I was lied to today. It was a lie that we both knew was a lie, but it was told just the same. It was told flippantly, unashamedly, without even a thought. In my experience, this has become a very common occurence, a VERY common occurence, but it never ceases to leave me stunned.
As a teacher, I often see, read, or hear about initiatives to try to teach character and good citizenship (code words for morality [you can't talk about morality though, because it's suggestive of absolutes which are incredibly offensive and dangerous]). These programs seek to instill virtue into people who have been indoctrinated with the teaching that right and wrong are subjective and that they and everyone else are nothing more than the result of happenstance, driven by the primal instinct to do what is necessary to ensure their own survival. Many parents have left the raising of their children up to the institutions, and the institutions, in turn, have worked to sterilize themselves of any moral truth. So these citizenship initiatives fall flat. Their slogans and buzzwords become punchlines and cliches in the conversations of the people that they were meant to save. Why should they buy into a philosophy that many of the adults in their lives don't even live by? Why should they consider morality when we spend so much time and energy teaching them that morals are nothing more than social constructs that are in no way absolute, and none of it matters anyway since we are nothing more than soulless chemicals interacting with each other. Why should they listen with any degree of seriousness to morality taught by people who are unable to coherently articulate why their morals are good?
Gentlemen, we should provide a sharp contrast against all of this background noise. As the Lord's men, we should know and be always ready to provide answers as to why we believe what we believe. They need to know why God's law is right and why it works (and you can rest assured that it does). The Lord's men must be ready always to make a defense to everyone who asks us to give an account for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).