In the front section of USA Today on Friday was a feature article,
“Letting teenagers have their romantic sleepovers,” the point being it is better for parent/child relationships to let kids ‘do it’ at home. Angela
Jolie is cited as one whose mother allowed her to have her boyfriend sleep over
when she was only 14—and who plans to be just as liberal with her children (more fodder for TV
programs like “Modern American Family”).
This is why I rejoiced to see the Robertson family making the rounds on TV last week, promoting their show "Duck Dynasty" (averaged 8.4 million viewers), along with their Christian values. In an interview, one of the Robertson brothers, Jase, and his
wife Missy, said their faith and family values were the reason they chose to remain abstinent until marriage, and now see the same commitment
in their children.
I can’t guarantee that you will like watching “Duck Dynasty” but we can
all thank God that in a time when shows about selfish housewives are peaking,
American viewers have fallen in love with a godly family who closes every
episode at the dinner table giving thanks and honor to Jesus Christ.
Angela Jolie and her children probably won't be watching.
You know you are living in extraordinary times when school soda vending machines are out, but condom dispensers are in. Putting nutrition labels on frozen pizzas may express appropriate concern for our youth, but what does it say when the same government provides birth control, morning-after pills, and abortions to them? Do those come with warnings too?
Of course the issue isn't nutrition or sex. It's moral ambiguity, the post-modern version of “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Isaiah told of a future time when standards and behavioral attitudes would be reversed, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Is. 5:20).
When Jesus spoke of the days of judgment, His disciples asked “when shall these things be, and what shall be the sign of your coming?” Jesus said it would be a time of great deception (Mat. 24:4). One might argue that human beings have always blurred the lines between right and wrong. But we are not seeing lines blurred; we are seeing them erased. Jesus’ return must be really close.
There are so many strange and unprecedented things happening in the world today. As Spirit-filled believers, we should be able to discern the signs of the times, and not as the Pharisees whom Jesus chided for being able to interpret the weather, but not the signs of the times (Matt. 16:3).
The title of this post, taken from an article this morning in the Contra Costa Times, and the cute picture of elderly nuns doing yoga, caught my attention as one of these signs. "This is where I find the most peace," said one Sister, after a recent class. You may argue there is nothing wrong with practicing yoga as a physical exercise. But the fact is that yoga is a spiritual discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving consciousness of the divine.
Albert Mohler recently wrote about this: When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga. The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral. Christians are called to look to Christ for all that we need and to obey Christ through obeying his Word. We are not called to escape the consciousness of this world by achieving an elevated state of consciousness, but to follow Christ in the way of faithfulness. Stefanie Syman, author of “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America” wrote, The embrace of yoga is a symptom of our postmodern spiritual confusion that reaches into the church. And so, the seemingly innocent story of nuns practicing yoga is not so cute after all. It's a sign of the times.
