Denison Forum

It’s worth noting that humanity’s original sin occurred in large part because Satan offered Adam and Eve a shortcut to the knowledge and status for which they longed (Genesis 3).After all, it seems doubtful that the devil would have had the same success if he’d offered them night classes and hours of study to become like God and know good and evil. Instead, he offered them a piece of fruit with the promise that one bite was all they’d need to become like God, and they took it without much hesitation.In many ways, we continue to struggle with that same temptation today.

Perhaps Tim Keller’s most famous quote was his observation, “The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”I invite you to embrace and proclaim the two biblical facts Dr. Keller noted.

Chick-fil-A made news again this week—complete with calls to boycott the fast-food chain—in response to ire over the company’s stance on diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI). Of course, Chick-fil-A is no stranger to such controversy, but this time it came from those who have typically been on the other side of the outrage. The company’s DEI policy garnered attention on Twitter and quickly went viral from those who assumed that it pushes similar “woke” policies to those often denounced by conservatives. Erick McReynolds, the company’s vice president of DEI, was a focal point of the controversy, though more for the existence of his position than for anything he said or did.What’s most peculiar about the recent outrage, however, is that there is nothing new about Chick-fil-A’s stance. Their DEI policies date back to 2020 and do little more than formalize their long-held position that they do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sexuality, physical condition, or a host of other descriptors. That approach is good for business, good for the gospel, and also what every company is required by law to do when it comes to hiring staff and serving customers.

In his Breakpoint article yesterday, Colson Center President John Stonestreet highlights a remarkable initiative by Princeton professor Robert George. John describes Dr. George as “perhaps the leading Christian legal thinker of our lifetime.” He is a brilliant cultural analyst and stalwart follower of Jesus.Dr. George is responding to Pride Month by announcing what he is calling Fidelity Month. This initiative will launch today with a Fidelity Month webinar open to the public at 2 p.m. EST. The group’s purpose is “to establish June as national ‘Fidelity Month’—a month dedicated to the importance of fidelity to God, spouses and families, our country, and our communities.”

Yesterday we discussed ways to use our resources and influence in voicing our disagreement with unbiblical immorality. Today let’s consider the positive side of this cultural coin. As MLB player Clayton Kershaw said in a recent statement, we can “show what we do support, as opposed to maybe what we don’t. And that was Jesus.”

When I served as a college missionary in East Malaysia, those I sought to reach were not my enemies. To the contrary, they were people for whom Jesus died and who deserved to know the One I knew. I was simply a beggar helping other beggars find bread.In the same way, in cultural conflicts, our opponents are not our enemies. Satan is the enemy; those who reject biblical truth are his victims.This is why “speaking the truth in love” should be our daily aspiration and mantra (Ephesians 4:15). Rather than fighting our opponents as cultural warriors, we should love them as cultural missionaries sharing God’s word and grace in the place and time he has assigned to us.

The same technology that threatens to make internal monologues a thing of the past has also been used to help a mute person speak and even enable a paralyzed person to walk, reminding us once again that the potential tradeoffs in these developments can be more complicated to weigh than they appear at first glance.

My call today is for us to renew our commitment to thinking and living biblically, whatever the consequences in our broken, post-Christian culture. To this end, let’s close with a reflection from Billy Graham: “Early in my life, I had some doubts about whether or not the Bible was really God’s word. But one night in 1949, I knelt before a stump in the woods of Forest Home, California, opened my Bible and said, ‘O God, there are many things in this book I do not understand. But by faith, I accept it—from Genesis to Revelation—as your word.’

You are a missionary to where you are and to when you are. It is by divine providence that you were not alive a century ago or a century from now (if the Lord tarries). Embracing your identity as the child of God and your calling to help others know God is the foundational decision you must make each day.

You may know that the United States has a “poet laureate” named Ada Limón. (She was actually featured in last night’s Jeopardy! Masters show.) But did you know that we also have our first “drag laureate”?

