What do movies tell us about ourselves?
One Battle After Another won the Academy Award for Best Picture last night, along with five other Oscars. Michael B. Jordan, Sean Penn, Jessie Buckley, and Amy Madigan won acting Oscars.
The awards show prompted some reflections for me, which have less to do with the films themselves than with the experience of watching them.
My wife and I took two of our grandkids to a movie the other day. We seldom go to the theater except with them, it seems. However, hardly a week goes by without us watching at least one movie at home, usually on a streaming service such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.
We are apparently not unusual: only half of Americans went to a movie theater in 2025, while 75 percent told surveyors that they had recently opted to stream a movie at home instead of watching it in the theater. The movie-watching experience, wherever it takes place, is ubiquitous. While 7 percent of Americans told Pew Research Center they had never seen a movie in theaters, I cannot find data indicating that a significant percentage of Americans have never seen a movie at all.
So-called “moving pictures” were first developed in 1891; the first time projected moving pictures were presented to a paying audience was in December 1895 in Paris, France. Over the generations since, they have become a pervasive and indelible part of our lives.
Why is this?
“What distinguishes us from the beasts in the fields”
Clinical psychologist Ana Nogales explains in Psychology Today that movies can be cathartic, as they express the emotions we feel. They help us escape from our own world for a couple of hours as well, offering entertainment that distracts us from our challenges.
She writes that they can be therapeutic when they “help us view things from a different perspective and become more understanding of other people.” And they inspire us with stories of achievement that encourage us to be our best selves.
I would add that the best movies are often the most surprising, the ones with a plot twist we did not foresee, films that convey an unanticipated message that nonetheless resonates with life. In The Future of Truth, acclaimed filmmaker Warner Herzog writes:
I don’t think truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving. A movement, an uncertain journey, a seeking full of futile endeavor. But it is this journey into the unknown, into a vast twilit forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose; it is what distinguishes us from the beasts in the fields.
“On purpose for a purpose”
Obviously, I disagree with his postmodern rejection of objective truth. As I often note, to claim there are no absolute truths is to make an absolute truth claim. Our Father has a mission for each of our lives, a kingdom assignment by which we are to know and glorify him and lead others to know and glorify him. As Max Lucado notes, we were created “on purpose for a purpose.”
But I do agree with Herzog that our pursuit of this purpose is a “journey into the unknown.”
Every significant junction of my life has been a surprise to me. I thought when I went to seminary that I would earn a PhD and return to my alma mater to teach philosophy. When my seminary offered me a faculty position, I thought I would stay there for my career. I resigned from the small church we had been pastoring during doctoral work, expressing my gratitude for all they meant to us and telling them that they were the only church we would ever pastor.
Our call from the seminary back into the pastorate was therefore a surprise to us, as were our subsequent calls to churches in Atlanta and Dallas. When two very gracious friends came to my wife and me in 2008 with the idea of launching what became Denison Ministries, we were shocked. But this ministry, which began in February 2009, has grown to a size and scope I could never have imagined. We began with a daily article and seven thousand subscribers; last year, our ministry’s content was read, heard, or seen more than 110 million times around the world.
Please believe me when I say that none of this was our doing. The vision came from God; the content our team and I produce is led by him; the growth of the ministry has come as we have followed his direction. We have worked hard, but even the capacity to do so is his gift to us.
And our Lord continues to use our team to deliver his word to the world, not because we are worthy but because “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12) and always accomplishes the purpose for which God intends it (Isaiah 55:10–11).
“The power at work within us”
I tell you our story only to say this: God has a plan for your life that transcends anything you can plan for yourself. Because his ways are “higher than your ways” (Isaiah 55:9), he is “able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20).
When you pursue your Father’s purpose, your life becomes a “motion picture” in which the scenes you “film” today are part of a story you are telling the world. The key, as a wise mentor once taught me, is to stay faithful to the last word you heard from God and open to the next.
And the key to this key is knowing the living Lord Jesus so personally and intimately that you can hear his voice and follow his lead.
Plato famously likened humans to prisoners chained in a cave in such a way that they cannot see the fire behind them but only the shadows it projects onto the wall before them. The purpose of philosophy, he believed, was to break these chains so we can turn from the “shadow” of the physical world to the “fire” of the world of ideas. The job of philosophers is to help others break their chains so they can join us in this quest for true knowledge.
Plato was wrong about the power of philosophy: only the Spirit can break the chains of sin and free us to experience the Light that defeats all darkness (John 1:5). But he was right that, once our chains are broken, we are to help others with theirs.
With whom will you share your story today?
Quote for the day:
“We need storytelling. Otherwise, life just goes on and on like the number Pi.” —Ang Lee, Academy Award-winning director
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