Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Nov 5, 2025 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

On Twitter recently I saw this short video of a young British Journalist, Louise Perry, explain why she became a Christian. In 2022 she published a book called, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which indicates like many secularist liberals she had been mugged by reality. It is obvious from the devastation coming in the wake of “the 60s,” and the rejection of traditional Christian sexuality morality, that something is terribly wrong. The rejection of monogamy and the sexual exclusivity of marriage, and yes between a man and a woman, destroyed the foundation of civilization and source of true human flourishing, the family. Not only have we seen the explosion of divorce and single parent households, but we’ve discovered that children raised in such an environment are often emotionally and psychologically damaged. Every study over the last 50 years makes this undeniable. Everyone agrees, even those who reject the primacy of the family, that children do best in a two parent, mother and father family.

Frenchman Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the academic discipline of sociology, which can be defined as “the study of human society, social behavior, and the structures, institutions, and interactions that shape them.” It is clear from such study that certain things work better than others, meaning they bring human happiness, peace, safety, and prosperity, or they don’t. Normal human beings tend to prefer these to misery, war, crime, and poverty, so it makes sense to try to order our lives and society so they produce more of the former than the latter. For Ms. Perry, she saw that the sexual revolution and everything associated with it clearly wasn’t working. I don’t know her story, but she clearly saw a connection between what was working, what could work, and Christianity. So in her studies she came to the conclusion that if Christianity “were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” In other words, for human beings to function optimally in a society, the truth of Christianity could be verified by that, and she found that it is. That realization is happening to a lot of people in this age of Great Awakening. For some reason people prefer harmony over chaos, love over hate, beauty over ugliness, liberty over tyranny. Go figure.

Living in a Christian World: Gospel Influence Everywhere
A journey through Western history allows us to see these contrasts in living color. We can also clearly see this in other countries and their cultures today, but so much of the World is Westernized it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate how unique our Western culture is specifically because it was created by classical and Christian influences. I say classical because both ancient Greece and Rome have had significant influences on the development of the West, but those pagan civilizations were as unfamiliar to us as aliens from some distant galaxy far, far away.

Historian Tom Holland’s journey to an appreciation of Christianity in the development of the West is chronicled in his highly influential book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Here was someone who grew up enamored of everything he thought ancient Greece and Rome stood for, until one day he realized he had absolutely nothing in common with those people. Their moral value system and view of the world was completely, well, alien to him, something he could not relate to at all. Mind you, he’s not a Christian, yet sees the world through Christian lenses, and realizes we don’t have the modern world without Christianity.

Holland’s book was a profound revelation for me, and multitudes of others. We’ve all grown up in a Western culture that is what it is because of Christianity. On some level we know that, but like the air we breathe we take it for granted, as if it’s just the way things are supposed to be. The problem with this is that living in a dominant secular culture, we just assume the blessings we enjoy of living in a modern society just happened for no reason at all. We live with a modicum of peace and prosperity, political liberty, education, health, etc., just because. In other words, they come from chance, just like they think the physical universe came from chance. The “narrative” of the secularist is that the Enlightenment saved us from religious fanaticism and tyranny, and because of science and technology we have the modern world in spite of Christianity, most certainly not because of it. That gets the reality of the situation exactly upside down, as well as inside out.

The ancient world was a brutal place, brutal in a way unimaginable to us now. We see this in movies and literature, but it’s difficult for us to comprehend the realness of it, and how difficult everyday life was for most people. Because of Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder, I’m reading the 1951 novel, Spartacus, from which a movie as made in 1960 with Kirk Douglas. The story is about the slave revolts in the Roman Empire, and a line from the story is apropos for the time, “I am Spartacus,” as other slaves stood up to protect and affirm what Spartacus stood for. A lot of people today are saying, I am Charlie Kirk.

The author, Howard Fast, paints a horrendous picture of slavery and how cheap life was in a way that makes American chattel slavery in the 19th century look like Disneyland. The brutality of it is incomprehensible to us. The story starts with some wealthy patrician Romans taking a trip on the Apian Way, and on both side of the road 6,000 slaves are hung, naked, on Roman crosses as a sign of Roman justice. They had put down the slave revolt instigated by Spartacus, and the book looks back in time at how it all developed. It’s brilliant in the way it depicts the image of God in man struggling to live with dignity against impossible odds. This was the world Tom Holland grew up with and loved so much he became an historian of the ancient world.

What’s powerful about the book is that the slaves are driven by visions of a world they think will never exist, but they are willing to die for a taste of freedom and their Utopian dreams. Spartacus is the inspiration for those dreams. Little could they have known that in a hundred years another man would die like a slave on a Roman cross to free mankind from the sin that enslaves far worse than shackles. In the book Holland focuses on the crucifixion and how absurd it is that such a thing would become the inspiration and symbol of a religion that would take over the world, and make it a better place. What the slaves in the slave revolt missed is that the nature of a civilization cannot be changed by force of arms because unless man is fundamentally changed, nothing else will change. To transform the nations, man must first be transformed, which can only be found in one religion on earth, Christianity. All religions in one way or another require people to confirm to some kind of law to change, whereas Christianity declares the person supernaturally changed by the power of God, and who because of that now wants to obey God’s law. The inner person is changed before the outer person can truly live a different life.

We call this gospel, the good news, man set free so he can live free. Then those set free can live in a way that enhances human dignity in everything they do because now they live according to their natures as created by God, the telos or purposes for which He created them. True human flourishing can only happen in a Christian context. God in the Old Testament reveals to us that obedience to his law is required for blessing, while disobedience incurs His curse. The gospel, the New Covenant, as the Lord tells us in Jeremiah 31, means God’s law has now been put in our minds and written on our hearts. This now spreads throughout society in everything Christians do, and personal transformation allows societal transformation, gospel influence everywhere and in everything.

Transformation and Truth
The contrast of the ancient pagan world, BC, to what the world eventually became because of Christianity, AD, is what prompted Holland to write an almost 600 page book. He was driven to such effort because he had to know what it was that made the modern world in which he lived and embraced and loved so different from the ancient pagan world. What exactly caused the change? Jesus of Nazareth! It’s unfortunate that Holland still hasn’t been able to embrace Jesus as risen Lord and Savior, but he’s on my heathen prayer list, so I trust God will bring him there in due course. Nevertheless, he has done the church a great favor by writing the book, and completely changing the nature of the conversation about Christianity and the modern world.

The book was published in 2019, and it certainly didn’t appear at the time anyone except Christians were buying his argument, especially going into the 2020s as the woke and Covid nightmare took over the world. But something amazing happened on the way to the leftist repaganizing of the world: Jesus of Nazareth! Even the once angry “New Atheists” are proclaiming the benign influence of Christianity on Western culture, when they once declared that “religion poisons everything.” Secularism is proving the feeble lie it’s always been. 

That is the contrast in our day, not to ancient paganism, but to a modern secularism that was just another version of the ancient, barbaric creed. As secularism has come crashing down in this third decade of the 21st century, we’ve been able to see the contrast juxtaposed, side-by-side with Christianity, and secularism is not looking like the dream Utopia our cultural elites promised. It’s in fact just another form of slavery Spartacus and the Romans slaves could have recognized as such. The reason so many are now coming to this realization, and that we’re seeing a Great Awakening among us, is what Louise Perry discovered. If Christianity is supernaturally true, it must also be sociologically true. In other words it is self-authenticating, obviously true, first lived out in an individual’s life, and then in society. If it’s true, it will work. If it claims to be an explanation for reality as we find it, how it got here, why it is the way it is, then it should also tell us how to make it work the way it’s supposed to work. If you want to fix a car engine that’s not working, it’s best to use a repair manual for that specific model, and everyone agrees the world we’re born into is very broken and needs to be fixed.

