It’s a bizarre world in my view.
It’s awash with opinions, ideas and recommendations that vie with each other for the most way out, for only way out things are newsworthy!
Being a man of technology I get my daily news on-line. Looking one day last week at ‘The Age’ on-line, it was instructive to read the column headings under the title of ‘Daily Life’. The 4 daily life issues for this particular day came under the following headings: parenting: “I took my kids to a tattoo parlour – and this is why I think more parents should do it”; “what would you pay for a kitchen – thanks to reality TV the kitchen has become the star of the home”; “should you confess to an affair – one psychologist says honesty is not always the best policy”; “fitness fads – the new trends worth trying and what you should avoid”.
Now I confess that I failed to read the rest of those articles. Perhaps I missed something special which would have changed my life! But day after day such ‘expert’ pieces are paraded before a thirsty public wanting to know what life is about and how they should live. Here are well-educated and articulate people writing and digesting all manner of bizarre offerings in their daily consumption.
This is really the stock in trade of secular faith and its efforts in converting the masses to its fundamental doctrines (I am not picking on these articles particularly, one could just have easily pulled out a few TV programs, etc). A few observations: it’s all about ‘me’ and ‘my happiness’; it covers essential areas which are seen as giving meaning to life – identity/self-image; money/comfort; sex/relationships; health/fitness – these are the bread and butter pre-occupations – and ones we need more biblical teaching on!; there are moral imperatives used – words like ‘should’ and ‘ought’, though the underpinnings of those imperatives are never explored.
On one level these articles reflect individual opinion, but they are individual opinion from within a particular understanding of what life means – a secular framework shapes them and that framework itself is always beyond question or critique. It’s little wonder people get so messed up!
By contrast this week we have been reading from the New Testament letter of 1 Thessalonians and I have been preparing messages from the book of Colossians. Here we find a totally different framework for the mind. Here we discover that we are not writers or readers fumbling in the dark for some new twist or take to manufacture some fleeting human happiness. Here we find connection with a God who so loved the world he gave his Son; who made us male and female and beautiful in ourselves in relation to him; and who builds our lives into faith, hope and love, bringing transformation and leading us into eternal realities beyond human construction.
Now I am sure this may be bizarre in itself to a great many people today. But I will take this kind of bizarre any day of the week! As Colossians puts it, God “has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves” (1:14). In our daily consumption of thoughts and ideas may we feed ourselves on what God says and shape our minds and lives accordingly.