It’s been a season of improbable quarterback stories in the NFL. Drew Lock led the Seahawks to a last-minute game-winning drive over the Eagles Monday night after losing the starting job last year and playing sparingly this season. Tommy DeVito, undrafted out of college, has become the starter for the Giants and generated headlines after he “classily handled” a free appearance at a New Jersey restaurant Tuesday.

But the story of stories has to be Brock Purdy, the last pick in the 2022 NFL draft (for which he was dubbed “Mr. Irrelevant”). He is playing so well for the 49ers that, according to the Wall Street Journal,  many consider him the frontrunner to win league MVP this year.

However, I’m leading today’s Daily Article with him because of who he is, not what he’s doing. Before the season began, he told a reporter, “God has me where he needs me.” He testifies clearly, “The bottom line, my identity is in Jesus.”

If more Americans had the same “bottom line,” our democracy would be secured and empowered in paradoxical ways we urgently need to embrace today.

A republic “if you can keep it”

The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that bars former President Trump from the state’s 2024 primary ballot continues to reverberate this morning. In my Daily Article Special Edition response yesterday, I noted that divisive partisan reactions to this issue spotlight the deep level of distrust many have for our democracy, our institutions, and our leaders.

For cultural context, let’s note with Joseph Nye, former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, that American exceptionalism has stemmed from three factors: our geopolitical size, location, and resources; our commitment to humanity’s quest for freedom; and our moral virtues.

Today, however, the world is smaller than ever, as Houthi rebels in Yemen demonstrated yesterday by threatening to strike US warships if the Iranian-backed militia is targeted by Washington. Humanity’s quest for freedom seems less global or attractive in a world increasingly dominated by autocratic regimes in China, Russia, and elsewhere. And postmodern relativism has redefined morality as personal and subjective while castigating those who defend biblical morality as intolerant and dangerous.

Unsurprisingly, when the Wall Street Journal asked Americans, “Do you think the American Dream—that if you work hard you’ll get ahead—still holds true,” just 36 percent said it does. Eighteen percent said it never did; 45 percent said it “once held true but not anymore.”

According to James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, “A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”

How do we “keep it”?

“We must live through all time, or die by suicide”

On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln offered an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” He was twenty-eight years old at the time.

He began by referencing the same three advantages Dr. Nye catalogued: “the fairest portion of the earth,” a government conducted “to the ends of civil and religious liberty,” and “hardy, brave, and patriotic” virtues received from our forefathers.

Lincoln then asked, “At what point should we expect the approach of danger?” After discounting enemies from abroad, he answered: “If it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Accordingly, he summoned Americans to “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.” Lincoln then concluded his remarks: “Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’”

“The joy of the Lᴏʀᴅ is your strength”

The best way for America to rebuild such moral and spiritual foundations is for Americans to build our lives on the lordship of Christ and the authority of his word.

Jesus promised that when we hear and obey his teachings, we are “like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7:24). When the storms came, his house did not fall “because it had been founded on the rock” (v. 25). If, however, we refuse to think and live biblically, we are like foolish men who built their house on the sand (v. 26): when the inevitable storms of life came, “it fell, and great was the fall of it” (v. 27).

In light of Jesus’ wisdom, we can judge the foundation we cannot see by the effects of storms on the structure we can. Is America’s “house” standing or falling today?

When ancient Israel repented in obedient response to God’s word, Nehemiah assured them, “The joy of the Lᴏʀᴅ is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). During this Advent week of joy, if we will do the former, we will experience the latter.

To this end, let’s remember Brock Purdy’s testimony: “The bottom line, my identity is in Jesus.”

What is your “bottom line” today?

Denison Forum

I must begin with a confession: I’m not a big fan of Christmas movies. I’d rather watch football over the holidays and catch up on novels. In fact, I had not seen Elf, consistently ranked among the best Christmas movies, until our grandkids recently asked to watch it with us. I now understand why it’s so popular. But I’m not changing my mind about the predictability and “cheese” factor of many holiday movies.

It turns out, that’s why they’re so popular.

Dr. Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist and director of the Media Psychology Research Center, explains: “You would almost be disappointed if they weren’t a little cheesy and predictable, because that’s why you’re there. You’re there to have a feel-good movie. This lowers stress, and it reinforces feelings of hope and renewal and all of those things that Christmas is supposed to bring.”

The good news that can be bad news

Dr. Rutledge is obviously right about our need for “hope and renewal” these days.

North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile this week that has the range to strike anywhere in the mainland United States. The CDC is warning that hospitals and emergency rooms could be forced to ration care by the end of this month as COVID-19 hospitalizations rise while influenza and RSV cases remain high.

The volcanic eruption in Iceland, the deadly earthquake in China, and the powerful storm in the northeastern US are reminders of our finitude and frailty. The ongoing Houthi attacks on international commerce illustrate the susceptibility of the global economy to terrorists.

There is much about the world that is not in our power to change. Which of these stories can you impact through your personal influence and capacities?

The good news—which can be bad news as well—is that the resources most foundational to American democracy are as much within our grasp as when our nation was founded.

“We must not sink into pagan materialism”

Speaking in 1926 to commemorate the 150^th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge concluded:

[The Declaration] is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.

As one example of these “altar fires,” consider our first president’s warning: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. . . . Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

The “father of our country” also believed that “the foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.” And he asked, “Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?”

“Though the fig tree should not blossom”

Both presidents were echoing biblical principles proclaimed twenty-five centuries earlier when God warned the sinful Babylonians: “Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity!” (Habakkuk 2:12). In response, he announced his ultimate purpose: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lᴏʀᴅ as the waters cover the sea” (v. 14). Everything God did then and everything he does now is a means to this end.

This is not because the Lord is a divine egotist. To the contrary, for God to seek the glory of anyone above his own would be for him to commit idolatry. Similarly, for us to glorify anyone above the Lord commits the same sin and forfeits all God can do in lives that are fully yielded to his purposes.

Now you and I have the privilege and the responsibility of choosing to think biblically and act redemptively. We can “cultivate the reverence” for “the things which are holy” that is foundational to our national virtue and thus to our “permanent felicity” under God. During this Advent week of joy, no matter how challenging our circumstances, we can then say with the prophet of old:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lᴏʀᴅ; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17–18).

In what—or whom—will you “take joy” today?

Denison Forum

When I saw this New York Times headline yesterday, my first thought was that the pope has endorsed homosexual relationships. Judging from the media reaction, many are making the same assumption. When I read the actual Vatican announcement, I learned that the truth is much more complicated. Nonetheless, my first impression is, I fear, the lasting impression this news will leave with our secularized culture.

At the outset, I want you to know that my response does not express an anti-Catholic bias on my part. I have been privileged to know and serve alongside many Catholic priests across my ministry and am grateful for the many Catholic readers of The Daily Article. Catholic writers and theologians continue to inform and enhance my personal spiritual life. And I deeply appreciate the church’s continued support for the sanctity of life.

Nonetheless, I believe the Vatican’s announcement to be a foundational mistake with massive cultural ramifications we need to understand through the lens of biblical truth.

“When people ask for a blessing”

Titled “Fiducia Supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” the declaration was submitted to Pope Francis for his review and approved with his signature. It “remains firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church about marriage, not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion.” In this way, it is not “changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage.”

In fact, the document quotes Francis’ definition of marriage as the “exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children.” The declaration adds, “It is only in this context that sexual relations find their natural, proper, and fully human meaning” and states that “the Church’s doctrine on this point remains firm.”

What is new here, however, pertains to the “blessing” of individuals by the church, an act separate from the sacrament of marriage. In short, the declaration extends to Catholic clergy the authority for “blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples.”

The document then spells out in detail the practice of “blessing” in Scripture. It notes that biblical blessings are often conveyed by God to people and by people to others without moral preconditions. It therefore advises: “When people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. . . . those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.”

To summarize: Fiducia Supplicans authorizes Catholic clergy to pray for God’s blessing on those in “irregular” and same-sex relationships, so long as this is not confused with the liturgical sacrament of marriage, which remains available only to a man and a woman.

“If the trumpet makes an uncertain sound”

Fiducia Supplicans states that “the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice” (my emphasis) and adds that “there is no intention to legitimize anything.” But this is already how the document is being interpreted by LGBTQ advocates and the mainstream media.

This is because to “bless” someone in non-theological Catholic terms means precisely to “legitimize” them. When I asked my then-girlfriend’s father for his “blessing” on our engagement, his affirmation was obviously his endorsement of our marriage. As Merriam-Webster makes clear, to “bless” someone means to “approve” of them.

Rev. James Martin, a prominent Catholic LGBTQ advocate, responded to the Vatican’s declaration: “Along with many priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex unions.” Anyone reading his words would assume that they “offer a form of moral legitimacy” to such unions.

This is a significant step toward normalizing LGBTQ relationships, now with the “blessing” of the leader of the largest Christian denomination in the world. Such normalizing is unbiblical since Scripture clearly forbids “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality” and all sexual activity outside marriage (Galatians 5:19). Rather than give such an “uncertain sound” (1 Corinthians 14:8 NKJV), we are to “flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18) and encourage everyone else to do the same (cf. James 4:17).

“We must obey God rather than men”

Fiducia Supplicans offers the Church’s blessing not only to same-sex couples but also to those in “irregular situations.” The document nowhere defines the term, but it does refer to those who are engaged in “extra-marital sexual practice.” I assume that the two phrases are meant to be equivalent.

Would they include those in polygamous and polyamorous relationships, a growing movement in our culture? What about adulterous relationships? Sexual relationships between adults and minors? Between humans and animals?

Once we start blessing what God forbids, where do we stop? This is why the apostles’ testimony should be ours: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). And it is why Scripture warns: “Desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15).

“There is no freedom without truth”

It seems that Pope Francis wants the Catholic church to be more loving toward all people regardless of the sins they commit. I commend such inclusive grace. God loved us “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8) and calls us to love others in the same way (cf. Matthew 22:39).

