The historian, Sidney Mead, described the United States as a nation with the soul of a church.   If we are truly a nation with the soul of a church then the most important thing you can do this July 4th is to be in Church getting right with God. The genius of our nation is not in our political parties but in our people. But until we are willing to accept God’s spiritual remedy for our sick soul, our nation will night rise above our own spiritual condition. The nation can never be better than we are.

It does not take too much time in study to realize that the founders of our nation firmly believed that the morals, values and ethics of the Bible were foundational to the success of our nation.  This quote from Thomas Jefferson is found on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever

It is time for Christians to stop following the world and return to being the people of God.  I firmly believe that the nation rests on our shoulders, we are salt and light to the nation.  We cannot cower down when we are accused of being out of date, out of touch and moralistic.  Christians have to shed the clothing of secularism and let the robes of Christ be seen.

All too often, in the name of cultural relevance, we have compromised the Gospel.  Too many churches try to look like something besides a church, a sound stage, a movie theater, a fun park.  And every such act is a compromise with the world.  The world does not need another emergent church or any other cutting edge organization.  What the world needs is a repentant church, a church that seeks the face of God in hopes that God will renew us.

Revival among the people of God is the only hope for a declining nation.  Please pray for revival and may it begin with you and with me.

Prayer is, perhaps, the most important element for those seeking a great awakening.  A lot of things happen when we spend time with God in prayer.  God has chosen that the mechanism of prayer to be his way of allowing us to participate in the ruling of his world.  God chooses to do something only when we pray and only when we pray according to his will.  This fact struck me some time back when I was doing a study in the Book of Revelation.  Notice what these verses say.

Revelation 8:1 When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
2 And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.
3 Another angel came and stood at the altar, holding a golden censer; and much incense was given to him, so that he might add it to the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar which was before the throne.
4 And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, went up before God out of the angel’s hand.
5 Then the angel took the censer and filled it with the fire of the altar, and threw it to the earth; and there followed peals of thunder and sounds and flashes of lightning and an earthquake. (Rev 8:1-5 NASB)

The action of heaven stops for about an hour so that the angels could collect the prayers of the saints and add them to the smoke of the incense.  Then and only then did he cast it to the earth as an act of judgment.

If we do not pray, we do not hear God.  Even reading his Word will not penetrate our hearts if we do not practice the art of conversation with God.  We become like the fool of the book of Proverbs who refuses to listen to Wisdom:

22 “How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing And fools hate knowledge?
23 “Turn to my reproof, Behold, I will pour out my spirit on you; I will make my words known to you.
24 “Because I called and you refused, I stretched out my hand and no one paid attention;
25 And you neglected all my counsel And did not want my reproof;
26 I will also laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your dread comes,
27 When your dread comes like a storm And your calamity comes like a whirlwind, When distress and anguish come upon you.
28 “Then they will call on me, but I will not answer; They will seek me diligently but they will not find me,
29 Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of the LORD.
30 “They would not accept my counsel, They spurned all my reproof.
31 “So they shall eat of the fruit of their own way And be satiated with their own devices.
32 “For the waywardness of the naive will kill them, And the complacency of fools will destroy them.
33 “But he who listens to me shall live securely And will be at ease from the dread of evil.” (Pro 1:22-33 NASB)

God’s judgment on those who do not hear is to abandon them to themselves. Romans 1 confirms that this is the worst kind of judgment is this life.  But those who listen to God shall be secure.

How does one pray for revival?  One prays with brokenness and honesty.  We may not know how far from God we truly are until we make prayer for revival a regular part of our lives. Too often our prayer lives are just  slight glances at God with a few words that we really have not thought though.  When we finally become aware of our sin before God, it should shake us up.  And when we realize that God has not been listening to us because of our sin, then it should cause us to cry out for mercy.  There are several Psalms that serve as an example of when God stopped listening to the nation or to the one praying.  Psalm 51 is, of course, a Psalm of Contrition.  There David begs God to restore to him the joy of his salvation.  That sounds like revival to me.  Psalm 80 implores God to rescue his people.  But there is more than that.  He asks, “O LORD God of hosts, How long will You be angry with the prayer of Your people?”  The people have so sinned that God was angry even with their prayers. All one can do is ask God to forgive us and move beyond this impasse.  And only God can remove the barrier.  The Psalmist is persistent in his prayer to God.

