NOTE: I invite you to join me in honoring our veterans today by praying for them, their families, and our nation. I am sharing a personal reflection in an article we will publish on our website this morning.

The US Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will not revisit its landmark 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The Court rejected an appeal from Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who was ordered to pay compensation to a same-sex couple after denying them a marriage license due to her religious beliefs.

For those of us who believe in Jesus’ definition of marriage (Matthew 19:3–6; cf. Genesis 2:18–25), this news is disappointing but not surprising. Whether the issue is abortion, adultery, divorce, pornography, euthanasia, or a host of other moral concerns, we should not expect a secular democracy to guide itself by biblical morality.

How is such secularism working for our culture?

The popularity of “ethical non-monogamy”

Among Millennial and Gen X respondents to a recent survey, more chose “ethical non-monogamy” over monogamy as their relational style preference. In case you’re not familiar with “ethical non-monogamy” (and I hope you aren’t), the term refers to “romantic or sexual relationships where all partners consent to having multiple intimate relationships.”

Of course, for those of us who believe biblical morality, the term is as oxymoronic as “minor surgery” (there’s no such thing for the patient), an “unbiased opinion,” or the “Civil War.” (An elderly member of the church I pastored in Atlanta cautioned me against the latter term, reminding me that “there was nothing civil about it.”)

Pornography is becoming more violent and addictive than ever. Chatbots are becoming more sexually explicit as well. Without the constraints of network television FCC regulations, streaming services air movies regularly that are highly pornographic. (I won’t link to recent examples, nor will I watch them.) A recent Saturday Night Live host actually made jokes about sex trafficking, rape, and pedophilia. (Again, I won’t link to what she said due to its disgusting nature.)

At the heart of our cultural morass is our rejection of a cultural moral compass. It’s not just that we disagree about right and wrong—secular people no longer believe there is such a thing as right and wrong.

This has implications for our national future. As the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke noted, “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

But it also has implications for our eternal future, an issue you and I urgently need to consider today.

JD Vance hopes his wife will become a Christian

My wife and I were watching when Vice President JD Vance recently addressed a group of students at a Turning Point USA televised event. When he was asked about his wife’s religion (she was raised Hindu), he said, “I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”

The reaction was swift and vociferous, some branding Mr. Vance a “bigot” and worse. Such critics betray a basic ignorance of biblical teachings regarding the necessity of evangelism (cf. Matthew 28:18–20; Acts 1:8). But even more deeply, they point to the greatest danger of our tolerance-based ethos: the insistence that Christians tolerate what harms another person eternally.

Jesus said of himself, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18). This is why he later testified, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

The apostles took Jesus’ words to heart when they risked their lives to proclaim concerning him, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Lest there be any question, consider this clear statement: “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12).

“I loved you enough to say no”

Here is the biblical logic behind the claim that salvation comes through Christ alone:

• If God is the Supreme Being, he must be perfect (Isaiah 6:3). Otherwise, a more perfect being would be more supreme than he.
• Heaven must be perfect as well, or God cannot remain perfect while dwelling there (cf. Revelation 22:1–5).
• Every human being has sinned, committing mistakes and failures which break our relationship with our perfect Creator and must bar us from his perfect presence (Romans 3:23).
• The consequence of sin is death, since sin cuts us off from our holy Lord and thus the only source of eternal life (Romans 6:23).
• A person who would pay this debt on our behalf must be sinless himself, or their death could pay their debt but not ours (Romans 5:8).
• Jesus Christ is the only sinless person who has ever lived and the only one who died in our place to purchase our salvation (1 Peter 2:24; 1 John 2:2). No other religious leader or figure of history has ever claimed to be and do the same.
• When we ask Jesus to forgive our sins and become our Lord, he reconciles us to his Father and makes us the children of God (2 Corinthians 5:21; John 1:12). No other religion makes the same offer.
• If we reject our Father’s loving grace, we will spend eternity separated from him in a place the Bible calls “hell” (Matthew 10:28; cf. Revelation 20:15).

