Do you ever feel like we're losing the battle?
I'm sure that I'm not the only one. I look around at the declining moral climate and the escalating (it seems) descent into cultural chaos, and wonder what in the world made me choose to start a family and bring children into this mess! I'm told that something like 16,000 teens per day contract a sexually transmitted disease in this country now! Kids are killing each other at a rate we've never seen before. Parents are killing their own children at a rate we've never experienced, either. Why!?
Because so much of our society has decided that "holiness" is an antiquated concept. Unless you are Mother Teresa or the Pope, it seems that it just isn't cool to live a life of real devotion to God any more.
But who decided that for us? Did we come to that conclusion after a thoughtful and thorough time of reflection? Not really. We just gradually settled into a comfort zone wherein we can pursue those things which are pleasant to us and go to God when we need His help with something really important to us.
The trouble with that approach is that the Bible refers to it as idolatry. We are actually serving another god than the One we profess to worship. When we give our attention to the pursuit of comfort and happiness we are serving "the god of pleasure".
Jesus Christ asked a rhetorical question of His students in Matt 5:13; "If salt loses it's flavor, how shall it be seasoned?" Obviously it's impossible to season salt! It is either salty, or it's worthless as to it's primary purpose!
What we are experiencing today in our current cultural climate is that same lack of seasoning! The salt has lost much of it's flavor in our country and indeed in our world. But according to Jesus, those of us who are His followers are intended by Him to bring His flavor into our world!
You and I (Christians) are His salt! And if we are to have any effect at all we must live our lives truly devoted to Him and to His primary purpose for our lives.
"But our culture is already in the tank!" Not if you and I step up and begin LIVING our faith in our day to day lives.
Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11) give us our example. It's a confusing story on it's face, but we find in Jephthah's daughter a young woman who saw true devotion to God in a time and a culture where almost everyone was living for their own pleasures. In a culture where sexual immorality was normal she was a virgin. In a land of compromise she lived her life by personal conviction and commitment.
We don't even know her name, but we know that she was seriously salty. She got that from watching her Dad.
Will anybody get it from watching you?
- Pastor Robert Fountain