A quick scan through the major headlines these days is overwhelming. The Ebola outbreak is spreading faster than efforts to contain it. War is ongoing in the Middle East and is rising in the Ukraine. Freedom of religion in the United States is under attack from seemingly all sides.
My tendency is to respond to the headlines by just not reading the headlines anymore. Out of sight, out of mind, just let me live in my little world here in Northeast Alabama.
But as those who understand that our God is sovereign over this world, is moving history along according to His perfect will, and calls His people to pray for the coming of His Kingdom and shine as citizens of that Kingdom, we can’t close our eyes.
An extremely helpful tool that keeps me from closing my eyes to the world is “The Briefing”, Al Mohler’s “daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.” The Briefing is only 20 minutes long, and in it Mohler summarizes some of the most note-worthy headlines, and then explains how we can think about them as Christians.
At the end of today’s episode, Mohler summarized our responsibility:
“The list, indeed the stack, of issues to be discussed appears to be almost insurmountable and still growing. Indeed, that appears to be an almost permanent condition. Christians in this generation are being called to think through so many issues, so quickly, simultaneously, and our responsibility is to think in Biblical terms, to think as thinking Christians, thinking Christianly and Biblically. We are called to bring every though captive to Christ, and that means in this world we have to be those who think through a Christian worldview, who consider these things as Christians based upon the totality of Christian truth, reasoning from Christian first principles in our consideration of these issues that are coming to us in almost “machine-gun” rapidity. It seems to be no exaggeration to believe that this generation of Christians faces a unique, if not unprecedented, responsibility to confront so many of these issues simultaneously, and more importantly, faithfully. We’ll try to think through these issues faithfully together.”
You can download the Briefing podcast on iTunes. I hope it can be as helpful to you as it has been to me the past two years.