If God is real, and he most certainly is, why does he not seem real to so many people? The answer is simple: The heights of Western culture are dominated by secularists who think God is a curiosity from a benighted past out of which science and the rational Enlightenment have rescued us. They dominate education, entertainment, and media of all kinds, those instruments of influence in the culture that have a significant effect on how we view and interpret reality. For them, God seems no more real than Santa Clause. A sociological term that captures this phenomenon is plausibility structure, or those influences in the culture that make certain things seem real (plausible) to us, or not. Unless someone has a strong competing plausibility structure, like their home and church, God likely will not have much relevance to their lives. Most people like it that way, but they are not why I write this post.
When I became a “born-again Christian,” as we were called way back when, my primary thought was that if God is really real, if this is not some fairy tale or wishful thinking, then he deserves my all. Everything I think and do would be affected because, well, he’s God and I’m not! I think being raised a nominal Catholic (we went to mass every Sunday, but that was about it) had two important positive influences on my young mind. One, I believed there was such a thing as Truth, and two, that the Bible contained that Truth. As a Catholic I never remember being encouraged to read the Bible, so unsurprisingly I never did. But I heard it read every Sunday, and believed it was God’s word. This was part of my competing plausibility structure.
The pastor at our church last Sunday said there were likely three types of people hearing his sermon:
- Those who accept the gospel, but whose hearts are cold to the truth and reality contained therein
- Those who accept the gospel, and are passionate about its truth in their lives
- And those have yet to accept it
In a theological sense, God’s sovereign purposes in election can explain these three types of people (and everything in between), but the temptation is to say there’s not much we can do about it because that’s the way God wants it. However, human responsibility is never abrogated by God’s sovereignty. Yes, everything is in some way just as God wants it because he’s working out his sovereign, redemptive purposes for the building of his kingdom, and eventually our resurrection in a new heavens and earth. But in the meantime there are all kinds of things we can and must do. To get a sense of what I mean, we read these words from the only Psalm (127) penned by King Solomon:
Unless the Lord builds the house,
the builders labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the guards stand watch in vain.
Whatever is built without the Lord is, in Hebrew, emptiness and vanity, literally nothing. But without the builders, i.e., us, there can be no house! We are what’s known in philosophy as secondary causes. Without the primary cause, God, nothing can happen, but he uses secondary causes, us, to make it happen. And guess what that means? We better build really good houses! If we don’t, we only have secondary causes to blame.
Part of the reason people accept the message but it doesn’t impact their heart or lives is because the secular culture has zapped from their minds and imaginations the reality of God; he isn’t real to them in any meaningful sense. So what do we, and pastors, need to do about this in addition to pray? Persuade these people that God is indeed real! And that Jesus is who he said he was, and that he rose from the dead. In other words, that Christianity is the Truth! So even though the Lord by the power of his Holy Spirit builds the plausibility structure house in the person’s soul, we and pastors must do whatever we can to build it as well, so that Christianity will seem way more real to them than Santa Clause.
We must counter the secular message machine at every turn, which is why I wrote a book on persuasive Christian parenting. I never expected my children would buy this Christian thing simply because I did, or I took them to church and read the Bible and prayed with them. My job was and is to persuade them that it’s the Truth. So just as I parent apologetically (defend Christianity as the Truth), and encourage every other parent in our age to do so as well, I also pray pastors would preach apologetically. Too many pastors, probably most, think the people sitting in the pews are on the same plausibility page as they are in respect to the realness of the message they preach, but that’s not possible in the secular 21st century West. Tim Keller is a great example of a pastor who preaches apologetically; he’s always defending the message because he can’t assume everyone hearing him believes it’s the Truth. He was likely compelled to do this because he started his church in the most secular of places, New York City, but I contend every pastor in every city and town and village must do the same. That is if they want the God they preach to seem real to their parishioners because, well, he is!
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