Hire a goldsmith, and he makes (a god); then they fall down and worship! — Isaiah 46.6

Because modernism has largely done away with physical representations of deities, it is far more difficult to identify the idols which pursue our hearts each day. As I’ve written, a culture’s idols are revealed by what it pours the most energy and resources into. Ancient cultures built structures that survived millennia; U.S. investment portfolios designed around the 7 deadly sins outperform the S&P 500 every quarter.

Yet our idols are not always sins like lust and anger. Timothy Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, explains, “When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping.”

The greatest sign of idolatry is its churn. Pursuit after pursuit proves insufficient. Jobs come and go; markets crash; lovers disappoint; things once counted on fall through. It’s not the pressure of modern culture, it’s the result of our heart’s natural path to seek fulfillment in things outside God. In his observations of 19th century America, Alexis De Tocqueville recorded:

Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.

The fulfilling life we long for isn’t found in our pursuits, but as a result of our ability to prune such things from sapping our time and energy. Only then can we fully pour ourselves into, and receive everything we need from, the one true source of life. Dr. Keller concludes:

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God. This cannot be remedied only by repenting that you have an idol, or using willpower to try to live differently. Turning from idols is not less than these two things, but it is far more.

“Setting the mind and heart on things above” where “your life is hid with Christ in God” means appreciation, rejoicing, and resting in what Jesus has done for you. It entails joyful worship, a sense of God’s reality in prayer.

Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol. That is what will replace your counterfeit gods. If you uproot the idol and fail to “plant” the love of Christ in its place, the idol will grow back.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 46 (Listen – 2:12)
Revelation 16 (Listen – 3:17)

All of them are put to shame and confounded; the makers of idols go in confusion together. But Israel is saved by the Lord with everlasting salvation. — Isaiah 45.16-17

Because many of Scripture’s authors lived under political oppression it is easy to see how Christians today can faithfully respond to leaders with whom we do not agree. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God,” wrote Paul. He would spend extended portions of his life —even penning the gospel—in chains.

Most Christians in the western world do not face this type of persecution. It is not uncommon for politicians to defend freedom of faith and work to serve causes which sit at the heart of the Christian Scriptures. Victories in these areas—like treatment of the fatherless, single mothers, and immigrants—are massive steps forward for humanity. But elevating political victory to supreme importance is to confess functional atheism.

In his book Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel, Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore highlights this tension in America:

Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That’s why one could speak of “God and country” with great reception in almost any era of the nation’s history but would create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned ‘Christ and him crucified.’

God was always welcome in American culture. He was, after all, the Deity whose job it was to bless America. The God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ, however, was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to ‘Amen’ in a prayer at the Rotary Club.

Isaiah reminds his readers that all idols will crumble—yet that is not what brings joy to the faithful. Russell continues:

Our vote for President is less important than our vote to receive new members for baptism into our churches. A President is term-limited and, for that matter, so is the United States (and every other nation)…. Our church membership rolls say to the people on them, and to the outside world, ‘These are those we believe will inherit the universe, as joint-heirs with Christ.’

Christians should celebrate when truth breaks through in our culture’s institutions and politics—but our hope should, at the same time, be drawn beyond these temporary victories to the glory of the Kingdom. “It may be that America is not ‘post-Christian’ at all,” Russell reflects. “It may be that America is instead pre-Christian, a land that though often Christ-haunted has never known the power of the gospel, yet.”

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 45 (Listen – 4:39)
Revelation 15 (Listen – 1:29)

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Timothy Keller

Research and experience tell us that a majority of people reach for the spiritual to help them interpret and bear up under horrendous suffering. Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived three years in the Nazi death camps, observed how some of his fellow prisoners were able to endure the horror and pass through it while others could not. The difference came down to what Frankl called meaning.

The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living.

To “live for meaning” means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.

Because this was the only way to survive the terror of the death camps, Frankl noted how often secular or nominally religious people turned to faith once they entered those place. Many prisoners developed a new “religious interest… the most sincere imaginable.”

The secular view of life does not work for most people in the face of suffering. Why not? One reason is because human suffering comes in such an enormous variety of forms, stemming from a wide spectrum of different causes. The Western approach oversimplifies the complex causes of suffering.

