Change - Are You Sure?

Happy Birthday America! I wish I had better news as to the condition of your heart, but I’m afraid with all the garbage you’re ingesting lately, it’s eventually going to bring on cardiac arrest to the land of the free and home of the brave. Cure America with your vote!

Mark Twain once said, “The only person who likes change is a wet baby.” In the past 60 years we’ve gone from eight-party telephone lines to wireless smart-phones that allows one to talk, text, watch TV and/or movies, download and store music, connect to the internet and more, all in the palm of your hand, anywhere in the world at any time. From medicine to the military to marriage and moral values, the undeniable fact is, America and the world are smack dab in the middle of historic and accelerated change. It’s enough to make your head spin! And, if not careful, it may cause you to lose your footing, at least morally and spiritually. The past fifty years, America has seen a sea of change in public moral beliefs and practices. Abortion (which still always stops a beating human heart) has gone from being a punishable crime to a personal “choice” and a constitutionally protected “right.” Homosexuality is out and getting louder and prouder, and its proponents are bent on seeing to it that “same-sex marriage” will gain legal social acceptance and legal protection. It will some day be illegal, categorized as a “hate-crime”, to preach and teach against homosexual practices, calling them sin as the Bible clearly teaches (Leviticus 18:22; 1 Corinthians 6:9). Talk about change! While the homosexual community clamors for the right to marry, heterosexual couples in record-breaking numbers are shunning marriage and just “living together.” What used to be popularly referred to as “living in sin” has now been politically corrected and sanitized in the language of change to be colored – “cohabitation.”  Another troubling change is the collapse of a code of decency in public dress, speech, entertainment, etc. TV is a wonderful tool capable of tremendous public good, but TV these days might just as well stand for “trashy values.” My point is not to suggest America was ever some kind of moral paradise where nobody ever did wrong. Sin is as old as Adam and Eve. My point is that along with the explosive rate of change in technology, communication and medicine (don’t get me wrong, most of which has been for the better) the pace of moral change in our culture has been dizzyingly influenced by these changes and definitely for the worse. As a culture we are educating minds but not morals, and as a result we are getting smarter about, but not better at, life. A pre-Socratic philosopher named Heraclitus believed change was central to the universe and that everything was “in a flux” like the constant flow of a river. He famously said, “You cannot step twice in the same river.”

[Hebrews 13:8] God’s moral and spiritual truth never changes, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Because the river flows, it changes constantly. The question for the church is, will we keep our moral and spiritual footing as the world goes on changing, or will we be swept along with the current? It is nearly impossible to stop the river of moral change swirling and flowing around us. But Christians can and must continue to stand for what is right. William Penn said, early in American history, “Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong; even if everyone is for it.” As it relates to moral changes in America, that are sinful and wrong, are you swimming against the current or just going with the flow? The Bible and the voting booth are sure things.