Ungodliness

In an almost unbelievable turn of events, a man already facing legal proceedings for fare evasion was caught trying to avoid paying for a train ticket yet again—this time while on his way to court for the original offense. The individual, who owes more than £30,000 in unpaid fines (about $37,500 in USD), attempted to board a train without a valid ticket, only to be stopped by vigilant railway staff during a routine ticket inspection.

Despite facing mounting legal consequences, this man continued a pattern of behavior that authorities described as “prolific fare evasion.” His repeated attempts to dodge payment laid bare the ongoing struggles faced by transportation services to enforce fare collection and deter habitual offenders.

The incident took place in London, where public transportation relies heavily on trust and compliance with fare policies to maintain its operation and funding. Transport officials have expressed frustration but also underscore the importance of fairness for all passengers who pay their way. Authorities must balance enforcement with opportunities for rehabilitation, hoping offenders will recognize the value of integrity and lawfulness.

This man’s actions serve as a sobering reminder of the consequences of unrepentant behavior. Instead of facing his charges and seeking to make amends, he chose to continue evading responsibility, compounding the legal challenges he already faced.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There comes a time when we must stop and ask ourselves—How long can I keep repeating the same sin, expecting to escape the consequences?

George Orwell’s book 1984 is one of our society’s most frequently referenced illustrations of what life would be like under an authoritarian government. In the book, citizens of the fictional nation of Oceania are under constant government surveillance, including in their own homes. Devices called telescreens display propaganda and record peoples’ actions. This allows the government to monitor people even in what should be the most private place they know—their homes.

Historically in the US, the Fourth Amendment protects Americans from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government, acknowledging the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects." It is a bedrock principle of the Bill of Rights.

But a new survey reveals that an astonishing number of Americans, particularly younger Americans, would be comfortable throwing this fundamental protection on the ash heap of history. The Cato Institute survey of Americans finds:

29% of Americans aged 18 to 29 respond affirmatively when asked, “Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?”

20% of Millennials between the ages of 30 and 44 also want everyone watched.

However, among Americans 45 and older, support for such totalitarian surveillance drops considerably to 6%.

From Ivy League campuses to the digital domains of Facebook, there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency. There is an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.

If these trends continue, the US may confront a very different privacy landscape in the future. It is possible that at some point, the American public will be open to extreme government overreach.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians might think that if we aren’t doing anything wrong what does it matter if we are being watched? But do you spank your children? Might some government official somewhere want to recast that as abuse? Do you teach your children that God made us male and female? Do you insist that marriage is between one man and one woman? What might some in the government think about that? To be constantly monitored is to be constantly assessed. And knowing, as we do, that our governments don’t measure right and wrong by God’s standards, we should fear the prospect.

In the popular, BBC murder mystery series Broadchurch, the mystery is who in this lovely little seaside town could have murdered a child. The local detective, Eli Miller, is dubious that anyone from the town could’ve done it. This is a tight knit community of good people. She says, “We don’t have these problems.” In response, Detective Inspector, Alec Hardy argues with her.

Hardy: Anybody’s capable of murder, given the right circumstances.

Miller: Most people have moral compasses.

Hardy: Compasses break.

Tim Keller adds: “The fictional detective inspector is telling us exactly what the Bible says. You must not be in denial about your capacity for evil. You will do some really bad things in your life that will utterly shock you, unless you get ahold of this particular truth from the Bible. Blame shifting is therefore one of the most dangerous things that you can do.”

Legend has it that G. K. Chesterton, the famous philosopher/theologian, was asked by a newspaper reporter what was wrong with the world. He skipped over all the expected answers. He said nothing about corrupt politicians or ancient rivalries between warring nations, or the greed of the rich and the covetousness of the poor. He left aside street crime and unjust laws and inadequate education. Environmental degradation and population growth overwhelming the earth’s carrying capacity were not on his radar. Neither were the structural evils that burgeoned as wickedness became engrained in society and its institutions in ever more complex ways.

What’s wrong with the world? As the story goes, Chesterton responded with just two words: “I am.”

