Navigating a complex world with the wisdom of God

Navigating a complex world with the wisdom of God

We live in a complex world.  The tectonic plates of society, culture, life and religion are re-arranging themselves into new and strange shapes.  Should we even attempt an answer, after all having a confident response to anything today can lead to all sorts of trouble!  Let alone think we can find stable ground from which to speak and live that answer from?

Sex and Sexuality

Perceptions on sexual ethics, preferences and practices are shifting at astonishing rates.  The media seems to suggest that the only sexual sin left is to choose not to have sex.  Yet reported cases of sexual abuse are at all-time highs.  And the tension between what is private and public is no longer agreed in even the broadest sense.   Just a decade ago what would have been restricted from public consumption is now mainstream viewing, while access to pornography is available at the click of a button.

Life and Death

Questions about when life starts and how life should be allowed to end are mind-boggling in their intricacy.  Who makes those judgements, based on what principles, is being questioned as medical advances open up new arenas of ethical questions unthinkable even 20 years ago.  What rights do individuals, families, the medical community, or the legal system have?  And the same questions, perhaps even more emotively, are being redefined in the debate around when life begins; a debate that recently introduced such disturbing phrases as ‘post-birth abortion’.     

Wealth and Imbalance

Global wealth is entirely sufficient to provide for the global population.  Yet deaths through malnutrition and preventable diseases are growing exponentially.  The UK can debate the accessibility of tertiary education while the majority of the world’s people remain functionally illiterate.  The comfort of one global citizen comes at the gravest cost to another.  And while we have been internationally stunned by global recession we remain confident in money to provide answers.      

Stability and Authority

Institutions such as marriage, parenting, church, government, and law, once universal in offering a guide to life are being mocked into redundancy, replaced by celebrity opinion, facebook, tolerance, and twitter.  Time magazine recently cited Lady Gaga and her 63 million twitter followers more influential than the International Monetary Fund.  While the fragmentation of society and a trajectory toward segregation not assimilation makes us strangers to a neighbour’s culture, 24 hour global news cycles give us unrestricted access into every pocket of the world.

Gender and Identity

Personal clarity about the biggest questions of life is less and less available.  Who am I?  Why do I exist?  What effect does my gender have on my identity?  What are my responsibilities – to self, to others, to the environment?  How am I to function in community?  What are my ‘rights’ and responsibilities?  We see the extreme desire to defend identity expressing itself in acts of terror, civil dissatisfaction with harsh government, and riots that seem to have no meaning.  It expresses itself in a society that magnifies economic potential above the soft values of parenting, home-making, and volunteer contribution.  Shockingly a recent popular women’s magazine felt able to degrade the stay-at-home-mum on par with the bunny girl as a perceived assault on feminism. 

  

Two Mistakes

In this complex world, what is the church’s response?  What is the Christian’s response?  How are we to live and think and feel and speak?  How can we be a people joyful in the changes for good but brave to speak and act prophetically? 

There are two errors we could make.  The first is to be silenced by the complexity, controversy and confusion.  But this is not a time to be silent, but a call to step forward with humility (for we are weak) and confidence (for God is strong).  The second mistake is to be strident.  To forget there is no such thing as an issue, just people.  People like us with lives and friendships and pressures and delights and insights and desires and hopes.  Just as silence is a mistake so stridence is too.

There is a better way that follows Jesus, holding in tension what we so often segregate – clarity and compassion; courage and humility; realism and a deep conviction that God does act.  I want to offer four attitudes to cultivate as we seek to speak and live for Jesus as Lord of all life. 

Clarity

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2Timothy 3:16)

God is not silent.  God speaks.  God speaks forcefully and clearly in his Word the Bible.  Our response needs to be informed and intelligent - that we might be known as those who look deeply into deep things.  But also resolutely biblical, searching the scriptures longing that our hearts might warm with the clarity God’s Word brings to even the most distressing and complex situations. 

Compassion

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (Ephesians 4:31-32)

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. (1Corinthians 13:1)

Embracing, sympathetic and accepting of all even if we feel unable to affirm all they are.  We must wrestle to expand our minds to their fullest to tackle the realities of our world, but equally we must enlarge our hearts to become the most generous of global citizens.  If we rightly grapple with the issues and reflect biblically for answers but fail to be generous in love then we become a harsh irritant not a healing balm.  While if we correctly reach out to all with a heart-felt embrace but neglect to speak bravely we become naïve and weak in a world that needs wisdom and strength.  We must be both a clear and a compassionate people.

Courage

…be ready in season and out of season…For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2Timothy 4:2-4)

Obedience to God to live and speak allied to his Word will mean disobedience to trends and patterns in society.  Disobedience to such influential forces as peer pressure, media hype, assumed values, and legal statutes takes courage.  We will need to be a bold and daring people in our obedience to God.

Confidence

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed.  (Romans 6:17)

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry…In these you too once walked, when you were living in them.  (Colossians 3:5-7)

This clear Word from God in his Bible, to speak courageously and live out lovingly, is also a Word of expectation.  A Word that does not return empty or void, nor echoes for a moment before being lost in the winds of culture.  Rather it is a word of hope and new life and change and transformation.  A Word that first spoke the world into being and now speaks to our world, in all its complexity and pain and uncertainty to change people and bring them, through Christ, into intimate loving relationship with an awesome and wonderful God.