It may be an odd time to express this, with it being close to Thanksgiving and all, but lately I find myself both shocked and grieved by the wickedness in our world. In Missouri, a 13 year-old girl slits a nine year-old girl's throat and hides her body in the woods, because she "wants to know what it feels like to kill someone." In North Carolina, a five year-old is prostituted out by her mother to adult men, and then murdered. Last night, Adam Lambert puts on one of the most vile, disgusting, and wicked public displays in the history of our nation, and the majority of Americans shrug their shoulders. Very soon, unless something changes, all of us will be required to pay for our fellow citizens' abortions out of our hard earned wages.
Most of the time when I hear Christians lament about the culture, my honest first impression is "get over it." The culture is what it is, and it doesn't do us any good to whine about it. Our job is to be salt and light, in whatever time/place we find ourself in. I have actually heard a compelling case made that an ungodly culture is healthy for the Church, because it makes the true Church very distinct from the pretenders. In other words, you can't fix a problem until you acknowledge it exists. And perhaps for too long the American church could pretend all was well, because society's mores generally constrained evil (at least publicly). But no more. Now we see wickedness exposed in all its ugliness that was under the surface all along.
The prophet Jeremiah once said, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." I think we (the Church) know this, but it's still difficult to see it increasingly on display.
