The Awakening

But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take [any] person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand. (Ez 33:6)

Godly men and women know we're in a war. The battles are for personal integrity, for our families, our cities, and for cultures all around the world. Yet the weapons of our warfare are neither worldly or physical. On the contrary, "they have divine power to demolish strongholds." (2 Cor. 10:4)

Responding to the Watchmen's cries, people of faith are joining ranks to make a difference. This awakening is seen in the broad-based coalition of pro-family groups that announced the launch of a statewide constitutional ballot initiative entitled the “Florida Marriage Protection Amendment”. The Amendment seeks to protect and preserve marriage by defining it as the legal union of one man and one woman in the Florida Constitution. The petition and other information on the Amendment can be found online at the official web site of the Amendment, http://www.florida4marriage.org/

And with "The Awakening" as its 2005 theme, another movement taking the nation by storm is Promise Keepers. PK's mission strives to unite and ignite men to become passionate followers of Jesus Christ through the effective inculcation of seven promises to God, his fellow men, family, church and the world. The international ministry based in Denver, Colorado has directly reached more than five and a half million men since its founding in 1990. To get more information about the ministry that's being used of God to advance His kingdom, visit the official Promise Keepers website at http://www.promisekeepers.org/.

As noted below, together we're making a difference. But the battle for the world's hearts and minds is pervasive and requires we remain viligilent.

Join the awakening,

Roy Tanner



Standing Firm

God...we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes [are] upon thee...Thus saith the LORD unto you, Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle [is] not yours, but God's... Ye shall not [need] to fight in this [battle]: set yourselves, stand ye [still], and see the salvation of the LORD with you. (2 Chron 20)

Although I consider myself bold, I have to admit, even I was a little bit intimidated...

It was last summer, and I was attending my first Promise Keepers Conference in Orlando, at a packed-out TD Waterhouse arena. Men from every race and denomination had gathered for a day and a half of mind-blowing music, speakers, and worship. Without exageration, it was one of the most powerful exhibitions of male fellowship I have ever experienced.

And it gave me hope that if people of faith would come together to confront this generation's challenges-- faithfulness, courage, and individual integrity, we could see a move of God again in restoring our nation...For the battle is not ours, but the Lord's.

To put an exclamation point on this assertion, I offer up excerpts of a recent article by New York Times columnist David Brooks, entitled "The virtues of becoming virtuous" (8/9/05), where he writes...

"According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in the United States has dropped by more than half since 1993. I've been trying to figure out why...To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous.

Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.

The decline in domestic violence is of a piece with the decline in violent crime overall. Violent crime overall is down by 55 percent since 1993, and violence by teenagers has dropped an astonishing 71 percent, according to the Department of Justice.

The number of drunken-driving fatalities has declined by 38 percent since 1982, according to the Department of Transportation, even though the number of vehicle miles traveled is up 81 percent. The total consumption of hard liquor by Americans over that time has declined by more than 30 percent.

Teenage pregnancy has declined by 28 percent since its peak in 1990. Teenage births are down significantly and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed in the country has also been declining since the early 1990s.

Fewer children are living in poverty, even allowing for an uptick during the last recession. There's even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace. People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955.

I could go on. Teenage suicide is down. Elementary-school test scores are rising (a sign that more kids are living in homes conducive to learning). Teenagers are losing their virginity later in life and having fewer sex partners. In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960s and 1970s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980s, have been declining since the early 1990s.

I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We're in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel.

The second thing that has happened is that many Americans have become better parents. Time diary studies reveal that parents now spend more time actively engaged with kids, even though both parents are more likely to work outside the home.

Third, many people in the younger generation, under age 30 or so, are reacting against the culture of divorce. They are trying to lead lives that are more stable than the ones their parents led. Post-boomers behave better than the baby boomers did.

Fourth, over the past few decades, neighborhood and charitable groups have emerged to help people lead more organized lives, even in the absence of cohesive families.

Obviously, we're not living in a utopia, where all social problems have been solved. But these improvements across a whole range of behaviors are too significant to be dismissed.

You want to know what a society looks like when it is in the middle of moral self-repair? Look around."

Bottom line, ordinary individuals who believe can still make a difference -- by the grace of God.

Roy Tanner



Depraved New World
Gene Edward Veith
Excerpted from Table Talk Magazine

Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin [is] a reproach to any people. (Prov. 14:34)

Sexual immorality is nothing new, as we can tell from the Bible's warnings against it. What is new is that sexual immorality now has cultural approval.