If we embrace our suffering as an opportunity to trust Christ with our pain and serve others in theirs, “the salvific meaning of suffering” will be revealed to us. We will testify with Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). We will experience an intimacy with our Lord and our fellow sufferers unavailable to others.And when our journey leads us from this world to the next, we can say what Tim Keller told his family before his homegoing: “I’m ready to see Jesus. I can’t wait to see Jesus. Send me home.” The old hymn was right: “The way of the cross leads home.”What cross is yours today?

From the moment the Dodgers chose to honor a group that so overtly dishonors core Christian principles and, more explicitly, the Catholic expression of those principles, they were headed down a difficult path. That they made the correct decision to turn back still opened them up to criticism and derision from those who believe that the Sisters deserved their place of honor in the Dodgers Pride Night event.The same principle applies to each of us as well.

As we noted yesterday, God’s judgment against our sins is certain. But sins also bring their own consequences. The “just penalty” for them “always pursues” those who commit them.Infidelity destroys marriages; pornography damages the brains of those who consume it. When we eat “forbidden fruit,” its inherent poison sickens us. You can mark it down as an inexorable law of the universe: sin “always pursues the transgression of the unrighteous.”

Here’s the reason: only Jesus Christ can change the human heart so that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).As a result, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Christians have the Holy Spirit living in us as his temple (1 Corinthians 3:16) and thus have the power to refuse temptation whenever it strikes: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). (This includes sexual sin, which we recently released a resource on, titled, “What does the Bible say about pornography? Can you break free from sexual temptation?”)

There is ultimately only one cure for the sickness of sin and the depravity of the human condition.Being religious is not enough—many churches and church leaders in Germany tragically and heretically supported Hitler’s regime. Trying harder to do better is not enough—despite the laudatory and courageous fight against anti-Semitism being waged by Yad Vashem and many others, this scourge continues to grow in America and Europe.But when Christ rules our heart, we love everyone he loves and hate everything he hates.

For many years, my Israeli friends have taught me the importance of resilience as they refuse to allow threats of violence to change their lives. They take shelter when necessary, but they choose not to live in fear because this gives the “terrorists” (“those who cause terror”) what they want.When violence does strike, they return to normal as quickly as possible. While Americans might turn the site of a terrorist attack into a memorial to those who died, Israelis typically do not. They do not want to memorialize the crime, believing that they pay tribute to their dead by living well.I witnessed such courage in Israel last week.

Throughout Scripture, we find people whose legacy changed from hero to villain or the other way around over the course of their story. David, for example, started out about as well as anyone could. He was a man after God’s own heart who slayed Goliath and retained such respect for God’s anointment of Saul as king that, even after the latter repeatedly tried to kill him, David refused to respond in kind. Yet, by the end of his story, he’d become a poor father, an impotent ruler, and his parting wisdom to Solomon was a list of people to kill—several of whom he had sworn to protect (1 Kings 2:1-9).

The Bible consistently assures us that living biblically is the best way for us to live (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16-17). However, I cannot prove to you that this is so. A relationship with God, like all other relationships, requires a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating. You cannot prove you should take a job until you accept it. You cannot prove you should get married or have children until you get married and have children.When you take God at his word, you discover that he always keeps his word. Conversely, as theologian J. V. Langmead Casserley noted, we do not break God’s word: we break ourselves onGod’s word. The choice is yours.

“We have become a nation that is more focused on the right to kill than the right to live.”This is how California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to the mass shooting in Allen, Texas, as he criticized Congress for not passing gun control reform. However, given his passionate support for elective abortion and efforts to bring women from other states to California’s abortion clinics, pro-life supporters like me find his statement tragically ironic.

Warren Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies. He has been extremely benevolent over the years, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable causes. Forbesestimates his net worth at $1141 billion. My net worth is several zeroes less.The ninety-two-year-old was recently asked at Berkshire’s recent annual shareholder meeting how to avoid mistakes in business and in life. His response: “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it. It’s not that complicated.”Rather than writing our own obituary and trying to live up to it, what if we allowed God to define our life mission and then partnered with him in fulfilling it? How would we do this?