His answer is unlikely to be popular with a generation schooled to cultivate self-esteem, to pursue its passions and chase self-fulfillment first and foremost. ... (But) maybe there is something to Chesterton’s answer after all. In fact, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was fond of saying that original sin—the idea that every one of us is born a sinner and will manifest that sinfulness in his or her life—is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically verified. Everyone, whether a criminal or a saint, sins. Insofar as that dismal verdict is true, it’s hardly surprising that there is a great deal wrong with the world.

Walt Whitman, one of the greatest of American poets writes in, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" of his capacity for evil:

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, ...

In seaside towns all across the United Kingdom, authorities have posted signs warning people against feeding seagulls. The theory is that years of being fed by the public has encouraged the gulls’ aggressive behavior, including acts of outright food theft.

Nevertheless, researchers suggest a new, simple way to deter theft from the flying scavengers --staring at them. According to Madeleine Goumas herring gulls took on average 21 seconds longer to approach a bag of potato chips while a human test subject stared at them.

Goumas said, “Gulls are often seen as aggressive and willing to take food from humans. So it was interesting to find that most wouldn’t even come near during our tests. Of those that did approach, most took longer when they were being watched.”

Potential preaching angles: 1) Sin; Omniscience of God - Wrongdoers tend to back away when they know they're being watched. God is the ultimate all-seeing eye, and does not turn a blind eye to evil. 2) Satan; Spiritual Warfare – We must also be on guard at all times for the attacks of Satan who is always lurking.

People magazine once undertook a part-serious, part-tongue-in-cheek survey of its readers on the subject of sin. The results were published as a "Sindex," with each sin rated by a sin coefficient. The outcome is both amusing and instructive. Sins like murder, child abuse, and spying against one's country were rated the worst sins in ascending order, with smoking, swearing, and illegal videotaping far down the list. Parking in a handicapped spot was rated surprising high, whereas unmarried live-togethers got off lightly. Cutting in front of someone in line was deemed worse than divorce or capital punishment. Predictably, corporate sin was not mentioned at all. The survey concluded, "Overall, readers said they commit about 4.64 sins a month."

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course calculating our sins (according to our standards) is not this easy or precise. In the Bible, sin is not just a few bad acts that we do. It is a power that we are in (See Romans 3:9). As the writer Dorothy Sayers once said, "[Sin] is a deep interior dislocation at the very center of the human personality." The 20th century poet W.H. Auden called sin "The error bred in the bone."

Commenting on his performance in the gangster drama Black Mass, actor Johnny Deep said, "I found the evil in myself a long time ago, and I've accepted it. We're old friends."

In 1927, the famous English poet and essayist T.S. Eliot became a Christian and was baptized and confirmed. Prior to his conversion, Eliot belonged to London's Bloomsbury Group, a small, informal association of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of central London. But when news of Eliot's conversion hit the news, the Bloomsbury Group responded with shock and even disgust. The writer Virginia Woolf, the de facto leader of the group, penned the following letter to one of her peers:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become a [believer] in God and immortality, and he goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem more credible than he is. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Words change meaning over time in ways that might surprise you. Here are just a few examples of words (so, preacher, take your choice) you may not have realized didn't always mean what they mean today.

1. Nice: This word used to mean "silly, foolish, simple." Far from the compliment it is today!
2. Silly: Meanwhile, silly went in the opposite direction: in its earliest uses, it referred to things worthy or blessed; from there it came to refer to the weak and vulnerable, and more recently to those who are foolish.
3. Awful: Awful things used to be "worthy of awe" for a variety of reasons, which is how we get expressions like "the awful majesty of God."
4. Fizzle: The verb fizzle once referred to the act of producing quiet flatulence (think "SBD"); American college slang flipped the word's meaning to refer to failing at things.
5. Clue: Centuries ago, a clue (or clew) was a ball of yarn. Think about threading your way through a maze and you'll see how we got from yarn to key bits of evidence that help us solve things.
6. Naughty: Long ago, if you were naughty, you had naught or nothing. Then it came to mean evil or immoral, and now you are just badly behaved.
7. Guy: It comes from the name of Guy Fawkes, who was part of a failed attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605. Folks used to burn his effigy, a "Guy Fawkes" or a "guy," and from there it came to refer to a frightful figure. In the U.S., it has come to refer to men in general.

