“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!”

–Abraham Lincoln (March 30, 1863)–

And since then we have had 146 years of one generation after another consistently getting more and more selfish. It has not been an addition factor from one generation to the next, but a multiplication factor. The concentration of selfishness and evil in the country is astounding! We do not live in a “good” place. We do not live in a “good” culture. Our America does not acknowledge God, much less need, thank, or desire Him. Yet there are the few who do see Him for who He is, and see us for who we are, and with those few I pray and toil and cry for the many. We are all too arrogant. We are all too prideful. We are all too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

So this is my struggle this morning. I am a head person. A thinker. A knowledge person. When a problem comes up, I want to get all the information possible so I can go about solving the problem logically and systematically.  I’m not sure how I came to be this way, because I have also always been a dreamer with my head in the clouds, so this is all really weird for me. But my struggle as a thinker, is to feel. I often push my heart out of the way because knowledge is black and white, concrete, solid. I can deal with the sure, the predictable. I don’t think that knowledge is bad, but the exclusivity that I hold it to is. God is seeking those who would worship him in spirit and in truth, and I worship him in truth, but have a hard time worshiping him in spirit. I don’t know, maybe it is because I know what my life looks like when following my heart. I am a very selfish person when I follow my heart. Or maybe I wasn’t really following my heart, but my idolatrous desires. Or was it my unregenerate heart that has always led me to such selfishness? All I know is that in following my heart in the past, I have heart a lot of people, not least of which is my wife, and always God in the most.

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Withing this past week, I have had a huge revelation about the way that our response to the small things in life indicate our view of the bigger things. Sometime in the past week, I finally stated following ALL the traffic laws. Let me give you a background of where I am coming from, and then I will tell you why this is so big.

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If souls please thee, let them be loved in God; for they also are mutable, but in Him are they firmly established, else would they pass, and pass away. In Him, then, let them be beloved; and draw unto Him along with thee as many souls as thou canst, and say to them, “Him let us love, Him let us love; He created these, nor is He far off. For He did not create them, and then depart; but they are of Him, and in Him. Behold, there is He wherever truth is known. He is within the very heart, but yet hath the heart wandered from Him. Return to your heart, O ye transgressors, and cleave fast unto Him that made you. Stand with Him, and you shall stand fast. Rest in Him, and you shall be at rest. Whither go ye in rugged paths? Whither go ye? The good that you love is from Him; and as it has respect unto Him it is both good and pleasant, and justly shall it be embittered, because whatsoever cometh from Him is unjustly loved if He be forsaken for it. Why, then, will ye wander farther and farther in these difficult and toilsome ways? There is no rest where ye seek it. Seek what ye seek; but it is not there where ye seek. Ye seek a blessed life in the land of death; it is not there. For could a blessed life be where life itself is not?”

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A conversation between me and a friend of mine last night has led me to think a lot about the way that we are so selective with what we choose to condemn and what we choose to justify. St. Augustine said, “Pride is the mother of all sin. Pride gives birth to all other sin.” The second that we look past the log in our own eye to tell our neighbor about the speck in his, we have become prideful and arrogant. In the Bible, homosexuality is never divorced from any other forms of sexual immorality. This leads to John 8:7 where Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”. We are not to throw stones or cast judgment because we ourselves have sin in our lives. I am almost willing to bet that anyone who would condemn homosexuals has their own sexual sin that they have not addressed. I am also willing to bet that anyone who is tolerant of homosexuality, is so because they know that they have their own sexual sin in their life that they have not overcome, and therefor know that they cannot cast a stone. Ephesians 5:3 says: “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.” So if we are all sinners and no one has the right to address sin, what’s a christian to do? If both sides are sinful, what’s the answer?

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