Denzel Washington spoke at pastor T. D. Jakes’ International Leadership Summit last Saturday, where he explained his reaction when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards last week. Washington went immediately to speak with Smith, a decision he explained to the group: “I don’t know all the ins and outs of this situation, but I know the only solution was prayer, the way I saw it, the way I see it.”

In other headline news, North Carolina defeated Duke last Saturday in what is being called a “game for the ages” and will play Kansas in tonight’s NCAA men’s basketball championship. When Hubert Davis, North Carolina’s first-year coach, was introduced last April, he told a press conference that his faith “is the most important thing to me. My faith and foundation is firmly in my relationship with Jesus. It just is.”

By contrast, this Atlantic headline caught my eye: “Why People Are Acting So Weird.” The writer documents a variety of ways people are acting more rudely and violently and points to heightened stress, the increased use of alcohol and drugs, and isolation enforced by the pandemic.

Today’s news offers tragic examples: at least six people were killed and at least twelve were wounded in a shooting yesterday morning in Sacramento, California. A man was shot to death in Atlanta. And one person was killed and at least eleven people were hospitalized Saturday night after a shooting incident at a concert in Dallas.

In light of all the bad news, how are Americans doing? In a recent Gallup poll, only 17 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the direction of the country. However, 85 percent were satisfied with their own lives.

This disparity highlights the point I want to make today.

The challenge of “compassion fatigue”

Denzel Washington and Hubert Davis are Christians who act on their faith when the opportunity arises. By contrast, the perennial temptation in Western culture is to keep our personal lives and our public lives separate.

This temptation extends not only to our actions but also to our intercession. “Compassion fatigue” is a real challenge in these hard days.

For example, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared on screen last night at the Grammy Awards. His speech began: “The war. What’s more opposite than music.” In reference to the music industry’s biggest night, he said, “Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals.”

When you see the daily reports about the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, are you praying with the same passion you did a month ago?

Here’s another example: Ramadan began last Friday. There are more than two billion Muslims in the world, each of whom rejects the divinity of Jesus and is therefore without true hope of eternal life (cf. Romans 8:9). Does this fact weigh on your heart today?

By contrast, our Father loves each of us as if there were only one of us, Muslims included. And he is working in the Muslim world in ways we have not seen in Islamic history.

A sheikh leading other sheikhs to Christ

My friend Tom Doyle has been ministering in the Middle East for many years. His marvelous book, Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World? tells story after story of ways God is “awakening” the Muslim world by his Spirit.

Over the weekend, I read a companion book, David Garrison’s A Wind in the House of Islam: How God is drawing Muslims around the world to faith in Jesus Christ. Garrison reinforces Tom’s point by documenting statistically the fact that “Muslim movements to Jesus Christ are taking place in numbers we’ve never seen before.” He reports on nine different geographical regions in the Muslim world, identifying eighty-two movements to Christ in “what appears to be a historic hinge moment in the spread of the gospel across the Muslim world.”

Here’s just one example: Sheikh Hakim is a hafez, which means he has memorized the Qur’an. He told Garrison, “If someone said that Jesus was God, we would kill him. When I was a Muslim, I burned churches for Islam.”

He was an overseer of four mosques and was training three hundred Islamic teachers when an African evangelist gave him a New Testament in Arabic. “That night Isa [Jesus] came to me in a dream,” he says. He saw himself chopping down a mosque’s minaret. When he told the evangelist, “He smiled and explained to me, ‘You are going to win many sheikhs to the Lord.’”

When Hakim came to faith in Christ, he lost his job and his farm, and his father tried to murder him. Today he moves from town to town because there are always some trying to kill him. He has since led four hundred Muslim sheikhs to Christ, more than three hundred of whom have already been baptized.

Three ways to pray today

I invite you to join me in three prayer requests today.

First, ask God to give you his heart for our hurting world so that you can pray with passionate compassion.

Second, pray each day during the month of Ramadan (April 2–May 1) for millions of Muslims to come to faith in Jesus and for God to protect Ukraine, end this war, and redeem this tragedy.

Third, pray for the Spirit to move in power in our churches and broken culture. We have never needed a spiritual awakening more than we need a transformative movement of God today.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on this day in 1968. He died knowing that the movement for racial justice he led would ultimately triumph. While we still have far to go, we can claim his testimony as our own today: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Will you pray for the passion to speak unarmed truth in unconditional love today?

