Finding Good

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Blog

John Schroeder

Dec 10, 2023 

Yesterday I mentioned that, following cultural trends, the church seems to have done away with the concepts of sin and salvation and substituted concepts of personal fulfillment, but that in doing so it has made fulfillment impossible since the effort has eliminated the measuring stick.  We have become a church in search of comfort instead of righteousness.

(Snip)

Christianity in the United States has, in an effort to achieve “relevancy,” largely abandoned concepts of good and bad and substituted instead things like “wholeness.”  Now, in a sense that’s not wrong.  The end state of Christianity is, in fact “fulfillment,” “wholeness,” “contentment,” whatever such word you prefer.  The issue is not that – the issue is how to get there.  Those things are not achieved by the denial of our sinful state, but in the confession of it, the forgiveness of Christ, and our continual efforts, with God’s help, to overcome it.  We have used the good of the end state as a disguise for the evil of avoiding the effort to get there.  Using the end state as a disguise makes the end state impossible to achieve.  Screwtape would be proud.

It is Advent.  The Christian calendar begins afresh.  It begins with the miracle of the Incarnation, the infinite wrapping itself in the finite.  The magnitude of this miracle alone should be enough to drive us to our knees in confession – not of how unhappy we are, but of how we stand in the way of our own happiness.

_________________________________________________

Scewtape Letters Playlist