Welcome Aboard

Note: This commentary first aired on September 2, 1991. In light of the fifteenth anniversary of “BreakPoint,” we are reairing it today. Welcome to BreakPoint. Since this is our first broadcast, I’d like to begin by telling you what I hope to accomplish in the five minutes I’ll be spending with you on the air each day. I can do that best with a story. When my work keeps me holed up in my study all day, my wife, Patti, is my eyes and ears to the outside world. She monitors what’s on news and television, and then she fills me in at the end of the day. One day she simply couldn’t wait till the end of the day. She saw a program so jarring that she burst through the door of my study. “Come on,” she said. “You’ve got to see this.” She had been watching the Phil Donahue show. The guests that day were mothers talking about their children’s sex lives. How did they know about their children’s sex lives, you may ask. It turned out they were allowing their kids to engage in sexual activity right in their home, under the watchful parental eye. These families had told their kids that sex was not something done in the back seat of cars. It was safer and cleaner in one’s own bedroom. One family even came up with a special code: When the daughter stuck a piece of green tape to the bedroom door, that was the signal for “Keep Out—Intercourse in Progress.” Okay, you say, what do we expect from Donahue? Donahue, Oprah, Geraldo—they scour the earth for the most bizarre people to put on display. The programs are modern-day freak shows, just like the kinds of things I used to pay a nickel to go see when I was a kid. But what struck me most about the program was the audience reaction. While the mothers were explaining the modus operandi of parent-supervised sex, the audience was nodding sympathetically! It’s the attitude so common on [all of] these programs: If this is what you feel is right for you, who are we to judge? No one stands up and challenges it all. Oh sure, people in the audience will sometimes say, “I don’t feel comfortable about that.” But it’s phrased only in terms of what offends me personally. They simply aren’t asking the right questions. What are the right questions? Simple. Things like, What is truth? What is ultimately real? What are we living for? Unless we realize that there are such questions—that all through history the great pursuit of humanity has been for answers to these questions—then we [simply] flounder along, drifting with popular trends. As Christians we are often offended by the immorality portrayed on television, in films, and in tabloids. And rightly so. But I suggest that we should also be disturbed by something much deeper: that our culture has stopped asking the big questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Remember the bumper sticker a few years ago that said, “Jesus Is the Answer”? Well some wise guy shot back, “What’s the Question?” That was intended as a put down, of course. But it is precisely the point today. People no longer know what the great questions of life are. So this is what I hope to accomplish on BreakPoint: to ask those questions, to take the issues of the day and hold them up to examination in the light of God’s truth, to show that each issue reflects some facet of the big truths, the ultimate truths, that should guide our lives. Big answers for the big questions. I hope you’ll join us.  

For Further Reading and Information

Please donate online today to help Prison Fellowship continue to minister to prisoners and for BreakPoint to continue its biblical worldview ministry. Or call 1-877-322-5527. Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale, 1999). Charles Colson with Anne Morse, How Now Shall We Live? Devotional (Tyndale, 2004).

08/31/06