The Church Awakening

My official start to my journey into devotions, critical thinking and meditation through blogging. Off the bat I'm a slow reader b/c I can't speed read - I can't retain that much information all at once. I prefer to chew on things a little at a time. As a read the intro to "The Church Awakening" by Chuck Swindoll I realized off the bat God brought this book into my life. I saw advertisements on it through Amazon, at the Desiring God conference, magazines, etc. I decided to buy it at Sam's Club, to only discover that I had a free copy of it through a member's subscription at Catalyst. I returned the book to Sam's club and then began to read it knowing that God wanted me to have it for free!

Anyways, Chuck introduces that he is approaching this book with the fact that the church has slipped into the postmodern world - to be more specific - Christian era to a post-Christian-era. The hint of it comes from his observation that, "Our world is not only ignorant of the basic facts of the Bible, most now are skeptical, convinced there is no such thing as absolute truth. The deception is so subtle we can be led to believe that what is wrong is right, and what is bad is, in fact good. And, tragically, most people don't realize either until it is too late." 


I see that in our churches today (I'm not just calling out Compass either). This type of thinking has (whether a person knows it or not) has produced apathy and indifference towards the living gospel of Jesus Christ. There are several reasons for this but I believe at the top of the list is tolerance of sin. At some point we have allowed the "acceptable" sins to be more acceptable. Don't get me wrong, I want to run far from legalism but I also want to equally run far from cheapening God's Grace. I really feel in our post-Christian era sin has become diluted and accepted to the point that we can't see through the eyes of God anymore. 


As Chuck Swindoll defines postmodernism he takes it a step further, "Postmodernism thrives on chaos. It desires to destroy all moral criteria and replace it with no criteria. It seeks a world in which everything is relative, where there is no truth and perception alone is reality. Since God's eternal truth has no place in such a world, with the rise of postmodernism we witness a commensurate decline in biblical knowledge."  


Decline in biblical knowledge: One truth that I took away from the recent Desiring God National Conference (theme - "Think for the glory of Christ") was that God used the written word to speak to us. Not verbally/orally or through media, He used people as His conduits to write out what He wanted to say. Therefore we need to read, meditate and apply God's word on a daily basis to combat the decline of biblical knowledge so that we can discern what is true and to what is relative. 


So I pray that we as follower's of Christ can take scripture daily and immerse ourselves into His absolute infallible truth to know that God is really speaking to us and wants us to apply that truth to show that He really does live, move and in us have our being... 
Christ is ALL!