Tag Archives: wages of sin

Have we lost our “Dear Abby” minds?

I opened the newspaper today and read about the death of Pauline Phillips a.k.a. Abigail Van Buren of “Dear Abby” fame. While I was growing up the “Dear Abby” syndicated column was as much of interest to me as the thoughts expressed on the editorial page, and sometimes it was even more interesting than the front page for that matter.

But I doubt that today the views of “Dear Abby” or of her sister in advice-giving “Ann Landers” would be picked up as content suitable for publication by today’s mass media empires. You see, the Abby and Ann type of advice with its emphasis on moral absolutism—stuff like adultery, promiscuous sex, and lying always being wrong—is no longer fashionable among the “politically correct,” the elite gatekeepers of society who exercise considerable control over what is perceived as acceptable or not today.

You see for the power elite setting society’s agenda these days the advice of poor Abby and Ann are just too 1950ish. They are seen as being too judgmental. Why, they had the brazen nerve to write that pleasure and “doing your own thing” ARE NOT the final arbiters in determining what is right or wrong. Abby and Ann thought personal integrity and sexual responsibility actually counted for something. How foolish and naïve of them!

The passé commonsense preached by those Jewish ladies is perceived as being stuck in a time when actual biblical values were still taught in the churches and synagogues; and the Holy Scriptures were actually read even in the public schools— and  portrayed in the movies and on television. Horrors! How antediluvian! How backwards!

But now in 2013 society has “progressed” or at least, moved on. Consider this sample of the post-modern enlightened social values being fostered at one of Canada’s most influential universities:

The University of Toronto, you will be edified to know, is “kicking off its annual Sexual Awareness Week” next Monday at a downtown Toronto club, the Oasis Aqua Lounge, where swingers are welcome. Facilitating the adventure is the university’s Sexual Education Centre (SEC), which arranged for students to pay only $5 a person instead of the $40 per person Oasis usually charges.

An exuberant Reddit user posted the information in a University of Waterloo forum thus: “U of T is holding an orgy, and you’re invited! You just need your student ID….”

As I said of Yale’s sex week, this tarted-up promotion of voyeurism “strikes me as nothing more than a forum conceived to proselytize the student body on the cultural virtue of dumbing deviancy down, and to shame students who adhere to traditional moral standards of reasonable restraints on sexual gratification.” http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/01/16/barbara-kay-university-of-torontos-pimps-r-us-program-offers-discounts-to-sex-party/

The Sexual Education Centre at the University of Toronto “is an affiliated levy group of the University of Toronto Students Union. Undergraduate students pay 25 cents a term for the services, and can opt out if they choose.

The group’s mission is to foster a sex-positive attitude in the greater U of T area, by offering information, programming, safer-sex supplies, and peer counselling in a welcoming environment. Their sexual awareness week includes a discussion on sex positivity, an interactive sex toy demonstration and an afternoon of pornography. The first event is the party at Oasis [Aqua Lounge]: the organization rented the club and lowered the price to $5 a person. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1315033–university-of-toronto-student-group-hosts-epic-sex-club-adventure

It would seem that a great many of us have lost, indeed, our “Dear Abby” minds.  Our society hasn’t progressed. It’s merely degenerated down to the level of pagan Rome and its infamous orgies under the modern deceitful word-disguise of practicing a “sex-positive attitude” and having a healthy “sexual awareness.”

“I’ve got something to say. Is anybody listening?
I’ve a warning to post. Will anyone notice?
It’s hopeless! Their ears are stuffed with wax—deaf as a post, blind as a bat.
It’s hopeless! They’ve tuned out God. They don’t want to hear from me.
But I’m bursting with the wrath of God.
I can’t hold it in much longer. “So dump it on the children in the streets. Let it loose on the gangs of youth.
For no one’s exempt: Husbands and wives will be taken,
the old and those ready to die;
their homes will be given away—all they own, even their loved ones—
When I give the signal
against all who live in this country.”
God’s Decree. “Everyone’s after the dishonest dollar, little people and big people alike.
Prophets and priests and everyone in between twist words and doctor truth.
My people are broken—shattered!—and they put on Band-Aids,
saying, ‘It’s not so bad. You’ll be just fine.’
  But things are not ‘just fine’!
Do you suppose they are embarrassed
over this outrage?
No, they have no shame.
They don’t even know how to blush.
There’s no hope for them. They’ve hit bottom
and there’s no getting up.
As far as I’m concerned,
they’re finished.”
God has spoken. God’s Message yet again: “Go stand at the crossroads and look around.
Ask for directions to the old road, the tried-and-true road. Then take it.
Discover the right route for your souls.
But they said, “Nothing doing.” Jeremiah 6:10-16 The Message.

Isn’t it funny that a message written almost 2,600 years ago is just as relevant today as it was to the people to whom it was first delivered?  Human nature hasn’t changed much.

The people who scoff at the moral, ethical values taught by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are creating their own future black hole of despair into which they are being sucked. Sex can be extremely pleasurable, which is why the earth’s human population has tended to grow rather than shrink over the millenia. But such pleasure without morality is just plain old-fashioned lust—not love!

