Repairing the Reconstruction Destruction

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Like to welcome you to this year’s seminar and This emphasis it’s a parenting seminar, but it’s a little bit of a different emphasis if you’re coming expecting a lot of very Specific parenting things to do When to discipline when not to discipline that kind of stuff. That’s not this seminar. This seminar is focused on thinking generally generationally But we want to be thinking generationally. What’s it going to take for us to be able to raise those kind of People who are going to be a cut above what’s the likelihood that they’re going to live a rarefied life onto the Lord? Sadly the statistics are not in our favor even within the Christian community about What happens to a young person when they get to a certain age?

And we’re trying to see what we can do as far as it’s up to us to be able to change that In 2022, Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research Group conducted a survey titled, What Do Americans Believe About God, Salvation, Ethics, and the Bible?

And they had a survey that after the survey they had a findings and this is part of what they said, hopefully you can read that, they said quote, the 2022 survey results for U.S. evangelicals reveal concerning trends related to the exclusivity and the deity of Jesus Christ, the historicity and divine nature of Scripture, objective truth, gender identity, and homosexuality. Now the summary did go on to add a bit of good news and they said at the same time encouraging trends include evangelicals increasingly biblical views on abortion and sex outside of marriage. So what I want to do is I want to share with you a few of the responses to some of the doctrinal statements that were put before the people that were taking this survey. And I’ve filtered the respondents down to just those who claim that they belong to an evangelical church and who go to church at least once a month. And so I want to take a look at the survey results and then I further limited the the respondents down, or I broke them into two age groups.

So what we’re gonna see here is we’re gonna see the people who are between the ages of 50 and 64 in one column and the people who are between 18 and 34 years of age. We wanna see if we see any discrepancy, any difference between what these so-called evangelicals who go to church once a month, how they responded to these statements. And they were presented with a whole slew of statements. You can find this online if you wanna go back and look at it. I’ve only pulled out some of the statements. Let’s take a look at what the survey says. So first statement was, God learns and adapts to different circumstances. God learns and adapts to different circumstances.

20% of the older set agreed with that statement and 42% of the younger people agreed. God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. There we had 27% of the older generation agreed, which is already concerning. And 47% of younger evangelicals agreed with that statement.

Jesus is the first and the greatest being created by God. This one was really bad news on both sides. 59% of the adults older agreed 62% of the younger agreed. Jesus was a great teacher but he was not God. 13% of the older agreed. 36% of the younger agreed. The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being. 32% as you can see older agreed. 67% of the younger. Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature. 31 percent, again, of the older agreed. 48 percent of the younger agreed. Worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church. 26 percent, 46 percent. Gender identity is a matter of choice.

14% versus 31% agreed with that. God is unconcerned with my day-to-day decisions. 3% of the older agreed, but 17% of the younger did. And then one more. Religious belief is a matter of personal opinion. It is not about objective truth. 12% of the older agreed, 23% of the younger. It’s a sad fact that many young evangelicals today are either ignorant of the faith of our fathers or they’re abandoning it all together. And again, I wouldn’t give the older population necessarily a high score on that either. But you can see the decline. Why is this decline in biblical faith occurring? Even outside the area of religion, there often is a failure to successfully transmit the wisdom of one generation to another. The old ways are being cast off in favor of new, more so-called enlightened ideas. Sometimes this is a good thing, but often it’s not.

History is full of examples of nations rising only to crumble from within. Why does this pattern seem to be the norm and not the exception? Another sad state of affairs is the fact that we have the rise of the stupid. An article I recently read suggested there is a threat lurking in our nations greater than the rise of wicked despots. That threat is stupid people. I read this article I was reading that was on the website BigThink.com. You can see the references up there. The author, Johnny Thompson, wrote, it’s easier to deal with evil people than it is stupid ones. But stupidity is much harder to weed out. That’s why it’s a dangerous weapon.