I’ve listened to hundreds of Christian testimonies in the last handful of years, and the more I’ve listened to the more I’ve realized what a powerful apologetic transformed lives are for the veracity of the Christian faith. The skeptic would chalk up changed lives up to psychology because that’s all they got, but mere human psychology can’t make fundamental transformations of human nature. In other words, thinking good thoughts of sweetness and light and fairy tales, doesn’t mean good results will follow. In fact, each human being knows there is a war going on inside of them, the proverbial angel on one shoulder and demon on the other. Pascal puts it perfectly as he normally does:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

Positive thinking without supernatural power can never fully address our wretchedness. When you hear enough stories of people’s personal transformation you realize lies cannot do that. Multiply that by entire societies and nations, and thinking lies can do that is every bit as ridiculous. If Christianity isn’t true, then it’s a lie. J. Gresham Machen writes in Christianity and Liberalism that, “Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.” That event is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a man tortured to death on a Roman cross. If that event didn’t happen, if Jesus didn’t come back to life as his followers claimed, and gave their lives for that claim, then Christianity is a lie, all of it. But it is not a lie, and the transformation that inevitably comes in its wake is powerful, even irrefutable, evidence of that.

Constantine the Great’s Conversion and the Beginning of Christian Western Civilization
Because of Pietism and dispensationalism, modern Evangelical Christians are confused about the influence Christianity should have on society and culture. The question confronting us reveals the confusion. Should Christianity’s influence on the culture be the incidental fruit of the gospel? In other words, mostly personal, and society influenced unintentionally because of that? Or is societal influence one of the main purposes of the gospel? Jesus in the Great Commission made it clear that entire nations should be discipled, not only individuals. Since the Second Great Awakening, however, discipling the nations came to mean discipling Christians within nations, not actually teaching entire nations. The word disciple in Greek means to instruct or teach, to become a pupil. So Jesus was telling his disciples that they were to go and teach and instruct entire nations, a foreign concept to the personalized Pietistic Christianity that dominates most modern Evangelicalism. I read something recently that captures the Evangelical mindset perfectly. Speaking of the Great Commission, this person said that “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” No he’s not. God is calling people within nations to Himself to transform those nations, starting with themselves and their families, then their communities, and so on.

Which brings us to Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor in the early 4th century who converted to Christianity and slowly brought Christian influence throughout the empire. Why do you think he thought doing this was an important part of his Christian faith? Or thought that Christianity wasn’t merely about his personal life? Because Jesus’ disciples, the Apostles, taught the world transforming power of Christianity, and the early church embraced that. We must never forget in this debate between Pietistic personalized Christianity and world transforming Christianity, that the declaration, “Jesus is Lord,” was treason in the Roman Empire. It was a blatant political statement. The societal transformation skeptics, let’s call them, tell us that we don’t see any political or cultural engagement in Acts or the New Testament church as if 2,000 years of history hadn’t happened. But most importantly they forget what “Jesus is Lord” meant in that context—Christians were radically political.

Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337, began this transformation not long after his conversion in 312. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313 which stopped the intermittent persecution of Christianity throughout the empire, and granted tolerance to Christians, allowing them to practice their faith openly. The process was slow and no doubt imperfect, but his favoring of Christianity marginalized traditional Roman pagan religions, reshaping Roman cultural identity toward Christianity. He also introduced laws reflecting Christian morality such as banning the brutal practice of crucifixion, and ending gladiatorial games, which was just another use of slaves for Roman entertainment. He also enacted measures to protect widows, orphans, and slaves. He realized something that Martin Luther taught over a thousand years later, and Christians have forgotten in our day: law is a teacher. The laws not only reflect the cultural values of a people; they teach the people cultural values. The ancient pagan world was slowly becoming the modern Christian world because of Constantine.

I can hear some Christians complain about my describing the modern world as Christian. You’ll have to read Holland’s book to understand what I’m saying. It was the influence of Jesus through his church, his people, that we have human rights, slavery is outlawed, if not disappeared, the rule of law, the nation-state, science and technology, capitalism and free enterprise, among other blessings. All those Christians complaining about how rotten things are would never want to exchange modern life for life in the ancient pagan world. As you can see, the Christian influence that transformed the ancient brutal pagan world into the much less brutal modern world goes far beyond what we consider “spiritual,” but it is all spiritual.

And speaking of that, this allows me to address the contentious topic of Christian nationalism, or what a Christian nation is. You might be able to infer from what I’ve said about Christian influence in the world, that in a Christian nation not every person has to be an orthodox Christians who confess Jesus as risen Lord and Savior. What they do have to buy into Christian assumptions about the nature of reality, whether they are aware of them or not, or can explain them or not. It doesn’t matter what each individual in a society believes on a metaphysical or religious level, they will benefit if Christianity is the dominant cultural worldview. That doesn’t even take the majority of people to be Christians, although that is certainly what we want.

What counts on a sociological level is what people believe about the ultimate nature of reality. Since we’ve been talking about sociology, let’s use a sociological concept to describe this: plausibility structure. This is the mental and psychological societal structure, a mental map, that defines reality for a people. It makes certain things seem real, the way they are supposed to be; it’s just the way things are. Since the mid-20th century, post-World War II, and especially “the 60s,” the West’s plausibility structure has been secularism. That has proved a complete failure, and now Christianity is rushing in to fill the empty space.

Conflict vs. Conquest in Our Fallen World: A Tale of Two Perspectives

Conflict vs. Conquest in Our Fallen World: A Tale of Two Perspectives

Oct 29, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

For my entire Christians life, from the fall of 1978 to August of 2022, I believed the nature of the Christian life in this fallen world was a conflict between good and evil, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. I assumed, but didn’t think much about it, that the conflict was almost between two equal forces. I also believed God is almighty and sovereign, but for some reason allowed the devil the upper hand in our fallen world. I knew this cosmic war into which we were born would eventually be won by the forces of light over darkness, but in this world for the most part darkness wins. There was at least partial victory on a personal level in the process of sanctification, but on a larger societal level victory would have to wait for the Second Coming. Until then things would likely get worse until Jesus returned to set all things right. Most Evangelical Christians see the world pretty much the same way as I did.

Like most Christians, I also believed the gospel would be preached to the entire world, but more people would reject than accept it. In a term familiar to Bible readers of the Old Testament, only a “remnant” would be saved. Jesus seemed to indicate this in his teaching on the wide and narrow gate (Matt. 7):

13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

This confirmed my basic pessimism about the nature of the spiritual war in which we are engaged. If we’re using a spiritual metaphor of who gets the most points in this game wins, then the devil clearly wins. He gets the most points because he gets the most souls. I learned later to read this passage in its redemptive-historical context, not out of context as if Jesus was speaking about Gentiles and salvation for all of time. No, Jesus was speaking to Jews because he was sent only “to the lost sheep of the house Israel” (Matt. 15:24). Most Jews rejected Christ and judgment came upon them in AD70. The Great Commission would have a very different ending. The gate would now be open wide with the proclamation of the gospel, victory ensured by the power of the Holy Spirit unleashed from Christ with “all authority in heaven and on earth” reigning at the right hand of God.

