Council Grove Christian Church

6/10/26
Servants of God,
“Where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking
 and all the children are above average.”
-Garrison Keillor, describing Lake Wobegon
 
“Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished.
And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.”
-Acts 4:13
 
The humorist Garrison Keillor created a fictional hometown called Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. He said that the name comes from an Indian word meaning “…the place we waited all day in the rain [for you].” Keillor would tell stories about the people and events in this small town in his sincere yet sinical manner that was both comforting and convicting. Many of his listeners and readers came to believe the place was real. Well, in the way good fiction is real, it was. We all live in Lake Wobegon or at least we are tempted to.
 
Keillor’s line that in Lake Wobegon “…all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average” has led those who study human psychology and behavior to talk about the “Lake Wobegon effect.” They speak of it as “illusory superiority”. There is an inescapable human tendency to overestimate our own abilities. It is easy for us to see in others. The idea that everything is bigger (and therefore better) in Texas comes to mind. So does the notion that those with a “college education” are destined unalterably to better lives. How about the idea that “our little town” or city or community is the exception to crime, bigotry, or poor government schools. It is easy to live in an illusion. Thinking that “Pride Month” is a good thing illustrates the point. As Pastor Callahan pointed out in his most recent sermon, to glorify what God calls an abomination is wicked.
 
The founders of America, particularly the Puritans of New England, took a healthy yet critical view of human nature. They read and believed the Bible.  They took seriously the biblical teaching that humans are glorious but fallen beings who needed both personal spiritual rescue and a righteous human government to keep them in check. The Puritans were not perfect, but they knew that an unrestrained people are both idolatrous and dangerous. They grasped the concept that Jesus Christ’s saving mission made it possible for a person to be freed from the bondage of human pride and prejudice. They knew that only by living in accord with a divine order could humans live respectfully and safely with one another.
 
To them, education had one primary purpose: to ensure the citizens of the colony could read scripture. They believed that a proper understanding of God and the human condition was essential to all other understanding. They believed that a true understanding of math, science and history could only be understood with the aid of divine revelation. They believed that good citizens are necessary before there can be good government.
 
Our nation is now dominated by the foolish notion that there is no God who has a standard we must live by. Added to this is the consistently disproven belief that with enough government spending  every ill can be solved. There is no evidence that things have gotten better for Americans since we dismissed God from our educational institutions and from society at large.
 
Jane Austen, the author of the novel Pride and Prejudice noted that vanity and pride are different things. Pride has to do with our illusionary view of ourselves; vanity has to do with the illusion we want others to have about us. The Bible destroys both these sins with reality. In truth there is no place this side of heaven like Lake Wobegon. Not our town. Not our family. Not our church.
 
When Americans humble ourselves and receive God’s true evaluation of our condition and repent and turn to Christ alone as our savior and the one who can restore us to our intended purpose, we will stop living in Lake Wobegon and start living meaningful and productive lives in the real world. America needs a great spiritual awakening and you and I must work and pray for exactly that by beginning with a biblical evaluation of our own illusions of superiority.
 
Blessings,
 
Pastor John
Coram Deo