In light of all the recent tragic events in our country, it seems a good time to share this blog.* Not long ago a friend asked me to write down for him what I think are some of the important problems our nation is facing today. Here was my response, and those from many other nations may be seeing some of the same things.
• Unbelief (failure to trust Christ)
• Self-justification, rationalization and refusal to repent
• Nominal, self-serving belief in a God created in our image
• Loss of the sense of God’s reality and majesty
• Idolatry—putting things and people in the place of God
• Failure to recognize accountability to God as Judge
• Refusal to come to terms with our mortality
• Demonization of and disrespect for authority, starting with the Bible’s authority (but including demonization of churches and government)
• Abortion and other forms of child abuse
• Racism and lack of understanding, respect and compassion for those with different skin
• Disrespect and lack of understanding, respect and compassion for those in law enforcement
• Failure to give people the benefit of the doubt; tendency to rush to judgment, misinterpret, misrepresent and condemn those whose beliefs and politics we disagree with
• Self-obsessed political leaders who habitually lie and distort reality
• Prevailing sense of entitlement
• Presumption that we’ve earned what’s in fact been graciously given to us by God and bought by the sacrifices of others
• Unthankfulness/ingratitude
• Whining, fault-finding
• Laziness; lack of discipline and self-control
• Lack of contemplation, meditation and serious thinking
• Functional illiteracy
• Minimization of gender differences
• Human rights abuses
• Insensitivity to or selective sensitivity to the plight of the poor and oppressed
• Treating women and children as objects rather than subjects
• Desensitization to sexual immorality
• Superficiality and lack of depth; celebrity worship; celebration of the trivial, neglect of the important
• Chronological snobbery: imagining that new ideas and standards are automatically superior to the old
• Failure to learn the lessons of history
• Worship of youth and making the elderly disposable
• Spoiling children by perpetually making them the center of our lives and theirs, resulting in their selfishness, immaturity, laziness and irresponsibility, which they carry into and through adulthood
In summary, our problems center on our failure to recognize: 1) who God is and 2) who we are…humans made in God’s image, yet marred, broken, separated from God and hell-bound because of our sin.
