Don’t Look Away. You Need To See It.

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Before we get to today’s article, I just want to mention that am writing from the perspective of a man that has experienced many of the challenges of which I write…. and those spiritual battles continue daily. The articles are implications of what it means to obey the commandment to raise your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. They require some reflection and are particularly for Christians who, as Peter would say, are diligently seeking to confirm their calling and are making every effort to supplement their faith. Said more succinctly, serious Christians. If you know other believers who desire to walk more faithfully with the Lord, please forward an article to them and tell them to sign up for future articles. Thanks so much!

I have been staring at my screen for some time now, struggling to find the best possible way to introduce information to you while not doing anything that would encourage you to tune out.

In fact, I almost gave up on writing about our culture today and maybe choosing another topic, but I received two communications today from highly respected church leaders. The first one was an email from Alistair Begg titled, “How to interpret the changing culture.” He writes, “What happened? The baby boomers (my group) gave up on God and raised their millennial children in a moral and religious vacuum. Christian parents failed to do the hard work necessary to see their children established in the faith. Consider the great concern of grandparents as they see their offspring showing little or no interest in the things of God.”

Then I listened to Kevin DeYoung’s podcast where he lamented about what he is seeing everywhere in our country and encouraged listeners to be bold. Church leaders have been talking about cultural change now for some time, but they are feeling a greater urgency to prepare the flock for action and persecution than ever before.

In last week’s post, I challenged you and me to not “box up” or compartmentalize things that are going on in the world God has placed us in, and to open our minds to understanding the vast challenges against the Kingdom of Christ as well as the innumerable opportunities to grow the Kingdom of Christ. Daily, it is a battlefield for which we will be held accountable for our thoughts and deeds. We can choose to look away, but we are commanded to engage.

There are three common responses that I have heard when I have been part of the discussion about the worldwide problem of evil. First, the declaration made by some, “I do enough.” That is one way of claiming permission to dismiss any further reaction to what is happening in the world. This may, in fact, be true. But it would probably have been better said if someone were to say that they truly cannot do anymore. However, I do not know of anyone who could actually make that claim with a straight face.

The second common response is more subtle and isn’t always clearly articulated but is essentially the belief that many of these evils going on in other states or even other countries, does not have any effect on that person’s family. I remember thinking that way some years ago. I live in a conservative state (Georgia) and a conservative county. You remember the Bible belt, right? Well, the devil’s way of chipping away at Christian values while the Christians are enjoying the world has yielded wonderful returns for him. In a mere two decades, Georgia has become a liberal, left leaning state and even that conservative county that I have lived in for more than 30 years has their school system rolling over to the most anti-Christian teachings. This is where 96% of the children are taught every day. My grandchildren are playing with those kids in their neighborhood.

The third reason that people dismiss doing anything more to think about or react to evil in our world is expressed like this: God is sovereign, and nothing can stop Him from working out His plan. In other words, He doesn’t need me to accomplish it. This is an attempt to say that God’s sovereignty trumps my responsibility, and this is bad theology. Think about it- God will sovereignly save people for Jesus, but He doesn’t evangelize them, we do. He doesn’t meet the lost for lunch, invite them to church, or send them emails filled with truth. We do. He also doesn’t go on mission trips or pray for unbelievers everywhere. We do. Maybe you don’t feel called? You were called. You were called when God sovereignly used another human being to share the good news of the gospel with you and by default (see Matthew 28:14), you were conscripted into His army of Kingdom first seeking-warriors!

So, what about this wicked world? Do you realize how wicked it is? Frankly, it has been a struggle for me to determine how much ink should be spilled on this topic. Unless you have been living under a rock, you already know that the magnitude and speed of change in our culture during these last 50 years has been pervasive and dramatic. Rather than write pages of details on the rapid decline of our culture, I will just touch the high points which overlay many other divisions and segments of depravity.

I was born in 1956 and grew up during the sexual revolution which began in the 1960s. With each successive decade, the moral decline in the area of sexuality has picked up steam. As many of you know, the current state of affairs includes things that would have never been imagined by those who lived in the 60s and 70s. Fast forward to 2023 where we find ourselves in a world where the Supreme Court of the United Sates has voted in favor of same sex marriage (2015); And now, just 7 years later, the state of the culture (as it pertains to sexuality) has changed at a faster pace than it was moving previous to that fateful decision. America no longer recognizes men and women as the men and women of their physical birth. Any person can demand to be recognized as the sex of their own choice (or no sex at all) and the subsequent effect on marriage, family, childbirth, the church, the workplace, and education, has been devastating.

