This is me, processing, but first, a few disclaimers and perhaps a spoiler. I didn’t watch the 2023 Grammy Awards. Quite frankly, I wasn’t interested. But in this day and age, it’s hard to NOT know about things with the plethora of social media onramps trying to keep us up to date with the latest offerings that our culture wants us to know about and to see.
Just to be clear, this is not a religious, right-wing, knee-jerk reaction to the worldliness of the world. I get it. There is light and there is dark, there is music and there is art. Sinners sin, Jesus saves, and God so loved the world. I know. But sometimes, things just need to be said.
By now, I imagine that most of us have seen the headlines of what happened when Sam Smith (dressed as the devil), and Kim Petras (the first transgender woman to win this award), performed their duo “Unholy” and CBS tweeted, prior to their performance, “we are ready to worship”. It was not the first time, nor will it be the last, where such blatant pornographic and demonic debauchery will take the center stage — all in the name creative license.
I am not going to throw stones, sit in the seat of the scornful, or scream at the sinister ways of the world — but I am going to say something. I am both sad as well as I am sober. I’m sad because I want humanity to be better than this, but we are not. We are lost and we are being led astray like sheep to the slaughter. We are being consistently lied to and led to believe, by the pervading cultural narratives, that good is evil and evil is good. I’m sad, because sin is being celebrated and our Savior is being silenced.
I am sober because we all have choices to make, but making choices in this super connected and wired world are super hard to make. As believers, we are in the world, but not of it, right? But how does that really work out in our day and age? The psalmist wrote that there is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God. But what do we do when our world is streaming sin, sex, and satanism twenty-four hours a day and available on every device that we own?
I love God, I honor the scriptures, and I seek to follow the commands of Christ in my life. I also genuinely desire to reach my world through cultural relevance, biblical revelation and see people authentically experience the supernatural — but I wonder if compromise is creeping in far too easily and crippling our convictions. The challenges are real and so is the conflict.
I wonder what the music festival looked like in the prophet Daniel’s day? They erected a golden statue and they played all kinds of music. The command was clear: when you hear the music, get ready to worship. And worship they did, except for three of them. Three of them did not bow to the pervading narrative. They stood up instead. Standing up was a death sentence, for it was decreed, “Whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast immediately into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.”
I know you are probably familiar with the story. If not, you can read about it in the Bible — in the book of Daniel chapter three. My point? Those three Hebrew boys, who stood up against the worship of false gods in their generation, modeled a message that is super relevant to us today. I believe God is raising up a generation, in our day, that will not fear the fire, but fear the God Who stands in the midst of the fire. I hope to live my life and lead my family with that same level of love, loyalty and conviction. It’s the best thing that I can do to really make a difference in this world. #nocompromise