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 “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” —Psalm 14:1

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus illustrated the unpredictability of life with his now-famous metaphor, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” He might have been reading the news:

• Skippy is recalling 161,692 pounds of peanut butter because of possible contamination with stainless steel fragments.
• Bruce Willis is retiring from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder caused by brain damage that affects a person’s communication ability.
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Bruce Arians is unexpectedly retiring.
• A massive pileup caused by a sudden snow squall on a Pennsylvania highway involved eighty vehicles and left six people dead.
• Singer Tom Parker passed away from brain cancer at the age of thirty-three.
• Americans will be able to choose a gender X designation on passport applications starting April 11.
• Yesterday was the international “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

In contrast to the constant flux and chaos of our fallen world, the Bible proclaims of our Maker, “From everlasting to everlasting you are God!” (Psalm 90:2). But fewer Americans than ever seem to agree.

Secularism continues to grow in the US. According to Pew Research, roughly three in ten Americans have no religious affiliation of any kind. Younger generations are less engaged in church than their parents; many committed Christians are not active in a local congregation.

On this April Fool’s Day, let’s consider King David’s admonition in Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” His observation applies not just to atheists and secularists but also to committed Christians in ways we may not fully appreciate today.

“The most dangerous period since the Soviet Union collapsed”

Our secular culture increasingly insists that personal authenticity is the path to flourishing, defining authenticity as “a feeling that people interpret as a sign that what they are doing in the moment aligns with their true self.”

Historian Carl Trueman calls this viewpoint “expressive individualism.” He explains that it enables a person to believe they are “a woman trapped in a man’s body” or that an unborn child is an organism encroaching on a woman’s life she is therefore free to remove. As I note in The Coming Tsunami, Christians who disagree are stigmatized as outdated, intolerant, oppressive, and even dangerous to society.

And yet, we might ask, how is this radical secularism working for us?

Consider this statement by the Wall Street Journal editorial board: “The world is entering the most dangerous period since the Soviet Union collapsed, and perhaps since the 1930s.” The editorial focuses on geopolitical dangers, but we could add the opioid epidemic and other “deaths of despair,” deepening political sectarianism that threatens democracy, and the escalating crime rate in the US.

“I think we are ready to listen”

In response, an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News caught my eye: “I’m an atheist, but between COVID and nuclear weapons, I’m ready to give God a try.”

Josh Selig is a ten-time Emmy Award-winning television producer and director. He writes: “We’ve entered a pantomime of our own lives. More often than not, it feels like we’re pretending. Pretending to live. Pretending to work. I read an article that said more people than ever are quitting their jobs. Perhaps it’s because our jobs no longer seem important. Not much does. All of our ceremonies feel unceremonious.”

He then tells God: “Although I check daily, there are no answers in my newsfeed, in my inbox, or on my phone. So, I’ve come to you. If you don’t exist then, of course, never mind. The joke’s on me. But if you do exist, and I suspect in your own way you do, then I hope you’ll get back to me.”

Selig concludes: “I’m here. We are all here. And, finally, I think we are ready to listen. Hope to see you on the mountain one day.”

Secular reasons for spiritual engagement

An atheist indeed has good reasons to “listen.” Contrary to American secularism, religion is growing dramatically around the world. Ramadan begins tonight, a month of fasting in Islam that is just one example of religion’s pervasive attraction for billions of people. (For more, see Shane Bennett’s article on our website, “4 things every Christian should know about Ramadan.”)

Even secular writers agree that “on average, religious people are generally happier, healthier, and live longer” and that “religious people are more likely to feel that they belong to a community.” Numerous studies show that the rituals and social bonding inherent in religious engagement are vital to flourishing.

The health benefits of religion are clear as well: a comprehensive Harvard study found that people who attend religious services weekly or more are 16 percent less likely to become depressed and show a 29 percent reduction in smoking and 34 percent reduction in heavy drinking.

For secular reasons alone, Psalm 14:1 turns out to be right.

Why Scottie Scheffler plays golf

Scottie Scheffler poses for photos with the trophy after winning the Dell Technologies Match Play Championship golf tournament, Sunday, March 27, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

However, the best evidence for biblical faith is its transformative effect on those who embrace it.

Pro golfer Scottie Scheffler is an example. Now ranked #1 in the world heading into next week’s Masters, Scheffler was profiled in Golf Digest after winning a difficult tournament last month. He explained how he keeps his composure under pressure: “I don’t place my value in golf. It’s kind of a tough balance because I spend so much of my time trying to improve and to be good at this game.

