Escaping the Grip of Worldliness
To love the Lord Jesus, to cleave to Him with full purpose of heart, to count him as “all our salvation and all our desire,” this is what He requires. This is also what our blessed Savior deserves from each of His redeemed people. If we do not despise worldly trifles, when standing in competition with His will, His presence, and His glory, then He shall regard us as denying Him, and we must expect to be denied by Him in the judgment day!
Worldliness is the besetting sin of most professing Christians! It is certain that very many of them are as eager in the pursuit of wealth as the heathen. This accounts for the little influence of the Word of God upon them. The seed is good, but the soil is bad! And the noxious weeds of worldliness, by their speedy and incessant growth, keep down the feebler plants of piety in the soul.
“The cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lust for other things, choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful.” Mark 4:19
But please note that it is not the overt act of covetousness or creature-dependence that is condemned, but the inward disposition of the mind and heart. The supreme delight of mind that arises from the possession of wealth, is itself a denial of the sufficiency of Christ to be our desired portion and treasure.
O, brethren, enter into your own bosoms, and judge yourselves in relation to this matter. Inquire whether Christ has such a full possession of your hearts, as to render all earthly things relatively vain, empty, and worthless, in your estimation. If not, then how can you call Christ your desired portion, or imagine that you have formed a proper estimate of the immeasurable blessings of salvation? Know assuredly, that if you have proper views of Christ, you will regard Him as your Pearl of Great Price!
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Divine Therapy
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, September 10, 2021
Being overwhelmed by a vision of a great God at the center of all things is ultimately the only antidote to confusing the needs of ourselves as creatures with the meaning of life. While the pathologies of our culture—from materialism to sexual confusion—each have their own distinctives, the solution is ultimately the same: a vision of God that makes every problem, challenge, or question seem like a passing momentary affliction compared to the eternal weight of glory that is to come.There can be little doubt that we live in an age where the individual is sovereign. Whether it is commercials selling products on the basis of how they will make us feel or parents suing schools for refusing to allow their children to attend class dressed in any way they choose, ours is a world where individual rights and demands carry a peculiar weight. And the result is that our institutions, particularly our voluntary institutions, are more like boutiques competing for customers in the marketplace of self-fulfillment. Colleges sell themselves on the basis of allowing students to find themselves and reach their potential. And churches promote their programs as sources of personal happiness and well-being. Religious and irreligious, we are all expressive individuals now, seeing the purpose of life as feeling good and anything that hinders that as being evil.
The question of how to counter this and to recapture the New Testament’s vision of the Church as a body of believers who find their identity not in themselves but in love of God and of each other is a pressing but difficult one, made more so by the fact that our problem is in part the result of something we all consider good. Freedom of religion is a wonderful thing. Who wants to live under a regime where simply gathering together in the Lord’s name might merit prosecution, incarceration, or even death? It is good to worship without fear of reprisals.
Yet, when there is religious freedom, there is religious choice; and where there is religious choice, congregants are always in danger of tilting towards being customers, and churches towards being spiritual boutiques, presenting themselves as the answer to particular needs or desires. Add to that mix a normative notion of selfhood that places the individual and his or her needs—”felt” needs, to use the modern phrase—at the center of life, and the stage is set for precisely the kind of religion we have today.
A Vision of God in His Glory
If the problems of consumerist Christianity are so deeply entwined with the pathologies of the wider culture, from its cult of the independent self to its imperious belief that personal happiness is the great criterion of truth, then it is easy to despair. How, as Christians, do we break from this seductive cage in which we find ourselves and in which too often we enjoy being confined? And how do we persuade the rising generation that Christianity is not simply one possible option available for finding happiness and satisfaction in this life but rather is the very meaning of life itself?
I would like to suggest that one vital part of the answer is to be found in that most difficult and yet glorious of Christian teachings, the doctrine of God, particularly the doctrine of God as he is in himself. If patriotism leads individuals to see themselves (and if necessary, sacrifice themselves) in light of a larger, greater reality, that of the nation, so Christians stand or fall by whether they see the God they worship as truly greater than themselves. A God who is simply man writ large is no more worthy of devotion, and no more captivating to the imagination, than a sports hero or a movie star. Only as our imaginations are taken captive by a vision of God in his glory will we see any change in the wider malaise of modernity which afflicts our religious institutions.
I have some personal grounds for believing this can be done. Each year I teach an undergraduate course on the doctrine of God, and each year I am delightfully surprised by the effect it has on many students.
