Just walked out to get the paper for my wife to read, when she wakes up. There on the front page was a headline that I thought I'd never see in my lifetime. "Sears to close @ the Gadsden Mall". I was flooded by memories of times when I went with my mother to Sears.
Funny how things get stuck in your mind, or at least the perception of how things will always be. The sun will come up....the temperature will begin to drop as we enter into the fall season, headed for winter, and there will always be the stores that you grew up with as a kid. Well, life is not dictated to by the longevity of commercial investments.
In fact everything has a time and season. Every part of life is always winding down. As I've gotten older, I am getting a taste of what my parents must have gone through during my teenage years. All the social unrest of the 60's....the assassinations....the war in Viet Nam.....the dismantling of the moral structure in our nation by the left-thinking groups. No wonder my parents kept holding on to the old ways that had sustained them. It was their way of coping with all the change that was happening around them.
Even in Scripture, God gives us a glimpse of what we are experiencing today. Why? Because life and time are on a constant move downward. Time is winding down, and life is only getting darker in our nation and the world.
II Timothy 3:1-5
But mark this; There will be terrible (perilous / stressful) times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God-----having a form of godliness but denying the power...have nothing to do with such people.
Now the case could be made that such behavior and attitude have been around forever. Basically what we have is a listing of character defects, but if the verses had not started with the idea that such behavior would mark "The last days", I might thing differently about it.
In our country today, we see these behaviors not only evident in our society, but held up as being the right way to live. No thought given to the simple truth that these things are an the complete opposite of the life Christ is calling us to live.
Now here is the dark part to this whole "character defect" part. Take this kind of behavior and cover it with an addiction, and you've got yourself a mess to end all messes. Not only do you have a life locked into high gear toward self destruction, you've got a life that is spiritually blind and deaf, driven by a hard heart that is only bent on "self". "I want what I want, when I want it" is the creed for a person headed this way.
That list from II Timothy is a sobering list.
God did not allow it to be a part of the scripture to throw fear and hopelessness in our face. He gave it as kind of a mirror that allows us to see ourselves and check our hearts. Do I possess any of these character defects? If so, am I willing to let God's Holy Spirit work in me, to change me into the person God desires me to be?
Do I take this list of defects in II Timothy and reach out to others who may also be in the darkness, outside of God's will? Am I willing to love them into the Kingdom and a new way of living? A way of life that can only be found in Christ.
Hebrews 4:8
"Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts."
Food for thought here on Tuesday morning.
God on you...
mbb
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