What I call eschatological pessimism is specifically the fruit of dispensationalism, whether we hold to that eschatology or not, or even know what it is. A pessimistic take on the nature of things just seems obvious and the most realistic. All anyone has to do is open their eyes and they’ll see that righteousness and peace and justice are not exactly marching victoriously throughout the world. Suffering seems to be everywhere, and it appears we’re fighting an uphill battle akin to Mount Everest. I imagine Christians felt that way in the 20th century during the darkest days of World War I and II. Slaughter on that scale had never happened in the history of the world, and not even close. Over a hundred million people lost their lives because of man’s inhumanity to man, because evil is clearly dominant in this fallen world. The 20th century is in fact why the pessimistic perspective came to dominate conservative Protestant Christianity. This is an important part of the story which we’ll explore below.

In my journey I even got to the point of mocking my younger self who believed he could “change the world.” In fact, the entire point of our existence is to “change the world.” But I came to believe that’s a fool’s errand, and only God could do that. Real change would only happen at the end of time when Jesus returned and wiped out evil once and for all. This is true for almost the entire church, that is how deeply engrained eschatological pessimism is. When I embraced postmillennialism a few years back that all changed for me. I was exposed to a completely new way of looking at life. Prior I thought of this eschatology as something of a joke, unworthy of even considering. Now I was eager to learn more because I knew nothing about it.

The Death of Postmillennial Eschatological Optimism
The man who killed postmillennialism lived in the century before it officially died. His name was J.N. Darby (1800-1882), and his aversion to postmillennial eschatology was one driving factor in his development of a completely new eschatology, called at the time, the new premillennialism. Premillennialism, which has been around since the early church fathers, holds that Jesus’ second coming will occur before (pre-) a literal 1,000-year period of peace and righteousness on earth, which is the Millennium as described in Revelation 20:1–7. Darby took this theology of “end times” in an entirely new direction which eventually came to be known as dispensationalism in the late 1920s. I’ve written about that previously, so I won’t get into the details here, but what became dominant because of Darby was eschatological pessimism. No longer was the church marching triumphant through the world, and in fact the church was the problem. It was corrupt and beyond saving.

What drove him was an antipathy to the idea of the church ushering in a “golden age,” something he saw as a secularized perversion of the gospel. The church was a heavenly entity, and it was Israel that would bring heaven to earth in due course. That all would happen only after things got increasingly worse and the church raptured from earth in the great tribulation. Then Christ would return with his people and reign from Jerusalem for a thousand years of peace on earth. That’s skipping over a lot of details, but you get the point. Postmillennialism, therefore, was the enemy.

It so happens he picked the right century to begin to discredit the eschatology that had dominated the church for most of its history. As much as Christians experienced suffering over the centuries, they all believed in ultimate victory on this earth. If not, what did Christ come for? Pietism, which started developing in 17th century Lutheran Germany, would in due course lead to an answer: escape. In this view that developed through first and second Great Awakenings, and eventually into dispensationalism and fundamentalism, the purpose of Christianity was to go to heaven when we die, and while we’re here, personal holiness. The effect of the gospel on society became increasingly less important until in the 20th century it became completely irrelevant.

The 19th century saw the full flowering of several forces that would in due course make Christianity, almost, the non-entity it became in the modern world. The Enlightenment had been growing in influence, and it seemed one of its primary goals was to discredit the Bible and Christianity. In that, it was doing a very good job. Along with this growing influence was the scientific revolution which almost seemed to make God unnecessary. Progress became an obsession for Western man, and he seemed to be doing a rather good job of it. Two other forces developed in the church. One was the Pietism I mentioned, which turned the eyes and priorities of Bible believing Christians to heaven and away from earth, and the other was a liberal version of Christianity that embraced the assumptions of the Enlightenment. Throughout the century these two grew increasingly apart, until the early 20th century when the fundamentalist-modernist controversies erupted. You can easily guess which side won.

Various versions of postmillennialism were dominant into the 20th century given the incredible march of science and technology. It seemed man could accomplish anything he set his mind to, and because the Western world was still culturally Christian, the biblical notion of progress was secularized but retained some Christian terminology. That was soon to come crashing down, and along with it the credibility of postmillennialism. I place the beginning of the end with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. That was a cultural blow akin to a 9/11, but the enemy was an ice berg. Even the name of the great ship implied indestructibility, but destructible it was. A crisis of cultural confidence was on the horizon, but nobody could imagine it would include a war the horror of which was beyond imagination. Then just a decade later a Great Depression, and a decade after that a war far worse than the supposed “war to end all wars.” Amid all this was the rise of communism which would kill tens of millions more, and that golden age postmillennialists were promising looked like a nightmare instead. By the middle of the 20th century postmillennialists were harder to find than a conservative professor in a college humanities department.

The problem with this assessment of postmillennialism as a failure is that it never addresses the biblical case for it. It is always assumed that what it teaches is a notion of the advance of God’s kingdom is only in one direction, forward. It doesn’t seem to occur to the critics that a hundred years in God’s plans proves nothing. It is clear from Scripture that our God is never in a hurry. He, for example, promises Abram that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and it takes 2,000 years for that offspring to arrive! When he finally arrives, accomplishes his mission, then leaves and promises to return, another 2,000 year has passed and he hasn’t returned yet. So presuming we can interpret God’s intentions from historical events is unwise, not to mention unbiblical. His intentions are perfectly clear from Scripture, and now to me about eschatology. I’d rejected postmillennialism without even knowing anything about it, and now I was going to rectify that. Which brings us to the other perspective.

The Biblical Idea of Conquest Over Sin
The first book I read about postmillennialism was The Millennium by Loraine Boettner. I had gotten it seminary but don’t ever remember reading it. After being born-again into the Late Great Planet Earth hysteria of the late 70s, I wasn’t much interested in eschatology at the time. He introduced to me to the idea that the biblical testimony is one of conquest over sin, not mere conflict with it. And most importantly, this conquest is not just for our personal lives but for the entire world of human beings living in societies. Jesus’s Great Commission was to disciple nations not merely individuals within nations; how had I missed that all these years? My eschatological assumptions and the influence of Pietism.

I previously understood Christianity primarily as a personal affair, and whatever effects it had on society was a spillover from Christians living Christianly. Thankfully, Boettner, began changing my perspective, and that when Jesus said nations, he actually meant nations. The point of the gospel isn’t just that individuals would be saved from their sin and go to heaven when they die, but that Christians within a nation would transform it by proclaiming King Jesus and his authority over every area of life within that nation. Scripture proclaims, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34), and, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance” (Ps. 33:12). And what people did He choose for his inheritance? When God chose Abram he specifically promised that through him all peoples, all nations, would be blessed through him. In Psalm 2 we learn the nations will belong to the Messiah:

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron;
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

What does verse 9 sound like to you? Conquest! Decisive, unequivocal conquest. That, brothers and sisters, is what makes the Great Commission great, not plucking a few souls out of the nations while good and evil duke it out. The Apostles affirm this when Peter preaches the first Christian sermon in Acts 2 and quotes from Psalm 110, a Messianic Psalm and the most quoted and referred to in the New Testament:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
35 until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

That Psalm too proclaims conquest over the nations:

5 The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.

This crushing and dashing is not for the end of time, as I used to think, butt began when Christ ascended to the right hand of God. A couple quotes from The Millennium explains this perspective well. Quoting my theological hero, B.B. Warfield, he writes:

As emphatically as Paul, John teaches that the earthly history of the Church is not a history merely of conflict with evil, but a conquest over evil: and even more richly than Paul, John teaches that the conquest will be decisive and complete.

