Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. How long can a civilization endure once it's detached from

its roots, most importantly from the root of truth itself? That questions at the heart of the recent

documentary Truth Rising, a film produced by a focus on the

family in the Colson Center for Christian World View. Oz Guinness, one of the world's leading

apologist and my co-hosts in this documentary, often refers to the West as a cut-flower civilization.

In other words, it's been detached from the essential truths that rooted and nourished it, and so the

West cannot survive.

When an entire civilization abandons the ideals that have nourished it, there are certainly

consequences. And that's why most civilizations we think about are subjects of history books,

their artifacts stock the shelves of museums. History can tell us that a civilization died. Sociology might even tell us

why, but neither helps us know what it means for us to be called to a particular pivotal time in a

civilization's history and how we should live. But that is where we are. And so we have to choose.

Will we be agents of renewal or complicit in the decline? For followers

of Christ, it's not a strategic choice. It's an issue of obedience. We're called to this time

in place, not by accident, but by God's design. Every Christian has to decide then, will I obey

the call of Christ in this moment? Or will I shrink back? In truth Rising, and now in the accompanying Truth Rising, the study, which is now available

at colsoncenter.org slash study, God's game plan for this civilizational moment is summarized

in four essential concepts, hope, truth, identity, and calling.

The very first lesson of truth rising this study deals with the essential concept of hope. When the Bible speaks about hope, it's not in the sense

of wishful thinking, as we often use it today. The Bible doesn't speak of hoping for some circumstance

to change. Biblical hope, both for this moment and for the

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