Let’s start with some good news: the late Alex Trebek’s TV wardrobe was donated to men who are homeless or leaving jail. When an H-E-B grocery store near Austin, Texas, lost power in the recent winter storm and was unable to check out customers, employees let them take their goods home for free. A delivery driver’s vehicle got stuck in a client’s driveway when the storm began, so the couple took her into their home for five days.

Have you seen any of these stories headlined in recent days?

Riots in Portland and “negativity bias” 

In other news, cancel culture has come for a Hyatt Regency hotel in Orlando, Florida. The hotel hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last weekend. Former President Donald Trump spoke, as did a number of other Republican and conservative figures. As a result, critics called online for the hotel to be boycotted.

Cancel culture is also coming for Dr. Seuss on claims of racist stereotypes in his books. A school district in Virginia is just one example. And rioters vandalized several buildings in downtown Portland, Oregon, over the weekend, protesting the Biden administration’s immigration policy and the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Unfortunately, such bad news is much easier to find in the news than good news.

“Negativity bias” is the psychological term for our collective hunger to hear and remember bad news. Part of this is schadenfreude, the pleasure we derive from another person’s misfortune. However, studies indicate that we are also conditioned to avoid danger and thus respond more quickly to bad news that threatens us.

This means that we often look for the negative and overlook the positive. As a result, we can make things worse than they are. Our fears become self-fulfilling prophecies and we miss much of the good that surrounds us each day.

Hiding from a king in a cave 

Let’s relate this fact to yesterday’s Daily Article, which focused on the importance of supporting religious freedom while speaking the truth in love with LGBTQ persons and their advocates. Toward the close of the article, I stated my plan to suggest specific ways we can do both.

For foundational guidance, we turn to Psalm 57, David’s prayer when he was hiding from King Saul in a wilderness cave (probably 1 Samuel 22:1, but possibly 1 Samuel 24:3). Here we find four principles that apply when we face opposition to our faith. Each of them calls us to focus on the good in the midst of the bad.

One: Trust God’s presence. 

David begins his prayer: “Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by” (v. 1). He knows that the Lord is sheltering him in the face of mortal peril, even though he cannot see his “wings” at the time.

Two: Trust God’s purpose. 

David continues: “I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfills his purpose for me” (v. 2). Note that it is God, not David, who “fulfills” this purpose. The darkness of the tunnel does not contradict the sovereignty of the engineer driving the train.

Three: Trust God’s power. 

David testifies: “He will send from heaven and save me; he will put to shame him who tramples on me” (v. 3, my emphasis). He knows that the King of the universe is more powerful than the king of Israel.

Four: Trust God’s providence. 

David admits: “My soul is in the midst of lions; I lie down amid fiery beasts” (v. 4). Yet he can pray, “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth!” (v. 5). He knows that God knows his challenges and will bring his glory “over all the earth,” including the threat he faces.

Four steps to the spring of the Spirit 

With this backdrop, how can we respond redemptively to those who advocate for causes that threaten our religious freedom and attack our beliefs?

In Crisis in America: A Christian Response, Pastor Garland Hunt offers practical wisdom for this moment in our nation’s history. I would summarize his suggestions for facing opposition in four steps:

• Perception: What is God saying to us through this event?
• Personal accountability: Is there wrongdoing I must admit and change?
• Prayer: How can I intercede for those affected and for God to act for their best?
• Persuasion: What changes are needed? How can I help people make them?

Because God is sovereign in every “cave” of life, we can trust his presence, purpose, power, and providence. We can therefore look for his hand in the challenges we face.

Before we can ask others to change, however, we must ask God what changes we need to make (1 Peter 4:17). Then we can pray for God to work in the minds and hearts of our opponents (Matthew 5:44). Only then can we be effective catalysts for change in our broken culture.

I’ll close with a lesson from the winter storm we recently suffered in Texas. My home in Dallas was blanketed with more snow than I have ever seen in our city. However, when the temperature finally climbed above freezing and the sun came out, the snow began to melt. Not so quickly that you could watch it happen, but slowly over time.

In a day or two, the snow had melted in the sunlight. However, it persisted far longer in the shade.

If we do our job as the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), we will make an eternal difference in our winter-gripped world. We may not see the spiritual snow melt today, but the spring of the Spirit is coming.

This is the promise and the invitation of God.

Denison Forum

Former President Donald Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, criticizing President Biden on a variety of issues and pledging not to create a new party. In other news, Chadwick Boseman won last night’s Golden Globe for Best Actor in a motion picture-drama, six months after he died of colon cancer at the age of forty-three. And Emma Corrin paid tribute to Princess Diana after winning a Golden Globe for portraying her in Netflix’s The Crown.

