Christians have never had more sermons, clips, debate recaps, and “stay away from that guy” channels in their pockets. And somehow we have never been worse at telling good from evil without a narrator doing it for us.
That is the charge Nate Sala of Wise Disciple laid down on September 17. He makes Christian content for a living. He is not asking anyone to burn the podcasts. He is saying the goal of teaching cannot stop when the video ends. If it does, you did not grow. You just got fed.
False teachers are real. Bad theology is real. The Bible tells you to test what you hear. None of that is in dispute. The problem is what happened after the church outsourced that testing to a feed.
A Minefield With No Map
Sala’s picture of the modern church is ugly because it is accurate. A believer finds a pastor who actually opens the Bible. Then a video appears. Stay away from that guy. So they switch. Then another video appears. That one is compromised too. Shared a stage. Used a phrase. Liked a tweet. Before long, following Christ feels like picking your way through a minefield. One wrong sermon and you are contaminated.
If consuming more Christian information automatically made us more discerning, we should be the most discerning generation of Christians who ever lived. But that’s not what’s happening.
What is happening is suspicion without skill. People can recite the blacklist. They cannot explain the charge from Scripture. They know the names they have been told not to trust. They do not know why. That is not discernment. That is discipleship by rumor.
Hebrews already diagnosed it. Solid food belongs to the mature, “who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.” Those believers had teaching. They had time. By then they ought to have been teachers. Instead they were dull of hearing and back on milk. Access to truth did not produce grown men and women. It produced dependents.
You do not get strong watching other people lift weights. A good coach can show you the form. He cannot do the reps.
Your Character Is Doing the Judging
Here is the part the clip-and-condemn crowd hates. Discernment is not a hobby for people with sharp tongues. It is a moral faculty. The kind of person you are becoming decides what you can see.
Paul does not leap straight to a renewed mind in Romans 12. He starts with a living sacrifice. Present your body. Stop being squeezed into the world’s mold. Then the mind is renewed. Then you can prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Holiness first. Clarity second. Reverse the order and you get a Christian who can spot a heresy in a stranger’s clip and cannot spot pride in his own chest.
Jesus ran into that type in Matthew 12. The Pharisees knew the Torah. They kept the Sabbath like it was a second god. The disciples plucked grain. The experts condemned the guiltless. Christ told them they had never understood the line, “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.” Knowledge without mercy does not protect the flock. It puts innocent people in the dock and calls it faithfulness.
That spirit is all over Christian social media. Outrage trains the algorithm. Suspicion feels like holiness. Mercy looks like compromise. And a generation that cannot distinguish those two will call evil what God has not called evil, and call good whatever their favorite channel already approved.
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.
Love Has to Grow With the Knowledge
Paul’s prayer in Philippians 1 is not that the church would get better at compiling dossiers. He prayed that their love would abound more and more in knowledge and in all judgment, so they could approve things that are excellent and be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ, filled with the fruits of righteousness.
Love. Knowledge. Judgment. Fruit. If your “discernment” produces a colder heart, a shorter fuse, and a longer enemies list, you did not mature. You got a hobby that flatters your flesh.
Sala calls the other disease spiritual obesity. You have ingested hours of Christian information. You cannot open the Book, think carefully, and render a judgment that is actually rooted in the text. Teachers can help. They cannot replace the work. At some point you have to become capable of testing a claim yourself. If you can only repeat someone else’s conclusions, you did not grow up. You changed channels.
The Next Middleman Is a Machine
This would be bad enough if the only substitute for Scripture were other Christians with cameras. It is not.
Barna research found nearly half of practicing Christians would trust artificial intelligence with their own spiritual growth. About a third say an AI’s spiritual advice is as trustworthy as a pastor’s. At the same time, 94 percent of pastors and 83 percent of practicing Christians worry the same machines will misinterpret Scripture. They are afraid of the tool. They are still handing it the question.
That is the same muscle going slack. First we let a discernment channel tell us who is safe. Now a chatbot will tell us what the verse means. Both can be useful in their place. Neither can be your senses. Neither will stand for you when you give an account.
Wolves still wear wool. They still need to be named. The answer is not a ceasefire with false teaching. The answer is a church that can open the Word without waiting for a thumbnail to tell it what it just read. Milk is for infants. Solid food is for people who have practiced.
Put the phone down. Pick up the Book. Do the reps.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.