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Sa. All right, friends, Greg Kokel here. And I've got a special treat for you today. Now most of you know about Reality student apologetics conferences. The last season, one of our keynote speakers was John Stonestreet. Now, John is the president of the Colson center for Christian Worldview. Many of you know him from the Breakpoint Audio commentaries that he hosts. He's been a friend of STR for years and years and years and years and a friend of mine and he's a great communicator as well. That's why we put him on the big stage for Reality. So this hour what you're going to hear is his keynote presentation for Reality last season. The title is A Big Enough Worldview, Cultivating Hope, Truth, Identity and Calling in the Students. So I think you're going to enjoy this. And so I'm just going to without further ado, let John take it over here. Have a good time listening to Johnstone street and Big Enough. Welcome everybody. Appreciate you coming. I know there's a lot of great topics and breakouts that are going on. These are great events here at Stand To Reason and it's really cool to be able to work with them. My name is John Stonestreet. I'm the president of a different organization called the Colson Center. And does the name Chuck Colson ring a bell? Do we need to talk about who Chuck Colson was or anything? Everybody knows who he was. Chuck was a wonderful Christian leader of the last generation and really cared about worldview. This is one of his famous quotes here that we are built on as an organization. Chuck, of course, also founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, which is the largest ministry to prisoners and their families on the planet. But he also was super passionate about worldview and helping Christians think from a Christian worldview and think of Christianity as a worldview. As you said here, genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all of reality. It is a worldview. And that's some of the stuff we were talking about last night, that when we talk about Christianity, we are talking about something that is personal, but we're not talking about something that is private. And for too many Christians, faith has become this hyper privatized sort of reality, kind of a me and Jesus sort of thing. Now this is one of the best things about Christianity that God didn't just choose to reveal to us a bunch of rules or God didn't just choose to reveal to us kind of what what he's doing in history. He also chose to reveal himself to us personally in Christ Jesus. But he also revealed all that stuff, right? And the place that Jesus Christ has as the creator of all things and the restorer of all things. And so his role within the redemptive story is more than just how you can get to heaven when you die. It is a way of seeing all of life and the world. And I remember, for me, kind of having grown up in a church at a Christian school and a Christian school that was at the same church, really, really small, my assistant principal was also the Bible teacher and the assistant pastor, and the pastor was also the Bible teacher, and my youth pastor was also my basketball coach. Anybody else come from a background? You know what I mean? It's like six out of seven days a week I'm in that same building, hearing from the same people. Sometimes I couldn't remember who my Sunday school teacher was and who my third grade teacher was because it all got confused. But I remember, for me, learning soon after, as a sophomore in college, that Christianity was more than just about my eternal fate. It was also about how I see everything that was revolutionary for me. It was incredible to think about all of the ramifications and the implications of Christian truth. And it was absolutely kind of a stunning thing. And it was really helpful because the year before that, when I was a freshman in college, I decided to go to a Christian college. The motto of the college was Thy word is truth. And the first New Testament class that I was signed up for taught us that the miracles and the Gospels had been fabricated in order to embellish the Jesus story in the first century then. Interesting. And I won't say which college it was, but it was Eastern Mennonite University is what it was. But it was, you know, early Progressive College. In 1990, this would have been. In 1990, let me do the math. This would have been in the. In the spring of 1994. There were pro gay protests at this college in 1994. I mean, it was fascinating. Now, I had been to church my whole life. I had six out of seven days a week, learned about Christianity. I memorized a lot of Bible verses because not only did I go to a Christian school where they really wanted you to memorize the Bible in the King James, but also I had a wanna. Anybody here do a wanna. I mean, memorized tons of verses, right? I had no idea what to do with that. That claim that the miracles in the Gospels have been fabricated or that historic Christian sexual morality needed to be rethought because of the new things we now know about homosexuality or, I mean, just fill in the blank, there were a million different ways that my faith was challenged. And I want to introduce a phrase because it's been a phrase to me that has been really helpful in terms of thinking about what it is that we're trying to do as those of us that are invested in any way in the next generation. It's a phrase from a book called the Fabric of Faithfulness by an author named Steve Garber. And Garber is writing about Christian education in this book, particularly higher Christian education, and what he's saying here. He centers a lot of what he's doing around the book, around this idea of not just teaching Christianity as a worldview, but cultivating a big enough worldview. That phrase, big enough worldview, is what I want to go off of. What does it mean to have a big enough worldview? What Garber was doing in this book was talking about his own experience with college age students at a Christian college program where Christian colleges from around America would send students, and he would give them an experience in Washington, D.C. at the intersection of faith and politics. And he would watch these students, he would get to know these students and he would watch them go on through their life. And some of them make it. Some of them were divorced within 10 years and broken within 10 years and had left the faith within 10 years or had never really connected with the church at all or whatever, a million different ways. And he said it was so interesting because it was the things some of the students that I thought were just short, they knew all the answers, they had it all, and they didn't make it. And then there were other students who made it. And I was like, they didn't have a chance, you know, so how is it like, what made the difference and what he was doing