Sermon Illustrations on Human Nature — page 2

God's Snapshot

Romans 3:23

In the days when there were few cameras and few photographs, and when it was an event in one’s life to have one’s photo taken, an evangelist with a party of friends was enjoying a pleasant Saturday afternoon in Glasgow, Scotland, on a lovely summer day. He carried with him a little leather case containing his Bible and, as he walked along, a company of young people out for an afternoon’s enjoyment approached him and said, “Please will you take our photograph,” thinking that the little leather case contained a vest-pocket Kodak.

Without a moment’s hesitation the evangelist said, “Oh, I have it already.” The spokesman of the party asked in surprise, “When did you take it? You must have taken our picture when we weren’t looking.”

“Well, anyway I have it here, and here it is,” said the preacher as he pulled out his well-worn Bible and said, “This is God’s photograph of every one of us,” as he read Romans 3:23 - “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

New Reality: the Bentness of Human Nature

Romans 7

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram devised a now-infamous series of experiments. The goal was to understand why seemingly ordinary men carried out the demonic orders of the Third Reich.

In Milgram’s experiments, a volunteer was told to administer electric shocks to another “volunteer” when he answered a question incorrectly. The victim was an actor — there was no electricity. But with each failure, a more powerful electric shock was ordered.

When volunteers hesitated, an authority figure prodded them, starting with “please continue” and escalating to “you have no other choice, you must go on.”

These words were enough for two-thirds of the volunteers to administer what they believed was a fatal shock.

When Milgram published the results, the response was outrage, both over the implications of the experiment and Milgram’s methods.

Given the notoriety of the Milgram experiments, you’d expect that, if they were repeated today, the results would be different.

Well, you would be wrong. French documentary film makers recreated the Milgram experiment with some exceptions — the subjects thought they were taking part in a reality-television show called The Game of Death; they had an audience; and unlike Milgram’s subjects, they could actually see their victim.

The subjects were told to shock a man in an electric chair if he made a mistake. And now, as then, they complied! Eighty percent of the subjects administered the shocks, being egged on by the audience, who also thought it was for real. The screaming and begging for mercy didn’t stop them. When the man in the electric chair keeled over seemingly dead, the hostess yelled, “You’ve won!”

When the documentary recently aired on French television, the nation was aghast. Sociologist Jean Claude Kaufman noted that whereas Milgram only had “authority,” the French experiment had both an authority figure and television’s “manipulative power.”

While there’s no doubt that television, especially reality television, can make you stupid, there’s more at work here than psychology. What Milgram uncovered was something about what C.S. Lewis nicely called the “bentness” of human nature.

When a subject in the French documentary says that he “wanted to stop the whole time, but [he] just couldn’t,” he’s echoing what St. Paul wrote in Romans 7: “For what I do is not the good I want to do,” but “the evil I do not want to do.”

British documentarians also recreated the Milgram experiment on television in England.

What’s at work here is our fallen nature. Circumstances can push it in one direction or another. In this case, the willingness to inflict pain or suffering on others comes from inside us.

The answer to this bentness isn’t education or “awareness.” If it were, the French and British wouldn’t have been able to reproduce Milgram’s results.

The answer lies in what God, in the person of His Son, did on Good Friday and Easter, which we observe next week. He put the old nature to death on the cross and a new man, the first fruits of a new creation, rose to life.

While avoiding reality TV is a good start, it’s that new life in Christ that keeps the worst bits of our history from repeating themselves.

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Curing the Human Condition

Albert Einstein, a man who was often ambiguous about his religious views, once admitted that he rejected the God of his Jewish heritage for that of Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher.

For Spinoza, “God” was not a supernatural Being but an omnipresent principle of cosmic order and harmony. His universe was one of matter and motion in which every outcome was pre-determined according to that primal physical essence. It was a thoroughly naturalistic worldview, leaving no room for free will.

Enamored of the ideas of Spinoza, Einstein rejected the notion of free will in favor of the belief that everything obeys the deterministic laws of nature. For folks who similarly take naturalism seriously, a human being is not an autonomous agent acting upon nature, but a biochemical machine ruled by Nature.

