In Psalm 917 we read, The wicked shall
be turned into hell, And all the nations
that forget God.
I grew up in the 1950s.
Some of you still recall that time.
It was a time in America when hemlines
were lower and morals were higher.
It was a time when immodesty was considered
profane and sin stayed in the shadows.
Homosexuality was considered perversion and adultery was a
social scandal.
Television back then was still in black and
white and a Christian society prohibited Hollywood from
broadcasting sex and nudity and swearing into our
living rooms.
But that all changed in the 1960s.
I remember walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago
and seeing for the first time the Playboy
building with its black bunny logo as it
loomed in the distance.
In the 1960s society was in chaos and
social mores were changing as gross evil paraded
down the street while the churches went into
the shadows.
In the early 1960s a television commercial was
banned by being broadcast by the Methodist Church
because it had an outhouse in it and
they put influence on that television programming to
prevent it from being aired.
The church back then influenced society instead of
society influencing the church.
The 1960s introduced miniskirts and free love and
hippies who were anti-establishment and stoned out
of their minds.
The church caved into a society that relaxed
all the rules of normal decency.
Instead of holding their ground and preaching hard
against sin the church gave up ground and
quit preaching on sin.
The anthem of the 60s was love is
all you need and the churches fell in
with that mindset and only spoke about a
god of love.
Gone was the vestige of the Puritan preacher
who denounced sin and warned guilty rebels about
a sin-avenging god who would cut you
down in your rebellion.
As society relaxed morally so did the church
by not calling sin sin and the gospel
was diluted to make it more palatable to
sinful man and the way of salvation was
broadened in ways that Jesus never did by
televised mass evangelism crusades.
Soon Christianity was popular again and everyone from
Hollywood celebrities to sports figures were tipping their
hats to the man upstairs.
That's who God became just a man upstairs
who was put on the same level as
men.
The churches stopped warning folks about hell and
ceased preaching man's duty of repentance and when
the church did that it paved the way
for the government to kick God out of
our educational system and legislate them out of
our judicial system and ban them out of
corporate society and as the years have gone
by I couldn't believe my eyes as I
watched a nation go to hell.
A public prayer was banned from public schools
and our schools became the killing fields of
mass murderers.
Our government legalized abortion and our streets became
washed with the blood of senseless crimes and
violence.
We legalized marijuana and drugged the only hope
of the nation which is its youth.
We legalized homosexual marriage and mocked the biblical
institution of marriage to where most folks now
just live together instead of getting married.
We drowned the nation with booze and poisoned
it with tobacco and perverted it with pornography.
The America of today doesn't even remotely resemble
the America of the 1950s but God says
in his word the wicked should be turned
into hell and all the nations that forget
God.
America may have turned her back on God
but you can't blame the White House or
the courthouse but you can sure point your
finger at the church house for being the
ones who forgot the God of the Bible.
Our text says that the wicked and the
nations who forget God should be turned into
hell while living in America today is like
living in hell because the devil has the
reins.