Andrée Seu Peterson: This time next year

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, January 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from member-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Andrée Seu Peterson now on the passage of time and becoming a new person in the new year.

ANDRÉE SEU PETERSON, COMMENTATOR: As we begin a new year it is well to remember that you won’t be the same person next year as you are this year. You will be a better person or a worse one. Things will happen (that you can’t help), and you will make choices (that you can help).  

The rest of the world won’t be the same next January as this January either. I heard a finance counselor on the radio tell a caller that he should pay off his debts first and then think about going on vacation. “Europe will always be there,” he said.

The advice was sound, but not so much the travel tip. Europe — as you know — will not be the same in one year’s time as it is now. It will be that much more the product of a self-extinction birthrate and immigrant takeover.

There is a process by which a thing becomes, over time, transformed into another thing. Interestingly, the stages in that process can also be traced throughout the manifold strata of reality under the sun —individuals, nations, churches, cultures, and biological cells. Nothing stays the same.

For individuals, consider the apostle Judas’ self-destruction. He had allowed the devil a foothold, so that we read that at the last supper “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus.”

Fatal penetration follows: “Then after he had taken the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly’” (v.27). Judas has been flirting with the dark side, and by the dark side he is finally devoured.

On the level of churches? Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, “Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbeliever to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an ‘Arms are for Hugging’ sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.”

Satan’s “designs” (2 Cor. 2:11) of penetration, infiltration, and death are manifold. God’s grace reaches far as the curse is found.

You and I can be a better individual by this time next year. Our weapons are clinging to Christ, keeping his word, wielding the sword of faith, and praying every day.

And as for Europe, I would recommend you visit earlier rather than later.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Andrée Seu Peterson.

(Photo/WNG)

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