Marc Estes

There are three shocking realities that have moved into a place of acceptance in our society today. Each of these have a profound affect on the culture in which we live, and many of us don’t fully understand the ramifications of such atrocities:

• We can have Morality without Religion
• Whatever is Legal is Moral 
• Morality Cannot Be Legislated

Gene Edward Veith states in His book, ‘Post Modern Times’, “While people have always committed sins, they at least acknowledged these were sins. A century ago a person may have committed adultery flagrantly and in defiance of God and man, but he would have admitted that what he was doing was a sin. What we have today is not only immoral behavior, but a loss of moral criteria… We face not only a moral collapse but a collapse of meaning…”

 In the book, ‘Rebirth of America’ is a paralyzing statement is made. It reads as follows, “Forgetting to acknowledge ‘the Power that mad and preserved us a nation,’ her citizens began to congratulate themselves on their own achievements, to celebrate man, while relegating God to the back seat… Wallowing in materialism self-centeredness and pride, many Americans decided that they really did not need God after all. Some began to taper with God’s absolute standards, and to tolerate what they would never have allowed before, in their own lives or in society around them. That which God says is never right could be sometimes right, depending on the situation… America once legislated against those things that God said to be wrong. But gradually we began to tolerate, then accept, then condone openly, and even promote, that which was once unthinkable. The perversion and degradation that once made us blush are now flaunted before the eyes of a nation that was conceived in the fear of God. It happened little by little, right before our eyes, not because someone forced it on us, but seemingly because we did not care. We just didn’t care…”

So we change the titles that God labeled as sin to something more appealing:        

• Sin as rebellion towards God  to Personal Preference or Choice
• Drunkenness to Adult Entertainment or at best a Social Disease
• Perversion to Adult Movies
• Sodomy to Alternate Lifestyle
• Immorality to a New Morality

We can debate the terms and definitions all we want but we can’t argue or deny their effect.

• Crime now costs taxpayer $2 Billion a year
• Serious crime is committed every 3 seconds
• Someone is robbed every 83 seconds
• Someone is murdered every 27 minutes
• Suicide is the second largest killer of teenagers.
• One of every three children under age of Eighteen have been, or will be, sexually molested.
• 100,000 handguns are taken to schools every day.

What is the Answer?

We must once again be open to analyze how we define our morals and values and be willing to lovingly adjust those that seem to be the reason we have gotten so far off track! Change in a nation starts with change in you. We can’t change a nation until we first change ourselves. We must once again recognize sin for what it is and call it for what it actually is and not be embarrassed to make the personal changes that are necessary as well as stand for righteousness in a land that has lost its focus.