A well-known Christian activist once said, “If someone on American television in 1959 said they had a vision. In the next thirty years, we will have murdered twenty-five million children in ways too barbaric to describe (abortion). Sodomites will be parading in the streets. Politicians will be proclaiming gay pride week. Your tax money will be going to fund blasphemy and homosexual pornography. It will be illegal for a public schoolteacher to recite the Lord’s Prayer or read Psalm 23 in her classroom. Still, that same teacher will be able to tell your child where to get a condom or an abortion without your consent or knowledge that there would be a drug crisis and that we would have mass crime going on in our country. Who would have believed it?” Nobody!” He’s right. America has changed. (Tanya Kay, By Divine Design, Nashville, 1995, p. 90)
There is no doubt the world has changed, and not for the better. Beyond the observations made nearly thirty years ago, morality has taken a deep plunge into the vast ocean of pleasure-seeking and hedonistic agendas of transgenderism, mass murder, pornography, and prejudice – to name a few. The news pumps daily minute-by-minute stories that fill listeners’ minds with the degradation of a world gone mad. Watching the news can depress a person.
It must be remembered that moral decline is not new. Someone observed how bad the world was becoming, to which another replied, “It’s always been bad.” And that is the truth. The world of Noah was so bad God destroyed everyone except eight people. Pharaoh made a national law to kill the Hebrew babies. Herod slaughtered the young boys of the town of Bethlehem. The coming of Jesus two thousand years ago did not stop the wars, murders, rapes, hatred, and poverty. Morality struggles to balance goodness in a dark world of evil.
Jesus came to offer hope for a lost world. No one knows the answers to the human question more than the One who created man. God has never left His creation without the answers of life. The reason the world turns dark is because the world turns away from God. History is filled with the blackened bones of nations that forgot God and tried to determine right and wrong by human wisdom.
The choice is a matter of what list you want to live. If you want to live like the world, seek after sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, anger, drunkenness, and wild parties. Following these things will never bring you happiness. God offers a solution. Happiness is found in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (See Galatians 5:19-26)
The world is a dark place, and the darker it becomes, the more we need to be the light of the world. Darkness can never overtake light. It is only when the light is lost that darkness wins. Let your love for Christ shine in this dark world. Visit the Trenton Church of Christ. http://www.trentonchurchofchrist.com