Do You Think This Baby Will Be A Preacher When He Grows Up?

Now a break for something cute.....

Have you ever seen a baby preach a sermon?

The YouTube video below is absolutely adorable and more than a bit strange.

Out of the mouth of babes, eh?

Unfortunately, I think this baby is better than the majority of preachers that I have seen on television.....

Gender Roles

The idea of traditional gender roles has become anathema in modern American society. To even discuss the idea of different roles for men and women these days is to invite the wrath of the politically correct crowd.

But are men and women exactly the same?

Do husbands and wives have different roles to play in the context of the family?

Those are important questions.

Most Americans today would reject the idea of specific gender roles.

But the Bible embraces them.

In Ephesians 5:22-25 the Scriptures say this.....

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

When you read through what the Bible has to say about gender roles, one of the things that jumps out is the huge responsibility put on men. Husbands are expected to do whatever they have to do to protect their families. That includes having to die for them if necessary, just as Christ died for the Church.

But are men brought up to be this type of extraordinary "servant-leader" in the United States today?

No.

If you turn on the television today, you won't have to wait long to see how men are expected to behave in modern America - sex crazed, beer swilling, irresponsible idiot slackers who cower before their more mature, more responsible and more dominant female partners.

The truth is that the "strong male" has become an endangered species in the United States. It has been widely reported that testosterone levels in men are dropping about 1.2% per year, and 59% of all college students are now female. In fact, it has been reported that women in their 20s in the 10 largest cities in the United States now earn more money than men of the same age. Those women who are still looking for a traditional "man" complain that all they find are overgrown boys who have given up, tuned out, are slaves to their addictions and who won't take responsibility for anything.

Not that men are bad - most of them feel completely lost and confused - as if they have lost something that they didn't even know they were missing. All of their lives American men have been taught that they are NOT the leaders of the home, and that it should be expected that women will yell at them and tell them what to do. Movies and television reinforce this programming every single day by bombarding men and boys with the message that they are irresponsible subservient slackers who need to be corrected by the more responsible females.

Just think about all the times you have watched a scene where a female character yells at a male character and chews him out.

And what do we do?

We laugh and snicker.

But now take that same scene and flip the characters.

We would be horrified, wouldn't we?

And rightfully so.

So why do we think it is cute when the female verbally abuses the male?

The truth is that we have taught a generation of women that they should lead and dominate men. Instead of teaching them the Biblical principle that women should respect their husbands and let them lead, we have instructed our young women to rebel against any semblance of male leadership.

A shocking study done by the respected Pew Research Center confirms that in the United States it is women who predominantly rule the home.

The study surveyed 1,260 individuals who were either married or living together. What the study found was that in 43% of all couples, women make more decisions in the four areas Pew surveyed: planning weekend activities, household finances, major home purchases and television watching.

26% of the time men make more of the decisions, the survey revealed, and 31% of the time the decisions are made "equally".

So should we be surprised?

Is it not obvious that the women wear the pants in most American families now?

For example, one respondent to the USAToday article about this survey wrote this:

"I am a manager at work, and wouldn't have it any other way. But when I get home, I'd much rather chill out and let the wife make the calls."

The truth is that we have trained a generation of American men to be immature, subservient, submissive wimps who are very hesitant to take responsibility or leadership.

Watch just about any sitcom or any television commercial or any movie with these issues in mind. Watch who the dominant partner in any couple is. Once you know to look for it you will see it everywhere.

This is not how a society should work.

The Bible teaches that men should be strong, powerful, sacrificial servant-leaders as we see in Ephesians 5:25:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

The truth is that men need to be so strong for their wives and children that they need to be ready to die for their families if it comes down to that.

How far we are from that ideal today.

Instead of creating a society full of strong men who would be willing to die for their families if need be, we have created a society full of weak, irresponsible, passive men who won't stand up for anyone or anything.

Is that something to be proud of?

Should we boast that we have nearly eradicated traditional gender roles from modern American society?

Not at all.

The rejection of traditional gender roles has made America much weaker, and it is future generations who will continue to pay the price for our foolishness.

Christian Nation?

The new American Religious Identification Survey shows that most religions in the United States are losing members rapidly. According to the survey, the percentage of self-identified Christians in the U.S. has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 percent of the population to 76 percent.

