I posted the following in 2017. It’s from Tyler McKenzie, a pastor in Louisville, Kentucky. It may be 3 years old, but the sentiments are as timely as ever:

“If we’re not self-aware, there are many ways social media can make us less, not more, social. One way that quietly goes unnoticed (but whose painful consequences are undeniable in our culture) is that it allows us to choose and filter the voices we listen to.

It feeds confirmation bias politically, racially, culturally, religiously, etc. It creates a sort of self-made groupthink bubble in which you can simply screen out people who express any opinion on any thing that you don’t like.

No wonder the States of America are Divided, not United, today. No wonder literally everything feels so polarized – Choose your side! No wonder efforts to find compromise or solutions seem fruitless.

I believe the Jesus follower chooses a better way.

-We have the humility to listen, knowing that nothing about us is perfect, including our beliefs. God had to die for us wretches, after all.

-We welcome conversations that are challenging with those who are different because we know we always have a lot to learn and this may be another opportunity.

-We speak with truth AND love. Love without complete truth is enablement. Truth without love will never be heard because… you sound like a butthead.

-We honor the God-given-Jesus-died-for dignity of every human being, even our enemies, by at least trying to understand their beliefs, perspective, and cultural narrative.

-And we do actually try to understand others rather than just win arguments. The most loving thing you can do for someone with whom you disagree is understand and represent their argument fairly. 90% of frustration in disagreement comes from feeling ‘misunderstood’ or ‘misrepresented’ by the opposing voice.

Boiling it down, what I’m saying is this… The Jesus follower intentionally cultivates diversity in their life. God is an artist, and every person is another portrait that can lend us perspective on Him. #JesusIsWhy” (Tyler McKenzie).

“‘I SHALL NOT WANT,’ the psalm says. Is that true? There are lots of things we go on wanting, go on lacking, whether we believe in God or not. They are not just material things like a new roof or a better paying job, but things like good health, things like happiness for our children, things like being understood and appreciated, like relief from pain, like some measure of inner peace not just for ourselves but for the people we love and for whom we pray. Believers and unbelievers alike we go on wanting plenty our whole lives through. We long for what never seems to come. We pray for what never seems to be clearly given. But when the psalm says ‘I shall not want,’ maybe it is speaking the utter truth anyhow. Maybe it means that if we keep our eyes open, if we keep our hearts and lives open, we will at least never be in want of the one thing we want more than anything else. Maybe it means that whatever else is withheld, the shepherd never withholds himself, and he is what we want more than anything else” (Freerick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry).

I just want to repeat that last line because it’s the truth that we all need right now: Maybe it means that whatever else is withheld, the shepherd never withholds himself, and he is what we want more than anything else.

Maybe what I want more than the gifts of God is God Himself. Maybe what I want more than God giving me answers is to find that God Himself is the answer to all my questions.

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

In case you needed your priorities reset and rebooted, this picture should just about do it.

How many of us focus on what we don’t have and take for granted what we have?

I read somewhere more than once that if you have a roof over your head, more than one change of clothes, more than one meal in the last 24 hours, access to clean water, transportation, and people who love you, you are richer than most.

In fact, you might be in the top 5% globally speaking.

Somewhere out there someone would give anything to have one of your “bad” days. Your worst days are probably better than their best days.

So if you want the cure for the disease of comparison and complaining, it’s gratitude. If you want to eliminate envy and banish bitterness, the answer is to give thanks.

Measure your life by what you have, not what you don’t.

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful^; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:4-13, ESV).

“Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always ‘me first,’
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love” (1 Corinthians 13:4-13, The Message).

How is everyone doing tonight? Are you coping well with the current state of pandemic affairs? Are you stressed out or are you remaining relatively calm?

These are not build ups to some point I want to make. I genuinely want to know how you are out there in the wonderful world of interwebs.

Please let me know how I can pray for you during this time. I know for me the best way to pray is for endurance for this season. I know it’s dangerous to pray for patience because that’s usually when your patience gets tested the most, but I think we all could probably use it right now.

Pray for our leadership at the national, state, and local levels –whether you agree with them or not– for wisdom and guidance. Pray for the coronavirus to go away.

Do let me know how I can pray for you. I’m not being rhetorical. I’m really asking, “How can I pray for you?”

I’m not the best at praying, but I’d like to pray for you.

That’s all.

“It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self” (Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss).

