Everybody has to come to grips with life. Both the natural aspects like family, women, and work. But everybody must also come to grips with their creator and deal with their soul.”
–Cliff Hudgins (Viejo and the Outlaw)
“For the message of the cross is foolishness [absurd and illogical] to those who are perishing and spiritually dead [because they reject it], but to us who are being saved [by God’s grace] it is [the manifestation of] the power of God.”
–1 Corinthians 1:18 (Amplified)
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How to Live in a Pagan, Apostate, and Foolish World
Key Verse: “We know that we are of God, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one.” –1 John 5:19 (HCSB)
Look at the news, if you dare. The state of the world is baffled, skeptical, and cynical. If you don’t think so just look at the way in which they have handled COVID-19. They cannot make up their mind about it. Mask to three masks, the vaccine works, but not all the time. They keep changing their minds–they are baffled. Being baffled they tend to just put bandaids on the sore instead of digging out the root of the disease.
Yet the world refuses to look at Christ. He is the cure. Why is it that people have such trouble with the truth? Instead of accepting the truth, the world will pour out its mockery and in some places it wrath upon it. Ted Baehr writes, “The Church once shaped Western civilization… Now our culture is shaped by the mass media of entertainment. The results are confusion at best and vile paganism at worst.” The new progressive culture will get rid of Dr. Seuss yet allow the filthiness of rap music to be allowed.
The Christian has been saved from the false hope of the world. He knows that the explanation is not a particular idea, nation, or man; the explanation is man’s rebellion against God. This act of rebellion produced fear–then jealousy, envy, and sorrow.
“It can all be traced back to the fact that men and women were really meant to live a life in communion with God, and that happiness, in a full and final sense, is only really possible when they obey the law of their own being; and that as long as they refuse to do that, they can experience nothing but turmoil and unhappiness and wretchedness.”
–D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
The world rebels against God and, therefore, produces its own miseries. Man, in his own sin, brings about misery to this world. “Because of sin we are in a world like this, and the world is like this because of sin.” (Lloyd-Jones)
One problem is that Christians and others in the world, think that Christian behavior is to be expected. How can this be in a world that does not believe or accept Christ? Why should the world then apply Christian principles? They have pushed His moral code aside (and with the last election many Christians did as well).
There is unrest in the world because of the rejection of Jesus Christ. The world is baffled because they have gone against God’s moral code and value system. “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our souls are restless until they find their rest in Thee,” said Augustine centuries ago. Man is restless, man is rebellious, man seeks to go his own way and therefore there is no rest, no security, no peace–only a delusion.
“The supreme need of the world, and of people as individuals, is a knowledge of God, fellowship with Him and communion with Him, and that, says the Bible, is the central need.” (Lloyd-Jones) Yet man, in his foolishness, thinks that he has a better way. Man with his new enlightened woke culture knows better than the Almighty God, and thus we have the wickedness, the evil, and the miseries in this world.