Hope for the Unhappy
The World Happiness Report reveals what many of us probably already knew about the condition of our nation: people are unhappy, disillusioned, and disappointed. This report might be the most hopeful news for our nation in recent memory, especially when we think about the prominence of Gen Z in this report. The prodigal son “came to his senses” and returned to his father when he sat alone in his misery. Perhaps the Lord will use our national mood to direct our attention to the truth of His Word and spark revival anew.
It’s that time of year again, when the World Happiness Report releases its findings on the happiest countries on the planet. From 2023 to 2024, the United States plunged from 15th to 23rd, hitting an all-time low in average happiness ranking. When two time periods are viewed side by side – 2006 to 2010 and 2021-2023 – the U.S. has had the 15th-sharpest decline in overall happiness of the 134 countries surveyed. Of western nations, only Canada fared worse (14th highest decline). What has led to such a steep reduction in people’s overall happiness in the U.S.?
Gallup, one of the key research firms collaborating on the World Happiness Report, explained the falling happiness rates result from “Americans under 30 feeling worse about their lives.” Specifically, Americans under 30 feel less supported by friends and family, less free to make their own life choices, more stressed about their living conditions, less confident in the government, and more concerned about political corruption. By contrast, the report found that older Americans are happier than their younger counterparts.
Americans under 30 are those within Gen Z. This is the generation that has grown up with smart phones and social media, and that often communicates with friends through digital means – sometimes even within the same physical space.
Americans between 18-29 years old have the lowest religious involvement of any adult age group in America, with only 27% attending religious services at least once per week (by contrast, 38% of Americans 50-64 years old and 48% of Americans over 65 years old attend religious services at least weekly). Gen Z is unquestionably the least religious generation in American history.
Politically, a plurality of Gen Z claim they are independents or unaffiliated (38%), while 35% belong to the Democratic Party and 26% belong to the Republican Party. However, party identification is not necessarily a clear indicator of what matters to Gen Z. Surveys show that adults under 30 strongly support abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism, and policies that enlarge the government.
When the religious and political views of Gen Z are set alongside the findings from the World Happiness Report, are there any reasons for Christians to be encouraged? I believe there are. For example, one of the key reasons why Gen Z feels unhappy is because they do not feel supported by family and friends. Yet it is precisely because of their views on family and friendship that misery has followed. The biblical definition of a family is a father, a mother, and (if the Lord wills) children sharing life together as a unit. Through the media’s relentless quest to cast the family into a more “modern” mold, the family itself has been dismantled and destroyed. Acceptance of sexually deviant practices, such as homosexuality and transgenderism, eliminate the reality of the family.
Certainly, people can – and do – attempt to re-define the family on their own terms. But re-defining something God ordained does not make that redefinition correspond with reality. Eventually, the proverbial chickens will come home to roost. Reality wins every time.
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10 Reasons to Host a Pastor Story Hour
Whether it is Pastor Story Hour or something else, we want our children to see us active in the world. We do not want them to grow up hiding from culture. We do not want them to believe that our faith is private, quiet, and secretive. We do not want them to grow up afraid to engage. We want them to feel encouraged to labor for Christendom. Excited and eager to see King Jesus reclaim territory for His Kingdom in their lifetime. And we want them to see themselves in that work, encouraged that God might use them to do something extraordinary for Jesus. When we model it to them, they will catch a vision of doing it themselves.
As people across the nation have been hearing about our Pastor Story Hour, I thought it would be helpful to sketch out some of my thoughts on why we are doing an event such as this. And while I prefer to sit and talk about this over a dark roast coffee, I would like to be brief enough here to be truly helpful. Of course, considering that I am a preacher, my goal may already be in jeopardy. Nevertheless, I would like to provide a few significant thoughts on why we believe this event is so helpful, useful, and necessary.