But in a culture that understands “blessing” not in the technical terms of the Vatican declaration but in the general dictionary sense of approving, the document will mislead many into believing that God condones what he in fact forbids. It will therefore encourage people to commit sexual sins—homosexual and heterosexual—that are harmful to them. And it will be used to marginalize and stigmatize further those of us who declare and defend biblical morality.

Pope St. John Paul II observed, “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” How do we know what we “ought” to do? He added: “Man’s free creative forces will only develop to the full if they are based on the truth. . . . There is no freedom without truth.”

Where do we find such “truth”?

Jesus said to his Father, “Your word is truth” (John 17:17) and promised his followers that the Spirit would “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Accordingly, during this Advent week of joy, we can say to God, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11).

Will you walk God’s “path of life” into the “fullness of joy” today?

Denison Forum

This headline caught my eye over the weekend: “If Hamas is allowed to survive, their web of terror will threaten us all.” The subtitle warns: “It’s not just Jews who are in grave danger when terror groups like Hamas grow in strength and number.”

The writer is responding to reports that seven people were arrested in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands last week on suspicion of planning attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe. Four of the seven were suspected Hamas members. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: “In recent years, and even more so after the murderous attack on October 7, Hamas strives to expand its operational capabilities around the world—and in Europe in particular—in order to realize its ambitions to hit Israeli, Jewish, and Western targets at any cost.”

A British columnist, citing the rise of antisemitism after the October 7 invasion, warns: “If recent protests are anything to go by, then we may be uniquely vulnerable to this terrorist threat. If calls for ‘jihad’ are taken literally, with young men believing they should fight a holy war on our streets, then we may face the worst terrorist threat since al-Qaeda or ISIS.”

Hamas is ramping up its propaganda war to inculcate antisemitism among young people in the larger Muslim world; for example, #freepalestine is now found on thirty-nine times more Facebook posts than #standwithisrael. If the terrorist group’s hatred of Jews spreads across the West, the October 7 atrocities may be the beginning of a larger genocidal movement against the Jewish people and everyone who supports them.

A terrorist tunnel beneath a baby’s crib

“War is hell,” as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman said after the Civil War. His description is especially proving true in Gaza, where the Israeli army’s death toll is already almost twice as high as during a ground offensive in 2014, more than seventeen thousand Palestinians have died, and more than one hundred hostages are still being held by Hamas.

The IDF’s killing of three Israeli hostages they mistakenly identified as a threat sparked massive rallies over the weekend calling for a pause in the fighting to allow more hostages to be released. However, as Israel mourns the three young men and grieves for the rest of the hostages, Hamas continues to use them—and Palestinian civilians in Gaza—as human shields and leverage.

For example, IDF soldiers uncovered a Hamas tunnel hidden beneath a baby’s crib in Gaza yesterday.

The terrorists have made clear their intentions to eradicate all Jews, whom they consider to be the enemies of humankind. Such dehumanizing is always the first step toward the genocide of a people. For Islamic jihadists, it is born in a worldview that sees Jews as “enemies of Allah” and subhuman descendants of “apes” and “swine.”

But antisemitism also has roots in the Western world that are less obvious but no less dangerous to us all.

Did we come from “primitive slime”?

On this day in 1912, the “Piltdown Man” fossil was discovered. Originally claimed to be a “missing link” ancestor of humans, the remains were later found to be a hoax. However, the view that humans are the product of chance rather than creation persists across our culture. Forbes recently announced, for example, that scientists have a new theory for how life’s “building blocks” arrived on our planet, claiming that comets could have delivered amino acids and proteins to Earth and other planets as well.

One researcher writes in Smithsonian magazine: “Scientists agree on the basics of how life began, perhaps four billion years ago. Inorganic materials in the depths of the sea—subjected to favorable chemical conditions—most likely came to form a primitive slime over a long period of time. That slime eventually gave rise to bacteria, or perhaps blue-green algae” that led to life as we know it.

If humans are no different from anything else that evolved in this way, a utilitarian pragmatism that uses people as a means to larger ends is inevitable. If we commercialize and trade swine, why not hostages viewed as their descendants by their captors—or so Hamas might say.

Once we abandon the biblical truth that all people are created in God’s image and thus sacred from the moment of conception (Genesis 1:27), any human can be the subject of those strong enough to subjugate them in an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” contest for supremacy. We see such dehumanizing when preborn babies are aborted for financial reasons and the elderly infirm are euthanatized, girls and boys are sex trafficked and forced into prostitution, and racial prejudice fuels systemic injustice.

And we see it when Jews are villainized for their race and religion.

Decorating 22 homes and creating 400 snowmen

This is the Advent week of joy. Paradoxically, biblical joy is a consequence, not a goal. It is a “fruit” of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) that we experience when we seek the Lord with intimacy and can pray with David, “In your presence there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11). And it is a gift we experience most fully when we share it with others.

My first pastor used to say that JOY is an acronym for Jesus, Others, and Yourself. When we love others in response to God’s love for us, we want to pay forward the grace we have received and their joy enhances our own.

I’m thinking of an Oklahoma man who decorated twenty-two homes on his street for Christmas and the Wyoming woman who created nearly four hundred personalized snowmen for the people of her town. My guess is that they are experiencing a more joyful Christmas along with those whose holidays they enriched.

Henri Nouwen is right:

When you know yourself as fully loved, you will be able to give according to the other’s capacity to receive, and you will be able to receive according to the other’s capacity to give. You will be grateful for what is given to you without clinging to it, and joyful for what you can give without bragging about it. You will be a free person, free to love.

Will you be “free to love” today?

Denison Forum

While it’s not unusual for nativity scenes to make the news around Christmastime, a different form of public display inside the Iowa state capitol building has made headlines in recent days. The Satanic Temple placed a statue of the pagan idol Baphomet and other satanic paraphernalia in the building’s rotunda near the capitol’s annual nativity scene.

While the scene has generated quite a bit of controversy from many of the state’s citizens, responses from the community have varied.

Governor Kim Reynolds called it “absolutely objectionable” while asking for prayer over the building. Rep. Jon Dunwell pointed out, “I don’t want the state evaluating and making determinations about religions.” Considering history has shown that when the government attempts to regulate religion, religion usually loses, he has a point.

Conversely, Michael Cassidy—who ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in Mississippi last year—responded by tearing the idol down yesterday. He’s since been charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief.

What has largely gotten lost in the controversy, however, is that equal representation for satanic groups isn’t really the point they’re trying to make by placing their idol on capitol grounds.

As Russell Moore described, “These gaudy goats exist to make a point in the culture war—namely, that public places shouldn’t allow Christmas crèches or Hanukkah menorahs and so forth. The devil displays are just a means to an end. It’s not so much about whom the followers love as about whom they hate, which is religious people—especially the kind that would be outraged by a devil in the capitol.”

As he goes on to conclude, “Shock and repulsion from religious people aren’t merely unintentional byproducts; they’re the whole point.”

Consequently, when Christians like Cassidy react to such displays with anger and violence rather than prayer or dialogue, we play right into the hands of those who are hoping for just such a response.

Fortunately, there is positive news when it comes to Christmas displays that honor God as well.

Why are nativity displays still popular in post-Christian England?

While nativity displays are common throughout many regions of America, it may surprise you to learn that public displays of Christ’s birth play an equally—if not more—significant role across the Atlantic.

In England, roughly 25 percent of parents of kids under the age of eighteen go to church with any semblance of consistency. Yet, as Madeleine Davies describes, 78 percent of the population support their children’s schools putting on nativity plays every Christmas. Considering that 94 percent of all kids in the UK go to state-funded schools, the gap between those who look forward to attending a nativity play and those who would go to church to hear a sermon on the same subject is quite vast.

For most, the reason has less to do with religion than it does nostalgia. As Rob Barward-Symmons, the impact and evaluation manager at the Bible Society, notes, these plays function as “a valued rite of passage for parents to share with their children.” A Hindu mother who attended a Church of England school as a child added that she wants her children to “have the same memories” and to know the same story that she “learned as a kid.”

And even if the story of Christ’s birth will remain just a story for many of these children, we should not underestimate the power of nostalgia and what God can do with even those small seeds later in life.

In a way, connecting people personally with the Christmas story has been the purpose of such plays since the Middle Ages. And the similarities between their purpose then and now extend in some interesting and noteworthy ways.

Nativity scenes tell the story that many won’t read

Tradition holds that Saint Francis of Assisi set up the first live nativity scene in 1223 as a backdrop for his Christmas Eve sermon. Within a century, they’d grown in popularity and began to be featured at churches throughout Europe.

As Eleanor Parker, a lecturer in medieval English literature at Oxford, describes, the plays eventually evolved into standalone productions that told the entire story of the Bible from creation to Revelation. Such performances served an important purpose within medieval society because back then both the Bible and the sermons at Mass were in Latin at a time when few outside the clergy could understand that language. As a result, paintings, sculptures, and plays were often the only way they could learn the biblical stories.

In a similar way, our culture is increasingly illiterate when it comes to the Bible. Few outside the church—and, unfortunately, far too few inside the church as well—are likely to pick up a Bible and read it for themselves. As such, nativity plays and other traditions like Christmas carols can serve an important role in translating the truth of God’s word in a way that often slips past the barriers that people raise against the faith at other times of the year.

The question for us then becomes whether we will position ourselves to take advantage of those opportunities when they arise.

This Christmas, give the gift of faith

While I haven’t seen it as much this year as in the past, the notion that the culture is waging a war on Christmas remains far too common a refrain among many in the church. That’s not to say the accusations do not, at times, have some merit. However, seeing aspects of Christmas appropriated in ways that leave much of the message behind still presents us with unique opportunities to share the gospel with those who desperately need to hear it.

For many, Christmas carols, nativity scenes, and other Christian traditions carry a degree of nostalgia and fondness for reasons that have little to do with celebrating the birth of our Lord. But that doesn’t mean the path to turning those traditions back to Christ isn’t much shorter now than at other times of the year.

If you hear a neighbor or coworker remark that they love a particular carol, take a second to ask them what they like about it. If you see a nativity scene or Christian decoration in their yard or office, ask what it means to them. These simple questions can present the chance to have truly meaningful conversations, and the same can be true with family and friends as well.

