This Is Our Time: Everyday Myths in Light of the Gospel

by Trevin K. Wax

Tim and Kathy Keller believe our efforts to find the ideal soul mate are counterproductive. “We are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires,” they write, “and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.”6 When people enter into the marriage covenant with these expectations, they miss the truth that 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.”

Sullivan points out another way that marriage has changed. It has become more of an emotional commitment than anything else. This is the myth of marriage as just an expression of love. “From being a means to bringing up children, it has become primarily a way in which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another,” he writes.

If your love is built solely or primarily on romantic feelings, then whenever that romantic “high” fades away, as it is bound to do, the next stage of the marriage relationship—the deeper love of your companion—will feel like a letdown.

Stanley Hauerwas, ethics professor at Duke University, says we never marry the right person. “We never know whom we marry; we just think we do,” he writes. “Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”

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 means to be self-centered. . . . Raw, natural talent does not enable you to play baseball as a pro or write great literature without enduring discipline and enormous work. Why would it be easy to live lovingly and well with another human being in light of what is profoundly wrong within our human nature?”

a good marriage always invites people into its sphere of happiness, especially those who are single and in need of family bonds.

Like all Christians before him, Bonhoeffer believed marriage is not just a private romance but a public institution ordained by God as the means by which the earth is filled with people who bear His image. “In your love you see only your two selves in the world,” Bonhoeffer continued, “but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to His glory, and calls into His kingdom.”

cohabitation is more likely to lead to future divorce.25 Why is this the case? Perhaps it’s because cohabitation robs a couple of the security of covenantal love. Premarital sex offers your partner one aspect of who you are (your body) while you hold on to all of the other aspects of your independence (social, economic, legal). It is a pale imitation of marital love, no matter how pleasurable it may be in the moment.

marriage is one of the greatest predictors in experiencing poverty and a host of other tragic social outcomes. . . . To care for marriage isn’t to harken back to the good ol’ days. To care for marriage is not to implement a new moralism. To care for people is not simply to care about ‘our’ idea of marriage. To care for marriage is to care for people. Every child has a mom and dad. The question is whether they know them as a single unit, as a married mom and dad.”

“The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.”

To treat sex as if it’s nothing is to diminish what sex signifies. To treat sex as if it’s everything is to confuse sex with the transcendent reality it points to.

Don’t miss the longing for God in the sexual revolution. People are starving for God, and so they settle for sex. Even if this longing for God is unconscious and people say, “I’m just looking to have a good time,” they look to sex (rather than something else) to find a sense of transcendence because they know deep down there must be more to it than just a biological or physical process. One of the reasons our society is so sex saturated is because we are so transcendence starved. Unable to reach the heavens, we go under the bedsheets. And because our society senses that there must be something more to sex than casual encounters, people try to amp up the experience with new methods, new partners, new medicines, or new identities—whatever it takes to achieve satisfaction.

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.

we must not only explain why God’s design is best but also show how it’s beautiful. You can’t do that on your own. Neither can I. Sex is a church thing. Marriage is a community project. Chastity is a communal commitment.

As long as you are looking up to God for salvation, you cannot look down on anyone else. Grace shatters any sense of superiority.

the best way to resist the myths in our society is not to channel all our energies into explaining why we don’t engage in certain sexual behaviors but to build up communities that show the world why we do embrace the moral clarity of Jesus and how beautiful it is. Chastity is less about following a rule than it is about pursuing the Divine Lover.

To be faithful in this time, we must spot the decline and progress myths whenever we see them, and then counter them with the Bible’s story line, which is better and more satisfying because it happens to be true.

He built bridges of commonality whenever possible and issued gospel challenges whenever necessary.

I have no intention of getting into the specific details regarding debates of the end times. But take note: if your view of the future depends on an irreversible movement toward the worst possible scenario, you must not let your posture become purely defensive. Pessimism can lead you to adopt a “hunker down with the faithful” approach to the world that is largely driven by fear, not faith. The truth is, every generation believes that things are getting worse when compared to the past. Every generation adopts, at some level, a variation of the myth of decline or the myth of progress. Every generation of Christians believes they are in the last days of this world. And every generation, so far, has been wrong.

The “myth of progress” in our own country goes something like this: Humans are evolving into a more just and compassionate people. Acts of brutality are reversions to our basest, primitive instincts. They are no longer acceptable for a world that is building for the future, continuing our journey to peace, prosperity, and justice for all. So, not surprisingly, whenever we are confronted with terrorism or the barbarous tactics of radical Islamists, it’s common to hear American leaders—both on the Right and on the Left—say things like, “We are living in the twenty-first century now,” and “The terrorists ultimately fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy.” The rhetoric may sound hopeful and courageous, but if history shows us anything, it is that “the future” has often belonged to those who are passionate enough about their cause to destroy anything in their way in order to build something different. It all depends on what your vision of progress is, doesn’t it?

We must beware of both the myth of progress and the myth of decline. 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. It’s time now to see how the gospel challenges both of these myths. First, the myth of progress. I’m convinced one of the reasons people love to talk about the future is because they’re scared of the past. It’s easier to look forward rather than backward because the future is vague, amorphous, and from our vantage point, it doesn’t yet exist. The past, on the other hand, is a real and solid thing. We meet our ancestors, who built the world we have inherited. Like it or love it, the past is there, and too many who label themselves “progressive” would rather not deal with it. The myth of progress leads you to downplay the past. And why not? Once you believe you are part of the most privileged, progressive, and advanced era in human history, you will find it unnecessary to reach into the past and retrieve insights that may be useful for contemporary society. The past is something people are escaping from, not something they would ever turn toward. Whatever is found in the past that does not fit with our contemporary mind-set can be swept away without even the slightest engagement.

But what about the myth of decline? How do you know if, in avoiding the myth of progress, you’ve adopted its evil twin? Simple. 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.

We can’t fall for the myth of decline, as if there were a golden age in the past that we are to find and be faithful to. Church history is a treasure box, not a map. As Christians, we do not honor our forefathers and mothers by seeking to return to their times; rather, we honor them by receiving their wisdom and learning from their victories and failures. We retrieve from the past the elements and tools needed for faithfulness today. No golden age of Christianity existed in the past, only an unbroken line of broken sinners saved by the grace of God and empowered to transmit the gospel to the next generation. The world wobbles, and this truth cuts against both the myth of progress and the myth of decline. In charge of this wobbly world is the King of kings, which is why we must understand the story line of the world as explained in the gospel and embodied in the church, not the story as our society conceives of it today.

The reason some kids abandon their faith is not because they go to college but because they stop going to church. They immerse themselves in a world with different assumptions, rituals, and beliefs. The church becomes something for the holidays. Do not underestimate the power of the church. One of the best ways to keep our kids and engage unbelievers is simply to invite them to see the community of faith in worship and in action. It is not that the church replaces other, rational strategies and arguments for belief in God but rather that the church becomes the atmosphere, the teller of a better story, a story whose truth begins to work on the heart of all who experience it.

Jesus’ resurrection is something that happened in the past that points to the future of all who belong to Him. Not only that, but we get a foretaste of resurrection even now as we are spiritually “made alive” with Christ—raised from the dead in a spiritual sense even as our outer bodies are wasting away.15 So Easter is about the glory of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and the power of this event—like a nuclear bomb sending ripples into all of creation—catches us up in the shockwave, raising us from our sin and death and promising bodily resurrection when Christ returns in the future.