What is your greatest fear? Go ahead and think of it for a minute. A few of my friends think it should be clowns. More seriously, for some it might be loss of family, terrorism, or something simple like heights, or snakes, or mice. FDR said the “only thing we need to fear, is fear itself.” While I understand the context of FDR’s speech, fear can be a good thing and can motivate us to take action. Fear pushes us to take all sorts of measures to ensure our safety, we buy locks, we use alarms, we obey the speed limit, we watch safety videos at our jobs, all in an effort to protect ourselves. Evidenced by our actions, fear is often viewed with an external context, yet what if the greatest potential for harm comes not from the outside, but from inside of ourselves?
Take this political season for instance, there is a whole bunch of fear over who our next President might be. Yet, I hear little fear about what our Country is turning into outside of politics. See, I think our biggest fear should be ourselves. Our desire for self is what could end up destroying the democratic-republic of America. See, freedom requires self-less-ness, and cannot exist in a self-gratifying community. A free society requires morality, restraint, sympathy, and philanthropic passion. As postmodernism has removed our moral compass, we have lost our ability to properly function as a free and libertarian society. Politics is not to blame for our current condition, WE are to blame. Our greatest challenge in America is not a political candidate, it is our loss of truth, absolute truth, and our focus on self. C.S. Lewis said that “secularization and worldliness have deceived us into thinking that the satisfactions of earthly desires are adequate for our souls.”
Those two things together, the loss of a moral absolute and the emphasis on pleasing self are the two greatest issues that threaten our country. Would you join me in praying for the people of North America? Pray that we would repent from our short-sighted, self-gratifying, desires and turn to the only God, our Creator, who defines right and wrong and who is the standard for all things good. We cannot exist as a free society and turn our back from biblical principles, it just won’t work…and we are now experiencing the results of removing God from freedom. We, as a nation, as a continent, as a world, need the saving power and transformational nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Psalms 27:1 tells us that with God as our compass, we have nothing to fear.