After all, given that a large percentage of kids who grow up in at least nominally Christian homes leave the faith later in life, many devout followers of Jesus have family members who do not share that faith. Yet even among those who have rejected Christ, Christmas often holds fond memories, and family traditions rooted in the gospel can persist even after interest in the gospel has waned.

So as December 25 draws closer, let’s look for opportunities to celebrate and redeem the culture’s approach to Christmas. Their approach to the holiday may not always mirror our own, but that doesn’t mean God can’t still use it in some truly remarkable ways. The question for us is whether we will be ready to help when those opportunities arise.

Will you?

Denison Forum

The latest Godzilla movie is getting rave reviews and shattering box office records after a massive opening weekend. Alex Fitzpatrick reports in Axios that the film is “set in postwar Japan . . . to explore the country’s struggles in grappling with its actions and the incredible devastation levied upon it.” In other words, it’s a sign of our war-torn times.

Here’s another: “Peach Fuzz” is the Pantone Color Institute’s “color of the year,” chosen because it conjures peace and serenity. A company spokesperson explained: “We’re going through a lot of turmoil in our lives, and we have a need for a color that’s nurturing.”

In a day some are calling the “Age of Unhingement,” perhaps we should not be surprised by such news. According to columnist Rick Newman, “If America had a national mood, it would be gloom.” Responding to surveys cataloging dismal consumer attitudes, he hypothesizes that “Americans are so overwhelmed with negative news that they’re more inclined than ever to think things are terrible.”

It’s not just the seasonal depression that often comes with winter; the CDC reports that our suicide rate is the highest ever recorded. It has been consistently climbing since 2001, up nearly 50 percent over the last two decades. Unsurprisingly, just 21 percent of us are confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.

If we’re so spiritual, why are we unhappy?

At the same time, Pew Research Center reports that seven in ten US adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way. If we’re so spiritual, why are we so unhappy?

Perhaps a clue is found in this part of the report: 22 percent of us say we are spiritual but not religious. Of this group, 71 percent believe that “parts of nature, like mountains, rivers, or trees can have spirits or spiritual energies.” Nearly half say the same about “certain objects, like crystals, jewels, or stones.”

While only 2 percent of spiritual but not religious people say they attend religious worship services weekly or more often, 78 percent say they spend time “looking inward or centering” themselves at least a few times a month.

Such self-centered, self-defining spirituality is the hallmark of our times. According to George Barna’s latest inventory, only 4 percent of Americans embrace a “biblical worldview,” meaning that “people’s ideas about all dimensions of life and eternity are based on biblical principles and commands.”

“Nearly all that we call human history”

If humans are created by a holy God for personal relationship with him, the fact that we are living in the “age of unhingement” should not surprise our secularized, post-Christian culture. C. S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity:

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could “be like gods”—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

He then explained why our independence from God doesn’t work:

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

When Lewis wrote his book in 1952, these were the binary options: “religion” (meaning biblical Christianity) or irreligion “apart from God.” As we have seen today, however, millions of Americans are embracing a “spiritual but not religious” third option where they choose the parts they like and refuse the rest.

Beware the “most intimate souvenirs of hell”

At this point I am tempted to congratulate all of us who do embrace a biblical worldview, who attend church services regularly, study our Bibles and pray daily, and read (or write) resources like this Daily Article. But I sense the Spirit issuing this warning: you and I are just as tempted by cafeteria-style spirituality as the rest of our post-Christian culture.

Every time we choose to sin, we reject God’s word and will and grieve and quench his Spirit (Ephesians 4:30; 1 Thessalonians 5:19). To quote Lewis, we “invent some sort of happiness for [ourselves] outside of God.” But a holy God cannot bless unholiness and remain true to his holy character. To the contrary, he must withdraw his favor and, if we persist in unrepentance, invoke his judgment.

This is why this Advent week of peace is so relevant to our times. Scripture declares, “God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33). As a result, the prophet could testify to him, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (Isaiah 26:3). The psalmist prayed, “Great peace have those who love your law” (Psalm 119:165). Because “peace” is a “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22), “to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6).

Do you have such peace?

We’ll close with one more reflection from C. S. Lewis, this time in The Great Divorce: “If we accept heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of hell.”

Do you need to abandon such “souvenirs” today?

Denison Forum

A threat is rising to the US and global commerce from a group you’ve probably heard little about: two missiles fired from territory held by Houthi rebels in Yemen missed a commercial tanker loaded with jet fuel today. An American warship also shot down a suspected Houthi drone that was flying in its direction. This after a missile fired by Houthis struck a Norwegian-flagged tanker in the Red Sea yesterday.

Such attacks have been targeting commercial vessels for several days. US Navy ships have shot down an array of drones headed their way believed to have been launched by the militant group. Last month, the jihadists seized a transport in the Red Sea linked to Israel and are still holding the vessel.

So, who are the Houthis? How much of a threat are they to Israel and the US? The answers are troubling for the region and are contributing to the growing prospect of global war.

A worst-case scenario for the US

Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest nation, is a country of twenty-eight million people on the southern end of the Arabian peninsula. In the 1990s, the Houthi movement emerged in the northern part of the country in reaction to rising Saudi financial and religious influence. Their name comes from the surname of the movement’s early leader, Hussein al-Houthi, who died in 2004.

The Shiite group, backed by Iran, has been fighting Yemen’s Sunni-majority government for two decades. They control the capital city of Sanaa and much of the western part of the country. They have been protesting the IDF’s post-October 7 incursion into Gaza by targeting ships headed toward Israel as well as US forces in the area.

It is not difficult to imagine a scenario by which Houthis in the south combine with Hezbollah in the north, Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza to form a four-front assault against Israel. All four are proxies of Iran, which has long sought Israel’s destruction. They could not realistically defeat the IDF, but their incessant attacks could discourage Israelis and prompt them to abandon their nation.

In such a scenario, the US would likely need to escalate its military support for Israel. This at a time when Ukraine is seeking additional support for its ongoing war with Russia. If China were to invade Taiwan, the US would find itself on the other side of yet a third global conflict.

According to A. Wess Mitchell, senior advisor for the United States Institute of Peace and a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, this is the worst-case scenario for the US. He writes in Foreign Policy that our military is not designed to fight wars against two major rivals simultaneously, much less three. We would fight such a world war as “a thinly stretched US military alongside ill-equipped allies that are mostly unable to defend themselves against large industrial powers with the resolve, resources, and ruthlessness to sustain a long conflict.”

Mitchell believes that waging such a global war “would require a scale of national unity, resource mobilization, and willingness to sacrifice that Americans and their allies have not seen in generations.”

“A situation without obvious historical parallel”

Is Mitchell correct in his assessment? A recent poll asked Americans about values they consider “very important,” contrasting responses made in 1998 with today. The results:

• Patriotism: 70 percent vs. 38 percent today
• Religion: 62 percent vs. 39 percent today
• Having children: 59 percent vs. 30 percent today

What explains this radical shift?

Carl Trueman writes in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, “The modern self is one where authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s inward feelings.” Such a worldview privileges the individual over commitments to patriotism, religion, children, or community. Trueman calls this “a situation without obvious historical parallel.”

These reflections give us even greater reason for concern regarding our nation and her future. The internal “crisis of despair” we are facing, alongside potentially the greatest external threats we have seen in decades, combine to make this Advent week of peace even more relevant for our society and for our souls.

“Not as the world gives do I give to you”

Paradoxically, the peace we need is found not in seeking it but in resolving the foundational issue that robs it from us. Yesterday, I shared Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most famous quote from his classic, The Cost of Discipleship. Here is his statement in its context:

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

We were created to love God and each other unconditionally and sacrificially (Matthew 22:37–39). Consequently, self-centered people acting “in accordance with one’s inward feelings” are at war with God, others, and themselves.

However, when we surrender our lives, ambitions, and challenges to the Prince of Peace, his omniscience guides us, his omnipotence empowers us, and his omnibenevolence encourages us. We can claim Jesus’ promise, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27a). And we can answer his invitation, “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (v. 27b).

Is your heart “troubled” or “afraid” today?

Denison Forum

President Biden hosted the annual White House Hanukkah Party last night; invitees included Holocaust survivors and leaders from across Jewish religious denominations. However, I’m thinking today of different ceremonies held recently in dark places: some eight hundred menorahs from Israeli children who were evacuated from the area around Gaza were delivered to IDF soldiers fighting in the Gaza Strip. As they lit these candles on the front lines, families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas held their own Hanukkah observance in Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, in another moving act of solidarity, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lit the first candle on a huge menorah in front of Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate. “I wish that the candle of Hanukkah will shine far beyond this square and much longer than just for the eight days of Hanukkah,” he said while wearing a black velvet skullcap.

As Jews around the world grieve the atrocities of Hamas’s October 7 invasion, global solidarity with them both as a people and as a nation is vitally significant.

However, there’s a problem with conflating the two, one we urgently need to understand in our conflicted day.

When one day of oil lasted eight days

Hanukkah originated in the second century BC when Greco-Syrian rulers took over the Jewish temple and outlawed Judaism. Judah the Maccabee led his fellow Jews to defeat one of the mightiest armies on the earth, drive them from the land, and reclaim the temple. However, when they sought to light its menorah (the seven-branched candelabrum), they could find only a single cruse of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks.

Miraculously, when they lit the menorah, the one-day supply of oil lasted for eight days until new oil could be prepared under conditions of ritual purity. To commemorate and publicize this miracle, Jewish leaders instituted the festival of Hanukkah (meaning “dedication” and pointing to the rededication of the temple).

Jews around the world are observing that miracle this week. Some are deeply devout, living daily by the 613 laws of Judaism. Others are less so. Still others are secular, identifying with Judaism as their race rather than their religion. But all are united in their commitment to their people and to the tiny nation that was founded to ensure their survival.

This conflation of race and religion is typical for other religions as well. Most Muslims were born into Islam. The same holds true for Buddhists and Hindus. Their religion is a component of their family origin and, likely, their racial demographic.

Unfortunately, many think the same is true for Christianity—including many Christians.

