Countering
the Spirit of the Age
.
by Bob Tedesco
Introduction
Do not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind
that you may prove what is the will of God,
what is good, acceptable and perfect. Romans
12:2
Growth in Christian maturity, Christ-like
character, and holiness of life involve a process
of spiritual transformation which begin with
purification, self-knowledge, and the readiness to
receive instruction and change. We would all grow
a bit if we knew more about ourselves. We’d grow
even more if our brothers and sisters in Christ
who know us well were courageous enough to reveal
what is often hidden from our own interior eyes.
Some of us are very good at defending ourselves
and could rightly be called lawyers in this area.
Self-knowledge brings forward those flaws that the
Lord shows us. We move through these cycles of
self-knowledge and purification by allowing the
Lord to show and purify us of our imperfections.
In this stage there is a certain kind of moral
integration going on. A new Christian rarely
matches the character and the nature of a fully
mature member of the kingdom of God. Morally and
behaviorally we need to be integrated into the
kingdom of God, and he works to accomplish this
through self-knowledge, instruction, and
purification.
Scriptural knowledge is a part of the process. One
of the reasons we encourage reading Scripture so
much is that it will show us something about the
kingdom of God and challenge us to make changes.
Scripture is valuable for your spiritual growth,
not just as a means of learning the history of our
faith, or about miracles, or how to receive a
healing, but to learn about what we’re called to
be – renewed in our minds, so that we can be
transformed more and more into the image and
likeness of God. More and more we are
conformed to the kingdom of God.
It could be considered a corollary to the above
statement to say it’s a mistake to expect deep,
moral development from a teenager or from a 12
year old.
I had an experience once of seeing a child do
something wrong and I reported it to the mother.
The child then lied about it and the mother did
nothing about it because her view was that her
four-year-old child doesn’t lie! She trusted that
if the child said she didn’t do it, then she
didn’t do it. How many of us know a four year old
child who is perfectly honest, especially when
they’ve been caught doing something wrong? To
expect that kind of character and moral
development from a four-year-old is not a good
approach.
Personal and spiritual development are somewhat
mutually dependent. As we grow in character, it
lays a good groundwork for spiritual growth as
well. Conversely, if we deteriorate in character,
that impedes any kind of spiritual growth and
usually brings discipline.
In this article we are considering the effects of
the world, the flesh and the devil in a somewhat
collective way. We’re not going to mention the
flesh or the devil, but simply to say they work
together collectively. The devil makes sure that
the world has lots of elements in it that appeal
to our flesh and draw us away from being what the
Lord wants and what the Lord wants for his family.
Zeitgeist: The Soup We Live In
There is a philosopher who is credited with the
word ‘zeitgeist’. We’ll identify it as the “soup
we live in”. Its meaning comes from combining two
German words: ‘zeit’ meaning ‘time’ or ‘age’; and
‘geist’ meaning ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. Together they
make up the term ‘zeitgeist’ which could be
defined as the ‘mind of the age’ or the ‘spirit of
the age’. We as Christians know what that means.
In scripture we’re warned against the spirit of
the age, but we also acknowledge that we must live
in it. We understand the effect it has on us.
Every new Christian has been formed in this
zeitgeist ‘soup’ and is now working to get into
the soup of the kingdom of God, which is of
superior moral quality and superior behavior. The
spirit of the age does not support that effort.
You can observe this simply by turning on your
T.V. You can watch leaders of the land, our
politicians and government officials treating each
other viciously and saying vile things about each
other. That’s the soup we live in. It’s easy to
pick it up. If you say something about my
behavior, I could say, “That’s fake news!” Just
that quickly, I could dispense of you and not have
to listen to you. So, ‘zeitgeist’ is defined as
the moral, intellectual, general beliefs, values,
ideas and spirit of a time and place that
powerfully motivate the actions or decisions of
the members of a society.
Sometimes a committed Christian might say, “I
don’t know why I made that decision. Looking back
on it I just don’t know why I did that.”
We’re motivated by the soup. We’re absorbing the
character of the world, whether we’re Christians
or not, and we need to do something about it. We
need to be transformed by the renewal of the
mind so we can prove what is the will of
God.
Awhile back I was noticing and thinking about the
‘personality’ of the age, even among Christians.
As a teacher, I’ve noticed that almost all of us
are spring-loaded to say, “Yes, but…” or, “Who
said so?” or, “You’re not the boss of me!” We’re
spring-loaded against, specifically, good
teaching. We’re not as spring-loaded to respond,
“Yes, but...” to what we hear or see on T.V.
because it appeals to our flesh. But we easily
say, “Yes, but…” to the challenges of scripture.
