Evangelicals like me have been on the losing side of the culture wars for decades. The sexual “revolution,” rise of LGBTQ ideology, legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage, proliferation of online pornography, legitimization of prostitution and polygamy, escalation of adultery and divorce—the list goes on.

But things are changing.

In his 2024 book The Third Awokening, Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in England, described his damaging personal experiences with the liberalism and cancel culture of “woke” ideology. A year later, he is able to write a new Wall Street Journal article titled, “Welcome to the Post-Progressive Political Era.”

Dr. Kaufmann documents the retreat of DEI mandates, a “substantial rightward shift among young people from 2021–24,” and a rising backlash against transgender medicine and men in women’s sports. In addition, declining birth rates, crises in youth mental health, and rising deaths of despair show that cultural progressivism is “part of the problem rather than the solution.”

Then he asks: “We are leaving the age of progressive confidence, but what will replace it?”

The question is obviously critical to our national future. You and I can answer it in the only way that changes souls and transforms culture for the glory of God.

“America stands at the crossroads of her national destiny”

Billy Graham once warned:

Christianity to many people has faded into mere form, lost its relevance to life, and holds no central allegiance in our lives. When a nation loses its faith, it loses its character. When it loses its character, it loses its purpose for living. And when it loses its purpose for living, it loses its will to survive.

I am convinced that America stands at the crossroads of her national destiny. One road leads to destruction, and the other leads to prosperity and security. Most are going down the broad road that leads to destruction. We are going the way of Rome rather than the way of the cross.

Many will blame the Republicans or the Democrats. But it is the American people as individuals that should take the blame. We backslide as individuals before we begin to decay as a nation.

Dr. Graham wrote these words in 1958, the year of my birth. Across my lifetime, I have seen our nation slide much further down the moral slope of which he warned, as I noted earlier.

We can blame those who champion such immorality, but it’s a fact that lost people act like lost people. So did you and I. We ought not be surprised: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Suppose, however, that a group of people knows better but does not do better, that God calls them to be the “salt of the earth” but have lost their “taste” and effectiveness by compromising with what they are supposed to be converting (Matthew 5:13). Are they not significantly to blame for the demise of their culture?

If they live by the Bible and share its truth but are rejected, that’s one thing. If they do not do both, the fault is not with the message but with the messenger (or lack thereof).

“When God is all in all”

My purpose today is not to inflict guilt. Rather, it is to point to a way forward by sharing an insight I recently found to be both encouraging and empowering.

On Maundy Thursday, Jesus told his disciples, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another” (John 13:34a). The famed theologian St. Augustine (AD 354–430) asked, “Wasn’t this commandment already part of the ancient law of God, where it is written ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself?’ Why, then, is it called a new one by the Lord, when it is really so old?”

Then he notes the rest of Jesus’ statement, “just as I have loved you, you are to love one another” (v. 34b) and comments: “This is the love that renews us, makes us new men, heirs of the New Testament, singers of the new song.” When we experience Jesus’ love, we are transformed into his character (Romans 8:29) and empowered to love others “just as” he loves us.

Augustine noted that such people:

…love one another as those who belong to God. All of them are children of the Most High and consequently brethren of his only Son. They share with each other the love with which he leads them to the end that will bring them fulfillment and the true satisfaction of their real desires. For when God is all in all, there is no desire that is unfulfilled.

Imagine Christians around the world experiencing Jesus’ love in such a joyful, transforming way and then loving others as sacrificially, unconditionally, and passionately as Jesus loves us. No wonder he could promise, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

“Remember what you are saved for”

Here’s the practical response to which we are called today:

Ask the Holy Spirit to help you experience Jesus’ love so fully that you love him in return and thus love people as he loves people and hate sin as he hates sin.

We treat well those we love; we typically refuse what we hate. When we hate sin as Jesus does and love people as he loves us, how can our world be the same? How can people not be drawn to Christ in us as they were drawn to Christ incarnate (cf. Matthew 4:25)?

Oswald Chambers was adamant: “Remember what you are saved for—that the Son of God might be manifested in your mortal flesh.” Consider the difference Jesus made in the world by himself. Now imagine if the world had two billion “little Christs,” or two million, or even two dozen.

Why not you and me?

Why not now?

Quote for the day:

“The same Jesus who turned water into wine can transform your home, your life, your family, and your future. He is still in the miracle-working business, and his business is the business of transformation.” —Adrian Rogers

Our latest website resources:

• Pete Rose now eligible for the Hall of Fame. Will he get in? A reflection on sin, forgiveness, and consequences
• Global deals, air traffic chaos, an NBA conspiracy theory & the Biden cover-up book
• How to leave a legacy that matters
• Edan Alexander, last living American hostage, freed by Hamas: A meditation on courage, commitment, and purpose
• My first pastoral sermon and Pope Leo XIV’s first homily

Denison Forum

In twenty-five years of writing the Daily Article, I have never begun by asking you to click on a link, but I’ll do so today. A painting by Mark Rothko just sold at auction for $37.8 million. Please take just a moment to look at it, then we’ll proceed.

