DAYS OF NOAH: I am my father's son-in-law and my mother-in-law is my stepmother!

"And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all."

Luke 17:26-27

The April 12, 1993, issue of Newsweek unknowingly reported the signs of the times.

Bill Wyman, of The Rolling Stones, married his son's wife's daughter, a woman 34 years his junior. Her mother married Wyman's son, Stephan, a man 16 years her junior. That makes Stephan his father's son-in-law and his mother-in-law his stepmother.

No wonder Jesus made this prophetic comment: “And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it shall be also in the days of the Son of Man … .” Truly, those days are upon us!

Christianity, Illustrations,
Licentiousness, Religion

LICENTIOUSNESS: Writing our own hall passes!

“ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness” Jude 1:4

A few years ago, California Highway Patrol officers ticketed to a man on the one of their Interstate freeways. The officers observed a vehicle heading south toward San Diego, at freeway speed, with a lone driver and two legs hanging out from under the hood. It seems the carburetor linkage broke, so one steered and the other laid under the hood accelerating for his friend. The driver couldn’t believe he had been cited. [FxLine News, April 24, 1994]

This points out that relativism isn’t the only social ill we are dealing with today: licentiousness is another. Though the driver and his friend were going in the right direction, at the correct speed, they were driving the wrong way … just to get what they wanted.

Licentiousness is what I call “writing your own hall pass.” In our Jr. High School, we needed hall passes, signed by a teacher, to be in the halls during class time. In order to circumvent the rule, my friends and I stole a pad of passes and forged our teachers’ names. We did this for no other reason than that we wanted to do what we wanted, irrespective of right or wrong. [No, I’m not proud of what we did.]

Check the dictionary and you’ll see licentiousness is generally defined as “lacking moral discipline or ignoring legal or social restraint; having little or no regard for accepted rules or standards of behavior.”

Look around at the world today; you’ll be surprised at how many people are driving down the road of live with legs hanging out from under their hood.

Christianity, Illustrations,
Licentiousness, Religion

THERMOSTATS: And other things that set the pace!

“choose for yourselves whom you will serve”

Joshua 24:15

A thermometer reflects the temperature of the room; a thermostat adjusts the temperature for the room.

God has too many children who are more like thermometers than thermostats; what he needs is a house full of the latter.

Like Rip Van Winkle, the church is asleep … when it awakens the world will be so hostile to her that it will find itself an impotent representative of an omnipotent God.

John Curran said, “The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.”

Our culture reflects a nation running so hot on relativism, materialism, voyeurism and depravity, that it’s screaming for those who have the courage to march on the wall of opposition. We need those with guts enough to adjust our nation’s temperature, rather than giving in to the pressure to reflect it.

The church is imitating secular society at an alarming rate. Increasingly we are adopting secular views which seem good and feel good; gleaning, as it were, here and there, as the world’s spirit moves us, ignoring the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Truth!

Christianity, Church health,
Illustrations, Religion

EMOTIONS: Control central!

FOCUS OF THE WORLD! [2 Corinthians 10:3-5]

Emotion is defined as “a state of pending or present excitement, characterized by strong feelings, often with a tendency toward a definite kind of behavior,” e.g., anger, affection, depression, devotion, allegiance, love, etc.

When we see the American flag, it elicits a certain kind of emotion for Americans, something else for foreigner; when we see a fireman, policeman, or soldier, it results in a specific emotion; Easter scenes do the same for Christians; a child’s wedding or a loved one’s passing bring out a plethora of strong feeling; and certain hymns or choruses do the same. These are life and character building emotions.

Yet in this violent, deviant, self-obsessed world, with its collective focus three feet off the ground, we’re confronted with a glut of destructive emotions. The whole of our society seems to need "tenting," to exterminate the pests operating in the framework of our national and spiritual houses.

Reading what Paul said to the Corinthian church in his second letter, we rightly conclude the church, as a whole, has failed to take much thinking captive. He said:

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

Fortresses are going up faster than churches; graves are flooding with the rotting carcasses of the lost, faster than the saving of souls; and the rate of growth of biblical ignorance is only exceeded by the combined annual rate of the printing of Bibles.

Where the church's emotions ought to be running high with righteous indignation (abortion, homosexuality, pornography, deviance), we instead suffer rebellious indigestion.

Godliness

We are told that in many places in Indonesia, the tidal wave from the Christmas earthquake of 2004 off the coast of Sumatra came as a wall of water 30-50 feet high is many places.

Most people simply drowned; but witnesses are saying that a large number of them were battered to death or were cut to ribbons by the debris caught up in the water.

The godless forces of this age have become like a wall of water, climbing high over our heads. The debris they pick up on their rush to overwhelm us is battering the best parts of our existence and slicing the remainder into scrapes.