Because evil people find it hard to take power, they need stupid people to do their work. Like sheep in a field, a stupid person can be guided, steered, and manipulated to do any number of things. Evil is a puppet master, and it loves nothing so much as the mindless puppets who enable it, be they the general public or inside the corridors of power. Evil is easy to identify and fight against, not so with stupidity,” end of quote. And he goes on in this article then to quote Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, as you know, was a German pastor who died in prison during the days of Hitler. And from that prison, he had written some letters that are referred to now the letters from prison.

But Bonhoeffer also believed that it was the stupidity of people in Germany at that time that paved the way for the rise of Hitler. He wrote, quote, neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears. Facts that contradict one’s prejudgments simply need not be believed. In such moments, the stupid person even becomes critical. and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and being easily irritated becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bonhoeffer did not see stupidity as an intellectual problem because there were plenty of intelligent people who had bought into Hitler’s lies. He saw primarily as a moral problem. He said pride and selfishness then helped fuel this kind of stupidity. So continuing on to the bad news, modern education won’t save us. If it’s true that stupid people are part of the problem, then one would be tempted to find the solution and better education. Unfortunately, that’s got its own set of problems nowadays. The veil is being pulled back on the educational system, showing that it too often is adding to the problem of stupid people.

In C.S. Lewis’s Hideous Strength, there’s a scene there where Miss Hardcastle, she’s part of the NYSS police, she’s talking to Mark Studick and dropping hints about what the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, NYSS, what that is, what they’re up to. And Stuttuck wants to know what Nice’s political affiliation is. And Hardcastle says they don’t have any. They play both sides. She says it is absolutely essential to keep a fierce left and a fierce right on their toes and terrified of each other. She says they do this by manipulating what people read in the newspapers. But then Stuttuck says, well, that’s not going to work.

He says, I don’t believe you can do that, not with the papers that are read by educated people. And Miss Hardcastle says, tells them, she says, you don’t understand. NICE doesn’t have a problem with the educated people because they are more easily manipulated because the education system has taken away their skepticism. It’s the common workman who will be the problem for NICE because they don’t easily swallow what they’re being sold in the news.

Now, does that sound downright prescient given what’s going on in our educational system today. I mean, just a fun fact, 57% of people with postgraduate degrees, 57% of people with postgraduate degrees identify with the Democrat Party in America, as opposed to 35% for the Republican Party. Given the two parties’ platforms, that’s just an interesting statistic. And a little bit more bad news before we move on. Deconstructionism. I titled this session, Repairing the Reconstruction Destruction. I have in mind the reconstruction that follows after one deconstructs what they once held to be true. Deconstructionism is a word you hear a lot lately from various celebrities.

Several notable Christian pastors have made headlines for having turned apostate after deconstructing their faith. think Josh Harris and Rob Bell are two examples. The term is used by historians, sociologists, psychologists, religious scholars, and others to justify their rejection of orthodox views that were once settled matters. Deconstructionism was originally developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, I believe. His idea was to deconstruct text to find what the bare assumptions were behind them. The core belief in this approach is that objective meaning is impossible to discover. So to understand an author’s view, you had to find out what their subjective assumptions were behind what they wrote.

Deconstruction tries to identify the assumptions behind assertions and show how cultural, religious and other biases have affected those claims. And by doing this, the veracity of those claims then can be shown to not be based on any real objective truth at all. Deconstructionism has become a core principle in the postmodern era that we live in. With respect to Christianity, Apologist Alisa Childers offers this definition, and you had it up there. In the context of faith, deconstruction is a process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. the Christian will deconstruct all the way down to into atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction, but the type of faith that they embrace is almost never resembles the Christianity that they formerly knew. Now, not all attempts at deconstruction are bad. There are times when certain biases have entered into people’s ideas that they hold as gospel truth.

In those cases, it can be useful to identify those biases so that we can get better at the objective truth of the matter. So you have to ask yourself the question, why? This is a, this is, it’s sadly as rare today as many people simply want to abolish any notion that there’s any truth that transcends mankind and holds him accountable. So why this decline that we’ve seen going on, and I would suggest to you it has to do with the great lie. Deconstruction, as it is commonly used today, is just the latest incarnation of Satan’s original question to Eve in the Garden. Has God said? And I want you to keep that question in your mind throughout the session because to me that explains pretty much everything that’s gone wrong with the world since the Garden is constantly asking, has God said?

