I Want To Invite You Take A Trip With Me

I have listened to all the repulsion and vented anger people are spewing over the sexual misconduct of certain powerful people. All sorts of sentiments are being expressed. For the most part I am cool with that.

I am not sure I understand everything I hear since sexual “misconduct” seems to include everything from incident/accidental touching to outright rape and everything in-between. So I guess, we are adopting the same standard on this that was adopted in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for pornography when he said, “I know it when I see it.”

The phrase is a colloquial expression to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters.  I first came to understand this back in the 1980's when I had a lady come by to talk to me about someone who was touching her inappropriately. When I asked her just what that meant she replied, “He puts his hand on my arm when he talks with me.” Surprised I said, “But I have done that myself and never give it a thought.” she quickly said, “That is not what I am talking about. We you take my hand or touch my arm its not the same as when this person does it.”  I confess I was really getting confused until she said, “Brother David, there is touching and then there is touching.”  I later asked my wife about it and she said, “I know exactly what she means.”

You see my touching communicated care and concern while this other man communicated something far more intimate. The physical actions were identical except my touching was appropriate and his was inappropriate. This lady could not clearly define the parameters that made one touch acceptable and rendered the other inappropriate . . . . .  and yet she could tell the difference. This was a case of “I know it when I feel it.”  Truth is, I have no way of know what the man had in his heart and mind but I needed to help her deal with the issue and put a stop to it. Suffice it to say it was resolved and over time the man was made aware that such touching was unwanted and unappreciated. His dilemma is that it is a subjective thing and you never know whether the issue begins in the heart and mind of the toucher or the one touched.

I said all that to say that while we may not always be able to quantify inappropriate sexual behavior we all know it when we see it. The trick is separating the intentional from the unintentional. Easy in sever cases less evident in minor instances. Not all sexually inappropriate touching is created equal or requires the same responses.

Now to what started this train of thought: 

But when I read "Going to Church" right now on the Matt Lauer situation is exact reason why workplace harassment lives and thrives, . . . . " I want to just scream! If the people involved had been "Going to Church" a bit more and taken Christianity a little more seriously perhaps none of these lives would be going through such trauma.

Our nation has drifted so far from its Judeo-Christian roots that it has completely forgotten the “Rock from which it was hewn.” All of this can be traced to a movement embodied in Joseph Fletcher’s book Situation Ethics.  Little by little starting in the 1960's with Gabriel Vahanian (Syracuse) whose 1961 book, The Death of God, gave the movement its name. This was followed by Baptist Harvey Cox’s (Harvard Divinity School) paperback, The Secular City (1965). Next came Thomas J. J. Altizer’s, (Emory University) The New Essence of Christianity. Finally there was Paul M. Van Buren’s (Temple University) The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. These men and the movement they started has resulted in large measure to the secularization of Christianity in America and the outright rejection of moral absolutism.

Thanks to the men mentioned in the previous paragraph and others like them we as a society and nation have pretty much decided in the name of "Freedom from Religion" that the Christian Faith was outdated and irrelevant to our times. Beginning with their influence and that of their disciples we began a steady drift from the moral and ethical principles that hold a society together. If, and that's a big if, we were living by the "Thus saith the Lord" of the Bible there would be far fewer instances of inappropriate sexual behavior because there would be far fewer people without a moral center.

In generations past not everyone lived according to the principles of Scripture but they did acknowledge that the Bible set the moral and ethical standards for human behavior.  There were fixed (absolute) standards and those standards were derived from the Bible. Bad things happened but society responded with a strong hand. Ministers prior to the 1960's never dealt much with the psycho-theological aspects of the Gospel and rightly so.  Basically their message was to society was : (1) Here is the standard, I.E., the Bible,  (2) you are coming short of that standard, I.E., you are a sinner (3) only God can meet the standard, I.E., is sinless and holy, (4) In Jesus He does just that, I.E., meets the standard of the Bible, (5) When an individual repents of his sin and profess that Jesus is Lord he receives a new nature that is empowered to resist sin. In short, the preached and relied upon a supernatural transformation that had the power to change the human core (heart).

As a result of the God is Dead movement and the Secularization of Christianity our society eventually adopted a moral value system built on the shifting sand of human reason and relativism. This system is doomed to fail and destined to produce such behavior as we are reading about in our papers daily. We have sown to the wind and of that sowing we have reaped a whirlwind.

As early as 1988 Psychiatrist Karl Menninger was asking "Whatever Happened to Sin?" He understood the direction were had chosen as a society and he knew next to go would be Virtue then Friendship and finally Happiness in the Moral Life. The end of the matter is that now everyone does whatever is right in their own eyes . .. eyes blinded by sin

We shut the God of love out of our society; we have decided we no longer needed a God because in our humanity we can create a Great Society. Well, all we have managed to do is created a time of great trouble and replace the hope in our heart with fear.

You don't like what your reading and hearing then just wait . . .it can get worse and it will get worse . . . in fact it will bring us down into the dust. "The wages of sin is death" is an Absolute.

I believe it was Pogo who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." "But each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death."

I abhor, detest and despise what these men have done and I grieve for all the lives that have endured the pain of being the victims of these men's sin. I don't know what the short term answer is but in the long run the only real fix is found in the offer God has extended to us when he said to humanity, "If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will heal their land."

There is a place in Judea mention frequently in the Bible as the place where Jacob first encountered God personally.  Bethel is about twelve miles north of Jerusalem. I remember standing there in 1973 and thinking what a bleak place. It is 1200 feet above sea level, windy and covered with large rocks.  It was not a comfortable place but it was where Jacob spent the night as he fled his brother. As years past Jacob (later Isaac) would return to this place to get things sorted out spiritually in his life. He would return to the place where he first met God personally.

There is an old fashioned word that needs to be brought back to our vocabulary and that is the word Revival. We need a personal revival. Like Jacob we need to return to or personal Bethel . . . . . that time when we first met God and felt truly spiritually alive.  The Church needs to return to her Bethel and recapture the excitement and power that she had on the Day of Pentecost.

Let me ask you, “Has there ever been a time when you loved Jesus more than love Him right now? Has there ever been a time when you were more excited about the things of God than you are today? Has there ever been a time when you were closer to the Lord than you are this moment?”  If so, it is time to Go Back To Your Personal Bethel.

We don’t need new laws or a greater number of prosecutions. What we need is what Paul spoke of in Ephesians Two where he said God in Christ has created a new kind of man (ἵνα τοὺς δύο κτίσῃ ἐν αὑτ? εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον). I want to invite you take a trip with me: A trip Back to Bethel. That place where you first met God. That place where God first became real to you.