Articles

Few of us today have any meaningful connection to the sources of our food and the other products we consume. Most meet their daily needs, and much more, with the scan of a barcode, a click, or a swipe on a phone. If you want it, you get it—and often right away.

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“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor … to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.” (Isaiah 61:1, 3)

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The apostle Paul’s sermon in Athens in Acts 17:22–29 is a masterpiece in Gospel contextualization. It is rhetorically skillful, it is culturally sensitive, and it is biblically faithful. It springs from a place of deep grief for the lostness of its hearers, it leads them to Jesus Christ through a deep exposition of who God is and what He wants with the world, and it does so in language that yields both clarity and goodwill. It is the exemplar of great evangelistic preaching in a world for whom God is, as He was to Paul’s Athenian hearers, “unknown.”

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The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade, has brought an old, familiar accusation before Christians around the United States: “The Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion.”

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It has never been easy to be a college student. You face pressure from every side to answer the perennial question: So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? That’s not to mention the social stressors of figuring out where you belong, and perhaps of being away from home for the first time. Your years at university can be thrilling, yes, but they can also be daunting.

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Today, we are living through what is arguably the most rapid change in family structure in human history. Standards and principles that were once commonplace now seem on the verge of extinction. As David Brooks puts it, “The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals.”¹ In such a cultural climate, it is absolutely vital for us to know what we believe about the role of the family, where we belong in relation to the family, and how, as outposts of God’s kingdom, our families ought to operate.

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“He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” (Psalm 40:2)

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It is a countercultural, widely unacceptable notion to say you are not the owner of your own body. Again and again we instead read or hear things like this: “You are your own person. What you do with your body is entirely up to you. It’s nobody else’s business.” So when we read Paul’s reminder to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, it hits like a ballistic missile, exploding the mythologies of our day.

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If we were to conduct a survey with only one question on it, “What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ?” we would receive many different answers. Some would say that following Jesus means being religious, others that it means attending church, and still others that it means learning what Jesus taught, putting into practice the Sermon on the Mount, or loving your neighbor. But while these responses all get at part of the whole truth, their sum would not provide a complete answer.

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Freedom in Christ is one of the great benefits of knowing God. Many Christians rightly value this wonderful gift. It’s common, however, for people to tout this freedom as a rationale for doing what they want when they want with whomever they want. Believers with a mistaken notion of Christian freedom may watch things they shouldn’t watch, can be influenced by people they shouldn’t imitate, and can say things they shouldn’t say, all the while forgoing biblical instruction and Christian fellowship. In the words of Peter, they are “using … freedom as a cover-up for evil” (1 Peter 2:16).

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