“You’ve really got to look at the motivation for why I play. For me, I have a relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s why I play golf. I’m out here to compete because that’s where he wants me. He’s in control of what happens in the end. So just really staying the course and staying faithful and letting him be the guidance for me versus anything that I do.”

When secular people like Josh Selig see the way our truth has changed our lives, they may consider making it their truth. When they do, they meet the Truth (John 14:6).

Is the Truth your truth today?

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Virginia (Ginni) Thomas is the wife of longtime Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. According to the Washington Post, twenty-nine text messages obtained by the Post and CBS News show that she “repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

In response, some Democrats are calling on Justice Thomas to recuse himself on cases related to the January 6 Capitol riots. Some are even calling for Justice Thomas to step down from the court or be impeached.

As we will see today, this controversy is relevant far beyond Justice Thomas, his wife, and their critics.

A defense of Justice Thomas

Former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy states that the statute governing judicial disqualification, Section 455 (of Title 28, US Code), involves “financial or legal stakes in the matter, or some connection to the matter as an attorney.” According to McCarthy, “Ginni Thomas’s conservative political activism—up to and including the text messages to Mark Meadows about the 2020 election—does not activate those triggers.”

He adds, “If it did, many judges appointed by Democrats would have been disqualified from cases over which they’ve presided despite the political and legal activism of their spouses.” His statement links to a Newsweek article detailing numerous examples of such activism.

To reinforce his argument, McCarthy states that “Supreme Court justices are not even subject to disqualification over their own activities that bear directly on cases.” He notes the example of Justice Elena Kagan, nominated by President Obama, who served as Mr. Obama’s solicitor general when the administration was formulating its legal strategy to defend the Affordable Care Act. When the Act came before the Supreme Court, she did not recuse herself from the case and in fact provided the critical vote to uphold it.

McCarthy therefore concludes: “The smearing of Justice Thomas is transparently partisan politics, nothing more.”

Using a senator’s words against him

Whether you agree with McCarthy or not is not my point. Rather, I want to focus on the method he used to make his case.

If you accuse me of wrongdoing and I can show that you have done what you now accuse me of doing, I can win our rhetorical battle. Unsurprisingly, politicians do the same.

For example, earlier this year, Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sought to change the Senate’s filibuster rules. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton then used Sen. Schumer’s previous statements in support of the filibuster against him. 

My point is not to castigate our public officials. I am grateful to those who are willing to serve in a day when they face more criticism—fair and unfair—than at any time in my lifetime. My purpose today is actually the opposite: rather than criticizing political leaders, I want to point a finger at myself. And perhaps at you.

“She gave me fruit of the tree”

One very simple way to avoid responsibility for our sins is to point to the sins of others. This story begins early: when the Lord called Adam to account for his sin in the Garden of Eden, Adam responded, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). Eve in turn blamed the serpent (v. 13).

Satan is delighted by the degenerating moral condition of our culture. And he is also delighted when Christians point to the sins of others to justify their own.

Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine is obviously one of the most horrifically sinful acts by a political leader in recent times. But his sin does not justify my hatred of my brother. Even though the world would say the two have no comparison, Jesus disagrees (Matthew 5:21–22). It is the same with adultery and lust (vv. 27–30), proving the point that the sins of others do not excuse my sins or yours.

“Keep your heart with all vigilance”

I had a fascinating conversation recently with a millennial Christian leader. He believes that the single greatest reason many of his generation are dropping out of church is the ongoing moral crisis within the church.

I’m convinced that he’s right.

We can complain that critics are holding us to a different standard than they require for themselves, and we’re right. But they’re right to do so. We claim that the Holy Spirit of God lives in us (1 Corinthians 3:16) and that his “fruit” in our lives includes “goodness,” “faithfulness,” and “self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23).

If Muslims or Buddhists, Republicans or Democrats made the same claim, would we not hold them to it?

God’s word declares, “It is time for judgment to begin at the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17). To this end, let’s remember Proverbs 4:23: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”

The text explains how: “Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (vv. 24–27).

How cockroaches survive

Scientists tell us that cockroaches survived the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs by hiding in tiny soil crevices that protected them from heat and by being omnivorous scavengers who will eat what others will not.

Sin does the same: it hides from the heat and light of God’s truth and will “eat” anything we “feed” it.

If we would make a transformative impact on our culture, Christ must first make such an impact on us. Daily submission to him is vital to the sanctification that empowers our lives and witness. Oswald Chambers observed: “Abandon to God is of more value than personal holiness. . . . When we are abandoned to God, he works through us all the time.”

How abandoned to God would he say you are today?

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