The United States of Decline

It would be hard to look at the state of the State and its people and not see the decline occurring across the board. I am fifty years old and the country I live in today is nothing like the one I grew up in. Some of that was pure ignorance on my part because people were unaware of the rot and corruption within government due to successful media misdirection and its school system propaganda. We did not know what we did not know.

Taking ignorance out of the equation, where we stand today is the result of decades of lies getting exposed and people responding to those lies in the worldly ways available to them. This is the carnal effect of people becoming aware of reality and giving up and giving in to their own desires embracing sinful lifestyles. These carnal responses of non-believers are opportunities to win souls for the Kingdom of God. These do not hurt.

What hurts is the ignorance of people within the Church. People within churches across the USD continue watching their 24 hour news show of choice and consuming lies everyday as if they are real. Christians believe the same lies and are well-versed in the lies and ignorant of Scripture. I can ask nearly every active church member in the USD about presidential elections and they can riff for 10 minutes straight one way or the other. I can ask them about sports and they can go on and on about the corruption of the NFL and NCAA and how baseball is speeding up the game. I can ask about the endless wars the USD is continually fighting and fomenting and they can tell me all about the banner on their Facebook page pledging their support.

If I ask them about Scripture, real prayer, sharing the Gospel and discipleship I will get stares and then claims of participation in each of the four prior. However, if I were to follow them around I would almost certainly see without fail a believer who puts all their eggs in the worldly basket and almost none in the divine. God gets the short end of the stick. God is our after thought. After we have worked all week. After we have set aside some money for relaxation and fun. After we have paid our bills and watched the games and taken our naps and planted our gardens and mowed our grass and about one thousand more "afters."

God gets the little bit that is left.

This morning I read Romans 1 and at the end is a short paragraph detailing the effects of relegating God to last place and it goes like this,

"And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind..." and then Paul lists all the shameful things that fill our televisions and our movies and if we are honest, most of the United States of Decline have taken and embraced this final paragraph of Romans 1 and made it their religion and their faith. Americans fornicate wildly in all manner of unseemly ways. They drink, gamble, use drugs and boast about it all. We build man-caves as temples to our new gods where we worship and invent new ways to do and think evil. The things described in this final paragraph Paul says are not only worthy of death, but the people living these ways derive pleasure from doing them.

We live in a State of Decline filled with unrepentant sinners and backsliding Christians who have given up the glory of God for a tarnished crown made by man, probably in China. There is nothing Christian about the USD. It is worth rejecting and has been given over to its lustful passions and God-hating ways. There are a million doors waiting for Christians to knock on and share the good news of Jesus but we are too distracted, too tired, too broke, and too lazy to place the first things first because we have the worst things blocking the way to the good news.

WE can do better.