Sermon Tone Analysis

*How To Target Your Kids Before They Do*

*May 2, 1999                  Ephesians 6:1-4*

 

This is progress?

*Mass murder in our age of "enlightenment"  /by /CAL THOMAS*

 

            *While American forces bomb Yugoslavia with the announced intention of stopping one form of slaughter, gunfire comes to yet another public school in which more than a dozen have been slaughtered and others, critically wounded, remain In peril.*

* *

*       After Paducah, Ky., after Jonesboro, Ark., after Springfield.

Ore., the pattern is familiar.

With chips on their shoulders, grievances in their hearts, and weapons in their hands, students who should be planning for life instead plot death.

They wound and kill fellow students for reasons known only to demons.

Are these cries for help from the abused, neglected, and abandoned generation, or is this the price we continue to pay for believing we could live as we wish, laugh at morality, and imagine judgment day would never come?

Why should young people take life seriously when their overworked, aborting, day-care, euthanasia culture does not?

Life is so cheap, relationships are so meaningless-children get the message.*

* *

*       We await the psychiatrists' explanation, but don't we secretly know what it is?

When you mix the ingredients for a cake, you get a cake.

When you mix the volatile Ingredients of corrupted culture, vulgar entertainment, and broken, loveless families, you get child killers.

*Okay, so these are rare, but their rarity is small comfort when you are the victim or the parents of a dead child.

* *

*       The initial profiles of the young people allegedly responsible for the killing fields that have now come to Littleton, Colo., are familiar: They were into Satanism, Nazism, hate, and violence.

What Is making so many young souls so sick?

There will be the predictable explanations from clinicians.

And factual reports.

But who can adequately explain this?*

The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new age of world peace and security, but we are less secure than ever.

Genocide occurs in our "enlightened" age, and mass murder occurs at home.

This is progress?

This is peace?

This Is security?

Wasn't the Brady bill supposed to protect us from such things?

Or maybe it was these 100,000* *police officers.

*Kurt Thompson, a Washington, D.C. area psychiatrist whose clients Include adolescents, sees today's teens suffering from a horrid sense of disconnection."

They reconnected technically through the Internet, but they're disconnected relationally.

Too many parents, he says, think by the time their children become teenagers their iob is almost done and that other forces will complete the shaping of young minds and spirits.

Oh sure, we can put metal detectors at the school-house door, but who makes mental and moral detectors?*

The pace of life can be just as fast in a big city as in a small town, says Dr. Thompson, and kids who are en the edge, or over it, are hard to spot.

*It's not all the parents' fault.

Teens are free moral agents.

But Dr. Thompson says too many don't spend enough quality /and /quantity time with their children, nor do enough pray with and for them, or tell them how much they are loved and appreciated.*

Government officials are making predictable statements.

Look for some to suggest adding more gun laws to the thousands already on the books that didn't stop this latest shooting.

*Politicians are powerless; parents are not.

Parents have the best chance of curtailing violence in the heart before it reaches the head and the hands.*

-® 1999, Los Angeles Times Syndicate                                                   *WORLD *I /May 1 1999/

* *

*A Bull's-eye God */by /*JOEL BELZ*

He insists on being at the center of our existence.

There will be those who say that to take a symbol from the world of guns and weapons in the wake of Littleton, Cob., is in poor taste.

To which I say that when you're desperate, as our society certainly is right about now, poor taste (or being politically incorrect) is one of the last things you worry about.

So let's make this point first: *Societies regularly tend to think they have the option of doing one of three things with God.

They put Him at the bull's-eye center of their existence, which is what many in our culture did during its earliest days.

Or they totally exclude Him from the target, which is what our public society has formally sought to do during the last generation or two.

Or they try to tolerate Him at the margins, somewhere in the outer rings of the target-which is what we typically do when we have a shooting at a public high school, a war, a hurricane, or some other violent emergency.*

* *

*       For the last week, you've been watching American society scramble back from the bleakness of trying to live with God totally off the target of their lives, struggling desperately now to find at least a little place for Him again in the outer rings.*

*No one pictured that more poignantly last week than columnist Peggy Noonan, writing in /The Wall Steet Journal /on "The Culture of Death."

Ms. Noonan wrote: "People have had it.

Something is different about this story.

