IS AMERICA ON THE CUSP OF A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?

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David Closson, director of the Centre for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, thinks that the measurable rise in popularity of religious and Bible apps is a sign that America may be on the cusp of a spiritual awakening.

At the same time, America is deeply divided, yet there is no single conflict at the core of the discord. Instead, an ideological divide is widening at an alarming pace. We have seen “cancel culture,” which initially aimed to suppress opposing voices, evolve into an “assassination culture,” where some openly call for the violent elimination of adversaries. Perhaps this is the reason why young people are looking for something better: hope in a world consumed with hate.

“I’m encouraged by the growing popularity of faith-based apps like YouVersion and Hallow,” Closson told TWS. “As someone who works closely on cultivating a biblical worldview in the next generation, I see this as more than a digital trend — it could be a sign that something deeper is stirring. The political and cultural ‘vibe shift’ we’ve all sensed might actually point to a spiritual awakening. People are looking for clarity, truth, and hope in a confusing world, and many are turning — or returning — to faith as the foundation for that. I believe this hunger for meaning could very well be connected to a deeper worldview shift that could signal the beginning of revival in our nation.”

The surge in religious app popularity is coinciding with a marked rise in the sales of print Bibles, with sales up 22% as of last fall (compared to the same period the previous year), which is being partially attributed to a jump in first-time buyers.

Observers say the resurgence in faith can be partially attributed to — of all things — the ubiquity of phones and the increasing popularity of religious apps like Hallow. In a profile on the explosive growth of the Catholic app published Saturday on The Free Press, 39-year-old “Sarah,” a fallen away Catholic, says she had hit rock bottom after she embarked on an affair and found herself estranged from her husband and three children. Alone in a Chicago hotel room after binging on drugs and alcohol, she offered a desperate prayer to God for help. Days later, she happened upon an Instagram ad for Hallow featuring Hollywood actor Mark Wahlberg, inviting people to pray the rosary. After downloading the app and listening to morning prayer routines, short sermons, a guided “examination of conscience,” and a multitude of other resources, she sensed a change beginning to happen in her.

Months later, Sarah had moved back in with her family and began therapy with her husband. Sarah is now a cantor at her church and regularly goes to confession. “She is convinced God used Hallow to save her soul, her marriage, her career — perhaps even her life.”

As of now, Hallow has been downloaded 23 million times since its creation in 2018. In February of last year on Ash Wednesday, Hallow became the first religious app to ever reach the number one spot in Apple’s App Store. The app once again reached number one on Ash Wednesday this year. Sarah told The Free Press that the reason for the app’s massive growth is because there are a multitude of people like her who are “starved for connection, for meaning” and “starved for God.”

Hallow is far from the only religious app to see unprecedented growth over the last year. Bible Chat, “an AI chatbot trained exclusively on the Bible,” has been downloaded seven million times since 2023 and was second only behind Google Translate in the Reference category. On January 5, the first Sunday of this year, almost 800,000 people installed the Bible app YouVersion, with 18.2 million people opening the app that same day.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as persecution of Christians increases as we enter the tribulation and extreme tribulation of the last seven years before Jesus returns to restore righteousness.

MANY THRIVING METAVERSES

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In October 2021, Facebook (FB) announced what was arguably the largest corporate change in its 20-year history. Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team had decided to go all in on “the metaverse.” So much so that the company decided to change its name to Meta (META) and rebrand entirely.

Here’s what the company’s announcement stated…

The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together – and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.

Meta’s timing to focus on “the” metaverse – one it hadn’t created yet – was costly. Meta’s share price collapsed 73% from the time of the announcement through November 2022. The stock then languished there for several months into the new year. It meant that there was no immediate way to monetize this massive multibillion-dollar investment it was making. And the worst part? It diverted its entire corporate focus to its metaverse initiatives at precisely the same time the world of artificial intelligence was absolutely booming with breakthroughs.

It went all in too early on a technology that was not ready to be monetized… and it paid the price. That November (2022), Meta cut its workforce by 11,000 (13%) to reel in costs. By March 2023, it announced more job cuts – another 10,000 positions – and that it would be shifting its focus away from the metaverse and heavily into large language models and generative AI.

Many Thriving Metaverses

What drove Zuckerberg to make the move to Meta? There were already several prominent metaverses thriving with activity, growing exponentially and wildly profitable… and Zuckerberg wanted to be one of them.

Fortnite, a massive multiplayer online social game, is a perfect example. Fortnite has grown into a metaverse with more than 500 million registered players and about 220 million monthly active players.

The Fortnite metaverse has already generated more than $26 billion in revenue through March 2024 and is one of the most popular games in history.

