C. J. Mahaney in his great little book “Worldliness” states “Today, the greatest threat facing North American evangelicals is not persecution from the world, but seduction by the world”.

 

Every morning, when we wake up, the attack on our Christian values begins:

• News reports preaching to accept this and that – be tolerant. If we don’t accept their point of view, we become narrow minded bigots whose values are unloving and, in some cases, criminal.

• Advertisers screaming we need this to be fulfilled and must have that to be happy.

• Our workplace telling us that our security is based on corporate performance not family, community, church life or God.

• Our work associates tell us to “lighten up” when we try to take a stand on a moral issue and then, as we start to weaken, they offer an abundance of positive reinforcement to suck us deeper and deeper into their world.

• We get home, turn on the TV only to have the programmers and advertisers start indoctrinating us into their world view through subtle, but effective, social engineering.

• Our children, who have also been impacted by this never-ending bombardment, pled with us to let them enter into this world and its ways.

• Even in our church family, carnal Christians misquote and take scripture out of context in an effort to bring us alongside them so that they can justify their own disobedience.

 

The onslaught of the secular world view is relentless, persistent and ever present.

 

It doesn’t happen all at once, it’s a gradual falling away, often going undetected until we wake up one morning realizing that we are now “both in the world AND of the world”. In the beginning our Christian light shone brightly upon a hill, then it was lowered, next it was covered up and eventually it was snuffed out.