It is very difficult to speak about Jesus today in the secular world in which we live. The Christian life demands that we live according to the will of God, which means sacrifice, something of which our hedonistic and materialistic society of today knows little about. Our Lord told us that as Christians the world would be our enemy: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:18 & 19) St John tells us, “Do not love the world or the things in the world, if anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.” (1 John 2:15) What does this mean? It is not the earth which God created that we must hate, nor any of the people in it – but the sin which is destroying our world!
It is because of this sin that we are compelled to go out into the world and bring to it the only hope of restoration - the healing grace of Christ. We live in a world of “moral relativism” where people judge their own morality by comparing it to their neighbours or their government’s. The problem in doing this, is that even our government’s laws are sometimes opposed to the law of God, with legalised gay marriages, abortion, the morning after pill (being given to children of school age without parents knowledge), sperm banks, egg donations, surrogate mothers (all these crimes bring three people into the sacred covenant of marriage, given to us by God, and thousands of children are growing up not knowing their real parents) Then we have cloning and other scientific pursuits that are all an abomination in God’s eyes. We also have programs on our TV’s, which show our children the acts of murder, drug abuse and casual sex, some of these films our government has approved as “suitable” viewing for our children to watch. There is also more nudity in our T.V advertisements today, than you could see 20 years ago in X rated films, but we have become desensitised to it. Our standards of morality are disintegrating so fast today that we can no longer remember where we have come from, let alone where we began. Archbishop Faulton Sheen once said, “If you don’t live the way you believe, you will believe the way you live.”
The devil is making his greatest assault at this time and he is hitting at the very core of our civilization, and the world has not even noticed! All the above crimes are the attack of satan upon our families, and the family is a microcosm of our society. Satan knows that if he can destroy the family, he can destroy civilisation itself. The father should be the head of the household, the mother the heart, and the children its precious fruits but the devil’s assaults are clear: Take the children away from the family table with fast-foods, take them away from family games, conversation and intimate moments with TV and game stations. Take the mothers out to work with the fathers and leave the children to bring themselves up. Take the husbands away from the wife’s with pornography and sexual licence, take away the father’s ability to discipline his children. Take away all their hope by showing them soap operas that will reflect the worst of society’s behaviour and let them believe that this is how life is meant to be. Is it any wonder that our children turn to drugs to free themselves from this terrible world in which they live?

The devil is very powerful at present, and he is playing his trump cards. He has fooled the world, through their pride and scientific knowledge, into believing that he doesn’t even exist, that he is just a myth, a long forgotten character made up by a backward and superstitious people. But we know different, and we must make our world aware that although we are in the midst of a spiritual warfare there is a better way of life, a good life filled with love, and the hope of a better world.

If we take our moral standards from the world we will never please God; our morality must come from God’s own law, lived out through the Holy Spirit acting within us. If you were to go out into the streets today and ask people to list the 10 commandments of God, how many would be able to do so? Fewer than 5%, it is reported, and yet this is God’s law brought down to the world by God Himself. And to we who have entered into the New Covenant of Christ, God tells us, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). What God is saying here is that we will not only know God’s law but through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we will love and cherish that law and have the desire to keep it. Continued on next page.