Unrighteousness

In 2007, the I-35 bridge that crosses the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapsed suddenly during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The investigation revealed that the gusset plates that connect girders together in the truss system were undersized, resulting in a structural flaw leading to its collapse. A year after the tragedy, The New York Times summarized what went wrong:

The designers had specified a metal plate that was too thin to serve as a junction of several girders, investigators say. The bridge was designed in the 1960s and lasted 40 years. But like most other bridges, it gradually gained weight during that period, as workers installed concrete structures to separate eastbound and westbound lanes and made other changes, adding strain to the weak spot.

To say it another way, the bridge lacked integrity. A bridge has integrity when it does what it was designed to do. Cars, trains, or people can travel across the bridge without it collapsing. In this sense, integrity isn't about morality, but about the ability to function according to the intended design.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Character; Integrity. (2) Faith—The Bible says that humans are designed to live by faith. We are not meant to be in full control of every situation, to be all-knowing, or to live merely by what we can perceive. This is what we were designed for.

"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.

I imagine you're familiar with the phrase "ship of fools." It was a common medieval motif used in literature and art, especially religious satire. One such satire is Hieronymus Bosch's famous oil painting by the same name, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. [See an image of "Ship of Fools."] This marvelous work, which is filled with symbolism, shows ten people aboard a small vessel and two overboard swimming around it. It is a ship without a pilot (captain), and everyone onboard is too busy drinking, feasting, flirting, and singing to know where on earth the waves are pushing them.

They are fools because they are enjoying all the sensual pleasures of this world without knowing where it all leads. Atop the mast hangs a bunch of dangling carrots and a man is climbing up to reach them. Yet above the carrots we find a small but significant detail: a human skull. This is the thirteenth head in the painting, unlucky in every imaginable way. The idea is that these twelve fools, who think all is perfect, are sailing right to their demise. The only pilot on board, the only figure leading the way, is death.

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.

Sometimes no one ever really knows what lurks beneath until things get a good shake. An April earthquake in the region of the Solomon Islands shook loose a World War II torpedo boat which had rested on the ocean floor for over 60 years. The boat's hull was intact—explosives and all. A bomb unit was deployed to detonate the torpedoes safely.

Experts believe the PT boat is just one of many pieces of military wreckage that pepper the coastline of the islands. This piece is particularly fascinating in that it's the same variety of military craft U.S. President John F. Kennedy commanded.

Jay Waura of the National Disaster Management Office said, "We were amazed by this finding, as previously this wreckage had long been sitting under the sea and rusting in peace without anyone knowing about it."

As of 2006, the stock market boasts 150 mutual funds that designate themselves as "socially responsible." This means that investments are only made in companies that meet the ethical standards of fund managers.

But back in 2002, a new investment vehicle quietly surfaced: the Vice Fund. The prospectus of the Vice Fund claims that it favors "products or services often considered socially irresponsible." Investments have been made by various managers in companies linked to alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and military contracts.

This fund and another, the Gaming and Casino fund, both rest on a certain approach: Stocks that exploit the dark side of human nature are a natural for Wall Street, particularly during economic downturns.

Dan Ahrens, former manager of the Vice Fund who moved to start the Gaming and Casino fund, expands on this philosophy in his book Investing in Vice. He believes that bad habits don't change, even through bad economic times. People still indulge in vices regardless of what happens in the stock market; smoking, drinking, gambling. There's financial profit in war.

And, so far, those philosophies have produced results. The Vice Fund has returned positive monetary gains, some reaching beyond 20 percent over five years.

Editor’s Update (2023):

The Fund has reported fairly steady annual total returns, with dividends consistently contributing to the Fund’s overall return. As of June 30, 2022, the Investor Class has a five-year annualized return of 0.74%, and a 10-year annualized return of 6.79%.

Through June 30, 2022, it reports an annualized return since inception of 7.82% versus the benchmark set at 8.32% by the MSCI All Country World Index.3 As of Sept. 9, 2022, it has a dividend yield of 0%.

