When our faith gains traction in the real world, where people live and suffer, a variety of responses take place as people have those realities pointed out for them. Those responses vary from disgust to praise that such things would be mentioned. Attempting to live a life of faith without entertaining the harsh realities that exist outside the walls of our places of worship is an ineffectual faith. 

We are living in an absurd time in human history. Absurdity is being redefined as reality. I could create a long list of absurdities. Included in that list is the sad and sick reality that we are now being told there are 72 genders. As a nation, we are printing money without any backing of its value to keep our economy afloat. A growing group of nations, China and Russia included, are buying and storing tons of gold to back the creation of a new currency that will displace the American dollar as the dominant global petrol currency.  If you don’t consider these issues as important, I wish you well.

Another absurdity is our government wants us to believe we can get rid of fossil fuels and in the very near future simply switch to wind and solar to power our lives and the national power grid. That sounds good when sipping a latte during a bible study in a warm coffee shop heated by a gas furnace on a cold overcast winter day when the wind is not blowing. This is nonsense in the developing real world where they don’t have time to entertain such foolishness.

Attempting to accomplish the will of God on Earth without the reliability and power of the Spirit and remaining tethered to the truth of God’s Word is equally absurd. Without the Spirit and Word working together the grid of our faith will fail.

The wind of the Spirit and the unchanging eternal truth of God’s word has always been present and at work in the Church when God does something new and sustains that new thing for future generations. We can misinterpret a nice church campus and a crowd gathered on Sunday morning who continue to remain unruffled by the developing realities in the world as evidence we are on course with our mission. That is perhaps one of the greatest deceptions afoot in the Church in this generation. Taking the power of the Spirit and the truth of God’s Word into a suffering world is an act of worship.

As nations continue to descend into what is becoming a global crisis on many fronts, only the power of God’s Spirit and His Word working together will keep the lights of our faith on as our world continues to descend deeper into depravity, deception, and darkness.

“A time is coming, and even now has arrived when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers” (John 4: 23).