1) GOSPEL – The doctrine behind every conversion and the heartbeat fueling every Christian is the Gospel. It is the power of almighty God, and it is not only the MOST ESSENTIAL doctrine that we could ever learn as individuals, but it is the most essential doctrine that our children could ever learn as well! The Gospel is the doctrine that will guard their hearts and minds should they find themselves in a secular university. The Gospel is the balm for their weary soul when they walk through the pain and suffering life will inevitably throw at them. The Gospel is the life raft for their doubts, the comfort in their sadness, and the fuel for all their joy and gladness. As parents, we are responsible for preparing them for life without us. But, to do that well, we must actively, deliberately, and passionately teach them the Gospel.
As elders and pastors, we take that work seriously (1 Ti 4:1-2). We want to be a resource for our parents in helping you understand the Gospel so that you can also train your children to know God’s glorious Gospel!
2) PASTORAL LEADERSHIP – We believe pastors have been called to bring the truth of the Scriptures to bear on every facet of God’s people’s lives. We do not want to produce people who can behave like Christians during a Sunday morning service. Instead, we want to develop people who are impacted by the Gospel at every level, in every nook and cranny of their lives, so that all of their life looks like Christ. To do that, we must not take for granted that people are leaving the safety of our churches on Sunday to enter the battlefield on Monday. While we are reading commentaries and preparing messages throughout the week, our people are inundated with the enemy’s lies, saturated with every wind of cultural dogmatism, and pressured to compromise. Frankly, if we are not actively seeking to help our people develop a Biblical worldview, then we are preparing them for failure.
As pastors, we stand with one foot in the Biblical world of truth and theology and the other foot in the world of liberal and secular ideology. We stand on the wall and see the trends coming, the pagan philosophies forming, the secular ideologies gathering steam, and we are the exact people God called to help. We are the ones who help equip God’s people to think about things from a Biblical worldview, and that duty must never be abandoned. For this reason, an event like Pastor Story Hour is so helpful because we can pick and choose topics to teach that do not usually come up on a Sunday morning. Further, we can take those topics and use them as an opportunity to train our children and equip our parents. That is pastoral leadership.
3) FAMILY WORSHIP – The more we become acquainted with the Gospel, the more we realize that it is not just a Sunday doctrine and not the kind of thing that can be contained in a one-hour church service each week. The Gospel finds its way into every aspect of our life, which means we must also teach the Gospel in every area that our children live. This is why the Gospel must be read in books, sung in songs, prayed at dinner tables, tucked in with them when they go to bed, and the aroma of the home they will awaken into.
For this reason, Pastor Story Hour is not only for the children to learn the Gospel, but it is also an intentional environment for parents to come and watch us teaching their children and to observe how we do it. We want moms and dads to see how we do it and get ideas and inspiration on how to do the same thing for their children in their own homes. We want you to feel comfortable, competent, and confident in knowing how to instruct your children in the Gospel. We believe Pastor Story Hour can be a wonderful part of that! Our goal is that Pastor Story Hour will be a blessing to every member of the family and that it will invigorate family worship in our community and beyond!
4) CHRISTIAN EDUCATION – Along with family worship, we believe the Church has a God-ordained responsibility to educate all of our people in the Gospel and to help equip them for service in His Kingdom.
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Devotion in an Age of Distraction
Not everyone sees God’s beauty. Some are “haters of God” that have “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 1:23, 30). That’s why Samuel Parkison says there is an aesthetic component to salvation: when the Spirit regenerates us, he enables us “to behold the beauty of the Trinity mediated in Christ.” This new ability to see God’s beauty isn’t mere intellectual perception; it “includes the affections,” so we are stirred and drawn by his beauty (Irresistible Beauty, 15).
Mary Oliver once said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion” (Upstream, 8). Yet we struggle, don’t we, to set our minds on “the things of the Spirit” and “the things that are above, where Christ is” (Romans 8:5–6, Colossians 3:1–2)?
We know the mind attentive to the Spirit is “life and peace,” yet we’d blush to admit how often we reach for the empty stimuli of social media and news feeds. And it’s easy to wring our hands and declare that we’re uniquely handicapped by our Age of Distraction and the relentless competition for our attention. Are we really defenseless, though, doomed to distracted, ever-scrolling minds?