Men and women who had sex without being married to each other once felt ashamed and practiced their fornication in secret. Now, having sex outside of marriage is taken for granted as part of the single life and has become the rule, not the exception. Young women who became pregnant out of wedlock once dropped out of sight to go to special homes where they could have their baby out of the public eye. Now, they either get an abortion or openly embrace their identity as single mothers. Among teenagers, sex used to be reserved for marriage, then for "being in love:' but now even dating has become obsolete, replaced with an impersonal, one-night only "hooking-up" with someone they do not even know. Instead of waiting until marriage to have sex, couples live together - having not only sex but sometimes children together - with marriage being reduced to an optional ritual, with no real consequence in itself.

A taste for pornography used to be an embarrassing vice, to be satisfied in out-of-the-way, "dirty" movie houses and bookstores. Now, porn is sold in reputable hotel chains and as pay-per view TV. Homosexuality used to be a vice committed in secret. Now, homosexuals have not only come out of the closet, our popular culture insists "nothing is wrong with it:' and the cultural elite is demanding that homosexuals should have the right of marrying each other.

Other cultures have been tolerant of sexual immorality, but even these stopped short of seeing sexual immorality as a good thing. In ancient Greece, prostitution was commonplace, but not for young women of respectable families, who valued virginity and for whom promiscuity would be anathema. Homosexuality was rampant, especially for young men in the military, but no one ever so much as suggested that homosexuals should marry each other. (What happened is that men who indulged in this vice in the army then married a woman as soon as their service was over and had normal families, showing that homosexuality is not innate but culturally constructed).

Contrary to those who insist that the prohibitions of such sexual immorality in the New Testament are merely "cultural" it is clear that Paul and the other inspired authors were being counter-cultural, since the vices they condemned were quite acceptable in the Greco-Roman world. And yet, even the immoral Greeks saw the necessity of protecting the institution of the family.

Those who complain that moralists focus too much on sex, to the exclusion of more important moral problems in the culture (such as poverty, the environment, and health care) are staggeringly naive. Sex is the most foundational issue in culture, determining whether there even is a culture.

This is because, as all anthropologists agree, the basic unit of any culture is the family. And families come into being because of sex. A man and awoman are brought together by sexual desire for each other and so get married. Their sexual activity engenders children. The parents care for those children, protect them, and teach them how to grow up to form families of their own. Sex is a "family value:' But when sex is divorced from marriage and having children, the family and thus the culture as a whole are put in serious danger.

So what caused this dramatic, unprecedented shift in our culture's attitude towards sex?

First was the decline of the cultural authority of Christianity after the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century and accelerating into the twenty-first, the biblical view that moral absolutes have the status of objective truth has been fading from people's understanding. This was the changeable. Get rid of the unfavorable necessary loss of foundation that made consequence, and what once was immoral what would happen later possible.

On May 9, 1960, the FDA approved the birth control pill. Now one could have sex without having to worry about that side-effect of having children. There was no longer a utilitarian reason not to have sex outside of marriage.

What birth control technology did was to separate sex from procreation. This was at first within marriage, but then the contraceptive mentality made sex before marriage acceptable, as long as young couples know how to avoid pregnancy.

But now sex is reduced simply to a physical pleasure, with no necessary connection to its God-designed, family-making function. If it is merely a highly pleasurable physical sensation, what difference does it make how that sensation is brought about?

If a man and a woman want to have the pleasure of sex without having children, why should they be married? If a person of the same sex sexually stimulates someone, what could be wrong with that? After all, sex need have nothing to do with procreation, so why should the biological equipment of ones partner make any difference? Conversely, if marriage is simply a sexual attachment, unconnected with having children, why shouldn't homosexuals be able to get married too? If sex is just a pleasure to enjoy, why do we need any relationship at all? A person can just have sex with himself, aided by pornography.

In the shadow of the pill, the Sixties continued to unfold as a time of cultural revolution. The liberation movement; the touchy-feely romanticism of the hippies; the rebellion against traditions and institutions fomented by the times; the commercialization of sex in the entertainment industry; the apotheosis of the self - all of these played a role in the sexual revolution, and they remain powerful cultural forces today.

The next decade took the next step. On January 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. Contraception never completely prevented sex fromproducing children. Now it became legal to kill children once conceived. To mere permissiveness was now added unspeakable cruelty, all in the service of the alleged right to have sex without engendering children.

Marriage is certainly no longer necessary to have children, to the point that some sub-cultures have all but dispensed with marriage altogether. But now we have come even further. Just as it is possible to have sex without children, it is possible to have children without sex.

