A beautiful movie that illustrates our “times”

Jesus warned us about those who “cannot interpret the signs of the times” (Matthew 16:3). A recent experience revealed our cultural “times” to me in a way I have been considering in the days since.

Janet and I watched a television movie the other night that told the story of a couple’s romance, marriage, and family. The characters were extremely likable and the scenery was beautiful. The dialogue was smart and often witty, and the actors played their parts well.

At one point, the wife is involved in a terrible car crash and is on life support for many months before coming back to her husband and her family. The movie ends poignantly with the family looking up into the night sky they love and celebrating their life together.

However, when the lead characters had their first dinner together early in the film, they then had sex. At the time, she was dating another man with whom it seemed she would likely become engaged to be married. He was dating another woman. But none of this stopped them from doing what they did that night.

As we watched the movie, I noted the degree to which it normalized their behavior on a visceral level. It was a given that sex between consenting adults is appropriate and even loving. Any thought of biblical morality and the sanctity of marriage was far from the screen.

Do you remember “blue laws”?

Cultural shifts are like the pendulum of a clock, always swinging from one extreme to the other. For example, I’m old enough to remember when American religion was socially entrenched for many to the point of legalism.

• “Blue laws” forbade purchases before noon on Sunday.
• Married characters on television slept in twin beds lest viewers think of them having sexual relations with each other.
• Movie rating systems enforced strict codes regarding nudity on film.
• Catholics and Protestants were often so at odds with each other as to believe the other was not truly Christian.
• Many Protestants felt the same way about members of other Protestant denominations.

My Baptist church frowned upon going to movies or dances, playing cards or dominoes, or drinking alcohol of any kind or quantity.

If that was then, this is now.

“When men choose not to believe in God”

How is our moral relativism working for us?

You don’t need me to recount in depth the issues our society is facing today, from broken homes to the epidemic of pornography, sexually transmitted diseases, and adultery. Or the resulting epidemic of loneliness, despair, alcohol and drug addictions, and deaths of despair.

If a traveler refuses to consult their compass, it’s not the fault of the compass when they are lost.

By contrast, King David testified, “I say to the Lᴏʀᴅ, ‘You are my Lord’ I have no good apart from you’” (Psalm 16:2). He noted that “the sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply” (v. 4a), so he resolved: “their drink offers of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips” (v. 4b).

Consequently, he could testify: “I have set the Lᴏʀᴅ always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (v. 8).

The point is not that David perfectly obeyed the God whose word and will he chose to trust. His tragic affair with Bathsheba and its aftermath demonstrate the opposite. It is that even when he fell, he knew how to get back up. When he became lost, he knew how to be found. His repentance, framed so passionately in Psalm 51, attested to the fact that he knew the “north” on his compass and was able to follow its guidance into his best future.

G. K. Chesterton observed:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

And what we believe, we become.

Three simple steps

To say with David, “I have set the Lᴏʀᴅ always before me,” consider these simple but transformative steps.

One: Guard your thoughts.

Paul exhorted us, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, my emphasis). Jesus warned his disciples, “Watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6).

What “leaven” must you “beware” today?

Two: Focus on Jesus.

Christ alone is “lord both of the dead and of the living” (Romans 14:9). He is as alive today as when he walked our planet. He is ready to speak to you, lead you, forgive you, empower you, and use you. He wants an intimate, daily, personal relationship with you.

All of God there is, is in this moment.

In response, we are to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” (Colossians 3:1–2).

Oswald Chambers consistently taught about the importance of hearing the voice and call of God. The key, as he explained it, is simple: “We have to keep that profound relationship between our souls and God.” When we do, “God gets me into a relationship with himself whereby I understand his call, then I do things out of sheer love for him.”

By contrast, Peter was rebuked by Jesus as being used by Satan and a “hindrance to me” (Matthew 16:23a) for this reason: “For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (v. 23b).

Three: Trust God to experience his best.

When two blind men came to Jesus, he said to them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said, “Yes, Lord.” He then touched their eyes and said, “According to your faith be it done to you,” and “their eyes were opened” as a result (Matthew 9:28–30).

Is Jesus waiting to open your eyes today? He can give only what you will receive. His benevolence and omnipotence are limited only by our choices.

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis observed:

It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that he is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream.

George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, “You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.” That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what he has, not what he has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not.

To be God—to be like God and to share his goodness in creaturely response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.

What “food” will you eat today?