The “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” 2024 pinup calendar features female influencers and aspiring politicians. What makes the calendar newsworthy is that the models are posing in what the New York Times calls “old-school images of sexiness—bikinis, a red sports car, a bubble bath.” The article documents the use of profane speech and sexual innuendoes by conservative political figures as well.

What especially bothered me was the reported escalation of vulgarities by pastors in their sermons and writing. This despite the clear biblical command: “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving” (Ephesians 5:4, my emphasis). As John Piper comments:

Crudeness is the sludge that accrues when the fountain of Godward thanks dries up.

What causes this “fountain” to dry up? The answer is more relevant to evangelical Christians than you might think.

Why Earth’s tilt is so important

Today is the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. The season will actually arrive at 11:06 p.m. EDT with the arrival of the Vernal Equinox. At that moment, the direct rays of the sun will shine down on the equator producing the effect of equal day and night.

From that point forward, the direct rays of the sun will migrate north of the equator, with hours of daylight steadily growing longer. They will finally arrive at the Tropic of Cancer, which is latitude 23.5 degrees north. This will be the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. They will then head south and the days will grow shorter once again.

Right now, you’re no doubt asking why you needed to know any of this. Nothing you just read is actually relevant to your life. These facts don’t change anything about your day.

Or so we think.

It turns out, the earth’s spin axis tilt of 23.5 degrees, which makes possible the changing seasons I just described, prevents temperature extremes that would render our planet uninhabitable. In addition, this tilt appears to be optimal for life to develop and thrive. And it has been essentially constant, likely due to the stabilizing effect of the moon, which is crucial for the development of advanced life.

This is just one of many examples of the “anthropic principle,” the fact that the current structure of the universe and the constants of nature are arranged precisely in a manner that permits life on our planet to exist. In the minds of many scientists, these constants are far too numerous and far too precise to be coincidental.

Rather, they furnish evidence of a Designer who fashioned our universe precisely as the Bible says he did.

The problem of a gift we cannot lose

Now comes my question: How much credit can you and I take for anything we’ve discussed today?

My query is motivated by a professional observation an investment banker once shared with me: the first generation creates the wealth, the second generation conserves it, and the third generation loses it. This is true to human nature: when we receive a gift we didn’t deserve, we typically acknowledge it with gratitude and seek to use it well. Then we take it for granted as though we deserved it. Then we abuse it until it’s gone.

This pattern is especially threatening for evangelical Christians in America today.

Yesterday we discussed the fact that we should fear the Creator more than anything in his creation. One primary way we “fear” and revere God is to acknowledge that he is in fact our Creator and that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17).

Of all his gifts, our salvation is the most precious, of course. The eternal life purchased for us by Jesus on the cross saves us from an eternity in hell for an eternity in paradise. We evangelicals especially focus on the fact that this gift is freely given by grace (Ephesians 2:8–9) rather than the result of our good works or merit. And we know that since we cannot earn our salvation, we cannot forfeit it, either.

Here’s the problem: A gift we cannot lose is a gift we can take for granted, then a gift we can abuse.

Whether it’s profanity, or political slander, or pornography, or premarital or extramarital sex, or any number of other moral issues plaguing the evangelical church today, we are tempted to live like the lost people we are called to win. And they are watching.

“My worth to God in public”

The paradox is that those of us who emphasize the grace of salvation should of all people be the most motivated to respond with godliness. Not so God will love us, but because he already does. Not so he will bless us, but because he already has. Anyone who truly grasps God’s grace must respond with gratitude that empowers personal and public holiness.

This is what happens when, to use John Piper’s phrase, the “fountain of Godward thanks” erupts in our souls.

Oswald Chambers noted: “My worth to God in public is what I am in private. Is it my master ambition to please him and be acceptable to him, or is it something less, no matter how noble?”

What is your “master ambition” today?

NOTE: “What does it mean to be a Christian?” If someone asks you that, how will you answer? The gospel of Matthew is a primer on discipleship, and my latest book seeks to help you better understand just how essential it is that we truly understand—and act upon—Jesus’ call to discipleship. Request my cultural commentary on Matthew today.