Examples of that that we see, it shows up throughout history in various forms including these modern mantras that we are familiar with question authority, do your own thing, speak your truth, my God would never dot dot dot. These are all just manifestations of the big question, the big lie, as God said. The result is that we have reached a point in time where subjective feelings overrule objective facts. Carl Truman, in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, traces from the days of Russo and Romanticism to the present the development of the quest to understand human identity. He shows how the sexual revolution of the 1960s was just a symptom of the changing definition of personhood.

On page 27 of his book, he writes, quote, So in the hands of men like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, the world loses its innate teleology. These three men effectively strip away the metaphysical foundations for both human identity and for morality, leaving the latter, as Nietzsche is happy to point out, a matter of mere taste and manipulative power games. And you’ll notice at the bottom there, sometimes you’ll see I’ve got references to these books. I’ve read this one. I recommend it. It was a good read. Historically, the concept of self had been rooted in external objective facts. Your gender, for example, you just had to look in a mirror and figure out what your gender was.

Over time, objective facts have given way to subjective feelings. A person’s sense of self is now determined by how they feel rather than what they objectively are. Truman insightly shows how this explains the need to force others to accept one’s self-declared identity. An example would be when the person goes into the baker and wants to have a cake to celebrate their coming out or whatever it may be and the baker refuses. In the past, that person, irate customer would just walk out, be unhappy and put something on Facebook and say, don’t buy a cake there. But today, because identity is so tied up to who that person is, it’s now the equivalent of a physical assault on that person, and therefore, I can’t just let it go and just be mad.

You actually now have to punish that person. It’s no different in their brain than if you reached out and punched him in the nose, and Truman does a good job of showing how that happens. Now Truman’s book stopped short of giving a gospel solution to the problem, but it’s well worth a read if you want to understand how we got to where we are today regarding gender identity chaos. So what can we do to prevent ourselves and our heirs from joining the ranks of the stupid? If you keep Satan’s question has God said in your mind it will help explain much of the craziness that’s going on today. You’ll find it the root of every effort to upend the cultural beliefs and values that have shaped Western civilization. It’s in man’s nature to rebel against anything that constrains him. Satan knows this and he has subtly worked to sow the question, has God said, into every human mind.

Training ourselves and our children and their children to detect this lie will play a big part in raising rarefied errors that avoid the various snares of the devil that so many have fallen into. As we discuss raising rare fight errors, it should be obvious that you can’t preach what you don’t practice. The starting point for training your errors is to make sure you are living out the principles that you are trying to inculcate in them. One of the top reasons that young people give for leaving church life is the hypocrisy they witnessed growing up, and Jonathan’s whole session is dealing with this topic of hypocrisy.

Almost anywhere you look, you can see the big lie affecting life. If you don’t have this 30,000-foot high view of what is going on, you can find yourself playing wack-a-lie with every manifestation of the original lie, and for every lie you whack, two more pop up. We need to start thinking more strategically about what’s going on so we can train ourselves and our heirs to understand the nature of the attack and how to gird up the loins of our minds so that we can defend against it. I suggest to you that a key strategy to combat Satan’s lie is to embrace the claim that the values of the true, the good, and the beautiful are objective truths and they’re not subject to human opinion and then train ourselves and our heirs to live accordingly.

We could spend the next 100 seminars talking about the true, the good, and the beautiful, and I’m not going to dive into what those mean. That’s going to be a, you ever remember back in college when they said this assignment has left us an exercise for the student and that was actually the hard part. The teacher did the easy one on the board. The hard part for you is to go home and think about the true, the good, and the beautiful, and if you buy into the statement that they are objective truths. These three core values have long been recognized as universal givens in the cosmos. Plato and Aristotle are among the philosophers who viewed them as transcendentals.

