It begins with the Church recognizing first how pagan it has become, then rooting out our rotten structures and rebuilding them in the eyes of the Word and His word. We can’t hope to overturn the advances of Satan with a gospel that doesn’t even move those who already believe it. Our preaching must be with power and assurance, and our discipleship needs be ordered to shape all the areas of life that a Believer needs prepared to face. And none of this can come about without prayer. We so underestimate what prayer can accomplish because we fail to comprehend the God we pray to.

As the next to last entry for the fall series on things that go bump in the night we need to talk a little bit about a subject that can illustrate for us some of the dangers of the world in which we are currently living, especially in the West. When I say “the West” I mean Europe and North America. The cultural fishbowl in which all of us live in our day-to-day. Despite what your DEI representative (and I can’t be the only southerner who reads that as Dale Earnhardt, Inc.) told you at the last HR meeting it is okay for us to identify and express ourselves as Western. We are men and women who are the result of a bunch of dead white guys philosophizing about the world and we are also the result of the infiltration (in a good way) of the Bible into how we see and understand everything around us. It’s not white supremacy to notice our own culture, and even think that it is good and in fact better than what came before Europe became the Europe it became after Constantine’s dictate. We should celebrate the fact that we don’t sacrifice babies on the altar (well, more on that in a second) and force women to die with their husbands. Those things are bad. White men passing laws that stopped it were good. We shouldn’t be ashamed to say so. The art, philosophy, science, religion, etc… that produced the Christian states of Europe were and continue to be a blessing to all those downstream from them. Yet, there is a problem.

In our prayer and worship help today we are going to talk about the world in which we live today and how the same men tasked with building up have been working to destroy and tear down. We are now experiencing the results of this evil. In some sense the reappearance of the strong gods, the pagan culture we left a millennia or more ago is all a result of men abandoning their responsibilities in accordance with the Fifth Commandment. Everything comes back to the law of God, and whether society will bow their knee to Christ or seek to be their own god. Psalm 2 and other passages warn us as to the consequences of such. I get calls/texts regularly from folks both within and outside the congregation about why we see such rampant licentiousness and sin in the world today. On one hand the earth has been so since the days of Adam’s fall. However, there were times when it was better, even if sin was still present. The golden age is not yet with us. In our Thursday catechism lesson this week we are going to hear about Stews, and as will be opened there that means brothels, houses of ill-repute. Why did our Westminster Divines write about this? Because it was a problem. They were all over the place in Seventeenth-Century England. How many open, public, state-authorized spaces do we have for this practice in Clover? I am not naïve enough to not know that there is availability for such if you were desiring to look.

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