With all due respect to Mr. Rothko, do you wonder if you could have painted this yourself? Perhaps that’s the point.

When I taught philosophy of religion at various seminaries, I always included a section on art history in the belief that artists reveal our culture to us in ways we often cannot see otherwise. Rothko is Exhibit A.

The Russian-born painter emigrated to the US in 1913 at the age of ten. His father’s death a few months later left the family without financial support and led Rothko to sever ties with his Jewish religion. Fluent in four languages, he was a brilliant though erratic student who viewed art as a vehicle for emotional and religious self-expression.

In his lifetime, he experienced the Great Depression, faced antisemitism, and lived through two world wars and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s emphasis on the tragedy and emptiness of life, the dark colors and abstract expressionism of his later work focused on transcending the individual and an almost mystical sense of the unknown.

Long preoccupied with darkness, death, and mortality, Rothko died by suicide in 1970.

When you look at the painting that just sold at auction, you see and feel what you bring to the painting, not what it brings to you. It is but a window permitting and even inviting you into your inner self. You discover the meaning that exists and, in a sense, are “painting” the painting yourself.

And that, Rothko wants us to believe, is the only meaning there is.

Warren Buffett’s three best investments

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” Millions of other existentialists and people who have never read him nonetheless agree. It is conventional wisdom today that truth is personal and subjective, that there are no absolute truths (which is an absolute truth claim), and that we are free (or condemned) to find our own purpose in this world.

The good news is that a new generation is coming to see this deception for the lie it is.

At a time when the American dream of affluence is falling apart, when Americans trust each other less and many do not know their neighbors, when we feel as untethered as an astronaut floating in space and struggle from chronic stress so viscerally that some adults are now sleeping with stuffed animals, many young adults are choosing a different path.

According to a Free Press profile, “zoomers” (adults under thirty years of age) are “quitting the rat race, skipping the $8 lattes, and buying homes in towns you’ve never heard of.” In choosing family over career, many are leaving cities for smaller communities and rural living.

They know what happiness research has resoundingly concluded: healthy relationships are the key to flourishing. Billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett could have told us this long ago. He still lives in the same Omaha house he purchased in 1958, calling it the third-best investment he’s ever made. The top two? His and his wife’s wedding rings.

“Gen Z is finding religion”

What young Americans are learning about meaning in life is turning many toward the Lord.

While secularism has been on the rise among younger generations for some time, we are now seeing a religious resurgence among young men, religious revivals on college campuses, and more students than ever reading the Bible. Newsweek reports a surprising rise in religiosity in their generation, along with a decline in secularism, while Vox headlines, “Gen Z is finding religion.”

Even Silicon Valley, long a bastion of millennial secularism, is witnessing a spiritual revival of surprising proportions.

None of this should surprise us. One way the Lord redeems the brokenness of our fallen world is by allowing it to show us the darkness of the human condition without Christ and resulting need for light beyond ourselves. After decades of sexual “liberation” and the plague of pornography, adultery, and broken homes it has produced, many want a better way.

Abby Laub is director of communications at Asbury University, the site of a sixteen-day, around-the-clock worship service that drew fifty thousand visitors and included students from over two hundred schools. She explained: “If you look at the world, and you look at what is going on and what Gen Z is facing, I just think they are absolutely desperate for something other than what the world is giving them right now.”

Popular atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens assured us that we don’t need God to live with meaning and purpose, but the consequences of their influence are proving them wrong. From the nihilism of abortion to the hopelessness of euthanasia, a society that commodifies and commercializes life is finding death in its place.

Mark Rothko’s art, especially his later work, is popular in large part because it holds a mirror to the bleakness and hopelessness of the culture that drove him to despair. Now it’s our turn to offer that culture a better way.

“If Jesus did it for me, he’ll do it for you”

My fear for Gen Z is that they will turn to religion about Jesus rather than experiencing a transforming relationship with him. Having faith in faith is nothing new; “the demons also believe, and shudder” (James 2:19 NASB).

As I noted yesterday, Jesus intends to make us not just better people but new people. Yet embracing the new requires us to release the old. Confessing and repenting from sin is essential to being forgiven for it. Admitting we need the transformation only Christ can make and then drawing closer to him through regular Bible study, prayer, worship, and obedience takes time and discipline.

If Gen Z and other Americans are to pay the price of transforming Christianity, you and I must lead the way. When we choose to obey our Father, his Spirit makes us like his Son (Romans 8:28). As we submit to his Spirit and live with holistic holiness (Ephesians 5:18), we become the “light of the world” amid the darkness of our day (Matthew 5:13–16). And as I often say, the darker the room, the stronger and more attractive the light.

I passed a church sign recently that declared, “If Jesus did it for me, he’ll do it for you.”

What has Jesus done for you lately?