Babies can now be conceived sex-free, in Petri dishes. The egg and sperm can come from anonymous donors. But not even egg and sperm are necessary any more with the technology of cloning. in which one cell of any kind can be replicated until it constitutes a human being. When cloning is perfected, parenthood will be obsolete, since one's child will really be ones identical twin.

We will depend on technology both to prevent children being conceived and also to conceive them. The artificial womb is on the verge of development. Women will be freed from the pains of childbirth, and gender itself will be obsolete. Children will be manufactured, not born, engineered to be just as we want them. Abortion will take care of the mistakes and make possible a new much-heralded industry, conceiving babies in order to grind them up for their stem-cells to make medicine for adults.

All of this is not only possible, but, more ominously -- it is thinkable. Our cultural elite does not even see anything wrong with this, and is lobbying to make it happen. In the absence of a biblical understanding of moral absolutes, the family will soon be obsolete, genuine culture - and genuine sex - will be impossible.



What the world owes Palestinians and the Left
Dennis Prager
Posted: July 26, 2005
© 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

In the last few weeks, innocent men, women and children have been blown up, paralyzed, brain damaged and otherwise had their lives ruined by Muslim suicide bombers in Britain, Egypt and Iraq.

Who can we thank for this man-made plague? Palestinians and the Left.

We need to thank Palestinians for their major contribution to humanity – religiously sanctioned mass murder of innocents through suicide. Prior to the Palestinians, this did not exist.

It is true that Tamil suicide bombers in Sri Lanka have murdered many thousands and they are not Muslims. But the Tamil rationale for suicide terror – though utterly immoral – is confined to a (secular) nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. Palestinian Muslims – no Palestinian Christians have committed a suicide bombing – have created a religious and moral basis for mass murder and did so within a worldwide religion with a billion adherents. When the Palestinians sent brainwashed young men to blow themselves up in Israeli buses, cafes and discos, they offered justifications that provided the basis for many others to do the same.

They said that blowing up Jews in Israel – of any age and in any location – was an act that glorified Allah, that one who engaged in such atrocities was a Muslim equivalent to a saint, and would be rewarded in heaven by many beautiful virgins. I do not know of any Muslim religious organization or leader who condemned this Palestinian Muslim terror-theology as anti-Islamic.

Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, has devoted his life since his son's murder by Muslims in Pakistan to building bridges to the Muslim world. He told me on my radio show that he is sad to report that "99.99 percent" of the Muslim world does not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. It is no wonder, then, that so few Muslims religiously or morally condemned Palestinian terror against Israeli Jews. At best, some Palestinians condemn Palestinian terror as counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Period. It may be impractical, but not immoral or un-Islamic.

What therefore happened was that the religious justification for murdering innocent people took hold in the Muslim world. It apparently never occurred to Muslim leaders that once you justify evil, that evil will eventually be unleashed against you, too. If blowing up Jewish children is OK, so is blowing up Egyptian, Moroccan, Iraqi, British, Spanish and Russian children.

And that is where the Left comes in. They have provided the secular and universal justification for Palestinian Islamic terror against Jews.

According to the world's Left, it's OK for Palestinians to put bombs in an Israeli student cafeteria because:

1) Israel occupies Palestinian land (even though a leftist Israeli government offered 97 percent of it to Yasser Arafat)

2) Therefore, Palestinians are engaging in legitimate resistance

3) Since Palestinians don't have sophisticated weaponry, they use their weapon, the suicide bomber

4) Israelis kill Palestinian civilians, so there is a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians (even though the Palestinians target Jewish innocents and the Israelis do not target Palestinian innocents)

But, alas, the anti-Israel Left (an almost redundant description), too, did not understand the genie it had helped unleash onto the world. Why is it all right for Muslims to blow up Israeli children, but not Russian children? Israeli buses, but not British buses? Jews in Israel, but not Muslims in Iraq?

Actually, for many on the Left, it is all right. The socialist mayor of London himself blames the terror in his city on British support for America and Israel, not on Islamic terror-theology.

Like London's mayor, the Left around the world blames Israel for the Palestinian suicide bombers, and blames America for those in Iraq. Without the Left around the world, the Palestinian God-based mass murder through suicide would have been an isolated phenomenon, universally condemned as the evil it is.

And who is to blame for the Muslim terror in other Muslim countries such as Morocco and Egypt? Here, the leftist and Muslim apologists for Palestinian terror enter cognitive dissonance.

The next time you read of men, women and children blown apart by a young Muslim praising Allah, you can thank Palestinians and the Left.