When I was a kid, classic rock was just rock and it came on big, beautifully packaged 33 1/3 RPM records. My budget limited my record buying, but I owned Deep Purple’s Machine Head and Santana’s Abraxas. I had Dark Side of the Moon, of course, as well as Chicago and Chicago II. Peter, Paul, and Mary shared space with John Denver and The Lovin’ Spoonful. Elton John’s Madman Across the Water and Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road joined everything Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Blood, Sweat, and Tears had recorded by 1974.
And then one day, I threw it all away,
convinced by the articulate alarmists of the day that this music was unfit and possibly dangerous for a follower of Jesus.“Well, that was life in the evangelical 80s,” you say. “We’re different now.”
No, I don’t think we are. The fearful spirit that animated the alarmists in those days is with us still. Alarmism, tinged with anger, is what sells books, drives podcasts, and fills conference halls. The fear that momentous concerns lie under every secular stone plagues every era, obscuring in the process a healthy appreciation for God’s common grace.
As God sends rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous, so he showers gifts even upon those who may despise him. The beauty and good that non-Christians bring to the world, and that beauty is all around us, testify to God’s glory. When alarmists call for us to burn the chaff, the wheat goes up in smoke and God’s glory is diminished.
In the home-schooling world in which my wife and I raised our children, Harry Potter threatened to turn good Christian kids into Satanists. Missed were the themes of loyalty and friendship and faithfulness and sacrifice which were at the heart of the stories, and for which wizardry was simply the backdrop.
In a men’s group I led, a man spoke scornfully about science. Science, according to the voices to which he was listening, was a grave enemy of Christianity and to be treated with an element of suspicion if not contempt. I reminded him that as a pilot he trusted in the good gift that science was every time he climbed into the seat of his airplane. Yes modern science operates in an atmosphere of naturalism, but it still uncovers the glory of God. Our indiscriminate generalizations blind us to the common grace of God that is everywhere to be celebrated.
Public education is often slammed among Christians. While there are legitimate philosophical questions to be raised, to condemn the whole obscures the beautiful, and it is God behind the beautiful. I’ve watched deeply caring teachers love and guide students through very difficult things. When my grandsons tragically lost their father their public school teachers rallied around them. The school psychologist sat with them during the memorial service and wept with them after. A kindergarten teacher gathered them up two at a time to take them to her house to show them they were loved. Behind these kind and generous acts we need to see the wonderful grace of a good God.
A preacher in my hearing strongly criticized “mindfulness” as a therapeutic tool, characterizing it as a dangerous eastern philosophy. I’m sure he was technically correct. His broad-brushed dismissal was disconcerting, however. At the time someone dear to me was being treated using a form of mindfulness. It was being deployed as a way to encourage this person to treat each day as having sufficient worry of its own. It sounded accidentally biblical rather than intentionally evil. This was God’s grace delightfully shining across a secular landscape.
We need not fear the artifacts of a non-Christian world. Rather, we should joyfully embrace the grace of God that is found in them. Pastors pastor best when we model thoughtfulness and discernment, not alarmism. We wear a prophetic mantle, yes, but we wear it with care. Conversation and discernment nurture a healthy pilgrim life; alarmism nurtures mobs.
Our fears are relieved by a proper confidence in God’s uncommon grace. God’s saving grace reaches into the damaged, broken, and defiled sinner’s heart and gives it new life. We who are the recipients of this grace celebrate it and hunger for it and do all we can to protect it from being cheapened by any implication that anything else needs to be added to it. This grace is sufficient and uncommonly precious. And, important to consider in this case, it is grace that keeps us. Not even Mick Jagger is powerful enough to undo God’s true saving grace.
This is the confidence that allows us to delight in all of God’s acts of grace. God indeed shines in all that’s fair.
Including in those great records that I will, sadly, never get back.
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All of it except for The Very Best of the Lovin’ Spoonful. This record was just too dear to me to throw out. John Denver also seemed to make the cut, which is odd to me. I can report that though sitting around the fire and passing the pipe around was his thing, it did not become mine, no matter how many times I listened.
And, oddly, those same Christians loved Narnia and Shakespeare. We Christians can be so selective in what we label as wicked.
From the title of Richard Moouw’s book on the subject of common grace, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace, itself taken from the hymn “This Is My Father’s World” by Maltbie D. Babcock.
I agree w Holzmann, love that line!
Ah, how beautiful!
I particularly love your observation about that which is "accidentally biblical rather than intentionally evil."