The machine view

With Nature as master, human thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors follow predictable patterns amenable to scientific investigation and intervention. Richard Dawkins has gone as far as to claim that we are genetic robots mechanically responding to the “desires” of selfish genes. Such thinking motivates the ongoing efforts to discover the bio-physical “causes” for sexual preferences, religious beliefs, anti-social behaviors, and mental illness.

For example, education advocate Stacey DeWitt credits Darwinian processes for child bullying, as does psychologist David Buss for adultery. Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, attributes “faulty circuits” in the brain for depression and various mood disorders.

Insel muses that treating mental illness may be “akin to ‘rebooting’ a computer that has become frozen.” His expectation is that our “science-based understanding of mental illness very likely will revolutionize prevention and treatment.”

In the “machine view” of human nature, improving the human condition is a matter of treating defective parts, scientifically and impersonally.

Contrarians

Against that view are a couple of Duke University neuroscientists. In October, Drs. Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi received an award (and will receive another one in December) for their research on the influences of genes and environment on human behavior. The summary of their key finding, according to Dr. Moffitt, is “you can’t choose your genes, but you face many choices in life which can determine how those genes will play out.” (Emphasis added.)

The late Bill Wilson would agree.

Wilson was a hardened atheist and struggling alcoholic who was frequently hospitalized for his addiction. It was during his fourth hospital stay that Wilson, at the end of himself, raised his voice in desperation: “If there be a God, let him show himself!”

Wilson would later say of the experience: “Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light ... I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison.”

The following day, friend and recovering alcoholic Ebby Thatcher convinced Wilson that surrendering to God was the only thing that could emancipate him from the grip of the bottle. That became the vision for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the organization Bill Wilson founded over 75 years ago.

Success secrets

At the core of AA’s method is its “12 Step” program. Of the program, addiction specialist Drew Pinsky states, “In my 20 years of treating addicts, I’ve never seen anything else that comes close to the 12 steps,” adding, “In my world, if someone says they don’t want to do the 12 steps, I know they aren’t going to get better.”

While the 12-step program has been credited by millions of addicts for saving their lives, its effectiveness is a mystery to many observers. It could be so effective because it goes against the grain of our “science-based understanding.”

Against the notion that “Nature is all there is,” the 12 steps acknowledge a higher Power, God. Against the culture of self-esteem and personal power, the 12 steps call for surrender to God, seeking change through submission and prayer. Against the view of man as a slavish genetic machine, the 12 steps require acknowledging and confessing moral failures and making amends to those hurt by poor moral choices. Against radical individualism, the 12 steps call for involvement in a community of trust, accountability, and mentoring.

Another organization has remarkably similar features: surrendering to God, confessing our sins, reconciling with our neighbor, growing in maturity through the spiritual disciplines, and fellowship in the community of faith. And, like AA, many of its members credit those “steps” with their salvation not only in the here-and-now, but in the yet-to-come.

And yet

Despite AA’s unparalleled effectiveness, many (even most!) alcoholics who enroll in the program fail to overcome their addiction. The same is true of that other organization, the Church.

For well over a decade, pollsters have observed that membership in church is not statistically correlated with behavior outside of church. For some time it has been known that divorce is no respecter of faith professions; but more recently it has been found that incidences of other untoward behaviors like substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, gossiping, and lying are the same for believers and non-believers alike.

It is a sobering reminder that ever since Jesus called Andrew and Simon to become fishers of men, many of the “called” have failed, and failed miserably, in their calling.

During Jesus’s earthly ministry, James and John were given to pride and self-promotion, Thomas to doubt, Judas to theft and betrayal, and all of the Twelve to fear and lack of faith — Peter to the point of denying his Lord thrice. Then there were the “many of his disciples” who turned away after Jesus’s hard teaching on the Eucharist. All this by individuals who walked with Jesus and witnessed his divine powers!

Considering that nearly all of Paul’s letters contain pastoral teachings against carnal practices that threatened the unity and witness of the church, it is no mystery that people in every organization struggle mightily against the pull of the flesh only to succumb to its gravitational force. It is a sign that human nature is far more complex than the scientific view would have us believe.

Not a machine

Rather than a cog in the cosmic mechanism, man is a free moral agent whose behaviors are intrinsically resistant to scientific analysis. Contrary to Spinoza, free will is a wild card that can trump the demands of our chemicals and genes.

