Scared About the Future? - A Hopeful Christian Response | The Populace

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My name is Zach Conover and this is The Populace. At The Populace, we want to apply a

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Christian worldview to the cultural topics of today. Whether it's street interactions, social media posts, or publications, we do want to weigh the spirit of the age against the biblical hope.

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In today's episode, we interviewed university students about their fears.

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We asked them the question, what frightens you most about the world we live in today?

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Here are a few of their responses. What frightens you most about the world we live in today?

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God, the fact that Donald Trump could be president again. Probably just the fact that we don't know where life could go,

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I guess you could say. The uncertainty. Yeah. It's like, it's hard to be yourself in this world and it's hard to feel accepted because there's so many things, like, there's like barriers between people.

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I guess one thing that I don't really like is kind of the negligence of Earth and like how like, I don't know,

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I feel like there are many things we could do to kind of like help like cut down with pollution. But like, not many people are really pushing for them.

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Everything's built to hold us down, I guess. I don't know. That's what it seems like. I feel it's definitely

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AI because it is affecting my career so much, so seriously that I don't even think

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I'd get a good job immediately after my bachelors. Currently I'm pursuing bachelors in computer science.

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Basically, there's no religion nowadays. Like, I'm a big religion guy and it seems like it's just all,

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I got a 12 year old, so they're just, they don't even know about Jesus like most of them.

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You know what I mean? It's just, to me it seems like that. It just seems like it's just going into like, everyone's trying to demonize everything.

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You see it all on TV. You see everything. So that's why I hate about the world and it's getting too lazy.

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The answers were interesting in that they had to do with concerns about caring for the planet, advancements in technology, artificial intelligence, and worries about how to establish a career or get a good paying job after school.

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But there was one answer in particular that really stuck out to me. Let's go ahead and take a closer look at this interaction and then we'll apply some of our theology.

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What frightens you most when you think about the world we live in? What frightens me most about the world we live in?

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Yeah. I think it's just, to me it's almost a lack of empathy that people have nowadays.

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It's like you, to me like you can no longer just go up to a stranger and have like a heartfelt conversation or like see any sort of emotion with people.

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I feel like we've just become so conditioned to just stick to what society wants and just keep our heads down as opposed to show emotion and show empathy towards other peoples and other stories when they're not necessarily like confining to what society wants them to do.

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And you can tell this young woman has a lot of genuine care and concern. It sounds like she's a person that really loves deeply and seeks to be there for people, whether it's friends or family and even strangers, one would assume.

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It's interesting that she says a lack of empathy is what most concerns her about the world that we live in today.

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And there is a sense in which I agree with that. I think there's certainly nothing wrong with listening to someone's story, trying to understand their perspective and even suffering with them when and where it's appropriate to do so.

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The ability to show compassion is good and God honoring. God's word says that we are to weep with those who weep in the right context.

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My question would be for this young woman, if I had another shot, would be, are there limits to empathy?

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Does showing empathy towards people who are hurting or have a story that does not conform to the expectations of the world, when we're showing this person empathy, is there a limit to that?

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Does empathy have boundaries that are defined for us? Because my position would be as a

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Christian that love needs to have a standard. There needs to be something that defines what love is.

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Again, and I'm going into this because I'm thinking to myself, many people in the world would equate showing empathy, putting themselves in the shoes of another person with love.

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And if showing compassion, which we're called to do as Christians, is a form of love, then is there a limit to the lengths that we are to go to suffer with other people?

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Let's go ahead and listen to some more of what she says here next. What is empathy? Empathy to me, it's like the ability to sort of feel for someone, feel sorry for someone.

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Like for example, if my friend comes up to me and says, hey, I failed my exam, me being empathetic would be, oh my gosh, like,

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I'm so sorry. Like, do you want to talk about it? Like what happened? Whereas I feel like now most people just hear it and they pretend to care.

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And it's like, I know not every situation is going to receive the same amount of care and attention, but it's just like, at least try to care, you know?

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Like people are so self -centered. Very interesting. I don't disagree with that at all. I think that people are naturally self -centered.

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I have a worldview that can make sense of that even with the problem of human sin. I think that we should be people that genuinely want to care about our neighbors.

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Now, notice I asked her a follow -up question. I said, what is empathy according to your perspective?

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And I think that she gave a pretty standard response. She even gave an example, right?

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If your friend does bad on a test, you should feel sorry for them.

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You should want to put yourself in their shoes, right? I know what you're going through, I'm sorry.

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Again, this is not inherently wrong to do, but once again, is the empathy that we are trying to show to people tethered to anything, or should we just allow ourselves to get lost in the emotions of others, even if those emotions conflict with the truth?