As of Sept. 9, 2022, the Vice Global Fund had total assets under management of $79.2 million. As of June 30, 2022, top holdings in the Fund included Galaxy Entertainment, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and Philip Morris International.

Dallas Willard writes about a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl in her backyard who one day discovered the secret to making mud (which she called "warm chocolate"). Her grandmother had been reading and was facing away from the action, but after cleaning up what was to her a mess, she told little Larissa not to make any more chocolate and turned her chair around so as to be facing her granddaughter.

The little girl soon resumed her "warm chocolate" routine, with one request posed as sweetly as a 2-and-a-half-year-old can make it: "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?" Nana (being a little co-dependent) of course agreed.

Larissa continued to manufacture warm chocolate. Three times she said, as she continued her work, "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?"

Then Willard writes: "Thus the tender soul of a little child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong."

Any time we choose to do wrong or to withhold doing right, we choose hiddenness as well. It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one—the quietest one; the one that we least acknowledge making—is simply this: Don't look at me, God.

It was the very first prayer spoken after the Fall. God came to walk in the garden, to be with the man and the woman, and called, "Where are you?"

"I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid," Adam answered, "so I hid." Don't look at me, God.

A Russian man named Vladimir Villisov specially designed his own coffin to accommodate his vast collection of pornography. "The girls in those magazines have been my companions for years," said Villisov, "and I want them to accompany me to the next life."

Pastor and author John Ortberg shares this humorous story that pointedly conveys the truth about human nature.

Many years ago, early on in our marriage, my wife and I sold our Volkswagen Beetle to buy our first really nice piece of furniture. It was a sofa. It was a pink sofa, but for that kind of money, it was called a mauve sofa. The man at the sofa store told us all about how to take care of it, and we took it home.

We had very small children in those days, and does anybody want to guess what was the Number One Rule in our house from that day on? "Don't sit on the mauve sofa! Don't play near the mauve sofa! Don't eat around the mauve sofa! Don't touch the mauve sofa! Don't breathe on the mauve sofa! Don't think about the mauve sofa! On every other chair in the house, you may freely sit, but on this sofa—the mauve sofa—you may not sit, for on the day you sit thereon, you will surely die!"

And then one day came the "Fall." There appeared on the mauve sofa a stain…a red stain…a red jelly stain. My wife called the man at the sofa factory, and he told her how bad that was. So she assembled our three children to look at the stain on the sofa: Laura, who then was about 4, and Mallory, who was about 2½, and Johnny, who was maybe 6 months. She said, "Children, do you see that? That's a stain. That's a red stain. That's a red jelly stain. And the man at the sofa store says it's not coming out, not for all eternity. Do you know how long eternity is, children? Eternity is how long we're all going to sit here until one of you tells me which one of you put the red jelly stain on the mauve sofa."

For a long time they all just sat there until finally Mallory cracked. I knew she would. She said, "Laura did it." Laura said, "No I didn't." Then it was dead silence for the longest time. And I knew that none of them would confess putting the stain on the sofa, because they had never seen their mom that mad in their lives. I knew none of them was going to confess putting the stain on the sofa, because they knew if they did, they would spend all of eternity in the "Time Out Chair." I knew that none of them would confess putting the stain on the sofa, because in fact, I was the one who put the stain on the sofa, and I wasn't sayin' nuthin'! Not a word!

Ortberg turns from that to say, "Here's the truth about us. We've all stained the sofa."

"The man who denies original sin believes in the Immaculate Conception of everybody." —Writer G. K. Chesterton

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

—G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England, 1917

We've lost sight of the fact that some things are always right and some things are always wrong. We've lost our reference point. We don't have any moral philosophy to undergird our way of life in this country, and our way of life is in serious jeopardy and serious danger unless something happens. And that something must be a spiritual revival.