Priests and ministers are forever making it easier
for us. They might present a tough scriptural text
and we might hear, “Oh, what’s really meant by
this is…” But they would do better by asking us,
“What if he really meant that?” Some things really
do have to be explained. When you’re teaching, you
have people at all stages of discipleship, so it
is prudent to look at some things more critically
as they may require more explanation. But the
spring-loaded “Yes, but…” is not helping us!
If we’re teaching in initiations, working with
people who want to be discipled, or engaging
people who come into our university outreach, many
of whom may have already been evangelized, we may
find that many of them have decided that gay
marriage is a good thing. If you question that
stance you should expect a great big, “Yes, but…”
We’re spring-loaded by the spirit of the age to
accept gay marriage, or fornication, or people
living together outside of marriage. There is a
lot of spring-loaded reaction when you’re trying
to teach just about anything about the kingdom of
God!
The personality has two sides: the negative and
the positive. On the negative side skepticism
seems to be an automatic response for many people.
Also on the negative side is the tendency toward
being anti-hero. When I was a young person heroes
were good (the “Lone Ranger”). Today’s heroes are
often portrayed as having serious flaws
(selfishness, ignorance or prejudice) which
distances them from typically heroic characters,
and they lack positive qualities or virtues such
as courage, integrity and compassion. They often
have a darker side which can blur the lines
between the good guys and the bad guys. They might
be acting like a hero, but somewhere there are
bones in the closet! So Hollywood did away with
the heroes. Remember the anti-heroes of the 60’s?
Marlon Brando/”Wild One”; James Dean/”Rebel
Without a Cause”; Robert Mitchum/”Thunder Road”
(‘58); Clint Eastwood/”Dirty Harry”. It’s now part
of the soup. We’re anti-hero as a culture. No one
is worth following or believing except for actors
and celebrities.
Hebrews 11 has a list of heroes who laid a
historical groundwork for us. Those men and women,
matriarchs and patriarchs of the faith, are real
heroes!
Another negative on our list is the idea that ‘old
is bad’. Our culture has for a long time
worshipped youth and youth culture. We are
constantly looking for ways to appear younger, act
younger; wanting to relate to what is current and
popular culture. There is little respect for the
older members of our society and less for their
ideas and values.
“Break the rules’ is also part of the
personality of the age. We read in 1 Samuel 15:23
“Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”
Hollywood has more than its share of rebels,
scoffers and mockers. Rebellion is always
portrayed as a virtue in the movies. We admire the
rebel. “I’m gonna do it my way!” And then I’m
gonna sing a song about it!
Politics has become one big soup of mockery.
Jude 18-19 says, “They said to you, ‘In the
last days there will be scoffers who will follow
their own ungodly desires. These are the men who
divide you, who follow mere natural instincts,
and do not have the Spirit.’” To enter into
a posture of mockery is a very unspiritual thing
to do and to accept as a part of your soup.
Our list also includes discontent. There
is a great deal of discontent and dissatisfaction.
People are unhappy with their car or house, parish
or congregation, pastor or minister, spouse or
children, neighborhood or country…the list could
go on and on. Every day more and more seeds of
discontent are sown. But the apostle Paul marks it
as a sign of his growth as a disciple that he has
learned to be content, whether rich or poor,
healthy or sick, peaceful or in trouble. Learning
to be content in whatever life brings our way is a
sign that we are making progress in the spiritual
life. Discontent (ingratitude) is good for sales
but bad for spiritual growth.
Mavericks are making their voices heard, too. A
recent presidential candidate defined himself as a
‘maverick’ most likely because he could identify
that element in the cultural soup and knows that
our current social climate embraces the
independent who distances himself from the rest of
the pack.
Anger, fear and narcissism are also running
rampant in our culture and helping to create the
soup we live in. Narcissism is growing and so are
the crimes that spring from it. The culture seems
designed to produce this kind of aberrant
psychological profile. We are then questioning the
news reports with, “Why would a person do such a
thing?”
On the positive side we can see many good and
virtuous traits such as creativity, generosity,
heroism, inventiveness and caring for the
needy. The miracles we see in the medical
field are astounding, and have to be among the
many positive things we observe in our
society…things that give us hope to continue on.
Biases… Many, Many Biases
Psychologists have identified between 75-100
different biases that can affect a person’s
decision making ability as well as their social
life. For instance, I married a wonderful woman
with red hair and green eyes. So now I have a
positive social bias toward red hair and green
eyes that I have to watch out for. It could be,
for me, an Achilles Heel. We can have a negative
bias toward a certain name if we’ve had difficulty
with a person by that same name.