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Naturalism: Bumping into Reality
Naturalism denies the obvious, reducing human beings to physical parts stuck together without reason or purpose—biological accidents, cosmic junk. No wonder they call it nihilism—nothing-ism. And when you start really believing nothing-ism about human beings, bad things begin to happen. Most of us know better, though. Deep inside, we know we’re not simply chunks of meat in motion. Reality informs us there is something wonderfully unique about humans—qualitatively, not just quantitatively. Humans are special, wonderful, valuable.
To celebrate Stand to Reason’s 30th anniversary, we’re republishing classic issues of Solid Ground that represent some of the foundational ideas characterizing our work over the decades—ideas that continue to be vital to apologetics and evangelism today.
Lately, I’ve been enjoying my nine-year-old Annabeth’s theological common sense. “Papa, why don’t atheists believe in God?” she asked.
“Well, for a number of reasons,” I said. “Partly because they can’t see him, so they don’t believe in him.”
“Can they see atoms?” she offered.
“Good point. But I think they’d say that doesn’t count since they can still detect atoms with scientific instruments, something they can’t do with God. They won’t believe in anything they can’t measure scientifically.”
“That is the weirdest thing that I’ve ever heard,” she concluded.
My fourth grader was on to something that more educated types seemed to have missed: Lots of things are real that cannot be detected by science. How did she know that? She didn’t go to grad school. Innocence often sees the obvious.
Annabeth’s insight was about the inadequacies of naturalism, modernism’s worldview conviction that reality consists completely of material particles in a physical universe governed by natural laws.[1]
Naturalism is best summed up in Carl Sagan’s famous faith statement, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”[2] No God, no souls, no Heaven, no Hell, no miracles, no morality, no sin, no forgiveness, no transcendent purpose—just molecules in motion. It’s the worldview of virtually all atheists and the methodological philosophy governing all science.
Entire cultures have been subtly indoctrinated with this physicalistic view. Even many religious people have a naturalistic impulse in their day-to-day dealings with reality, relegating whatever spiritual “beliefs” they have to the shadowlands of “faith.”
Dealing with naturalism can be daunting, until we realize we have a powerful ally working in our favor: Reality is actually on our side.
Reality, Our Ally
This is an insight I learned from Francis Schaeffer. If Christianity is true, he noted, then the worldview it presents is accurate—it describes reality the way it actually is even for naturalists who deny it. “Regardless of a man’s system,” Schaeffer pointed out, “he has to live in God’s world.”[3] This situation creates a problem for skeptics but an opportunity for us.[4]
Someone once said that reality is what you “bump” into (and sometimes get injured by) when you don’t take it seriously. Consequently, anyone who denies some significant feature of the world is headed for a collision. Skeptics are not just at odds with “religion,” then. They are at odds with reality. Their claims about the world dictated by their competing worldview are going to conflict in important ways with the actual world they experience every day.
Schaeffer called this the “point of tension,” a kind of dissonance between what naturalists say about the world and the way the world really is. Sooner or later, they’re going to affirm—sometimes without even realizing it—features of reality that make no sense given naturalism.
On the one hand, the naturalist speaks from his own worldview. On the other hand, the way he lives affirms things that have no place in his view of reality but make complete sense in ours. He is sending two conflicting messages at the same time but doesn’t realize it. He’s bumping into reality.
Atheist Richard Dawkins is a prime example. On the one hand, his naturalism dictates that morality is just a relativistic trick of evolution to get our selfish genes into the next generation. On the other hand, he rails against the God of the Old Testament as a vindictive, bloodthirsty, homophobic, racist, genocidal, sadomasochistic, malevolent bully.[5] Do you see the problem?
Clearly, Dawkins is not coming to this conclusion based on his naturalism. Instead, that’s his commonsense moral realism talking. His protest makes no sense in his worldview but is perfectly consistent with ours.[6] Dawkins is living in a contradiction on this issue. That’s the point of tension. He’s trading on our worldview, not his. Dawkins is bumping into reality.
There’s something else I want you to see, though—not just the contradiction naturalists live in, but also the explanatory power of Christian theism over naturalism. Here’s what I mean.
Important details of the Christian worldview fit nicely with the way we actually discover the world to be. They resonate with our deepest intuitions about reality. This “fit” is the classical definition of truth.[7] Consequently, Christianity has the ability to make sense of salient details of the world and of human experience that naturalism cannot.
I want to suggest some practical ways to take advantage of both the naturalists’ “bump” into reality and the superior explanatory power of Christian theism. My goal is to be shrewd and creative—to catch him by surprise, if I can—maneuvering with questions wherever possible. This is the heart of the “tactical” approach.
