Where do you fit in a post-Christian culture?

Do you realize how important your piece is?

Anyone out there like to build jigsaw puzzles?  Call me old fashioned, but something about completing a hard-to-build puzzle is incredibly rewarding and satisfying.  I know, I get it.  You’re saying that it’s 2021.  Didn’t the art of building puzzles vanish decades ago?  Well although we live in a digital world, it breathes fresh air into the lungs to step away from a screen and do something that dusts the cognitive cobwebs off the mind.  I like puzzles.  I tend to get a few of them out during the winter months to help with the confinement.  It takes me forever to finish one, but a little bit here, a little bit there, and my face dons a smile of accomplishment to see it develop and grow.

Especially now, during the stalling shutdowns that are still plaguing our social atmosphere, a good puzzle can seem like a good friend.  I typically like to have a puzzle out on the table around Christmas time.  It will heighten the mood and spirit of the season.  It’s a great key element to our holiday atmosphere.

Puzzles are more than a mental challenge.  I challenge you to set a one out.  You might be surprised at how your family gets involved.  

My grandmother always had a puzzle out at her house, and us grandkids would whittle away at it as we would sit and chat with others, waiting on something to eat.  Countless images were pieced together over the years as we would visit on Sundays.  For me, a puzzle brings the sense of nostalgia.  It brings my childhood back.  It’s just a thing.  Hey, pass me the French fries.  

In our house, puzzles are a common thing.  Our youngest loves to build puzzles with me.  I sit and watch as he demonstrates his skills.  No matter if it is a tractor or a fire engine puzzle, Michael is proud as a peacock to show off a finished product.

Every so often the other boys will help me with a puzzle.  This comes with a price though, as most often there are other agendas involved.  Like vultures encircling from high above, teenagers will wait until it nears completion’s end to make their move.  Justin will attempt to commandeer my mission, finish the puzzle right out from under me, and claim the title of puzzle champion.  The firstborn uses different tactics.  Bradley has hidden the last piece in secret on more than one occasion.  Unaware to anyone but himself, that piece is kept safe and sound.  When it is clear that the missing piece is needed, a wrestling match then occurs.  Yes, that last piece is worth gold.  I might have worked at getting the other 98% together, but their triumph depends on who places that last piece on the table.  

One piece can make all the difference.  

It makes me think of our place in society, how we fit into things, and what part we can play to make a difference.

With the current divide in our country, I’ve never seen a more fitting moment for this post to be published.  There are more opinions as to the direction our country should take now days as grains of dirt along the sidewalks we walk on.  There is dissention, discontentment, and discord.  Simply put, the United States no longer seems united.

I will admit, I’m not happy with the way our nation is doing things right now either.  But what can one person do?  Aren’t we all just a piece to the puzzle?

My wife and I had a breakfast conversation this past week.  At least in the United States, it is crazy how many life-changing events have occurred in such a short span of time, and at such rapid-fire pace.  If one watches the news, pays attention to social media, or brings up politics at the next family night for pizza, no doubt your ears will tingle at what is going on in our country today.

During breakfast, we sat and ate our egg and cheese burritos while we discussed how far things have gone morally/ethically since we were kids.  In such short time (though it seems long to others) we’ve seen things go from a predominantly faith-based world to a post-Christian society, and sadly, it happened right before our eyes.  Just since the new change of president (love him or hate him) the box has been opened for an even deeper exposure of hot topics into the light.

Scary that this is the world our children are living in right now.  So, I can't help but suggest the obvious: are we living in a post-Christian culture?

I don’t dabble much in politics.  To me, it’s a sticky mess of tar that people get caught in, and once stuck, lose sight of what they are really trying to achieve.  I’m not one who is going to waste my time trying to prove my opinion and show myself as being right.  I’m not interested in hearing that my opinion is wrong, either.  To me, proving the point doesn’t really matter; it is what it is.  Instead, I have a much more important objective: why not aim to bring as many people to Jesus as we can, and that, as fast as possible.

You see, to me. . . time is short, and the days are evil.  Does it really matter if my opinion on the political realm meets your approval or not?  Nope.  Does it matter if our differences as people is stacked up against each other?  Not really.  Is the fight more important than the outcome?  Is my energy worth spending in the battle to get you to see my point of view or vice versa?

