More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 26 - November 21, 2017
What if we are living according to the myths of our culture without even questioning them?
“Ideas do not catch on just because some scientist makes a discovery. They gain popularity because this is what a lot of people want to believe.”
There’s knowledge about and then there’s knowledge of. On our phones we can easily access knowledge about something, but only personal experience can grant us knowledge of something. Confusing “knowledge about” with “knowledge of” is one of the most common mistakes we make in a connected world. What’s crazy is that sometimes, when faced with the choice of knowledge about or knowledge of, we go with knowledge about.
Now that we are bombarded with knowledge coming at us from every which way, we feel the need to tailor our intake. We’ve got to slow down the stream of knowledge so we can actually drink from it. We need the waterfall to become a trickle. So, what do we do? We develop a winnowing process of news and commentary. We select voices, newscasters and content-blasters that we want to hear from. We slow the stream down to the people we trust. Over time, this leads you to follow online the people who think like you do, to read the websites where writers are interested in the same things you are, and to
...more
Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith believes we live in a time when many people feel like they are caught in a “tangled web of angst.” He compares the home of a teenager today to that of previous generations: “The home was a space to let down your guard, freed from the perpetual gaze of your peers. You could almost forget yourself. You could at least forget how gawky and pimpled and weird you were, freed from the competition that characterizes teenagedom. No longer. The space of the home has been punctured by the intrusion of social media such that the competitive world of self-display and
...more
Take that device that says, “You are the center of the universe” and make it say, “God is all in all.”
Do the stories our churches tell and the stories our churches embody offer a taste of heaven so that people are inspired to long for life they didn’t know existed?
Desensitization is not a sign of spiritual progress but of sensual dullness. Do not confuse the ability to be unfazed by depictions of sin with spiritual maturity.
Just as we use maps or GPS navigation to travel to a destination, we also have maps in our mind about where we are going in life, or what the point of everything is, or what we need to make us happy and fulfilled. That’s why we sometimes describe events or seasons of life as being “mapped out.” We turn to the language of “maps” because we see our lives as a journey, a story with a beginning and an end, and we see ourselves on route toward a destination, pursuing joy and happiness.
If we are to be faithful Christians in this—our time—we must consider the primary maps that give direction to people in our world, maps that work on our imaginations by laying out a vision of the future and the road to happiness. What is the point of everything? Why are we on the earth? What does “the good life” look like? What will make me happy?
“It’s not until we’re shipwrecked that we realize we trusted faulty maps,”
“Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me?” he said in an interview on 60 Minutes. “I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what [it’s all about].’ I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me? I think, ‘It’s got to be more than this.’ I mean this isn’t—this can’t be—all it’s cracked up to be.”
We could sum them up as the search for significance, a longing to transcend our earthly existence, to make something of ourselves and of this world.
No matter how strong these men were, one crew made plans that took into account what was really there while the other made plans based on what they hoped to find.
You can be courageous yet still be wrong about the world. You can be brave yet perish. You can be a strong and determined person on a path to destruction. Sincerity, as good a quality as that may be, cannot ultimately save you. “There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death” (Prov. 14:12).
Are you beginning to see just how prevalent this map is in our society? Once you know what the map says, you start to see it everywhere. It’s in songs about believing in yourself, following your dreams, looking inside to find the hero within, or learning to love yourself. It’s in books where the main character casts off anything from the outside that pressures him or her into conformity. It’s in our churches, where God is summoned to help us become whoever we really want to be.
The longing—to have the desires of your heart—is right. But the lie is that your heart can tell you exactly what those desires are.
In our era it takes absolutely no courage to create and live by your own standards. True courage is not deciding for yourself what is “right and wrong” but seeking to discover what truly is right and wrong—for yourself and for everybody else. It takes courage to look outside yourself, to bind your heart to an ideal that is bigger than your own set of standards, to investigate truth rather than invent it.
Like Apple, most corporations don’t just sell products; they make promises.
The myth of accumulation is so powerful and ever present that we often don’t notice it. We also don’t see how our habits of accumulation, as well as our expectations for how easy it ought to be to buy something, shape our hearts. The myth of accumulation determines what we value and why.
We don’t have to make a conscious decision to value something less than our grandparents did. We automatically do so, simply because we’ve been formed by our society’s habits of purchase.
The American Dream is the idea that anyone who works hard should be able to find comfort and success. That dream becomes the narrative that shapes our choices; we tell our life stories in ways that correspond to its terms. Whether we are “moving forward” or “stepping back” depends on our financial progress.
Is it possible to enjoy the things we have without giving our stuff so much significance?
He and Tiffany realize that everything about our society tells them to measure their lives once again in terms of wealth and security, not Christlikeness.