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So an example of that might be if you come across someone who says, listen,

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I just want you to feel what I'm feeling right now. I have a very deep feeling in my bones that even though I am this biological sex, actually,

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I feel very strongly that I'm not. I'm another sex. Now, is that an empathy that we should just engage in completely to the point of losing ourselves in the feelings of this person and affirming them against what we know to be true?

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You see, the world takes advantage of things like this, in particular with Christians, knowing what

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Jesus says about love. Well, here are my feelings, so you need to affirm those feelings no matter how destructive they are, even if they're self -destructive.

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Empathy is different than sympathy, right? No matter what, you have to agree with me and affirm what

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I'm feeling is true, else you don't actually care about me. And again, this brings us back to the need for a standard.

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I would say that's a destructive or toxic form of empathy because what happens when someone's feelings disagree with God's law and God's truth?

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You see, the Bible defines love by keeping God's law.

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It's by giving someone their due according to what God says. Again, I don't deny that this young woman loves people deeply, but at what point does showing empathy prevent us from seeking a person's good the way

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God defines it? That's the measure of whether or not we truly love people.

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The most terrifying thing to me about bringing empathy into this discussion is the idea of living in a world where people's emotions will not be governed by truth.

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Thinking about the world we live in today, is that common? Again, that's what I would ask this young woman. Do we live in a world today where people use their emotions to steer and direct other people into what to believe and how to feel even if those beliefs and those feelings contradict what

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God has said? I would say you could point to many, many examples of this happening in the culture today that we live in, whether it's on an individual level, whether it's any societal level with our laws, our policies, our economic policies, our immigration policies, aspects of cultural hot button topics, whether it be marriage or gender or abortion even, the issue of life, all of these topics can be hijacked emotionally speaking and used to manipulate people into bypassing their convictions for the sake of helping others.

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And that is something that we cannot do as Christians. We cannot bypass what we know to be true in order to affirm people even though they may be suffering, even though what they might be going through is very, very real.

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You see, one of the scariest things about our culture is that many of the people in it seek to emotionally manipulate others into disagreeing with God by jumping completely into their narratives even when those narratives are false and destructive.

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As Christians, we have to be able to listen to people and enter into their situations without being sabotaged by people who would seek to steer us away from loyalty to God by calling us heartless and uncaring for refusing to agree with what displeases him.

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The hope of helping others comes from being tethered to the root of truth.

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And that's the only way we're gonna love people properly because it's a scary, scary place if we have empathy in this world that is separated from a standard.

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So, we're gonna go ahead and take a look at two of the comments from the last episode.

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I'll read the first one here. Nick Nixon, 3650. How would you respond to someone who says, just live for the moment?

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And then he goes on to answer his own question. I would share my own life experience before I got saved.

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Sex, drugs, opulence are all spiritual dead ends. There are short -term dopamine hits that have severe diminishing returns.

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I've tried everything the secular world has to offer and it's all temporal. It's all fleeting.

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The only true peace and fulfillment I've discovered is through living for Christ. Nick, I wanna zero in on just a phrase that you put there.

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You're absolutely right. But in terms of how it relates to this discussion, diminishing returns.

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I think about when Jesus talks about laying up treasure in heaven, not on earth where thieves can break in and steal and where moth and rust can destroy.

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If our treasure is set on earth, if we're looking to these temporal things to satisfy an eternal longing, then we're gonna be disappointed.

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We are gonna face the inevitability of diminishing returns.

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But the hope that we have in Christ, if we know him, if we're living for him, if we find our purpose in glorifying

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God, then the Bible says that we have a hope that never runs out.

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It's a hope that we are born again into and it's living. It's not subject to death. So I think you're absolutely right.

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I think that is what we need to press upon people as we're talking with them. Thank you for the comment, Nick. Next one here,

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M. Christer says, Years ago, I heard someone say that the purpose of education is to discover how

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God has made the world and then to conform my life to that reality. I like simple.

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I like simple too. And I think what you just provided here is a great working definition of wisdom.

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Not only wisdom, but the goal in the end of education. When we're educating people, when we're educating ourselves, that should be the end goal.

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We're seeking to know God more fully, to know the world that he made and acquire wisdom and insight and understanding his way.

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Those things, wisdom, insight, understanding, they are all to be one as we are conforming our minds and our understanding to truth.

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That's all for this week on The Populace. If you wanna see more of these interactions, subscribe to all access at apologiestudios .com

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where we'll post full length conversations. We'd also like to hear your thoughts on this topic.

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How would you have answered or responded? How would you have thought through this on the spot and given an answer?

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Leave a comment below or send us an email at thepopulace at apologiestudios .com.