From the start, we discover that God carefully crafted and created out of Love. We are not an abstract surrealist painting splattered on a canvas.
We pointed you at verses in Genesis, Matthew, and John that establish the fact that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were there in the beginning. From the first chapter in Genesis, He begins answering four basic questions that confront all of us:
- Who am I?
- Where did I come from?
- Why am I here?
- Where am I going when I die?
At its root, WOKE will see the death of assumptions. Quite often, that is as hard to endure as the death of a friend or losing your job. Many of our initial churchy assumptions rose from centuries of thought that modern science suddenly seems to refute. That often makes us feel dumb as we struggle with answers. George Barna wrote in his insightful study of Millennials that over 50% of them left church because no one had any answers.[1]
Lets pause on this a moment. Strauss and Howe define the Millennial Generation as those born from 1982 to 2004.[2] Today in 2020, that means Millenials are between 16 and 38. They straddle that boundary between young adult and midlife. In other words, Millenials are saying Christians have no answers as churches for the past 20 years dismissed traditional Sunday School to the garbage bin. Another way to state this is that across the birth years of the Millenial generation, the body of Christ lost its ability to teach the next generation. We abdicated our responsibility to teach the younger generation! Instead, we trundle off to an hour of Bible Teaching (maybe) at a local church and call it a day. Jan and I homeschooled out children but still could have done a better job.
Yet, discipling Millenials and their kids are critical as all of us come face to face with the new discoveries in Archaeology and Biology that seem to turn our churchy assumptions on their heads. No matter what stories and theologies we encounter, from UFOs and aliens to Buddha and Mohammed, the Scarlet Thread from Genesis to Revelation is truly unique. It begins with God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and ends with Jesus walking with us among the lampstands of the Seven Churches in Revelation. In this life, you and I walk between that beginning and end, sometimes feeling, like Peter Pan, that we are somewhere between sleep and awake. If you think about it, there is no stranger, no harder, no more magnificent story than the love story of God creating us and the earth, becoming man, rising from the dead, and promising to return for his bride. That story begins in Genesis. It’s worth asking what the Creator of the Universe must do to convince you he loves you.
[1] https://www.truthpr.com/american-culture-faith-george-barna-survey-how-the-core-beliefs-and-behaviors-of-millennials-compare-to-those-of-other-adults/
[2] Strauss & Howe, Generations.