Brannon nods. “Yes, the question you should ask is not, ‘Would I be okay without this stuff?’ but, ‘Do I think I’ll be happier with this stuff?’”
Most of us don’t fit into either of those extremes. And so we drift between asceticism and indulgence, as if we can correct one with the other.
Maybe one reason is that more and more people believe the myth that Christianity is private. It’s common to define religious freedom as “believing whatever you want,” as long as you do so privately or in the context of your local church.
The Church is God’s shining city on the hill, not the United States.
I see a generation gap here. When I talk with older Christians about recent developments in society, I get the impression that many of them see mobilization of Christian voters as the best way to effect change. When I talk with younger Christians, I get the impression that the landscape has shifted to the point they expect to be a minority. Their emphasis is more on the pastoral and less on the political.
Embracing that tension is not weakness but faithfulness.
We have not truly grasped the full authority of Jesus our King or the expansiveness of His church until we realize that we have more in common with the Christian in Iran than our unbelieving next-door neighbor.
Our first and ultimate citizenship is the global people of God, people from every tribe, tongue, and nation who bow the knee to King Jesus.
Because many people see Christianity as something private, not public, they expect religion to stay on the margins of civic life. Faith is something you turn to for your own therapy, but it can’t be expected to have answers for public life. And so, in the absence of religion, political activism has grown up to take its place. So, where do we turn in times of tragedy? If not prayer, then policy. If not church, then state. If not the warmth of a common humanity, then the fire of our partisan divides.
marriage is “two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation.” Rather, they are looking for someone who will accept them as they are, complement their abilities, and fulfill their sexual and emotional desires. “A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low—or no—maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. Simply put—today people are asking far too much in the marriage partner.”7
In Tim Keller’s pastoral counseling sessions of married couples, he often hears this statement: “Love shouldn’t be this hard, it should come naturally.” Keller responds by asking, “Why believe that? Would someone who wants to play professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball’? Would someone who wants to write the greatest American novel of her generation say, ‘It shouldn’t be hard to create believable characters and compelling narrative’?”15 Why is marriage hard? Because “any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things
...more
And then, in a line that has become one of Bonhoeffer’s most quoted, he wrote: “It is not your love that upholds marriage, but from now on it is marriage that upholds your love.”21 There, in the prison cell awaiting his execution, Bonhoeffer described a deeply countercultural vision of love and marriage. Love is not what makes marriage work; marriage is what makes love work.
Tim and Kathy Keller write: “In so many cases, when one person says to another, ‘I love you, but let’s not ruin it by getting married,’ that person really means, ‘I don’t love you enough to close off all my options. I don’t love you enough to give myself to you that thoroughly.’ To say, ‘I don’t need a piece of paper to love you’ is basically to say, ‘My love for you has not reached the marriage level.’”
When we share the same undergirding ideas about marriage as the culture, the Christian’s no to same-sex marriage looks arbitrary and motivated by animus toward our LGBT neighbors rather than being a part of a comprehensive vision of marriage that counteracts our culture in multiple ways.
(And, of course, Jesus would have us mock neither of these men.)
People are starving for God, and so they settle for sex.
One of the reasons our society is so sex saturated is because we are so transcendence starved.
In this case, we put sex in its place not by saying, “Sex isn’t a big deal” but by telling people, “You are so much more than your sexuality.” We will not reduce our human self-understanding and self-expression to sexual urges. The church must elevate sexuality when the world diminishes it, and the church must knock the legs out from under sexuality when the world exalts it.
“Our knowledge of what is right and wrong cannot be derived from what comes naturally to us because everything that is wrong with this world came naturally from us,”
Jonathan Grant, a pastor from New Zealand, says our approach should be “double-edged.” We are to “challenge our culture’s worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formation involves both resistance and redirection. But it is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries.”
The myth of progress is effective because it gets at the longing to be part of a story that is going somewhere.
faith. The gospel shows God doing the most amazing things in the most unlikely times.
The buzzword for progress is the future, and the buzzword for decline is return. For the myth of progress, the focus is on shedding the baggage of the past as we lean forward into the future. For the myth of decline, the focus is on returning to some pinnacle from which we have fallen.
The myth of progress creates a sense of superiority over others that leads to exploitation and abuse.
If you are animated by the idea of “returning” to the past or “getting back” to the old days, then you probably have in mind a previous era you idealize, an era by which you judge the present.
In short, no Golden Age of Christianity exists. And whenever I come across Americans today who seem nostalgic for the “better” society they knew in the 1950s or 1960s, I must ask, “Better, as defined by whom?” African-American brothers and sisters would not look on those years with fondness, as if they were “the good old days.” If we are nostalgic for an older era, it is usually because we’ve imagined that era as less sinful than it really was.