Fortnite has its own currency, V-bucks, and its own developer ecosystem that allows creators to build new games and metaverses within the Fortnite ecosystem. Fortnite is owned by private tech company Epic Games which was last valued at $31.5 billion in 2022.

Equally as impressive as Fortnite, if not more so, is publicly traded Roblox (RBLX) which now has 380 million monthly active users. While Roblox graphics may not be as flashy as Fortnite’s, it is impressive in the scale of its universe with 79.5 million daily active players. And where Roblox excels over Fortnite is in its remarkably vibrant developer community that builds different games and new worlds within the Roblox metaverse. Roblox has about 2.5 million developers working with its metaverse. Those community developers made more than $410 million in the first half of this year alone. The Roblox metaverse is a fully functioning online world with branding, advertising, e-commerce, gaming, and its own currency of course – Robux.

Last week was an exciting week for the company as it had its annual developers conference which gave us a view on the future of metaverse technology… I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that the future of the Metaverse is all about artificial intelligence and generative AI.

Roblox gives its users and developers the ability to apply generative AI in designing a character for the game using simple text prompts. But this is just scratching the surface of what Roblox will be enabling. The company is leaning into multimodal AI that will enable not just image generation, but animation, work in 3D, software programming, and eventually video generation.

Roblox’s AI-powered metaverse strategy is already working extremely well. The company is now valued at $27 billion and will generate about $4.2 billion in revenue this year and more than $500 million in free cash flow. Compare that to Meta’s Reality Labs division which generated only $1.9 billion in revenue last year at a massive multibillion-dollar loss.

Meta would have been better off acquiring Roblox and its AI-powered metaverse from the start instead of spending at least $46.5 billion starting from scratch. Either way, the employment of generative AI is going to be a boom for gaming and metaverse development that will empower not only companies to accelerate development… but also developers and creators to take part in filling these metaverses with interactions, transactions, commerce, and social interactions. 

Is it any wonder that this generation that was taught evolution is true and there is no God would spend their time creating their own world in the metaverse? As there is no meaning or purpose to life on Earth and this world is a mess anyway, we will create our own world where we are in control. Either that or the rising suicide rates for teens indicate they decide to end their lives.

The Bible, God’s Word is a book of prophecy and thankfully God has revealed in detail what will happen in the world before Jesus returns to restore righteousness. What we see happening in the world, particularly with the younger generation is exactly what is prophesied. Also, the nation God established for His purposes, Israel, is the centre of the world’s attention with antisemitism rampant, once again exactly as the Bible prophecies would occur before Jesus second coming to Earth.

HOW A WORLD WITHOUT GOD FUNCTIONS

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Christ the King has been forced out of the public square in secular Western society. In His stead, the masses now do exactly as C.S. Lewis predicted and worship celebrities. Within the USA, Taylor Swift towers above them all. According to a new survey, country star-turned-pop icon Taylor Swift’s endorsement would likely influence 18% of voters in America, including about 30% of voters under the age of 35.

Without a God to worship, the public will inevitably worship lesser gods. This lesson is written throughout history: the ancients would worship and sacrifice to Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Horus, and countless others. Without the revelation of the one true God, Perfection Himself, these false gods were but exaggerations of common human strengths and weaknesses.

Now, in the ages since Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, a new sort of god has come to be. No more can men conjure gods in their imaginations, unseen beings responsible for thunder and lightning; instead, the public now worships those among them who are deemed to have transcended common human limitations: billionaire businessmen, cutting-edge scientists, and talented performers are all glorified in God’s place.

Under the tutelage of the Serpent, man has usurped the throne of God — if only in his own mind. Where God invites man to become one with Him, man’s new idea of god promises that every man can become a god, and on his own terms, not on Someone Else’s.

Without Christ at the center of the public square, man now gobbles poison, and Swift is peddling it with her views on abortion and sex. In fact, Swift’s very few political statements directly contradict the noble notion of self-sacrifice inherent in a Christ-centered public square: endorsing the killing of one’s own children for whatever reason — career, reputation, economic ease, or just consequence-free sex — and supporting the sterile LGBT agenda, incapable of producing children or building families, in direct conflict with God’s design for human sexuality. Like the rest of the cultural elite horde, Swift buys into, repackages, and mass-distributes the Luciferian agenda. But unlike the rest of the cultural elite horde, her influence may be enough to alter the outcome of an election.

Finally, there is an alarming degree of political illiteracy prevalent among her fans. Self-declared “Swifties” willing and ready to base their vote on the pop star’s endorsement are not informing their political worldview but allowing someone else to form it for them. One politician’s endorsement of another is a means of informing the political worldview of citizens, a way of saying, “If my policies align with your priorities, then consider voting for this guy, there’s a lot of overlap.” But if swaths of Americans are prepared to vote for a candidate based only on one individual’s recommendation, they are not bearing in mind the God-given responsibility they have to form their consciences well and vote accordingly. They are not bearing in mind God’s commandments and designs and how those ought to be lived out in a virtuous society.

