Scooter, a seven-year-old hairless Chinese Crested pup, was born with back legs and joints that are backwards. When he was born, a breeder turned him in to animal control for euthanasia, but an animal rescue group saved him. He walks on his front legs and sits on his back legs like a tripod. According to the Today profile, “Because his feet are backwards, when he goes to the bathroom it lands on his feet, but Scooter just flings it up in the air.” (There’s your devotional image for the day.) Last Friday, Scooter won the 2023 World’s Ugliest Dog contest in Petaluma, California.

In other news, a newborn girl left in a Florida Safe Haven Baby Box has been adopted by the firefighter who found her. He and his wife had been trying for more than a decade to have a baby. “I picked her up and held her,” he said. “We locked eyes, and that was it. I’ve loved her ever since that moment.”

One more good news story: a man tried to return home from Oklahoma City to Charlotte, North Carolina, last Sunday, but his plane was delayed repeatedly and he had to wait in the airport for eighteen hours. He was rewarded by being the only person on the flight when it finally took off. He got a free pass into first class and a private party with the crew. His TikTok post was viewed more than three million times in less than a day.

Church buildings turned into nightclubs

When we read the news, we should always ask: Why are these stories in the news? Out of all the events that occur across a day, why are these being reported and others excluded? In the case of good news, the answer is obvious: you and I want to read such stories, so media outlets know they will be popular and will drive clicks and views.

Now to the negative side of the equation: we are seeing numerous stories in recent days about a reported decline in religiosity in our society. From empty church buildings being repurposed as hotels and nightclubs, to headlines like “US Church Attendance Still Lower Than Pre-Pandemic,” to articles on “Americans moving away from religion,” you would think that biblical faith is on life support in the US.

But pull back the curtain, and the story changes.

The repurposed church buildings are in Europe, where liberal denominations have denied the foundational tenets of Scripture for generations going back to Friedrich Schleiermacher and the advent of “liberalism.”

The decline in US church attendance is from 34 percent before the pandemic to 31 percent today, which means that a third of Americans are in worship on any given Sunday. This is three times higher than the percentage of Americans who watch sports on television and 50 percent higher than those who go to movies multiple times a month or engage in sports and exercise regularly.

And of the “Americans moving away from religion,” the New York Times writer notes that nearly half are Buddhists and Jews and “around 30 percent of most Christian denominations.” She does not specify between mainline and evangelical churches, but the former are seeing much higher rates of decline than the latter.

In fact, according to cultural commentator Glenn Stanton, church attendance is at an all-time high, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of the population, and “the number of Christians in the world today is larger than it has ever been in the history of the world.”

“Our citizenship is in heaven”

My point is this: we should expect secular media to normalize secularism. The more they predict the demise of our faith, the more they expect their predictions to become self-fulfilling. But don’t be deceived: God is still on his throne and one day, “At the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and . . . every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11 NASB).

But also don’t be complacent: even one person outside God’s kingdom is one too many. The psalmist said of those who turn to the Lord in faith, “Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:12). The people you know who do not “take refuge” in him are missing his abundant life in this world (John 10:10) and his eternal joy in the next (Revelation 21:1–5). They deserve to know what you know and to meet the Savior who saved your soul.

And don’t be fearful: no matter what happens today, God has you. Jesus assured us, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27–28).

For a true follower of Christ, the worst things are never the last things. This is because “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20–21).

“Viewing a movie after you’ve read the book”

Max Lucado explains God’s omniscient providence this way: “It’s like viewing a movie after you’ve read the book. When something bad happens, everyone else gasps at the crisis on the screen. But not you. Why? You’ve read the book. You know how the good guy gets out of the tight spot.

“God views your life with the same confidence. He’s not only read your story, he wrote it.”

Why do you need to trust your story to his providence today?

Denison Forum

If you live in Russia, you must be wondering what last weekend’s coup means for your future. If you live in the US, you should be asking the same question, though for different reasons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke publicly last night for the first time in two days, denouncing as “blackmail” the rebellion by the Wagner mercenary group and insisting that his nation and government are united against any threats. However, as Tom Nichols noted in the Atlantic, Russia’s “once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict . . . just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine.”

