I really liked the following comments by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, both former speechwriters and advisors to President Bush 2. I hope you take the time necessary to read their words in light of the reality of Paul's explanation (1 Cor. 25:25) of what Jesus is doing in the world right now. God bless, Jeff
Christ will rule until he puts all his enemies under his power
1 Corinthians 15:25 (CEV)
Is America slouching toward Gomorrah?
"When it comes to cultural analysis, many evangelicals have sex too much on their minds. Some perspective on American society is in order.
Things Are Getting Better
By many indicators, our society has gotten better. The divorce rate has been declining since the early 1980s. Since 1990, the rate of abortions has fallen by more than a third, and the number of abortions each year has fallen by more than half. This year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the percentage of teens having sex has declined significantly over the past 25 years. Crime, violent crime, and rates of homicide are down by more than 50 percent from the early 1990s.
Of course, areas of concern remain. Today more than 40 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers. Marriage is increasingly a class-based institution, destructively weakening among working-class Americans. But our broader culture has shown, in some areas, a remarkable ability to mend itself. Many evangelicals mistake alarming legal trends for across-the-board cultural decay.
Further, Christian public engagement has hardly been ineffective. Evangelicals were part of a coalition to dramatically increase funding for the global fight against HIV/AIDS, helping more than nine million Africans to gain access to life-saving treatment. In their best abolitionist tradition, evangelicals have helped to place sexual trafficking on the global agenda. They have advocated for persecuted religious minorities in the Middle East. At home, they have provided foster families and adoptive homes, visited prisoners, advocated for criminal justice reform, opened crisis pregnancy centers, and championed the rights of unborn children.
America is not slouching toward Gomorrah. And the duties inherent in democracy remain. Cultural retreat would betray our faith, because it would betray the call and responsibility to seek the common good.
"Though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong.
The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and backbiting; the pleasure of power, of hatred.
For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two.
That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity
Christianity's greatest period of vulnerability and political weakness was the time of its most explosive growth.
"In many books, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has described how a tiny and obscure Messianic movement in the 2nd and 3rd centuries became the dominant faith of Western civilization. He points to early Christians' "communal compassion" and social networks; their care for the sick, widows, and orphans; their welcoming of strangers and care for outsiders; their respect for women (who were considered second-class citizens); and their connection to non-Christians.
This summer, nine African Americans were gunned down during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The gunman, Dylann Roof, was motivated by racism.
Less than 48 hours after the killings, the victims' families were allowed to speak directly to Roof at his first court appearance. The family members spoke in honest, unaffected ways about their grief and heartache. Yet they
bestowed forgiveness upon the man who had killed their loved ones. It was an extraordinary moment.
The greatest and most powerful Christian distinctive is not the exercise of power; it is the offer of grace.
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