I’ve visited some of the most dangerous inmates in some of the most evil prisons in the country and one of the things I’ve observed is that the overwhelming majority were brought up in a highly dysfunctional family that was devoid of any love.
It’s no small wonder that they became violent, full of hate, and bitter. The majority don’t like themselves or their situation, but have no idea how to improve. They know little to nothing about the Bible, or our God of love and compassion, or the good and wholesome things in life. Their idea of fun is to get drunk and/or stoned and blur their miserable existence from their tortured minds for a few hours and many want to strike back at the world which they hate.
I was thinking that our nation has becomes a dysfunctional family. We have become polarized in our thinking and there is no civility, much less love for each other. Our government is shut down and the leadership just wants to jockey for political position. We have dangerous enemies who want to destroy our way of life at every turn; our economy is a wreck; our schools are pathetic; we have problems at every turn, and our leaders hate each other so much they will not even DISCUSS ways to find common ground.
Sigh . . . We are the product of our dysfunctional family?
Oddly this country was founded by God fearing men who established it one nation under God and prayed for guidance. They believed, read and utilized the Bible and the Ten Commandments were the foundation for the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of rights and the Constitution, and an entire nation’s line of thinking.
Over time we prospered greatly and God mightily blessed us. Then something happened. Illegal drug use exploded in the 60’s and it was a time of race riots, war, assassinations, protests, and chaos. Madalyn Murray O’Hair pursued a lawsuit, which led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling ending official Bible-reading in American public schools in 1963. Just ten years later the Supreme Court legalized abortion in a case brought before them known as Roe vs. Wade. Down, down, down we went; our leadership took prayer out of schools, the Ten Commandments out of public buildings, crosses off graves of veterans, and legalized homosexual marriages, pornography, and marijuana.
The United States of America family in essence became a dysfunctional family.
So what kind of children is our dysfunctional family producing?
We have become a family that is filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, and greed; we are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; we are gossips, greedy, self-serving, envious, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful, and we invent ways of doing evil; we are disobedient to parents and are without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful . . .
I didn’t pen that it comes straight out of the Bible in Romans 1:30. The Apostle Paul let us know that our family’s condition is not unique to just us and this period of time. It is common to ALL families that turn from God.
Bible commentator Matthew Henry wrote about these verses and said in essence that the horrid depravity of man reveals the truth of our Lord’s words. Light came into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil; for he that does evil hates the light.
I think that’s what happened to our United States family. God shone His light on us and He blessed us as no other family in history save Israel, but sadly much like Israel we rejected the light, preferring evil.
Our plight will not change, until and unless we undergo honest self-examination, the end of which should be a deep conviction of sin and of the necessity of deliverance and full submission to the faith of Christ.
We must be renewed by Divine power.
I doubt that there has ever been a man who didn’t have a reason to lament his strong corruptions, and his secret dislike to the will of God. Even the toughest inmates in the toughest prisons in the most evil death row houses in the country can understand this concept and feel a need for peace, joy, and love in life that only comes from Jesus Christ. I have no doubt that our United States family all over this great land yearns for the same.
Let’s pray that our United States of America dysfunctional family returns to God whereby He can once again shine His light upon us.
Have you given up? Well don’t! Have faith! Pray! And work hard each day for revival! It will take all hands on deck to intervene in this dysfunctional family, but we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us provided it is in His will for our lives.
Psalms 99:8
O LORD our God, you answered them. You were a forgiving God to them, but you punished them when they went wrong.
October 2, 2013 – Click here to listen