Most weeks, I choose articles to highlight based on a common theme or idea – sometimes it might be a topic we are learning about on Sunday mornings, or perhaps something that is coming into focus in our culture or society. This week, I offer up three articles that aren’t as closely related. Instead, I personally found each of these to be thought-provoking insights into the Christian life in our modern era…
- A few weeks ago, I highlighted several articles regarding hospitality. But what does it look like to actually cultivate this as a habit? Tim Challies gives a good introduction to applying the Scriptures to our lives: “While we are to teach others what the Bible says, we are also to demonstrate what it says, and we do that by inviting people into our homes and into our lives.“
- We live in a culture where we are constantly told and encouraged to speak our mind. This can be helpful at times, but there is also a danger where we care more for expressing ourselves than we do for actually thinking a question through; more for using what we stand for or against to signal our identity than for carefully considering how to reach the world we live in. Trevin Wax writes an important article about how the lethal combination of social media and politics has subtly changed our idea of what a faithful church looks like: “What we must resist, especially as our discourse seems more and more shaped by worldly tactics of political polarization, is this insidious inference—that if you don’t engage this issue in this way, or follow the lead of this political action committee, or take orders from a famous Christian leader, then you’re failing to ‘take a stand,’ or you’re not ‘truly committed to Scripture’.”
- Lastly, I’ve been reading a fair bit about technology lately. Tony Reinke’s 2017 book “12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You,” is a remarkably insightful look at how the constantly-connected, technology-centered, always-within-reach world of cell phones, social media, and tech giants is changing how we think and live. Trevin Wax points out something very insightful when it comes to how we use technology: we’ll (generally) turn off our phones to pay attention and not be distracting in a movie theater, but we won’t in church. Why is that?