The survey also reports that Catholics, Baptists and other mainline Protestant denominations have seen large drops in numbers since 1990.

The number of Americans who claim no religion at all has reached 15%, which is up from 8% in 1990. Islam, Wicca and eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism also show large gains in the survey.

Acknowledging this same trend, Newsweek recently ran a major article entitled: The End Of Christian America. Newsweek ran their own poll about religion and it turned up some stunning findings:

*Fewer people now think of the United States as a "Christian nation" than when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008).
*About two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is "losing influence" in American society.
*The percentage of Americans who think religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 48 percent.

This trend of Americans moving away from Christianity is showing up even more prominently among young adults. A shocking new survey by the Barna group reveals that less than 1 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 have a Biblical worldview. This new data clearly shows that the youngest adults in America have clearly rejected traditional Christianity.

Barna's survey defined having a Biblical worldview as holding the following beliefs:

*Believing that absolute moral truth exists
*Believing that the Bible is completely accurate in all of the principles it teaches
*Believing that Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic
*Believing that a person cannot earn their way into heaven by trying to be good or by doing good works
*Believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth
*Believing that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.

But even those who still call themselves Christians do not necessarily hold to traditional Christian beliefs any longer. Two other recent surveys show that the majority of American Christians believe that accepting Jesus Christ as savior is NOT the only way to eternal life.

USAToday recently reported on an almost unbelievable new survey that has found that 52 percent of American Christians believe that eternal life is not exclusively for those who accept Jesus Christ as their savior.

A different survey that was taken last year by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 57 percent of evangelical Christians in America believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life".

That shocking study revealed what many Christians have known for quite some time - apostasy among "evangelical Christians" is spreading, and it is spreading rapidly.

Evangelical Christians are supposedly those who follow the teachings of the Bible the closest. But this survey shows that even a majority of them do not even believe in the most fundamental precepts of the Christians faith.

For example, John 14:6 says the following:

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

If there was another way for our sins to be forgiven, then why did Jesus need to die on the cross? If there were other ways to salvation, then Jesus could have come down to earth, pointed out a bunch of other ways to get to heaven, and then could have gone back up to heaven without having to deal with the cross.

But the reality is that there was no other way for our sins to be paid for.

And yet these new surveys reveal that a majority of American Christians now believe that there are other ways to heaven.

The Pew survey also revealed that 45% of Americans as a whole say they seldom or never read their religion's holy books.

Perhaps if more Americans were reading the Bible then they would know what is truth and what is error. Instead, Americans have surrounded themselves with preachers and self-help coaches and ministers who tell them what they want to hear, who always make them feel comfortable and who never tell them about sin, holiness or the judgment of God.

The current situation in America reminds us of 2 Timothy 4:3.....

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

The sad reality is that the trends all show that church attendance in America is in decline.

Dave Olson, the director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church, has done some really interesting research into the church attendance patterns of Americans.

Olson's findings contain a ton of bad news. For starters, his research found that the percentage of Americans regularly attending church is only 18.7%.

Olson has put his findings into an eye opening slideshow entitled "Twelve Surprising Facts about the US Church".

Here are some of the things that he found:

The percentage of people who actually physically attend a Christian church each week is quite a bit below what pollsters report.

The percentage of people who attended a Christian church each week decreased significantly between 1990 and 2000.

Only one state, Hawaii, actually saw an increase in the percentage of the population attending church between 1990 and 2000. Every other state in the entire nation saw a decrease in church attendance.

Evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics are each strong in very different regions of the nation.

The church planting rate has been declining steadily throughout the history of the United States.

If these current trends continue, the percentage of the U.S. population that attends church each week in 2050 will be about half of what it is today.

So what does all of this mean?

It means that America is not a Christian nation any longer.

The percentage of Christians in America is rapidly declining, while other religions are gaining members rapidly. Even many of those who still call themselves "Christians" have rejected the fundamental principles of traditional Christianity.

However, sometimes when things seem the darkest is just when God brings new light on to the scene. As old institutions die out, perhaps God will bring something to pass which will be even greater than anything America has ever seen before.

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