Psalm 80:1 For the choir director; set to El Shoshannim; Eduth. A Psalm of Asaph. Oh, give ear, Shepherd of Israel, You who lead Joseph like a flock; You who are enthroned above the cherubim, shine forth!
2 Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, stir up Your power And come to save us!
3 O God, restore us And cause Your face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.
4 O LORD God of hosts, How long will You be angry with the prayer of Your people?
5 You have fed them with the bread of tears, And You have made them to drink tears in large measure.
6 You make us an object of contention to our neighbors, And our enemies laugh among themselves.
7 O God of hosts, restore us And cause Your face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.
8 You removed a vine from Egypt; You drove out the nations and planted it.
9 You cleared the ground before it, And it took deep root and filled the land.
10 The mountains were covered with its shadow, And the cedars of God with its boughs.
11 It was sending out its branches to the sea And its shoots to the River.
12 Why have You broken down its hedges, So that all who pass that way pick its fruit?
13 A boar from the forest eats it away And whatever moves in the field feeds on it.
14 O God of hosts, turn again now, we beseech You; Look down from heaven and see, and take care of this vine,
15 Even the shoot which Your right hand has planted, And on the son whom You have strengthened for Yourself.
16 It is burned with fire, it is cut down; They perish at the rebuke of Your countenance.
17 Let Your hand be upon the man of Your right hand, Upon the son of man whom You made strong for Yourself.
18 Then we shall not turn back from You; Revive us, and we will call upon Your name.
19 O LORD God of hosts, restore us; Cause Your face to shine upon us, and we will be saved. (Psa 80:1-19 NASB)

Again this sounds like a request for revival, for a great awakening among the people.  If we want God’s face to shine on us, I think we too must become men and women of consistent prayer, asking, even begging if need be that God will cleanse us, make us holy and most of all, send a great revival upon us and upon the land.

I closing I recommend that the reader check these articles on prayer and revival.  The first is by the old Scotsman, Robert Murray M’Cheyne.  http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ref-rev/01-4/1-4_mccheyne.pdf

The second article is by Roger Nicole  http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ref-rev/01-3/1-3_nicole.pdf

The following are quotations on the meaning of Revival  from Iain H Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858

There are eras, said (Samuel) Davies, when only a large communication or outpouring of the Spirit can produce a public general reformation. Thus, preaching on “The Happy Effect of the Pouring Out of the Spirit” from Isaiah 32:13-19, he argued that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the great and only remedy for a ruined country– the only effectual preventative of national calamities and desolation and the only sure cause of a lasting and well-established peace. (p 21)

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In speaking of the meaning of revival it is also essential to note that what Davies and his brethren believed about revival was not something separate from, or additional to, their main beliefs; it was rather a necessary consequence.  Such is a man’s state in sin that he cannot be saved without the immediate results from it, the gifts of God.  Therefore, wherever conversions are multiplied, the cause is to be found not in men, nor in favorable conditions, but in the abundance of influences of th Spirit of God that alone make the testimony of the Church effective. No other explanation of revival is in harmony with the truths that are “the essence of the Christian scheme– the utter depravity of man, the sovereignly-free grace of Jehovah, the divinity of Christ, the atonement in his blood, regeneration, and sanctification by the Holy Spirit.

This school of preachers held that the Holy Spirit has appointed means to be used for the advancement of the gospel,  pre-eminently the teaching of the Word of God accompanied by earnest prayer.  Yet no human endeavors can ensure or guarantee results.  There is a sovereignty in all God’s actions.  He has never promised to bless in proportion to the activity of his people.  Revivals are not brought about by the fulfillment of “conditions” any more than the conversion of a single individual is secured by any series of human actions.  The special “seasons of mercy”  are determined in heaven.  Thus for a modern biographer of Davies to say what Blair “began a revival of religion in 1740″ is to assert the opposite of what they believed.  For the same reason it would have been obnoxious to these preachers to hear themselves described as “revivalists” . . .(p 22)

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. . . It can be further noted that what happens in revivals is not to be seen as something miraculously different from the regular experience of the church.  The difference lies in degree, not in kind.  In an “outpouring of the Spirit” spiritual influence is more widespread, convictions are deeper, and feelings more intense, but all this is only a heightening of normal Christianity.  True revivals are “extraordinary,” yet what is experienced at such times is not different in essence from the spiritual experience that belongs to Christians at other times.  It is the larger “earnest” of the same Spirit who abides with all who believe.

