What Our Culture Needs

In the ’60s, the Beatles claimed “All you need is love” and the hippie generation sought to live that out. However, many found that answer wanting and looked for more as depicted in the recent movie “The Jesus Revolution.” The '80s worked out the final vestiges of the cold war, resulting in the collapse of the Berlin Wall and what many believed was a new era of world peace. As technology advanced and moved society forward, scientific truth became the answer to all humanity’s woes. The '90s birthed a new era of informational exchange exponentially accelerating the rate at which the pool of human knowledge expanded as well as the rate lies could be spread. Facts and fiction could now be shared with a few strokes on a keyboard in an email. The dawn of a new millennium ushered in unprecedented connections through social media and smartphones. Now so-called truth experts could peddle their claimed knowledge through multiple platforms around the world. In our current era, however, truth has seemed to fall out of favor. Society demands love and acceptance now “or else.” The term ‘truth’ gets tossed around still but with little, if any, weight. You need to accept people and their beliefs about reality regardless of any external data to the contrary.

What does the world need today? A mere pendulum swing won’t prove helpful in our culture today. We need the balanced approach evident in Jesus himself—grace and truth. We read in John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” And two verses later (vv.16-17) we read, “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

Moses gave truth in the law, but the law could not transform. The law’s purpose pointed out our sins and failures but could not bring about righteousness—only God’s grace found in Jesus Christ could do that. Jesus brought grace and truth. He said “the truth will set you free” in John 8:11 and also told the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

The apostle John emphasizes this balanced approach of grace and truth throughout his gospel. Jesus came “full of grace and truth” and “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” As followers of Jesus, we must engage our current culture “full of grace and truth.” Compromising on either of those will push us to an unhealthy extreme. But practically, what does that look like today?

 

Engaging with Grace

God’s grace flows from His nature of love. As the God who is love, He acts graciously toward humanity in sending His Son Jesus to die on a cross for our sins. Humanity did nothing to deserve God’s gracious sacrifice to atone for our sins, but He did it anyway as a gracious act of love. God did not ignore sin as Romans 5:8 informs us, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God chose to act in grace toward us even though we were sinners. That defines grace—acting in love toward those who have done nothing to deserve it.

The Beatles were not accurate in saying “ALL we need is love,” but it certainly is accurate to say “we need love.” People are starved for genuine love and sadly look in so many wrong spaces for it. As we engage a culture that displays an increasing antagonism toward Christianity, we must guard ourselves against responding with aggression. We will be treated unfairly even as our Lord Jesus was, and we will likely be viewed as an enemy, even as we ourselves were to God prior to saving faith. Grace moves us to love people, even those who see us as enemies. Jesus, after Roman soldiers nailed him to a cruel cross, hung there with his life ebbing away and prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” That’s grace.

Every person you and I meet, no matter their personal beliefs, is created in the image of God and loved by God. We can love people as image bearers, not because of what they have done to deserve an act of kindness, but because they are loved by God as His image bearer. Why not invite that atheist neighbor who thinks you’re a fool for believing in God over for a barbecue or bring a meal to him if he’s sick. Bring a cup of coffee to that co-worker who doesn’t hold to a biblical view of marriage. Demonstrate grace through acts of kindness rooted in God’s love for a lost humanity. In such a way, we model Christ himself who was full of grace.

Engaging in Truth

We cannot ignore truth though. Jesus himself said, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus walked this planet as truth incarnate and left his word, the Bible, as truth in written form. Satan speaks the language of lies and has blinded many to the truth. Jesus characterized the devil as follows in John 8:44, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” Truth exists and is found in Christ and his word. The fact that there is absolute truth opens the possibility for lies, which do exist.

