Over 100 years ago, because of the dangerously poor air quality in London, the word "smog" was coined. A combination of the words smoke and fog, it describes that filthy haze that hangs over many large cities in our world. It covers our buildings and monuments with grunge and blackens our lungs while we breath. More dangerous, however, is a spiritual smog that hangs over our communities. We have become so accustomed to it that we cannot see it. Although we feel it's effects daily we often do not recognize it. Our spiritual eyes burn and we have a hard time breathing with our spiritual lungs, but we have lived in the spiritual smog so long that we somehow have come to believe this normal. Smog was a word created by combining the words smoke and fog. Maybe we need another new word to express the spiritual smog in which we live. We live in a world draped in deadly spog, spiritual smog.
In 1892 nineteen people drowned in London by accidentally walking/falling into the Thames. The air quality was so bad they never saw the river. About that same time a newspaper article was written explaining that this was a natural phenomenon and had nothing to do with the coal that was being burned all over the city. Similarly we live in a fallen, broken world filled with the spog of sin and spiritual darkness. This is not normal. It is not how we were created to live. Unfortunately, as believers we sometimes excuse it by saying, "It's a sign of the end times." That may very well be, but wouldn't it be better to recognize the spog as a sign of a fallen world that desperately needs the cleansing wind of the Spirit and the light of a risen Savior?
Father, forgive me for getting too comfortable with the spog of my world, forgetting that the clean air of your gospel is our only hope. Give me fresh vision for the clean air of you gospel and a burden for a world blind to the spog that surrounds them.
By His grace,
Rick Weinert
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