| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Cancel Culture's Irony
00:02:17
|
|
| We hear that we hear the phrase the cancel culture a lot these days. | |
| Can you explain what that means? | |
| Yeah, Tim is really such a good person to explain that from the young person's perspective. | |
| I want to give you a background on it first. | |
| The cancel culture really is eliminating things we disagree with, but the problem is we should have a love of truth regardless of anything. | |
| I acknowledge that there's a lot of bad parts of American history, but just because I would not do them today and I disagree with them doesn't mean I cancel them and don't teach about them. | |
| As a matter of fact, what we do in the summer, we have young people coming in, HS18 to 25. | |
| Tim leads a leadership training program, and we cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of American history. | |
| We cover all of it because it's all true. | |
| Now, it doesn't mean it's all good because we can learn from the bad, you know, World War II. | |
| I can teach you all about Hitler and make good lessons off a really bad guy who did evil things about what we should never do today, the attitudes we should never allow today. | |
| But I don't just cancel Hitler because he's a bad guy. | |
| We learn lessons from him. | |
| So what we're after is truth at the basis. | |
| Yeah, one of the ironies of the modern cancel culture movement is, I mean, Dad, as you pointed out, it wants to remove just largely history. | |
| It's rooted a lot in cultural Marxism, which is not so much about correcting history as it is tearing down the system, which is part of what Marxism wants to do. | |
| It wants to remove the institution. | |
| With all that being said, one of the ironies of cancel culture is that the modern argument is if somebody did something wrong, we can never celebrate them, which is why you're seeing so many statues being torn down. | |
| And ironically, over recent weeks, many of the statues being torn down were the heroes who fought against the very things that today people are accusing them of. | |
| You can kind of go through some of the list of people who, wait a second, their life, they fought against slavery, they fought against racism, they fought for equality. | |
|
Why We Can't Celebrate Faults
00:04:31
|
|
| And today, we've lost that message. | |
| And for many people in this cancel culture movement, it doesn't really matter who they were, what they fought for, because they were from a previous generation. | |
| They represent the American kind of system, the establishment, and that's all bad. | |
| And as Christians, we need to be a lot smarter than that. | |
| Really, as humans in general, we should be wiser than that. | |
| But as Christians, imagine the really stupidity of saying that we can't celebrate anybody who ever did anything wrong. | |
| What do you do with someone like King David from the Bible? | |
| Because King David, we know, was an amazing man in the sense the Bible says that he was a man after God's own heart. | |
| The Bible doesn't say that about anybody else. | |
| David was a special guy. | |
| We know David had an anointing as a worshiper when Saul was being bothered by these evil spirits. | |
| And David comes in and starts playing the harp. | |
| And all of a sudden, Saul is comforted. | |
| David was an amazing worshiper, wrote the majority of the book of Psalms. | |
| He was also an amazing warrior. | |
| We know, I mean, he killed Goliath, right? | |
| What he did to the Philistines, his whole career. | |
| He was an awesome warrior. | |
| But even think before he killed Goliath, when he goes and tells Saul that, hey, this giant's no problem. | |
| I've already killed lions and bears. | |
| He was a young teenager in this moment. | |
| If he's already killing lions and bears, I mean, he could have been 11, 12, 13 killing lions and bears, and he did it with rocks and sticks. | |
| We live in Texas. | |
| We have guns. | |
| We hunt. | |
| I wouldn't be scared of lions and bears with my guns, much less with a rock and a stick. | |
| David was an amazing warrior, right? | |
| I mean, brave, incredible. | |
| So the Bible tells us a lot of really good aspects of David, but the Bible also tells us about David's family life. | |
| It talks about Absalom. | |
| Remember, Absalom was the son who actually murders a brother. | |
| He then tries to violently overthrow his father's kingdom. | |
| Really bad situation. | |
| Adonijah, when the Bible introduces Adonijah, who was another one of David's sons, it starts off by saying that Adonijah, the son whom David never corrected, comma, and it picks up. | |
| It introduces him saying that David never once corrected him. | |
| And I can't imagine having a dad who never once was like, hey, son, no, no, hey, we don't do that. | |
| Never once, never once did David correct Adonijah. | |
| David was not a good father, like at all was not a good father. | |
| So the Bible shows us some of David's weaknesses. | |
| And not only does it show us his weaknesses, it shows us some of the great sin in his life where the Bible talks about Bathsheba and Uriah. | |
| And not only does he have the affair and Bathsheba gets pregnant, he then murders Uriah. | |
| And here's the point of this: the Bible tells the whole story. | |
| And in cancel culture, we say we can't celebrate people who have done bad things. | |
| So then here's the important question for Christians. | |
| Then how do we celebrate King David? | |
| How is King David today still one of the greatest kings in Israel's history? | |
| How could you celebrate King David? | |
| And the answer is pretty simple. | |
| Because we don't celebrate the sin, the weaknesses, the faults, the evil in his life. | |
| We celebrate how a perfect God used an imperfect man and did great things through him. | |
| And this is how we really ought to be thinking about not just American history, but I mean, this is the hope for us too, right? | |
| That a perfect God would use imperfect vessels and would do great things to us. | |
| This is the hope of the gospel. | |
| And in cancel culture, it completely contradicts biblical and gospel messages in very irrational fashion. | |
| Because if we say we can never celebrate anybody who did anything bad, then you can never celebrate anybody ever again. | |
| We would argue apart from Jesus, which there could be worse things than saying only celebrate Jesus. | |
| Actually, that'd be a really good thing. | |
| Let's just celebrate Jesus. | |
| But this is the great irony of cancel culture: people aren't thinking through where does that lead, what does that produce, and being rational and saying, guys, the starting place of all humanity is all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, meaning nobody's perfect. | |
| And so we recognize that everybody's going to have mistakes. | |
| Everybody's going to have faults and sins and failures and weaknesses. | |
| But we don't celebrate them because of those. | |
| We celebrate in spite of those, how a perfect God used imperfect people and did great things through them. | |