in the Fabric of Faithfulness is really trying to write an account on what is it that the students who made it and succeeded and became strong Christian adults, like, what did they all have in common? And he framed it around this idea of a big enough worldview. And since I read that book, I have been captivated by that phrase. What do we mean by a big enough worldview? Well, a lot of us have cultivated a worldview in our own hearts and minds, but it's just not big enough for the challenges of, of the real world. It may not just be big enough for unique challenges of a particular cultural moment. Right. In other words, maybe, for example, it's big enough for the conversation we were having 75 years ago about whether or not the Big Bang is a legitimate theory of Origins for Christians or something like that. But it's not big enough for the challenges of the multiple sexual identities that we're fighting over. Does that make sense? In other words, it's got to be big enough for the historic questions that we have, and it's got to be big enough for the challenges of the moment. How do we think about the faith in such a way? The other angle on this that I've become more convinced of, especially recently, is that we have to think about a big enough worldview, not just about the things we know, but the things we know with. We have to think about a Christian worldview not just in terms of the things that we know, but the things that we know with not just the beliefs that we have, but the life that we embodied. Another way to say this is the worldview that we really have is not the worldview that we have, it's the worldview that has us. Right? And this is, I think, a challenge in the way we've talked about Christian worldview and we've talked about having answers and we've talked about answering skeptics and we've talked about apologetics. Let me give you an example. I know I look so young. I mean, super, super young to all of you. So this is going to come as a surprise that this is actually somewhere around year 25 for me, teaching worldview in different settings. Okay, I know. Shocked, aren't you? No, it's horrified, really. This is your future right here. It's been about 25 years. And listen, I came into this honest. I had graduated from a different Christian, transferred to a different Christian college, graduated from that Christian college, was asked to stay and lead a traveling team that would go around and speak on worldview through the lens of media and pop culture. And around that time I started seminary, and around that time I started teaching worldview at the university, at the college there. Mostly freshmen and a required course and all that sort of stuff. So I learned worldview the same source as everybody else did. And we talked a lot about worldview in a comparative way. What I mean by that is we would say, look, if naturalism is true and God does not exist, then there is no anchor point for morality. And if there is no God, then there's no source of meaning that's ultimate in the universe. And so with God or without God, you get a meaningful universe or a meaningless universe. And it was all rather theoretical and hypothetical now. It was all true. Right? I mean, that's a of legitimate argument. If there is not a God, if the whole universe started with a big bang and is going to end with a bigger bang, then there's not really a source of ultimate meaning, right? And that's the critique that worldview people would have against, for example, naturalists or postmodernism. We talked about postmodernism a lot, and we should have talked about postmodernism. And we talked about it like this. Like if everyone has their own kind of central, their own internal reference point, like we're. In other words, there's no there there for us to. To know then, and everyone determines their own truth, well, then up can mean down, and right can mean wrong, and boy can mean girl. And we use those as hypotheticals, right? Because hypothetically it is true. If everyone determines their own meaning, then right can mean wrong. Left can mean right. Up can mean down. Boy can mean girl. Now here's the thing I want to say that last one, boy can mean girl. We just debated that at the Supreme Court. Do you see what's changed? It is no longer hypothetical. When we're talking about worldview stuff with this generation, we're not talking about hypotheticals. We're talking about actuals. Actuals in a way where even some. And we had thought we had exhausted the Christian capital of Western culture thoroughly in the 80s and 90s. Man, were we naive, because at least we thought there were boys and girls back then. We have now hit a point where, listen, that crisis of meaning that we said was a hypothetical if God didn't exist. Fifteen years ago, a British newspaper did a survey of young people age 15 to 25 and asked them a series of questions. One of the questions was, does life have meaning? It did not specify, does life have this meaning or that meaning or this meaning? Just, does life have meaning? Fifteen years ago, nine out of 10 respondents in that age demographic said, yes, life has meaning. They didn't agree on what it was, but they said that it did 10 years later. So about five years ago, 10 years later, same survey, same demographic, age 15 to 28, they asked the same demographic, does life have meaning? One out of 10 said it did. Ten years later, suddenly the collapse of meaning is no longer a hypothetical. The collapse of reality is no longer a hypothetical. So we now live in these cultural waters. We also live in the cultural waters in which some of the ideas we flirted around with, say, for example, with the sexual revolution, that we could separate sex from marriage and we could separate marriage from babies, and we could separate sex from bodies. Now we have the technology to let that happen. Honestly, just an Hour ago, somebody just showed me an accountability post from a friend of his through a porn accountability thing called Covenant Eyes. Some of you know this and saw a website he'd never seen before, figured out what it was from the person he's keeping accountable, the young person. And what it came back was completely like self constructed AI pornography. In other words, what was hypothetical a generation ago has become actual. Here's my question. What does it mean to think about Christianity and to think about a Christian worldview, at least in a way that is moving from kind of the hypothetical beliefs to how do we need to think about the rest of the world? Does that make sense? This is what we've been working on at the Colson Center. We've been doing it for, of course, every single day on our breakpoint commentary, which is something that Chuck Colson started and we continue. We're trying to embody this engaging some story that's live reality in the headlines from a Christian worldview. You can find that wherever you get podcasts. But over the last couple years, we've been working on a different project and this project more recently has taken the form of a film called Truth Rising. This is a film that we've worked on with Focus on the Family to really talk about the moment that we're in and to try to make sense of it and then say, what does it look like to have a Christian worldview of this? So this Truth Rising project involves a documentary and it also involves a study. And what the study really is about, the documentary really is about explaining the cultural moment with Os Guinness. Do you guys know Oz? Oz is a good friend of ours. Oz is a wonderful thought leader and he talks about this cultural moment being a civilizational moment. In other words. Well, not to go too much into it, but it's worth seeing because think about it, when we think about civilizations, we're usually reading a history book or we're in a museum digging, looking at an artifact of a civilization that long ago what died? Because civilizations don't last forever. Civilizations come and go. Fair enough. So there's no reason to think that our civilization is going to last forever. Is that fair enough? And there's been a lot of thinkers for a long time pointing out red flags, like, this is a bad sign. This is not a good thing. This is pointing a direction for our civilization. Oz says that we're actually at a civilizational moment. This is a moment in which a civilization comes to a particular point and it's been cut off from those ideas and truths that animated It. And then it becomes like a cut flower, right? If you cut a flower off from its roots, you can put it in water, right, and keep it looking good for a while. But if you don't keep. If it's cut off from its nutrients, if it's cut off from its roots, eventually what happens to that flower is withers and dies. And there's lots and lots of signs that our civilization is withering and dying. One of them being we used to have conversations about boys becoming girls in a hypothetical term, and now we're having them in the Supreme Court, right? That's one of the signs that maybe we can look at. And so that's really what the documentary is about. And then to say, well, listen, what kind of life then are Christians being called to? My friend Larry Taylor, who runs the association of Christian Schools International, ACSI is the crediting body for Christian K to 12 schools. He has this wonderful analogy that he talks about where he says the level of our preparation has to meet the level of competition. It's a really wonderful phrase that goes right along with the idea of a big enough worldview, isn't it? There's a verse in Ezekiel where the prophet goes, look, if you can't run with the foot soldiers, how are you going to outrun the horses? The reason I think it's essential that we understand that it's a civilizational moment is that if you're here and you're invested at any level as a parent, as a youth pastor, as a youth worker, as a grandparent, as any sort of mentor or teacher of the next generation, you're not preparing them for just any ordinary cultural moment. You're preparing them for a civilizational moment. And if that worldview that we're giving them is not big enough, do you see the math problem that we have? So this is the sort of thing that we've been trying to work on in the Colson center with this Truth Rising Project. The study that comes out of the Truth Rising Project is really trying to articulate what it is that a big enough worldview would be at its most basic level. What we've done is try to construct a framework that we think is distinctly and uniquely just as biblical as it can be, centered around what I think are the four pillars. Four pillars that we have to actually make sure that when our students enter the world, they're able to see the world through this set of lenses. It's kind of like when you go to the optometrist and you sit in the chair and they're like, is this one better or this one better? You know what I mean? They end up putting all these lenses. We have four pillars, four lenses. These are the things that have to be part of that prescription, so to speak, for it to have a Christian worldview. The four lenses really consist of this. Number one is what's true about our civilizational moment. The second one is what's true about reality. Number three is what's true about the human person. And number four is how should we live? So when we're looking at these four pillars, those are the things we're trying. It's still anchored around what is true. But what's true about this moment, what's true about the story of reality, what's true about the human person, and how should we live? Here are the four words, the four words that make up the pillars. Hope, Truth, identity, calling. Hope, Truth, identity, calling. Let's start with the idea of hope. Hope is a word that we use a lot. Usually we use it in a way that the Bible does not use it. The way that we use hope is almost always in some form of wishful thinking. Right? So in other words, we say that I hope this happens and that doesn't happen. I hope Duke beats Michigan this afternoon. I hope that my team wins. I hope the next election goes my way. And almost every way that we use the word hope, we are using it in such a way that we hope something will change. Now, what's interesting is in the New Testament, there's a whole book about hope in the same way that there's a book about joy. Did you know there's a book about joy in the New Testament? Anybody know this? Yes. What book? Philippians. That's right. Who wrote it? Paul. Where was he when he wrote it? He was in prison. So the context of the book of joy in the Bible is prison. Anybody know what the book of hope is? First Peter. The same way that Paul talks about joy, Peter talks about hope. The context of the book of joy is prison. Anybody know what the context of First Peter is? If you read the first six or seven verses, Peter talks about these early Christians like they are the exiles in the Old Testament. Like they are actually. Like they've just gone through the Babylonian captivity. In other words, he's using Old Testament language to talk to them about the persecution that they're feeling. Literally, the context of the book of hope, of all things in the New Testament, is persecution. But here's where we have to get our lenses straight right off the bat, because in no way Does Peter said, I hope you stop being persecuted? Do you see what I'm saying? He never uses hope in that wishful thinking. It's never a hope for something to change. For him, hope is hope in something. It's not hope for something new to happen. It's hope in something that has already happened. In fact, I think that there are four fundamental realities that are behind how Peter, and especially beyond that, in the New Testament, talk about hope and what would it look like? Remember, here's the question. What would it look like? If this is not just stuff we believe in, but this is stuff we believe with, we think about everything through this lens. Now, the fundamental thing, bless you, that has happened, that will never change, that Peter says defines our hope is the thing that we say to each other. In fact, this Sunday or this past Wednesday started the season of Lent. If you're a liturgical church. I know we're in a Baptist church, probably not the case. But that leads up to. It's a series, a season of preparation for a Sunday in the spring called Easter. And from the very first church, Christians across time and across place have always said something to each other at Easter. What is that? He is what? He is risen. He is risen indeed. Right? This is the first thing that Peter points to. Christ is risen. Now, I know when we say Christ is risen, what we typically mean is, I believe Jesus rose from the dead. By the way, you should believe Jesus rose from the dead. If you've never studied the evidence behind the resurrection, you should. It's remarkable and it's great. But Peter is not saying, hey, everyone, say, I believe that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. He's saying that because Christ is risen from the dead, you have hope. You see how that's different? It's not, I hope persecution stops. By the way, the people that Peter's writing to, the persecution's not going to stop. It's going to get worse. History tells us there was a guy named Nero. That's who Peter is writing to, the victims of Nero. It's going to get worse. And Peter says, look, no matter what happens, Christ is risen from the dead. For Peter, the resurrection of Christ is the central thing that defines this cultural moment that he was writing to in every cultural moment. Now, do we. Do you think about the resurrection that way? Do you think about the resurrection as not only the defining thing that makes sure you get to heaven, but the defining thing of all of reality. Like, it is the thing through which you have to think about human history. Do you see what I'M saying Christ has risen. In other words, it goes something like this. No matter what happens in the history of the world, Christ is risen. So the next election doesn't go the way that you want. Christ is risen. March Madness doesn't come out the way that you want. Christ is risen. The persecution of Christians extends beyond the places around the world, like Nigeria, into the west in new ways. Christ is risen. Miley Cyrus puts out another album. No, I don't know. That's a hard one. I get it. Here's the second one. Christ is Lord. This is, to me, where it really starts crystallizing. Because Peter, by the way, connects Christ is risen with Christ is Lord in his Pentecost sermon. You got to look at that in Acts, chapter two. Okay, so same author of one Peter Acts, chapter two, he's saying this, that God has made him both Lord and Christ. This Jesus whom you crucified. Here's where we don't have a big enough worldview. All right, you ready? We usually talk about Jesus Christ being Lord this way. I've made Jesus Lord of my life. Now, I hope you've made Jesus Lord of your life. But that's not the barbaric yelp of the early Christians. The barbaric yelp of the early Christians was whether you believe it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, Jesus Christ is Lord of heaven and earth. So the reality in the world that we live in is under the lordship of Christ, there is no other world. There is no other. There's not a reality in which Jesus is not Lord. I guess you know what I mean. Christ is Lord. Whether you believe it or not. There is. That's really important, particularly in a culture like theirs in which there were other people claiming to be Lord, namely, in that case, Caesar. For us, we have a lot of Caesars. We have a lot of different people claiming to be Lord. And biblically, hope is based on the fact that none of them are actually the Lord. Christ is Lord. Third, Christ is making all things new. Now, this is important on a number of levels. I know in a room even this large, we would have different views on exactly what the end times might look like. I'm sure some of you in here are pre mil and some of you in here might be post mil or Amil. I'm pan mil. It's all going to pan out in the end. That's terrible. I'm sorry. It's a terrible joke. It's a joke that you can only tell if you went to seminary. Okay? So if you did not go to seminary. You are not allowed to use that joke. It's in the NDA. Okay, I'm just telling you whatever you think the mechanics are of how the end times are going to happen. Biblically speaking, what we can all agree on is what will happen because Jesus himself says it. John quotes it in the book of Revelation. Behold, I am making what all things new. That's where history is headed. So one of the things that, that tells us in terms of what's true about our moment is that we need to keep straight the story in the moment. Don't confuse the story in the moment. Let me give you an example. Imagine that you asked me, hey man, did you like those Lord of the Rings movies? Or if you're a real nerd, did you really like those Lord of the Rings books? And I said no. I mean, I read the first one and then I quit. Like, how'd you quit after the first one? I was like, well, because they killed Gandalf. He was fighting that demon thing on that bridge and they killed him. How can you kill Gandalf? He was awesome. He was Gandalf the Gray. He was a cool wizard. He had a pipe. It was awesome. Why did you kill Gandalf? I don't want anything to do with. And you would say to me, what? He comes back, that's not the end of the story, right? And he's even cooler when he comes back. Now the point is, is that you cannot think, you cannot understand a story from the perspective of a moment. You have to understand a moment from the perspective of a. Of the story that it's a part of. I'll give you an example about. Several years ago, I co wrote a book with a friend of mine, some of you may know, Sean McDowell. Sean and I wrote a book on same sex marriage before the Obergefell decision. And people are often like, why did you write a book on same sex marriage? And I'm like, I was hoping to make some friends and thought that would help. At the time before the Supreme Court mandated same sex marriage on all of America, there was a strategy, state by state, to politically define at the state level marriage between a man and a woman. Put that on a ballot initiative most of the time and then get the people to vote on it. And then at the state level it would define that. And so that's what happened 30 some states prior to the Supreme Court mandating it on all of America, 30 states voted to determine that marriage was between one man and one woman, including of all places, ready California. And I was talking to a pastor who was highly involved in that. Really wonderful