Why is it that so many of the
kids who grew up in our Southern Baptist
churches and who are now college age are
either living with their girlfriend in open immorality
or pregnant with their boyfriend's baby and not
married and they see nothing wrong with it?
Why do our young people today lack a
moral compass?
What went wrong?
I know dozens and dozens of young people
who grew up in a so-called Christian
home.
They grew up in a so-called fundamental
Baptist church and who don't see anything wrong
with fornication and they openly live with their
sex partner.
They can watch the most perverted movies out
there and enjoy it and call it entertainment.
When Southern Baptists tried to reach the world
by letting the world into their church, they
lost what authority they once had and now
the chickens have come home to roost.
When a denomination changes its theology from a
God-centered gospel to a man-centered gospel,
it broadens the way of salvation in ways
Jesus never did.
And when you stop preaching against sin and
when you stop warning folks about hell and
when you omit man's duty of repentance, then
you have congregations of worldly individuals who are
baptized but not regenerate.
We invited our kids to walk an hour
for Jesus and we told them they were
saved and what they saw was a contradiction
where their parents acted one way at church
and another way at home.
They grew up with a set of strict
rules that were just plain old legalism and
they lived in a home where their parents
always talked about Jesus and the importance of
being a Christian, but who held a parenting
mindset of a do-as-I-say mentality
instead of a do-as-I-do walk
and who were religious individuals but who had
no reality of God in their personal lives.
And as the kids grew up seeing that
double standard they saw right through our hypocrisy
and the pastor at church was not a
voice of authority to them to be looked
up to because he resembled too much the
Wizard of Oz behind the curtain hiding behind
his gizmos of flashing lights and smoke screens.
So our kids who grew up in the
nursery of our church and who attended either
private Christian school or were homeschooled were completely
unprepared to go out into a world full
of the flesh and the devil.
They didn't like your rules so they lived
by some of their own.
They can get drunk with each other and
fornicate with each other and see absolutely nothing
wrong with it.
Some of them could even still come to
church on Sunday, sit there and smile and
think they're Christians.
I know some Southern Baptist pastors who are
godly men and who have a God-honoring
ministry but they are the minority in the
denomination bordering on apostasy.
Just because the denomination is South in the
name of it doesn't mean it has to
go South spiritually.
Only a heaven-sent revival will clean up
the mess we made and re-establish Christ's
preeminence in our sanctuaries and his prominence in
our lives once again.