Through the power of will a person can overcome the power of Nature to complete a 40-day fast, live in lifelong monogamy or celibacy, sacrifice his life for another, endure persecution, or submit to martyrdom.

For that reason, curing the human condition is a matter of conditioning the will, not re-engineering the genome. As the apostle Paul reveals, it is a life-long process of transformation that begins by “renewing our minds,” as opposed to re-wiring the brain.

Ahead of his time

Paul was twenty centuries ahead of the modern psychological insight that thoughts influence actions which lead to behaviors and habits that shape character. Therefore, he counseled believers to direct their thoughts to “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable ... excellent or praiseworthy,” and to put into practice what they had been taught.

But Paul knew that character formation required more than information; it required preparation, girding oneself with the spiritual weapons of truth, faith, righteousness, salvation, and the gospel, and engaging in the spiritual discipline of prayer.

He also knew that character is tested in private, when no one is watching, but it is forged in community. Accordingly, he encouraged believers to see themselves as vital parts in an organic whole, united under the Headship of Jesus Christ.

Likewise, the author of Hebrews urged his readers: “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

Channeling our thoughts, applying our faith, practicing spiritual disciplines, and participating in a community of mutual support and encouragement involve moment-to-moment decisions that defy methodological explanation and control. They are the actions of free-willed individuals pursuing a character-shaping process that will remain unfinished this side of heaven.

Along the way, many will fail, and fail miserably, as did the early disciples. Yet despite their failures, they have confidence that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”; a confidence that seems to have eluded a 17th century philosopher and his 20th century disciple.

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Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a BreakPoint Centurion.

Of Mice and Men - and the Abolition of Both

A new medical discovery might pose ethical challenges we’ve never faced before.

Almost one year ago, molecular biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi at Kyoto University did something that may forever change the way we think about human life. But at the time, he had little idea just how significant his discovery was.

Publishing his results in the academic journal, “Science,” Hayashi says he assumed they would be of interest mainly to his fellow biologists. So imagine his surprise when he began receiving emails from infertile women, all very interested in his work. One woman in England offered to fly to his laboratory in Japan, hoping he could help her conceive a child. “That is my only wish,” she pleaded. Hayashi was also contacted by the editor of a gay and lesbian magazine looking for details.

So what did he discover, exactly? The journal “Nature,” picking up the story this summer, reports that Hayashi used the skin cells of a mouse to create “primordial germ cells,” or “PGCs.” For those of us non-biologists, that may not mean much — until we read that he went on to mature these cells into eggs, fertilize them and implant them into a female mouse, which then gave birth to live young. Let me run that by you again: this researcher made a mouse a mommy — using nothing but its skin.

Hayashi then went on to create sperm in the same way, and successfully birthed more mouse pups, these being the descendants of their father’s skin.

According to “Nature,” if these processes could be replicated in humans, infertile individuals could become parents. But, wait, there’s more! This technology would allow anyone to produce either male or female sex cells, meaning (theoretically) that women could become biological fathers, and men biological mothers. Thus the interest in the LGBT community.

“What’s the big deal?” somebody might say. “If people — especially infertile couples — want kids, what’s wrong with Hayashi’s research making it possible for them?”

Well, we might reply that it’s not natural to manufacture a child from skin. But then again, neither is installing metal joints or doing a blood transfusion — but we do these things routinely. Isn’t medical science all about cheating nature’s grim prognoses and making the impossible possible? Why should this be forbidden?

Well, I think C. S. Lewis would have responded with another question: “Is there anything that should be forbidden?” That’s precisely the challenge he issued in his famous essay, “The Abolition of Man,” and to which academics of his day had no answer.

As part of mankind’s conquest of nature, Lewis argued, we’ve conquered our own belief in moral absolutes. After all, the materialist would say, such beliefs are also part of nature. They’ve evolved to help us survive. But now that they’ve outlived their usefulness, we’re free to rise above them. The problem, as Lewis pointed out, is that we have no higher level to which we can rise. When we give up saying, “I ought,” the only thing we can still say is, “I want.”

“Man’s conquest of Nature,” Lewis writes, “turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”

What ultimately sets us apart from the rodents in Hayashi’s laboratory is not our technology or power to cheat nature. It’s our ability to say “no” to things we want to do, but maybe shouldn’t do. It’s the intuition that the way our parents brought us into this world is good. It’s the love that values children for their own sake and not because they fulfill our dreams and wishes.