In the Footsteps of the Undistractable
In my own war against distractions, I find hope and help in saints who lived centuries before our digital age. Read slowly these words of Augustine, describing “the bridegroom who is beautiful wherever he is”:
He was beautiful in heaven, then, and beautiful on earth: beautiful in the womb, and beautiful in his parents’ arms. He was beautiful in his miracles but just as beautiful under the scourges, beautiful as he invited us to life, but beautiful too in not shrinking from death, beautiful in laying down his life and beautiful in taking it up again, beautiful on the cross, beautiful in the tomb, and beautiful in heaven. (Essential Exposition of the Psalms, 131)
If we had a time machine and could pull this man taken by the beauty of his Beloved into our digital age, would the wild horses of iPhones and earbuds drag his attention from God? By no means. The way Augustine talks about Christ convinces me that he could not not be captive to God’s beauty. He’s held firm and undistracted by the same one-thing passion that captivated David:
One thing have I asked of the Lord,that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the Lordall the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. (Psalm 27:4)
Jonathan Edwards, another undistractable saint, found God not only beautiful but “the foundation and fountain of . . . all beauty” (Works, 8:551). In his sermon on “God’s Excellencies,” he told the congregation,
God is every way transcendently more amiable, than the most perfect and lovely of all our fellow creatures. If men take great delight and pleasure in beholding and enjoying the perfections and beauties of their fellow mortals, with what ecstasies, with what sweet rapture, will the sweet glories and beauties of the blessed God be beheld and enjoyed! (Works, 10:429)
Like Augustine, Edwards was enthralled by God’s beauty in Christ and would surely never trade those “sweet glories and beauties of the blessed God” for the empty cisterns of clickbait. The question is, would we? Can we ordinary saints living in the Age of Distraction be so captured by God’s beauty that we grow increasingly undistractable?
Beauty of All Things Beautiful
Before we answer, we should clarify what we mean by God’s “beauty.” Philosophers love to ponder the idea of beauty. When they meditate on what is truly beautiful, they are (perhaps without knowing it) granted glimpses of the God who is beautiful.
Beauty is the good, and God is most good (Psalm 119:68). Beauty delights and arouses desire, and God is our delight and the desire of our hearts (Psalm 37:4). Beauty displays perfection, and our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Beauty shines with radiance and splendor, and Christ is the radiance of our God who is clothed with splendor (Psalm 104:1; Hebrews 1:3).
Beauty resounds in harmony and unity, and the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the eternal perfection of harmony.
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5 Things You Should Know about Creeds
Most Christians have heard of things like the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed, but many Christians also have a number of misconceptions about creeds. There is a lot of misunderstanding about the nature, history, and purpose of creeds. Here are five things you should know about creeds.
1. The word “creed” comes from the Latin word credo, which simply means “I believe.”
The plural form is credimus, which means “we believe.” In short, when we recite a creed, we are simply making a statement concerning what we believe. What this means is that if you believe anything, you have a creed. What if you say, “I believe in no creed but Christ”? Well, then, that’s your creed. It’s a short creed, but it is a creed. When we understand that creeds are human statements of faith, it also helps us better understand the relationship between Scripture and creeds. Holy Scripture is inspired. The Greek word in 2 Timothy 3:16 is theopneustos, which literally means “God-breathed.” Scripture is the inspired Word of God. Creeds are non-inspired words of men. In the Scriptures, we hear God saying, “Thus saith the Lord . . .” In the creeds, we respond, “We believe you . . .”
2. The Bible itself uses creed-like summaries.
Probably the most well-known example of this is the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4, which begins “Hear, O Israel: The lord our God, the lord is one.” This short creed-like statement is expanded upon by Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:6 to take account of the further revelation concerning Jesus Christ. Other creed-like statements in the New Testament are found in Romans 10:9–10 (“Jesus is Lord”) and 1 Corinthians 15:3–4.
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