February 23, 2024
Happy Friday,
Keep me from deceitful ways; be gracious to me and teach me your law.
Psalm 119:29
Some highlight parts of the Bible they cannot accept. As Christ-followers, we should allow the Bible to highlight the parts of our lives that are unacceptable to God.
Lent: Not sure if anyone is joining me, but I am again reading the first 100 pages of Les Miserables, asking myself how I can become more like the priest who gave Jean Valjean the candelabra in an act of transformative grace.
Change: As a management consultant, I frequently shared the equation: F1 > F2 = SQ. Translated, that reads: if the fear of change (F1) is greater than the fear of not changing (F2), the Status Quo will prevail. After citing it, I’d invite management teams to explore ways to defang F1 or elevate F2 (or both). I’ve been thinking about this equation lately, although not in the context of organizations. The question I am asking is in terms of a person’s life. What is F1 (the fear of change) keeping you from doing?
WOTW: Honorable mention goes to looksmaxxing, the goal of men going under the knife to get a chiseled face; throuple, slang for a polyamorous grouping; boy sober, which is not about alcohol-free males but women choosing to avoid men; and hurkle-durkle — a Scottish word for “lying in bed when you should be up and about.” (FWIW, the book of Proverbs recommends against becoming a hurkle-durkler.) Full honors go to Replication Crisis — a term describing our growing awareness that many reputable science journals have published studies based on data now believed to be faked.
Without Comment: 1) This Hill article notes that fewer than 4% of US marriages now occur between Democrats and Republicans; 2) This Financial Times article graphically displays the “growing global gender divide” — i.e., the boy soberness of the world; 3) This article credits the 70s TV show Love Boat with the popularity of cruises; and 4) This NYT piece claims the newest generation of satellites is powerful enough “to resolve features of individual faces from Earth’s orbit.”
Marriage? Here are 2.5 minutes of a commencement speech given last year by Harrison Butker, the field goal kicker for this year’s Super Bowl-winning KC Chiefs. In it, Butker argues for marriage and parenting. As both marriage and population rates drop in the US, we can expect such comments to become more frequent and more controversial.
Quote Worth Requoting: “Anybody can become angry. Few can be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose.” Aristotle; “God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but he has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.” Augustine.
What’s Actually Happening: Those only casually paying attention to the claims — and counterclaims — about religion are likely to be confused. Why? Because three things are happening at once: 1) the number of Nones (i.e., the Nones, Dones, Exvangelicals, etc.) is growing; 2) the number of orthodox Christ-followers is growing; and 3) the number of people who do not attend Church but identify as evangelical is growing.
Sin 201: If you want to read about sin, you could do worse than reading Ralph Venning’s 18th-century classic The Sinfulness of Sin. Of late, I’m bothered less by my sin’s sinfulness than I am by its stupidity. I was pushed in this direction after learning that the Greek term moros — from which we get the word “moron” — is used to describe our sinful actions. If we had a pure heart and could see what God sees, we would never choose sin.
Resources: Click here to hear (or read) my latest sermon, which explores our access to God, and here to read an article by Glenn Wishnew, the associate director of Lakelight Institute, on the topic of cultural apathy.
Closing Prayer: Gracious God, our sins are too heavy to carry, too real to hide, and too deep to undo. Forgive what our lips tremble to name, what our hearts can no longer bear, and what has become for us a consuming fire of judgment. Set us free from a past that we cannot change; open to us a future in which we can be changed; and grant us grace to grow more and more in your likeness and image, through Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen. (The Worship Sourcebook)