What people don’t understand about Christianity

Do you ever wonder why so many wars are fought in the name of religion?

The present conflict in the Middle East is one example: Hamas is convinced that Allah intends them to have the same land Jews are convinced Yahweh promised to them. Skeptics often point to religious wars waged across human history as evidence that religion does more harm than good.

Here’s what they’re missing: true Christianity is not a religion about God but a deeply personal, transformational relationship with him.

Jesus was adamant: “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). When a person places their personal faith in him as their personal Redeemer, they become a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Peter said of this experience: “According to [God’s] great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). When we ask Christ to forgive our sin and become our Lord, he makes us into the “children of God” (John 1:12).

Now, when we submit our lives to his indwelling Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16; Ephesians 5:18), the Spirit makes us more like Christ (Romans 8:29) by manifesting his character in and through our lives (cf. Galatians 5:22–23). As we worship, pray, study Scripture, and live biblically, we grow in grace as the new people of God (2 Peter 3:18).

Such people love their enemies and pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:44). If they are walking in the Spirit, they do not initiate conflict but seek to advance justice and peace (Micah 6:8; Matthew 5:6, 9).

What “hinders our spiritual life more than anything else”?

You knew these theological truths before I recounted them. However, we must beware the same temptation that adherents of religion face.

I define religion as the human attempt to please and secure the blessing of God (or the gods). We choose to attend services at a church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or shrine and to invest money and time in religious activities. All of this is on our terms, done as we wish. All the while, we hope that God (or the gods) will reward our religiosity with benefits that outweigh its costs.

Since 85 percent of the planet’s population identifies as “religious,” I just described nearly seven billion people. How is transactional religion working for the world?

Oswald Chambers observed, “The characteristics of individuality are independence and self-assertiveness. It is the continual assertion of individuality that hinders our spiritual life more than anything else.” This is why, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

During this Advent week of peace, if you would know true peace, trade a transactional religion about Jesus for a transforming relationship with him. Submit all that you have and are to him as a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). Ask him to take away anything that is not his best for you and add anything that is. Ask his Spirit to make you more like Jesus than you have ever been before. And know that he delights to answer your prayer, to the glory of God.

Watchman Nee said, “A born-again person ought to possess unspeakable peace in the spirit.”

Do you?

If not, why not?

Denison Forum

With the continuing wars in Ukraine and Israel, political unrest, and a seemingly endless supply of reminders that we live in a fallen, broken world, it’s understandable that many have begun to wonder more openly if we are living in the end times. But while those questions are worth asking, we shouldn’t let them distract us from the fact that God is still moving in ways that often resemble Acts far more than Revelation.

I needed that reminder this week and found it in a recent profile of pastor Somphon Sriwichai’s work in Thailand.

Sriwichai’s story starts when, as a baby, he got sick and both the local shaman and traditional healers failed to help him get better. In desperation, his father took him to a Buddhist temple and made a vow to the statue of Buddha that if his child was healed, he would dedicate him to the temple’s service. Sriwichai began to get better shortly thereafter and, when he turned eight, went to live at the temple, later joining as a novice monk.

Life as a novice was difficult for a child, however, and when he turned nineteen Sriwichai left and moved back home with his father. Shortly thereafter, he began to hang out with criminals, drug dealers, and murderers, eventually joining one of the local gangs.

His life took a dramatic turn, however, when at twenty-nine he had an unlikely encounter with a group of local Christians.

“What kind of party is that?”

As Sriwichai describes it, “I was drinking heavily and using drugs with a friend when we heard people singing. ‘What kind of party is that?’ I asked. He answered, ‘That’s not a party, those are Christians.’ Curious, I decided to check it out.”

Sriwichai goes on to tell of how he wandered into the meeting drunk, high, and looking more like a threat than a potential convert. But despite his state, the group’s leader welcomed him in and shared the gospel with him. What struck him most was the grace and forgiveness that stood in such stark contrast to the karmic understanding of the world he’d grown up with.

As he remembers it, “I knew that, according to my own religion, I was destined to be reborn into one of the levels of hell because of the bad things I had done. I began to wonder about this grace and to hope for this forgiveness.” The leader went on to pray with him and Sriwichai “began to weep” and “sensed that my many sins had been forgiven. I had been changed but did not know what to do next.”

It was not until he came across another group of Christians three months later in Chiang Mai that the seeds of faith planted that night began to grow into a real relationship with the Lord.

Sriwichai eventually went through three months of Bible training before embarking upon a life of gospel work that more resembles those very first generations of believers nearly two thousand years ago than what most of us in the West experience today.

Whether it’s receiving visions from God that guided him to the city where he still serves, gaining credibility with the lost by praying for and healing a local shaman, or serving his community by caring for the refugees and children at risk of human trafficking, Sriwichai’s life testifies to the continued power of the gospel to transform lives and cultures today just as it did in the first century.

The entire profile is worth reading, and I encourage you to take the time to do so. But in reflecting on his story, there’s one point in particular that I’d like to focus on today.

Embrace hope

This week we have been discussing the advent theme of hope. In a day where suicide continues to rise as one of the leading causes of death and each day brings new reasons for despair, when we respond with hope rather than anger or fear it stands out. However, for hope to work it must be more than a naïve ignorance of the world around us.

The early Christians harbored no illusions as to the depravity and difficulty they would face as they lived out the gospel in a culture that showed little interest in abiding by God’s standards. Yet they did not let that opposition rob them of the hope they found in Christ. And the same should be true for us today.

So on the days when it feels like we’re living in Revelation, choose to embrace the hope of Acts. Then approach each day with the knowledge that you have the same Holy Spirit in you that has helped believers from Paul and Peter to Somphon Sriwichai change their world with the gospel.

How can you follow their example today?

Denison Forum

Since Time magazine first began selecting a Person of the Year in 1927, it reports that “the person chosen has typically been a ruler over traditional domains of power.” Fourteen US presidents, five leaders of Russia or the Soviet Union, and three popes have been recognized, for example. And yet, as Time notes, “The person whose singular influence was revealed throughout 2023 has held none of these roles—or anything remotely similar.” Singer–songwriter Taylor Swift was chosen because “in a divided world, where too many institutions are failing, [she] found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light.”

Time magazine explains that in her music, Taylor Swift is “committed to validating the dreams, feelings, and experiences of people, especially women, who felt overlooked and regularly underestimated.” As a result, “So many have turned to [her] tales because they’ve been so disappointed by the storylines that emerge elsewhere in society.”

“The battle of the Red Sea” is intensifying

Let’s consider some of the storylines emerging today.

Swift’s selection was announced a day before the eighty-second anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It comes as Europe is facing what one authority called a “huge risk” of terrorist attacks over the Christmas period. As one example, a tourist was killed and two others were injured Saturday in a terrorist assault near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The killer had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

Closer to home, a gunman killed three people and wounded a fourth yesterday on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The gunman was shot dead by police; a motive has not yet been established. This after a Texas man killed six people, including his parents, in separate attacks earlier this week.

Meanwhile, what the Telegraph calls “the battle of the Red Sea” is intensifying daily. Ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck three commercial ships Sunday, while a US warship shot down three drones in self-defense. According to US Central Command, “These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security.” Yesterday, Israel intercepted a missile over the Red Sea targeting Eilat, a southern coastal city I have visited often over the years. The US Navy also shot down a drone originating from a part of Yemen controlled by the Houthis.

All this while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are continuing their fight against Hamas in Gaza, seeking to remove what the Telegraph calls “a terrorist organization bent on killing civilians, taking hostages, using civilians to shield its own fighters, and doing its best to wipe Israel off the map.”

According to the writer, the IDF is “the most moral army on earth” for this reason: “The terrorists have surrounded themselves with innocent civilians inside hospitals. Knowing that, Israel risks the lives of its soldiers to infiltrate these structures, take down Hamas fighters, one by one, and destroy their terror tunnels underneath. Put bluntly, Israel risks the lives of its own soldiers to spare the lives of innocent Palestinians. Their terrorist enemy does the exact opposite. It uses innocent civilians to protect its soldiers.”

“The anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare”

Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead was a student and friend of Henry Kissinger. In a retrospective on the statesman’s recent death, Mead writes:

Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and the right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow civilizations, and the human beings who inhabit them, to flourish.

As a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany who later fought the Germans and helped liberate one of their concentration camps, Kissinger experienced human depravity firsthand. He understood the brutality of humans against humans we are witnessing today. In his view, the purpose of political power is to create an order that mitigates this depravity as fully as possible.

However, despite the combined efforts of leaders and nations across eight decades, conflict in the Middle East continues. As does terrorism and other violence escalating around the globe.

This is why, as the Advent week of hope reminds us, our broken world desperately needs the transformational hope found only in Christ. Like the shepherds who “made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child” (Luke 2:17), you and I are commissioned by God to give the Christmas gift of transforming hope to everyone we can.

How to measure our love for God

Our willingness to share our hope in Christ is based not only on the fallenness of our world but especially on our love for our Lord.

We can measure our love for someone by our love for those they love. If you truly love me, you will love my family. We love our Lord to the degree that we love those he loves—and he loves everyone (John 3:16). And we love those he loves to the degree that we share what is best with them, whatever the cost to ourselves.

Would you take a moment to ask Jesus if there is someone you know who especially needs to experience his hope in your compassion today?

Denison Forum

Israel accused the United Nations on Monday of failing to respond adequately to accounts that Hamas carried out widespread sexual violence against women when it attacked Israel on October 7. According to Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, “Sadly, the very international bodies that are supposedly the defenders of all women showed that when it comes to Israelis, indifference is acceptable.”

About one hundred and fifty activists also marched in front of the UN headquarters. One speaker said, “When the institutions that are globally mandated to protect women stay silent—not only international law loses meaning; humanity’s shared values lose meaning.” Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu similarly voiced his anger that the international community is ignoring atrocities against Israeli women.

Their statements highlight one of the great travesties resulting from Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7: despite overwhelming evidence of Hamas’s brutal crimes against women, their brutality has been ignored, described as morally equivalent to Israel’s response in Gaza, or even defended in the West.