Which is why, in our rush to bypass making babies the truly human way, we’ll likely miss how much we’ve begun to look like the laboratory animals.

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The Glitch In Our Moral Software

Job 25:4

Black Friday came a little early this year in Louisiana, with shoppers emptying store shelves. But why it happened says a lot about who we are as humans.

On October 13, 2013, Wal-Mart shelves in Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, were stripped bare as hundreds of shoppers descended on the stores. The occasion for the unseemly behavior wasn’t a Black Friday sale but, instead, a computer glitch.

The glitch was in the software that administers food stamps. Food stamp recipients receive electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, cards that function in much the same way as your debit card.

And like your debit card, there’s a balance, and if you try to spend more than the balance, the transaction won’t be approved. However, on that Saturday night, the EBT cards weren’t showing a balance. Wal-Mart decided to allow purchases on the cards, anyway.

Word spread about the loophole in the system, and the result was a run on the stores. The Springhill chief of police said that the resulting crowd was worse than any “Black Friday” he’d ever seen.

A woman whose actual balance was forty-nine cents put $700 worth of food in her carts. Unfortunately for her, by the time she tried to check out the system was working again.

Reactions to what happened differed among those who didn’t participate in the free-for-all. One shopper thought the response to the glitch was just “human nature.” Other shoppers weren’t so forgiving: They told a local television station that what happened was “plain theft.”

And of course, both are right. For people who knew or should have known how much was remaining on their cards, sweeping store shelves clean is theft. And it’s also human nature, the result of what we Christians like to call “the Fall.”

And by “human,” I don’t mean only the kind of people stereotypically associated with the food stamp program. In Plato’s “Republic,” Plato recounts the legend of the Ring of Gyges, which enables its wearer to become invisible and, thus, to do whatever he desires without fear of being caught.

According to Plato, people who do the right thing when no one can see them are truly happy; while those who take advantage of the invisibility the ring provides are slaves to their appetites.

If Plato was correct, then slaves come in all shapes, sizes, and income brackets. Five years ago, the global economy was nearly destroyed by people in expensive suits who believed they had discovered the financial and legal equivalent of the Ring of Gyges.

They peddled derivatives and mortgages they knew were garbage. Yet no one was saying “no!” so they went ahead.

Like those Wal-Mart shoppers, they took advantage of a glitch in the system. As Bob Dylan once sang, “Steal a little, and they put you in jail. Steal a lot, and they make you king.”

What happened at the Wal-Marts in Louisiana that Saturday night was fallen human nature on display. And what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the financial crisis was also fallen human nature on display. The result in both cases, albeit on vastly different scales, was chaos.

How right Chuck Colson was to say that the virtues are laws for healthy souls. And healthy souls are a prerequisite for a healthy civilization.

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They Might Have Been Buddies

Amos 5:14

Many of you have seen the 1993 movie “Schindler’s List” which was based on the book by Thomas Keneally. It tells the story of how German industrialist Oskar Schindler rescued hundreds of Jews from extermination by recruiting them out of the concentration camp to work in his factories.

The movie focuses in part on the relationship between Schindler and the Nazi camp commander, Amon Goeth. It contrasts the industrialist's efforts to save Jews and the commandant’s treatment of the prisoners. In the film Goeth is the personification of evil. He allowed horrendous treatment of inmates and perpetrated some of the cruelty himself.

Some years after the film came out Keneally was interviewed by Michael Shermer, a journalist who was writing a magazine article. He asked what Keneally he thought was the difference between Schindler and Goeth. Surprisingly he answered, “Not much. Had there been no war, Mr. Schindler and Mr. Goeth might have been drinking buddies and business partners, morally obtuse, perhaps, but relatively harmless. What a difference a war makes, especially to the moral choices that lead to good and evil.”

Shermer went on in his article to quote Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

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Michael Shermer, “Something Evil Comes This Way,” www.skeptic.com, 3-18-04

No Lord of the Flies Scenario With These Christian Boys

In 1965, a group of “bored witless” Catholic boarding school boys on the South Pacific island of Tonga, ages 13 to 16, decided to “borrow” a boat and escape to Fiji, which was 500 miles away, and maybe even to New Zealand.