Thus Davies and his brethren repudiated the idea that revivals restore miraculous gifts to the churches.  They regarded revivals as more wonderful than that: The Spirit magnifies Christ, and the more abundantly his influence is possessed by the believers the more they will live for his praise.  When we meet with lives such as those of Davies, Whitefield (he had such a sense of the incomparable excellence of the person of Christ), Aaron Burr, Sr (a perpetual holocaust [a sacrifice consumed by fire] of adoration and praise, and many others in the revival period, we are tempted to suppose that theirs was a different Christianity.  It was not so but rather, as Thomas Murphy wrote, it was “the baptism of the Holy Ghost which caused the infant Church [in America] to become animated by the most fervent piety.”  The same writer said of these preachers: “they believed in refreshings from on high, felt some of them in their own souls, and were ready for still more . . . these bright and cultured souls were stirred to their very depths, and blessings untold were involved therein.  They awoke to a life not new in kind, but new in degree, and in all truth and soberness a new prospect opened before our Church and country.”

If revival is a larger giving to the church of grace already possessed– a heightening of the normal– then it follows that the evidences by which revivals are to be judged are the same as those which form the permanent evidences of real Christianity.  Foremost in the New Testament list is the evidence of love to God and men.  At all times to all true believers Christ “is precious.”   Preaching on those words, Davies said:

Because he loves him he longs for the full enjoyment of him . . . Because Christ is precious to him, his interests are so too, and he longs to see his kingdom flourish, and all men fired with his love.  Because he loves him, he loves his ordinances; loves to hear, because it is the word of Jesus; loves to pray, because it is maintaining intercourse with Jesus; loves to sit at his table, because it is a memorial of Jesus; and loves his people because they love Jesus.”

For revivals to be judged to be true we are to look for no greater proof than the increase of this same grace.  Love is not uniform in its strength but it knows many degrees.  Although it is an “active principle” in all Christians, love can also blaze and burn.  Men filled with the Spirit are filled with love (Eph. 3:16-19) and “the sacred fire of love” (to use Davies’ words) will affect al that they do.  They cannot be to others than fervent in spirit as well as dissatisfied with their own coldness. (p 23-24)

In the last few years I have become burdened with the need for personal spiritual awakening.  In discussions with our local pastors, I have discovered that this is a growing burden among my pastor friends.  The desire is not only for personal awakening but for our churches, especially for our churches.  But it also seems that our denominations all need to experience a Great Awakening.

Of course, I am most familiar with Southern Baptist Churches.  While we southern Baptists have been known for our growth and evangelism, some kind of death pall has come over us.  I was recently in a denominational meeting and the topic of the day was the demise of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  In the last few years the International Missions Board of the SBC has suffered various doctoral issues.  But the biggest problem has been the North American Missions Board.  Money is down. Our collective number of baptisms are down. People have had to be laid off, missionary service has had to be postponed due to the lack of money. The seminaries have had to cut salaries and law off workers.  While the SBC is the largest protestant denomination in the United States, we are now easily ignored.  In fact, many Christian journals have set up a death watch to see when we will keel over.

The question is how can we fix it.  I do not think it can be fixed in the traditional sense.  No commission or study is going to give us a solution.   While my analysis may be a bit amateurish, I think we can clearly see the problem if we want and learn about a possible solution.

Baptists use to be plain people, ordinary working men and women.  We were far from the seats of power.  It would be true that in county seat churches, doctors, lawyers and local politicians would be members of local Baptist churches. Yet Baptists were largely engaged with local community ministry and foreign missions.

In the twentieth  century Southern Baptist had grown enough that leaders wanted to be part of the larger social and even political power group that wields influence in our country. I suppose that there is nothing wrong with this and may have even appeared as an act of providence.  But in serving God we are connected to the only seat of power needed to influence a nation.  Seeking to be power players can be a dangerous thing in that it causes us to forget utter reliance on God.  The result is that Southern Baptists became main street.  We were no longer just plain old people.  Now we have presidents who were Southern Baptists.  Southern Baptist pastors and leaders became nationally known figures.  We were caught up in our size, in the amount of money raised collectively for ministry, and most of all, public fame brought by being main street and being powerfully connected.  We were part of the rising new south and we had a big role to play.  I am convinced that our social success contributed to our decline.

