May 27^th:      Plainfield Christian Church, Plainfield, IN, Sunday School, Worldview, Creation issues, Creatures

May 24-26:   Leave for Kentucky and opening of Answers in Genesis Creation Museum

May 17-19:   FEAST (Homeschool Convention) San Antonio, TX , Worldview, Creation/Evolution issues

May 14-22:   Taryn and Mirren, post term class at Pensacola Christian College

CURRENT TRENDS IN THE CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND FAMILY

By Dr. Jobe Martin

The God of the Bible “. . . established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children: That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children, That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments,” ( Ps. 78:5-7) As we travel around the U.S. and overseas, ministering in churches, Christian Schools, and camps, we see, increasingly that “form of godliness”, the external facade, but hardened, cold, and hypocritical hearts toward God. The sin we see and hear about among God’s people is shocking. Sin in the body of Christ is not being dealt with, from the church, to the family, to the individual parent and child.

The average Christian family is caught in a lethargy of compromise that dilutes and neutralizes us from being useful vessels for our Master (II Tim. 2:21). Our first love is usually the approval of men rather than the approval of God (In. 5:44, 12:43). We work diligently on making an impression on people (peer pressure)” but lack conviction and courage when it comes to making a difference for our Lord. We reflect, in fact, the church of Revelation 2:4 who had lost their first love.

Christian families, it is time for us to remember the works of God and live out His commandments! Our children are losing hope in God because we parents and grandparents are, in the eyes of our children, largely hypocrites. Our walk and our talk do not match up. There is nothing new under the sun, (Eccl. 1 :9), but our toleration of evil and wickedness must cease, especially in a time when there is a glut of Christian information and influence. Can it be that we have lost the discernment to even know good from evil and are doing what is right in our own eyes? (Judges 21:25) Most certainly, ” There is a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”(Prov.14:3).

The ways of death in the family are characterized by pride and selfishness. Christian parents who insist on indulging their sinful, fleshly pursuits are killing hope in their children by not “doing what they know is right”. (Jas. 4:17) A father who takes his family to see movies with any kind of nudity, blasphemy of our Lord, or bloody violence, is selfishly indulging his flesh and his children know it. The trend, however, in Christian families, is to accept and even enjoy the pagan evil culture in which we live, and to “tolerate” it rather than standing on the Word of God. Perhaps if Christian families were more familiar with God’s Word (”I will set no worthless thing before my eyes” - Ps. 101:3), the Holy Spirit would have some true truth to work with, as opposed to the world’s seductive lies. The time spent on movies, TV, and sports could be greatly invested in eternity if we would make godly choices. We prefer the entertainment of the world (and yes, even in the church), to the living and active entreatment of God’s Word.

Why do we have a column on trends in the family? The primary reason is that the trend is in the wrong direction. Christian families are loving and practicing wickedness. Let’s face it, we hate other family members, we rage in anger toward each other, we with great lust look at Internet pornography, an astonishing number of our “Christian ” children are involved in all areas of the occult, there is flagrant “in your face” disobedience to parents, we are unthankful, and we have that “form of godliness”, that denies the power! (II Tim. 3:1-7) We parents and grandparents, for the most part, are too selfish to take the time and pay the cost of loving our children. We send them out into the humanistic, Marxist, New Age institutions of learning so that they can be carefully taught the lies of evolution, sex education, tolerant attitudes, deconstructionism, and “Decision Making Skills”. The teaching of evolution undermines the foundational truths of Scripture, sex education instructs the youth on the “how to” details of sex without biblical guidelines, and the tolerant attitudes generated by multiculturalism undermine the ability and opportunity to share one’s faith. Deconstructionism results in the ridiculous lack of logic that says words have only the meaning you assign to them, and decision-making skills enable your children to be unhindered by their parent’s values. It frees them to be able to make their own decisions, even at six and seven years old!! The Lord Jesus established the Christian family so that we could be an audiovisual lighthouse to the pagan culture around us of the indwelling and abiding power of God to do what is right. (Col. 1:27)

