I trust everyone is having a great New Year! We are enjoying our week of corporate prayer and fasting as we seek to make Jesus FIRST in every area of our lives. New beginnings give us all the chance to reflect on LIFE from a God-centered perspective. From a biblical perspective, LIFE is a sacred trust. LIFE is a gift from our Creator, so all of our choices must be made in the shadow of His greater purposes and designs. Our life is a sacred gift which requires faithfulness on our part as stewards.

This is why we need a worldview that is biblically saturated, Christ-centered, God exalting and Holy Spirit empowered! Why is a biblical view of reality so important? Worldviews fulfill a couple of vital needs:

1. They provide unity to thought and life. Have you ever lived in what social scientists call cognitive dissonance? This occurs when your thoughts and your actions are in disharmony. For instance, you know smoking is bad for you, yet you keep lighting up. As a result, you live in a state of emotional and mental disruption until you can reconcile these opposing activities. A worldview helps you live a consistent, unified life. What you believe fits reality and informs the way you live. You are in harmony with God and with yourself. Life is good!

2. Worldviews also help to define the “good life.” What is the meaning of life? Why are you here to begin with? What’s the purpose behind this thing called life? Worldviews help to keep us from living what Socrates called, “The unexamined life.”

The start of a New Year is the perfect time to push the “pause” button of life, and to take some time to reflect on the deeper questions. Examine your life. Are you happy with the way you are living? What changes need to take place? Where do you need to grow? What relationships need some focus and care? Most importantly, how’s your relationship with Jesus?

Remember, your life is not you own. It has been given to you by your Creator as a “sacred trust.” Let’s commit together to maximizing this trust in a way that honors Jesus and brings Him great glory!

The recent edition of Newsweek came out with the stunning headline, “We are all Hindus Now.” Since, according to an earlier edition, we are no longer a Christian nation, what would give rise to this new description of American religious life?

According to the author, ”recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.”

Here’s the evidence. Many people claiming to be Christians no longer embrace Jesus’ own words in John 14:6 where He makes an exclusive claim to be “The way, the truth and the life.” It seems some professing Christians are actually more like Hindus who believe there are many different paths to God.

Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, describes American faith as what he calls  ”the divine-deli-cafeteria religion.”  We like to pick and choose the elements of religion we find tasteful while conveniently rejecting the spiritual “brussel sprouts” and other items we find less palatable. According to Prothero, this is “very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You’re not picking and choosing from different religions, because they’re all the same,” he says. “It isn’t about orthodoxy. It’s about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that’s great, too.”

Whatever works for you. So that is how we are defining TRUTH? In reality, this approach conveniently makes YOU God. What makes you happy, or successful or whatever…

This view demonstrates the heigth of irrationality. If everything is true. then nothing is true. If God is what you want Him to be then He really doesn’t exist. You just took his place. You are the creator and your God exists for you. What foolishness!

Last time I checked, we exist for His glory and pleasure! So fill your plate with all of God’s revelation. Let’s follow the steps of King David and challenge the world to “taste and see that the Lord is good!” Eat it all. Prevent brain decay.

I just read some statistics revealed in a recent book by Ken Ham entitled, Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it. Ham worked with a professional pollster to survey those who went to church every week or nearly every week and they deliberately polled conservative, Bible-believing congregations. Here are some of the disturbing findings:

• A mass exodus is underway. Most youth of today will not be coming to church tomorrow. Nationwide polls and denominational reports are showing that the next generation is calling it quits on the traditional church. And it’s not just happening on the nominal fringe; it’s happening at the core of the faith.
• Only 11 percent of those who have left the Church did so during the college years. Almost 90 percent of them were lost in middle school and high school. By the time they got to college they were already gone! About 40 percent are leaving the Church during elementary and middle school years!
• If you look around in your church today, two-thirds of those who are sitting among us have already left in their hearts; it will only take a couple years before their bodies are absent as well.
• The numbers indicate that Sunday school actually didn’t do anything to help them develop a Christian worldview…The brutal conclusion is that, on the whole, the Sunday school programs of today are statistical failures.
• Part of the concern is that the mere existence of youth ministry and Sunday school allows parents to shrug off their responsibility as the primary teachers, mentors, and pastors to their family.

I believe one of the major reasons for the tragic fallout is the rapid secularization of our popular culture. Christian educator, Arthur Holmes, writes, “The fact is that Western Civilization has become thoroughly secularized; Christianity is regarded as largely irrelevant to culture and science and learning, reduced to a private and inward affair.”

When our teens see no connection between what we talk about on Sunday morning and the world in which they live the rest of the week, it leaves our Christianity in the category of “irrelevant.” When we leave no room for the supernatural move of the Holy Spirit to touch hearts and lives, it sends the message that our Christianity is “impotent.”

When we combine an experience that is both irrelevant to real life and impotent to address impossible situations and challenges of life,  we leave our teens scratching their heads and asking, “So why am I here?”

We must be able to articulate the superiority of our Christian worldview as the best explanation of reality and we must boldly demonstrate the power of God by ministering the good news of the Kingdom. Fire and light is the only remedy for a secularized culture.