Lifestyles which allow no room for the elderly have fueled the “physician assisted suicide” movement. Lifestyles which allow no room for the inconvenience of children have fueled baby murders by the millions. Lifestyles which allow no room for personal responsibility have fueled the drug and pornography industries, leading to the ruin of countless thousands of lives.

What is going on here? No one person has the definitive answer but research is pointing back to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; where the questioning of God and life began, and where people began to look for salves for the guilt associated with their new wealth, toys, and lack of concern for others.

The former questioned the value of any non-humanistic philosophy, man became man’s new god; the latter fed the hubris and greed of man, leading to class distinctions along the lines of intellect and wealth.

One philosophy says, “If you can’t keep up, it must be your fault.” The other says, “If you’re poor or sick it isn’t our fault, we’ve worked hard for what we have. And no, you can’t have any of ours.”

Without Christianity interceding at every juncture the slaughter of “the least of these” would be worse than it is … you see, the destination of godlessness is human perfection, an unreachable objective.

The Caesars, the Hitlers, the Pol Pots, the Idi Amins, the Mao Zedongs, and our Islamo-fascists have revealed their "solution" for man’s problems, death to all who will not submit and serve their altar death.

Social Issues

Equally Hurt [1 John 2:15-17; other topics - Equality, Godliness, Roles, Sexes (Battle of), War (Cultural)]

A survey by MSNBC, September 1999, [1] asked the following question: are men really miserable? The survey offered four possible responses:

• You bet. They're expected to live to an impossible set of standards. (17%)
• No way. Men are just fine the way they are. (7%)
• It's all the feminists’ fault. (7%)
• Men and women have been equally hurt by a culture that values fame, power, and money above all. (69%)

The survey accompanied an article by Susan Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male, Wm. Morrow & Co., on how culture conspires to make men miserable. [2]

What I see revealed in the results of this unscientific survey is a lack of awareness and sensitivity on the part of the shakers-and-movers of our society, something seemingly not lacking among the general populace. I'm beginning to see that most Americans aren't as stupid or as relativistic or as materialistic as most politicians, entertainers, educators, media gurus, and society mucky-mucks make them out to be.

Clearly, most respondents are aware that we all share the blame for the appalling condition of our culture and that fame, power, and money are not the answers.

[Adapted from [1] approx. 5,300 responses as of 9/15/99; no margin of error was given, if any. [2] MSNBC, 9/15/99]


Nonetheless [Psalm 49:16-20; other topics - Evil, Perseverance, Regeneration, Tribulation]

The shootings at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Ft. Worth, Texas, reminded me of something I read a few years ago.

Wm. Bennett, Ronald Reagan’'s Secretary of Education, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, shared a discussion he had with a Washington DC cab driver. The cabby, a native of Africa, was in the nation‘s capitol doing grad work; he told Bennett when he finished his studies he was going home, where it would be safer for his kids. He said he didn't want his daughter viewed as a piece of meat; he also said he didn't want his son to be " the target of violence from the hands of other young males." He said, "It's more civilized where I come from!"

This is the opinion of an African man concerning the greatest nation on earth.

Bennett also relates how a young Polish girl, here on student exchange, said, "When I first came here, it was like going into a crazy world, but now I am getting used to it." She compared the two countries in this way: "In Warsaw, we would talk to friends after school, [then] go home and eat with our parents and then do four or five hours of homework but now I'm getting used to it. I'm going to Pizza Hut and watching TV and doing less work in school."

Bennett says, "Something has gone wrong with us." [1]

The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators points out that during the last 30 years our population has increased 41%; gross domestic product tripled; while social spending rose from $144 billion to $787 billion ... a five fold increase.

Those figures sound good, don't they? Well, during the same 30 year period, we experienced a 560% increase in violent crime; a 400% increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling of divorces; a tripling of children in single parent homes; a doubling of teen suicide; and a 75 point drop in SAT scores. [2]

None of this is encouraging news ... but we do have Good News; our voices just need to be heard [Romans 10:14, 15]. Who will go and tell them!

One young man tried to tell the shooter at Wedgwood, but it was too late and it cost him his life. Perhaps, as we reflect, we should wonder who our neighbor is and who we know that hasn’t heard the Good News while we still have time?

"Those who trust in their wealth, and boast in the abundance of their riches." [Psalm 49:6] surround us, yet they arena’t the shooters. Nonetheless, their intense and sin-filled materialistic, greed is the reactant that seems to send the shooters over the edge.

[Excerpted from "America's cultural decline," William J. Bennett, AFA Journal, April, 1994 … 16, 17[1]; Ibid [2]]