Lust is a sinful behaviour, spiritually speaking according to the Judeo-Christian perspective. And in the end, those who become slaves to sin—yes, sin is addictive—lose all chance at finding the intimate happiness that flows from being with one’s true love, one’s soul mate. And, as it is written, anyone who becomes such a slave to lust also loses out on any chance of God’s gift of living eternally in His Kingdom of truth and light, because the wages of sin is death. Death is not living in an ever-burning hell (God is not a bondage freak), but rather death is the complete termination of consciousness and being, the end of all life (Romans 6:23).

Your average person is reluctant to consider his or her convictions, prejudices, and even superstitions. It is the rare person who has the curiosity and courage to look through the so-called “progressive” attitudes popular in this present society and turn away from them. In the Scriptures this is called repentance. Anyone who has been caught up in the sin of lust must repent of it to become part of God’s family and to take up what He offers to those who obey Him (Luke 8:21).

While the example of the University of Toronto student association that I cited here is an extreme—variations on, or echoes of that theme can be found reverberating throughout our society and its forms of entertainment. What starts on university campuses today becomes social mainstream behaviour tomorrow. This degeneration of sexual morals is the future of this society, a future that will be dark and violent due nation-wide moral bankruptcy.

As a whole, human beings are reluctant to admit error and so most embrace willful blindness to avoid doing so. But like the prophet Jeremiah, I would encourage you to take to the tried-and-true road of personal integrity and sexual responsibility as taught by the Scriptures. If you do this, you will keep both your “Dear Abby” mind and your happiness while others will lose whatever they think they have.

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When compromise becomes the language of the Devil

When my youngest son wants to do something I’m not too excited about, we’ll talk together and come up with a compromise solution in which each of us gives a little so that the household can continue on in harmony.

Compromise is a normal part of the give and take of any family or human relationship. We adapt our personal preferences and opinions for the greater good of getting along with another. That’s normal.

But when it comes to the moral logic of the Universe and the demonstrable truth of the Judeo-Christian scriptures about what is right and what is wrong, it has always been required of Christians in every epoch of history to draw a line in the sand over something with which they cannot compromise.  To accept the sinful cultural practices of their time or civilization would have been anathema.

For first century A.D. Christians it was not offering a pinch of incense on the Roman altar of state in order to acknowledge that Caesar was supreme: a small act of Roman paganism that clearly violated the Bible’s first commandment:

Then God gave the people all these instructions: “I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery. You must not have any other god but me” (Exodus 20:1-3 NLT).

Many thousands of Christians were hideously murdered by the barbaric Roman state for refusing to compromise with the “most noble Caesar, the civilized world’s benefactor” and just offer that little act of worship.

For post-modern Christians living in the 21st Century, there is now a tremendous pressure to conform to what may be labelled “politically correct paganism,” which like all the pagan ideologies of the past, essentially worships and exalts human ideas of right and wrong above the divine ones taught by the Hebrew and Greek scriptures.

In the latest edition of a sorry series of similar events, a biblical-values sensitive, conservative Anglican congregation was forced out of its long-held church property—St. Albans Anglican Church on King George Street—at which they had been meeting since before Canadian Confederation in 1867 by the “politically correct” Anglican Diocese of Ottawa. The issue was same sex marriage.

The pastor of this forced-to-leave congregation, George Sinclair, said:

The move was “an issue of conscience, and for us, conscience trumps building …
A church that just has the building, but does not have the dreams and visions that come from God, is on its way to dying … If you end up thinking you’re smarter and nicer and wiser than the master [Jesus Christ], in what way are you still his disciple? … The Bible is very clear on certain things, as to what is right or wrong.”
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Anglican+Church+followers+find+home/5008958/story.html#ixzz1QcGf00LT

These conservative Anglicans came to understand that when it comes to sin—compromise is indeed the language of the devil.

Sin? What is sin? Why can’t one compromise with sin?

The Apostle John gave a succinct defintion of just what sin is:

“Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4 NRSV).

The law that the apostle was referring to is God’s law as contained in the Hebrew and Greek bibles—not Canada’s federal and provincial law, not even the rules and policies of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa.

God’s law divides behaviour and thought patterns into those that are permitted, generally called “righteousness” and those that are forbidden, which is “sin.”

Spiritually speaking, there are serious consequences for those who deliberately chose to live sin-full lifestyles. As the Apostle Paul wrote:


For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23 NLT).

The reason no one can compromise with sin and get away with it in the long run is because…well, without God we’re just dead meat. The Bible does NOT say you have an immortal soul! The scriptures clearly teach that eternal life is only for those who belong to Christ and who are resurrected from among the dead (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:23).

The whole purpose of Jesus first coming and His sacrifice was to rescue His people from the consequences of sin. We cannot cuddle up to or give ourselves permission to do what the Scriptures say is wrong and not pay the price! Again, listen to this warning from the Apostle John:

Dear children, don’t let anyone deceive you about this: When people do what is right, it shows that they are righteous, even as Christ is righteous. 8 But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning. But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:7-8 NLT).

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