Let’s face it.  Regardless of your opinion on climate change, women’s equality, abortion, the fairness of a recent election, foreign policy, or the country’s divide on race. . . (I could go on for days), what we really need to be focusing on is where we are going from here.  In the distraction of the moment the enemy has gotten our eyes off the war.  What is the greater good?  To only voice your opinion as criticism on politics is almost pointless now days; it is static white noise among the throngs of thousands.  Instead, I think I have a better option.

What if we spent our energy trying to lead people to Jesus, disciple them, and let God show us the moral/ethical/spiritual guidelines we need to follow?  What if instead of promoting our own agenda, we promoted him?  Can the church of 2021 aim for that simple solution?

This leads me to the point of my post today.

There has never been a greater time of need for that one, single puzzle piece.

Though we might already be too far gone to say we are still a Christian nation as a whole, aren’t you a Christian individual?  Aren’t you alive, breathing, an able minded person that can be used by the Lord?  You might feel that you are just one cog to the watch, one piece to the puzzle, one insignificant star in the sky.  But is that true?

We are living in an age (like it or not) that Covid is the governing force to most things.  Schools are hit or miss.  Jobs are touch and go.  Even churches are meeting at minimum capacities.  In a lost world that is desperately reaching for something to grab hold of during this time of moral decline, how is a partly filled church supposed to meet the world's out-of-control needs?  In all seriousness, how is a quarter capacity, or even half-capacity church going to combat the challenge at hand. . . and if it does. . . are we to judge its effectiveness?  Will we criticize it for trying?  Covid has changed almost everything we know about being an effective church.  The ways God used us back in the hay-day are not working now.  The ways we taught and discipled for decades has almost overnight become obsolete.  If the church itself doesn’t change the way that it does things, is it going to be effective at all?  Let me ask you this: just in light of what occurred this last year, would any of the old-school ways that you and I grew up being familiar with in the church work now?  It doesn’t for public schools and colleges.  It doesn’t for your career.  Why would we be so silly to think the church can stay the same?  

What is it going to take to be effective in this Covid era?

Simply put, the church needs to change with the changing times, meeting the needs of a changing people, and adapting to it.  That, in my opinion, is the way the church is still going to be effective.  Kudos to the church leadership, those men and woman who have seen that coming, and are doing a stellar job at engaging our culture for Christ in these crazy times.

And yet, I see something else developing.  It is beautiful.  It is breathtaking.

Could it be that God is taking his gracious hand of anointing, the same one that has rested on the church at large for centuries, and is giving a dose of it to individuals who refuse to settle for anything less than living their life to reach others for Christ? Could this be a point in history that individual puzzle pieces have extraordinary value?

Matthew 16:24-27 ESV

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.

I want to shout out to those who God has scattered across the globe that refuse to be silent.  I want to applaud those who have died to themselves and have taken up the cross of Christ, carrying it, regardless of anyone else’s opinion.  I want to take the moment and commend you, my fellow puzzle pieces, for doing your part in the grand scheme of things.  You have no idea how important you are.

At the risk of mentioning names without their permission, there are people who I believe God has systematically dotted across our landscape as remnants of Christ's name and candles of God's hope to the world.  These men and women are not the hope themselves, but hold it high for others to hear and see.  All you have to do is log on to Facebook or some other social media and you will quickly see that not all hope is lost.  There are people who are laying their lives down socially, committing what others may deem as social suicide, and are not in the least bit concerned about it.  There is a greater agenda than one’s own, and these people know it.

One such individual is Kirk Cameron.  Though I have not watched all his broadcasts or live viewings, I’ve seen enough to back him.  Say what you will, he is definitely living for Jesus.  Could he have had a bigger house, a bigger bank account, and a bigger following if he would have stayed in secular television?  Maybe.  But it’s clear that Kirk knows something better, something more important, something worth laying his pride down to achieve.

He knows he’s a puzzle piece, one of God’s last ones, and he’s doing his part to put things together for the Lord.

My call to action today is heavy, I know.  But when the moral and ethical decay comes crashing down around us, and we have no safe place for our children to live in, who will we point the finger at?  If we sit by and do nothing, who can we blame?  If we have no voice, no message of Christ to the world, our hands never get dirty from working, and the cross’s splinters never dig into our backs, then how on earth can we complain about the social state we are living in.

It’s time, not to promote an agenda, a political party, or an hidden motive.  It’s time to erase our names from the credits, put our efforts to what is really important, and let the light within us shine.

You are more valuable than you can possibly know.

Your piece to this puzzle, its gap, cannot be filled by anyone else.

Share the name and person of Jesus today.

It’s beyond worth it.

By Chuck Carr