Brother in Christ, sister in Christ, I implore you: don’t lose your home to a passing storm. At present your pressing temptation to alter or abandon your faith feels final and inevitable, a logical and irresistible imperative to fall back or fall away which doesn’t carry options or off-ramps – and that is hard to bear. Some movement or cultural moment is storming your conscience or your core beliefs, laying siege ramps to your certainties, cutting off supply lines to the city of your soul, and somewhere you have come to believe that resistance is futile. Brother in Christ, sister in Christ, I implore you: don’t lose your home to a passing storm.
As you consider deconstruction, deconversion or even the moral dereliction of the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, may I offer to you four facts that might anchor the home of your heart and might help you to stand firm when drifting back or away feel like a foregone conclusion:
1. Now is not absolute
Believers of all ages, but particularly young Christians are vulnerable to the tyranny of ‘now’. I know that you can feel like your life, locked as it is in the permanent present tense of media and messaging, is not related to what has gone before you or what might follow you – but this is a terrible illusion. Now is not absolute, and pinning your principles on the situation at present will put you in unthinkable peril. Let me tell you about two periods when ‘now’ looked right ‘then’, but looked foolish later.
When I was in my late teens I enrolled for a degree in English (with some philosophy). I loved the academic challenges this brought and the wide literature it led me into. Piggy-backing on all of this intellectual material, however, was postmodernism. Long before Christians spoke or wrote about this (ad nauseam) the ideology was alive in academic circles. In lecture after lecture, seminar after seminar, the fluidity of truth claims and the subjectivity of reason were emphasised over and over again until I began to fear and question what I had been taught and what I had believed. How could credible Christianity emerge from this truth hurricane with anything intact? The answer: it did because now is not absolute. Postmodernism came and went, rose and fell, just as every intellectual movement does (normally when it makes landfall in lived experience). I didn’t lose my home to that passing storm, and I am grateful for God’s grace.
Around 10 years later, New Atheism emerged – a ‘scientific’ storm that seemed to expose every believer as a fool. Its media was amazing, its figureheads intellectually intimidating, its sense of momentum irrepressible. Buses were emblazoned with scepticism, books were selling in their millions, social media abounded in posts and rebuttals and all seemed lost for simple faith. Friends of mine listened in and their Sunday School faith caved quickly to the pressure all around them. Now, New Atheism stands in ruin, ravaged by its own weather systems and robbed of cultural influence. Most of my friends, their foundations now more fully set in middle age, remain away from God, having lost their homes to a passing storm whose absurdity is now apparent. This is a cause for weeping.
2. Satan is not brand loyal
Today is different though, isn’t it? That’s what you tell me when we meet to talk. The academic excesses of postmodernism, the over-reach of New Atheism are so much of their time. The pressures now are different. They are rooted in identity, sexuality, technology, and human liberty – and their winds and waves are stronger and more stressful than any of these other movements. Your ‘now’ seems like a necessary corrective to the corrosive influence of regressive beliefs. This, my beloved friend, is exactly what Satan wants you to believe.
Please believe me when I say: Satan is not brand loyal. He doesn’t care how insufficient the Enlightenment looks today, how optimistic modernism evidently was, nor how anachronistic every other intellectual movement becomes in time. His heart was never in these things, he never believed in them himself – he just wanted others to. Satan is not brand loyal. He will leverage asceticism and hedonism, intellectualism and entertainment – he will even happily contradict himself, so long as you don’t believe in Jesus.
Satan is set on your destruction, it is his daily devotion, the song of his horrific heart, and what you are facing now might be culturally different than other generations, but it is qualitatively the same. The zeitgeist of today is the ridicule of tomorrow, and all Satan needs is a short time and an open heart. Brother in Christ, sister in Christ – please let learn that Satan is not brand loyal.
3. A hardened heart is fearful
Entertaining new ideas is exciting. Being able to wear the tee-shirt and share the hashtag give a sense of belonging and acceptance for a time. But please know, the lightly entertained concepts of today will become your deeply held convictions tomorrow. When I was in my twenties I could live with dissonance to a greater degree than I can in my middle years. The flux and flurry of youth will eventually seek to settle somewhere – even if it is just in resolute uncertainty. This is where your heart could harden, and these ideas could become the bedrock of who you are. Please take time to consider how difficult these entertained ideas, that frisson of deconstruction and change, might be to revisit in later years. Brother in Christ, sister in Christ – a hardened heart is a fearful thing.
4. Only God is faithful
Let me tell you about a fascinating book I am reading at the moment. It is by Justin Brierley and its title is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. I would love you to read it, because it shows over and over again that movements are momentary, but God is faithful. You are confused at the moment, intellectually and perhaps emotionally. There is much that could change if you just alter or abandon your faith, but from the depths of my heart I want to assure you that above the passing sands and unsettling storms of time – God stands true. Cultural moments come and go, but only a life founded in the words and work of Jesus Christ can truly stand – not just the storm of opposition but the final storm of divine judgement. Please hold fast to Christ Jesus – he is the only true Rock, the only one to whom fidelity and affection will seem logical years and an eternity from now.
Brother in Christ, sister in Christ – do not lose your home to a passing storm. Let’s talk about this, let’s think and pray about this together, let’s ask God to give us the perspective and wisdom that only time spent submitting to him can bring.
Thinking Pastorally 