Have you noticed all the bad news and madness lately? One of the common denominators in most of the National News has to do with moral values and the state of the American family. “The American family is at its worst state in the history of the country”, states one report. The statistics relating to the crumbling of the family are fairly startling! Since the 1960s, the American family has been on a downward spiral, according to the statistics noted by both Pew and Murray. Did you know that:
America now has the highest percentage of one-adult households in the entire world.
More than half of all babies born to American women under the age of 30 are done so out of wedlock.
Today, one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.
A total of 42 percent of single mothers in American are on food stamps. There are now 100 million citizens on food stamps and other forms of taxpayer-funded assistance. An entitlement mindset is overwhelming not just an entire generation of American parents, it is being handed down to their children and grandchildren.
The United States also has the highest divorce rate on the planet.
More than one million public school students are homeless, also a first in the history in the United States.
The teen pregnancy rate in America is twice as high as Canada, three times greater than France, and more than seven times as high as Japan.
America also has the “Highest Teen Pregnancy Rate in the World”.
One in every four American teenage girls have had at least one type of a sexually transmitted disease.
A total of 47 percent of high school students in the United States have had sex, and more often than not, at an age far younger than we want to imagine.
One of the most alarming things about our beloved land is that America has the highest rate of child abuse deaths around the globe. About three million child abuse reports are filed around the country each year. Approximately 20 percent of child sexual abuse victims are younger than eight years of age. According to the statistics cited in the study, approximately one in every four American girls will be sexually abused before their eighteenth birthday.
The fiscal and family trends which have been mounting in America, especially under the Obama administration, make an economic meltdown and civil unrest far more likely.
So what’s the answer? I believe that Father’s can break the cycle of negligence in their families and keep family history from repeating itself. It’s not going to be easy, and it will require more than just a few fathers committed to their families to get the job done. It will require a movement so great that it changes the course of history in our great land. So many dads are “missing in action” that we are causing our children to be placed under a curse. God warns us in the book of Malachi, “he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Mal 4:6). Let me explain this in more modern terms. Unless the hearts of the fathers are turned to their children the hearts of the children can not be turned to their fathers. And, unless the hearts of the fathers do turn to their children, God says that he will “strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”
What? Is this possible? Does He mean…strike all of the land? Yes! God is giving us fathers a serious warning here just like he tried to warn Aaron about his sons offering strange fire. I am not putting down moms and how they impact their children but God has placed fathers in the position of having the greatest influence in their children’s spiritual lives that will carry all the way into adulthood. He will hold us dads responsible. We can actually bring a curse down on our family (so to speak) by our negligence and our absence. Now maybe God’s warning that He will “strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” makes more sense, for as the family goes…so goes the nation.