“Reminiscent of a dark time in history”

Some of this silence and even support for Hamas can be explained simply as antisemitism. For example, protesters targeted a Jewish-owned kosher falafel shop in Philadelphia with chants of “genocide,” moving Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to call the demonstration “a blatant act of antisemitism” and to warn, “This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow describes the rising antisemitism after October 7 as “the return of pure hatred of the Jews.” However, as Morrow notes, “The new Jew-haters—especially young people on campuses—think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It’s morally fashionable among them.”

The reasons have been well documented: many in this generation have been taught that Israel stole, occupied, and colonized its land from its rightful Palestinian owners. Viewed through the prism of Critical Theory, the Jews are seen as majority oppressors of the oppressed Palestinian minority.

In a recent poll, 48 percent of college-age students said they sided with Hamas in its war with Israel. One college student was adamant: “Gaza is not a two-sided war. What is happening is the resistance of the oppressed against their oppressor.”

But many who are supporting Hamas have also been vocal in fighting for gender equality. Why, then, are they ignoring or justifying the Hamas terrorists’ violence against women?

Beware the “licensing effect”

For decades, many in academia have embraced the postmodern claim that all truth claims are relative and subjective, a worldview that has produced generations of moral confusion. As a result, when faced with conflicting truth claims, many think they are free to accept only those that align with their personal beliefs.

For example, many claim that Israel is a genocidal “occupier” of Palestine and therefore believe that the crimes of its “victims” can be justifiably ignored or justified. But not just the Jews are in jeopardy: anyone whose beliefs run counter to the ideologies of the cultural elite and the universities that produce them are in similar danger. As I have warned often in recent years, this danger especially includes those of us who defend biblical truth in the face of escalating sexual immorality.

Paradoxically (and nonsensically), the champions of tolerance insist that those they judge “intolerant” must not be tolerated. This is an example of the “licensing effect” by which people who believe they are virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to immorality.

As a result, those who have biblical answers to the moral issues of our time are rejected before these answers can be shared with those who need them most. If you are convinced that all doctors are dangerous to society, you won’t listen to their medical advice, no matter how sick you become. This is one of the ways Satan has “blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Ben Franklin’s advice on persuasion

During this Advent week of hope, how can we share the hope of Christ with people who do not believe they need such hope?

As we continue to reflect on the shepherds in the Christmas story, consider their motivation in leaving their flocks to worship the Christ: they were told that “a Savior” had been born “unto you” and that he would bring “peace” to those who believe in him (Luke 2:11, 14).

As Ben Franklin advised: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason.”

Every human, even the most postmodern among us, is created for intimacy with our Creator. It is in their innate interest to place their hope for the present and the future in his transforming love and grace. However, for the reasons we have discussed today, they are unlikely to consider logical appeals for the gospel.

What they cannot ignore, however, is its results in our lives.

The more intimately we know Jesus, the more persuasively we can make him known. As Christ lives “in” us (Colossians 1:27), the Spirit makes us more like Jesus (Romans 8:29). As a result, we love those who do not love us (1 Peter 4:8). We serve those who reject us (cf. John 13:14). We pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44).

And, as the hymn suggests, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

Who will know that you’re a Christian today?

Denison Forum

In the latest Indiana Jones movie, eighty-one-year-old Harrison Ford was de-aged forty years by artificial intelligence (AI). Accordingly, Sean Connery fans might hope they’ll see a young version of the first James Bond in the next Bond film. Alas, producer Barbara Broccoli has announced that, while the next 007’s identity is currently unknown, James Bond will not be an AI-rendered actor from the past.

Fans of the Swedish rock band ABBA are suffering no such disappointment. The group is currently making $2 million a week performing as avatars (lifelike digital images projected onto a screen). The band KISS now plans to do the same. “We can be forever young and forever iconic by taking us to places we’ve never dreamed of before,” KISS bassist Gene Simmons said.

Is this a good thing? Or is it just a less ominous example of a crisis that threatens us all?

“They’re some new kind of human”

Teenage girls in New Jersey were recently victimized by such technology when it was used to generate nude images of them that were then circulated at their high school. The Department of Homeland Security is warning that “deepfake” technology is being employed to generate hundreds of thousands of pornographic images, including those of children.

Fake audio is being used to steal passwords and breach financial accounts. Deepfake videos are being used to manipulate political opinion and voters. Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley is warning that “robust space and cyber capabilities [now] allow adversaries to target critical national infrastructure” vital to our military defenses. (For more, see my website paper, “ChatGPT and artificial intelligence: What you need to know.”)

But there’s an even deeper element to this rising threat.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes:

What is most urgently disturbing to me is that if America speeds forward with AI it is putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge. And there’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core. They seem apart from the great faiths of past millennia, apart from traditional moral or ethical systems or assumptions about life.

Finding “Bethlehem” today

This is the Advent week of “hope.” I would define hope as confidence in the future that brings benefits in the present. Soldiers hope their Boot Camp training is preparing them to serve their country more effectively, and this belief sustains them in their present challenges. Students hope their years of education will lead to careers that repay their investment, and this belief enables them to stay the course.

However, the validity of our hope depends on its basis. If you have cancer but place your hope in aspirin rather than oncology, your hope is not only misplaced but dangerous.

Similarly, if we hope that humans can solve humanity’s greatest problems, our hope deters us from trusting the One whose omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence we need so desperately. As creatures of such a Creator, our most empowering hope lies in submission to his gracious sovereignty.

Like the Christmas shepherds, we need to experience personally “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). But we no longer must “go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened” (v. 15) because it is happening in us. Oswald Chambers noted:

Every man is meant to be the “Bethlehem” of the Son of God by the regenerative power of redemption. Just as the historic Son of God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary . . . so the Son of God is formed in the life of the individual saint by the supernatural grace of God.

“With him everything else thrown in”

Paul assured us that “Christ in you” is “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27, my emphasis). How could it be otherwise?

“In [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (v. 19). As Richard Melick notes, “Everything that God is, Jesus is.” Thus, “through him” God could “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (v. 20). Because God died for us, God has the moral authority to forgive us for the sins that caused his death. He can thus make peace (the Greek word means to “make all things right”) in us, with us, and for us.

This is why the ultimate solution to every problem we face is found in daily submission to our Savior. When he is our Lord, his Spirit will guide us infallibly with regard to AI and every other challenge we face. We will love our neighbor as ourselves, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, Chinese or American, Democrat or Republican. And our differences will lead not to cultural division and destructive animosity but to kaleidoscopic celebration.

C. S. Lewis advised us, “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

For whom will you “look” today?

Denison Forum

As the whole world knows, Taylor Swift is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. She has attended four of his games this year, each of which the Chiefs won. All of Green Bay was hoping she would come to last night’s contest against the Packers; the Green Bay Press Gazette reports that “small businesses, community organizations, restaurateurs, nightlife spots, and local Swifties” across the area sought to welcome her.

She did attend the game, but Kelce’s team lost.

This might serve as consolation: the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan recently wrote that Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year. According to Noonan, Swift is “the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023,” with a concert tour that broke attendance and income records across the country and transformed the economy of every city she visited.

From pop culture to historical precedence: Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, died Friday at the age of ninety-three. The New York Times noted that “during a crucial period in American law . . . she was the most powerful woman in the country.” The Times added that she “inspired a generation of women” with her rise to such significance.

Former President Barack Obama wrote after justice O’Connor’s passing, “When a young Sandra Day graduated from Stanford Law School near the top of her class—in two years instead of the usual three—she was offered just one job in the private sector. Her prospective employer asked her how well she typed and told her there might be work for her as a legal secretary.

“Fortunately for us, she set her sights a little higher.”

“The only nation in the world based on an idea”

According to a recent study, nearly 2.4 billion women around the world do not have the same economic rights as men. In 178 countries, legal barriers prevent their full economic participation; globally, they have only three-quarters of the legal rights afforded to men. In addition, the United Nations reports that nearly one in three women worldwide has been a victim of violence.

Contrast the gender discrimination that persists in our fallen world with the example set by our Lord.

Jesus regularly engaged women in his ministry (cf. Luke 8:1–3), reaching out to women marginalized by their culture (cf. John 4), and including them in his most personal relationships (cf. Luke 10:38–41). The risen Christ could have appeared first to anyone, from his lead apostle Peter to his best friend John to his other apostles or brothers. Instead, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene and commissioned her as the first evangelist of Easter (John 20:11–18). Women were among the most significant leaders in apostolic Christianity (for more, see my website paper and podcast on this subject).

Paul sounded the death knell to gender discrimination when he announced, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). America’s founders built our nation on this biblical commitment to the sanctity and equality of all life (Genesis 1:27). As President Biden noted on Women’s Equality Day this year, “America is the only nation in the world based on an idea—the idea that all people are created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout their lives.”

If they were invited, you are invited

But there’s even more to the story: our lives are sacred not just because we are each equally created by God but because we are each created for intimate, personal relationship with our Creator.

Jesus was the only baby to choose his attendants, and he chose field hands who could not keep the laws of Jewish society and thus were considered ritually unclean. Shepherds could not sacrifice at the temple or attend services at the synagogue, but they could worship the Christ of Christmas (Luke 2:8–16).

If they were invited, we are all invited.

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent, celebrated by churches across the Christian world as they lit the candle of hope. We’ll discover ways this week to light that “candle” in our souls by embracing the truth that “Christ in you” is our “hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Let’s begin today by deciding that we want to know Christ more intimately than we do now. The more fully we experience the risen Lord Jesus, the more fully we experience his transforming hope for today and for eternity.

We know someone best, not by reading books or listening to lectures about them, but by spending time with them. So it is with our Lord, which is why Jesus commended Mary when she “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching” (Luke 10:39).

When last did you follow her example?

“To God I would commit my cause”

Job testified: “As for me, I would seek God, and to God would I commit my cause, who does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number” (Job 5:8–9). When we do the same, we will say with the psalmist, “I love the Lᴏʀᴅ, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live” (Psalm 116:1–2).

If you truly “love the Lᴏʀᴅ,” you will “call on him” all through this day and across this Advent season. He promises that “you will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

Will you “find” your Lord today?

