SOUTH ASIA – One former missionary youth used to sign his e-mails with the quotation, “America is my country, but Pakistan is my home.”
That is the sentiment of many missionary youth. They may hold U.S. passports, but otherwise America is far from being home ? and its culture is as foreign as could be.
That is why Jonathan Bright and Jonathan Phillips teamed up this summer to help missionary youth delve into God’s Word to learn how to distinguish between what is true and what is true-ish.
“Discovering and living truth matters more than anything else that happens in your life. It will affect everything,” Bright said. “The pursuit of truth is man’s greatest pursuit, and ultimately, truth is found through Jesus Christ.
“If I try to take all the information that I see is truth and I try to arrange or manipulate it in a way that feels right to me, it is a recipe for disaster,” he warned. “Guys, that’s what’s happening in our culture. We have truth, but we’ve said, ‘You know what? I don’t care what truth says. I’m going to make it say what I decide it should say; therefore, it will help me feel the way I want to feel, and therefore, I can do what I want to do.'”
Bright leads the student ministry at First Baptist North Spartanburg in Spartanburg, S.C. Phillips leads the junior high student ministry there. They spent a week this summer with 72 Southern Baptist missionary youth whose parents serve among South Asians.
About 1.5 billion people live in South Asia ? India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives ? and most are Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, tribal animists, and Sikhs.
The missionary youth see a constant live stream of religious worship before them daily as South Asians burn incense to idols in their homes, take offerings to temples, try to wash away their sins in the Ganges River, and bow in mosques during calls to prayer.
What they are less familiar with are the “religious” teachings of American culture ? true-ish statements that come across the television screen, some of which have even slinked into America’s churches. Phillips gave the example of one such teaching: first and foremost, God wants people to be happy.
“That statement is absolutely 100 percent true-ish,” he said. “It sounds kind of true. It feels true. There’s some truth in it ? God delights in our happiness, He does ? but it is absolutely true-ish. – So many people believe that the ultimate goal is that you are happy. Why? Because the pursuit of happiness seems right.”
Yet, Proverbs 14:12 (NIV) says, “There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end it leads to death,” Phillips pointed out.
“I am going to show you that this belief about happiness can lead you down a slippery slope, and after suffering from a long and painful fall, you’ll come to the conclusion that it is awful,” he said.
Using “six quick truths,” Phillips described the progression of the slippery slope.
– Without a belief in absolute truth, the truth is defined by whatever makes me happy.
– When the bottom line is my happiness, happiness becomes the standard by which I judge my actions.
– Whatever makes me happy must be right.
– Since God wants me happy, anything that doesn’t make me happy must be bad.
– If that’s the case, then discomfort, sufferings, obstacles can’t be God’s will, because I ain’t happy when those things happen.
– Without knowing it I begin (to bow) to the false gods of comfort, money, things.
“I don’t even realize it,” he said, “but by the end, I have ended up at the bottom of this slippery slope.”
Phillips then shared what he called a countercultural statement.
“This is it. Are you ready? God doesn’t want you happy,” he said. “Oh, snap, no, he didn’t just say that?”
Yes, Phillips said, continuing to explain that God does not want happiness in three different cases.
– God doesn’t want you to be happy when it causes you to do something wrong or unwise. “You can’t put happiness above your holiness ? or becoming more like Christ ? or you lose.”
– God doesn’t want you to be happy when it is based on the things in this world. “In the end, man, it always leaves you just slightly empty; because the world and its desires just pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”
– God doesn’t want you happy; God wants you blessed. “Happiness comes from happenings, things that happen; but blessed comes straight out of God’s hand. The Bible says that in His presence is the fullness of joy.”
“The truth is ? not the true-ish ? you were made for a relationship with God, and that’s it,” Phillips said. “If you are spending time with Him daily, you are spending time talking with Him daily, you’re reading His Word daily, then you will be blessed beyond happy. Like the fish, you are made for that water, baby, and that water is full on relationship with God.”
Bright highlighted for the youth other true-ish ideas that have permeated American culture.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere. What’s true for you may not be true for me. Don’t push Christian beliefs on me; I don’t accept that a loving God would send someone to hell. If you believe that Jesus is the only way to God, then you must be one of the most uneducated, bigoted, narrow-minded people to ever live on the earth. If someone is really seeking to discover God, and you’re genuine about that, then all the paths lead to the same.
“Those are the kinds of statements that our culture is making,” Bright said. “The culture will tell you for you to put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ is to commit intellectual suicide. The presence of faith is not the absence of reason. Our culture tells you the opposite.”
Many of the missionary youth have lived overseas much of their lives and have had little or no exposure to the postmodern concepts of relativism and subjectivism that are prevalent in today’s American culture.
Bright explained that relativism is basically the idea that there is no such thing as absolute truth or right and wrong.
“Here’s a presumed truth: there is one and only one way to God. Now as Christians, we know that is the truth. But for the sake of argument, let’s just say that is a presumed truth. The exact opposite of that truth is that there are many ways to God,” Bright said. “Folks, I don’t live in your world, but I’m telling you in North America, this is real. The predominant way of thinking is one can know God if they only seek Him in a sincere way. Now how you choose to seek Him doesn’t really matter. It’s all about being sincere. It’s all about being humble and real, being transparent.
“That is a lie that Satan has used against our culture. He is using it against your generation, and it is destructive,” Bright said. “Do you see kind of how that works? (It’s) not (that) the only way for you to get to God is to set yourself on fire; it’s nothing that outrageous. It’s truth, and then he just massages it and twists it and changes it, and guess what? He has turned it into something that is true-ish.”
With subjectivism, an individual has the right to determine what is right or wrong without submitting his judgment to any outside authority beyond himself, Bright said.
“Basically, the idea is ‘I’m the boss. I make the rules,'” he said. “But what happens when our two belief systems are in conflict with each other? Who’s right? That’s the problem. When there is no authority, what you say is right may be in conflict with what he or she says is right. – We do need authority.”
Some of the missionary youth are recent high school graduates or rising seniors who will be attending college in the United States this fall or next. Bright and Phillips intended for the messages to prepare them to face their own culture.
“Some of you may sit in a freshman philosophy class and you may cover some of this stuff, and they may say there is no such thing as absolute truth,” Bright said. “Now I just want you to make one observation. Here he (the professor) just made an absolute statement. Do you get that? Do you see the irony?”
“Truth is not a what; it’s a who,” Bright said. “Truth is Jesus Christ.”
Arrested and bound, Jesus, responding to the Roman official who would decide whether He lived or died, declared, “Everyone on the side of truth listens to Me.” To that, Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
“The way you decide to answer that question is one of the most, if not the most, significant things that will form your life,” Bright said. “And it doesn’t matter what Mom or Dad say, how they answer that question. It doesn’t matter how your denomination – answers that question. It comes down to how you answer that question.”
“I’m not going to assume that just because you are an MK (missionary kid) that you love the Lord,” he said. “I think one of the reasons He has called us together is for us to love each other enough to maybe ask some hard questions-. If you believe that Jesus came to proclaim the truth and you believe that we are called as His followers to also proclaim the truth, does your life reflect that?”
During the week, two missionary youth accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior and a third followed Him in believer’s baptism.
*Name changed. Goldie Frances is a Southern Baptist missionary serving as a writer in South Asia.
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