Sex, Love, & Veritas: The Emergence of an Orange Highlighter Lifestyle

I want to present you with 3 subjects:  Sex, Love, and Truth.  Tell me.  Can you competently explain to me how you would consistently defend each of these subjects according to what Scripture teaches about them? 

The common young person today cannot articulate why he believes what he believes.  This is not the case for Christianity alone, as it is the case for most worldviews across the board.  Young people, whether atheistic, skeptic, postmodern, deistic, or theistic, cannot define the basic foundational principals within their current belief system.  But for the sake of my article I want to pick on Christianity. 

Since the mid-1800s, Christians have withdrawn from the intellectual world and have placed emotionalism, easy-believism, and profound rhetoric at the center of their methodology and understanding of the Christian faith.  With the rise of modernism and evolutionary theory Christians began to vacate the academic pedestals and jump into the shadows of not having to defend why they believe what they believe, much less be able to live with a consistent worldview.  In most churches today Christianity has become so fluffy that we count success in the form of numbers in chairs, not spiritual growth and the development of battle-tested warriors who are ready to engage the culture with the truth of the gospel no matter what the cost.  Believe me, I know the temptation to count success in the form of numbers, but this discussion is for another time and another article. 

You may be thinking, “What in the world does an orange highlighter have to do with sex, love, and truth?”   Allow me to explain.  The way we go about structuring, or compartmentalizing, our lives today is very analogous of the way we use a highlighter to mark key sentences in our books.  More often than not, we liberally work through a piece of literature, whether non-fiction or fiction, with a highlighter in hand ready to note key points, subjects, and arguments that the author has so authoritatively made.  We do this not only within our study of exhaustive pieces of literature for school but also when reading Scripture during quiet times, listening to sermons, etc.  We mark verses that stick out to us; highlight parts of chapters that speak truth into our lives at different places along our journey; and make notes in the margins for later reference. 

A highlighter, when used correctly, is for highlighting key parts of a text.  When used this way it is good, very good.  I am afraid many young people today compartmentalize their lives like they are highlighting key sentences found within specific texts. 

Here is how we do this… 

Young Christians take their orange highlighter and begin to highlight all the verses that make them feel good.  They highlight all the important ones… believe in Jesus; love Jesus with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; love others and treat them as you would want to be treated; God works for the good of those who love him; come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest… we could go on and on and on. 

More often then not, we know what the Bible teaches but we do not apply the Scripture to our lives.  We don’t want to highlight and apply the hard passages… Be holy as I am holy; strive for sexual purity; Contend for the faith; defend the faith once delivered for all the saints; present yourself as a living sacrifice; renew your mind; present yourself diligently dividing the word of truth; stand firm always ready to give an answer for the hope that you have received… we could go on and on and on here as well. 

This is too difficult though.  Right?  It would imply that we would actually have to develop a biblical worldview.  This means that we would have to spend time training and discipling the mind to think long and hard about the Bible and truth issues.  No way… who would want to do that?  There aren’t very many.  Would you?