Denison Forum

Last night Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis debated California governor Gavin Newsom in what was billed as “The Great Red vs. Blue State Debate.”

But while the given purpose was to provide both governors a platform to contrast the approaches they’ve taken to leading their respective states, the amount of bad blood that has built up between the two men over the last few years seemed to elevate the stakes beyond their respective approaches to governance.

Both governors came into office in 2018, and both were reelected in 2022 by decisive margins. More importantly, though, both were also in charge of leading their states through the Covid crisis, and much of their mutual resentment stems from that time. Their resulting rise in the national profile served to heighten their exposure on other subjects as well, and neither has been shy about pointing to the other as essentially everything that is wrong with the opposing party.

Consequently, when they met last night on Fox News for the debate, it quickly moved beyond the rivalry between their states to focus more on competing visions for the country. And, given the size and national significance of both California and Florida—the first- and third-most populous states in the nation respectively—framing the conversation in those terms made some sense.

Ultimately, the debate between Newsom and DeSantis was a chaotic and intense event that covered some important ground but also devolved into name-calling and contrasting claims that likely led to a restless night for those with the unenviable task of fact-checking the myriad statements made by both men.

However, my most enduring takeaway from the debate had less to do with their approach to any particular subject than with the general feel of the event. And, as we’ll discuss shortly, there’s an important lesson in there for us today regardless of where you fall along the political spectrum.

Revealing the wide gap in American politics

While President Biden is technically not running unopposed, his team has acted as though he is. It is unlikely he will appear on a debate stage until next September. As such, the only presidential debates that have taken place so far have been on the Republican side. Moreover, none of those have included former President Trump, who still has a large lead in the polls.

Consequently, while there have been some contentious moments, for the most part the candidates have been largely debating the best method to accomplish the same goals. With a few exceptions, their general approach to governance and their beliefs on the more significant issues are fairly aligned.

That was not the case last night.

What stood out most in the debate between DeSantis and Newsom was the vastly different ways in which each approached not only leading the country but also their vision for what the country should be in general. There was little to no agreement on any major policy throughout the evening, and seeing their views expressed in such stark contrast was a good reminder of just how wide the gap has become in politics—at least when expressed by politicians.

In contrast, the differences between candidates within either party seem—while not insignificant—relatively minor by comparison. And therein lies the lesson for us today.

Division vs. unity

When the majority of our conversations take place in contexts where everyone involved agrees on the big issues, then the little stuff starts to seem more important and divisive than it really is. And while that’s true in most areas of life, it’s especially relevant when it comes to our faith.

As Christians, it’s important to remember that what divides us is typically of far less importance than what unites us. Yet it can be easy to lose sight of that fact when most of our conversations take place with other Christians. That’s why, historically, the greatest periods of fighting amongst believers often occur in situations where most people at least claim to be Christian.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, for example, most of the debates and fights among believers occurred in the Eastern Roman Empire, where the church experienced relative peace and prosperity. However, in the western half of the Empire, where barbarians invaded and Roman society largely collapsed, a sense of community developed there even among factions of the faith that, less than a hundred years prior, thought the other side was going to hell.

And the same basic pattern plays out throughout much of Christian history.

The gravity of the issues that we allow to divide us is often directly linked to the degree to which we understand our need for other people. If Christians are in short supply and persecution seems imminent, the circle of whom we’re willing to work with gets much bigger. By contrast, if we have the option of going to church each Sunday with people who think and act like us, then that circle tends to shrink.

Are Christians “one”?

My purpose in bringing this up today is not to condemn the impulse to prefer the company of people with whom you have much in common. That’s natural, and such friendships can be greatly beneficial. Rather, my purpose is to challenge all of us—myself included—to be more intentional about stepping outside those smaller circles to engage with people who don’t share our beliefs.

That could include a lost coworker or neighbor, someone from a different denomination, or even just a person with whom you’ve never really had more than surface-level conversations.

One of Christ’s final prayers before the crucifixion was that his followers “may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11). When we are intentional about making room in our lives for people who think differently than we do, it can help us become the answer to that prayer by reminding us of all that we have in common with our fellow Christians.

So whom can you reach out to today? Is there a person God has already brought into your life who would fit that description?

If not, will you pray right now that he would?

Denison Forum

Israel confirmed early this morning that a temporary pause in the Israel–Hamas war would extend for at least one more day, with eight more Israeli hostages reportedly set to be released. Tragically, the tenuous nature of this truce was demonstrated when two Palestinian brothers affiliated with Hamas opened fire at the main entrance to Jerusalem, killing three Israelis and wounding six other people.

Meanwhile, what we know so far from the hostages who have been released is vital to winning another conflict: the propaganda war that seeks to validate Hamas while delegitimizing Israel.

Emily Hand is an example of the Israeli children hostages. After the nine-year-old was freed by Hamas, her father described her condition: “She was just whispering, you couldn’t hear her. I had to put my ear on her lips. She’d been conditioned not to make any noise. . . . You could just see glassy-eyed terror.” He added: “Last night, she cried until her face was red and blotchy, she couldn’t stop. She didn’t want any comfort, I guess she’s forgotten how to be comforted. She went under the covers of the bed, the quilt, covered herself up, and quietly cried.”

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NOTE: Henry Kissinger, an American diplomat and Nobel winner, died yesterday at the age of one hundred. I will publish a Daily Article Special Edition this morning reflecting on his life and significant legacy.

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“The danger many Jewish people fear the most”

Anti-Israel propagandists have claimed for years that Israel “stole” and “colonized” its land from the rightful Palestinian owners. (For more, I invite you to download my free digital book, The War in Israel: What You Need to Know about This Crisis of Global Significance.) Ironically, as commentator David Rubin notes, “Billions of people around the globe are about to celebrate the birthday of a Jewish man, born in Bethlehem 2000+ years ago, but don’t think Jews lived there before 1948.”

Now apologists for Hamas are claiming that the terrorists didn’t commit atrocities on October 7 while demanding a permanent ceasefire that would empower Hamas to slaughter more Israelis in the future. But the more children kidnapped by Hamas tell their stories, the more difficult it becomes to defend such atrocities.

This ideological war is consequential far beyond the Middle East. As Jewish American and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer writes in the New York Times, “Too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear the most.”

Sen. Schumer documents the shocking rise in antisemitic violence in America after Hamas’s October 7 invasion and asks, “Are we still a nation that can defy the course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled, and massacred over and over again?” His question is obviously crucial for the future of Jews in America.

But it is also vital for the future of America herself.

The lowest point in our nation’s history?

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” is a law of propaganda often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party. Similarly, the first stage in changing culture is to normalize the new “truth” or behavior, then to legalize it, stigmatize those who oppose it, and criminalize their opposition.

LGBTQ advocates, for example, have followed this playbook very effectively in recent years. To illustrate: Disney’s new “family” Christmas movie portrays a family with two fathers and features a boy calling another boy a “hottie.” Evangelicals like me who disagree with such sexualization of children are stigmatized as “homophobic” and dangerous to society and may face legal and criminal penalties in the future.

However, while God loves us and wants to bless us (cf. Ephesians 2:4–5), he cannot love us and bless that which harms us.

When we abandon biblical truth and reject biblical morality, the prophet’s description becomes true of us: “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God” (Isaiah 59:2). Since God is the only source of spiritual life (John 15:5), “to set the mind on the flesh is death” (Romans 8:6).

We should therefore be grieved but not surprised that US suicides reached a record high last year, or that overdose fatalities have risen fivefold in the last two decades, or that 68 percent of us say this is the lowest point in our nation’s history they can remember.

“There is only one relationship that matters”

In a sermon attributed to St. Macarius (AD 300–391) we read:

Woe to the path that is not walked on, or along which the voices of men are not heard, for then it becomes the haunt of wild animals. Woe to the soul if the Lord does not walk within it to banish with his voice the spiritual beasts of sin. Woe to the house where no master dwells, to the field where no farmer works, to the pilotless ship, storm-tossed and sinking. Woe to the soul without Christ as its true pilot; drifting in the darkness, buffeted by the waves of passion, storm-tossed at the mercy of evil spirits, its end is destruction.

Woe to the soul that does not have Christ to cultivate it with care to produce the good fruit of the Holy Spirit. Left to itself, it is choked with thorns and thistles; instead of fruit it produces only what is fit for burning. Woe to the soul that does not have Christ dwelling in it; deserted and foul with the filth of its passions, it becomes a haven for all the vices.

Does his warning describe and explain the spiritual and moral condition of our culture?

Conversely, we are promised: “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). Jesus assures us, “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit” (John 15:5).

To this end, I will close by sharing my favorite paragraph in my favorite daily devotional, My Utmost for His Highest. I read it every year on this date and am encouraged and challenged each time by Oswald Chambers’ wisdom:

There is only one relationship that matters, and that is your personal relationship to a personal Redeemer and Lord. Let everything else go, but maintain that at all costs, and God will fulfill his purpose through your life. One individual life may be of priceless value to God’s purpose, and yours may be that life.

Will God “fulfill his purpose through your life” today?

Denison Forum

A private funeral service and interment for former First Lady Rosalynn Carter will be held today in Plains, Georgia. Yesterday, a tribute service in Atlanta made national headlines. It was attended by former President Jimmy Carter, now ninety-nine years old and in hospice care, along with President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and former First Ladies Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Melania Trump.

Mr. Carter was unable to speak at the service, so their daughter, Amy Lynn Carter, read one of his love letters on his behalf. Written seventy-five years ago when he was serving in the Navy, it said in part, “When I see you, I fall in love with you all over again. Does that seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me.”

Watching coverage of yesterday’s service, I found myself pondering all that has happened in Mrs. Carter’s ninety-six years of life. Her husband was the first US president born in a hospital. Penicillin was discovered a year after her birth. She was sixteen years old when the first dialysis machine was built, twenty-eight years of age when the polio vaccine was made available, and forty years old when the first heart transplant was performed.

Now my Apple Watch tracks my blood oxygen, heart rate, time spent asleep, respiratory rate, fitness activities, and wrist temperature. Artificial intelligence and advances in genomics are revolutionizing health care.