This was why Paul had “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” for his unbelieving Jewish brethren (Romans 9:2). It was why early Christians risked—and many gave—their lives to preach the gospel to “the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Like them, we should no more tolerate the spiritual lostness of our secularized friends and neighbors than we would tolerate a terrorist who would murder them. The more they reject our message of salvation, the more they need it. And the more we love them, the more we will risk their temporary rejection for the sake of their eternal souls.

Author and humorist Erma Bombeck once wrote to her children,

“I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it.”

How much will we love the people we influence today?

Quote for the day:

“Witnessing is that deep-seated conviction that the greatest favor I can do for others is to introduce them to Jesus Christ.” —Paul Little

Our latest website resources:

• If spreading the gospel was as easy as ‘67’
• Tariffs on trial, Nigerian Christian persecution, Dick Cheney, Mamdani and Dems win big & NFL trades
• How can Christians respond to persecution and defend religious freedom?
• Washington walks back attempts to single out Catholic clergy
• Trade deals, East Wing destroyed, NBA gambling scandal, election day preview & scented stamps

Denison Forum

A group of Senate Democrats reached an agreement last night with congressional Republicans, the first in a series of votes that would lead to reopening the US government. The negotiated deal reverses federal layoffs, promises a future vote on expiring Obamacare subsidies, and fully reopens the government through January 30. The Senate and the House still require a final vote, then the continuing resolution would head to President Trump for his signature.

Healthcare benefits have been at the heart of the longest-ever government shutdown, which raises the question: How much of our lives are spent managing our mortality? Americans spend $265 billion each year on physical activity, $70 billion a year on weight-loss plans, and $100 billion on prescription drugs.

Nearly a million people have evacuated in the Philippines ahead of a deadly typhoon that struck yesterday. Paris residents are entering a lottery to share cemetery space with Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. The plastic surgery industry is now booming in the US.

It is human nature to seek to mitigate human finitude, but the mortality rate is still 100 percent. In a world where death comes to all (Hebrews 9:27), why should we believe that “God is love” (1 John 4:8)?

 “Let death do its work in us”

I spent the weekend grappling with a sinus infection, the details of which I won’t share as you begin your Monday. However, I would wager that, like me, you can name something (or several somethings) about your health you’re glad you won’t have to endure forever. And every day you tire of the news with its never-ending cycles of doom and gloom, you can take heart that your world will not always be like this.

St. Ambrose of Milan (339–97) is best known for his influence on St. Augustine, but he was a brilliant theologian in his own right. He encouraged us:

Let death do its work in us . . . so that life may do its work also: a good life after death, that is, a good life after victory, after the battle is over, when the law of the flesh is no longer in conflict with the law of the mind, when we have no more battles with mortal flesh but in mortal flesh we have victory.

He understood that for Christians, dying is not the final battle but the final victory. Our death is but the doorway into a life without death, a world in which “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4) and, as John Donne warned our old foe, “Death, thou shalt die.”

Max Lucado is right:

Though you and I may wish for a longer life for our loved ones who have gone before us, they don’t. Ironically, the first to accept God’s decision of death is the one who dies. You see, while we’re mourning at a grave, they’re marveling in heaven. While we’re questioning God, they’re praising God!

As I often said at funerals, when we take our last breath here, we take our first breath there. We close our eyes in this world of death and open them in that world of life. We step out of the “car” and go into the “house.” We are well, and we are home. And we discover for ourselves the truth of Jesus’ promise: “Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:26).

“No different from being unborn”

Here’s our problem: we cannot prove that it is so.

When we die, we obviously have no agency to save ourselves from death. Like a patient under anesthesia, we are completely dependent on someone besides ourselves to bring us back to life. But unlike those facing anesthesia, we cannot interview someone who has come back from the other side, so we have no way to prove that the other side even exists, much less that we will go there upon our death.

Every position we take on the afterlife is, therefore, a faith position.

The atheist Richard Dawkins is sure that “being dead will be no different from being unborn,” but he has absolutely no way to prove that he’s right. He has faith that there is no God, judgment, or afterlife, just as I have faith that all three are real.