A second factor can be found in our tendency to want to program everything.  If we have a problem, a need, or a want, someone will come up with a program to fix it.  Most of the programs came from our Sunday School Board, as it was called, now Lifeway.  Many came from the Home Missions Board, now NAMB. We borrowed from the business community our sense of organization and record keeping.  And these practices served us well.  It allowed to have a standard Sunday School and Discipleship program thus fulfilling the biblical mandate to teach Scripture, to teach discipleship including churchmanship, doctrine and history, to encourage fellowship and to do evangelism through these two programs.  These two programs gave us a uniformity as a denomination that one would not normally find in a non connectional church.

Being successful at Sunday School, we concluded that we needed a program for everything.  Evangelism, Stewardship, building and equipment, almost anything you could imagine.  Soon churches were trying to make one-size-fits-all programs work in their churches even thought most programs were written for larger churches.  The program approach stifled local creativity among church members and even encouraged them to be observers and not participants.

Often these programs were unitarian without thought given to doctrine. This is the third and perhaps most important factor.   We became impressed by size and numbers while we neglected based doctrine.  I am convinced that our efforts at evangelism, no matter how noble, resulted in churches being full of lost people who made emotional “decisions” instead of coming to faith in the incomparable Christ.  It became a routine matter for denominational leaders to claim that the purpose of the church is evangelism.  I heard this just this week.  Not only is it the only purpose of the church but we pastors need to repent if we disagreed with the speaker.  It is a kind of arrogance that says I know better because I am a denominational worker and you are a mere pastor.  The fact is, the purpose of the church is to glorify God and bring him honor by our holy living. But above all, the church brings honor and glory to God by faithfully worshiping him.   The pastor shepherds the flock.  Shepherding includes teaching them the things of God, helping the member to become mature believers. Thus, discipleship and fellowship are integral elements in the purpose of the Church.  When these things are done, the church will be self replicating, evangelism will be normal and natural.  But, no, we tend to listen to our “leaders” who know better.

Our literature has been so dumb-down that very little substance is found in it.  We have been too busy trying to accommodate the world that we have stopped teaching doctrine.  Baptist suffer from a lack of understanding of our basic doctrines.  No one really understands the sovereignty of God and his right to order the lives of his people according to his purposes.  We “accommodate” God by coming to church when it suits us and, for the most part, not paying attention to the things of God during the week. This latter behavior is being reinforced in local churches, often because they are following the latest trend and fad expressed by denominational leaders.

The same can be said for the doctrine of the church, the person of Christ, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the atonement. Feelings have become the substitute for sound doctrine.  We lose members to cults, and defective churches because we have settled for the lowest common denominator instead of seeking to teach doctrine that leads to a mature Christian.

Finally, this needs to be said. We fought over various definitions of orthodoxy for 25 years and it left us weak and feeble in our practice of the faith.  I am not commenting on the necessity of that fight but the results.  The main argument was that there were many in the denomination who did not believe that the Bible was the inerrant, infallible Word of God.  The battle was won but if you survey the preaching and teaching done by many Southern Baptist pastors you would never know it.  Much of the preaching is topical.  The topics are often about finances, marriage and sex.  The drama of preaching has become more important than the words preached.  It is not unusual to see a stage with cars, motorcycles, beds, and others displays used to promote the subject of the sermon.  It is all entertaining and many men have become famous preachers for these kinds of tactics.  But the Word is not being preached, the kingdom of God is not being built.  No doubt the subjects of modern preaching are important, but we are called to proclaim Scripture not topics.  Expositional preaching is almost gone from many pulpits (if they have a pulpit) because the pastor is trying to imitate his favorite popular preacher.

