3. Live By A New Standard Series

SE011923

HOW TO STOP YOUR CULTURE FROM DYING

3. LIVE BY A NEW STANDARD

(Title SLIDE)

Remember, in week one we made the point that our culture is in decline. We’re feeling it:

- Financially

- Morally

- Socially

(SLIDE) In stark contrast, Ephesians is God’s renewal manual.

- First renewal of the human heart by spiritual adoption in Christ because of God’s love.

- Second renewal of human community as God makes one new humanity out of a world divided by race, ethnicity, gender, social status.

- Third, this week we talk about renewal of human behavior based on a new standard.

I hope you see how Ephesians is building on itself:

- (SLIDE) New People united into a

- New Community live by a

- New Standard

In contrast to the Old Standard Paul describes as,

o (SLIDE) Eph 4:19: “…They have no sense of shame. They live for lustful pleasure and eagerly practice every kind of impurity.”

MORAL DECLINE:

So let’s frame just how new the new standard is. First, would you say that the state of moral values in our Country are getting better or worse? Gallup asks that question every year and in 2023 we reached an all time high of people who said moral values are getting WORSE:

- (SLIDE) 83%

Now, obviously, every culture and every ERA sins. Never been a time when Americans didn’t sin… a lot.

- Yes, even the squeaky clean 1950’s was a decade full of sin!

o (SLIDE) I mean, girls wore dog collars on their ankles! and

o (SLIDE) the boys were seeing how many humans they could stuff in a phone booth,

…so you know some pretty dark stuff was going on! *

Jokes aside… all cultures are broken, all times, all places. Just take one area, sex. In the 1950’s an astonishing number of firstborns arrived less than 9 months after the wedding of their parents. Wow! So did they have more preemies back then?? Hmm… I’ll let you puzzle that one out.

Meanwhile today, there’s actually less premarital sexual activity among students than there was 20 years ago.

(SLIDE) What’s different now, is not that people are worse people. So what IS getting worse morally that would make this graph go up and to the right? I think it might have something to do with Paul’s diagnosis of the moral climate in Rome. What did he say:

- (SLIDE) “They have no sense of shame”

“Have no sense of shame” is actually one word in the Greek: Apo-lego. We get our word APATHETIC from this word. It means literally “to lose the ability to feel pain.” To be “past feeling.”

What’s different now, is not that do more bad stuff, is that we’re past feeling bad about it. In order to not feel bad you have to invert the moral order. When it comes to sex for example, today people feel that...:

- It’s not wrong to break sexual taboos,

- It’s that sexual taboos are broken and wrong because they make us feel bad.

The changing moral landscape is not confined to sex:

- We think truth is what works or

- Truth is what I feel to be true instead of what corresponds to reality.

- We think what is right is what feels right.

(SLIDE) MORAL RELATIVISM

Another name for this is MORAL RELATIVISM. Where did this moral relativism come from? Well, it’s complicated but the New Atheists certainly played a role.

(SLIDE) Who are the New Atheists?

- Richard Dawkins

- Sam Harris

- Christopher Hitchens

- Daniel Dennet

Also called the Four Horsemen these guys wrote at the beginning of this century right when our world was changed by religious zealots who flew airplanes into buildings. In response, these guys said, “religion poisons EVERYTHING.” And in several best-selling books they made their case that believing in God was irrational and delusional.

What does this imply, we asked the New Atheists? Well, here was the list of implications if God was truly dead:

- No gods

- No spirits

- No souls

- No life after death

- No miracles

- No ultimate purpose to anything

- No ultimate meaning in life AND, critically:

NO OBJECTIVE FOUNDATION FOR MORAL VALUES.

In this way the New Atheists were like the Old Atheists, like Friedrich Nietzsche, only a lot cooler, with Instagram accounts, and one even looks like movie star Ben Stiller (Sam Harris). What did the Old Atheists say was the implication of atheism for moral values? Nietzsche said:

- (SLIDE) “We have unchained the earth from its sun… Whither are we moving now? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? God is dead. God remains dead”

Friends this is the straightforward implication of Atheism: