Continue. Keep moving forward. Keep doing the job you’ve been called to do, speaking the truth in love and righteousness for the good of your neighbor, to the glory of God.

It’s hard to avoid feeling discouraged these days. These feel like unprecedented times, and in many ways, they are. However, one thing is not unprecedented: sin. The fallen nature of man has always been here since Adam. It expresses itself one way and then another, depending on the fashions of the time. Even when it’s restrained for a time, it is always there, working in the background, waiting to break out into the open. So while it’s easy to let yourself feel lost and even helpless in the face of a rapidly changing culture, in a sense nothing has changed—not the root problem and not our commanded response. The problem continues to be sin as expressed according to the bad ideas of the time, and the response commanded of us continues to be to “destroy speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5) in a way that accords with the constraints of righteousness.

I was reminded of this again as I read Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, a book explaining the intellectual roots behind the cultural issues we now find ourselves facing (see a short summary and review here).

Read More