Possible Preaching Angles: Doctrine; Word of God; Theology; Love; Repentance; Marriage, and so forth—You can pick many words in the Christian vocabulary, words about biblical doctrine or a biblical lifestyle, and examine how these words have changed meanings from Scripture to today. Unfortunately, many of these changes in definitions of biblical words aren't just interesting or innocent; they damage our faith and weaken our understanding of Christ.

"Be sure your sin will find you out," Numbers 32:23 tells us. But in the case of this story, we could also say "Be sure your Cheetos will find you out." During the early morning hours of January 6, 2013, county deputies were called to the Cassatt Country Store in Cassatt, South Carolina to investigate a burglary. The deputies determined that someone had broken into the store and stolen beer, cigarettes, snack foods, and energy drinks. The burglar only stole $160 worth of goods, but caused about $2,500 in damages.

The store manager, Howard "Buck" Buckholz, said, "He knocked out our front door, he knocked out the beer cooler, and stole beer, cigarettes, Slim Jims, and in his haste, he punctured two or three bags of Cheetos." That was the burglar's undoing. Buckholz said, "Cheetos were all over the parking lot, at the place where he parked his car, and at the residence." The police followed the trail of cheesy dust right to the house where the burglar was staying with a friend. As investigators approached the front door of the home, they observed more fresh Cheetos on the front porch. Buckholz added, "He was very easy to catch. It was a very quick deal."

Possible Preaching Ideas: Our sin may not be revealed this quickly, but our sin and our actions will leave a trail. Like this burglar, we aren't near as clever as we think we are.

On April 20, 2013 NYPD officers raided a drug den in a Brooklyn, New York neighborhood. The police found a crew of five men in possession of 23,000 pills of oxycodone with a street value of $460,000. Apparently the men had used stolen prescription sheets to obtain the drugs. They were also accused of peddling heroin and cocaine and possessing a sawed-off shotgun.

But there was an interesting twist to this story: the men routinely texted their customers that they were closed for the Sabbath. One text read: "We are closing at 7:30 on the dot and will reopen Saturday 8:15 so if u need anything you have 45 mins to get what you want." That explains why police officers dubbed their year-long investigation into the group "Only After Sundown."

Editor's Note: This story is not intended to disparage all devout Jews—who may have much to teach us about honoring the Sabbath. It shows one example of our human tendency to observe one part of our faith while we ignore other parts.

Psychiatrist Scott Peck wrote of meeting with a depressed 15-year-old named Bobby, who was increasingly troubled after his 16-year-old brother killed himself with a .22 rifle.

Peck tried to probe Bobby's mind, but got nowhere. Searching for ways to establish a bond, he asked what Bobby had received from his parents for Christmas. "A gun," Bobby said. Peck was stunned. "What kind?"

"A .22."

More stunned. "How did it make you feel, getting the same kind of gun your brother killed himself with?"

"It wasn't the same kind of gun." Peck felt better.

"It was the same gun."

Bobby had been given, as a Christmas present, by his parents, the gun his brother used to kill himself.

When Peck met with the parents, what was most striking was their deliberate refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part. They would not tolerate any concern for their son, or any attempt to look at moral reality.

Two decades later and after his conversion to Christianity, Peck wrote about this encounter:

One thing has changed in twenty years. I now know Bobby's parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no vocabulary for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.

Interestingly enough, although Peck often worked with convicted prisoners, he rarely found evil there. He finally decided … "The central defect of evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it." This definition is reflective of Jesus' far greater severity in dealing with religious leaders than with prostitutes and tax collectors.

In his article titled "Unreasonable Doubt," Jim Spiegel quotes two contemporary philosophers who have resisted belief in God for personal and not just intellectual reasons. Thomas Nagel, an atheist who authored a popular introduction to philosophy titled What Does It All Mean? wrote: "I want atheism to be true … It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

The 20th-century ethics philosopher Mortimer Adler (who was baptized quietly at age 81) confessed to rejecting religious commitment for most of his life because it "would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person."

In his book “Wired for Intimacy,” William M. Struthers writes:

When I was young, I visited a farm that had an old-fashioned water pump. It was centered on a cement slab and would drip long after you stopped pumping. Over the years the dripping water had cut a trough to the edge of the slab. The trough was nearly two inches deep.