As Frankl recognized in the death camps, people who are their own legislators of morality and meaning have nothing to die for, and therefore nothing to live for when life takes away their freedom.

That story of late modern culture—that life is about individual freedom and happiness—has no place for suffering. But the Christian story is utterly different. Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story.

Suffering is the result of our turn away from God, and therefore it was the way through which God himself in Jesus Christ came down and rescued us for himself. And now it is how we suffer that comprises one of the main ways we become great and Christ-like, holy and happy, and a crucial way we show the world the love and glory of our Savior.

*Excerpt from Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. Penguin Books, 2015. Review at Christianity Today.
Today’s Reading
Isaiah 42 (Listen – 4:11)
Revelation 12 (Listen – 2:58)

This Weekend’s Readings
Isaiah 43 (Listen – 4:06) Revelation 13 (Listen – 3:20)
Isaiah 44 (Listen – 5:12) Revelation 14 (Listen – 3:51)

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Mark Noll

One of the most interesting ways to grasp a general sense of Christian history is to examine critical turning points in that story. But why, the question might be raised, be concerned about church history at all? Why think that any sort of knowledge about the Christian past—which can so easily seem obscure, petty, confusing, or complex—should interest or assist Christian believers in the present?

Studying the history of Christianity provides repeated, concrete demonstration concerning the irreducibly historical character of the Christian faith.

Since Christianity is not captured simply in a set of dogmas, a moral code, or a picture of the universe—though Christianity certainly involves dogmas, morality, and a worldview—since Christianity is ultimately the acts of God in time and space, centrally the acts of God in Christ, then to study the history of Christianity is continually to remember the historical character of Christian faith.

To be sure, there are dangers in taking history seriously. Throughout the entire history of Christianity, problems have constantly arisen when believers equate the human acts of the church with the acts of God, when Christians assume that using the name of God to justify their actions in space and time is the same as God himself acting. But that danger grows from a positive reality: to be a Christian is to have an infinite stake in the events of God-in-Christ, with all that led up to the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, and all that now flows from those realities in the shape of the church’s history.

Study of church history should increase our humility about who we are and what we believe. Even more than humility, a study of the Christian past can also engender profound gratitude. Despite a dazzling array of God-honoring triumphs and despite a wide and deep record of godliness among believers of high estate and low, the sad fact is that the church’s history is often a sordid, disgusting tale.

Once students push beyond sanitized versions of Christian history to realistic study, it is clear that self-seeking, rebellion, despotism, pettiness, indolence, cowardice, murder (though dignified with God-talk), and the lust for power along with all other lusts have flourished in the church almost as ignobly as in the world at large.

Despite a tangled history, the promise of the Savior concerning the church has been fulfilled: “the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” But precisely that tangled history points to the reason why Christianity has endured: “I will build my church.”

*Excerpt from Mark Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. Baker Academic, 2012. Brief summary at Publisher’s Weekly, lengthier summary on Study God’s Word Together blog.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 41 (Listen – 5:00)
Revelation 11 (Listen – 3:24)

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Andy Crouch

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so.

Why aren’t we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

Many attempts, especially Christian attempts, to come to terms with culture have fallen short because they paid too much attention to [individual] categories of culture. High culture, pop culture, ethnic culture, political culture—all are part of culture and worthy of attention, reflection and action. But culture is more than any of these things.

Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else. This is the original insight of the writer of Genesis. God, of course, began with nothing, whereas we begin with something. But the difference is not as great as you might think. For every act of creation involves bringing something into being that was not there before—every creation is ex nihilo, from nothing, even when it takes the world as its starting point.

Changing the world sounds grand, until you consider how poorly we do even at changing our own little lives. I sometimes wonder if breathless rhetoric about changing the world is actually about changing the subject—from our own fitfully suppressed awareness that we did not ask to be brought into this world, have only vaguely succeeded at figuring it out, and will end our days in radical dependence on something or someone other than ourselves.

So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.

*Excerpt from Andy Crouch, Culture-Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. IVP Books, 2013. Book review at The Gospel Coalition.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 40 (Listen – 5:09)
Revelation 10 (Listen – 1:59)