Monday, June 23, 2014
397 - Lost Without a Compass
Spirituality Column #397
June 24, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
June 24, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
Lost Without a Compass
By Bob Walters
Our
society tends to worry about the wrong things because it no longer is very good
at diagnosing humanity’s most basic problems.
For
50 years America has systematically thrown public money at private problems and
can’t understand why inner cities can’t educate their children, and places like
Detroit have all but shut down. We are
afraid to notice that Great Society giveaways initiated in the 1960s coincide
precisely with the takeaway of school prayer.
More money and less prayer led to an implosion of moral misdirection.
As
the Bible has further disappeared from public life and education, the bedrock
notion of the existence of right and wrong, of good and evil, of truth and
lies, has dwindled into a sniveling cultural narrative that starts and stops with
“Don’t judge.”
It’s
secularism’s favorite Bible quote. Only a
small bit of society any longer accurately comprehends where, how and why Jesus
said, “don’t judge.” I like Brent Riggs’ explanation: “Luke 6:37
(“judge not lest you be judged”) tells us not to be hypocrites, not to judge
without compassion or understanding, and not to judge based on our own
standards rather than God’s.”
Did
you catch that? “God’s standards.”
We
think “don’t judge” means “invent your own standards.” No. It
means God’s standards are real, authoritative, and supreme so don’t invent your own standards. God’s
standards are in the Bible, not in government programs or humanist intellectual
inclination. Morality is not about “going
to church” and doing “the Christian thing.”
It’s reading, knowing and acting on the Bible.
Society
currently, bafflingly, assigns top moral priority to homosexuality, sexual
freedom, gay marriage, and every non-traditional family structure. Christians are tricked into equivocating on
“sexual sin.” Non-believers ignore “sin”
entirely. Lacking biblical knowledge, our
family foundations and civic morality are disintegrating in sin we can’t
recognize.
Since
9/11 we’ve worried about Islam and its dramatically different religious and
cultural order. My biblical mentor
George Bebawi points out that Western culture is threatened less by Islam than its
own biblical ignorance and rampant secularism.
“The
Bible” TV miniseries (which morphed into this year’s movie “Son of God”) was
birthed because its producers recognized the dearth of Bible education in
schools. My wife Pam recently retired from
34 years of teaching public school English and noted the change in basic Bible
knowledge students brought to class. In
the 1970s, most had some idea of Noah and the flood. In recent years, most students had none.
The Bible is a moral
compass pointing to the love and truth of Jesus Christ. Without Jesus, we are morally lost. Without a compass, we will stay lost.
That is society’s
most basic problem.
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