While these stories are leading the national news this morning, another story received only local coverage in my area but deserves our attention.

When winter storms devastated our state recently, First United Methodist Church of Denton (north of Dallas-Fort Worth) started a GoFundMe campaign to help the Islamic Society of Denton pay for repairs to its building. This is just one expression of what a minister at the church calls a “longstanding friendship” with the mosque.

Did the church’s action endorse a religion that expressly rejects the Trinity (Qur’an 4:171) and deity of Jesus (Qur’an 5:72–73)? Did it send a signal of doctrinal compromise and unbiblical tolerance? Or did it build a relational bridge across which the gospel can travel, bringing the good news of Jesus’ love to Muslims in our region?

I do not know the Denton church, but I am confident that the third option is true. If so, these believers are following in the steps of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), Paul with Greek philosophers (Acts 17), and a host of other biblical and historical examples.

The lesson is both simple and profound: to win people to Jesus, we must love and serve them where they are, not where we wish them to be.

Why a gay writer opposes the Equality Act 

This principle is on my mind in light of the House of Representatives’ adoption of the so-called Equality Act last week, legislation which has been called “the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America.” It amends the 1964 Civil Rights Act by forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. However, it also forbids appeal to the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the part of individuals and organizations.

As a result, faith-based hospitals could be forced to provide gender-transition therapies. Children could change their gender without parental knowledge or consent. Faith-based adoption agencies could be forced to assign children to same-sex couples. Biological females could be forced to compete with biological males in sports and to share bathrooms and locker rooms with them. And the list goes on. (For a larger discussion of the Act and its consequences, please see my latest website paper, “The Equality Act: What Christians need to know.“)

I am adamantly opposed to the Act, as you might imagine. But this is not only because of my concerns regarding religious liberty. It’s also because I am convinced it is bad for those it is intended to protect.

A gay writer notes: “This bill will not protect our rights but destroy them for many members of our communities and society at large.” He observes that the Act will “lead to the erasure of women by dismantling sex-specific facilities such as bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, battered women’s shelters, and other vital female-only spaces” and notes that “the same would apply to men.”

He warns that “mixing the biological sexes in such a way will enable and facilitate sexual harassment and assault.” For example, he cites a transgender person who “preyed on women at two Toronto shelters. He has been convicted of sexually assaulting a girl as young as five years old. His victims include a deaf and homeless Quebec woman and a Toronto survivor of domestic violence.”

How Christians impressed Romans 

Experts agree that the Equality Act jeopardizes parental rights, women’s rights, and children’s rights. And, as constitutional legal scholar David French notes, the Act contains core substantive flaws. He states, “It is possible to protect LGBTQ Americans from invidious discrimination while still preserving religious liberty and recognizing material biological distinctions.”

Here’s my point: Christians should go beyond opposing the Equality Act on the basis of religious liberty. We should also make clear our concern for those it would harm, including the LGBTQ individuals its supporters claim to be protecting. And we should respond to these supporters by “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15).

Jesus taught us to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). He demonstrated his compassion by washing the feet of men who would abandon, deny, and betray him (John 13:1–12), then he called us “to wash one another’s feet” (v. 14). Paul grieved for the Jews who rejected his message (Romans 9:2) and even testified, “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh” (v. 3).

Eusebius, the early church historian, records that when plague afflicted Caesarea and Romans fled the city, Christians stayed behind and “tended to the dying and to their burial, countless numbers with no one to care for them. Others gathered together from all parts of the city a multitude of those withered from famine and distributed bread to them all.”

Such compassion so impressed the pagans that the Christians’ “deeds were on everyone’s lips, and they glorified the God of the Christians. Such actions convinced them that they alone were pious and truly reverent to God.” A few decades later, the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate observed that Christians “support not only their poor, but ours as well.”

How to know if you’re a true servant 

I plan to say more tomorrow about specific ways we can support religious freedom while extending biblical truth and compassion to LGBTQ persons. For today, let’s decide that we want to do both. Let’s decide that we want to emulate the One who “came not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:28). Let’s pray for those with whom we disagree, then seek practical ways to be the answer to our prayers.

The great British preacher Charles Spurgeon observed: “I think you may judge of a man’s character by the persons whose affection he seeks. If you find a man seeking only the affection of those who are great, depend upon it he is ambitious and self-seeking; but when you observe that a man seeks the affection of those who can do nothing for him, but for whom he must do everything, you know that he is not seeking himself, but that pure benevolence sways his heart.”

Here’s a shorter version of the same truth: to see if you’re a true servant, watch how you respond when someone treats you like one.

Will you be a servant today?

Denison Forum