Friday, December 2, 2011

Hypocrisy or True Morality?

Our family continues to grow. We just had another baby boy. He was welcomed home by three older brothers and a couple of aunties who helped care for him the first week of his life as mommy recovered. He was also welcomed home by a daddy who not only lived with his mommy, but was married to her.
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I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how the moral values of our society have degraded farther than we could have imagined. I recently read how few teenagers have both a mom and dad in the same house. Parents separating or divorcing is just part of the problem. According to the CDC, 41% of all births in the USA are to unwed mothers.
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Such statistics should break our hearts, but instead they have become the new “normal”. It is not my intent to single out unwed mothers. They did not reach that state alone. There was a father as well. If he can be found he will be forced to pay to support his child and that support will be a huge financial burden on him. At the same time the mother trying to raise the child herself will face challenges that are almost unimaginable.
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As a father of little boys, I cannot imagine trying to raise them without my wife’s help or her raising them without mine. My heart breaks for those trying to go it alone. At the same time I am so grateful that so many unwed mothers are choosing to let their babies live. I am definitely a strong advocate of adoption, but recognize it is not as common as raising a child alone.
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I bring all this up to show that this is one more area of our society where moral values have changed. The family structure has definitely broken down. My mother talks about when she was in high school in the early 1960’s and how girls were “sent away”. What often happened is that an unwed mother would be sent to live with relatives a long way away so no one would know she was pregnant and then the baby was put up for adoption.
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I fear the stigma ended up making the pregnancy itself look like a sin when there is nothing sinful about being pregnant. On the other hand, the behavior that results in pregnancy is to be reserved for marriage. 1 Corinthians 6:18 says, “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.” Fornication is the idea of sinful sexual relations. Hebrews 13:4 tells us, “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.”
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Today the values of our nation have changed much from what they were a century ago. Too many have forgotten or do not even care about God’s way. When everyone does what is right in his own eyes regarding sex, why are we surprised when there are so many sex scandals?
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Premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, pedophilia, and bestiality are not wrong because I say they are wrong, they are wrong because God says so. If we condemn homosexuality and participate in premarital sex are we not hypocrites? If we condemn pedophilia but commit adultery are we not showing a double standard? The point is not that we should accept other sins because of our own sins. The point is that all sin is wrong, including the ones we are involved in.
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The truth is that we are all sinners and that is why Christ came to die for our sins. “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20b). “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” (Romans 6:1-2)

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