So it is with pornography in a man's brain. Because of the way the male brain is wired, it is prone to pick up on sexually relevant cues. These cues trigger arousal and a series of neurological, hormonal, and neurochemical events are set into motion. Memories about how to respond to these cues are set off. As the pattern of arousal and response continues, it deepens the neurological pathway, making it a trough. Each time an unhealthy sexual pattern is repeated, neurological, emotional, and spiritual erosion carves out a channel that will eventually develop into a canyon from which there is no escape.

But if this corrupted pathway can be avoided, a new pathway can be formed. We can establish a healthy sexual pattern where the flow is redirected toward holiness …. That is part of the process of sanctification.

In 2008, New York Magazine ran a comprehensive article about research concerning kids and lying. In one study researchers gathered a group of children together and read them a version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf where the little boy is eaten by the wolf because he lies. In a survey of adults taken before the study, most thought the negative consequences in The Boy Who Cried Wolf would lead the children to be more honest in controlled experiments on honesty and deceit. However, after hearing the story, researchers observed that the children continued their usual rate of lying. Researchers then taught the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. In the story George goes to his father and confesses he cut down the tree. His father replies, "Hearing you tell the truth instead of a lie is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees." Researchers found that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree reduced lying by 43 percent. They concluded that the threat of punishment simply teaches children to learn how to lie better. When children learn the worth of honesty, as they did in the story of George Washington, they lie less.

In a study of teenagers regarding degrees of honesty and deceit, researchers found that most parents believe being permissive will encourage openness and honesty from their kids. Parents of teenagers would rather be informed than strict and "in the dark." However, researchers discovered a "no rules" policy simply doesn't work. One researcher noted: "Kids who go wild and get in trouble…have parents who don't set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do, but the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don't care—that their parent doesn't really want [the] job of being the parent… Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids." Though some rules result in arguments between parents and teens, only 23 percent of the teenagers surveyed considered these conflicts harmful to their relationship with their parents.

In a final study, adults were asked to disclose the worst lie they ever told. Surprisingly, many adults disclosed minor childhood lies. Researcher Dr. Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, comments: "I had to reframe my understanding to consider what it must have been like as a child to have told this lie. For young kids, their lie challenged their self-concept that they were a good child and that they did the right thing." Lies told during childhood affected their behavior later on. If they got caught and felt bad, they vowed never to do it again. But if they were good at it and got away with it, they would lie more often into their teens and adulthood."

If you don't believe in God and the Devil, I wouldn't say you're crazy, but you're intellectually malnourished.

—U.S. author, Norman Mailer (1923–2007)

Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in studying forms of human deception, asked college students and members of the community-at-large to keep a notebook to tally up the number of lies they told in one week. By the end of the experiment, DePaulo found that the students had lied at least once to 38 percent of the people they came into contact with, while the community-at-large had lied to 30 percent of those with whom they interacted.

Based on her research, DePaulo insists that we all fall into one of two categories of liars:

• Some of us are "self-centered liars"—we lie in order to make ourselves look better to others.
• The rest of us are "other-centered liars"—we lie in order to avoid hurting someone else's feelings.

The experiment also found that the proverbial "white lie" was more often told to strangers; deeper lies were reserved for those the liar loved most.

"In everyday life, people are often telling lies," says DePaulo. "[It's] not to get something concrete that they want, like more money, but for psychological reasons…

"Sometimes in our real lives, our valuing of honesty clashes with something else we also value, like wanting to be gracious or kind or compassionate."

Syndicated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a keen observer of world trends, devoted a recent column to the idea that technology has made everyone a potential paparazzo.

Friedman explains that anyone we encounter could have a cell phone with a camera that could record our actions. If we're rude or misbehave, we could end up on the offended party's blog for the whole world to see. "We're all public figures now," concludes Friedman.

For support, Friedman cites the book How by Dov Seidman. Its thesis: in this world of new and potentially revealing technology, how we live our lives and conduct our businesses has become far more significant than what we do. "We do not live in glass houses (houses have walls); we live on glass microscope slides…visible and exposed to all," writes Seidman.

What a concept—take great care about how you live your life, because someone is watching. This is news to columnists and authors, but it's hardly a revelation to those who believe in a sovereign, all-seeing God.