To say something’s transcendental just means that it exists beyond time, space, and matter. It’s a universal reality that extends beyond everyday, sensory experiences. The true, the good, and the beautiful are discovered. They’re discovered. They’re not invented by men. The Greek philosophers identified then, along with that, three basic capacities in men. Lagos, ethos, is it ethos or ethos? And pathos. So Lagos had to do with reason, ethos with morality, and pathos with emotion. They saw the true, the good, and the beautiful as corresponding with these three internal capacities. The logos are corresponding to truth, the ethos corresponding to goodness, and the pathos, pathos corresponding to beauty.

In his book, Awakening Wonder, A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and this would be a book I’ve ordered, I’ve got it, I haven’t read it yet, but it looked very interesting because I’m interested in this topic of what is the truth, the good, and the beautiful. But in this book, he describes this relationship that I just read this way. He says, quote, truth, goodness, and beauty are cosmic values that communicate divine meaning to the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic capacities of the human soul, which brings a balance in the soul, which in turn harmonizes the human person with divine meaning and purpose of the cosmos, which was considered the prerequisite to human flourishing, end of quote.

As classical antiquity gave way to the rise of Christianity, Christian theologians added to the understanding of these three values, showing then that they were a part of God’s revelation to man. Hence why we view them as objective and not subjective. In their understanding, these three values are not outside of God, but are literal parts of his divine nature. We can say God is truth. He is goodness. He is beauty. Or put another way, all truth is God’s truth. All goodness is God’s goodness. All beauty is God’s beauty. When he created the cosmos, he infused it with these three. Creation teaches us what is true, good, and beautiful by way of natural revelation, and then scripture does so by way of direct revelation. We can look to those two sources to begin to figure out what true and good and beautiful are. Creation, scripture. As God’s image bears, the true, the good, and the beautiful appeal to us, but because of the fall, sin now interferes with our capacity to rightly know love and fight for these things.”

Peter Krieft, who’s a Catholic philosopher, says everything that exists in some way is in some way true, good, and beautiful. If that’s a true statement, and I think he’s right, then again, think about everything. So all the decisions we’re making down to the lowest level decisions in life are in some way working with or working against the true, the good, or the beautiful. And I would suggest to you that if he’s right, it explains why Satan has man continually asking, has God said? Has God really said that’s true? That’s good. That’s beautiful.

He begins to sow that doubt constantly in our minds. In the rest of the session then I want to briefly discuss what these core values are and show by example how they are being perverted to accommodate man’s sinful desires. And then I want to leave you with a challenge to examine your own views regarding what’s true, good, and beautiful, and see if Satan’s lie has perhaps crept into your own thinking. And I suspect if we’re all honest and to some degree in some place we’ll probably find that we have bought in to the notion that these values are actually somewhat subjective. With a proper understanding of these core values and who gets to define them, the need as it relates to raising rarefied errors is then to teach them to know these things, to love them, and to defend them against wherever Satan’s lie, as God said, shows up. So now for the hard part. Trying to define good, true, and beautiful, and I’m actually not going to give you a definition you can write down. I’m going to talk more about them

and around them. Like I said, you can join the ranks of the philosophers to debating and discussing that, but I want you to grab a hold of the idea that there is the true, the good, and the beautiful. They are fundamental values and transcendental, something that is a reflection of who God is, that he is built into the universe, that we spend a lifetime identifying and discovering and ordering our lives according to it. And Satan, meanwhile, is chipping away at that idea that those come from God and that we’re free to define those for our own terms. Getting consensus even among Christians on the definition of true, good, and beautiful would be challenging. What the precise definitions are is less critical than in agreeing on who makes the definitions. Human definitions are what have gotten us into the mess we’re in. What Christians should agree on is that God gets to make the definitions. If you’re a Christian, if If you, as a Christian, oh, I’m sorry, if you ask a Christian if God has a definition for truth,

most people would say he does. Obviously, you pull out the Bible. After all, Jesus said he’s the way, the truth, and the life. So that one’s an easy question. If you ask them the same thing about good, they would agree that he probably has a lot to say about the topic. Jesus asked the rich young man why he called him good since only God is good, Luke 18-19. If you ask them the same thing about beauty, they might start to waffle a bit and suggest that while God probably has an opinion, he has largely left what constitutes beauty to man’s own judgment. Suppose God declared a certain artwork or a musical composition beautiful, but you didn’t care for either.