The ”democratic” part of our democratic republic is increasingly falling under the control of a handful of powerful, uber-wealthy cultural elites who dictate where political power goes and how it is exercised. Sounds an awful lot like tyranny.

Where we are in history is given in detail in end times Biblical prophecies. We are fast approaching the prophesied last seven years before Jesus returns to Earth. Lawlessness will abound and persecution of Christians will intensify. Are you ready for Jesus return?

Living Eternal Now – Ready for Jesus’ Return available on Amazon.

Taken from an article in The Washington Stand: The Swiftian Candidate: How a Pop Star Might Impact the Presidential Election by S.A. McCarthy (news writer for The Washington Stand)

GOOD NEWS STORY – ON FIRE FOR GOD

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‘On fire for God’: Over 11,000 students attend worship event to pray, celebrate the Lord

Amid ongoing concerns about the younger generation’s religious dedication, thousands of students attended a worship event aimed at equipping youth with the knowledge of Jesus.

The latest Motion Student Conference, which concluded on July 29 at the Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Alabama, hosted over 11,000 students representing 230 churches from 31 states and six countries. In addition, 2,000 volunteers assisted with organizing the event.

Motion is organized by the Church of the Highlands, a congregation with multiple locations throughout Alabama and Georgia. Attendees ranged in age from middle school to college and participated with their youth leaders.

Mark Pettus, president of Highlands College and associate pastor at Church of the Highlands, told The Christian Post in an emailed statement that Motion exists to empower a generation to live out Ephesians 2:10, which states:

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

“It provides an environment where students discover their identity in Christ and set their faith in motion to do the good things He planned for them,” Pettus stated. 

During the conference, students had an opportunity to attend sessions featuring speakers and worship band members before breaking into community groups to “unpack” what they learned, Pettus added. 

“Motion is more than a conference and more than bands and speakers,” Pettus continued. “It’s about a generation of young people empowered by Jesus, equipped to make a difference, and living out their faith.”

This good news story follows my recent post which reported that about half of Gen Z respondents in the American Bible Society’s State of the Bible USA 2023 study agreed with the statement that “the message of the Bible has transformed my life.” Among Gen Z adults between the ages of 18 and 21, 49% agreed that the Bible had a transformative effect on their lives. That number rose to 52% among Gen Z respondents between the ages of 22 and 26.

As we move towards the last seven years prior to Jesus’ return, Biblical prophecy tells us that persecution of Christians will increase. Tribulation, even great tribulation is ahead when the Antichrist declares himself to be God in the new temple yet to be erected in Jerusalem. I do hope that Highlands College know where we are in Biblical history and therefore end times prophecies so that they prepared these young people for the escalating tribulation that is coming.

GEN Z LIKE THE GENERATION THAT AROSE AFTER JOSHUA DIED

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A 2018 study from Barna Group found that Gen Z is the least Christian generation in American history as just 4% holds a biblical worldview, with more teens identifying as agnostic, atheist, or not religiously affiliated than previous generations. “Gen Z is different because they have grown up in a post-Christian, post-modern environment where many of them have not even been exposed to Christianity or to church. So that is a really unique shift,” Brooke Hempell, Barna’s senior vice president of research, said at the survey’s release event. “There are a lot of churches that are empty in this country. Gen Z is the one who is really showing the fruit of that. There are many of them [who] are a spiritual blank slate. For the first time in our nation’s history, that is more and more common.”

What is happening with the Gen Z generation reminds me of what happened when Joshua died. The Millennials (Gen Y) were brought up in schools and universities that taught evolution (billions of years) not creation (six thousand years and a worldwide flood) as the origin of the Cosmos, is it any wonder that the next generation, Gen Z no longer believes the Bible and the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.“ Judges 2:8-10

The generation that lived in Joshua’s time knew what God had accomplished through Joshua but they were no longer living in obedience to God’s commandments. Hence the next generation saw no evidence of God in their lives, in fact, the opposite.

“And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt.” Judges 2:11-12

Jesus told us that during the last days before His return there will be a great falling away from Biblical faith which is exactly what we see happening in our day. The following was told by Jesus to the disciples prior to Pentecost as Jesus knew the persecution of the early church that would follow.

“I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away… Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.” John 16:1, 3-4

Jesus told us that the same “falling away” would happen to the church in the last days before He returns in Matthew 24.

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” Matthew 24:9-12