Over the last few days, something has been up at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. Some are calling it a revival, some an awakening, some a stirring, and yet others are referring to it as a distraction, a confusion of truth, or a manipulation of students.

If you’ve been involved at all in the evangelical conversation that takes place online in the last few years, you’ve heard the word deconstruction. Deconstruction is the word used by those leaving the evangelical faith after they begin taking issue with certain ideas, doctrines, ethical concerns, or cultural aspects of evangelicalism.

In this short post, I want to call Christians away from the pull of anxious feelings regarding our current climate or circumstance, and toward Jesus’s cure for anxious souls. When we look around our communities, it’s easy to be swept up into the anxious feelings of the age. If we aren’t guarded against anxiety, we can become overwhelmed by the political clamor, outrage, and general uneasiness of today. If we merely fall in line with the temperature of Twitter and Facebook and CNN and Fox News, we’ll succumb to the stress and anxiety of society. 

We’re in the season of hope, but it doesn’t feel like it. This year, collectively, we’ve been through the wringer. Individually, each of us has had unique struggles brought about by the pandemic. In such times, we can find ourselves losing sight of what ought to be the enduring motivation for the Christian in hard times: The goodness of God.

The song is an invitation for the congregant to look at, or “come behold” the wonder of the various components of the gospel, which has made salvation available for fallen humanity.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a picture on Facebook with the caption, "It's not a religion; it's a relationship," I'd be a rich man.