I probably mentioned this in an earlier post, but I wanted to repeat it in case you might have forgotten in all the chaos and pandemonium. You are important to God and your individual life matters to Him. Even if you’ve given up on the idea of God and no longer believe in Him, He is still for you.

His desire is still that you should not perish but that you should come to true repentance and faith. His desire is to see you become all that He created you to be, a fully alive son or daughter of God.

You still matter.

Right now, people are blowing stuff up outside in the middle of a thunderstorm. That’s right. Nothing says “Happy Independence Day” like drinking alcohol and playing with explosives.

But I give you a picture of a baby sloth wearing pajamas. It may just be the cutest thing you will see all day. I guarantee it will be the least divisive thing you will see all day on the interwebs.

That’s it. Just baby sloths in pajamas. You’re welcome.

It seems like there’s an awful lot of anxiety and stress out in the world today. I am aware that there’s a pandemic going on, but I think there’s more to the worry factor than that.

I truly believe that a lot of people have taken it upon themselves to be the enforcers of whether people do or do not wear masks while out in public.

People have also decided that they must call out every single instance of injustice of any kind anywhere in the world and must be offended for everyone to whom there is a perceived insult or injustice.

Social media is full of people who feel that they must always correct anyone whose theology and ideology doesn’t line up with theirs. Many of them come across as rather self-righteous and condescending.

Can I lift a burden off your shoulders?

It’s not your job to save everyone.

It’s not even your job to save anyone.

God in Jesus is the one who does the saving in every sense of the word.

If your eschatology doesn’t make room for the righteous reign of God to right the societal wrongs of the world, then it is too limited.

You are supposed to be against injustice because God is against injustice, but only God is big enough to make wrong things really right.

Your job is to love God and love people. That’s what Jesus said.

The way you love God is to do what He says, grow in His image, seek Him daily above all else, and make His name glorious wherever you go.

The way you love people is to be a good neighbor, see them as God sees them, treat them like God treats you, and to display the image of Jesus to them in everything you do and say.

That’s your job. God will take care of the rest.

When you give in to the pressure of the world around you to fit in, you give away the one thing that makes you unique. You give away the one thing that when the moment comes people will need from you. The world doesn’t need you to be like everybody else. The world isn’t mad because you as a believer are too different from them. They’re mad because you’re too much like them. The one thing you can give is you coming alive to who you are in Christ and shining in the dark places.

That’s something I wrote a few years back after hearing a Kairos sermon about how the world doesn’t hate Christians because they’re too different but because they’re not different enough. Or maybe I heard someone else say it. I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter because the truth is that the world needs believers to be set apart and different.

When believers compromise away their convictions and confessions to accommodate the world, they trade away the hope they offer through Christ, the only hope the world really has.

When you deconstruct your faith, you are trading away living water for broken cisterns that can hold no water at all. When Peter confessed to Jesus that He alone had the words of eternal life, he meant it. There is no where else to go.

Be different. Be willing to risk being hated just as much as Jesus was hated during His earthly ministry. For some it will mean public ridicule and scorn. For some it will mean loss of possessions and family and friends. For some, it will mean death just as much as it meant Jesus going to a crucifixion.

But it is worth it. Jesus endured all the agony for the joy set before Him of seeing all sorts of people transformed from despair to hope, from darkness to light, from death to life.

We have the ministry of reconciliation between people of every language and nationality and race and ethnicity. The hope of the world is the hope of the Gospel, that Jesus came to die for and to save sinners like me and you.

It’s not popular or politically correct, but it is still the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. It’s John 3:16. It’s Ephesians 2:9-10. It’s 1 Peter 1:18-19. It’s the truth that no one is too lost or too bad or too late for God to redeem and make right and restore.

“Here is the mystery, the secret, one might almost say the cunning, of the deep love of God: that it is bound to draw on to itself the hatred and pain and shame and anger and bitterness and rejection of the world, but to draw all those things on to itself is precisely the means, chosen from all eternity by the generous, loving God, by which to rid his world of the evils which have resulted from human abuse of God-given freedom” (N. T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire).

That’s it. God in Jesus took on all the sin of the world on the cross.

That’s the hope for the world.

Our final hope is not in some radical upheaval or climate change or social justice or anything man-made. While we work toward true justice and peace, we know that ultimately the victory comes not from us but from Jesus.

Some say that others should pay for what their forefathers did long ago.

But when you look to the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, it says that no one pays for the sins of his or her father. Each one must pay for his or her own sin.

But then you look to the culmination of history in the Cross that says, “Jesus paid it ALL!”

That’s the hope of the world.