guy, really courageous guy at the moment. He took a lot of shots for doing that, but he led a push in the state of California to define marriage as between one man and one woman. And he was successful. And then like three weeks later, some judge said, oh, it's unconstitutional, and just overturned it, just like that. And then the Supreme Court. So I saw him not long after that, and he was really discouraged. Now, he wasn't discouraged like a quitter. He wasn't discouraged as someone who had no hope, but he was discouraged. He was discouraged like the man in the arena, you know, that Roosevelt talked about, you know, that quote. And I, I. And he looked at me, and here's what he said. He said, john, it's over. We've lost. Now, listen, I understand where he was coming from, but if this is true, really true, and if these aren't just things that we think about, but they're things that we think with, it is never true for the Christian to say, it's over, we've lost. It's not true for us to say that about our own kids. It's not true for us to say that about our nation, our civilization, our church, our community, our lost neighbors, that knucklehead. It is not true for us to say that. It is never true to say, it's over, we've lost. What Christ gives us to say and said is, Christ is risen, Christ is Lord, and Christ is making all things new. And then the fourth thing really quickly that defines these are what's true about the moment and why we have to be people of hope is that God determined this moment for us. I love to talk about this because I think it's something that we often miss. We think about calling as Christians as being called to a ministry, called to a job, maybe called to a relationship, maybe called to a specific work of charity or evangelism. And all that's true. But have you ever thought that you have been called to a cultural moment? Here's where you find it. Acts 17. Acts 17. Paul's talking to Epicureans and Stoics. That's loaded. Because Epicureans believed that the gods had created the world and lost interest, so there was no relationship with the gods and the universe and the time and place. Epicureanism is where we got the phrase, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Right. Solomon went through an Epicurean phase, and the Dave Matthews Band sang about it decades later. Right. In other words, that, that's the Epicureans. The Stoics believe that every moment was mandated, like there was no free will. The gods controlled everything. So Paul's talking to the Epicureans and Stoics on Mars Hill. Acts 17, you know what I'm talking about, that passage. And he says a lot of interesting things, but here's one little nugget that he says. The God who determines everything determine the exact times in which we live in the boundaries of our dwelling place. I don't like this. Do you believe anything as a Christian that you don't like? This is one for me. I don't like this one. You say, why don't you like this one? Because I have three daughters. I would not have chosen this moment for them. You say, what moment would you have chosen for them? I don't know. The good old days. Of course, I don't know when they were, but I've read about them and they sound awesome. God wanted called my kids to this time and place. He's called you to this time and place. What does it mean to think about our time and place, our cultural moment with hope, because we're called to it? And what is it that we're called to do in a time and place like this? That's where some of the other pillars came in. But this idea of hope is the central way that the Bible talks about what it means to live in a particular cultural moment. That hope is what should be definitive for us. Now, the other pillar of this is truth. Now, here's what I mean by truth. We know that in apologetic circles and worldview circles like these, usually when we talk about truth, we're talking about truth as being absolute or objective and not subjective. Right? So in other words, it's not based on the individual. When you say something that's true, it's because it corresponds to reality. Okay, I'm embracing that definition. And then what we do based on that is we argue for the truths of Christianity. And the Bible gives a lot of truths. God existed. There was a King David, right? Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers under Pontius Pilate. The Bible makes claims, and they can be historically verified if you, you know, we see it in the dirt and we see it in history and so on. In other words, the truths of Christianity, that's super important for the pillar that I'm talking about. For a big enough view. I'm talking about Christianity as the truth about reality. And because I used to be Baptist, I've also alliterated this into four Points. Just like there are four realities to hope, there are four chapters to truth. Some of you have heard this. None of this is any new. A way of talking about the biblical story in four chapters. What's the first one? Creation. What's the next one? Fall. What's the next one? Redemption. What's the next one? Restoration. You can sum up the biblical story right here, right? Creation, Fall, redemption, restoration. You can take this as a big four chapters and then trace the biblical storyline out from under it. I think, and agree with those who would say this is one of the best ways to understand the storyline of the Bible. But what does it mean? To have a big enough worldview? Are you ready? To have a big enough worldview is not just thinking that creation, Fall, redemption, restoration is a good and helpful way of understanding the storyline of the Bible. To have a big enough worldview is thinking that creation, Fall, redemption, restoration is the only way to properly understand the story of the universe. The world we live in is created. The world that God created is fallen. Christ is risen. So there is redemption in this world that exists and history is headed towards a new heavens and new earth. Every single person is made in the image and likeness of God. From my neighbor to my enemy, from my child to my grandparent. And every single one of them is fallen. And their fallenness not only breaks, it affects their own heart and their own soul, but it breaks the relationships around them. And they are redeemable because Christ payment on the cross is big enough to redeem their sins. And the world that they live in is also a world that's headed for a new heavens and new earth. We tend to understand the Bible as a collection of things to be broken up so that we can pull out what Philip Yancey once called a moral McNugget and apply it to our life. What I'm saying is that the collision that we have today, that's evidenced in how the hypothetical from a generation ago became the actuals. Like literally, you're walking around with people that think that the story of the universe is the story told by the philosopher