Quote for the day:

“The Bible was not given for our information but for our transformation.” —Dwight L. Moody

Our latest website resources:

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Denison Forum

The world’s first mass-produced flying car prototype has made its public debut. It transforms from a car to an aircraft in under two minutes and will cost between $800,000 and $1 million. You can buy yours in the first quarter of next year.

With the way things are going at the nation’s airports, you may want one.

Flights to Newark Liberty International Airport were delayed yesterday by as much as seven hours. The airport’s problems first made headlines on April 28 when a technical outage caused more than a thousand flights to be canceled or delayed. Radios went dead for thirty seconds during the outage, giving air traffic controllers no way to tell pilots how to avoid crashing their planes into one another. More disruptions are expected, causing officials to reduce the number of flights in and out of Newark for the next several weeks.

In related news, hundreds of flights were delayed Sunday at Atlanta’s airport because of a runway equipment issue. In recent months, airplanes have bumped wings in San Francisco and Washington, DC. A number of commercial flights have aborted landings at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as well.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has announced plans for a new air traffic control system, which will take three to four years to build and cost billions. In the meantime, unless we own a flying car, those of us who fly will have little choice but to trust people we don’t know and never see. When we step onto a plane, we abandon all personal agency. We are in the hands of pilots who fly the plane, controllers who direct them, and those who maintain the equipment upon which we risk our lives.

There’s a principle here that applies not just to air travel but to every dimension of our lives.

“I do not do the good I want”

Why do I so readily trust people I don’t know with my life and yet struggle to trust the God I do know?

Lost people who don’t believe God exists would obviously not trust him any more than you and I would pray to Zeus for help. But I’m thinking of all the times I know the living Lord Jesus wants me to do something—or not do something—but I struggle to choose his will over my own.

Today’s article is motivated by a verse in Numbers 15 that struck me recently: “Remember all the commandments of the Lᴏʀᴅ, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after” (v. 39, my emphasis). When I “follow” my “heart” (internal inclinations) and “eyes” (external appearances) more than God’s loving heart and omniscient knowledge, he considers my decision to be spiritual adultery.

It’s not hard to see why.

The Bible says Christians are “married” to Christ as his “bride” (cf. Revelation 19:7; 21:2). Any time we choose to trust and serve someone else, it’s as if we have made them our spiritual spouse instead of Jesus. Imagine your feelings if someone were to treat you in this way. Now imagine if you gave up a heavenly throne to die on a Roman cross for them and they still rejected you for another.

Our problem is not that we don’t already know all of this. When we’re tempted, you and I know our sins will grieve our Savior. Why, then, are we sometimes “inclined to whore after” our desires rather than our Lord’s perfect will?

It’s as if the FAA has warned us that the airplane we’re about to board is going to crash, but we take our seats anyway. We would rather go down with the plane we choose than flourish on the flight God intends for us.

Paul understood our dilemma (Romans 7:14–23) and asked, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (v. 24).

Why we are “more than conquerors”

Now comes the good news: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25). Why? Because “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2).

Christians have the indwelling power of the Spirit to free us from our own fallen inclinations and the sins into which they would lead us. Now we are “more than conquerors through him who loved us” (v. 37).

How do we experience this spiritual victory?

Paul explains: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (v. 6). We “set the mind on the Spirit” when we begin the morning by submitting to him (Ephesians 5:18), “long for the pure spiritual milk” of God’s word (1 Peter 2:2), commune with him in prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and live in community with God’s people (Hebrews 10:25).

Then the Spirit changes the inclinations of our hearts, and we become the change our fallen culture desperately needs to see.

When God produces a “new kind of man”

In his first homily as pope, Leo XIV rightly noted that “there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.” He added that even many baptized Christians do not experience the risen Christ in transforming ways and thus “end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.” (For more, see my website article, “My first pastoral sermon and Pope Leo XIV’s first homily.”)

If we want our skeptical post-Christian culture to believe Jesus makes a real difference in those who trust in him, we must demonstrate that difference in obvious ways. It’s not enough to be nicer and more moral than others. C. S. Lewis was right:

Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

This “new kind of man” does not merely try harder to do better—he has a “new heart” and a “new spirit” (Ezekiel 36:26). The Spirit molds us into people who want what God wants more than what we want. Then we choose godliness because our hearts yearn for it. We love Jesus more than we love sin. And we manifest the living Lord Jesus as his “body” in the world and draw the world to him (1 Corinthians 12:27).

Jesus promised,

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

Will you “see God” today?

Quote for the day:

“I want to change my circumstances. God wants to change me.” —Rick Warren

Our latest website resources:

• Edan Alexander, last living American hostage, freed by Hamas: A meditation on courage, commitment, and purpose
• My first pastoral sermon and Pope Leo XIV’s first homily
• A letter to motherless mothers
• New reasoning Ais “lie” and “hallucinate” more: The spiritual dangers of AI
• 3 reasons why churches fail at mental health

Denison Forum