The pace of Christianity’s decline in America correlates with the previously mentioned instances of sexual perversion and the decline in morality as a whole in our culture. Here are a handful of bullet points from Pew Research Center (December 14, 2021):

The secularizing shifts evident in American Society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the religious composition of the United States finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.
Christians continue to make up a majority of the US populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011.
Currently, about three in 10 U.S. adults are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity.
Today, 24% of U.S. adults describe themselves as born again or evangelical Protestants, down six percentage points since 2007.

And there’s more.

Mass Manipulation

We also have experienced COVID and all that it showed us about the hearts of people. During the time of COVID, we saw deceit and wicked manipulation from those in leadership and a massive percentage of our population that had little or no ability to discern the times because their love and trust for God was either small or nonexistent. Simply put- no love for God equals no discernment and no joy.

Economic Consequences

The refusal of man to obey the creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply is not a sin without consequences. Declining birthrates has lit a self-destructive fuse on an economy that will result in too few young people that will work, pay taxes, and support the aged in the years ahead.

Fear

An absence of the one true God in the lives of so many people has fueled the fire of various types of fear that had already been growing in powerful and destructive ways. Fear has manifested itself in producing the greatest levels of births out of marriage (fear of commitment), a lower birthrate among married couples (financial fears), and all-time highs in the percentage of people experiencing anxiety, depression, and committing suicide.

Looking for Help in the Wrong Places

And how are those fears dealt with in today’s culture? Sadly, they are not confronted and redirected by the truth. No, they are temporarily assuaged by drowning one’s mind using prescription meds, recreational drugs, various kinds of substance abuse, or entertainment. You will note that I listed entertainment in the category of drugs. This is because entertainment, like drugs, provides a temporary way to escape a person’s reality. As the great Os Guinness wrote years ago, we are a nation that is entertaining ourselves to death, and that entertainment is not only an escape for parents and children, but it is also a powerful teacher of worldview.

The Emergence of Critical Theory

With the country being shaken and sifted during COVID, it was the perfect time to crank up the beliefs that are associated with Critical Theory. New definitions for being inclusive, the rights of the people, racism, and reparations were drilled into the minds of the people, even Christians, and destruction and hate were stoked.

America’s K-12 Schools

And finally, there is education. About 90% of all American schoolchildren (including children from Christian families) attend a K-12 school every day for about 8 hours, that trains them to become atheists. Following their K-12 education, they typically attend a college or university that is overwhelmingly secular in its training of young minds and in many cases, aggressively anti-Christian in their teaching of young adults.

America’s Colleges and Universities

According to an article by John Ellis in the Wall Street Journal (January 14, 2022), “The current left-right campus faculty ratio is probably about 15 to 1, but new appointments are being made at a rate of about 50 to 1. As we approach complete leftist saturation among professors, college campuses will become even more intolerant, irrational, and politically aggressive.”

Ellis continues, “More important still, academia’s influence on society will intensify as the number of people who have graduated from radicalized campuses increases and the number of those who graduated with a conventional college education decline. A generation – students from about 2000 to now – has graduated from one party campuses. Where will we be when two generations have done so, and another generation has died off?”

Why?

There are many reasons that have been cited for these changes, but for the Christian, we must not look to the secular psychologists, the so-called brilliant ones in the world of academia, or those of great wealth and fame for answers. Christians know that the only source of absolute truth is the Bible, and to attempt to find answers apart from the wisdom of God is folly.

For the Christian, the answer to this moral decline in our culture is directly related to the spiritual condition of the hearts of the people and those hearts are increasingly alienated from God. Some of those hearts are not Christian and until they are given a new heart (regeneration/salvation), we cannot expect current trends to change. Others have a heart that belongs to the Lord, but their Christian lives are weak and stunted by worshipping other things that crowd their devotion to Christ. They are to be the salt to the world, but they have little saltiness and therefore, little effect. We know that as Christianity grows in a culture, there is an increase in both salt and light. The salt has a preserving or restraining influence, and the light brings truth that transforms minds and culture. Conversely, when salt and light (Christianity) is in decline, we can expect to see the opposite- less truth and less restraint of evil in society.

We have been witnessing the master plan of Satan and it really is quite brilliant. He has been using man’s pride, greed, and a myriad of idolatries to create lies and confusion around foundational truths about God’s creation. If he can disrupt the creation order (the family, marriage, sexuality, procreation, work, education, rest) and distract God’s people to prioritize the things of the world over their dedication and love to God, he will continue to have the kind victories we have witnessed these last 50 years.

So, what do you do with this tsunami of sin rolling over the country and the cultural waves that are crashing into your heart and the hearts and minds of your children? What is the Christian parent’s responsibility before God? There are many Biblical answers to that question, but before we see what God has to say, I want to us look beyond the state of the culture by looking next week at the state of the church in America, and the following week a brief survey of the state of Christian parenting in America. In doing so, I hope that God will create a growing urgency and conviction about the need to engage more fully in the battle for the sake of Christ.