God’s Unchanging Laws – Sunday, February 22, 1981
We have heard much in recent years about the moral decay that seems to have weakened our country, of self-indulgent permissiveness, drugs, crime, pornography, the pampering of our youth, and rampant materialism.
However much distorted, the image has some validity. Things that would rarely have happened a few years ago are now commonplace.
Many say that morality is old fashioned, that it doesn’t apply to this generation, that those who believe in traditional moral behavior are narrow minded and “not with it.” The current belief seems to be that one should do whatever he or she feels like doing, no matter what it may be, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.
Well, if we are honest with ourselves, we know inside that God’s laws don’t change, that they apply to every person on earth. No matter how much we rationalize, popularity can never transform sin into righteousness. We are either keeping God’s laws or we are breaking them.
Shakespeare offered this advice: “Above all: to thine own self be true.”1 And how much more important it is to be true to the Supreme Being. Yet many people are living a double life—the life they let family and friends see and the life they live outside that small circle. We should not change our standards and beliefs for different people and different circumstances. To do so means being untrue to one’s friends, oneself, and one’s God.
Often, we are tempted to do things because they seem pleasurable, and sometimes it is just difficult to say “no.” But let an individual give reign to impulses and passions, and from that moment he or she yields up moral freedom—to be carried along the current of life, the slave of unchecked desires. On the other hand, if we control our appetites and weaknesses, we rule our lives with strength and wisdom.
God has declared in clear language that misery and sorrow will follow the violation of his laws. To deny a responsibility to God, to our fellow beings and to ourselves is to deny the true source of happiness.
And so, in our changing world we have an unchanging need to abide God’s unchanging laws, to practice and teach morality within the family, to return to traditional values and regain our sense of direction in a world where direction seems so distant.
1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3, Line 75 (or Familiar Quotation, John Bartlett, Little Brown, and Co., 1955, p. 171).
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February 22, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,688