We are discrediting the ministry (II Cor. 6:3) by selfishly indulging and tolerating sin in our families. We have been infiltrated and contaminated with wickedness. Part of this is rooted in the fact that we do not know God’s Word (My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, Hos. 4:6). And if we do know it, we lack the conviction to do it (He who practices the truth comes to the light, John 3:21). The Lord Jesus says that it is His Word that will judge us at the last day (John 12:48). Have we read His Word, the Bible, from cover to cover as families, so that we and our children and grandchildren know the standard by which each one of us will be judged? When each family member knows God’s Truth, it sets us free (John 8:32) to stand apart from the pagan culture, and do what is right. If we as family members do not do what the Bible says is right, we sin (Jas. 4:17), and maintain the trend toward unrighteousness.

Please, let us as God’s families, reverse this trend and decisively deal with the sin that so easily entangles us (Heb. 12:1). Let us practice the truth in the kind of observable fashion that the watching world (and our children) see “Christ in us, the hope of glory!” (Col.1:27) This means we must die to our selfishness and pride (I Cor. 15:31b) and live in the power of the Holy Spirit within the framework of scripture. It does not matter how we feel, we just do what is right, by faith in the fact of God’s Word (II Cor.5:7). Doing what is right begins with repentance and confession before our Lord Jesus who bought us with so great a price (I Cor. 6:20), and then before our family members. Next we establish godly habit patterns in our home. Reading the Bible from Genesis to Revelation becomes an attainable goal. A day does not go by that we miss out on the excitement of a specific family prayer time. Scripture memory becomes a part of daily life. Worship and fellowship with other Christian families occurs on a regular basis. Family ministries are established that emphasize evangelism, servanthood, and discipleship. All of these things are “counter- culture” and exact a cost! Old habit patterns are not easily broken, but change is possible when it becomes necessary and important. Glorifying God should be both necessary and important to us as “Possessors of Christ”, unless we are in actuality, only “professors”, giving lip service to our beliefs. (Is.29:13) The “cost” for the above might be being reproached for the name of Christ, but the scripture tells us in I Pet. 4:14, that we are to be happy, for the spirit of glory and God rests upon us! It is time for true Christian families to stop drifting downstream, content with the evil culture of our day, and to begin to swim upstream against the flood of spiritual debris. As we decide as families to swim against the downward current, we will experience the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus Christ (Knowing Him and the power of His resurrection and fellowship of His suffering, being conformed to His death - Phil. 3:10). Swimming upstream means investing in eternity (people’s lives and God’s Word). It means spending less time with temporal things, (such as movies, TV, computers, sports, malls). To be pleasing in ALL ways becomes our priority (to please Him in ALL respects, Col. 1 :10). We must become very careful in how we walk, not as unwise, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil (Eph.5:15). We MUST “come to our senses” as the prodigal did in Luke15:17, and understand the imperative of the times in which we live. Our Lord Jesus Christ could come for us at any moment (I Thess. 4:16), and yet the majority of Christians are fearful of this reality!!!

All that we do, say, and think, in our lives, our marriages, and our families, should be with the exhortation to not discredit the ministry (II Cor.6:3), and to bring honor and glory to our Lord who bought us with so great a price! So why do these truths not seem to convict and motivate us?

The Christian Family today has bought into our culture and has been changed more by it than impacting the world for Christ. As lovers of self more than lovers of God, we have sacrificed our birthright for the temporal gratification of a mess of porridge which will never satisfy. We compare ourselves with ourselves and are without understanding (II Cor. 10.12), rather than becoming “imitators of Christ” (Eph.5:1). Whether we will wake up in time to regain the years the locust have eaten is a personal challenge to each person reading this article. We all know that we do what is important to us, and most of us, if honest in our heart of heats, have to admit we make selfish choices everyday that routinely legislate God out of His rightful place of prominence in our lives. Change is never easy, but it is, by God’s grace, possible! New habit patterns can be established but only as we truly put the flesh to death (Gal.2:20, Rom.6.11 ,14), realizing that sin is ever crouching at the door and its desire is for us, but we must master it (Gen.4:7). Let us truly, in deed, and not in lip service, “choose you this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15).