Ernest Nagel, that we are an episode between two oblivions. Or in that play, the Breath by Samuel Beckett, where there's just a scream and the curtain opens and there's garbage all across this. This is a real play. There's garbage all across the stage. There's two or three deep breaths, there's another scream, and that's the end of the play by Samuel Beckett. Literally, it's part of the theater of the absurd. Now. It's one, one thing to see that on stage, it's another thing to walk around the world thinking that's the real truth about reality. When we talk about truth having four chapters, I don't mean that these are the four chapters of the Bible. I think they are. I think they're the four chapters of the universe. How do we think biblically in that sense? Not just think about biblical truth, but think with biblical truth. I'll give you one application for it. And also we can push forward on time here and hopefully stay someone on schedule. The third pillar is identity. If you were in my last session we talked about identity as being a critical thing of understanding what's happening in our culture. But also the biblical view of identity has been perhaps the most consequential life changing idea in the history of the world. Chuck Colson used to say this, that the Christian idea of the image of God is the greatest gift that Christianity ever gave the wider world other than the message of salvation. Because it's where we got human dignity, it's where we got human value. You heard some of that from John and Alan and those guys in the last session. But one way to understand who we are as made in the image of God is to understand the four relationships that humans are in. Upward, inward, outward and downward. Every single person, for example, first and foremost is in a relationship with God. God created us in his image. One of the distinctives about being human is that there's a self awareness. The Bible talks about this in Genesis 1, that we have eternity in our. That's not. We have eternity in our hearts. We have the knowledge of God. Romans 1 talks about that. Genesis is we're naked and not ashamed, right? That Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed. Then there's also the relationship we have with others and the relationship we have with creation. Upward, inward, outward, downward. Now this is who people. This is how to understand part of what it means to be made in the image of God. But we are part of a story. So these relationships are created, these relationships fell, these relationships are redeemed and these relationships then can be restored. Does that make sense? So we understand this in the scheme of things. Now let me apply this in a sense because this is what's true then about the human person. Let's start with the university. Think of a major or an area of study. Art history, psychology, anthropology, health sciences, education, pre law, any of those sorts of things. The reason that they're a thing is because God created one of these relationships and it's an expression of that. Right. Theology is the upward relationship. Psychology is the inward relationship. Sociology and law is the outward relationship. Ecology, biology, physics, that's all the downward relationship. Does that make sense? You can also think about culture in general. One way that people have talked about culture is in terms of its spheres or its mountains. In other words, that there's the arts and there's the sciences and there's government, and then there's family and there's church, and then there's politics. Right? Every sphere of government, it was a reflection of one of those relationships. A lot of them obviously fit into that category of others. Because when we talk about our outward relationship with others, we're talking about both the personal relationships we have with our neighbors, the relationships we have just like in a conference or something like this, but also the social relationships that we have, our relationship within a particular nation or civilization. Right? Now, if God created those universe, he created those relationships. He has intention for all of those relationships, right? The next chapter of the story is what fall. So if you're taking notes, you can just draw an X through all of those relationships, because which one of those relationships has been impacted by sin in the fall? All of them. And so a lot of times, the implications is how we encounter these relationships in the wild today are not as God intended them. It's the fallen expression of them. Wouldn't it be really helpful for a young person trying to make sense of our culture to know the difference between the part of the world that they experience that God intended and the part of the world that they experienced that was the result of sin? Doesn't that explain a lot, for example, in the area of, I don't know, sexuality? Right. It's interesting. You see all these relationships described in creation. In Genesis 1, God and Adam and Eve are in relationship. Adam and Eve are naked and not ashamed. Adam and Eve were made for each other. It's not good for man to be alone. They were created in order to subdue the earth and fill it. And then you see all four of these relationships broken in the narrative. Adam and Eve hide from God. They go from being naked and not ashamed to naked and ashamed. Adam and Eve immediately start blaming each other. And their kids really start blaming each other. In fact, you could also say that most of the Bible is the story of the brokenness of the outer relationships. Adam and Eve blame each other. Cain and Abel kill each other. And then the downward relationship, the be fruitful and multiply now comes with pain and with frustration. Here's the thing that we often forget These are the relationships God created. If these are the relationships that have fallen, which of these relationships did Christ's death redeem? All of them. A lot of times all we. This is why a kid's faith, a kid's worldview, oftentimes is not big enough. Because the only relationship they've ever heard as applied to Christianity and applied to what Jesus accomplished on the cross is this upward relationship. Not true. There are some, maybe prosperity churches that talk about mostly the inward relationship and how important that is. But you can see this in Ephesians, you can see this in Romans. Both are books that get into the depths of the glory, of the salvation and work of Jesus Christ. And the first half of it is just theology of like, this is all that's going on. Ephesians is like in the heavenlies. This is all that. It's amazing, right? And the second half of both Ephesians and Romans, after telling us how great salvation is, it actually then turns around and says, now here's what it means for husbands. Love your wives and children, obey your parents and servants, obey your masters. And it just goes down the line. See what I