There are lots of decisional biases that we carry,
a particularly common one is called Cognitive
Negativity Bias. This area of cognition has to do
with how we learn, our understanding and
comprehension, our ability to use our mental
capacities as we apply them to decision making,
our ability to reason, to interpret things and to
solve problems. Solving a math problem, for
instance, is in some sense a measure of your
cognitive abilities.
To illustrate how these biases develop, let’s
consider the following example. Let’s say you have
a favorite restaurant. You’ve been there many
times, had good meals, good times, good service.
You have a positive bias toward that restaurant.
One day you go into the restaurant, order a big
fish sandwich, take a bite, and pull out a long
hair from your sandwich. That single repugnant
event can quickly develop into a negative bias
toward that restaurant. All of the positive
experiences that you’ve had in that restaurant
suddenly are overshadowed by one negative
experience that you might never recover from! You
may never go back to that restaurant! Or at least
it might be a long while!
Human beings and animals have a built-in negative
bias. We tend to weight negative experiences and
negative information heavier than positive
information. Why is this so? A monkey wandering
through the jungle might spot a banana, his
favorite food, reach out and grab it. For
him, that is a positive event. But, if that
same monkey hears a stick cracking behind him in
the trees, he will turn around instantly. He won’t
think about it because it could be a predator
sneaking up on him. It’s a negative input, and a
scary one. We’ve all had scary events. You may be
downstairs late at night in the dark and hear
something move. It could be a little mouse, but
you react like it’s a something that could
potentially be life-threatening. Built into us is
a survival instinct, so we are programmed to
weight negative input heavier than positive input.
The first rule of conducting an engineering
brainstorming session is “no idea is a bad idea.”
If someone presents an idea, you should refrain
from throwing water on it, even if you think it
won’t work. It might be that their idea could lead
to another that will work. Quenching it
immediately takes it off the table, and people are
less likely to offer their ideas if they think it
could be met with negativity. So, there actually
is a rule to guide a brainstorming session because
of people’s tendencies to respond from a negative
bias to first see what is wrong with an
idea.
We have a human tendency to weight faults too
heavily. Weighing faults can also take a toll on
relationships. We can do it to our pastor, our
parish, our friends, neighbors, our government
leaders, our children, even brothers and sisters
in the body of Christ. It can also ruin marriages.
It leads to the tendency to expect perfection! You
can have eaten 100 really good fish sandwiches,
but because one of them has something in it that
shouldn’t be there that restaurant should be shut
down by the health department!
This issue is an important one to raise because we
need to be more accepting of each other’s
imperfections. There are a lot of wonderful people
in our communities, but we could make a reasonable
case that no one would be good enough to spend
time with if viewed through the lens of cognitive
negativity bias. There are all sorts of biases
that we use in making decisions or employ in our
social networks. But we should be cautioned about
the built-in tendency supported by the world, the
flesh and the devil, to be negatively charged.
The Mind of a Disciple
The mind of a disciple is shaped, formed and
challenged by scripture. Scripture can actively
help us with two stages of spiritual growth, both
the purgative and the illuminative. We can read
Scripture and sense the presence of the Lord come
upon us and open up a truth that we never
understood before. And, in fact, the mind of a
disciple has probably experienced some kind of
conversion to scripture. We all talk about being
baptized in the Spirit and accepting the Lord, but
something has to happen in the life of a disciple,
an awakening has to take place so that he finds in
scripture a source of consolation, of knowledge,
and of help in his spiritual life. He is, in fact,
converted to seeing scripture as the Word of
God.
The mind of a disciple is subordinated to the will
of God. That’s a hallmark of a disciple. A
disciple should be scriptural, positive, up-beat,
forward-looking. We need to spend some time in the
past, but too much time there is not good. When
you drive your car you look ahead through the
windshield to see where you’re going. When you
want to see where you’ve been you look into a
little rear-view mirror. We sometimes need to look
in the rear, but we don’t want to live there. In
fact, a lot of us want to move past what happened
there so we can focus on what’s in front of us,
what we see through the windshield. A graduating
senior is not looking back to the first day of
kindergarten or to a time when he got reprimanded
by a teacher. He is looking forward through the
windshield to the many opportunities that are
calling him on.
As disciples, we’re making our way toward the
kingdom of God. We want to be focused on what is
ahead, not what we’ve left behind.
The Mystery of Children and
the Wisdom of the Youth Bridge
There is a certain mystery to children. Watching a
group of children play is a very delightful thing
to do. They are completely free to be themselves;
they don’t care what race they are, what color
they are, even what religion they are. Many of us
have probably been inspired simply by watching a
group of children playing and having fun together.
The mystery enters in when they come home from
their first semester at college with a whole set
of new ideas, a new set of emphases, changes in
their ways of thinking about things; perspectives
that are unfamiliar to you. As a parent you
might say, “Boy, that was a great little kid and
now he’s struggling with this!” We wonder, “Why
aren’t they like me?”
