Sleepy Souls in the Modern World

“Everything in this modern world is somehow inexplicably geared to inducing sleep in our souls. Modern society is a veritable cave of Morpheus — the mythical place where men forgot reality and succumbed to dreams.”

~ Maurice Roberts, The Thought of God (Carlisle, Pa.: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993), 105.

The Power of Popular Culture

“Modern American popular culture presents many opportunities for innocent pleasures, but its principal attributes are, I believe, obstacles to enjoying the best of human experience. Popular culture is in many ways a very trivial matter. Some readers may balk at taking it so seriously. But its triviality, while making it seem innocuous, also enables it to be extremely pervasive, and that is its most toxic quality. It unobtrusively provides the backdrop, scenery, costumes, minor characters, script, and background noise of much of our lives. When we arrive, the stage is already set, the lyrics and music written, our lines and our movements already determined. Popular culture has the power to set the pace, the agenda, and the priorities for much of our social and our spiritual existence, without our explicit consent. It requires a great effort not to be mastered by it.”

~ Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1989), x111-xiv.

The Worldliness of Our Time

“Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, thinking processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to the periphery any thought about God. Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.”

~ David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1994), 29.