a higher standard

Welcome to this week’s blog from the Red Roof Church of Bulverde, Texas.  I’m Lee Harder the senior pastor at St. Paul wishing you God’s blessings for this coming week.  I would also like to invite you to join us for worship this Sunday at 8:30 AM or 10:45 AM.  I guarantee you will hear God’s Word from Scripture and celebrated every week.  If you can’t stop by in person, why not check out our recorded services.  They are uploaded every Sunday by 1:00 PM. at redroofchurch.org  We would love to have you be a part of our worship.                                                                                                                                                                                         
This past week has been a week of endings.  First, the Super Bowl game has been played.  It was a good game with winners and losers.  The ads, eagerly  anticipated, have aired, which some find more entertaining than the game itself, to the joy of all.  The halftime performance is now a thing of the past.  Did you see it?                                                                                                                   
I find it terribly frustrating and painfully disappointing to have a halftime show of a grandiose, family orientated celebration come across to be less than family friendly.  The Super Bowl has become an American icon of celebration with the parties and gatherings of family and friends geared to watch an historic sporting event surrounded by good food and good entertainment.  The halftime program of bump and grind wasn’t part of it.                                                                                                                              
Are these talented women gifted performers?  Yes!  Are they demonstrating the qualities (which they profess) that raise the standards for women as something other than objects of sexual exploitation?  I don’t think so, at least I didn’t see it.                       
The halftime performance was not for families and most definitely not for children.  For people who supposedly advocate a higher standard so that women are not treated as sexual objects, they can only be branded hypocrites.                                              
For people who speak of care and sensitivity for the needs of children who cavort in such scandalous fashion are frauds.  I would suggest that the NFL give more consideration to how they are perceived in the public eye by the ones who finance their francize, but realizing some of the behaviors expressed in recent years, it would be a waste of effort.                                                  
I mention this not to moralize over a football game halftime show, but to raise the issue of where we are headed as a nation.  Our value system of right and wrong seems to be on a continual decline.  Anything goes as long as it makes a person happy and content.  And it’s not your happiness that matters, it’s mine.  So what if we help cause a young boy to think that a beautiful woman is only a side of beef hanging before our eyes for pleasure and satisfaction.  It doesn’t matter if we inadvertently cause a young girl to think that the only way to be attractive is to dress scantily and grab ourselves in inappropriate ways.  I repeat, our nation is in trouble.                                                                                                                                                                                                    
If you still have doubts then I refer you to this past week’s political theatrics.  First, President Trump was acquitted of impeachment.  Yet the party of opposition made it clear that they would never accept the verdict.  Instead, they were to begin the same process over from a different tack in the near future.  More inquests.  More testimony.  More expressions of contempt.  The pontificating on the floor of the senate before the vote, in some cases, defied description. However, that was only the beginning as the vitriolic hatred for this president boiled over at the State of the Union.                                                          
Do I wish the president would have shook the hand of the Speaker of the House?  Yes.  Do I wish she could have refrained from her contorted facial   expressions of ridicule capped by tearing up the president’s speech? Definitely.
 
Our nation is divided and that division has created a hatred that is palpable.  You can cut the hatred with a knife, but one doesn’t dare use one because it will be plunged into the back of their political opponent.  The only other time I have seen such contempt, historically, is with the civil war  —  North against South.  Today, it’s right against left, elitists versus the deplorables.      
You know why this hatred, this vulgarity, this promiscuousness, this absence of ethics and morality exists in our culture today?  Much of the nation, its  people, have turned their backs on God or adapted Him to fit into a modern, sophisticated world, with what they want God to be, not who He is.  The standards of values, morality and ethics that God has laid out for humanity are too demanding.  So we look for an easier path, even in the church which should know better.  We want to do what feels good.
I suggest we spend a little more time in the Bible to see how the Hebrews faired when they took on God by disobedience and opposition.  God has been known to teach some pretty dynamic lessons to His chosen people. Historically, check out the empires, the civilizations that lost sight of their ethics and morals to embrace a depraved value system.  They cease to exist.            
Something to think about before the God who brought us into the world decides to take us out or call the class to order.                
And those are my thoughts.
God bless and have a great week. 
Pastor Lee