A Debased People

I remember when I was a little boy, you'd take a dollar bill to the corner grocery store, and the change they would give you back would be in silver, silver quarters, silver dimes. But gradually our government began to debase our currency by putting cheaper metal in it, like steel or copper or nickel, but they used to be pure silver. Some of you older saints know what I'm talking about.

There was a time in our nation when the dollar was backed by gold. Our currency actually had some real value behind it, but our government took us off the gold standard and debased the dollar as well. Our currency today is just cheap metal and worthless paper with nothing backing it but the good old U.S.A., which means as this nation collapses, so will our bank accounts.

A debasing of things means to lower their value, to corrupt something. In the book of Judges, we see a debasing in the people of God as their worship to God became debased by serving other gods. After the death of Joshua, we see what transpired in the lives of the Jews.

Look in the book of Judges, friends, in chapter 2 and in verse 10, the word of God reads, And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers, and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, yet not the works which he had done for Israel. The Jews fell into polytheism, where they combined the worship of Jehovah God with the gods of the Canaanite deities. The people of God became debased in their worship by serving Baal and Ashtoreth, and it was this idolatry in the people of God that began to pervert them in their daily living.

The Canaanites were an extremely corrupt people, and their deity worship comprised the practice of human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, self-mutilation, and homosexuality. These grievous sins sent the people of God into captivity for 70 years until they were finally cured of their idolatry. Today in my city is a parade of debauchery, where 250,000 sex perverts have descended like a swarm of locusts on our city to flaunt their depravity in a public spectacle of a parade of lewdness and immorality.

And where is the church in all of this? Where is the outcry? Where is the outrage against such moral indecency and degeneration? The church is busy at her ballgames and pizza parties, and she looks the other way and is silent because she has become debased in her own worship of God and is afraid of going to jail for her testimony for God and the gospel. But we'll meet tomorrow morning to talk about how much they love Jesus as they continue to exist solely for self-preservation. You couldn't find 250,000 Christians in this entire nation who would come out publicly in a public outcry against the grievous sins and perversions in the land.

I don't think you could scare up 2,500 Christians who cared enough to risk facing jail to make a public outcry against such perversion. You might find 250, maybe 25. That's how bad we've become.

That's how debased we are. Christians have lost their voice in this country. They just turn their head and look the other way and keep silent.

And their silence has a very debasing effect on their own worship of God and in their personal lives. Compromise in the church and conformity to society have made our churches nothing more than social clubs that gather weekly. But in America, before 1960, the church still had a voice of authority in the land.

A television commercial was kept off the air because it showed a picture of an outhouse. And the Methodist church felt that was offensive. And they collectively raised their voice against it and succeeded in keeping something offensive off public broadcasting.

But now we are bombarded by offensive images all around us in society because gradually the Christian church became debased. When you debase the gospel by diluting it of all its power to make it more palatable to sinful man, then you end up with a debased people. Like Israel in the book of Judges, where you have an entire generation which knew not the Lord.