Nobody can honestly, with eyes wide-open, doubt that our beloved America is embroiled in deep, seemingly irreversible crisis. Hostility to the Cross and all that it represents has deepened over the last 10 years and continues to do so. In June 2011, the Pac10 moved to invite the secular institutions from the Big XII to join the Pac10 in a super-conference.  But the oldest educational institution in Texas, a Christian university, Baylor University, was excluded!  Secularists at the University of California said clearly, explicitly, publicly, vehemently that there is no place for a Christian university in this athletic conference! No other reason — just that it was Christian!  This is one of many examples of the marginalization and exclusion of everything Christian from our culture. What is the answer to this, in our once-Christian culture?  Let’s start with an analysis about how we got there in the first place.  We have substituted moralism — legalism — for the message of the Cross.  The fundamentalist churches have their list of taboos, and the liberal churches have theirs.  But moralism is different from morality, and taboos are different from godly living. The cross, resurrection, and Presence of the Holy Spirit bring strange and life-changing power and motivation, inexplicable in any other way.  Religion is only a list of moralistic and societal rules without the power of the Cross. The cross shows us what we really are — sinful, proud, self-serving egoists in rebellion against a holy God. But on the other side, a loving, forgiving God who went all the way to the cruel death of crucifixion and abandonment, so we could be saved and have the power to live a life that would bring others to embrace the Cross, and also be saved. No wonder the song-writer could pen the words, “In the Cross of Christ I glory…”

REV. DR. RICHARD L. SHAW PH.D., PASTOR