And in his own words:

How long the conquest continues before it is crowned with victory—we purposefully use the word “conquest,” rather the “conflict,” for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it—we are not told. . . . This progress is to go on until on this earth we shall see a practical fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth.”

One of the great biblical metaphors is Israel’s entry into the promised land.

The Great Commission in the Conquest of Canaan
Most Christians are familiar with the story of the spies exploring Canaan prior to the Israelites entering the promised land. Coming out of Egypt, they had made a beeline to the border of the land God prepared them to inhabit. The Lord commanded twelve men, one leader from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan (Num. 13). It was a scouting mission. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.

They all reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were significant obstacles to taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as insurmountable obstacles to taking the land. The other two didn’t see it that way:

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:

31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel (Num. 14):

6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day they explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.

I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. Joshua and Caleb trusted God and his promise, and the ten did not. They were the only two of that entire generation who entered the land of promise.

The obvious message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life when all I saw was giants, I now believe this perspective applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. The entire world is our Canaan, the land of promise the Lord Jesus calls us to conquer in his name, and victory is ours to expect because of God’s promises and commands. In fact, in the gospel the victory is already won. We fight from victory, not to it. It is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church.

 

 

Mass Shooters: It’s All About Parents

Mass Shooters: It’s All About Parents

Oct 22, 2025 | Parents and Family

I wrote this post before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, but the principles apply there as well.

It seems my title has sadly turned into a pun. Death has once again, as we all know by now, come in another shooting at a school by a mentally ill person targeting kids. Our cultural elites have come to call people like this transgendered, a man who pretends he’s a woman, or a woman who pretends she’s a man. This specifically mentally deranged individual who targeted children at a Catholic Mass was allowed to “transition” by his parents when he was a teenager. It seems his mother has hired a powerful lawyer. Where dad is, I have no idea. In addition to such parents lacking wisdom and being morally obtuse, they have been indoctrinated by the secular leftist cultural machine and ended up destroying their son, and now devastating two families of dead children.

In biblical religion, a person can be guilty of their own sin while at the same time the parents be guilty of enabling their child’s sin. We’re all accountable for the responsibilities God has given each one of us. But this isn’t just about parents who enable their kids to become monsters, but about all of us, all those God has given the privilege and responsibility of becoming parents. For Christian parents this is built into the entire history of our faith. From the very beginning, literally the first chapter of our book from God, the story starts with the command for man and woman to be “fruitful and multiply.” When the story is interrupted by the little hiccup we call the fall, God tells us our salvation will come through the woman’s seed or offspring. In other words, the plan of God’s rescuing his creatures will be inextricably bound up in children and families. All the promises of this salvation to come include children and descendants of generations to come. In fact the morning I write these words I read Isaiah’s words written over 700 years before Christ was born (Is. 59):

21 “As for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord. “My Spirit, who is on you, will not depart from you, and my words that I have put in your mouth will always be on your lips, on the lips of your children and on the lips of their descendants—from this time on and forever,” says the Lord.

Once the Lord has achieved salvation for us, it will be passed down to our descendants from generation to generation, even as we’re told in Deuteronomy 7:9, “to a thousand generations.”

Parenting is being part of God’s plan of bringing the blessings of generational salvation to the earth. We get to be intimately involved in living out what God promised to us and accomplished for us. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as Jesus taught us to pray, largely comes through raising our children in the Lord. This puts a bit of a new spin on it, doesn’t it. That means we expect our faith to be generational, that our kids will carry on the faith we impart to them, the way of life that seeks first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, knowing everything else will follow. Unfortunately, as we know, that doesn’t always happen.

The Rise of the Nones
In 2014 and 15 we began to see a lot of stories in the media about something called “Nones,” not to be mistaken for Catholic nuns. These are young people who grow up in Christian homes, go off to college or life and abandon the faith. The term came from the wording on surveys where people are asked for their religious preference, and a growing number were picking, “None of the above.” The secular media was positively giddy about it, as anyone might predict, but in Christian circles there was only lament. Prodigals were leaving and nobody was sure if they’d ever come back. It does so happen that long term surveys discover that, as these kids become adults with families, having children often brings them back to the church. That is small comfort, however, for parents whose prodigal children are in a distant country.

Providentially in May of 2015 one of these nones would change the direction of my life. I read a piece online (sadly, the website is no longer available) about a young lady who grew up in strong Christian home, went off to college and promptly abandoned her faith. Here’s how this newly minted “None” starts her story:

I’m Lyndsay, and I’m an agnostic. I say this as if I have stepped into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting because my transition from “believer” to “non‑believer” feels somewhat pathologic. The purpose of my story is not proselytism; I simply wish to articulate how difficult and consuming this transformation was for me, and in doing so, hopefully feel less alone.

At school, her doubts about Christianity mounted, but they had nothing to do with whether Christianity was true or not. Rather, she felt that everyone in high school had “put her in a box,” and she simply didn’t like being “stuffed in a box that could not contain” her. She felt liberated by the freedom she found at college:

Once I was given the opportunity to breathe a breath of fresh, secular air, I could more easily acknowledge that Christianity is a way of life, not the way of life. I desperately wanted a different way of life, but coming to terms with that flagrant fact was the hardest thing I have ever endured.

I do not mean to sound so dramatic, but the changes rousing inside of me truly shook me to my core. I was a Christian. This label was all‑encompassing—it felt completely impervious to change. If I abandoned God, I would be stuck starting from scratch, discarding my entire identity along with my Maker. More than just a loss of sense of self, I would be stripped of security, hope, and companionship. But I could not will myself to believe any longer

When I first read this it ticked me off. I thought to myself, how could this happen? I was convinced, and still am, that this would never happen to my children. They are now adults, 23, 30, and 33, and I’m blessed to report they are still followers of Jesus. I never once wondered if their faith would endure because that is exactly how we raised them, and me as their father most intentionally. Now I read this and it fascinates me. How could she miss the entire point of Christianity? That it is true! Not once in the article does it seem to occur to her that whether it is true or not is the issue, and that everything else is secondary.

Christianity is also not “a way of life,” as if all Christians fit into a mold and come out looking and acting the same way. There are no Stepford Christians, as in the movie when the wives of Stepford change from free-thinking, intelligent women into compliant wives dedicated solely to homemaking, basically robots. There is no such thing as robot Christianity, each of us being as unique as our fingerprints, and each of our children should feel free to be their own fingerprint. But for her Christianity was constricting, the exact opposite of what it in fact is. Sadly, it appears she didn’t feel like she could talk to her parents or any other Christian adult in her life. Did she feel like she couldn’t ask questions or express her doubts? Our teen years are complicated, so who knows, but all I will say is that this doesn’t have to happen. If we can’t sell our kids on Christianity being the truth, and nothing else is, something is wrong. My job was to persuade our children that the only explanation for reality giving our lives ultimate meaning, hope, and purpose is in Christ. It’s actually not difficult because secularism as an explanation for reality offers them nothing. It is bankrupt, poverty stricken, and the evidence is all around us. Ex-atheist C.S. Lewis, as usual, put it perfectly:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

The Persuasive Christian Parent
I mentioned how this young lady changed direction of my life. I was going to respond to her article with a blog post, but I decided I would write a book, something I’d never done before. God used her to turn me into an author! I’d always had a thought in the back of my mind that it would be cool to be an author, given I love reading books so much, but I never felt compelled to do so; now I did. I had no idea what I was doing, nor how hard it would be. I just started writing. I’ve always loved writing and words and ideas, and started my first official blog in 2004, but this was a whole different ballgame. It took me five years to get a publishable version, and it was a painful process, but a learning one. It’s a little rough, but not bad for a rookie effort. Now I’m in the process of finishing number five. So, thank you, Lindsay! I found my calling later in life because of her, and if I can bless and help a few people along the way, praise God. I pray she comes back to Christ.

