“We don’t make our identity, but we receive it from the cultural queues around us”
-Victor Maynard
It's time for a short break. Over the summer I'll be producing less content so I can spend time on the lake and relaxing. I plan to continue learning and writing but taking a break from the weekly posting deadlines. If you are finding encouragement and growth as you read or listen I'd love to hear about it...
Hear we go on todays post...
In 2017, Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, did a Ted talk in the city of New York about the dominance of the major technology and media companies on culture... The talk, which was titled “How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google manipulate our emotions” exposed how large media companies are placed on a pedestal while they engineer their sites to be more addictive through emotional manipulation to produce maximum profits.
Make no mistake… these companies are not influencing us to love our neighbor’s, feed the poor, help the disadvantaged or practice holiness… the algorithms are designed to place emphasis on whatever cultural identity produces more profits for their shareholders or advertisers… we are merely pawns and paupers being manipulated to achieve their higher profits. The identity they imprint… or perhaps better said “inspire” within us is heavily leveraged to their own benefits.
Unfortunately, many Churches over millennia have chosen to utilize the same gaslighting techniques used by these multinational organizations… and the result is that many Church kids come out of childhood seeing no difference between corporate and religious gaslighting, and to be clear... there is no difference from God's perspective.
There is of course nothing new under the sun… there has always been outside forces trying to imprint their will on us… those times where the Church exploded in growth and positively influenced the culture were always started with the spark of genuine repentance and confession… but I’m getting ahead of myself…
Let’s be honest that the fruit from religious gaslighting speaks for its self… that version of evangelism produces pharisaical believers steeped in dogma and pride and apostates - not devoted followers of Christ.
Jesus recognized this as evidenced by His words recorded by Matthew in the twenty third chapter…
“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”
We have this picture of Christ that we have made… an image so to speak. The religious leaders of that time, who were steeped in dead works and dogma hated the fact they could not control those who Jesus teaching and life impacted… Jesus would not have it!
Jesus stood apart from that false religious piety and asked those who followed Him to come and find their true identity in Him. This drove those who tried to control the message and the will of the people nuts…
they needed to define people’s identities…
Jesus however seeks to reveal who we are created to be…
Jesus wants us to know the truth about ourselves.
The religious and the powerful want to hide the truth of who we are so we continue to remain bound… so we can serve their narcissistic desires.
John quotes Jesus saying:
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people.”
The Greek word life in the quote above, recorded by the apostle John means “Zoe”…
Zoe… means… “Life both physical and spiritual, throughout the universe, derived only from and is sustained by God's self-existent life. The Lord intimately shares His gift of life with people, creating each in His image which gives all the capacity to know His eternal life.”
When we find Identity in Christ it FREES us from dead works, from hopelessness, from the constant need for approval. Our hearts and minds become renewed through relationship and we can resist the injected viral desires that those who try to control us want us to believe is natural…
The choice continues to be ours…
Let’s boil this down right to the bones…
One voice calls you to show you the beauty of who He made you to be… set apart, royalty, a child of the King… while the other voice says to you that you should look within yourself… a self that has been conditioned and manipulated by constant media, television shows, news reports and centrally controlled educational institutions heavily influenced by special interests.
To simplify that... Christ calls us to look to Himself as our creator... where culture directs us to look inward to ourselves.
Do we choose the identity that shows us who we really are… to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes?
Alternatively... do we choose to align our identity with the conditioning we have received from a corrupted world?
Imagine what would happen this Sunday if every Church, every college campus had a mass group of young adults who came forward and knelt before altars confessing and laying it all before God… Asbury is a revival only because of the spark of confession and repentance… it does not require us to go there to get it… it is here… it is now. Christ wants us to see us as who he created us to be but BEFORE he can do that we need to realize that we have been infected. Our souls hard drive is corrupted by a virus…
Acknowledging the virus is there is confession, submitting it to Christ and reformatting it… that is called repentance… and when mere men do that enmasse it is called revival…
The choice is ours…
I’m choosing to align with Christ… and I hope you will to!
Let’s Be the change!
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