Since the troubles we experienced in the Southern Baptist Convention, no national leader has risen up to lead us back to the important things.  Institutionalism is stronger than ever even though all the major Southern Baptist institutions are in trouble.  What has been forgotten is that it is all about the local church, not the denomination.  Ultimately the denomination is nothing.  When we get to heaven all there is going to be, is the local church, the Bride of Christ.   The principle was given by Christ himself, “for whoever wishes to save his life will lose it.”  Institutions take on a life of their own and they often forget why they exist.  Instead, they become concerned for their self existence, protecting jobs without regard to their original purpose.  If we want to save the institutions of the Convention, then they will have to give themselves away so to speak, and become servants to the local churches.

It is the reason that these things happened that is the most disturbing.  It happened, not because of the leadership of the Convention, but because of the wants and compromises of the local churches and the pastors who lead them.  We cannot put the blame on others. If the convention is in decline, it is because the churches are in decline.  That decline is more than numbers, it has to do with the spiritual vitality of the local churches.  We got from our denomination what we demanded.

I think the answer does not lie in the SBC or it’s leadership. No Great Commission study can solve our problems. It is evident that we need a Great Awakening on a national scale.  The great need for an awakening becomes even larger when we view the condition of the SBC in light of the health of local churches.  We must get back to our relationship with God that caused our existence in the first place.  No Great Awakening ever began on a denominational level.  No denominational leader has been at the heart of one.  Great Awakenings begin in churches and with small groups of people who are so disgusted with themselves that they turn to God to restore them.   Most likely if there is ever a Great Awakening in SBC life, it will begin in some small church or group of churches. If God allows an awakening to come, he will sovereignly move his church and if he allows, it will spread until it becomes a raging fire.  It will not be something that any man, any institution can claim to be the leader of or heralded as the one who started it.  Great Awakenings are always a sovereign work of God.  No doubt, God wants us to be right with him.  But it must begin at the top, which is the local church.

Recently a friend sent me this quote from Joe McKeever, “Something that has eluded religious historians and pastors for decades: ‘Why churches do not have revival.’ Insufficient prayer? Lack of godliness? Those are important, but are the symptoms, not the reason. The real reason for no revival is: we don’t want one. Revivals mess with your mind, rearrange your priorities, upset your lives. We prefer to be left alone. Agree?”  And yes, I agree.  But when our situation becomes so grim, when there is little life left in the church, we can no longer sit back and watch it all die.  We are compelled to fall before God and seek His life-giving Spirit for a dose of real revival.

It is my greatest desire to see the fires of a Great Awakening blow its way among our churches and revive our Convention and our state conventions.  I pray that before I die I will see such a movement.  I hope that we all find ourselves before God confessing our sin, begging God for his forgiveness and seeing the revival fires light up in the hearts of believers everywhere.  May God grant it to us.

Cheap grace is grace without a price, grace without cost.  The essence of grace, we suppose is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. . . . Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system.  it means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth. . . It means the justification of the sin without the sinner…. The world goes on in the same old way, and we are still sinners even in the best of life. . . Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolation of his grace!  That is what is meant by cheap grace, the grace that amounts to the justification of the sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs.  Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin.  Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. (Cost of Discipleship, p. 45-47)

The 19th century Danish philosopher, Søren  Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) was an ardent critic of his Danish church.  He felt that the church had grown cold, lost is fervent connection to God and had very much become compromised by every day culture.     The following Kierkegaard quote has always challenged me.

I went into church and sat on the velvet pew. I watched as the sun came shining through the stained glass windows. The minister dressed in a velvet robe opened the golden gilded Bible, marked it with a silk bookmark  and said, “If any man will be my disciple, said Jesus, let him deny himself, take up his cross, sell what he has, give it to the poor, and follow me.” And I looked around and nobody was laughing.

Fortunately for us, we have given up on stained glass, satin bookmarks and velvet robes. Stodgy, boring worship services are a thing of the past.  But, we should not think we are any less ironic in our worship.  Now, if you are a happening church, you worship in a black box building with a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar lighting system that provides the perfect atmosphere for the perfect moment of worship.  Songs are beamed to multiple giant screens powerd by $80,000 video projectors.  The pastor arrives on stage on his Harley and we are entertained by the finest band money can buy.  And the pastor could replace Jay Leno on the Late Night Show with his polished monologue contributed to him by his host of writers/staff.

