“Men have forgotten God.”

That is the reason given by author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after fifty years of studying and writing about the history of the Russian Revolution, that led to the death of over 60 million people. In fact, he continued…

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

If that analysis were extended to today, to include the cultural chaos that emerged in the years after the Cold War into the first decades of the twenty-first century, it would be, “And, forgetting God, they abandoned truth.”

The abandonment of truth took the form of increasingly bizarre demands, especially within academia, government, and media, to accommodate what were obvious lies, myths, and falsehoods. According to Romans 1, the primary consequence of rejecting the Creator is to believe lies about reality, morality, and the human person. In our day, these lies are often sold with demands of “inclusion and equity” and with the promise of being free from traditional moral constraints and even the restrictions imposed by reality itself. These promises were as false as the lies. Instead of freedom, we’ve built a world with epidemic levels of unhappiness and isolation, not to mention the increased use of power and manipulation to enforce ideas that were obviously not true.

Men have forgotten God and thus abandoned the notion of truth. This is the basic description of what Os Guinness has called “our civilizational moment,” a pivotal time in the history of the West. A fascinating development in recent years has been watching as former skeptics of truth and God rethink the significance of both. Some who, just decades ago, proclaimed God a delusion and religion a poison talk about what we’ve lost in abandoning each. Of course, there are others who have doubled down on deception.

However, how God calls His people to engage this moment is no different than how He has called Christians at every other moment. We are called to bow our hearts and our knee to Jesus Christ, the Source of all Truth and the Embodiment of God’s love for the world. Christians are to be truth tellers, and to tell the truth in the way God has told us.

At the very least, we must not only know what is true, we must have confidence in what is true. Otherwise, we will respond to the deceptions and the deceivers of our time and place with either silence or anger. Silence is never appropriate. Anger is occasionally called for, but never in place of loving those who are the victims of lies. Love should never be confused with niceness. It is never loving to be co-opted into lies.

What it means to live out this essential calling that all Christians must be truth tellers in this critical moment, is the focus of the upcoming Great Lakes Symposium, Thursday July 24. Joining me for “Truth, Love, and Humor: Faith Without Fear” will be Jim Daly of Focus on the Family to talk about “Truth and Love without Compromise,” and Seth Dillon, president and CEO of the Babylon Bee.

Not only is the Babylon Bee everyone’s favorite “Fake News Site,” they’ve mastered the art of using humor to tell the truth. In fact, they were kicked off Twitter for it. That story has it all: Where does humor and satire fit within a Christian worldview? What truths are essential to tell in this cultural moment? What are the costs that might come for telling the truth? And what does it mean to commit to truth and leave the results up to God?

“Truth, Love, and Humor: Faith Without Fear” is absolutely free, but you must register. If you live near Bay Harbor, Michigan, please join us in person at the Great Lakes Center for the Arts at 7 p.m. Eastern time on July 24. Otherwise, join us for the live stream. Register at GreatLakesSymposium.org.

The promises of freedom by abandoning truth have failed us. Jesus’ promise of freedom is sure and confident, and it comes through knowing the truth. In other words, by calling people to the truth, Christians offer freedom. This is our calling, especially in this civilizational moment.

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