Faced with a faith decision we cannot avoid—and no one can avoid death—we do well to examine the evidence and then make our decision on its basis as best we can. Here’s the evidence upon which I base my hope of eternal life: the fact of Jesus’ empty tomb.

The fact that beckons when I doubt

I can prove to you without opening a Bible that Jesus of Nazareth existed, was crucified, and was believed by his followers to have been raised from the grave. When they began proclaiming the resurrection, the easiest response by the authorities would have been to produce Jesus’ corpse. This would have ended the Christian movement before it began.

But they did nothing of the sort. They fabricated the lie that the disciples stole the body only because they had no body to display (Matthew 28:11–15).

From then to now, the fact of Jesus’ empty tomb beckons to me every time the inevitable doubts of faith begin to find me. There is no logical explanation for it:

• If the disciples stole the body, they kept the secret better than any secret has ever been kept and then died tortured deaths for a lie.
• If the disciples went to the wrong tomb, the authorities would have shown them to the correct tomb.
• If Jesus had somehow resuscitated himself after his death, despite the spear that pierced the pericardial sac around his heart and the mummified airtight shroud in which his corpse was wrapped, he could not have performed the miracles that proved his resurrected divinity and sparked the Christian movement.

If Christ rose from the grave, he must be God. His word must be true. Trusting him must be the most reasonable decision to make. Sharing his hope must be the greatest gift we can give. And death must be the door to eternal life.

“The funeral of all his sins”

The Puritan Thomas Brooks (1608–80) noted:

“A Christian knows that death shall be the funeral of all his sins, his sorrows, his afflictions, his temptations, his vexations, his oppressions, his persecutions. He knows that death shall be the resurrection of all his hopes, his joys, his delights, his comforts, his contentments.”

Why is this reminder good news for you today?

Quote for the day:

“He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.” —Matthew Henry

Our latest website resources:

• If spreading the gospel was as easy as ‘67’
• Tariffs on trial, Nigerian Christian persecution, Dick Cheney, Mamdani and Dems win big & NFL trades
• How can Christians respond to persecution and defend religious freedom?
• Washington walks back attempts to single out Catholic clergy
• Trade deals, East Wing destroyed, NBA gambling scandal, election day preview & scented stamps

Denison Forum

Toward the end of President Trump’s first term in office, his administration designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC). The label is given to nations that “engaged in severe violations of religious freedom” as understood under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. While the label was removed the following year by President Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, Trump reinstated it this past weekend in response to increased scrutiny of the government’s failure to protect the Christians within its borders.

Designating a country as a CPC doesn’t lead to immediate sanctions or require the administration to follow through on Trump’s threats of military action and withheld aid. However, it does necessitate that Congress look into the matter, and representatives from the House Appropriations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are preparing to do just that.

But while President Trump is the most powerful voice to raise concerns over the treatment of Christians in Nigeria, he’s far from the first. Senator Ted Cruz introduced legislation in August proposing sanctions against the country for violations of religious freedom. And the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has advocated for intervention for years.

The Commission’s report from August of last year describes in detail the myriad ways in which Christians have suffered at the hands of terrorist organizations and bandits, as well as at the hands of the government at the state and local levels. Despite the country’s constitution officially prohibiting the adoption of an official religion, it does permit the use of Sharia and blasphemy laws. Citizens are not supposed to be compelled to abide by them, but that hasn’t stopped local and state governments from using them to imprison, beat, and even stone those who fail to abide by their codes of conduct.

However, Nigeria’s Christians are not the only ones to suffer such treatment, and the reality of the situation is more complex than the headlines make it seem.

Boko Haram and violence in the North

As Conner Jones described on this week’s episode of Culture Brief, part of what makes the situation in Nigeria so complicated is that the nation has a population of nearly 240 million people, and it’s split relatively evenly between Christians and Muslims. Most of the country’s Christian population resides in the southern half, while the northern half is predominantly Muslim.

The vast majority of the violence is located in the northern and central parts of the country. In major southern metropolitan areas, like Lagos, Christian persecution is relatively low. In the north, however, militant groups like Boko Haram target both Christians and Muslims who will not go along with their brand of radicalized Islam. While followers of Jesus are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than Muslims, these terrorist armies have killed tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims as well.

