A friend was lamenting how today’s music doesn’t measure up to older stuff and I made the point that our society is losing all biblical orientation and that’s why there’s more and more dumb, disgusting garbage pervading all art forms.

As I explained to him, a friend had just emailed me a very sobering new study that says only 4% of Americans now carry what is called a “biblical worldview.”

According to the study, done by Barna Research Group, this worldview is defined as having a firm belief in six Christian tenets: “Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; God is the
all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it
today; salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned; Satan is real; a
Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other
people; and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.”

When I forwarded this email to the friend complaining about today’s music, he emailed back that he found the study “a little baffling” and that he suspected if they had eliminated or modified two of the qualifiers—‘salvation . . . cannot be earned’ and ‘the Bible is accurate in all its teachings’—the researchers would have uncovered an
“enormously higher percentage of Christians in the population.”

He went on to explain that “many of us (including, if I read him right, C.S. Lewis) believe that salvation is at least partially earned (a conclusion implicit in the report; presumably, one way to earn it is to adopt a ‘biblical worldview’).”

As to the Bible being "correct in all its teachings," my friend wrote, “There are a great many Christians, myself included, who value and revere the Bible without regarding it either as totally accurate or infallible.”

My first thought upon digesting his response was why would he say he reveres a book when he is definitively rejecting one of its most basic teachings in the most general sense?

It’s like me saying I respect my Toyota car manual but I don’t subscribe to it at all when it says I must use only unleaded gas.

If there is one overriding, clear-cut message in the Apostle Paul’s writings (who tells the reader he got all his information from Jesus Christ) it’s that there’s NOTHING we can do to earn our spot in heaven and avoid hell. It is a 100% free gift from God and it is 100% dependant ONLY on us placing our faith in Jesus Christ, accepting that He is God’s Son, He died to pay for our sins and He was resurrected.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; Not of works, lest any man should boast,” Paul summarizes in Ephesians 2:8-9.
One good way of putting this basic truth is in the book, “Satan’s Policy of Evil,” written by Keith Blades.

Blades writes, "Grace means doing someone a favor, which means you are disregarding what they deserve or merit, and you are giving them what they do not deserve
and/or could not merit. Grace, therefore, excludes the considerations of
one's works, and deals with someone solely on the basis of the love and
mercy that is in the giver. In fact, grace is grace because it operates in
spite of the works of the one it is dealing with. It flatly refuses them,
knowing already the unacceptable nature of any works that might or could be
offered. Grace, therefore, is the opposite of works."