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Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

The Crisis Of Discernment Today

Bible Access Without Bible Reading

Survey Findings And A Key Claim

What Scripture Says About Sin

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Alright, welcome to a new week of the Daily Blade. So there seems to be a new crisis every day, right? So if you open up your Instagram or if you open up Twitter or you go to the news or something like that, there's some sort of environmental crisis, or maybe the newest crisis is gas prices, or oh my gosh, immigration, and oh, we have wars and rumors of wars. So there are plenty of crises to go around. But since the latter part of last year, I've spent a lot of time thinking about one of the worst crises plaguing humanity right now, and it's this a crisis of discernment. A crisis of discernment. And what I mean by that is we are existing in a time with so much information and so much confusion with that information, a lot of it driven by algorithms and all the way up to intervention by foreign actors. And it's actually wreaking havoc on the minds of people in modernity. And with the coming ubiquity of things like artificial intelligence coupled with quantum computing, I only see this issue getting worse, way worse, actually. And look, Christians aren't immune to this at all. In fact, my contention is that the crisis of discernment is affecting Christians in a much deeper way than it is everybody else. And that's because we live in a time in history, thank God, where access to the word of God has never been easier. We have free and cheap Bibles all over the place. We've got free Bible apps, we got Bible websites, we got auto-translate programs and apps so we can even read the Word of God in our own native language, even if we have an obscure language that we speak. And yet, even though Christians around the globe, and especially in the West, have more access to the Bible than ever before, we're reading it less and less. And there are a lot of reasons for this. There are people that think, hey, we don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we go to church occasionally. We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because our pastor does, right? We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we listen to Christian podcasts, because we we've read it before, right? You know, we know what it says, and because we at least sometimes read it and try to understand it, right? Like we just we just think that we already kind of know what's going on there. But in 2025, Legioner Ministries and Lifeway partnered to do something called the state of theology, okay? So they surveyed people that self-described as evangelicals. And one of the statements that those surveyed had to indicate agreement with in order to take the survey was that they believe, quote, the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe, unquote. But the results actually prove that a large portion of evangelicals actually don't believe that because they affirm things that the Bible does not. So this week on the Daily Blade, I'm going to present some of the statements that evangelicals believe according to that survey, and then we're going to see what the Bible has to say about it. So the State of Theology survey found that 64% of evangelicals agree with the following statement. And 53% of evangelicals agree with the statement everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature. So it should be really sobering that a majority of evangelicals believe that man is good by nature. But here's what the Bible has to say about that. Psalm 51, 5, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. So this verse from David directly dismantles the idea that we somehow become sinful later, you know, after our first moral choice. Like that's not a thing. Like we are sinful creatures from the very beginning of our existence. Like we are literally born into wickedness. And then we have Romans 5, verses 18 and 19. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. So these verses from Paul take us all the way back to the Garden of Eden and to the doctrine of original sin. And the one trespass of our federal head, which is Adam, made us all sinners. And it is a status that is conferred to us, right? It's not a behavior that we earned. So we literally arrive into this world as depraved sinners. And then one last verse, Ephesians 2, actually we'll do verses one through three here. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. So, guys, in these verses, Paul lays out that we have an inborn condition, okay? That by our very nature we're not good, and we deserve the wrath of God, and it's not because we racked up a bunch of sins along the way, it's because we were born in a condemnable state, not a state of innocence. So make sure you listen the rest of the week as we continue exploring the current crisis of discernment.

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