To their credit, the government has tried to intervene at times, only to find that its forces are often outmatched. Just last month, Boko Haram overran a military barracks along Nigeria’s northern border and forced the soldiers to flee, leaving behind their weapons.

Yet, as bad as the violence is in the north, central Nigeria is even worse.

Fulani Herdsmen and a more complicated conflict

Isa Sanusi, the executive director of Nigeria’s branch of Amnesty International, said in May that 93 percent of the roughly ten thousand people killed by bandits in the last two years came from two states in the central part of the nation. But while there is undoubtedly a religious component to the violence in this region, economics play an important role as well.

The primary perpetrators of the attacks in central Nigeria are the Fulani Herdsmen. For generations, they raised their cattle and other livestock in a nomadic way of life. However, as the country’s population increased, more and more of that land was converted to farms, most of which are owned and operated by Christians.

That said, what started as a land dispute has since morphed into something else.

These radicalized groups have learned that it is often far easier to find support for their cause when they can claim it is motivated by religion. Moreover, at least in central Nigeria, they receive less pushback by targeting Christians than they would by attacking those who share their spiritual perspectives.

And while government officials claim that “both sides have been perpetrators and victims,” Zayiri Yusuf—a Nigerian political analyst—notes that “I am yet to find any Muslim community where people have been sacked and others came in to occupy those places.”

At the end of the day, even if the violence is motivated by more than religion, religion is still at the heart of the death and destruction that has turned Nigeria into “The deadliest country for Christians.”

So, what can we do about it?

How to pray for the persecuted

When faced with the reality of persecution to the extent seen in Nigeria, we have to start with prayer. However, we can intercede for our brothers and sisters in Christ more effectively when we know enough about them to better empathize with what they’re going through. That means reading beyond the headlines and talking points to truly learn about their situation and the dangers they face.

So, while we pray for those who go to bed each night unsure of whether they’ll see the morning, we must also pray for those in the government who are genuinely trying to help but lack either the strength or resources to make a significant difference. And we need to pray that God would protect the Muslims who are being persecuted as well, understanding that those who perpetrate this violence do not represent the entire religion.

Taking the time to research the events and people for whom we pray will add depth to our intercession and help them remain on our hearts and minds far longer than if we simply offer a short prayer before moving on with our day.

Then, once you’ve prayed for those facing the threat of persecution, take some time to ask the Lord if he would ask anything else of you as well.

Wissam al-Saliby, the President of 21 Wilberforce, joined Dr. Mark Turman on this week’s Faith and Clarity podcast to discuss the persecution in Nigeria and around the world, as well as some of the more tangible ways that people can help. Organizations such as Open Doors, The Voice of the Martyrs, and others are also worth exploring.

We are all called to help

God is not going to ask most of us to share the gospel in areas where we might lose our lives for doing so. That may be his will for some, but even if it’s not your calling to go, we are all called to help.

So, before you close this article or pause this podcast, take some time to ask the Lord where he wants you to help. It could be as simple as setting reminders in your phone or on notes around your bedroom to help you remember to pray more frequently for those facing persecution. Perhaps he would have you donate your time or resources to one of the organizations trying to help those same people. Or maybe his calling for your life is to take the step of becoming more directly involved in taking the gospel to some of the world’s darkest places.

Whatever the case may be, know that he has a role for you to play in helping the lost come to know Jesus and in supporting your fellow believers as they attempt to do the same.

What is your role today?

Quote of the day:

“Every Christian a missionary; every non-Christian a mission-field.” —Winkie Pratney

Our latest website resources:

• Nigeria is becoming a “mass grave” for Christians
• Tariffs on trial, Nigerian Christian persecution, Dick Cheney, Mamdani and Dems win big & NFL trades |CB Ep. 44
• How can Christians respond to persecution and defend religious freedom?
• If spreading the gospel was as easy as ’67’
• Washington walks back attempts to single out Catholic clergy

Denison Forum