“How is everybody doing?”

Would you have thought such an innocuous question would generate global headlines?

At last night’s Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift became the only artist ever to win album of the year four times. The Houthis are also making headlines after they vowed yesterday to respond to US and UK joint strikes in Yemen.

Meanwhile, people are responding to a question Elmo from Sesame Street posted on X last week: “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?” As CNN’s headline notes, “He got an earful.” Some examples:

• “Elmo I’m depressed and broke.”
• “Every morning I cannot wait to go back to sleep. Every Monday, I cannot wait for Friday to come. Every single day and every single week for life.”
• “I’m at my lowest, thanks for asking.”
• “Elmo I’ve got to level with you baby we are fighting for our lives.”

Scanning the news, it’s not hard to see why. But there’s hope beyond the headlines if we’ll look in the right direction.

What will future historians say of us?

What ties these stories together?

• Oklahoma drag queen elementary school principal resigns amid outrage, official says
• Students at California school struggling after $250k in federal funds spent on ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program
• Syphilis is soaring in the US
• Polyamory, the ruling class’s latest fad
• Today’s teenagers: Anxious about their futures and disillusioned by politicians
• Ethics ratings of nearly all professions down in the US

Harvard theologian Harvey Cox observed:

We now live in a “post-Christian” America. The Judeo-Christian ethic no longer guides our social institutions. Christian ideals and values no longer dominate social thought and action. The Bible has ceased to be a common base of moral authority for judging whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable.

Why is this such an urgent crisis? In Man—The Dwelling Place of God, A. W. Tozer stated:

I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had enough intelligence to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

He wrote these words in 1966. What would he say of our culture today?

“He is love and he must bless”

If you could travel through space at the speed of light, it would take you forty-seven billion years to reach the most distant objects in the observable universe. No one knows what lies beyond that—except God, who measures all of this with the palm of his hand (Isaiah 40:12).

Here’s the good news: we can place ourselves in those hands if we “wait for the Lᴏʀᴅ” (v. 31a), choosing to depend entirely on his strength and grace. When we do, the rest of the verse tells us how he responds:

• We “shall renew [our] strength”—the Hebrew means that we exchange our weakness for his omnipotence, our helplessness for his hope.
• We “shall mount up with wings like eagles” in his supernatural power.
• We “shall run and not be weary” as we run “the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).
• We “shall walk and not faint,” no matter how hard the path becomes.

All of this our Father wants to do for us. As C. S. Lewis noted, “He is love and he must bless.” Because “God is love” (1 John 4:8), his nature requires him to seek always and only our best.

“More than conquerors through him who loved us”

Consequently, if we are not experiencing our Father’s best, the fault is not his.

If, as people told Elmo, we are “depressed,” at our “lowest,” and “fighting for our lives,” Cox must be right about our “post-Christian” status. If so, as Tozer warned, our civilization is “on its way to perishing.”

But what is true of America doesn’t have to be true of you.

You can “wait for the Lᴏʀᴅ” right now. You can name your greatest struggles and turn them over to his omnipotent grace. You can claim the fact that “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). You can then say with Paul, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). And you can ask:

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).

Who, indeed?

Are you waiting on God, or is he waiting on you?

Monday news to know

• 37 million at risk for flooding from blockbuster California rainstorm
• Super Bowl ads: It’s getting harder for commercials to score with consumers
• 2026 World Cup final set for MetLife Stadium
• Boeing finds new problem with 737 MAX fuselages
• This day in 1631: Roger Williams arrives in America

Quote for the day

“We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that he should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at his love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.” —Brennan Manning

Denison Forum

“China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike.” That is how FBI director Christopher Wray described our cybersecurity status with China before a House subcommittee this week.

And while it does not appear such large-scale cybersecurity attacks are imminent, China has already been caught attempting to access critical infrastructure sectors like our power grid, water systems, and oil pipelines as recently as last year.

Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, likened it to the Russian ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in 2021, but on a far more massive scale. For context, that previous attack—which closed a single pipeline for six days—resulted in more than 10 percent of the nation’s gas stations going dry until service was restored.

However, Americans are not the only ones facing the daunting prospect of such interference. It turns out, China is increasing its attempts to meddle with its own populace as well.

Powered by RedCircle

Why lies are hard to believe

As Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu write, “China’s top intelligence agency issued an ominous warning last month about an emerging threat to the country’s national security: Chinese people who criticize the economy.”

They go on to describe how “the Ministry of State Security implored citizens to grasp President Xi Jinping’s economic vision and not be swayed by those who sought to ‘denigrate China’s economy’ through ‘false narratives.’”

Among those “false narratives” are:

• News articles conveying people’s experiences of financial struggles and poor living standards
• Large amounts of local government debt
• A tumbling stock market
• And a crashing property sector, as exemplified by one of the nation’s largest developers going bankrupt after accumulating more than $300 billion in debt

The government has been utilizing Weibo—China’s version of Twitter/X—to spread misinformation on the state of the economy and restrict anyone who posts updates that run counter to their official narrative. Banks and brokerages have also been warned against putting out “carelessly produced” reports that portray the economy in a negative light.

Yet, at least so far, their threats do not appear to be having the desired effect.

As Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkley, points out, “the more the government suppresses negative information about the economy, the less confidence people have in the actual economic situation.”

And that basic truth applies to more than just economics.

Are you settling for milk?

Aristotle once quipped that “it is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

And that is especially true when it comes to issues of faith.

However, getting to the point where we can engage with thoughts that run counter to our faith requires that we actually understand our beliefs rather than simply parroting the opinions of others.

The author of Hebrews spoke to this reality when he wrote, “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:12–14).

The basic idea in this passage is that milk is food that someone else digested for you while solid food is something you have to digest for yourself. The latter takes more work, but it is a sign of spiritual maturity to which we are all called to strive.

Yet, as a teacher in my local church recently pointed out, it can be easy to get into the habit of settling for milk. Consider:

• If the extent of your time in God’s word is a sermon every Sunday, then you will spend roughly twenty-six hours a year engaging with the Lord.
• If you add a couple of Bible studies or weekday services to the mix as well, you can probably get up to about seventy-eight hours, or just over three

If you spent three days a year with your spouse, how well would you know them? Would it be fair to question how much you were really committed to them? What about your friends or your children?

The hard truth is this:

We cannot develop a meaningful relationship with someone without putting in the work, and that’s just as true for our walk with the Lord as it is for anyone else in our lives.

Fortunately, God is always there, ready to engage with us as soon as we’re ready to engage with him.

So let’s try to add more solid food to our spiritual diet.

That’s the best way to make sure that the next time we’re given the opportunity to share or discuss our faith with someone, we’re not afraid to entertain thoughts that run counter to the truth of God’s word. Rather, we’re prepared to engage with the confidence that can only come from a close and intentional walk with Christ.

How solid is your walk with him today?

Denison Forum