And we manage to do more with less.  We have less church and more family, or so we say.  We have vacation mission trips where we can see how the rest of the world lives and sing a few happy songs about Jesus for them.   Of course we worship God in the tree stand, the golf course, the infield stand at the ball game, and on the deck of the cruise ship.  We even fellowship with God’s people on Face Book and Twitter.  There is nothing like staying electronically connected–it is almost like being there.

But I smell a sense of irony here.  Just like the Danish church of the 19th century, we keep God at a distance by our very worship and daily practices.  We really don’t want to hear “sell all that you have, take up your cross and follow me.”  No, pastors still want to be superstars, and church members want to be free from God with no boundaries and still be sanctified.

And no one laughs.

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on the battle on all the battlefields besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point. (Martin Luther, cited in Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There. P 11)

More than ever, we need clear, pointed thinking and sound, focused preaching.  We dare not pull the punch because the world does not like it or because someone might be hurt.  To not tell the truth in our sinful environment is to murder the soul those who need to hear the Word of God.  We need to understand that the condition of the sinner is grave and that every living human is a sinner.  It is not a popular subject but it is the truth.  And in order for us to escape the wrath of God and to find purpose and meaning in life one must know the truth.  So, we cannot stand by and agree with the world that sexual immorality is perfectly acceptable, that homosexuality is just another lifestyle, that lying is a perfect form of defense, that willful violation of God’s law means nothing.

We cannot, at any time, agree that sin ceases to be sin.  But, the truth can only be presented and defended from a position of humility and grace.  When we are bold in truth, it must be as one who knows he or she is a sinner who had no hope until Christ himself redeemed him.  We are all sinners telling our fellow sinners where to find grace.

Many wise men have said that life is about the art of compromise. This is particularly true of relationships. Sometimes two people can’t be right but two can be wrong. Compromise allows friends, spouses and neighbors to get along with each other. And when one refuses to compromise, often relations are broken.

But, compromise can be a deadly serious thing when it involves one’s faith and principles. This past week, a notable Catholic University, Notre Dame, compromised on one of Catholicism’s most sacred principles, the sanctity of human life. While there was nothing wrong with having President Obama speak at the University, it was set up to be a political forum to undermine a moral principle. The student body seemed to have been swept away by the President’s speech in apparent agreement with his wisdom.

The president acknowledged that the difference between those who believe in the sanctity of life and those who are pro choice is irreconcilable. He said that we “can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.” While having all the appearance of wisdom, this says nothing and it solves nothing. In fact, it says can’t the pro life people and pro choice people just get along? In other words, let’s compromise. And by the reaction of the audience, they were agreeable with the suggestion.

I am sure the President is pleased with compromise because that means mothers can continue to abort their babies at any stage of their pregnancy. Can you see the faulty logic here? For the pro life person, death goes on. Nothing has changed. He or she has been compromised and we are no closer to treating unborn children as the image of God. In this case, compromise literally kills. It kills unborn children but it also kills another moral principle for millions of people. It is a kind of deception that suggests that compromise is fine. We made a serious effort to be civil, to get along. Yet, we are now worse off than before because reasonable people have been compromised by a deceptive idea.

Something deeper than a deceptive compromise is going on. We need to understand that every time we compromise a moral principle, we actually chip away at our moral foundations. You cannot take away one aspect of morality without compromising our entire moral framework. So, when we accept sex outside of marriage, when we agree to homosexual marriage, when we compromise and allow gratuitous abortions to take place, we coarsen our society, we degrade human nature, and we cheapen life. Already we have legal suicide is some States. In fact, it is easier for a person on Medicare to get help to commit suicide than it is to get medical treatment. Congressmen have made speeches and literally said that people over 65 years of age have a responsibility to die and allow limited resources to be used by the next generation. As pastor I have watched the elderly receive poor medical treatment simply because they were old. Why extend the life of an old person who will die in a year or two anyway? There is a direct link between the abortion issue and the treatment of senior adults. Can we not see how the slop slips once the moral foundation is removed? We take the life of an unwanted baby even up to the time of delivery. It is natural for fallen man, once restrained by moral principle, to now take the life of the elderly because they consume too many resources. Who will be next? The mentally ill? Left handed people? Religious people? Those who oppose evolution? No one should be so naive as to think these things cannot happen. They have happened before. It was not just in Germany. There was as strong eugenics movement in the United States in the first part of the twenty century–a natural outcome of evolutionary thinking. Planned Parenthood was founded on the eugenics movement. They were committed to eliminating inferior people from the human gene pool. You have to wonder who the inferior people were and would we be here today if they got their way?

