- Feb 5, 2002
- 187,902
- 68,899
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Female
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
Our problems cannot be solved without Jesus Christ and a people willing to live prophetic lives of Christian counter-witness.
I want to make one very simple claim, so simple it can appear naïve and even childish: We cannot solve our problems without God. More specifically, we cannot solve them without Jesus Christ, God incarnate. Which is to say, we cannot solve them without Christians willing to live prophetic lives of counter-witness.
This was brought home to me while watching news coverage of our nation’s ongoing, fractious unraveling over the issue of immigration. I was reminded of John Lennon’s song Imagine — so popular, apparently, with people of a secular nature. It is, in my view, one of the worst songs ever written in terms of its message. The song’s lyrics call for us to imagine a world in which there is no heaven or religion or countries:
John Lennon could not have been more wrong. As we watch the carnage in our streets play out on our TV screens, we need to remind ourselves that this is what reality looks like when Lennon’s vision comes to fruition. It is precisely when we lose our sense of divine transcendence, when we cease to believe that there is a heaven above our sky and that there is a singular God — one who is love and who binds us all together into one human family — that violence becomes inevitable.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
I want to make one very simple claim, so simple it can appear naïve and even childish: We cannot solve our problems without God. More specifically, we cannot solve them without Jesus Christ, God incarnate. Which is to say, we cannot solve them without Christians willing to live prophetic lives of counter-witness.
This was brought home to me while watching news coverage of our nation’s ongoing, fractious unraveling over the issue of immigration. I was reminded of John Lennon’s song Imagine — so popular, apparently, with people of a secular nature. It is, in my view, one of the worst songs ever written in terms of its message. The song’s lyrics call for us to imagine a world in which there is no heaven or religion or countries:
The vision, therefore, is rather clear: Only a world in which there is no heaven or hell, no God, no religion, no countries, no possessions — and with our focus only on this world — can bring us peace. And that is because, allegedly, once those things are eliminated, there will be “nothing to kill or die for.”
John Lennon could not have been more wrong. As we watch the carnage in our streets play out on our TV screens, we need to remind ourselves that this is what reality looks like when Lennon’s vision comes to fruition. It is precisely when we lose our sense of divine transcendence, when we cease to believe that there is a heaven above our sky and that there is a singular God — one who is love and who binds us all together into one human family — that violence becomes inevitable.
Continued below.
Christ Offers More Than John Lennon Could Ever Imagine
COMMENTARY: Our problems cannot be solved without Jesus Christ and a people willing to live prophetic lives of Christian counter-witness.