Now, according to Britain’s former ambassador to Russia, Putin’s future depends on the outcome of that war. As the uprising affects military morale and his standing among his own people, the Ukrainian military is continuing its advance and has reportedly landed troops on the Russian-side eastern bank of the Dnipro River across from the city of Kherson. No one foresaw such events when Putin launched his immoral invasion sixteen months ago.

The coup matters to the US as well, for three reasons. One is the potential of chaos in the world’s largest nuclear power, reviving decades-old concerns about who might ultimately control Russia’s nuclear forces. A second is the effect on global markets; shares fell yesterday as the rebellion added to uncertainties over the war in Ukraine.

A third is the threat of even greater instability and oppression if Putin falls. As retired Gen. David Petraeus noted on CNN’s State of the Union, “I don’t think we want a country that spans eleven time zones and includes republics in the Russian Federation of many different ethnic and sectarian groupings to come apart at the seams.” He added: “Is this the beginning of the end of Putin? We don’t know. Whoever follows him, if that is the case, will he be even more dictatorial?”

The “Five Big Forces” that change the world

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund firm with $124 billion under management. Forbes estimates his personal net worth at $19.1 billion. He has achieved such success by studying events and cycles across history. As a result, I follow his cultural analysis for reasons that transcend their financial implications.

Dalio’s new article for Time is titled “Why the World Is on the Brink of Great Disorder.” In it, he identifies the “Five Big Forces” that compose what he calls the “Big Cycle that produces big changes in the world order”:

1. Financial/economic forces
2. The domestic order force
3. The international world order force
4. Acts of nature
5. Technology

In each case, the US is experiencing transformation on a historic scale.

With regard to finances, “because of unsustainable debt growth, we are likely approaching a major inflection point that will change the financial order” such that “debt/financial conditions could worsen, perhaps very significantly, over the next eighteen months.”

Regarding domestic order, he believes “we are headed into a type of civil war over the next eighteen months” in which “populist extremes” are in conflict while “bipartisan moderates are for the most part quietly staying out of [the] fight.”

The international world order is witnessing a growing conflict between the US and China with important elections in Taiwan next year. In his view, “the odds of some form of a major conflict are dangerously high.”

Acts of nature include a generational pandemic, climate change, and an El Niño phase of the climate cycle.

With regard to technology, “there should be no doubt that generative AI and other technological advances have the potential to cause both massive productivity gains and massive destructions, depending on how they are used. The one thing that we can be sure of is that these changes will be greatly disruptive.”

Two encouraging facts

Few of us are able to change the changes Dalio identifies. We are “catching, not pitching,” as a friend of mine says. It’s easy to feel like powerless victims of forces beyond our understanding or control. When we are living on “the brink of great disorder,” however, followers of Jesus can take heart from two related biblical facts.

One: Your Savior is the “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Revelation 19:16). Nothing we’ve discussed today surprises him. Rather, our Lord has a plan to redeem all he allows for his glory and our good (Romans 8:28).

Consequently, we can turn our fears to him by faith and experience that “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) which can be our most powerful witness in turbulent times.

Two: You are living in this time of “great disorder” by God’s plan. He intended you to live today, not a century ago or a century from now (if the Lord tarries).

Consequently, he has a kingdom assignment for you, a way he wants to use your life and influence to make an eternal difference in our chaotic world (1 Peter 4:10). Author and actor Alexander Woollcott was right: “There’s no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day.” Your faithfulness to God’s call today can change someone’s trajectory for eternity.

“The surest way to death”

Pastor and author Paul Powell commented on the popular deception that morality is whatever I what to do: “Anything that is alive must, to remain alive, be tied to something else. A tree is fastened to the earth. If someone ‘frees’ it by pulling its roots from the ground, it is free only to die. Doing as you please is the surest way to death—spiritual, emotional, and physical.”

To what are you “tied” today?

Denison Forum

On Friday, the man known as “Putin’s chef” seemed on the verge of overthrowing Putin himself. Now he has been exiled to Belarus, where he may be targeted for assassination. Meanwhile, Putin remains in power.

But is he really?