We've been through it before but the reaction this time suggests some critical mass has been reached.*

"You could see it even in the unnerving sameness, the jarring predictability of what we saw on television as this very specific tragedy unfolded.

We all know the Kabuki now, we know it by heart.

First the aerial shots of kids fleeing the shooting, then the shot of the girl sobbing in the arms of her friends; after that the Associated Press photo of the boy with his baseball hat turned backwards, gesturing over a body; then the memorial at the local church with kids sobbing and a stricken pastor speaking; then the yearbook pictures of the perpetrators-' He was kind of quiet, kind of a weird guy'-then the neighbor's testimony about video games and Marilyn Manson; then the debate: 'It's the gun culture.' 'It's the community.'

"We all know how to do this now.

We have been here before, and too often....

We all know our part.

We all know what's next.

The difference this time, so far, is that the finger pointing seems wan, halfhearted.

People seem to be groping for that elusive thing, a satisfying answer-or partial answer-or a piece of the puzzle."

*Then, after grimly describing the dark "culture of death" that has come to pervade the lives of American children, Ms. Noonan-right there in /The Wall Street Journal-/makes a startling point: 'A man called into Christian radio this morning and said a true thing.

He said, and I am paraphrasing: Those kids were sick and sad, and if a teacher had talked to one of them and said, 'Listen, there's a way out, there really is love out there that will never stop loving you, there's a real God and I want to be able to talk to you about him'-if that teacher had intervened that way, he would have been hauled into court.*

* *

*       "Yes, he would have.

It occurs to me at the moment that a gun and a Bible have a few things in common.

Both are small, black, have an immediate heft, and are dangerous-the first to life, the second to the culture of death.*

"One more thing: I think every intelligent person I know has been having thoughts like this for years, and they don't want to, and they're right not to want to, because it just may be true that this is one problem our resourceful and brilliant country cannot solve.

The dark genie is out of the bottle and swims in the seas.”

*Yet right as Ms. Noonan is, there's this critical follow-up point: The God of the Bible is not someone who simply wants to be reintroduced to the outer rings of our culture's targets and goals.

It's easy to forget that what preceded the generation-long effort to exclude God altogether was a century-long effort to marginalize Him.*

But marginalization leaves everyone dissatisfied; believers are no longer nourished, while unbelievers can't stand even vestigial reminders of the past.

*So now's a good time to remind ourselves: Our dying culture will not pass from death to life by a few nominal reversals of some of our worst denials of God.

Allowing a symbolic Bible here and there, permitting a nonsectarian prayer now and then, tacking a summary of the Ten Commandments back up as a cultural icon-all those may satisfy an outrage here and there.

But that's not what Ms. Noonan's "culture of death" concern is ultimately about.

To respond with integrity to the cries we heard from Colorado last week means coming to grips with a bull's-eye God and hearing His insistence that He will not settle for anything other than the center of our existence.

We've tried nominalism in the past; we've tried relegating this God to the outer rings.

And we ought to know by now that it doesn't work.*

* *

*WORLD *I /May 1 1999/

 

*How To Target Your Kids Before They Do;*

*What Kids Wish Their Parents Knew*

Ephesians 6:1-4

 

James Dobson recently told a story that sums up the experience of parenting.

The mother of a 5-year-old girl became so sick that she had to stay in bed for an entire day.

She awoke to her daughter standing beside the bed holding a cup of hot tea.

The mother showed both delight and concern at the sight of her 5-year-old daughter standing there with cup of fresh hot tea.

She exclaimed to her daughter that she didn’t know she even knew how to make hot tea.

While she began to sip her tea the little girl told her "I did it just like you, Mommy."

She explained how she ran the water into the pot and turned on the stove.

Then how she got the tea leaves out and spooned them into the hot water.

However, she did say she wasn’t able to find the tea strainer but that didn’t stop her.

She said, "since I couldn’t find the strainer, I just used the fly swatter."

Seeing the horrified look on her mom’s face, she quickly added—"Don’t worry, Mom.

I knew that fly swatter in the kitchen was new so I used the old one".

Have you ever wondered at the wisdom of God in letting us become parents?

God must really trust us to place the most precious gift of creation in our hands.

Someone said "Every child begins life as a book with every page yet unwritten."

There are at least four things every child wishes their parents understood about what they really need.

As adults, we need to better understand the needs of the children whom God has trusted into our care.