If the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, then we must regain a spiritual understanding of Is. 48:11 where God tells us that He will not share His glory with another. Are we making God share His glory with all those things and activities that will not matter for eternity? In Dan. 5:23b it says “The God in whose hand are your life-breath and your ways, you have not glorified.” It is time for judgment to start with the household of faith, and if we judge ourselves, then the world will not be judging us. Let us not talk the talk if we are not willing to pay the cost of walking the walk, and let us be willing to say, ” . . . Yet not my will, but Thine be done” (Luke 22:42b), so that our great God and Father, the Lord Jesus Christ is the one that alone gets the glory!! (Ps. 115:1)

May 11th. Christian Heritage Academy, Rockwall, TX,  K-6^th grades, Incredible Creatures that God has created.

May 6th. Rockwall Bible Church, Rockwall, TX, 10:30am & 6pm: Seizing the Moment

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is thy keeper:

The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

Psalm 121

Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

Psalm 124:8

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear,

Though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

Psalm 46:1-3

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty of God, that he may exalt you in due time: casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.

I Peter 5:6,7

This past month on the Virginia Tech campus, we have lived through another school horror experience of human depravity that has escalated human suffering for many Americans. This might be a small thing in comparison to parts of the world where people are being tortured in unthinkable ways, but for America this is an outrage. Our liberal media has responded to this in such a way that we are already experiencing the “copycat” fall out. The despondent and dissatisfied start to follow suit for the recognition and celebrity status that they will inevitably attain (thanks to our liberal press) whether they live or die in the fiasco.

What this all amounts to is another stunning example of how our worldview affects every area of our lives, as our beliefs and our assumptions about life will determine our actions and our conclusions. In other words our IDEAS do have CONSEQUENCES, and our Assumptions will determine our conclusions.

Our culture (as we have allowed it) has affected our commitment to biblical absolutes and has come right into the church. Culture says there is no such thing as sin, man is born good and it is only a “flaw in our consciousness” or our environment that determines our responses or destiny. Modern Psychology has given us the right to be irresponsible and not accountable for consequences. It is always somebody or something else that has to be blamed. We sit with great piety on our pity pots, feeling “entitled” to our “rights” and continue to indulge ourselves in the numbing complexity of busyness, entertainment and preoccupation of most things that will not matter eternally. Most lives are becoming more and more empty. The old slogan of the 80’s is still very much with us today: “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins.”

Culture says that we are only evolving animals and that a fetus is not human until the moment of birth. Therefore we can kill them up to the point of birth with saline solutions or sucking them out in bits and pieces from their Mother’s womb. On the other hand, we spend millions to save whales and then arrest people that accidentally kill an endangered species. In many ways animals are more important than people. We can’t drill for oil in our own land to allow us to be less oil dependent because of a miniscule percentage of environmentalists. These, like the feminists and homosexual activists, seem to be able to control (with the help of the liberal media) our shift toward “their agenda” and the “politically correct cultural Marxism.”

Our children continue to become less and less intelligent, but with higher self-esteem than ever. They are so involved in electronic games that deal with murder, stealing, and lying (etc.), that the line between truth and reality is increasingly blurred. The web is now more dangerous than ever for our children with My Space and variations of it. Parents are so intimidated by their own children that they have lost their position of authority to rule in their own homes. As Isaiah 3:12b says: “Children are their oppressors and women rule . . .” Culture says that we can’t give the death sentence to murderers, but we can euthanize those that are no longer considered “productive.” (Check out history and much of Europe) In other words, MAN DECIDES TRUTH, NOT GOD.