Would it be okay for you to disagree with God? Does God even have an opinion about such things? How much liberty does man have to decide for himself what is true, good, and beautiful? I mean, think of it, it’s an interesting thought exercise. One day, you know, you see God, you know, listening to a piece of music, and he says, wow, that’s really beautiful. And you’re like, oh man, I hate that genre.

Is that tension okay? God says, well, okay, each to his own. Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, I get it. What would God say about such a conversation? When it comes to beautiful, Most people buy into the saying that beauty is a nigh of the beholder. One example of this comes from a woman named Sue Naabe, the CEO of Cody. It’s a beauty product company. She and her company created a campaign to redefine what physical beauty means. Naabe says the current entries for beauty across the leading English dictionaries are outdated, limiting, and exclusive. She wrote an open letter calling for change. She doesn’t say which leading dictionary definition she’s opposed to, but if we look at something like the Merriam-Webster, for example, its first definition for beauty says, the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.

Sounds like a reasonable definition to me. Does she have a problem with that definition? She created a change.org petition as part of Cody’s hashtag undefined beauty campaign. The petition states quote the term beauty doesn’t reflect the values of today’s society. I would probably agree with that statement. To her the current definition of beauty is more than inaccurate. It’s ageist and sexist. She writes quote the definition of beauty hasn’t aged well. The implicit ageism and sexism were born in a different time. We believe it’s time to bridge the gap, time to bring the definition to where society is today. By changing the definition, if more people feel included, feel beautiful, there will be a ripple effect which touches us all.

At Cody, we believe that no one can control or dictate what is or is not beautiful.” She’s calling for all of the dictionary publishers to then review their definitions and rid them of the, quote, implicit ageism and sexism they currently contain. Clearly, she sees beauty as a human-defined idea that needs some updating. In C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, he’s in there. He’s criticizing. It doesn’t say it explicitly, but if you read the biography or if you read the backstory of the book, he’s criticizing the rise of a philosophy called logical positivism. and then its follow on, which was subjectivism. These were coming into the English classroom, the school classrooms at that time, and he was very bothered by it.

And one of the books that was coming into the classroom was called the Control of Language, and so in the abolition, he refers to it as the Green Book. Logical Positivism is a philosophical movement that started back in the 20s, 1920s, that states, quote, scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines, i.e., thank God, are to be rejected as meaningless. And there’s the book there in case. Oh, note that book. I have read this one. I thought it was very helpful to understanding abolition of man. I recommend reading this so that you can get a handle on what Lewis was driving at in abolition.

So one of the authors of this green book, which Lewis was was objecting to, his name was Iver Richards, who was an educator and a literary critic. And again, he’s not called out by name in abolition. Lewis took exception to an illustration in the Green Book where two men are observing a waterfall. One man calls it sublime and the other one says it’s beautiful. But the author then of the Green Book criticizes these statements as being meaningless because they don’t state any objective facts about the waterfall, but only are comments about how the viewers feel about it. You can’t say the waterfall is objectively beautiful.

You can only say, I feel it’s beautiful. I think it’s beautiful. And Lewis was taking exception with that line of thinking. Well, Richards, in his own book, Principles of Literary Criticism, he elaborates on this idea so we can get a little better understanding of where he’s coming from. He wrote, quote, we are accustomed to say that a picture is beautiful instead of saying that it causes an experience in us which is valuable in certain ways. We continually talk as those things possess qualities when what we ought to say is that they cause effects in us of one kind or another. Few competent persons are nowadays so diluted as actual to hold the mystical view that there is a quality, beauty, which inears or attaches to external objects.

The remarks we make as critics do not apply to such objects but only to our states of mind.” Well, if people like Nabi and Richard are right, then there is no objective truth to the statement that something is beautiful. We see many examples today where those who work in areas dealing with aesthetics purposefully attempt to turn the concept of the beautiful on its ear and challenge any claim that beauty is in fact objective. Have you seen what the latest fashionistas and the artists are trying to pass off as art. This is from a recent, I think Paris, fashion. So I can see Glenn running out right after this to go by himself and outfit like that. We see similar effects to challenge the concept of objective truth. As Christians we accept that God is the ultimate source of truth. Once Satan’s lie interrupts that belief, everything is up for grabs. A quote often attributed to Chesterton notes that if we don’t believe in God, the problem is that we believe in nothing, but that we will believe in anything. And he’s exactly right. Without God, the whole realm of

epistemology or how we know things is upended. Without truth, it transcends.