mean? It's fascinating to me that Ephesians and Romans are two books in which the hypothetical become actuals, the theoretical or the theological become real life application. So I think it is possible for us to give kids a big enough worldview. Finally, not only do we have the pillar of hope, the pillar of truth, the pillar of identity, but just quickly, let's talk about the pillar of calling. And again, because I can alliterate everything, this also comes in a set of fours. And let me give you these really quick. And maybe we can take just a minute or so to have a couple kind of questions. So four realities to hope, four chapters to truth, four relationships to identity, four questions to calling. And if you pay attention, these are gospel shaped questions about calling. How are we supposed to live in this moment or in whatever moment God has called us to? Here's the first one. What is good? We ask the question, what is good? One of the great sources of heresy in the history of the world have been church billboards, especially in the South. And I remember once in a town that I used to live in, the big church in town had the billboard and this is what it said. Jesus is the only good thing left in a bad world. It sounded really spiritual, but I remember driving by it going, well, if that's true, why would I come to your church? You know, I mean, it's kind of self defeating at that point. But that's not actually what the Bible teaches. The Bible doesn't say Jesus is the only good thing in the world. The Bible tells us that when God created everything, he looked at all he had made and he pronounced it. What is there a lot of good stuff in the world? Good. So what happens when we come across something that's good? What do you do with it? Well, you're a pessimist. Yes. Let me rephrase. Not what do we do with it? What should we do with something that's good? We should share it. What else? We should be grateful for it. What else? We should protect it. What else? We should enjoy it. That's what we do. That's what we're called. To do with what's good is to preserve it, to protect it, to celebrate it, to share it with others. There's some wonderful stories in history about this. I mentioned one in my last talk. But I'll say a little bit more about it because it's really fascinating. If you think that it was the Republicans in the 1980s that invented the pro life movement in order to get more Republican votes, you don't know church history. The very first document we have in church history that dates probably from the late 1/ hundreds, it's called the Didache. And in the middle of the Didache, this is a statement of things that the apostles or the first disciples of the apostles wrote in order to help Christians live in a pagan society. And what they said is, thou shalt not commit abortion and thou shall not procure an abortion. Thou shalt not commit an infanticide. Now, the reason they said that is because both of those were legal in the Roman context. Not only were they legal, they were moral. They were considered acceptable. In other words, it was completely common for a Roman couple who had too many children and didn't want an extra one to throw it out in the wilderness and let it die. They also participated in abortion, which was really hard, particularly on women, as you can imagine back then. So this was very normal part of this. Children were considered property. You wanted to have a lot of boys because that was your retirement plan. You did not want to have a lot of girls because they ate too much. And so the children that ended up getting killed more often or thrown out for exposure were little girls. That's who they're writing to in the Didache. So one of the things that the early church did almost immediately to obey this teaching is they went out and found something that the world didn't think was good, didn't think was Valuable didn't think was worth saving. And they would go out and scour the wilderness for these little girls and they would bring them into their homes and save them. Isn't that cool? Anybody remember there used to be a radio guy named Paul Harvey? You remember that? And Paul Harvey was known for saying, what? And now for the rest of the story. There's the rest of the story, according to Rodney Stark, who's a sociologist at the University first of Washington, then he went to Baylor. Stark says that actually that's one of the things that explains the explosive growth of the church in the second century. How did the church go from this small little Jewish sect to be the dominant force in the history of the world? Well, here's what happened. If you're the Roman culture and you've kept all the baby boys and you've killed all the baby girls for like 30 or 40 years, what do you have a problem? Right? You have a whole lot of boys and not enough girls. So Stark says that one thing that explains the explosive growth of the church in the second century is that when these Roman men grew up and they wanted to look for wives, there weren't enough wives. Who had the women, the church, they had to go to church. You're saying, John, are you saying that the early church practiced missionary dating? Yes, that's what happened. And not only that, but the women, when girls were taken care of because they were valued, they weren't sexually abused and then subjected to abortion after abortion until many of them essentially just had no fertility. Their fertility was stolen from them. Now, what I love about that is I guess we could get in a time machine, go back a hundred, a couple centuries, and find one of these couples scouring the wilderness for a lost little kid and saying, hey, do you realize that you're part of something that's going to change the course of history? And they'd say, I don't know anything about that. I'm just trying to help her. So find what good you can. Protect it, celebrate, share it, so on. Secondly, what is missing? If something's missing, what do you do? You invent it, you contribute it, you innovate it. Some of the most incredible mission stories in the history of the world, internationally, is the story of Christian missionaries just saying, you know what's missing here? The rule of law. You know what's missing here? Human dignity. You know what's missing here? Fathers and what they do is they work to contribute what's missing, and it changes everything sometimes. Of course, the fundamental story of missionaries is you know what's missing? The gospel. Just the message of salvation, right? Or sometimes in our culture, it's the story of creation which has robbed people of the idea of human dignity. You see what I mean? So find out what's missing and contribute what's missing? Third, what is evil? What do you do with something that's evil? What does the scripture say? Flee from it, resist it. What else? Kill it if you can. Oppose it. Now, I know what some of you are thinking, like, well, I mean, I