One semester at college is sometimes all it takes
to effectively undo 18 years of training. Many
college professors are armed with biases that they
want to pass on to your children. But it isn’t
just limited to the math instructor or the physics
professor. It isn’t even limited to the university
faculty. It’s the whole world system – magazines,
entertainment, movies, music. A Greek general once
said, “Let me write the songs of the nation and I
care not who writes the laws!”
In our communities we have a network of programs,
groups and events that are meant to serve and
connect our youth from pre-school through
post-university. We call it the Youth Bridge. We
work to patch up any ‘holes’ in the bridge where a
young person is disconnected from his peers. The
Youth Bridge is a help to the parents in passing
on faith, vision, and our call to community and
discipleship.
The wisdom of the Youth Bridge is that it creates
zeitgeists with a little ‘z’. We’re all immersed
in this Zeitgeist with a capital ‘Z’. But the more
we can be in environments that represent the
kingdom of God, the more we can deal with the
spirit of the age. And the more we can get free of
the spirit of the age, the more we can absorb the
spirit of the kingdom of God.
Our children, too, need self-knowledge. They need
to be teachable; they need to resist picking up so
many biases that they can’t be taught anymore.
Some children can get to the point where no one
can tell them anything. Sometimes it’s a phase,
but sometimes it stays! They need environments and
friends who help on their spiritual journey. One
of the wisdoms of the Youth Bridge is that it
immerses our children in the kingdom of God and
its culture.
As parents, grandparents and singles we need to
support the Youth Bridge. Do everything you can to
help our youth. They’re still forming these biases
and what they think about things.
Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Take
your mind seriously; get it renewed so that you
may prove what is the will of God and represent
that to the young people that come across your
path.
Go easier on your friends, pastors, parishes,
bosses, children, and spouses. Don’t zero in on
what’s negative about them, but see the whole
person. Counter the spirit of the age by resisting
the urge to see through a negative bias.
Philippians 4:8
Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever
is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is
pure, lovely, gracious; if anything is worthy
of praise, think about these things. Whatever
you’ve learned and received and heard and seen
in me – do. And the God of peace will be with
you.
Expectations
of Christianity (c) 2019 by Bob
Tedesco is featured in his new book, Choosing
Discipleship: Embracing the Call in a Modern
Culture, published by Credo House
Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.
Bob
Tedesco is the founder of the People
of God, a
Sword of the Spirit community in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA where he
served as Senior Coordinator for 26
years. He has been involved in lay
ministry for over forty-five years,
serving in the Sword of the Spirit as
the North American Regional President
and Chairman of the Board of Directors
of the North American Executive
Committee.
Bob is the author of two books, Essays
on Christian Community and Choosing
Discipleship. and forty-one
Christian life articles published in
the Sword of the Spirit international
online magazine, Living Bulwark.
He has a BS in Aerospace Engineering
from the University of Pittsburgh and
worked as a consulting engineer for
twenty years. He and his wife, Bobbie,
have been married for nearly sixty
years. They currently have ten
children, thirty-seven grandchildren,
and eleven great-grandchildren. They
reside in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania,
USA.
Choosing Discipleship
Embracing
the Call in a Modern Culture
by Bob Tedesco
163 pages
Published in 2019 by Credo
House Publishers,Grand Rapids, Michigan,
USA
The
book is available in print at Amazon and Credo
House Publishers.
Choosing Discipleship
is an excellent book and very
helpful for keeping some key issues
before us in a compact way. It is very
useful, easy to ponder, and easy to teach
from. It is a great resource...
personally; I liked the style you used...
it relates to the busyness of our culture.
Bill
Durrant, Founder, People of God’s
Love Community, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Excellent pastoral material and also well
written. It’s a tremendous contribution to
the Sword of the Spirit worldwide and the
wider church as well... Seasoned leaders,
parents, pastoral workers, and community
members need to be refreshed and learn
again (and again) the vision and sound
principles and wisdom you have taught over
the past few decades... It will continue
to be circulated to many communities and
individuals for generations to come.
Don
Schwager, Editor, Living Bulwark,
international online magazine of the Sword
of the Spirit
Typing the manuscript for Choosing
Discipleship over the course
of a summer felt like being on an
extended retreat! My own life of
discipleship and my understanding of what
God is doing in the world today has been
significantly influenced by Bob’s clear
vision, insight, and wisdom... The impact
he has had both as a community builder and
author has stretched across continents,
and I suspect his influence will be felt
for many years to come.
Joanie
Nath, Senior Women’s Leader, People
of God Community, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
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