EVERY AGE HAS ITS OWN PROBLEMS

The Christian finds himself today thrown into a strange and difficult world, full of peril and anxiety. He knows Christ, he believes in Him, and he cannot forget what Christ has done for him in his own life. On the basis of this knowledge and faith [the Christian] seeks to understand and adjust to the terrible questions and uncertainties of the times. He knows it is unworthy of him as a Christian to bewail his fate and exaggerate the challenges in the midst of which he is thrown. Dangerous world? -- yes. Unprecedented difficulties? -- certainly. Tremendous challenges? -- of course. But God does not love him less, nor has [God] singled him out for trial in a special furnace beyond his power to bear or to subdue. He remembers what Paul told the Corinthians and he understands it to be exactly for him: "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it" (I Corinthians 10:13). Every age has its own problems, every age its own burdens and complexities, and throughout man is fundamentally the same, able to know and rest in the truth or to rebel... "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8).

-- Charles Malik, former President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, in “Christ and Crisis,” 1962

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