deu12-31
29 April 2007
“SETTING OUR OWN CHILDREN ON FIRE”
Deuteronomy 12:31
Life is about learning. Learning from every angle and every opportunity. Too often we approach these youth days as a means of I affirm that but without some balance, we are setting up a false reality for ourselves and our future. We have done a great disservice to our own future by only insisting on self-expression. AS a result, self expression has been a for self-destruction. Anti-social behavior.
We have relinquished our own responsibility in setting the course with young people. We rather just sit back and complain, "I do not know what happened to young people.”
One of the realities we must come to accept is that we have participated in the neglect of shaping and encouraging young minds and spirits to
Today’s passage is a warning which I am afraid may even be an indictment on us. “They sacrifice their own children to their gods.” That statement has haunted me in the past few weeks.
What is it that we are worshiping that makes us throw our own children into the fires of sacrifice to those idol gods?
There is a great difference between conformity and savvy survival. It’s an excuse to
The idol of self-defeat. We suffer from low aim. To quote Benjamin Mays. We instill in our children the very talk and that robs dreams, kills joy and murders vision.
THE “Five Heartbeats” A son battling with drug abuse has the chance to make it big in the music industry. His mother goes to find his father and tell him the news. “Eddie ain’t going to be nothing. I ain’t anything” (Expletive deleted)
We are the only beings in which garbage in does not equal garbage out. All our computers can only give us out what we pt in. These cells phones. We have convinced ourselves that something must be wrong with the technology when we get a wrong number. NO there is something wrong perhaps with the input. Something can happen to you in the midst of your mess. God can make a way. You can rise above it.
We throw our children into the fires of self-defeat.
The idol of uniformed and unmanaged sexual expression. I have said to you before that I am almost to the point that I want to declare sex as an adult activity but our pre-occupation with sex and sexual conquest is in us a manifestation of our own unwillingness to grow up. In other words, we cannot expect our young people to approach sexuality with a certain informed maturity when we are as adults act so childish about it.
Materialism
The idol of religion and faith not focused on the one true God. We make everything spiritual. And we choke out the faith of the Church.
Because of the pervasiveness of racism in this country, you cannot do everything you see the young white children doing. They have some safety nets that you don’t have. ON the other hand, being black is more tha being “not white” You cannot afford to do the opposite of what you see others doing.
She’s reading a book. So you don’t
She goes to class so you don’t.
He’s trying to go to college so you don’t
He’s not in jail so you do
She speaks two languages you don’t.
She learns how money works. You don’t
HE pays cash. You get a credit card.
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