Do you trust God or just your identity politics?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, let's take a look at a video of a Christian influencer getting all misty about an AI video.

[00:00:13]>> I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

[00:00:16]>> So, folks always say this when they see something that they can't explain, but that we have long-standing and perfectly natural and widely accepted explanations for. In this case, it's just an AI video that includes a whale expelling air bubbles from its mouth that this content creator just didn't pick up on.

[00:00:40]>> And if I truly believe what the Bible says, >> you don't. Your identity politics have conditioned you to accept certain interpretations of what's in the Bible, but the majority of the things that are stated in the Bible, you don't believe at all. Some of them you vehemently vehemently reject and refuse to accept.

[00:01:01]But because your concern is really this socially mediated interpretive framework and not what's actually going on in the Bible, saying that you accept the Bible and all that it declares is an identity marker. And so to put that identity marker on display publicly, to pray on the street corner, so to speak, to be seen of men is a way that you can curate and maintain and enhance your standing within the community. And that public performance of that piety also helps to strengthen your belief in the sincerity and the conviction of that piety. So, it's a way for you to curate your own identity politics and make them stronger and at the same time try to convince other people that your convictions are sincere and are deeply held. And really they're just convictions about this socially mediated conceptual framework and ideology and worldview that is based in part on the Bible, but really is an ongoing negotiation between that identity and its received tradition and its social and historical and rhetorical context and its goals for the future. So it's an ever moving target >> that God literally knows the numbers of hairs on my head. Think about this. The Bible says he knits you together in your mother's womb. That he's sovereign over every grain of sand on the earth. That gives us a choice. Don't miss this. He's asking us through creation. Do we trust him enough to give him our whole heart?

[00:02:45]>> Or at least can you perform publicly that trust in that socially mediated version of God that your particular tradition or denomination or movement has negotiated out of the Bible. That's what this is all about. This is all about putting on display for others your piety so that you can feel better about your own piety. Feel like, "Oh, I do trust God enough. I am good enough. I am enough." And you can put on display what are called credibility enhancing displays which show to other people within your own identity that you're one of the real ones and that you are worth increased trust and increased access to power and resources >> to give him our whole life. Do we trust him enough believing that if he's the creator of the universe and he has a certain way of doing things even though we think me we might have a better way we don't have a universe.

[00:03:47]The dumbest thing we can do is to try to make our own truth.

[00:03:53]Copyright 2026 somebody else's version of the truth that I have been incentivized to propagate >> to live for me and what I want instead of trusting that his ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts cuz he created us and then we surrender everything to his word. No, you surrender everything to the interpretation of the word that you have decided to accept as authoritative and your neighbor will have a different interpretation and people in another country will have a different interpretation and people on the other side of the world will have a different interpretation because you don't have pure unmediated unadulterated access to what the word means. You only have interpretations and those interpretations are contingent socially, historically, rhetorically. They are based on how people understand what's going on in these texts in their own social and historical and rhetorical circumstances. So all versions of the truth are socially and historically and rhetorically contingent. So what you're talking about is just the version of the truth that you have decided to accept which is not isometric with the word.

[00:05:14]It's just a situationally emergent interpretation that most benefits you in this moment. When we look at creation, it's like begging us to trust him. And yet you trusted somebody else's madeup version of the truth that they created on a computer. It's begging us to surrender.

[00:05:36]>> What you're surrendering to is just your identity politics.

[00:05:41]>> It's why I send a free daily devotional every single >> No, I'm good. And the fit for this video is still spawn number one.