We live in very strange times, something I’m reminded of every time I go to the store and for some strange reason everyone is wearing masks, except me! I wonder if I’ve entered the Twilight Zone, but my family assures me this is very much reality. So more than ever I’m in need of recalibration. I came across this phrase, “recalibrate your reality,” while listening to an episode of White Horse Inn some time ago, and it stuck with me. To calibrate usually refers to some device that does measurements, and setting it up so it can measure accurately. Put an “re” before it, and it is now being fine tuned to measure more effectively. The gentleman being interviewed on the podcast said we spend most of the week living in what we think is THE reality, and the God stuff is part of THAT. But that has it exactly backward. The Sunday reality is THE reality, and the rest of our week is part of that. Our tendency is to fit God into our story, when what we should be doing is fitting our story into God’s. Big, huge, gargantuan difference! (more…)
One of the most important things to teach your children, and to remind them and yourself daily, is that life is hard. The root of anger, and bitterness, and frustration, and just an overall bad attitude, is to expect it not be hard, as if the difficulties in life are somehow just a bug and not a feature. In one of the great understatements of history, Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Some translations use the word tribulations, and in the Greek it means, properly, pressure (what constricts or rubs together), used of a narrow place that “hems someone in”; tribulation, especially internal pressure that causes someone to feel confined (restricted, “without options”). Yeah, that sums it up pretty well. God said to Adam and Eve that life in a fallen world would be full of painful toil by the sweat of our brow, with constant thorns and thistles. In other words, life is hard! For Christians, however, hard is good. (more…)
You may have heard the term Scientism, which is treating science as something it was never intended to be, the only source of knowledge and insight into the true nature of reality. Actually science is much more humble than that; it knows it’s place, what it can and can’t do, should and should not do. Ever since the so-called Enlightenment, as Western intellectuals were turning away from religion, science slowly came to replace religion as man’s most reliable authority about the nature of reality. I came across a video from 2012 put out by the Discovery Institute called, “The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism.” It was being promoted at their website, Evolution News, with a title that instantly drew me in: “C. S. Lewis Foresaw Scientism’s Totalitarian Potential.” It is, of course, no coincidence that they are promoting the warnings of Lewis about the dangers of scientism at this point in time.
Watch the short documentary, and it will become quickly apparent how prophetic Lewis was about scientism in the age of COVID-19:
It’s kind of apparent that we are in a culture war. Make no mistake, conservative Christians didn’t start it, but we can’t escape it. Christianity had a great run in Western civilization as the default view of reality, over 1,500 years! That, of course, is no longer the case. The breakdown started a long time ago, arguably by the 1,600s, and Christianity ever since slowly, imperceptibly at first, lost influence and authority in the West. Even into the mid-20th century there was a thin veneer of christian influence in American culture, but that ended with what we’ve come to call The 60s. With the rise of the sexual revolution, the assault on all things Christian broke out into the open. The deconstructing of the family became job one of the secularists, and sadly many Christians have gone along for the ride. (more…)
As distressing as this over-hyped COVID-19 pandemic has been (a real threat to only a very definable fraction of 1% of the population), there have been some silver linings. One is that I’m questioning things I would have never questioned pre-COVID, and that’s a very good thing. Many of those questions are directed at modern medicine, and medical establishment, which has become for me a quintessential living example of the fall of man described in Genesis 3. Satan’s temptation to Eve was simple: God is a liar, and if you eat of the tree “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” With one bite we became beings who think we get to determine our own reality, a very God-like capability. The problem, of course, is that Satan is a liar. The bigger problem,is that people believe him, just as Eve did. (more…)
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