However, has our morality kept up with our medicine?

Anti-Israel protesters plan to disrupt Christmas tree lighting

The United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine on this day in 1947. The plan would have created an independent Jewish state and an autonomous nation of Palestine, but Arab leaders rejected the proposal. Hamas’s terrorist invasion of Israel on October 7 and the war it started are just the latest consequences of their rejection.

However, as I noted yesterday, many in the West continue to blame Israel for a conflict Hamas instigated. As postmodern relativism has deluded our culture into embracing “post-truth” subjective ethics, millions of people believe truth to be whatever they believe it to be. Consequently, protesters continue to claim that Israel’s response to Hamas’s atrocities is morally equivalent to those atrocities, if not even more “genocidal.”

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NOTE: I have written a book on the Israel–Hamas war which we are releasing as a free digital download. I invite you to get your copy here.

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For example, anti-Israel protesters calling themselves “Within Our Lifetime” glued themselves to Sixth Avenue during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and splashed red paint all over the New York Public Library flagship, causing $75,000 in damage. Another anti-Israel group shut down the Manhattan Bridge on the holiday weekend. Now anti-Israel demonstrators plan to disrupt the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony this evening.

To those who accuse Israel of genocidal crimes against Palestinians (when it is actually Hamas that seeks the genocide of the Jews), consider the story of Yahya Sinwar. He was serving four life sentences in an Israeli prison for attempted murder when his life was saved by brain surgery, reportedly to remove a tumor. He was released in 2011, one of a thousand Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Twelve years later, he masterminded the October 7 invasion that slaughtered more than twelve hundred people in southern Israel.

“Inching ever closer to the abyss”

Telegraph columnist Allister Heath is right: “There is a fundamental, profound moral and legal distinction between deliberately torturing, raping, and exterminating women and children, and the accidental, tragic death of civilians used as human shields as the result of careful, considered action taken by a law-bound army engaged in self-defense.”

Because so many in Western society are rejecting this distinction, Heath warns, “The world is inching ever closer to the abyss, and Hamas’s stooges are helping to drag us into another dark age.”

The rejection of objective truth and morality typified by the current denigration of Israel and the Jewish people tragically deserves Heath’s warning. We live in a culture where 40 percent of people willfully choose to be ignorant of the negative consequences of their actions. Similarly, multitudes are choosing willful ignorance of the realities in Hamas’s war with Israel and a multitude of other consequences resulting from our escalating rejection of biblical morality.

Why is this situation so dire for our future?

“My grandmother doesn’t need a eulogy”

In his 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, Ronald Reagan quoted the French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755): “The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principle upon which it was founded.” The “principle” upon which America was founded is the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and thus “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If “truth” is no longer “self-evident” and objective, the equality of all people and the rights that ensue are no longer “self-evident” and objective. And the republic built on those rights is imperiled.

I am praying daily that Americans understand the consequences of rejecting biblical truth and morality before it’s too late. If we admit our spiritual blindness, we can claim God’s promise:  “I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground” (Isaiah 42:16). If we admit our spiritual poverty, we can claim God’s provision: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

And when he does, we become the change our culture needs to see.

Rosalynn Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, said at her tribute service yesterday, “My grandmother doesn’t need a eulogy, her life was a sermon.”

What sermon will your life preach today?

Denison Forum

Casey McIntyre was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2019 and died on November 12, 2023, at just thirty-eight years of age. In the days leading up to her death, she urged friends to donate to a campaign that would cancel the medical debt of strangers. By the time she died, that campaign raised nearly $200,000, enough to pay off nearly $19 million in medical debt. As of today, it has more than tripled its impact.

In all the coverage I have seen of her remarkable impact, no one has taken a contrarian view—nor should they. Just for the sake of objectivity in reporting, someone could question whether the money could be put to better use or whether medical debt should be retired in this way. But Casey’s courageous generosity of spirit was so compelling that her story should be told with the affirmation it has received.

Unfortunately, such moral clarity is in short supply in our “authentic” society.

“The job of the army is to protect the civilians”

Authentic is Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year.” This should not surprise us since it is so often used these days to connote seeking one’s “authentic voice” and “authentic self.” Our relativistic culture assures us that we are what we believe ourselves to be, whether this claim relates to our gender, sexual orientation, or nearly any other identifier. Anyone who disagrees is being intolerant, which is the cardinal sin of our culture, or so we’re told.

The same is now true of others: if you think Israel is committing “genocide” and Hamas’s terrorists are “freedom fighters,” you can join multitudes of demonstrators who agree. This despite the fact that Hamas is unambiguous in its stated desire to completely eradicate the Jews (which is what a “genocide” actually constitutes), while Israel has possessed for decades the military capacity to take Palestinian hostages and yet has never done so.

A dear friend and I were discussing over the weekend the courage of our mutual friend now serving with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. She said of him: “It is hard to grasp such selflessness and devotion to fellow countrymen and complete strangers, knowing that his possible loss of life is real and the impact would be devastating for his own wife and children.”

And yet our friend risks his life every day to free hostages he has never met. His latest text notes, “The most important thing right now is the release of as many hostages as possible.” He explains why: “The job of the army is to protect the civilians, not vice versa.”

Of course, Hamas clearly disagrees as it hides its terrorists behind civilian hostages and other human shields. And yet, its advocates in the West continue to claim that the murderers are the victims of a conflict their atrocities instigated. (For more, download our free ebook, The War in Israel.)

“The worst in the nation had prevailed over the best”

How have we come to such a place of moral confusion and obfuscation?

One answer was explained in an insightful article published on the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy by R. Jordan Prescott, a private contractor working in defense and national security. He notes that many Americans reacted to the president’s tragic death by blaming America. For example, journalist James Reston wrote: “Somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best . . . something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence.”

This reaction led to the narrative that America is itself deeply flawed and violent. According to Prescott, a new “liberalism” emerged that accused our country of “a seemingly inexhaustible list of American sins—greed, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, slavery, genocide, environmental destruction, militarism, and imperialism.”

Their “solution” was to transmute this dogma of collective guilt and identity consciousness into what is often termed “woke” ideology today. Prescott notes that America’s educational institutions have been captured and used to advance this dogma “in direct opposition to the Judeo-Christian premises of the American Creed.”

In this version of reality, truth claims are but tools of societal transformation. Political strategist James Carville spoke for many in his profession: “Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you’re smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is.”

However, a relativistic “morality” that weaponizes truth for political ends and celebrates terrorists who kidnap children has its roots much further back in history than 1963.

“The further away you are from the devil”

Here are the first words spoken by the tempter to the first humans: “Did God actually say . . .” (Genesis 3:1). From then to now, Satan’s first move in his strategy to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10) is to steal, kill, and destroy the truth.

He knows that when “truth is relative,” the truth that Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) becomes just “your” truth or “my” truth. And when we jettison biblical truth and objective morality, we have no compass or map for the journey and are, in the most basic definition of the term, lost.

What is the way forward? Jesus assured us, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Note the order: first we must “abide” in God’s word, which means to think and live biblically. When we obey what we know from Scripture, then and only then are we “truly” Jesus’ disciples. Such holistic obedience positions us to “know the truth” as the Spirit guides us (John 16:13). As we know and live this truth, it will “set us free” (John 8:32).

Such biblical living is what Scripture means when it calls us to “submit yourselves therefore to God” (James 4:7a) so we can “resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (v. 7b). In this way we claim the promise, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (v. 8).

Billy Graham summarized today’s conversation with advice everyone in America needs to hear and heed: “Don’t be deceived by Satan and his lies. Instead, stay close to Christ—because the closer you are to him, the further away you are from the devil.”

How will you “stay close to Christ” today?

Denison Forum

Hamas freed seventeen more hostages yesterday; thirty-nine Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons in exchange. Among the hostages Hamas released was Abigail Edan, a four-year-old Israeli-American citizen who witnessed her parents being murdered on October 7. President Biden said at a news conference, “What she endured is unthinkable.”

Emily Hand is another hostage released over the weekend by Hamas. She was at a sleepover at a friend’s house when Hamas invaded and was initially reported killed, but it was later announced that she was among those held hostage. She turned nine while in captivity.

Yaffa Adar is another. The eighty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor and mother of three, grandmother of seven, and great-grandmother of eight was kidnapped from her kibbutz. Her eldest grandson was also taken hostage and remains in Hamas custody.

Amid the elation over receiving some of the hostages, the Wall Street Journal editorial board reminded us that “the cost is a short-term cease-fire that Hamas will exploit, and three-quarters of the 236 hostages will remain in terrorist hands.” They added:

The deal again shows the moral gulf between the two sides. Hamas kidnapped Israeli children as young as nine months to use as hostages and spring its jihadists who have been arrested or convicted in a fair trial for their crimes. Israel takes military risks to save its citizens. Hamas risks Palestinian civilians to save itself.

This “moral gulf” is worth exploring on an even more fundamental level today.

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

John Gray is an emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and a prolific author. His latest book, The New Leviathans, uses Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 classic Leviathan to explore the rise of totalitarianism in our generation.

In an article for Time, Gray explains Hobbes’ central thesis: humans can achieve a civilized life of peace, prosperity, and culture through a social contract that empowers a ruler whom all will obey. This sovereign power (which Hobbes called a “leviathan” after the sea monster in the book of Job), whether a king or a governing assembly, would be unbounded in its powers, but its authority would be limited to maintaining peace.

Hobbes believed that humans need such a ruler because we live in a state of nature he described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” However, in Gray’s view, such “leviathans” as we are seeing in Putin’s Russia, China’s Xi, and Western “woke” ideologies fail the people they are empowered to protect.

The reason is both simple and catastrophic: rulers are as subject to fallen human nature as those they rule. They are as tempted to be their own gods (Genesis 3:5) as the people they theoretically serve. More so, in fact: the “will to power” that Nietzsche so powerfully identifies becomes even more tempting as power becomes more available.

