21 Aug Don’t Go Down With the Ship
WE ARE TO LIVE FOR THE NEXT WORLD, NOT THIS ONE
In his book, Brave New World, Aldus Huxley envisioned a very unpleasant future, not because things people wanted were being withheld from them (as was imagined in Orwell’s book 1984), but rather, because everything was given to them.
With the glut of things available, regardless of their value, people began to sink to the level of their lowest appetites, causing a drastic deterioration in quality of life.
In its broad strokes, this seems to be what is happening in the United States. Our biblical heritage in the United States is becoming unraveled, and with it, the church is in danger of becoming unraveled. Pollster George Barna has, over the last 20 or so years, chronicled the unnerving decline of biblical values in American culture, which is paralleled in the church just 5 or 10 years later.
The Blind Quest for Happiness
As a culture, we have forgotten God. As a result, we no longer believe in objective truth. So, we have replaced truth with feelings, we have replaced facts with opinions, and we have joined a mad race to try to find happiness in life by following personal desires.
This pursuit of personal happiness is, counter-intuitively, creating great un-happiness. We are created by God, for God, and we can only be fulfilled with God. Happiness is not found by pursuing happiness. It is a byproduct of pursuing God.
Blaise Pascal observed:
“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and others avoiding it is the same desire in both, attending with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this objective. This is the motive of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
Pascal went on to say that people try in vain to fill the desire for happiness by whatever they can lay their hands on in the world around them. But these are all inadequate, because their deep desires can only be filled by God.
Whatever affects American culture also affects Christians because Christians are part of the world of American culture. No one can help being influenced by the culture in which he lives. That is how God created us, as social beings.
This helps us when the culture is good. It hurts us when the culture is bad. American Christians have been slow to perceive or accept the degree to which they are being assimilated into American culture. In leaning over to help the world, we have fallen in.
The Biblical Quest for God
So a deeply committed Christian must be quick to pick up on the weaknesses of the culture in which he lives, realizing that those weaknesses are affecting him. The challenge is to reject the values of the world in favor of the values of Scripture.
German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Englishman C.S. Lewis went further:
Christ says, “Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there; I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self… I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
As believers, we are called to stand apart from the world, to not be seduced by its self-destructive values.
Paul urges us, in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” In other words, we are not to go down with the ship!
The Apostle John wrote:
Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
We are to live in this world according to the values of the next, placing our hope in the world to come.
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