The most pressing reality
What’s the most pressing thing in your day today? By “pressing”, I mean, the most present, the most demanding, the most “real” – you might say.
Maybe it’s the kids. Maybe it’s the cooking, cleaning, and managing of the house. Maybe it’s a meeting with a client or your boss. Maybe it’s that email you need to send or phone call you need to make. Maybe it’s how you’re going to resolve the argument you had with your spouse last night. Maybe it’s that leaky faucet in the bathroom or check engine light in the car. Maybe it’s the blinking, beeping, and buzzing of your smartphone.
Far too often my days pass by as I’m pulled along by the urgent demands and not-so-urgent distractions of modern life. Some of which are on the list above. I confess, there are days when I live as a functional atheist, days when God hardly crosses the perimeter of my perception. From the moment I get out of bed to the moment I return, it’s as though I move from one thing to the next without thought of him or sense of his presence.
Which makes me wonder: how can this be? I mean, I’m a pastor after all. Maybe you’ve felt the same confused frustration I have.
As Christians, we believe God is the creator of the universe. It doesn’t exist without him. In fact, all things live and move and have their being in him (Acts 17:28). Which means God is the most real, the most present, and – dare I say – the most pressing reality.
God in technological decadence
But life in our modern world doesn’t feel that way. The cultural imagination we swim in tells a different story, a story where God is absent. Water comes from the faucet. Electricity comes from the plug in the wall – and light from the lamp I plug in. Food comes from the grocery store. News, email, maps, camera, games, calculator, step counter, health tracker, banking, shopping, reading, texting, relationships, and lots more happen on the supercomputers in our pockets – our smartphones. (And don’t forget, you can “call” someone with a smart-phone too.)
Where is God in the technologically decadent marvel of our modern world? In such a world, God seems like an woefully unnecessary addition. As Protagorus said, “Man is the measure of all things.”
This man-centered and materialistic worldview, which we are all born into, bears two striking facets. First, it’s built on human achievement. Without Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and countless other inventors, engineers, farmers, and Amazon truck drivers, where would we be? But God…what was his contribution again? Like Babel before us, we’ve built our tower to heaven.
Second, it’s a worldview pursuing human happiness; or perhaps more precisely, personal happiness. My sense of my identity and my well-being is the ultimate measure of meaning. For God - if he did exist - wouldn’t condemn me to temporary discontent, would he? As the godless have said for millennia, “Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” (1 Cor. 15:32)
The measure of all things
Our intuitions about the world, our place in it, and the God who (we fail to confess) made it betray the secularism of our age. Rather than demonstrating our enlightenment from the dark ages of religious belief, they show our self-centered slavery to our relatively minor significance in the world – that is, compared to the significance of the Creator. What if the hum, sparkle, and comfort of modern life is a veil to the true measure of all things?
Last week, I had the opportunity to gather with a group of pastors from New England for a prayer retreat. As we prayed and sang together, I was struck by what we were doing. From one perspective, here was a group of men speaking to and about someone who wasn’t “in the room”: praising him, submitting to him, and petitioning him with passion. As I myself prayed these words, I was moved to tears, “Thank you Father that Jesus is alive. He is not dead.”
Now, to an unbeliever, such a gathering makes no sense. It’s worthless. Yet as I sat there, I couldn’t help but think this was the most reasonable thing in the world. I felt in touch with the true meaning and measure of all things, the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What then?
But if it’s true that you or I, as a mature human being, can become blinded to God’s reality by the veil of our modern world, how much more an immature human being (read: your kids)? What might youth and family discipleship, therefore, look like in such a world?
That’s what I want to consider next time. But I’ll leave you with the passage we’ll explore together. It comes from Deuteronomy 6:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (6:4-9)