My wife, Patricia, likes to say, “We as Christians think that we have an uphill battle trying to win the culture to Christ; well, it’s been done before in Roman times, and back then, the culture was much more abhorrent than it is today. When we show the same love the Christians demonstrated in those days; we will win over today’s culture.”
When we read the newspapers or watch the news, it seems as though the nation and the world are goingfurther and further in the wrong direction. We’re not just talking about Islamic terrorism; more and more we are talking about random, murderous acts against innocent and unknown people. Sheer evil.
Where does this come from? The only explanation is, it comes from dark hearts. I used to work for a publisher who would usually ask anybody who brought him a new problem, “What changed. Why did we not have this problem yesterday, but now have it today?” Asking, what changed was his way of isolating the circumstances so that we could find the source of the challenge.
Bringing that approach to the dark and evil forces which indwell the hearts of the people who are carrying out heinous acts against their fellow human beings, we ask, “Why was America not like this in the past decades, but now it is?” We as Christians know the answer. It is encapsulated in Luke’s account in the Bible: A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.
So we ask, why are we seeing so much more evil? The Roman world overwhelmingly threw off their pagan ways and took on Christ’s message of love for one’s fellow man. Why did they do so? They witnessed such peace in Christ’s followers and encountered such tremendous selflessness, such enormous generosity, such overpowering love in those who had turned their lives over to Christ that they put their dark lives behind them to become children of light.
This same fervor swept the entire Western World for the last couple of millennia. The movement was so strong that it brought many of America’s earlier settlers to our shores, from places where they felt religiously oppressed. We are now witnessing a palpable flagging of faith, however. Look at the older communities; we see multiple churches in proximity to one another, many of them large and expensive edifices. That speaks loudly of the hearts of the believers of that day. While the building of new churches has continued, it is at a much-reduced level.
What about church attendance? When I was a child, all the families I knew attended church; that’s no longer the case. While there are numerous kind and generous people who don’t profess belief in God, we know from Jeremiah 17:9 that man’s basic nature is dark: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” As Christians, we know how Christ works on us to remake our selfish nature into His loving nature. We know that without constantly seeking His help, we could not hope to exemplify the life of love He lived 2,000 years ago.
