As I continue to prepare and think about what God is doing at Eternity, one of the things that has struck me lately is how fascinated we all tend to be with ourselves. We search endlessly the depths of our souls in an attempt to discover deep, hidden stones that once we turn them over, we believe we will find the long awaited answers that will solve all of our dilemmas, hurts, and problems.

And so, when I read this article today from David Wells (someone you may have never heard of but is absolutely brilliant), I thought it was an amazing article with tremendous insight. It’s not easy ready per se…but if you labor to grasp what he is saying, you’ll find it to be pretty spot on. Here’s the money paragraph that I think pretty well describes why we as Christians today and why our churches today are the way they are:

The habits and appetites modernity encourages are, today, simply at odds with those that biblical faith requires, and where that has not been recognized, a fateful series of substitutions takes place. Faith that has been infused by the spirit of modernity becomes focused on self rather than on God. It imagines that the world can be understood aright by gazing through the peephole of the self, so this kind of faith leans much on intuition and little on God’s revealed truth. It is guided more by circumstance than by conviction, and it is more pragmatic than principled. Christian faith, in consequence, is cast in therapeutic terms. Self-fascination replaces the older self-denial, the latter becoming a new obscenity and the former a new gospel. The search for wholeness then replaces that of holiness, feeling good that of being good. This, in turn, begins to obscure the difference between good and evil, or to make that difference one of small consequence, and perhaps out of this there develops an entirely new understanding of what good and evil really are. Good, in a secularized and affluent age, is to have, and to have is to be; evil, by the same token, is to be deprived, and to be without is to be lost. Salvation, therefore, is not salvation from the judgment of God but simply salvation from the judgment of modernity. To be saved is simply to have a personal sense of well-being, however that comes about. In short, those who wish to sup with modernity had better have a long spoon, because it has the power to wreck faith and to rob us of our ability to think of God’s world on God’s terms.

How do you think of God’s world? On your terms or on God’s terms as He has revealed to us in Scripture?