Guidelines For Living

Guest (Male): Take a break from your busy schedule and join Harold Sala for Guidelines for Living.

Harold Sala: Cultural battles are far more extensive than whether or not your child's teacher embraces gender fluidity or whether parents should be notified when a teen requests contraceptives from a clinic. The battle over culture began in the Garden of Eden when a husband and wife had to decide whether they listened to the voice of God or chose to put their backs to him and do whatever they pleased.

When Adam and Eve made the decision that forever altered humanity, the playing field was level. Today, however, when you are confronted with a choice, the choice is simply up to you. What is right for you is the standard of the world. You'd be hard-pressed to find many places today where God's word and his plan is the benchmark for human behavior.

The entire history of humanity is really a centuries-old story of cultural conflict. Does Noah listen to the voice of his culture, laughing at the thought of a flood, or quietly set out to build an ark that would save his family? Did Abraham ponder the difficulty of the journey when God said it was time to leave for a land he would give to him? Or did he simply obey?

And then, could not Lot, living in Sodom, have rationalized the moral behavior of fellow citizens and ignored the pleading of the angelic messengers who said God was about to destroy the wicked city? No sooner had God given deliverance to the three million descendants of Abraham, who found themselves slaves in Egypt, than they began to say, it would have been better to have stayed in Egypt than to come out here and die.

Should you visit London, take the city road bus to a cemetery known as Bunhill Fields. And there you will find a tomb with the remains of a 17th-century man, the son of a tinker or a welder in today's terminology, by the name of John Bunyan. In his youth, he was a rebel living a wicked life, but certainly no worse than most of the people of his day.

Then Bunyan was soundly converted and began preaching without a license. For this, he was arrested and spent the next 12 years of his life in the Bedford jail where he lived. There Bunyan had plenty of time to think through both history and life. And during that time, he wrote the most widely printed and distributed book in the English language, with the exception of the Bible. It was called Pilgrim's Progress. It's an allegorical story of the pilgrim who journeys through life constantly battling forces that would destroy him.

That friend is a picture of the person who strives to listen to the voice of God, obey the counsel of his word, the Bible, and defy the voices of our culture and our sinful natures in doing God's will. Take time to read Hebrews 11 in your New Testament. And there you read biographical sketches of the lives of large numbers of people who fought cultural battles, often being isolated and persecuted. At times they became martyrs, but they never gave in. They did not capitulate. They chose rather to walk alone with God than walk in the light with men.

Most of the time the challenges come in small things. And we are often prone to say, well, this doesn't really matter. But the small compromises then form the foundation of major ones. It is better by far to walk the lonely path with integrity and a clear conscience than to walk in the light of the world. The cultural battle is for your soul, for your family, and your very life. Never forget it.

Guest (Male): You've just heard Guidelines for Living. For more practical and inspirational messages, visit guidelines.org. If you find our devotionals helpful and would like to share them with others, consider supporting our ministry with a donation. Again, that's guidelines.org. Thanks for listening to Guidelines for Living.