Our world seems to be getting darker by the minute. At the time this article is being written, there have been 496 shootings, and 19,375 overall violent crimes this year in the city of Chicago alone. These are simply staggering numbers. According to the Chicago Police crime statistics website, the violent crime rate in the city is up 45 percent from last year, and 95 percent from the year before.

I was, for a short time during college, a volunteer fireman, and my responsibility was to operate the equipment while more experienced firemen entered the burning building.  Following a fire at one house, another student who had gone inside told me how he stood in the smoke-filled kitchen spraying water at the flames to no avail.  It wasn’t until he realized that he was facing a mirrored wall and that the flames were actually behind him that he turned and was able to extinguish the fire.  As long as he was sending water in the wrong direction the fire continued unabated.

America’s children are being targeted by sex predators. Their recruiters are already in our schools and libraries. These “transgender” people need your children as converts. Consider: Children returning from school carrying "gender unicorn lessons," which teach strange ideas of sex and gender; Public libraries are conditioning your children through “drag queen readings" to get children familiar with these recruiters; Schools are hiding from parents that they're giving puberty blocking drugs to their children.

As a pastor, I feel like every sermon could be turned into two calls to action – make sure you are reading your Bibles and keep praying. These acts of faith in no way help us earn or deserve our salvation, which is all of God’s free grace. However, it is easy to be slack in these two aspects of the Christian life.

For the last century, the United States of America has engaged in a great secular experiment: what if we pretended that God was irrelevant? What if we pretended that we could make laws that ignored God? Could the ‘public square’ be a place of free, rational discourse—free from claims about the implications of Christian theism on public life? This pretended neutrality has served to reveal one thing: that the line between secularism and paganism is dangerously thin.

I've often heard the term "worldview" compared to a pair of glasses—your worldview is the lens that sits right in front of your spiritual eyes and affects the way you see everything. If your glasses are scratched, the whole world will look scratched. If your glasses are smudged, the whole world will look smudged. And if your glasses are pink-tinted, the whole world will look pink. And so, the best way to deal with someone who insists the world is pink is not to endlessly debate back and forth about any particular object whose color you disagree about, but rather to change out their glasses for a pair that lets them see the world as it really is.

Any time we stand next to the casket of a loved one we may find ourselves asking why death exists in the first place. Even those of us who know that God is love and reigns supreme see death as a very dark experience. Could He not have devised an easier way for us to depart this life into eternity? Must there be such suffering and fear? I am quite sure that God, in His sovereignty, could have done things differently, but in wisdom He chose not to. Even the joyful celebration of Christ’s resurrection at Easter time does not erase the darkness that was Christ’s necessary crucifixion.

"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed." ~1 Peter 2:24

So the grandest of all Christian celebrations is upon us. This year, Friday April 7th is Good Friday. Sunday April 9th is Easter. Or Resurrection Day as some prefer to call it. The two dates vary from year to year. Why? It’s, well, complicated. Why do these two occasions give us the grandest of our faith celebrations as Christ followers? Because we get to color Easter eggs? Uh…wrong answer.

In Proverbs 8:36, Lady Wisdom declares that “All who hate me love death.” Those who scorn wisdom, who are wise in their own eyes, are not merely prideful, they have a death wish. Wisdom comes to us in many forms. Principally through God’s Word and his Church, but also through the traditions of our family, culture, and nation (Prov. 6:20, 22:28). When a nation rejects these forms of wisdom, it will be a nation soaked with blood.

It is a biblical principle that everything reproduces after its own kind. This is true in the physical world, going back to the first chapter of Genesis and right until today. Orange trees reproduce oranges (and orange trees), not apples (and apple trees), and dogs reproduce dogs, not cats. The same is true in the spiritual realm. 

Why has our culture gotten so bad, so fast? This question has been posed by many of us in recent days: young adults looking at the world we’re about to step into and wondering how we’ll manage, grandparents trying to figure out why their sweet granddaughter wants to be called Bert, parents watching the government school system trash their child’s faith, and pastors, trying to lead their flock away from glittering worldly baubles.

My mentor, when I became the leader of a pro-life organization, told me that it was not enough to inform Christians regarding the issues at stake in the abortion battle; I had to give them something to do or they would become frustrated and inactive. As I have listened to conservatives address the multiple threats the Left poses to America and our liberties, I find myself frustrated by the lack of options they present.

There are a lot of people proclaiming public schools as harmful - bastions of evil, intent on ruining innocent minds and brainwashing hearts. Some of it can seem like just plain noise, but how much of it is true? What is truly going on in public schools? Is there actually anything going on, or are people just crying wolf? During the Village Church of Barrington’s seminar “Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,” church elder David Cartwright answers this question by tracing the history of public schools.