 "Not So Common" Sense Summer is great. Our routines change. We hopefully take some time off and so our schedules and our routines change. I am doing a series of messages . . . honest. I say it that way because immediately after my series stared, I have missed one week and had a special message on Fathers Day, and so it has not seemed like a series at all. The series is entitled, Come to Your Senses. In a previous message I shared a verse from Hebrews which in essence says, "The mature ones are those who by practice have 'trained their senses' to discern between good and evil." I think you would have to agree that we are living in a time when the ability to tell right from wrong is no longer common at all. Hence the title of this morning's message, Not So Common Sense, fits. How does a person train his or her senses? That is not an easy question to answer. For one thing, we are living in a time when there is not longer an agreed upon morality. Time was, when there was at least an agreed upon set of do's and don't's. Not any longer. Our laws are flimsy. Political Correctness has gutted our institutions, and so we shouldn't be surprised that there is a generation coming up who have no moral compass. I mention this one first because one of the ways to train our senses is to have had parents who helped train our senses when we were growing up. "No, Don't touch." A conscience can be trained. It is a frightening thing to meet someone who has no conscience. In Psychology, a person like that is described as a sociopath. The term means, a person who never developed a conscience. Frankly I didn't believe that such a thing was possible, until I got a job in a State mental hospital. I met patients who had no qualms whatever about killing someone or stealing or lying. They seemingly did not have that internal governor that tells us, "don't do that because it is wrong." How do we know that something is wrong, wrong for everyone? Let's open our Bibles and find out. Pastor Jim |