We live in a culture that believes all truth is personalized and there is no external source of absolute truth. This results in a culture adrift and carried along by the ideological currents of the moment, having no anchor to hold it fast. Paul described this drift in Ephesians 4:14 as follows, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”

What’s the church to do in a culture adrift that caters to every whim of human imagination? The next verse tells us, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” Paul is speaking to the church and we must begin there, but we must not compromise the truth as we engage our culture. The truth should be spoken to culture but with grace. Paul further explains this in Colossians 4:6, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”

The world desperately needs truth. This fact has taken center stage in our culture with the issue of gender ideology. Bucking thousands of years of human history that affirms the biblical truth of two biologically based genders of male and female, culture today presents gender as an infinite spectrum disassociated from genetics and biology. Tragically, this trend has created irreversible harm for many who have adopted this as truth and proceeded with life altering surgeries and hormonal treatments.

Oli London, a former trans influencer and now detransition activist, shared the influences that led him to believe this lie for a time. He noted that his craving for affirmation and validation led him toward the trans influencers on TikTok. He only needed to watch one fifteen second video and the TikTok algorithm kept feeding him more and more videos. He watched these trans influencers with all of their followers and likes and started wondering if that was his answer. London wrote, “You think, 'Oh, wow, look at them, they're popular, they're getting love, they're getting validation' and I thought, ‘Maybe I can feel validated.'”

He began his transition and each step brought him praise in the social media world. His videos highlighting his transition process started getting over a million views and over 100,000 likes. He said, “Maybe this is the only way I feel love, I feel valid, is by getting this attention. I kind of went along with that and thought, ‘Maybe these people are right’ and that's what really pushed me to transition.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-trans-influencer-blames-tiktok-stars-rise-gender-ideology-trend-destroys-lives

However, his transition never fully satisfied him and he knew he needed more. Though an atheist at the time, he entered a church and started reading his bible. God worked through His word and Oli began to embrace the biological gender God made him at conception. He said, “It made me [realize]: ‘You know what, God made me a certain way, God made me who I am. Why on earth would I want to change that? Why am I going for all these extreme procedures? This is not how God made me, this is not what I was meant to be in life.” Oli has begun to embrace the truth of who God made him and God's love for Him.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252732/de-transitioner-oli-london-shares-conversion-to-christianity

Young people pursue validation through radical means today and have missed God’s truth that speaks to these issues. We read in Psalm 139:13-14, “¹³For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. ¹⁴I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” Every human being is made in the image of God and has eternal value because of that. God loves each person He has made and wants them to experience the joy of a relationship with Him.

The fact that we have sinned and rebelled against God has messed up the world with tragic ramifications. People are born with physical impairments, natural disasters bring death and destruction, and our brains don’t operate perfectly, resulting in mental health struggles and misinterpretations of reality. But the answer is not embracing brokenness and lies, rather it is pursuing healing and truth.

Consider how society approaches anorexia. A woman who struggles with anorexia believes she is fat despite external evidence. A doctor could perform caliper testing on her and reveal her extremely low body fat percentage, he could put her on a scale and show her how low her weight is, and he could even show her charts revealing the healthy weight range for a woman her height and age, but she might still believe she is fat. How does our culture approach a person with such a confused sense of reality? I don’t know of anyone who would affirm an anorexic in her perceived fatness and recommend liposuction as the proper procedure for dealing with anorexia. The results would be tragic. Yet culture has chosen to take that approach regarding gender dysphoria.

God’s truth informs us that people are made in His image and immensely loved by Him. Sin has brought severe brokenness to this world. Many are experiencing deep loneliness, hurt, and confusion. They need to hear that God has made them either male or female and loves them as such. They may not fit the societal stereotype of a male or female, but that’s alright. They are still the gender God made them and loved by Him. Without embracing truth, our culture has no firm foundation upon which to build.

 

Grace and Truth

Jesus came to this earth full of grace and truth and demonstrated grace and truth to a broken world desperately needing it. As followers of Jesus, we should do no less. We must guard ourselves from leaving out either of those essential virtues. Approaching others with only truth incites animosity. Approaching others with only grace harms them in the long run. May God help you and me live a life like our Lord Jesus full of grace and truth.

 

“…we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14