We’re left with opinion to back facts. Truth is no longer objective. It is only what the majority says it is, but without any authority to back it up. And it’s part of again why you see you know the woke campaigns and the cancel culture. This is all part of this. This is the effort. You don’t go with the majority. You know you’re silenced and they define what’s objectively true. George Orwell envisioned such a world in his novel 1984 where the Ministry of truth is a government agency whose sole purpose is to falsify history and rewrite it for its own purposes. The entire population is required to speak the new language of new speak or else be punished. Does project 1619 come to mind when one, where they’re trying to rewrite black history? Again, you just can’t make this stuff up, you know, that we’re living out what these people wrote about a long time ago. There are so many examples of denying the truth, and it’s becoming almost laughable. Facebook infamously now lets you choose from a list of some 50 gender options in opposition to the true choice of male-female.

And it’s insane, and if you can’t read it, that’s probably just as well. These examples are some of the more outlandish attempts to deny the truth, but the underlying belief that truth is something we invent permeates every part of her culture. Oprah Winfrey, the queen of talk show hosts, popularized the saying, speak your truth. We are told to be respectful of each other’s truths unless we say there is only one truth. I actually had a young gal, she’s a junior in high school and her parents came to my door last Sunday trying to see them get my vote for the school levy. And we had a great 20 minute conversation.

And she was waxing on eloquent about, I raised these concerns about what’s going on in our schools and what they’re being taught. And she says, well, the Christian viewpoint is just as valid. And we’ve created a space where everybody can share their truth. And I says, well, that’s part of the problem, sweetie. I didn’t call her sweetie. That’s part of the problem is that there is only one truth. And you’re telling these people that everything’s true. It’s your truth. And I said, that’s a concern. And that’s a problem. We got in the pitch for ECS while we were talking. The human mind is quite adept at twisting truth.

Once it accepts the notion that truth is subjective, it will always find a way to distort it. The truth has been revealed in both creation and scripture. We need to be good students of both to submit to the fact that truth, wherever it is found, is not a matter of man’s opinion. Similar things can be said about the definition of good. I’ve briefly touched on the beautiful and the true, but the same things can be said about good. The scripture records several times in history where things had degenerated to the point where everyone did that which was right in their own mind. These are not described as times when man was at its finest.

Every time man decides to be his own judge of what is good, it ends up badly. A modern example of this, a fairly modern, is the situational ethics. This was a branch of study developed by, of all people, an Anglican theologian named Joseph Fletcher. His book, Situational Ethics, The New Morality, was written to try and find a balance between moral absolutism and the view that things are fixed universal moral principles, and they’re binding on all creatures. So that’s on the, your, would that be the left side? And then, and she’s trying to find a balance between that view and a balance between the moral relativism on the right that says that there are no fixed moral principles at all.

And so on the website, Britannica summarizes Fletcher’s ideas this way, quote, Fletcher based situational ethics on the general Christian norm of brotherly love, which is expressed in different ways in different situations, according to him. He applied this to issues of doctrine. For example, if one holds to the absolute wrongness of abortion, then one will never allow for abortion, no matter what the circumstances within which the pregnancy occurs. Fletcher held that such an absolute position pays no attention to the complexity and uniqueness of each situation and can result in a callous and inhumane way of dealing with the problem.

On the other hand, if there are no principles at all, then the decision is reduced to nothing more than what one decides to do in the moment with no real moral implications involved. Rather, Fletcher held, within the context of the complexities of the situation, one should come to the most loving or right decision as to what to do. Notice how the morally right thing to do comes down to weighing the pros and cons from a human perspective. I assume being an Anglican, he factored in biblical teaching, but it isn’t clear if he viewed them as authoritative. His approach boils down to subjectivity over objectivity when it comes to deciding what is good, better, and best.