When I started writing I decided I would title the first chapter, “It’s All About Truth,” because for whatever reason, Lindsay didn’t realize that’s really all that matters. Is Christianity true or not? If it’s true, then you don’t abandon it, and if it’s not, then you do. It’s very simple. C.S. Lewis, an ex-atheist, put it in his own brilliant way:

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

It’s a binary choice, one or the other, true or not. What I realized as I was writing the book is that as Christian parents we need to raise our kids differently in a secular age. Thinking we can just take them to church and read the Bible and pray with them isn’t enough. Secularism assaults them every day, from every screen, in every place, and in every way. What is secularism? It’s life lived with God as persona non grata, an unwelcome presence. Whether He’s there or not, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he’s not relevant to this life. Watch any movie or TV show and God is for the most part invisible, and Jesus mostly some kind of expletive. Our children pick up the alternative secular faith more from such entertainment than any agnostic or atheistic teacher at school. Life without God begins to seem like a plausible alternative to Christianity, as it did to Lindsay.

This desensitizing us to God, and disenchanting of life, as if matter really is all that exists, is the unseen cultural force against which we do battle. I say unseen because the enemies of God, the secularists, aren’t even thinking about God or what they are doing. A God-less universe is just how they see reality, and it is out of this worldview that they write and produce products that seduce our children away from their Christian faith.

One of the sections (two chapters per section) is called, “It’s All About Culture.” (I decided that each topic I covered was as important as the next, thus each as “All About.”). Christian parents tend to live in fear of the culture, as if it had some kind of power to drag their kids away from the faith like a demon in a horrible nightmare. On the contrary, I subtitled this section on culture, “Your Children’s Best Friend.” What do I mean by that?

The culture is a massive, ubiquitous, all present, messaging system. It works 24/7, never sleeps, never rests. The greatest dereliction of parental duty in our age is allowing the secular cultural messaging carte blanche, free rein into our children’s imagination and thinking. What happens is that slowly over time what is plausible to them, what makes sense, seems real, changes. I guarantee you this is what happened to Lindsay. She didn’t logically go through the evidence to see whether Christianity is true or not. After she got to college her “plausibility structure” was changed by the environment, and Christianity no longer seemed true to her, seemed like the way the world was supposed to be. Agnosticism became a better fit.

If we don’t want this to happen to our children, then we need to teach them to interrogate the culture, treat it as a prosecuting attorney treats a witness for the defense in a trial. No message gets by without a question, and as we do this with them consistently, they will develop the habit of doing it themselves. Thinking about the culture critically will become a habit.

In our house, TV shows and movies were a tool I used all the time with our kids. I still do it with my longsuffering wife. I am the master of the clicker in our house (i.e., remote control), and no show could run without me stopping it numerous times for questions or comments. Every one of them in some way highlighted the poverty of the secular worldview compared to the Christian worldview. This “strategy” of mine went far beyond critiquing the culture’s entertainment, the goal always being to argue for the truth of Christianity in contrast to the lies of secularism, or any kind of God-less or non-Christian view of reality.

“Daddy’s Always Teaching”
The Great Commission starts with children, if we have them, and only then to others. I’ve never been particularly “intentional” about discipling our kids as we traditionally think of it. I was never good about Bible reading and prayer with them, family devotionals and so on. I tried from time to time, but I let life get in the way. But what I was good at was teaching them that Christianity is true. That is the only reason I became a Christian, and the only reason I stay one. It was second nature to me that when we had children I would teach them the same thing. Not too many years ago I was telling my daughter how bummed out I was that I was a terrible “spiritual” leader in our home, and she said, “Well, at least you taught us Christianity is the truth.” Well, there is that, and if one has to choose, and of course one doesn’t, then truth is the more important in our age, by far. We can’t assume our children actually believe Christianity is true, and every other religion and worldview is a lie. We have to teach them that, all the time.

Which brings me back to my daughter, our oldest, and one of the great moments of my life. In saying that I do not exaggerate. One Sunday on our way home from church, I was doing my typical lecturing on various and sundry topics. Our youngest, a son, maybe seven or eight at the time, said something with not a little annoyance like, “Why do you always have to lecture us, Dad?” I was nonplussed, surprised, taken aback, when our daughter came to the rescue: “Because, Dominic, daddy is always teaching.” My heart melted—truly one of the great compliments of my life. After all, this is one of the primary reasons I exist: the profound responsibility to raise our children before God.

Remember, it is not enough to know what we believe, we must know why. I get the impression most Christian parents are better at teaching the what, while the why is too often assumed. Maybe they assume the truth, the realness of their Faith, is self‑evident to their children. Or they believe it, and take their children to church assuming they’ll believe it too. But we must understand that we live in a time where our Faith is called into question in countless ways, and therefore, it must be defended to and for our kids in the face of those questions.

Lastly, when I was looking to publish my book I got pushback from some people who thought I was claiming I could guarantee that our children would never abandon the faith. So as not to be misunderstood, we cannot guarantee anything, and are in control of nothing (which is why we are enjoined throughout Scripture to trust the Lord and pray). However there is much we can do, which you can find out by reading the book. But it does not follow that just because we are not ultimately responsible for the results we can’t have confidence that we can build into our children a lifelong and enduring faith. Ultimately, thankfully, our confidence is not in our performance as parents, but in God’s provision. We learn an important principle in spiritual growth and sanctification from the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 3:

6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.

What happens with the seeds we plant in our children’s lives is up to God, but because of his covenant promises to us and our covenant children, our confidence is fully justified. However, He can’t do it without us. That’s the way farming works; no farmer, no farm, just weeds. But without God nothing grows.

Having said this, I understand the insecurity many Christian parents feel living in a dominant secular Western culture hostile to our Faith. But the conclusion I came to at the end of writing the book, is the conviction I started with at the beginning: Christianity is so powerfully credible that my kids should never want to leave it, or even be tempted to do so. God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways, and has provided us an over‑abundance of resources, that it is inconceivable that a secular Western culture would be more appealing to our children than Christianity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Danger of Intentions and Love’s Answer

The Danger of Intentions and Love’s Answer

Oct 15, 2025 | The Gospel

Early in my Christian life, my fundamentalist phase as I call it, introspection was encouraged. Part of this examination was questioning my motives and intentions to make certain they were not sinful but pure. The problem was that I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a perfectly pure motive in my entire life. I know my sinful heart all too well, and it’s not given to purity of motive. I also realized I was given to morbid introspection where I would try to pick apart what I was thinking, and guilt was a constant companion because it was anything but pure. Instead of looking to the cross and trusting God the Holy Spirit to do the inner transformation I needed, I thought I could figure me out. Good luck with that! I may as well dive into the vortex of a black hole. God through the prophet Jeremiah tells us why:

9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?

Over time I realized that if I had a hard time understanding my own intentions, how much more impossible it would be to figure out the intentions of other people. Yet I realized how easy it was for me to presume that not only could I figure out what they were, but I was certain about it! Whatever they said or did, I could perfectly infer their intentions, what they meant by what they said or did. If they weren’t certain what their intentions were, I could help them out.

