Good morning,
Last
week I ran across a YouTube video that was a beautiful parable of where
our world is going when it comes to knowing what truth really looks
like to our generation. The video starts with a forest of trees at the
edge of a body of water. As you watch, the water begins to become rough
and the trees begin to shake. Gradually the front row of trees starts
to move into the water and in seconds get shorter and shorter. In less
than a minute the last of the formerly tall trees disappears and nothing
is left but swirling muddy water. They had been swallowed up in what
is known as a sink hole. Sink holes are formed when the soil deep
underground is gradually washed away, then suddenly the ground above it
falls down into the empty space and makes a big hole where there used to
be a field or a small pond. It can take many years of gradual loss
with little or no warning until the sudden disappearance of that piece
of land. That is exactly where we are in our generation when it comes
to our relationship with God.
For hundreds of years the western
world has based at least part of their values on the light that God has
given us in his word, the Bible. Some countries have followed God’s
rules more carefully than others, but there was still a general
knowledge of what God defined as good and evil. Until the Nineteen
Hundreds there were occasional revivals and a great deal of missionary
work that kept these truths alive. Politically, men like Hitler and
Stalin and Chairman Mao have done their best to silence the truth of
God. Spiritually, we have faced the watering down of the truths of God
until what God calls light has been twisted into spiritual darkness.
During my lifetime we have watched the ideas that defined good and evil
turned inside out. God hasn’t changed one bit. What he tells us is
light and right is still the same. When we come to the cross of Jesus
to be cleansed from our sin and stand firm in our faith in Jesus as our
Shepherd, we can still personally have love based relationships with our
brothers and sisters in Jesus and a love based relationship with the
world around us. Will we still have to struggle with our sin nature? Of
course. But instead of pretending we are not sinning when we disagree
with God, we will turn to him when we sin, confess our sins as rebellion
against him and know the wonderful freedom of a clean heart in the face
of a lost world swirling in the muddy waters or a world swallowed up in
their rebellion against God. Please Lord, protect us from the moral
sink holes of our generation.
I John 1: 7 But if we are
living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship
with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all
sin. 8 If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not
living in the truth. 9 But if we confess our sins to him, he is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
wickedness.
Roy Wisner