The really sad thing about our American culture is that we are allowing the freedoms that we fought so hard to win, slip away from us through the political correctness of the day (Cultural Marxism). We allow high profile “celebrities” to get on college campuses and chant: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Stealing, cheating, immorality and violence are all a part of the college scene. In a recent historical video we watched, George Washington was portrayed as anything BUT the man that is revealed in his personal letters. Revisionist history continues to blaspheme our heroes, and there is no outcry from the silent majority. The leader of Iran is trying to propagate the incredible lie that the Holocaust never happened and yet we have people living today that are survivors of that infamy!!! Our “Christian” youth pledge in the “True Love Waits” campaign that they will remain chaste until marriage, and yet statistics show that 88% do not. With this last episode of violence (Virginia Tech) inevitably the question of gun control will again come to debate and our Second Amendment rights to bear arms will continue to be challenged. What is causing this “disconnect” in our thinking, essentially world wide? (There is no time or space to get into the political disconnects!!) When we throw out biblical absolutes, then we have no basis for civilized behavior. All of civilization has operated on some or all aspects of the Ten Commandments since the beginning of time. Yet now every man is doing what is right in their own eyes (Judges 21:25), calling evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). Such are the times in which we are living. As times get more challenging, what is our challenge, responsibility and commitment? Truly, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells, us, there is nothing new under the sun.

The phrase from the classic book, A Tale of Two Cities, comes to mind: “It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times!” As Christians we have to realize the calling we have in the face of these times (I Corinthians 1:26). We are to act with godly courage and penetrate this ungodly culture. Many of us are going merrily along and thinking of only #1. Jesus’ example was of one who came to serve and to die and to give His life a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28) and to proclaim “Truth” that has endured the millennia, specifically that He came to die that we might have eternal life. That life is in receiving the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior (John 3:16-18, I Peter 1:18,19).

With the time that we have left on this earth, and in the face of the “times in which we live” (I Chronicles 12:32) do we know and understand our times and what to do about them? How can we be more effective in our witness to the watching world? Are we defenders of, or defectors from the faith? Is our life pleasing to God, worthwhile or worthless? God has raised each of us up for such a time as this (Esther 4), so let us not squander the time and resources that are available to us as the days become more challenging (Ephesians 5:15). We pray that the Scriptures above will give us all added encouragement to realize that apart from the Lord, we can do nothing (John 15:5, II Corinthians 3:5), and our times are in HIS ample hands (Psalm 31:14,15), even in times like this. God desires our hearts, not our lip-service. Have you received the free gift of eternal life? (Eph.2:8,9, Rom. 10:9,13)

The last two months have been encouraging in ministry, but challenging in terms of health issues and time management. In addition to the flu, Jobe spent three days in the hospital to get the new drug for atrial fibrillation regulated and has done very well on it for six weeks now with no irregularities. We have both had dental work and cysts removed, and I’ve had my required repeat colonoscopy, no new polyps, but inflamed diverticuli. Please pray especially for Taryn and Mirren as they complete this first year of their doctoral program. They will do an immediate post-term course starting May 14. We are preparing for three homeschool conventions in the coming months and are researching additional incredible creatures. Pray for personal discipline and strength for sorting, tossing, organizing, and good use of time for the always impending mundane monotonies and the “unexpected!”

Schedule: May-June 2007

May 6: Rockwall Bible Church, Rockwall, TX, 10:30am & 6pm: Seizing the Moment

11: Christian Heritage Academy, Rockwall, TX, K-6^th grades, Incredible Creatures that God has created.

14-22: Taryn and Mirren, post term class at Pensacola Christian College

17-19: FEAST (Homeschool Convention) San Antonio, TX , Worldview, Creation/Evolution issues

24-26: Leave for Kentucky and opening of Answers in Genesis Creation Museum

27^th: Plainfield Christian Church, Plainfield, IN, Sunday School, Worldview, Creation issues, Creatures

June7-9^th: SETHSA (Homeschool Convention), Houston, TX, speak and exhibit

10^th: Possible ministry opportunity, unconfirmed

17^th: Taryn and Mirren back to Pensacola for month class

27^th: Grace Ave. Baptist Church, Richmond, VA: Incredible Creatures

29- 2: National Educator’s Convention (NEA), representing Answers in Genesis, Philadelphia, PA