At some point along the way I learned some things, and God had been dealing with me and my own issues, so I decided I wouldn’t do this anymore. If I wanted to know what someone’s motives or intentions were, I would do something shocking to most people—I would ask them. Until then I had no right to assume I knew. As we learned when we were kids, or should have, what happens when you assume something? You make an ass out of u and me. Don’t do that! Yet we do it all the time, especially about other people. So, don’t do that either!

God had obviously been working on me along the way, or more likely working me over, and because of his great mercy, for some reason I even decided I would give other people the benefit of the doubt and not assume the worst about them and what they intended. I know, that’s crazy! Isn’t it a rule of life or something that we must assume the worst about people? In fact it isn’t, but our sinful human tendency is to do just that. Unfortunately, this mentality God has ingrained in me through the pain of sanctification, is not common among sinful human beings. If it were there would be much more peace and harmony. Sinful human beings will always incline to reading intentions and motives into people’s actions or words, and then determine those are in fact their actual intentions and motives without ever asking.

How Do We Escape Intentions?
Well, first of all, that’s impossible. We are intending beings. When we do or say something, we have a purpose or plan in saying it, our intention. The reason we do or say it is our motive, the thing that is compelling us to act. These two dynamics are integral to human psychology, which means my question to start this section is senseless; we can’t escape our intentions. What we can do, however, is better understand them, learn to read them, so we can better figure out why we do or say what we do, and maybe not do or say it. Or do or say it differently.

This process is called sanctification, and it’s not easy, to say the least. It’s like being the anvil, and life is the hammer. Often we think it’s God wielding it, and it hurts! He is, of course, but not quite the way we think. That’s why I used the phrase “pain of sanctification” previously. It’s like a forging process. As metal is not easily molded without extreme heat and force so we are not either, sadly. Diamonds are also created in the earth through extremes of heat and pressure, and because they are so rare they are of great value. The process of sanctification is difficult, but the fruit is sweet, for us and everyone else in our lives.

So, if we can’t escape intentions, ours or anyone else’s, what are we supposed to do? Simple, learn to understand them. Of course that’s easier said than done, but it’s not impossible. As in politics, all it really takes is the will to want to do it. In the Christian life that’s simple: we don’t have a choice. Let me ask a question which has flummoxed friends and relatives for years. Why does God put other people, especially difficult people, in our lives. The answer is really simple, if seemingly impossible at times: to teach us how to love them! Ugh! I told this to a nephew of mine once, and he happened to be lying on the ground. He started wiggling and screaming Noooooo!!!! Then he said the magic words we all naturally feel—I don’t want to! Of course you don’t! That’s why God didn’t give us the choice. And lest you think I learned this in a book or theoretically, I didn’t. I was young, probably around 30, and this co-worker was terribly annoying. One day I was praying, more like complaining, to God and asked him the question: Why did you put this person in my life? And I could swear I heard him tell me out loud, “To teach you how to love her, you moron!” Well, maybe not he moron part, but the message was clear, and I never asked that question again.

So, how are we to go about doing what we just don’t want to do? A miracle, of course. This is in a way to answer the question at the top of this section. It might be better stated; how do we escape the tyranny of intentions? By what Charles Hodge explained as Christianity: the work of God in the soul of man. In other words, it’s a supernatural work of the power of God’s Holy Spirit in us that will get us to do what is impossible for us to do on our own, and which we don’t want to do anyway. It’s not just a matter of the will, of deciding, by golly, I’m going to love that poor slob! I really despise the person, but since I’m so magnanimous, I’ll cut them some slack. Leave it to a sinner to turn loving someone else into something about themselves. We’re hilarious, we sinners.

Love is the Drug I’m Thinking Of
That phrase might sound familiar to you if you’re a boomer or gen X’er. It’s a catchy 1975 tune from the band Roxy Music, and has nothing to do with the love I’m thinking of. That love is only from above, the love that comes from He who is love. This is when it gets kind of tricky, so if you want to escape and not bother with dealing with other people in this way, it’s best to stop reading (or listening) now. Before I get to the nitty gritty, I want to share a story of my having to deal with the beast in me, and how I learned my need for such love.

When I was in college I was involved in a Christian campus ministry called the Navigators. One Saturday we went to a swap meet to try to sell stuff and share the gospel. When I was ready to go back to school at the end of the day, the head of the ministry, an older guy probably in his thirties at the time, said he wanted to go back with me. I didn’t realize he had an ulterior motive—my sanctification. Mike was a guy who could be blunt and had piercing eyes. He could be intimidating. Pulling no punches he comes right out and says, “You’re not a very nice person to be around. You always want people to think like you, and you make them feel bad if they don’t.” And words so related. I was devastated. I can be intense, but am I really that horrible? I didn’t ask. That night back in the dorm I experienced what is called a dark night of the soul. I told God not only can I not love people; I also don’t want to! At that moment this Christianity thing felt impossible, and I didn’t think I could do it. Thankfully, that was a Saturday, and the next morning I went to church. Whether it was in the sermon or a verse I read, God said something along the lines of, of course you can’t do it, but I can do it through you! I remember an instant change from despair to hope.

If you ask me if God can still do miracles, I say of course he can. I know he still heals people of various maladies, but what’s far more profound to me is enabling two self-absorbed sinners to truly love one another. Now that’s a miracle! Such a miracle can only be found in one place, the cross. One of the reasons Christianity is historically verifiable is because of the many crazy things Jesus said, and this is one of them:

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

As modern people who’ve never actually seen a crucifixion, or a bunch of them at once, something common in the Roman Empire, we’ll have no idea what a horror it was. For Jesus to try to build a following on a metaphor of the cross is beyond absurd. Nobody makes that up. It had to come from the real Jesus of Nazareth, the real Son of God and Savior of the world. That’s the deal, though. In order to love others you have to die to yourself, and as the metaphor implies, it’s likely not going to be pleasant. Get used to it. But as Jesus also says (John 12:4)

24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

That’s the deal, there can’t be spiritual life without death to self, but in death is fruit and abundance, life and flourishing. Everyone knows selfish kids are insufferable, but so are selfish adults. When it’s all about me it’s about nobody else but me.

Sin is ultimately relational, first with God, then ourselves, then others. In Romans 12:1 Paul tells us because of  God’s mercy, we are to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, which is holy and pleasing to God. Those two words don’t normally go together, living and sacrifice, but dying to self is the path to true life. Then Paul adds something amazing. Doing this, he says, is our reasonable, rational, logical service or worship of God. In other words, it makes total sense logically in light of everything He has done for us in Christ. We are then compelled to love others. And in verse 2 he tells us how we are to do it, even if much of the time we’re not quite sure. Paul tells us, though, that we can “test and approve” what that is, what is God’s “good, pleasing and perfect will.” And there is nothing more God wills than that we should love others.

Loving Others is Not a Choice
That’s the thing about Christianity, it’s a take it or leave it proposition, as can be seen from Jesus using the cross as a recruiting tool. I’ve already said it, but it’s necessary to repeat: we have to love others whether we want to or not, whether it’s easy or not. Most of the time it isn’t. But what makes me compelled to do what can be so distasteful to me, is that I am commanded to do it by the very words of Jesus. From the Sermon on the Mount he commands us:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he was practicing what he preaches. Paul tells us in Romans 5:

10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

We were God’s enemies, and Christ died for us! Paul also tells us in Colossians:

21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.

