Negotiating Life in a Faithless Culture
Ours is a faithless age and we live in a faithless culture. All of this is compounded by the fact that there are no rural areas in America. There are urban, suburban, and “rurban” communities. Truly rural communities are disappearing if not altogether gone. Transportation started the process. Radio accelerated it. Television put it at high speed. And the internet has put it into hyper-drive. Three years into the third decade of the 21st Century, all points on the compass are influenced by the urban culture imported into our homes and lifestyles by the abundance of media and the ease of travel.
We live (swim?) in a stew of influences that shapes what we think, how we behave, what we value, and what we desire. It is a stew that is stirred by the once-great educational institutions, now so infected with wokism, political correctness, marxism and privilege as to seriously undermine any thinking parents decision to send their son or daughter to college. And most of those influences come to us not just from our schools of higher education but from the urban centers of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco and Chicago. What are the implications of this reality for all of those places and all the places between and around them?
Almost entirely negative. But not just negative, —corrupting, destructive, defilingly wicked sewage, effluent flowing into the culture, through our schools, our universities, our politics, our entertainment, our publics spaces, our language, our music, our conversations, and even our churches.
We are in trouble as a nation.
We need revival.
We need a revival like the first great awakening. (See the wikipedia article for some background, but it would be better to read J.Edwin Orr’s book on the effect of the revival for an inspiring account. See also the contemporary account by Tracy Joseph now available for less than $10 as a paperback and .99 cents on Kindle).
Jesus has saved all who believe in Him from sin and death. He has saved us and freed us and promised us eternal life but in this life he has also promised we will still have tribulation and sorrow. And part of our sorrow is having to live in the corrupting influences of our culture. We have biblical models to learn from. We have specific books in our Bibles that address and teach us how to live successfully, redemptively and hopefully in the midst of our declining cultural moment. So, if like Lot, your “righteous soul is tormented” by the evil in our culture (2 Peter 2:7-8), or like Jeremiah, you weep over the corruption you see in the church (Jeremiah 3:21), or like Habakkuk, you are confused over what to do as you look at the violence you see in your city, or like me, you are wondering, “How should I then live? How can I defeat the corrupting influence of the time in which I live, at least, in my own life?”, here are some biblical bio’s and books to plumb:
- Study the lives of Lot, Joseph, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, and Daniel.
- Study the books of Jeremiah, Lamentations, Amos, Habakkuk, Hebrews (particularly chapters 10-12), and the book of Revelation.
But whatever person or book you delve into as you try to better negotiate how to live in a time and culture like ours, make sure that all your study is bathed in prayer and all your meditation is done in submission to the Spirit of God rather than the spirit of the age. If we do that, we can still thrive, like Daniel in the midst of a crooked generation.
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