Fifty shades of today's evil

The three-part series of novels starting with “Fifty Shades of Grey” has sold more books than the Harry Potter series and “The Hunger Games,” informed my preacher, Richard Jordan, in his Sunday morning sermon two weeks ago.

“They’ve sold more than any other book in the English language except the Bible. Since 2011 they are the fastest selling book in recorded history. They are books about sexual perversion, bondage, sadomasochism, etc.

“Surveys say 40 percent of evangelical Christians acknowledge having read one or all three of those books.

“I was in Target this past week and discovered they are now selling kits for bondage and you say, ‘What?!’

“You say, ‘Why in the world does it get to be so commonly accepted?!’ It’s that verse in Isaiah: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’

“When you put that kind of stuff in your mind--and I know what they’re doing is selling the fantasy--it never ends good in real life.

“You put that kind of stuff in your mind and what it does is it puts in an itch you can’t scratch in your heart, and all of a sudden your marriage, your spouse, is not exciting; they’re not titillating enough, and you start looking elsewhere and it isn’t there. But that 'the grass is greener on the other side of the hill' kind of thing is there.

"It numbs your conscience and corrupts your heart and causes you to live in a fantasy world that isn’t real.

“I’m saying to you, these things are things you have to be careful about. Don’t just accept everything that comes along into your mind.

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“When you’re going to read, first thing to do is read Paul’s epistles. What you take in effects what goes on inside of you and a culture that can read and glory in this kind of extreme sadistic masochism . . . if you take the last verse in Romans 1 you’ll see exactly what it is—it’s the depths of sin and when your culture is there, Paul says, ‘Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.’

“When you live in a culture filled with this stuff, you live in a world that that’s the standard of life, listen, that never ends good in real life. In the movie, they went to the bank. You don’t have to experience sin to know it’s sinful.

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“When a culture rejects God’s Word and turns away from it, it winds up with things in its culture that are the antithesis of the way God created it; the opposite of the natural. There was a day in which our culture understood that.

“In 1854, the first published McGuffey Reader, the standard textbook of the one-room schoolhouse in the 1800s, had this as a text for children:

“ ‘If you can induce a community to doubt the genuineness and authenticity of the Scriptures; to question the reality and obligations of religion; to hesitate, undeciding, whether there be any such thing as virtue or vice; whether there be an eternal state of retribution beyond the grave; or whether there exists any such being as God, you have broken down the barriers of moral virtue, and hoisted the flood gates of immorality and crime. I need not say that when a people have once done this, they can no longer exist as a tranquil and happy people. Every bond that holds society together would be ruptured; fraud and treachery would take the place of confidence between man and man; the tribunals of justice would be scenes of bribery and injustice; avarice, perjury, ambition, and revenge would walk through the land, and render it more like the dwelling of savage beasts than the tranquil abode of civilized and Christianized men.’

“That didn’t say you needed to be a Christian. That just said you don’t need to be a part of Romans 1. Isaiah 5:20 says, ‘Woe to them call good evil and evil good.’ You know what that is? That’s foolishness. You can’t even identify reality.

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“In the story of Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, either she didn’t remember God’s Word correctly or she hadn’t received it correctly, but either way she’s going on faulty memory.

“If you’ve got it written down, you don’t have to go on faulty memory. You can go read it. And if you’ve been using faulty memory and you read it, you know what happens? The reading corrects your faulty memory.

“It’s dangerous not to read your Bible. It’s dangerous not to read Paul’s epistles.

“I want you to see why that is. I’m going to use an illustration here that Jesus used. It’s true in our age, too, because this is not a dispensational issue so much as it’s a, ‘Here’s how you’re made to operate. Here’s how your constitution as a person is made to function.’

“Matthew 6:22 says, ‘The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.’

“The thing that gives light, understanding and illumination in your inner man is the eye; it comes in through the eyegate.

“Your eye is the instrument that takes advantage of light. You can have all kind of light in the room, but if you don’t have an eye to see it, it doesn’t do you any good. If you’ve got an eye that can see, but you don’t have any light, you can’t see. So the eye is an instrument; it’s the intake of information and if the information you take in, He says, is single . . .

“You remember the verse in James where it says ‘a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways’? I’m going on human viewpoint, divine viewpoint, human viewpoint, divine viewpoint. But if your eye is single--just divine viewpoint--what happens? The whole body’s full of light.

“The psalmist says ‘the entrance of thy Word giveth light.’ It gives understanding to the simple. You know where you’re going to get light in your inner man about things? Out of the Word of God.

“But the next verse in Matthew 6 says: ‘But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’

“You see, if that light doesn’t come from the light of God’s Word, it’s darkness. How do you get darkness in your inner man?

“In Romans 1, it says their foolish heart was darkened, professing . . . there’s a thinking a process that produces darkness and death. No understanding. The result of that, Isaiah 5:20 says, ‘Woe to them that call evil good.’ He’s talking to a nation there. What you take in impacts what goes on inside of you. Don’t you ever doubt that.”