The Greek word for enemies implies a hateful, odious, hostility. That is how we thought of God in our rebellion, and he still literally loved us to death, his own, in the person of His Son. That’s why we don’t have a choice. In fact, the more sanctified we become and the better we get at it, we’ll ask ourselves, how am I to love this person. Better yet, we’ll pray for God to help us figure out how to love this person, and give us the willingness to do it. You’ll know you’re on the right track as you pray about it when you start giving thanks for this person, and actually mean it. Paul tells is in I Thessalonians 5:

18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

All, not some. That includes people. And the thanksgiving is specifically in Christ Jesus. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” or this variation over 70 times in his letters, so to him Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension have implications for every aspect and every moment of our lives. Everything we do is “in Christ,” thus we can’t see our relationships with others apart from Christ. The reason we can love others is because, as John says, God first love us, and that in Christ. That is I John 4:19, and John follows it up with the message of Jesus:

20 If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen. 21 And we have this command from Him: The one who loves God must also love his brother.

Lastly, since we’re talking about intentions and motives, we need to be careful that we’re not hoping this person will change just so they don’t annoy us so much. As shocking as it often is for us to hear, it’s not all about us. We’re supposed to love others for their good, which is why Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love our neighbors then adds, as we love ourselves. Only when we love others will we really be loving ourselves. When we do that, it will always be for our good in the end. And even if we’re not successful for whatever reason, God is glorified in our obedience. And what is the chief end of man, in the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. In that case, love is the drug I’m thinking of.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening

Charlie Kirk and The Current Great Awakening

Oct 8, 2025 | Western Civilization

When I started thinking about writing my last book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the words awakening and Great Awakening were out there in the zeitgeist, which in German means the spirit of the age. It’s the cultural climate of the period in which we live, and in early 2022 because Biden had “won” the election, we were in the full flower of the Covid scam and Wokistan. It was a dark time, and it would have been easy to lose hope, but because of the excesses of the left in government and culture, people were waking up to the truth. The realization many people were coming to happened specifically because they were being exposed to lies on such a massive scale that it became glaringly obvious something was deeply wrong with America’s ruling class. Although only some of these people were waking up to Jesus, and it was more than a few, others were in a way waking up to Jesus without knowing it. There are metaphysical and spiritual implications to truth because of he who is The Truth. If a person is an atheist or agnostic, and their minds start opening to truth, they are getting dangerously close to the source of all truth. This dynamic is possible because we are at the end of the several hundred year experiment of the Enlightenment. All Enlightenment figures believed in truth, except in a version untethered from the source of truth. Now because secularism born of the Enlightenment failed, truth now point to Jesus rather than away from him.

I wrote a piece here in June ’22 arguing that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left, which took over the Democrat Party with Obama’s election, only believes in “the narrative,” or whatever it is that advances and sustains their ideological agenda. They will use the “will to power” to advance it by any means possible. The ends always justifies the means for them. On the other side are old fashioned liberals who believe there is such a thing as truth, and have rejected the leftist takeover of the party. Of course, this doesn’t mean all those who believe in truth will end up putting their trust in Christ, but it does mean they can be confronted with the claims of the ultimate source of truth, the one who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Those arguments today are more plausible, and have more persuasive power, at this end of the failed Enlightenment. The reason is that philosophically, you can’t get truth from dirt, from mere molecules. Without God truth can’t ultimately prevail because it is grounded in nothing, and so doesn’t even exist. But it does, and so it can.

Which brings us to the difference of this Great Awakening from the previous two: it comes in a secular culture where Christianity’s influence was minimal at best. The previous two Awakenings took place in thoroughly Christian cultures, so there really is no comparison to our current cultural moment. Rediscovering truth as a cultural touchstone is important because it is a rejection of the relativism and postmodernism that dominated the second half of the 20th century, and found its ultimate realization in the leftism of the 21st. Up until the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 it seemed the triumph of secularism, and the third class status of Christians, would go on for the foreseeable future. But things took a radical change that day, one for many of us that is still hard to believe. Unless it is really happening, and it is.

I’ve said this many times here, and argue it extensively in my book, that secularism is basically dead. It had a good, very long run, but has run its course and proved to be a colossal failure. I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It seemed as indestructible as the physical wall separating East from West Germany, and fell as ignominiously. The basic premise of secularism was that a society could function and flourish without God, and it is glaringly obvious that doesn’t work. I was born in 1960, and the remnant of Christendom was hanging by a thread, it’s foundations having been completely gutted by the nascent secularism driven by America’s cultural elites. When Kennedy was shot and the Beatles showed up on the Ed Sullivan show a little over two months later, everything changed. What we came to call “the 60s” ushered in a cultural revolution that is only now coming to its somber end in 2025.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Real
By this third decade of the 21st century the youngest among us were hungering for something real, something that works, that makes sense of reality, that brings real meaning, real fulfillment, real hope, real joy, real healing, real anything. Secularism brought only disappointment and dysfunction because it only deals with half of reality, the material half, and that half will never make a person whole. If the material is all there is, then goodness, beauty, and truth cannot exist. They are only concepts “in the eyes of the beholder.” What ends up happening as we’ve seen throughout history, is that without God rooted in Scripture, goodness turns bad, beauty turns ugly, and truth into lies. It is inevitable. But the fact of the matter is that goodness, beauty, and truth do exist, and these metaphysical realities are touching millions around the world today, especially young people in the West who’ve grown up on a consistent diet of lies.

What is so shocking to many, I dare say most of us, is the seeming rapidity of the change. We felt the same way with peak woke that grew during Trump’s first term, and then came to dominate culture and politics in Biden’s term. Then all of a sudden, Trump’s elected again, and Christians and Christianity went from being mocked and denigrated, to Christ being proclaimed from the rooftops, including by the highest government officials, and that boldly. In a way we have Charlie Kirk to thank for that, but his horrible death only popped the cork, and the spiritual bubbly sprayed over the entire culture, and indeed throughout the world. It was yet another massive red pill in this Great Awakening journey God is granting his creatures. We also have the Internet to thank as well. First, information can no longer be controlled by the secular, leftist gatekeepers who once determined what was important and was allowed to be disseminated. And now people, especially young people, are getting their news and information from social media and the Internet, unfiltered, and uncontrolled by the secular leftists.

What is also amazing about this Great Awakening, is that while we’re breaking out of secularism like those awaking from a nightmare, we also seem to be breaking out of the Pietism that has dominated Evangelical Christianity for almost two hundred years. The lived Christian experience became a primarily personal version of spirituality. Another piece I’ve written here tells the story of Pietism and secularism being two sides of the same coin, each enabling the other. Charlie Kirk has been instrumental in bringing Christianity back to its world changing, culture transforming roots. While not being driven theologically, he realized through his talent and organizational skills at making things happen that it was Christianity that allowed society to function and flourish as God intended. As I recently heard a new British Christian, Louise Perry on Twitter say of Christianity, “If it were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” That is brilliant! Christianity lived out in obedience to God and his law, blesses wherever it goes, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago. Kirk understood better than most, it was Christianity that allowed true human flourishing in every area of life, including in politics.