This criticism of Fletcher’s work is not to say that there aren’t times when the scripture gives no clear instruction and so men need to prayerfully discern what the best course of action is. The problem with Fletcher’s middle-of-the-road solution is that it puts man in the judgment seat as to what is good. While he meant the book for good, it ended up really adding to the fuel to those who subjugate the good to pragmatism. Given man’s sinful nature, pragmatism has led, often led then to moral relativism. So while he was trying to strike a balance, all he did was he put us on the highway to moral relativism where we’re at today.

i.e. if it’s good for you, then it’s good. This kind of relativism is at the heart of the so-called right to abortion. So far, I’ve given examples of the mess that occurs when men treat the true, the good, and the beautiful as subjective, rather than objective values. The rejection of these values, as God gives, as God-given universals, explains how we have come to where we are as a culture. Embracing as good and normal all manner of behavior that was once deemed immoral or criminal. By having rejected the absolute nature of those values, you can trace the straight line to how we got to where we’re at, where things that we, our own culture once said were wicked, are now celebrated and praised.

There are several steps that need to happen for our heirs to escape joining this cultural death march and stop the destruction and repair the ruin. The first step I suggest to you is that we need to humble ourselves and recognize that God is the one who decides what is true, good, and beautiful. I’ll give you the word defer there. We defer to God when it comes up to discussions about the true, the good, and the beautiful. The next step is to engage in the process of growing in our understanding of what is the true, the good, and the beautiful, and how they relate to the daily choices we make. It would be nice if there was a manual that covered every situation there is, but there isn’t.

Beyond the Bible, wisdom is called for when making decisions. Those wisdom calls can be aided by seeking input from others who have committed themselves to discovering what God has revealed about these values. As you think about these virtues, you’ll quickly realize that pretty much all of life’s decisions from big to small involving from what we wear and how we groom to what we attach our affections to and spend our time on is all impacted by our thinking about the true, the good and the beautiful. And so again, as you’re trying to think, well, how can I apply this in my parenting process? What diet are your kids consuming when it comes to what they’re reading, watching, spending time with, entertaining?

Where are they at? being introduced to great works and being taught to understand them. Or are we allowing them, do we just recognize, oh, they just like, I’ll reach them back into my past, they just like mad magazines, so we’ll just buy them mad magazines. Or should we be steering them in a different direction? But being able to define what’s true and good and beautiful is not enough. There’s even a bigger step here and that is to learn how to delight. We need to teach them to develop a genuine delight in them. That was one of Lewis’s points he was making the abolition was if somebody looks at that waterfall and says it’s not beautiful to me, the problem is not the waterfall. The problem is the person.

They need to be trained to recognize that that’s beautiful. If you don’t like beautiful, you don’t have to like beautiful, but that’s beautiful. You need to train them. Of course, would work against teaching them the delight in it, so you would want to say you need a delight as well. Often this will require training our affections to let go of subjective feelings that do not agree with the objective standard. This is an area that parents should be proactive in when it comes to training their kids. Do not let them develop their own delights without guidance from you.

Satan is dangling a lot of shiny baubles before them, and without your guidance, they easily develop sentimental attachments to things that are contrary to the true, the good, and the beautiful. How your children spend their educational and leisure hours in addition to watching you will largely shape what they embrace as the true, the good, and the beautiful. And then once they’ve learned to defer to God and to be able to define these terms and to be able to delight in them, they need to be willing to defend them. Now I don’t mean defend them as if they can be defeated. They can’t. They’re universal. They’re from God. They can’t be lost. They can only be partially buried by the lie, as God said. We defend by pointing out the lie and upholding what is true, good, and beautiful. A lot of cultural shifts for the worse happen because the silent majority lets the minority get away with a lie. The majority grumble in private, but then the fear of sticking one’s neck out causes most to stay quiet. This only emboldens the minority to become

more extreme. It’s going to require work and sacrifice to rebuild the ruins caused by letting Satan’s great lie run on check for so long. So think of your workplaces, of you that are working big companies like Boeing and I used to work for Hewlett Packard, think about back when they first started introducing woke ideology and the things that were being said and the uncomfortableness that was going on, unstated uncomfortableness, but I don’t want to lose my job. I don’t want to hurt my promotional chances. And so people keep their mouths shut. And then the ding-dong up there, given the presentation, is empowered and says, oh, hey, but they all bought into it.