First, a qualifier. There is no “silver bullet”—no perfect answer, no magic apologetic trick guaranteed to change someone’s mind in a single session. Rather, my aim with people who are deeply committed to a false worldview is to try to plant a seed of doubt or uncertainty in their mind, or to get them thinking in a productive way about Christianity. I call it “putting a stone in their shoe.”
There are lots of different ways to do this with naturalism, but I want to focus here on three bumps with reality that create serious worldview problems for the naturalist yet serve to validate the Christian view. I’m going to call them “the bump of stuff,” “the bump of bad,” and “the bump of me.”
The Bump of Stuff
My starting point for this maneuver is simple: Stuff exists. Not too controversial. The naturalist cannot easily deny the existence of the material world. It’s her stock-in-trade, the only thing she’s certain about.
Here’s the fundamental question: Why is there stuff? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did everything come from? What caused the universe to come into existence?[8]
Let me show you how this line of questioning plays out tactically in conversation. I was once asked during an audience Q&A to give evidence for the existence of God.
“Can I ask you a few questions to get us rolling?” I said to the challenger. He nodded. “First, do you think stuff exists? Is the material universe real?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered.
“Good. Second question: Has the stuff of the universe always existed? Is the universe eternal?”
“No,” he said. “The universe came into being at the Big Bang.”
“Okay, I’m with you. Now the final question: What caused the universe to come into being?”
At this point, he balked. “How do I know?” he said. “I’m no scientist.”
“Neither am I,” I admitted, “but there’s really only two choices: something or nothing. What do you think? Do you think something outside the natural universe caused it to come into being, or do you think it just simply popped into existence with no cause, for no reason?”
At this point, the skeptic who prides himself in his use of reason finds himself in a rational box. Both the law of excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction (it can’t be neither option, and it can’t be both) oblige him to choose one of only two logically possible options available.
To admit something outside of the natural, physical, time-bound universe is its cause would be to contradict naturalism. Yet, who is in his rational rights to opt for the alternative? Even if he thinks it possible the universe popped into existence, uncaused, out of nothing, it’s an understatement in the extreme to say it’s not the odds-on favorite.Read More
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Remembering Gospel Truths Amidst Evil
As Christians, let us remember that Jesus is our only hope. On the surface of it, that statement might appear to be a little trite. But it isn’t. It’s true. Jesus is our only hope. In the conversation of life and death and sin and evil, Jesus must be the focal point. Jesus came to live, die and rise again so that we would be forgiven, but also so that as Paul says in Romans 6:6, “we would no longer be enslaved to sin.” Ultimately it was the enslaving power of sin that led to these evil acts. But then, in addition to this, Jesus provides us with the only hope we can have beyond the grave for these many victims. For all who are in Christ will one day be resurrected to new life, with all justice finally served and all tears and heartaches wiped away.
Mass shootings are no longer rare events in our nation. Many will remember the shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, Virginia Technical University on April 7, 2007, Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012, or at Parkland High School only 4 years ago. When these events occurred, there was shock among many in our nation. Questions such as, “How could something like this happen?” or “Who could do something like this?” filled our minds. But now, we look back and think of the shootings in Buffalo, NY, Uvalde, TX, Highland Park, IL, the mass shootings that occurred over the weekend of June 4th-5th, and it is becoming commonplace.
As we continue to hear about these sorts of atrocities, we must not become numb to what is happening across the country. It is easy to blame others, call for new gun regulations, and examine our mental health structure as these events continue to happen. These discussions need to take place. But before we move straight to solutions, we must realize that those involved are real people. They are sons and daughters of men and women like you and me. Families are connected to these victims and many are hurting. As we reflect on these types of events, let us never separate ourselves from the connection that we have with other human beings before we come up with an explanation or a solution. Instead, let us consider how we ought to process these sorts of events as Christians before an unbelieving world.
Evil is Real
First, as Christians, let us remember that evil is real. Though most of us recoil in horror at the thought that anyone would ever be able to even think about killing someone, there are others who have given into the wicked tendencies of their hearts to commit such atrocities. With sin entering the world through our first parents, we see murder as early as Genesis 4 with the story of Cain and Abel. Since this murder, we have seen countless acts of evil occur throughout human history and we see no signs of it letting up. As men and women allow their consciences to be seared to the truth (1 Tim. 4:2), we see that God gives them over to a depraved mind (Rom. 1:28).
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