More Christians than ever in my lifetime, especially politically and culturally influential Christians, are proclaiming Christ as King, and that our nation must be a Christian nation, rightly understood. And keep in mind, God used the most unlikely vessel to spark this spiritual wildfire, Donald Trump, with the Holy Spirit lighting that spark. It isn’t that Trump is our Moses leading us to the promised land, or a paragon of Christian virtue, but God enabled him to start something in hindsight no other public figure could: he drove the left certifiably insane. This was also enabled by the NeverTrumper right who revealed their true colors as the controlled opposition, and the result of this has been a revelation of God beyond anything that’s happened since the triumph of secularism in the 20th century. Initially, the title of my book was, Trump the Great Revealer, but my publisher suggested changing it because the book isn’t about Trump, but the Great Awakening coming in his wake, a great revealing.

The left revealing its true evil nature is God’s judgment in giving these people exactly what they wanted, and it just wasn’t good enough. They wanted more because at heart they are totalitarians. It reminds me of the passage in Romans 1 where Paul is speaking of God’s wrath against sinful humanity:

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Sexual debauchery is only one of the consequences of man’s rebellion against God, of his giving them over to their desires, because its ugly manifestations infect everything. Human nature being what it is, things often have to get very bad for people to eventually repent and find their way back to the Author of life that is truly life. Which is a good introduction to a change in my prayer habits that happened several years ago coinciding with my own eschatological awakening.

The Four R’s: Revival, Renewal, Restoration, and Reformation
For several hundred years in the Evangelical Church prayer for revival has been common. We’ve seen wide revivals like the Great Awakenings, and pockets of revival throughout Western history. I realized several years ago that revival in a secular society is no longer enough. In previous revivals, all Christians believed their faith should have societal consequences. Then as Pietism and secularism, two sides of the same coin, came to dominate Western culture in the 20th century, revivals became solely “spiritual.” For some my two sides claim seems odd. After all, isn’t Pietism deeply religious, and secularism not religious at all? The point is that one enables the other. Pietism is primarily about a privatized, personal religious faith, and secularism demands a privatized, personalized faith. In a secular Republic, like America is now, but slowly breaking out of, faith is allowed, but not in the public square. As long as religion stays within the four walls of the house or church, the secularist thinks it’s great, but when it starts sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, like government or law or education, it must be silenced and forced back into the private and personal.

Because of this Pietistic-secular dynamic, several years ago I stopped praying for revival only, and began praying the four R’s, for revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The first R is for the spiritual rebirth of individuals by the power of the Holy Spirit. The next two Rs means those people bring that spiritual awakening into God’s creation to renew and restore it, and the fourth R into the church to transform it into the engine of renewal and restoration for God’s people so they go out into the world to extend Christ’s reign on earth.

What this means in practice is that I am now praying for the earthly reclamation project that is the gospel. For too long Christians have seen the gospel in narrow, truncated terms, as if it was only about our personal salvation from sin. The gospel means, in effect, saying the sinner’s prayer, the Four Spiritual Laws, the Romans Road. In fact, what makes the Great Commission great, is that going from spiritual death to life, from darkness to light, is only the beginning. We are then to take that life and light into all of life. What did Jesus say when he gave the disciples their commission? Teach “them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And then Jesus gave us the New Testament to let us know what everything meant, and then to take that everything into every area of life. All things are transformed by the gospel, which means God’s kingdom coming and his will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

The beauty of this Great Awakening is that in large measure because of Charlie Kirk and all the work he did for the last 13 years, and then his assassination, more Christians are starting to understand that we can’t stop at the first R. His memorial is a great example of how renewal and restoration happen. Almost the entire executive branch of the United States Government was present, as were many from Congress. The boldness of government officials proclaiming Christ unashamedly was something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my lifetime. Sure, Christians have served in government, and boldly proclaimed their faith, but not in this way, not on such a grand scale. In addition to the people attending in two venues in Arizona, it is estimated that over a hundred million people saw it worldwide, and how many more will see clips and snippets into the foreseeable future is unknowable, but surely massive. Charlie Kirk in death is reaching far more than in life.

I recently heard Vice President J.D. Vance say in an interview that prior to Kirk’s murder, he hadn’t read the Bible much, and was uncomfortable being outspoken about his faith, but since he’s reading the Bible every day, and boldly proclaiming Jesus. He’s not the only one either. This is now widespread in the halls of power in the United States of America. And whatever anyone thinks about President Trump, he has really led the way in Making Christianity Great Again in America. Christianity has been welcome in his White House unlike any president in modern times, and given free reign to speak and be itself. That is an answer to my prayer for renewal and restoration. We add reformation when Christians realize the all-encompassing nature of the mission of the church, of God’s people taking the authority of King Jesus and Christian worldview into every nook and cranny of life because we understand again the theological richness of the first Reformation. The scope and extent of the gospel’s influence will then be unleased on the secularism that has decimated Christian Western civilization. But that means we will have to address the big lie of secularism.

The Secular Myth of Neutrality
Unfortunately, most Christians have never heard this phrase, and would likely not know what I was talking about. As I mentioned above, in a secular society religion is primarily a private affair. There is a long history of why this came to exist in Western societies, but religion is never just a private thing. Every nation and people has a view of reality that includes ultimate things, answers to the great questions of life that give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, or at least attempt to. There has to be some ultimate source of authority in every society, and if it’s not God it will be the state. We saw this come to full fruition in the tyranny of Biben administration, and now on terrible display in the UK. The religion of secularism was on full display, man like God determining what is good and evil (Gen. 3). There has never been and will never be a neutral public space where ultimate questions don’t have to be answered, it’s a myth, one we’ve been mired in since at least the end of World War II.

Ever since we’ve lived in a secular republic informed by the liberal (read left-wing) post-World War II “consensus.” That word in quotes means, sadly, that conservatives (including Christians) have gone along with the “consensus.” Most conservatives still buy into this, thinking something like a “Christian nation” is an oxymoron, in the words of Larry Arnn which I wrote about last year. I hope he’s changed his mind on that contention. The reason he said it, and why conservatives believe it, is because they believe if a nation is Christian, the government will force all the people to believe Christian things. That’s ridiculous because Christianity doesn’t teach such a thing, in fact exactly the opposite. Just read the gospels and Acts. Jesus seemed to do everything he could to get people not to follow him. And the Apostles simply proclaimed a resurrected Jesus as the Messianic fulfillment of the Jewish religion. People were free to believe it, or not.

Somewhere along the way in Christian history, Christians forgot this, and started forcing Christian belief with the threat of persecution, and sometimes death. That was when church and state were truly mixed up in an unbiblical and unhealthy way. Even then, however, the church couldn’t execute those they deemed heretics. That was a job for the state, the institution wielding of the sword (Rom. 13) for justice. This brings up something like blasphemy laws. Certainly, such a thing has no place in a Christian nation, right? Wrong. As we’ve seen in our secular republic, blasphemy laws are alive and well. The only difference is the content considered blasphemous. We all know and lived through this in the Biden years. The lie of the myth of neutrality was on full display, which I now see is why God allowed him to “win” the 2020 election. We got leftism on steroids. Some liberals and conservatives (who are basically liberals as well), still contend that a neutral secular state is the ideal we should strive for, but such a thing can’t exist, and never will.

That means in this age of the four R’s, this Great Awakening, Christians need to think seriously what a Christian nation in the modern world looks like. That will take a lot of work and debate and discussion, but many are now undertaking that. Part of the subtitle of my book was the refounding of America. The founders got a lot of things right, but not everything. Much of the Christian foundation of the republic happened because America was formed in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture, which was assumed, not explicitly stated. That was because secularism was already a force even then. That needs to change, and it is, but none of this will be easy. God gave us, then took away from us much too soon, a Charlie Kirk to give us a good start. Let’s build on his legacy so we can bless the generations to come with what he gave his life for.