read about these. They get captive. That's great. We think about, like, history of some of these amazing people. Like a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who fought evil, or Wilberforce who fought evil or something. Like, I'm not asking, what evil can't you do anything about? The question is, what evil can you do something about? Can you take care of the porn coming into your phone tonight? Can you deal with that? Right? In other words, the question is, when we encounter evil, wherever it is, what do we do with it? It. Fourth, what is broken? What do you do with something that's broken? You fix it. You redeem it. By the way, where do we look for what's good, what's missing, what's evil, and what's broken? Where do we look for it? I'll give you a clue. The story of the universe. Creation, fall, redemption, restoration. That's the story of all of us and our four relationships. In our relationship with God, what's good, what's broken, what's missing? What's evil in our relationship with self, what's good, what's broken in our relationship outwardly with our friends and neighbors and our relationship outwardly with our role as a citizen or a member of a community or a particular nation. When I look downward in terms of the property or terms of the resources that God has given me, what's good, what's missing, what's broken? Do you see what I mean? In other words, you have. You have the map and then answer the questions within the map. And now all of a sudden, what we're inviting kids onto is not just a set of beliefs. We're inviting them into a way of being human, a way of life, a way of living out the beliefs that are fundamental. It's an embodied existence. Remember, at the center of our faith is the idea of incarnation, that God became flesh. We shouldn't think that our faith is anything less than truth. But neither is it anything less than incarnational truth. Does that make sense? Like, this is living it out. And I think in a culture that has embraced a way of life that is completely opposite, where the hypothetical has become the actual. That's what I'm proposing. For us that want to cultivate a Christian worldview, it's got to go from being hypothetical to actual. It's not just what we believe. It's what we believe with. It's not just what we think about. It's what we think with about everything else. That's the proposal that I'm making. Last thing that I'll say. In my years as an Awana All Star, we memorized a lot of verses. I'm guessing many of you have memorized this verse as well. It's a verse that describes salvation in remarkable terms. It's remarkable clarity. 2 Corinthians 5:17. Anybody know? Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. All things have become new. 5:17. It's a wonderful verse, isn't it? I'm going to give you a deep theological truth about 2 Corinthians 5:17. It's immediately followed by 2 Corinthians 5:18. And then here's the thing about 5:18. It's immediately followed by 5:19. Do you know what 2 Corinthians 5:18 and 19 say? Almost the exact same thing. It repeats itself. If something is repeated in the Bible, that means what? Yeah, what I love about it is 5:17 tells us what salvation does to us. 5:18 and 19 gives us the so what? How are we then supposed to live? Here's what it says. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and he's given to us the ministry of reconciliation, verse 19. That is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting men's sins against them, but has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. If you have been reconciled to God, it is so that you can become a reconciler. You're a minister of reconciliation. I think at the end of the day, a big enough worldview is someone who has been reconciled and at least at some degree understands how to embody a life of reconciliation. That's what we've tried to get at with the Truth Rising project. I think on many of your chairs you've got a little QR Code. Everything about Truth Rising is free. The documentary is free. It's been seen by about a million people. It's available on YouTube, it's available on X. And the responses have been really critical because what we're doing is trying to be really serious about the cultural moment that we're in in the first half of the film and in the second half give you stories of people who are agents of reconciliation, stories of courageous Christians who are living remarkable lives right now. People like Jack Phillips, the baker in Denver, Colorado. Ayan Hersey Ali, a rather recent convert to Christianity who is willing to change your life around what is actually true. Chloe Cole, a detransitioner. Katie Faust, a children's rights advocate. In the name of the Gospel. It's really Seth Dillon, who is the CEO of the Babylon Bee. These are five stories of people who are trying to engage the civilizational moment as an agent of reconciliation. But the point is not for us to just celebrate them. The point is how do we live the kind of lives that's big enough that is faithful to the gospel in this moment? And so the Truth Rising documentary is followed by the Truth Rising study. The study is made up of four lessons. The four lessons are Hope, Truth, Identity, Calling. Each of the four lessons has two videos. One is a teaching video, one is a story video because we wanted to be. To embody the stories of hope, embody the stories of truth, and embody the story of identity, embody the story of. Of calling. It's completely free. You can find out more by scanning that QR code. Hannah's in the back. She's got some more of those. Or she can answer questions and point you in the right direction there. I also know that a lot of us are particularly concerned about that question of identity. Another set of resources we have is called the Identity Project. She's got some information about the Identity Project. Listen, everything the Colson center does is free. We don't charge other than for the Fellows program, which is an in depth one year deep dive into Christian worldview. I know we have one fellow in the back or in the middle of the program. Are you in the. In the middle of the program right now? So we can't call you a fellow yet. You're a jolly good. Just kidding. Ah, I get it. But if you want to know more about the Colson Fellows program, we have some information there. But check out the Identity Project. Check out Truth Rising. These are resources that you can have and you can use and you can teach for particularly high schoolers and young adults and parents. That's, that's the, that's the sweet spot, I think, for that study. Does that make sense? Okay. All right. I think we've run out of time to have any questions, but I'll stick around if you guys want to talk. I know there's. I think the final closing session here soon. You can say hi to Hannah on the way out and get whatever information you want. So thanks, guys. Appreciate. Sam. It.