As any parent of any teenage boy will tell you, their plans aren’t always fully thought-through. Such was the case with these boys. They set sail without a map or a compass. Caught in a storm, they drifted at sea for eight days before landing on an uninhabited island where they stayed, lost and thought dead, for fifteen months, before they were found.

The story may remind you of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of stranded boys quickly descend into debauchery and violence. But in this case, life did not imitate art. As Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recounted in an article in the Guardian last week, the Tongan boys turned the uninhabitable island into a functioning and decent community, complete with food production, workout facilities, a permanent fire, and religious services–all of which was constructed using, as he put it, “an old knife blade and much determination.”

Even more impressive than the physical infrastructure was the social stability. As Bregman put it, “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty.” Whenever there were disagreements and quarrels, instead of dropping a rock on “Piggy” (as they did in the novel), these boys imposed “a time-out” policy to let tempers cool.

How did these boys so thoroughly confound expectations? In the article, Bregman seems to suggest that fruitful cooperation comes naturally to most people. Instead of Golding’s dark assumptions about human nature in Lord of the Flies, we should instead “always look for what is good and positive in people,” and then expect to find it.

Unfortunately, Bregman’s interpretation of these events has two big problems. First, he assumes these boys from Tonga are the rule and not the exception, which is a stretch, given the sheer number of counterexamples from the daily news. Second, though Bregman did note that the boys “began and ended (each day) with song and prayer” and attended a “strict Catholic school,” he seems to miss the obvious connection between their formation and their behavior. Instead, he adopts a form of the “noble savage” thesis, as if how these boys behaved resulted from their inherent nature, not their schooling.

Of course, private religious education is certainly no guarantee against a Lord of the Flies descent to debauchery. As product of such an institution myself, I doubt the ending would have been nearly as happy if I were among their lot. And, to quote the greatest boys movie ever (“The Sandlot”), these boys got themselves in this “pickle” by stealing a boat. Still, not only did they survive, they nobly found ways to live together.

Did all that come from inside? Or was it put there?

I’m convinced that the best opening line in history is by C. S. Lewis’s in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” In selfish, snotty-nosed Eustace, Lewis personified how malforming and narcissistic, in both habit and pedagogy, education can be, especially when it encourages students to “look inside,” “express themselves,” and “be whoever they want to be.” He fully articulated his complaints about modern education in the essay, “The Abolition of Man,” which might have the best closing line in history: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Does anyone actually think that a bunch of Eustaces, lost on an island without any laws or food or authority figures, could yield such impressive results?

Underneath the story of these real-life boys from Tonga is the fact that they were formed, at their boarding school and likely elsewhere too, by a Christian faith and worldview. As scholar and author Anthony Esolen wrote on Facebook in response to this story, “religious faith is the strongest bond for any human society, especially when times are tough. Both of these truths are eminently borne out by all that we know about human cultures . . .”

What’s more, religious faith socializes young men. As Ravi Zacharias has often noted, if you found yourself in a dark alley late at night, with a group of rough-looking, burly young men walking swiftly toward you, would you feel better knowing they were coming from a Bible study?

The Catholic schoolboys from Tonga weren’t angels, but their religious background had shaped them in profound ways. They found ways to cooperate when times were tough because they were given resources to recognize and govern their own fallen natures. Without these resources, humans quickly devolve into our own devices. It’s either Eustace or Lord of the Flies. To miss this connection between faith and virtue, is an oversight almost as big as setting off in a stolen boat without a map or compass.

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Resources:

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months,” by Rutger Bregman, The Guardian, May 9, 2020.

“Is There Still a Place for Boys?” by John Stonestreet & Shane Morris, BreakPoint, February 6, 2020.

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Sphinx, The

Faith embraces unanswered questions and prefers seeking truth over false certainty.

Out of the changeful fury of the tide-rifts streaming by Wilt build thee, O world, a place of peace, and show God by and by? Or all the riot of roses and the loves that escape control, Are they rainbows shed on a melting cloud from the central sun of my soul?

O musical storms and stars, do ye strike wild chords unplanned? Or is there a master-musician, who leads with uplifted hand? If a God’s will shape the heavens, is He perfect, boundless, free? Or feel He the bondage of violent dust? Does He suffer and strive like me?