As the British historian Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“Nobody should blame us for the things we do”

Gray’s analysis explains why there will be “wars and rumors of war” until the Lord returns (Matthew 24:6). The ongoing exchange of hostages for prisoners will not end the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

To the contrary: Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, when asked if his goal was the annihilation of Israel, replied, “Yes, of course. We must remove that country.” He added: “We are the victims of the occupation. Full stop. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October million, everything we do is justified.” The fact that Gaza has not been “occupied” by Israel since 2005 makes no difference, apparently.

The only remedy for the sinful human heart is one illustrated by the hostages-for-prisoners exchanges over the weekend: trading the innocent for the guilty to free the latter through the suffering of the former.

Here is the solution we need: “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:20–21). At the cross, the Father transferred your sins and mine onto his sinless Son, who then paid our debt with his life: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

“It’s not in the stars to hold our destiny”

As the Christmas season begins, I want to urge us to remember that we were guilty prisoners exchanged for an innocent Savior. Jesus came “to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18, fulfilling Isaiah 61:1). The One born in a Bethlehem manger died on a Jerusalem cross. Your cross. My cross.

One of the symptoms of human fallenness is the delusion that we can save ourselves. Our secularized society assures us that we can be our own Leviathan, that we are the customers and consumers of our culture. In this calculus, holy days become holidays; Christmas is about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and nonstop consumption until we “ring in the New Year” not with prayer and fasting but with parties and feasting.

Maya Rudolph encouraged us to “create your own destiny.” William Faulkner similarly opined, “Man is indestructible because of his simple will to freedom.” Shakespeare was adamant: “It’s not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

To whom will you entrust your destiny today?

Denison Forum

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal by which Hamas will free fifty civilian hostages in return for the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and a four-day pause in fighting. The first hostages could be freed as early as tomorrow. US officials hope this deal in Israel could lead to the release of many more hostages, including those held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In all the reporting I’ve seen on this agreement, here’s a question no one has asked: Why is it that only the jihadists take hostages? Israeli forces have been inside Gaza for several weeks—why have they not taken a single Palestinian hostage to use as leverage with Hamas?

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NOTE: I have written a book on the Israel–Hamas war which we are releasing as a free digital download. I invite you to get your copy here.

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“We love death like our enemies love life!”

The answer is simple: the two have very different views regarding the sanctity of human life.

Israel’s worldview, rooted in the Hebrew Bible, believes that all people are created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:27). They consider hostages to be especially valuable: their central prayer, recited three times a day, speaks of God’s compassion as one who “heals the sick and frees the captives.” The Babylonian Talmud teaches that being held captive is worse than death or famine, for it includes them both.

This is why they freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single Israeli soldier in 2011. Over the years, they have released about seven thousand Palestinian prisoners to secure the freedom of nineteen Israelis and to retrieve the bodies of eight others.

Hamas, by contrast, stated in its original charter: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” They claim, “We love death like our enemies love life!” They view Muslims who die in war as martyrs who will be rewarded in paradise.

How we view the sanctity of human life is foundational to the society we create. Israel, as I have witnessed in more than thirty trips to the Holy Land, has built a thriving economy for the benefit of its citizens. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields and steals aid intended for them to construct tunnels and acquire weapons for killing Jews.

When we view each person as sacred, our definition of success changes dramatically.

Playing Scrabble in five languages

John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis both died on this day sixty years ago.

By most measures, both would be considered enormously successful. In a recent Gallup survey, Mr. Kennedy was the highest-rated former US president. He had a net worth of $300 million at the time of his death; in 2015, Forbes estimated the Kennedy family’s net worth at $1.2 billion. His presidential museum is one of my favorites and a lasting tribute to his iconic cultural status.

C. S. Lewis achieved remarkable success as well. He was a true genius, receiving three “firsts” from Oxford (the equivalent of graduating summa cum laude three times) and serving on the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge. (He also played Scrabble with his wife in five languages.) He attained national fame for his radio talks on the BBC during World War II and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. More than two hundred million copies of his books have been sold.

However, I will always remember my surprise upon visiting his home for the first time. Known as “the Kilns,” it is a modest house where he lived, wrote, and died. Lewis gave away most, if not all, of the proceeds of his books, often making his donations anonymously. He never bought a car or learned to drive and seldom traveled. He put his money in an “Agape Fund” and donated so much of it that a friend had to advise him to keep a third for taxes.

He was just as generous with his time, laboriously responding to each and every letter he received. His personal correspondence was so vast that it has been collected in three volumes.

“You have never met a mere mortal”

What explains Lewis’s extreme personal generosity? Consider this observation in The Weight of Glory:

There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Lewis was convinced—rightly—that people are inestimably significant, far above anything the material world can give or measure. As a result, he wisely invested his resources where they would bring the greatest return.

As did his Lord. Scripture says of Jesus: “By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible—whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). And yet he chose to make humans, knowing that our sins would cost him the cross (Revelation 13:8 NIV). And then he died a tortured, excruciating death for us (Romans 5:8). He would do it all over again, just for you.

Such sacrificial love is abundant cause for gratitude this Thanksgiving week and every day of every year.

“It is not your business to succeed”

Serving people in the will of God is the highest and best definition of success. The more we obey our Father’s calling to “serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10), the more successful our lives become.

C. S. Lewis was adamant on this point: “It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with God.” Billy Graham likewise asked:

How does God define success? His measure is very different from the world’s measure, and it can be summed up in one sentence: Success in God’s eyes is faithfulness to his calling. Paul was a failure in the world’s eyes—but not to God. Even Jesus was a failure as far as most people were concerned, but “he was faithful to the one who appointed him” [Hebrews 3:2 NIV]—and that is all that mattered.

What is your definition of success? Is it the same as God’s—and are you pursuing it?

How would you answer his questions today?

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As you know, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter died Sunday afternoon at the age of ninety-six. Former President Jimmy Carter said, “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished.”

A tireless advocate for mental health services, Mrs. Carter was instrumental in passing the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 and continued her work on this vital cause for decades after. In 1982, she and her husband founded the Carter Center, a nonprofit dedicated to a range of issues from improving global health to monitoring democratic elections to negotiating peace agreements. She could often be found volunteering with Habitat for Humanity along with her husband in building homes for those in need.

In a day when many leaders use their public platforms for personal celebrity, Rosalynn Carter used hers to serve others.

“A kind of private barn of money”

According to Guido Alfani, an economic history professor at Bocconi University in Milan, the wealthiest members of society have often in Western history been expected to use their riches “to support their societies in times of crises like plagues, famines, or wars.” For example, the Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini wrote in 1428 that “many greedy individuals” should “constitute a kind of private barn of money able to be of assistance to everybody.”

Those who gave charitably were not being entirely altruistic, however. Alfani notes that they wanted to allay the unfavorable way they were viewed by others and also saw such charity as contributing to “the benefit of their souls.”

Such transactional benevolence is rooted in fallen human nature. For example, after Jesus announced his intention to go to Jerusalem where he would “be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Matthew 16:21), Peter “began to rebuke him, saying, ‘Far be it from you Lord! This shall never happen to you’” (v. 22). Jesus responded: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (v. 23).

Why did Jesus say this to Peter?

The apostle wanted Jesus to be a military messiah who would overthrow the hated Romans, not a suffering servant who would die on their cross. Even after Jesus’ resurrection, Peter and the other disciples asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). They wanted him to do what they wanted, using him as a means to their ends. In this way, Peter was “setting his mind” not on the “things of God” but on “the things of man.” He was serving Jesus so Jesus would serve him.

This is what fuels Hamas in its drive to eradicate Israel so its Mahdi (a messianic figure) will return to rule the world for Muslims, including themselves. It fuels Christian nationalists who want God to bless America for the advancement of their communities and aspirations.

I say all of that to say this: an excellent test of character is to see how sacrificially we serve others when such service does not benefit us personally.

The paradoxical problem with our focus on evangelism

Jesus is Exhibit A of such character. He testified that he “came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45a). Then he proved it when he “[gave] his life as a ransom for many” (v. 45b). This fact highlights a foundational reason for Thanksgiving this holiday week: expressing gratitude to Christ for his selfless, sacrificial love.

A practical way we can thank Jesus for his grace is by sharing that grace with others. After washing his disciples’ feet, he called them to “wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14). We demonstrate our love for our Lord by our love for our neighbor (Matthew 22:37–39). The best way you can serve me is to serve my family.

Here’s the problem: we evangelicals tend to focus more on experiencing grace in salvation (Ephesians 2:8–9) than on God’s call to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18, my emphasis). Paradoxically, this omission limits our evangelistic effectiveness since we need such intimacy with Christ that his Spirit transforms us into his character (Romans 8:29) and manifests his grace to others (Galatians 5:22–23).

Exhibiting such character is vital if we are to reach our skeptical, post-Christian culture with the good news of God’s love.

The “three worlds of evangelicalism”

Aaron Renn was a partner at Accenture and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research before turning to a career as a writer on cultural issues. His February 2022 First Things article on the “three worlds of evangelicalism” was especially significant and urgent.

In it, he shows that American evangelicals have moved from the “positive world” (pre–1994) in which we were largely viewed as contributing to society, to the “neutral world” (1994–2014) in which we were viewed as one option among many, to the “negative world” (2014–present) in which we are seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. In my book The Coming Tsunami I document this shift as well.

In such an antagonistic culture, it is even more imperative that you and I manifest our Lord’s selfless, sacrificial spirit of service:

• When skeptics reject us, we know that they especially need our intercession and we “pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
• When they reject our message, we know that they especially need to know God’s love and we redouble our sacrificial efforts to share our Lord with them (cf. Acts 4:8–12; 5:29–32).
• When people need resources we possess, we choose to “do good to everyone” (Galatians 6:10), remembering that we are “serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:24; cf. Matthew 25:40).

To this end, let’s make time this Thanksgiving week to offer Jesus our worship and gratitude for his sacrificial love for us. Then let’s see opportunities to serve our family, friends, and others as invitations to demonstrate his selfless character in our compassion.

St. Fulgentius of Ruspe (AD 460–533) described the transformation God intends for his children: “They are enlightened and converted, thus passing from death to life, sinfulness to holiness, unbelief to faith, and evil actions to holy life.”

Will those you see this week see this transformation in you?

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