Healthy plants have deep roots and strong pillars have solid foundations. If we are to be Christians who are deeply rooted in Christ and built on the solid Rock, then we need more than mere sound bites. One means that the Lord has used throughout church history to strengthen His people’s faith and witness is reading good books. This book review series is identifying books that can serve as shovels that help you dig deeper in your Christian life.
Book: THE LIES WE ARE TOLD, THE TRUTH WE MUST HOLD – Worldviews and Their Consequences by Sharon James.
Do you ever find yourself baffled by the world around you? This book by Sharon James helps the ordinary reader make sense of what is happening today and provides tools for combating the chaos of ideas with truths from God’s Word. Carl Trueman hits the nail on its head in the foreword, when he states: “In this book she achieves a remarkable feat: she addresses the lies that our culture currently exalts as truth and does so in a way that crosses the generational divide and will be helpful both to young people and those who wish to understand them and help them think through the deepest challenges of our day.”
Many of us want to understand the world around us, but are easily intimidated as we try to wade through swathes of cultural analysis. Where should we begin? To help us get started, Sharon James gives us the substance of the book in a simple outline, titled, ‘Chapter Summaries.’ In the first chapter, she deals with the consequences of accepting evolutionary theory beginning in the 19th century – if there is no Creator God, there is no absolute morality. In the second chapter, she demonstrates how the denial of God led to various inhumane horrors, including the death camps of the 20th century. In chapter three, she shows how the godless philosophies of Nietzsche, Freud, and Margaret Sanger promised liberation but resulted in the bondage of broken families and enabled the strong to exploit the weak. In the wake of this nightmare, “confidence that our problems would be solved by human reason and science collapsed into the radical doubt of postmodernism,” which she addresses in the fourth chapter, where she explores the ill-effects of critical theory. The fifth chapter explains that critical theory has moved from universities to infect society. This gave rise to the West being thought of as inherently evil (racist, patriarchal, capitalist), leading to efforts to destroy societal structures such as the family and law and order, smashing statues, and revising or even negating history altogether. In chapter six, the author explains how this started to creep into churches, so that God’s ultimate truth is denied and the authority of Scripture is rejected and eternal judgment is mocked (pp. 13-14). She sums up the first half of her book, “The LIES We Are Told,” with the Scripture verse: “The fool says in his heart: ‘There is no God’ Ps. 14:1” (p. 25).
How are you falling for Satan’s lie that “denying God brings freedom”? Why does this always lead to destructive bondage? We will explore the positive way forward in the next post.
THE LIES WE ARE TOLD, THE TRUTH WE MUST HOLD by Sharon James. Published by Christian Focus Publications, Ross-shire, Scotland, 2022. Softcover, 302 pages.
Buy this book by clicking here.
- This is adapted from Mrs. Ricky (Frederika) Pronk’s book reviews in The Messenger. She is a member of Grace Free Reformed Church in Brantford, Ontario and, together with her husband Rev. C. Pronk, is involved in Reformed Book Services