“See, I have set before you life
and death, blessings and curses.
Choose life so that you
and your descendants may live”
Deuteronomy 30:19
Yesterday, I showed a picture of a man with one leg going one direction and the other leg going the other.
Essentially, he’s doing a split.
Well, let me tell you in no uncertain terms that men shouldn’t do splits! Our bodies just aren’t built for this!
And neither are our souls!
To this end – and per your request, a summary of last Sunday’s sermon – I invited us to consider the state of the world that many of us are so desperately clinging to, so desperately trying to keep a foot in. And I asked: Why? Why would we want to keep a foot in an increasingly broken world?
To that end – and to get a simple diagnosis of our current culture – I started googling things like The State of The Good Old, Middle-Class, American Dream. Here’s a quick analysis of our modern American culture …
· Increasing Pace
· Constant Change
How many of you feel like the pace of life is continually accelerating? It is! Indeed, we’re living in a period that social scientists are calling “Liquid Modernity.” This modern world is changing so fast that before a new normal solidifies under our feet, it’s changing again. Thus, our cultures foundations are increasingly liquid.
· Carpool Lines
· Unending Busyness
· Growing Exhaustion
When I laid out this next set of words, tired heads across the congregation were nodding. And I pointed the congregation to two resources. The classic Christian book on finding peace and margin in a busy world is Dr. Richard Swenson’s book, Margin. (One of our small groups read this about ten years ago … and keeps referencing it.) Next, I pointed to a more recent book that one of my sons just pointed me too. Kevin DeYoung (an author for The Gospel Coalition) has a book out entitled, Crazy Busy. I love the illustration on the cover. I love the subtitle more: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem.
· Self-Medication
· TV, Social Media, Computer Games
· Drugs, Alcohol, Pornography, Promiscuity
As a pastor, my heart breaks as I watch too many friends battling this modern epidemic of busyness and exhaustion. What the modern solution? Self-medication. Some of things we self-medicate with are mindless, brainless. Exhausted, we fall on the couch and numbly watch TV (or scroll through social media or peck away at computer games), only to get up three hours later (more tired than when we started) to go to bed and start the process all over again.
But there’s a second, darker form of self-medication that is swallowing increasing numbers of lives. We increasingly numb ourselves with drugs and alcohol. And even more insidiously, too many are increasingly compromising with pornography and promiscuity … (just so they can “feel something”).
Need I say that marriages are increasingly disintegrating as we become less and less of who God has created us to be?
· Materialism
· Debt
This is another way we modern Americans self-medicate. We call it shopping therapy. After all, isn’t The Pursuit of Happiness, our highest goal? It was codified as our manifest destiny in the Declaration of Independence, right? But while I was researching this, I found a research paper’s title that haunted me: Johnna Montgomery talks about The Pursuit of (Past) Happiness. That’s the insidiousness of debt. How many of us are still paying for what we thought would make us happy five years ago?
· Weekend Chores
· Sunday Activities
How many of us are so busy during the week that weekends aren’t for relaxation and refreshment anymore. Rather, we have to cram a week’s worth of shopping and chores into two, too-short days.
And how many of you remember when Sundays were exclusively for God, church, family, and church family? Now, and with the best of intentions, parents are saying, “I want my child to have the opportunity to be in the same things that I was in when I was a kid.” But now, those activities are increasingly on weekends. And we’re forced to choose between church and world. And church is increasingly losing out. (Now that may not effect a parent’s faith and salvation which is probably shaped and formed and secure, but what are these compromises teaching our children? That church is optional … if something better comes along? Jesus said, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” – Mark 8:36. Or “For what does it profit our children to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”)
· Anxiety
· Fear
In my searching things like “The Good Old, Middle Class American Dream” I found that in the last eight or ten years in America health care costs have skyrocketed. (Up about 40%.) So have college costs. (Again about 40%.) Meanwhile the average household income has gone down about 1%. And we’re increasingly trying to do more and more with less and less. And what’s creeping into the system is more and more fear.
· Whirlwind
And I called this toxic brew a “whirlwind.” (More on that tomorrow.)
Now, this is a depressing place to end a devotion. Diagnosis is never fun. Tomorrow – and in next Sunday’s sermon – I’ll begin pointing to a godly cure. In the meantime, if you’re too many of those are hitting too close to home, maybe it’s time to start praying: God, I don’t want to live a divided life, with one foot in the church and one foot in a broken culture. Help me take the hard but life-giving step of coming home fully to you.
In Christ’s Love,
a guy who is praying …
God,
I don’t want to live a divided life,
with one foot in the church and
one foot in a broken culture.
Help me take the hard
but life-giving step of
coming home fully to you.
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