Tuesday news to know

• Israel sending delegation to Washington to discuss US concerns over Rafah invasion
• Realtors reckon with a seismic shift to how they get paid
• In historic move, EPA bans asbestos nationwide
• Apple’s AI ambitions could include Google or OpenAI
• On this day in 2003: War in Iraq begins

Quote for the day

“It is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Denison Forum

While Congress has been trying to find a way to reign in TikTok for more than three years, the bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this week seems to have the best chance yet of limiting China’s potential influence through the massively popular social media app.

With a vote of 352 to 65, the legislation was sent up to the Senate with overwhelming and bipartisan support. And while it’s expected to face a more difficult time there, President Biden has already said that he would sign it if the bill makes it to his desk.

So, what exactly would the bill do and why has opposition to the app grown so much in recent years?

Why does Congress care?

Let’s start with why members of Congress on both sides of the aisle seem so worried about TikTok’s pervasive use by Americans:

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) requires that all Chinese tech companies surrender any data that the government requests, regardless of privacy laws in the countries where it was originally collected.
• While there is no clear evidence that the CCP has abused that ability in America to date, a former employee of ByteDance—TikTok’s parent company—alleged that the government used the app to “identify and monitor activists in Hong Kong during the pro-democracy protests of 2018.” Many in the American government fear the same capabilities could be used here as well.
• TikTok currently has an estimated 170 million American users and, as Rep. Mike Gallagher, the chair of the House Select Committee on the CCP and co-author of the bill, remarked, “America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States.”
• Whether it was a “Letter to America” from Osama bin Laden that went viral on TikTok last year or the way the app has promoted videos favoring Hamas in the wake of the October 7^th attacks last fall, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi—the bill’s co-author with Rep. Gallagher—noted that “the platform continued to show dramatic differences in content relative to other social media platforms.”
• And, given that it can take users as little as 10 minutes for TikTok to begin recommending shockingly explicit content on subjects like suicide, drugs, and a host of other topics, the threat extends well beyond geopolitical issues.
• Any lingering doubts as to the app’s influence were put to rest when TikTok pushed a notification—one some users could only remove by clicking on it—encouraging them to contact their congressional representatives to oppose the bill. In response, members of congress were quickly inundated with thousands of calls from people expressing a range of responses from anger to threats of suicide if the legislation passed.

And while companies and government entities have taken steps to ban TikTok to some degree, members of Congress appear on the verge of expanding their censorship of the app on a much broader scale.

So what would the bill aim to do?

What’s in the bill?

The basic gist of the bill is that ByteDance has six months to either sell off its American user base or leave it behind entirely, something the CCP has vowed not to do. However, that’s not all it contains:

• To begin, should ByteDance fail to divest itself of TikTok’s American market, the bill is designed to ensure that individual companies will do it for them. After the six months is over, any app store or entity found to host TikTok would face civil penalties of up to $5,000 for each user “within the land or maritime borders of the United States.”
• While the bill names ByteDance and TikTok specifically, the language is such that it would give the president the authority to designate other “foreign adversary controlled” applications as subject to similar censorship.
• Currently, the list of “foreign adversary” countries to whom the bill would apply consists of North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran, though that list could be updated at a later time should the American government deem it appropriate to do so.

That last bit of open-ended legislation is what has many of the bill’s detractors worried. Most see the threat that TikTok poses, but fear that giving the government the authority to impose this level of censorship could set a troubling precedent for the future.

In short, they’re worried that the solution will end up being worse than the problem.

And that’s a concern that extends beyond TikTok and the bill opposing it.

God’s solution: grow up

One of the most difficult aspects of fixing the sin in our lives can be addressing the symptom rather than the root cause of our struggles.

We see that idea play out with the religious leaders throughout the gospels as Jesus continually worked to tear down the man-made laws intended to keep people from sin, but which ended up keeping them from God. That dynamic was at the heart of his Sermon on the Mount, where six times Christ addresses the crowds with some variation of “You have heard it said…but I say to you” (Matthew 5:21–48).

In each case, his goal was to help people understand the ways that they had become so focused on controlling their actions that they had given sin room to take root in their hearts. And, as a result, their solution only made the problem worse.

Instead, Jesus called them to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Eugene Peterson, in The Message, translates it this way: “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

Christ’s call hasn’t changed. He still expects us to “grow up” and become the people he has created us to be. And a key part of doing so is learning to see beyond the moment to address the real problem without creating a host of others in the process.

Where does God want you to grow up today?

Denison Forum