“Putin’s chef” rebels against his master

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was born in 1961 and raised in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in the Soviet Union. As a teenager, he was caught stealing and spent nine years in detention. After his release, he began selling hot dogs in Leningrad, then became involved with grocery stores, gambling, and the restaurant business.

He met Vladimir Putin along the way and began receiving numerous government contracts to supply meals to the Russian military and schools. Over time, due to catering contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef,” he became a wealthy oligarch.

In May 2014, Prigozhin founded the Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization that has fought alongside Russian forces in Ukraine and is accused of horrific war crimes. As the invasion foundered, he became a vocal critic of Russia’s military leaders.

Last Friday, he claimed that regular Russian forces launched missile strikes against his Wagner forces, killing a “huge” number. In response, he ordered his troops to advance north on Moscow and demanded the ouster of Russia’s defense minister and chief of the general staff. In response, checkpoints with armored vehicles and troops were stationed on the city’s southern edge. The city went on alert as crews dug up sections of highways to slow the march.

Wagner troops advanced to one hundred and twenty miles from Moscow when Prigozhin called a halt, claiming he decided to avoid “shedding Russian blood.” According to UK security services, he did so after Russian intelligence services threatened to harm the families of Wagner leaders.

In a deal announced Saturday, Prigozhin will go into exile in neighboring Belarus, charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped, Wagner fighters will not be prosecuted, and some will be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin ordered his troops back to Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian regular soldiers.

“The final chapter of his rule”

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst said Putin “has been diminished for all time by this affair,” which constituted “the biggest internal challenge to President Vladimir Putin as Russia’s paramount leader for twenty-three years.”

Lucian Kim, NPR’s former Moscow bureau chief, put the rebellion in the larger context of Putin’s “suicidal war against Ukraine.” He writes: “The longer he stayed in power, the less interested Putin became in being remembered simply as the leader who stabilized Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was not enough. Putin wanted the legacy of restoring an empire, beginning with Ukraine.”

However, “Though battered and bloodied, Ukraine is unified and clear about its purpose. Now Russia looks like [a] failed state. Nobody in Russia understands what the war in Ukraine is about. And after Prigozhin’s rebellion, nobody knows if that war might not still come to Russia.” As a result, “It is unclear if we are witnessing the beginning, middle, or end of Putin’s end. What is certain is that it is the final chapter of his rule.”

The New York Times quotes Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with Kremlin connections, who said people close to Putin could persuade him “not to stand for re-election in Russia’s presidential vote next spring.” He explained: “If I was sure a month ago that Putin would run unconditionally because it was his right, now I see that the elites can no longer feel unconditionally secure.”

British political analyst Daniel Hannan believes Prigozhin’s coup is “the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin” since his “power rests on projection, on propaganda, on the image of invincibility. Now, all of a sudden, the curtain has been snatched back, revealing the Wizard of Oz as a small, mediocre, frightened man.”

“Shadowed by an illusory person”

In point of fact, we are all such a “wizard” projecting what psychologist Karen Horney calls our “idealized self” to the world. The problem with pretending to be what we are not is not just that our fiction is inevitably known by others. It is that our fictional self is not known to God.

In New Seeds of Contemplation, the monk and theologian Thomas Merton writes, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him.”

Think about that fact: our false, idealized self does not truly exist, but God can know only that which does exist. He cannot help us contact Martians since there are no Martians. He cannot help us “know thyself,” the Western quest since Socrates, since there is no true “self” to be known apart from the One who, as St. Augustine prayed, “made us for yourself, O Lord.”

Consequently, Augustine continued, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

“An exchanged life, not a changed life”

The good news is that the God who made us and thus knows us better than we know ourselves can remake us as his “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). So, to be your best self today, stop trying to be what you want others to see and ask Jesus to make you like himself (Romans 8:29) by transfusing your character with the “fruit” of his Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23).

Watchman Nee was right: “Victory has to do with an exchanged life, not a changed life. . . . It is not an evil ‘I’ being changed into a good ‘I, or a filthy ‘I’ being changed into a clean ‘I.’ It is to be ‘no longer I.’”

Jesus was adamant: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Paul testified that he had been “crucified with Christ” so that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). And Christ living through Paul changed the world.

Will you ask him to do the same through you?

Denison Forum