And that’s a lot of times that’s how this stuff works its way into our culture is that people who know better don’t stand up and say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and be willing to pay the price, you know, if that’s what it takes. Now, I’m not saying every time it’s the right time to stand up in the middle of a meeting and say that’s stupid, but there is a time and a place to stand up where it may cost you everything. But if we don’t do that, we’re letting the, uh, these, uh, evil people dictate the new definitions as I bring the session to a close. Let me recap what I’ve said. All of creation is an expression of God’s perfect truth, goodness, and beauty from the beginning of time.

Satan has successfully gotten men to ask themselves, has God said this challenge to God’s authority has become so woven into man’s thinking that even good people today accept some level of subjectivity to these God-given universals. And that’s a challenge to us as Christians to kind of think about that and have we allowed some of that subjectivity to creep in. This subjectivity has resulted in greater and greater levels of perversion of the truth, of true goodness and beauty, to where many believe that there really is no standard at all. To address the damage that’s being done, we and our heirs need to know, love, and defend what is true, good, and beautiful.

Now this is a lot easier to say than it is to do. Everything we say and do should be consistent with what constitutes these three virtues. Does what I wear comport with them? How I groom myself? The music or the art that I love? The things I value most and give my time and energy to? My identity? Who I love? My reviews of what it means to be autonomous, my views of what it means to be autonomous. The heroes I admire. The things that I find most meaningful. The things that bring me the most pleasure. Do those all comport with the true, the good, and the beautiful? There is nothing about us that can’t be passed through the filter of what is true, good, and beautiful.

How many of the things in your life I just mentioned would pass through this TGB filter, if you will, if God’s definitions were being used? It is evident that our nation is rapidly shedding any vestiges of the Christian faith that was once integral to its formation. There was a time when there was a lot more agreement as to what constitutes true, good, and beautiful because the word of God was held in higher esteem. It is shocking how quickly lessons learned by one generation are often forgotten by the next. And so as I close, I just want to read a little, a few verses out of Psalm 78 is a very poignant reminder of the need for each generation to diligently pass on its beliefs and values to the next.

Four generations in this passage are identified in it, including one that doesn’t even exist. Now the Psalm is specifically talking about the requirements of the law to rehearse Israel’s history to each succeeding, succeeding generation so that they can learn from past mistakes. At the point that the psalm is making is still valid today. As I read these first eight verses, consider what you are doing to help ensure your children and their children will know, love, and be able to defend what is true, good, and beautiful. So Psalm 78, verse 1, Give years, O my people, to my teaching, incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

And as your image bearers, you expect of us to be, to use them and to appreciate them, to learn from you of them. And Father, we just, we have to confess the sins. In many cases, our own sin, but certainly the sins of our nation as we have foolishly thought these things are up for grabs. And we see the mess that men have made of it. As we all as parents, grandparents, wherever we’re at in the parenting process, we think about these things, may you really help us in our heart to grab a hold of them, to do the work, to understand what they are, and then to do the even harder work to make them a delight to ourselves. And again, to be willing even to stand up and defend them if it’s going to cost us in this culture we live in. It’s a pleasure for all these things. We just ask in your Son Jesus’ name. Amen.

And as your image bearers, you expect of us to be, to use them and to appreciate them, to learn from you of them. And Father, we just, we have to confess the sins. In many cases, our own sin, but certainly the sins of our nation as we have foolishly thought these things are up for grabs. And we see the mess that men have made of it. As we all as parents, grandparents, wherever we’re at in the parenting process, we think about these things, may you really help us in our heart to grab a hold of them, to do the work, to understand what they are, and then to do the even harder work to make them a delight to ourselves. And again, to be willing even to stand up and defend them if it’s going to cost us in this culture we live in.