Jesus said to focus on helping the poor and the lowly. That is what most people say they are trying to achieve, help those in need. And Satan might agree with that focus, that it is a good thing to do. What?! So why might Satan be agreeing with our goals, which seem to be focused on loving God and neighbor? I think we are seeing why in our country, and in the world today. The end-result focused on by all those in power sounds like a very good thing, but the means used to achieve those results can be very bad. And that is where Satan gives his advice. It is like trying to help a poor person to get food, and Satan suggests we do that by giving him a gun so he can rob a grocer.
In our culture, there are record numbers of single people (and married people) “choosing” not to have children which they can’t properly take care of – by their definition of what take care of means, or by eliminating them by abortion other means. Many people justify these self-centered actions by pointing to the poor children or other people they can now help, or sometimes even to the church ministries they now focus on to help the poor --- as they ignore their spouse and/or children. Families and having kids are looked down upon by our society today, and especially family-focused activities, like prayer.
I’m reading a book titled “War and Peace,” but not the one you know. This one is sermons by Bishop Fulton Sheen, given from 1941-1945. They could --- or perhaps should is a better word --- be given in churches today. He talks about women working, focused on money or careers, not their children. He talks about prayers not allowed in school, and forgotten in homes, and college professors teaching there is no “truth or morality.” He talks about selfish views and the low-value placed on some life, which led to getting rid of those “unneeded lives,” --- like the Jews in Nazi Germany, (and aborted babies are today).
Perhaps Sheen’s (and other’s) sermons, along with the horrors of WWII, did bring about some change in the culture then. After the war, when television became popular, Bishop Sheen’s program was one of the top-rated shows. And from 1947-57 the Family Theater was a top-rated weekly radio program. That program began and ended with “The family that prays together, stays together.” I was born during that period, into a Christian America, where there was a truth, a moral right, and prayers were said in schools (and the pledge of allegiance).
You know where things are at now. The primary focus of politics or in the press or in our schools is making sure we “help people in need of help” ---- as those in power define those people, and that help. And Satan likely agrees with that end and will suggest ways to achieve it, even as he did with those doing “good things” to justify the war we now call WWII. And all of the people in power then, on all sides in WWII, thought they were doing “good things.” None thought they were doing evil. Satan lied to them well.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says to love as I have loved. Love starts now, whatever the situation. Past is past. Love now, is helping others --- yes --- but as Jesus would have loved them. Those ways never were self-centered, or for a political party.
It took a world war to change the then-existing cultural mindset of our country back then, as Bishop Sheen spoke of in his sermons. And with the similar mindset now in our culture today ….?
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