It has been a while since I last posted and I can only say that I have been going through a bit of a dry spell in regard to writing but something today caught my attention.
Have you ever considered how subtly our values come under attack?
This morning as I read in the book of Judges, a verse, 2:10, jumped off the page for me, and I paraphrase, “After the generation to whom God had given the Promised Land died, the next generation took over but they weren’t fully educated in the ways of God and they didn’t even know the history of all the wonderful things that God had done for his people, so they succumbed to the values of those who lived far from God.”
For those who know the book of Judges, it is an ongoing story of how one generation after another fails to adequately teach and train the next generation how to live by God’s values. As a result the People of God repeatedly succumbed to apostasy and lived by the values of the pagan culture instead of God’s values. Only when they cried out to God amid their oppression and suffering and turned to God, were they rescued from their distress.
Amid some ambient conversation I overheard some people talking about an evening school dance for elementary school children. The conversation was innocent enough but this morning the thought struck me after reading in Judges, “What are we teaching our children when we as adults encourage them to hook up with members of the opposite sex, even before they reach the age of puberty? Are we in fact setting them up for personal, moral and spiritual failure?”
I admit that the thought of a dance and the picture of the initial shy and awkward advances of the children seem cute, and at that age may seem innocent enough. However with the plethora of sexual pressure our children are under these days through various media forms, including some newly proposed school curricula, and given that they are perhaps at their most impressionable age, how soon before their cute social shyness, in the safety of a school gym, becomes off-site sexual curiosity? Have we, as the teachers and trainers of the next generation, lost our ability to play this picture forward and see the subtle and potentially disastrous conclusion to this real-life movie? Do we think that our prepubescent children have the innate ability to differentiate between what is appropriate and inappropriate in regard to socio-sexual behaviour?
It seems to me that we have let our guard down when it comes to training the next generation. My caution in writing this, is not designed to slam anyone, because all of us have been caught unaware and are subject to the subtle and gradual assault on our values, but to hopefully roust us out of the assumption that all the people, who influence the lives of our children, are doing so from the same value perspective that we have.
It seems to me if we want the next generation to prosper and prevail as happy, healthy and holy people, then we have to ask ourselves who in fact is the lord of the dance?
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