this?

In a brilliant new essay for the Atlantic, columnist David Brooks identifies two ways of approaching life: autonomy-based and gift based.Autonomy-based living is the basis for elective abortion, the sexual revolution, gender redefinition, “death with dignity,” and all other “rights” our secular society believes we deserve. According to Brooks, the consequence is a world in which “the purpose of my life ... is to be happy—to live a life in which my pleasures, however I define them, exceed my pains.”Gift-based living, by contrast, “starts with a different core conviction: I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself.” As a result, “The essential activity of life is not the pursuit of individual happiness. The essential activity of life is to realize the gifts I’ve been given by my ancestors and to pass them along, suitably improved, to those who will come after.”

“We think there can be a restoration of faith in America, and we think getting [the] Ten Commandments on these walls is a great way to do that. … We think we can really set a trend for the rest of the country.” Matt Krause, a former state representative and current employee of the First Liberty Institute, made that statement when he testified before the Texas Senate last month in defense of a bill that would require public schools to post a copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom from kindergarten through high school. The bill passed earlier this week and is expected to go before the State House of Representatives soon.The reasoning behind the legislation is that the Ten Commandments played a key role in the development of America’s founding documents and, as such, should be considered historical in nature rather than strictly religious. As one might expect, not everyone agrees with that assertion.Arguments over the value of the proposed law could prove irrelevant, however, if the Supreme Court decides that it is unconstitutional.

While it costs us nothing to pray today to Christ our Savior, it costs us everything to coronate him our King. C. S. Lewis observed, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. (For an excellent resource, please see Dr. Lane Ogden’s “What does the Bible say about mental health” on our website.) As a result, we’ll see a plethora of information like the Surgeon General’s report in the coming days. In the midst of all the bad news, however, here’s some good news: according to the Wall Street Journal, America is seeing a “surprising surge of faith among young people.”A recent survey found that about one-third of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds say they believe in the existence of a higher power. This is more than the percentage who doubt such an existence and is up from about one-quarter in 2021. The Journal explains: “Young adults, theologians, and church leaders attribute the increase in part to the need for people to believe in something beyond themselves after three years of loss.”