As we watch the news these days I am amazed by what is happening to us.  And maybe you, like me, are asking the question, “What is happening to America?”  There has been another shooting on Mother’s Day.  There is a man on trial for cutting the spinal cords of aborted children to make sure they were dead.  The IRS actually targeted certain groups of people for their political beliefs.  It appears that again (no surprise, I guess) politicians lied about something, specifically, the events in Benghazi, Libya. Another question, “Why aren’t all the laws we have stopping people from committing these crimes?”  And there are many laws!  The first time I saw the US Code of Federal Regulations I wondered how in the world I would find anything in that much paper!  And the congress keeps generating more and more laws. So why isn’t it working?  The answer is simple, really.  It can be answered with the quote of one of our founding fathers, John Adams:

[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

(Source: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1854), Vol. IX, p. 229, October 11, 1798.)

Do you see it?  The form of government that we have is not made to restrain people.  It was made for a people that were already restrained by a higher law.  No one needed to tell them that they should not steal or lie.  Those laws were in the bible.  They were already a part of their beliefs and their everyday lives.  A free society requires a moral people.  And, as we see in John Adams quote, without morality freedom cannot last. Here then is the crux of the matter!  We see America abandoning or redefining morality at every turn, abandoning the morals laid down in the bible for “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).  And the outcome is predictable! What does this mean for us as Christians?  Only that we would live the morality of the bible in our everyday lives.  So that others can see it.  We keep proclaiming the delivering power of Christ from the very things that our society is embracing.  We keep being light! We don’t need a policeman to be watching while we are on the freeway, we follow the law, because the bible tells us to.  We don’t worry about an IRS audit, because we don’t cheat on our taxes.  We return too much change.  We don’t take advantage of other people’s mistakes.  We live like this because the Holy Spirit lives in us! More laws are not the answer, a moral people are!  It starts with us and how we live, and with prayer, that our country will return to is roots.  That will only happen when we live as the people of God!