I know that I never shall answer the riddles that haunt the mind, I see but a spark of the infinite flame--to all the rest born blind. Yet envy I not the gazers who boast of their clearer sight; For safer I walk if I know I am blind, than calling the darkness light.

For all my riddle unanswered, for all my blindness known, I would rather keep asking the secret than to make it all my own. I believe that the stir of the questions is the spirit’s ultimate breath. All life is a passionate question. Wilt thou not answer it, Death?

--THEODORE C. WILLIAMS, _Unity_.

The Only True Objectivity Is Biblical Objectivity

Hebrews 12

All journalists are shaped by their worldviews, and the only way to bring true objectivity to journalism is to be shaped by the worldview of the Bible, Marvin Olasky says.[1] Olasky is editor-in-chief of World magazine, a syndicated columnist and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of 17 books, and his writing has appeared in such newspapers at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today.

“Only when we take up these biblical lenses can we see things as they really are,” Olasky said. “So here’s my thesis: the only true objectivity is biblical objectivity.”

Journalists frequently make two errors regarding objectivity, he said. Sometimes they claim to be completely objective and not bring any presuppositions to their reporting, Olasky said, noting that such claims are wrong because everyone has presuppositions and a worldview. He said others wrongly bring their presuppositions to bear on a story so much that they fail to report the facts accurately.

The right way to do journalism is to let the Bible teach reporters how to view any event and report on it accordingly, he said.

Olasky used a metaphor from whitewater rafting to explain that in some journalistic situations it is easy to know how to apply the Bible and in other situations it is very difficult. Just as rapids are classified in six categories according to their difficulty, Olasky outlined six types of situations of increasingly difficulty when applying the Bible to journalism:

• Class one situations involve cases where the Bible gives very clear instructions on how to view an event.

• Class two situations involve cases where the Bible has an implicit but clear teaching.

• Class three situations involve cases where people on both sides of an issue quote Scripture but a thoughtful Christian can reach a biblical conclusion with careful study.

• Class four situations have no clear biblical solution but can be analyzed by adopting a biblical understanding of human nature and taking lessons from history.

• Class five represents situations where there is no clear biblical teaching and no clear historical lessons but where a biblical understanding of human nature can help process events.

• Class six situations have no clear biblical answer and no other easy answers.

“A very strong biblical stand on the part of a Christian political leader, a Christian journalist on a class one or class two issue is biblically objective,” Olasky said. “A more balanced position on a class five or a class six issue is also biblically objective, given our limited knowledge. We have a goal here. Our goal here is to approach objectivity by giving God’s perspective prime time and keeping silent as best we can when He’s silent.”

Journalists must quote people on both sides of the story for all six classes, but there is no obligation to weight both sides equally when the Bible gives one clear answer, Olasky said.

Experienced Christian journalists can increase their biblical objectivity by studying the Bible carefully and consistently, he said.

“When we study what the Bible says, we can come closer to a God’s-eye view,” he said. “And consistency is vital.”

Christian journalists must not shy away from reporting difficult stories because by showing humans at their worst, journalists demonstrate our desperate need for Christ, Olasky said.

“You look at muck so you can see how desperately we need Christ. Bad news makes the good news shine ever so much more brightly. We need to always be looking up so that we have the strength to look down without being corrupted by it. And we look down so we can appreciate all the more what is above.”

The final goal of journalism is to run with perseverance in order to honor God and know that He is pleased, Olasky said, referring to Hebrews 12.

“We’re in the middle of the story,” he said. “We don’t know how it’s going to end up. Each of us has a narrative of our lives. It may end well. It may end in temporary defeat. But in either case, running the race as journalists helps us feel God’s pleasure.”

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1. Olasky spoke at the Baptist Press Excellence in Journalism Banquet in Nashville, Tennessee, Oct. 7, 2006.

Danger From Below

Hidden base instincts can flood and destroy moral character if not controlled.

Moral disaster to character is often wrought by the inrush of animal tendencies stored in the lower nature of man.

At various times during the construction of the Simplon Tunnel work has been retarded by the influx of water from underground springs. In the autumn of 1901 a stream of water burst into the Italian workings, and, attaining a discharge of nearly 8,000 gallons per minute, speedily converted the two headings into canals. Several months elapsed before the flow could be overcome. (Text.)--_The Scientific American._