Perhaps we have forgotten that many people were locked up in mental institutions to keep them out of society and to keep them from reproducing. This is one of the untold American tragedies. Thousands of families have missing family members. They were locked up in institutions and never seen or heard from again. They were cut off from their families, their history, their roots and no one really thought anything about it. It fact, it was a relief, they were an embarrassment.

These are dangerous days. People are willing to give up their freedoms in response to a good speech. We need to stop and listen, really listen to what is being said. Our educational system is not so bad that we fail to see bad logic. We are just too trusting of those who give smooth speeches. We have to listen and discern what is really being said.

Martin Niemöller was a German pastor and theologian who lived through those dark days of Nazi rule. In the early days he supported Hitler because he brought results. But like many of the clergy, he came to his senses and opposed the Nazis. He is famous for a statement he made about the problem of compromise:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

You have to wonder if history is not, in some way, repeating itself. I am not saying that the President has evil intentions. But bad ideas, sinful ideas have a bad habit of feeding the law of unintended consequences. It is the nature of a fallen and sinful world that evil triumph with very little effort. It is true, the world is fallen, we are fallen, sin is woven into the fabric of human society. But good, righteousness, and moral principle are fought for and maintained by hard work. It is always harder to do good but it should never deter us from doing the right thing. The Apostle Paul said, “Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith” (Gal 6:9-10 NASB). We do good for all people when we stand up for what is right.

I hope and pray that we will be ever vigilant to safeguard our moral principles.

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, may have lost the Miss USA pageant because she said she believed in normal, traditional marriage between a man and a woman. No one should be shocked that a homosexual would ask such a question. The homosexual club has as its agenda to break down moral barriers and gain acceptance for their perversion. But no matter how loud they shout or how militant they become, you cannot make a wrong into a right. If that is possible then there is no possibility of any kind of moral or virtue or value. Morality becomes a social or political convenience, not an absolute standard. We need to be clear about this. Once we cease being morally intact in one area of life, we cease being morally intact in all areas of life. It is obvious that homosexuality has taken a foothold in our society because sexual immorality, in general, has become acceptable in our society. How can an adulterer tell a homosexual he is wrong?

What is sad is that executive director of the Miss California USA wrote a letter to Perez Hilton in support of his position and against Prejean. Keith Lewis, in effect, gave tacit approval to Hilton for his outrageous name calling against Prejean. But that fact that Prejean was asked a moral question and she gave her answer and then criticized for giving the traditional and moral response is outrageous. What happened to freedom of speech? What happened to the freedom of religion? I suppose that their response is that she should keep her religion to herself but where is the freedom in that? Her faith is part of what it means to be Carrie Prejean. It seems that the Miss USA contest now officially supports homosexuality and in essence says to all contestants they most accept it as well.

We live in an increasingly immoral society and Christians and others who hold to traditional morality are being steamrollered by a well financed, well-thought out movement that is essentially anti moral and specifically anti Christian. But we Christians are so gullible that we keep watching their TV shows and going to their movies and buying their books, putting millions of dollars into their pockets. How dumb is that?

Unless you are a closet homosexual, normal people have no business supporting the industry that is trying to destroy us. We need to stop buying the music of those who push homosexuality. We need to stop seeing the movies of those who push that agenda and do the same with TV programming. Your voice will not be heard but your dollars will be missed. I believe that we, who are normal, spend enough money on entertainment that our dollars would be missed. It would probably shut down some TV shows and cause some movies to go bust. And it would deprive their movement of their financial support which comes from a lot of Christian pockets. There is no better time than now to stop your support. Families need the money in these tight economic times. Holding on to our money in these tough economic times may cause some of these to go out of business permanently. Never waste a good economic crisis.

It is time for us to put our money where our morality is. Stop supporting the homosexual agenda with your money. They cannot boycott you, they cannot call you names, they have no right to your spending habits. Over night we could stop some of this nonsense and take away their platform if we would spend our money elsewhere. It seems like an easy and smart thing to do.