Albert Moyer, Jr.

Today my pastor, Dr. Ed Young, did a sermon on parental guidance. He really hit the nail on the head when he said,”America is in trouble.” He started out by discussing two families that he has known over 30 years that were neighbors, same economic background, same houses, churches, parties, and social circles. He stated that sociologists would agree that almost everything about them was pretty similar. The problem is one family had complete disaster(disobedience, crime, decadence) in the household and the other complete happiness (story book family and progression). The question is,”How can that happen?”

It happens when there is a lack of family values and modeling in the home.

So one might ask,”What is a value?” A value is a life principle. Of course people will try to defeat you when you state biblical knowledge, but you can counter them by asking, “Where do you get your values? What is the source?”

Today we look on the news and see heinous and horrendous crimes one after the other against woman, children, men, and just about all over the world. In America, 48% of our teachers leave teaching. That’s almost half. We have around 135,000 kids taking guns or some sort of weapon daily to school. Over 24% of kids are scared to go to the restroom for fear of being bullied or accosted at school. We have lost our moral compass. We are not teaching boys to men or girls to be women. What we have is a failure of parenting! We treat the disease and not the problem.

Let’s take a tour of values and how we got to where we are today.

From the 1st century until the 18th century man based his life and law on transcendent values and natural law. Men looked up to the heavens for guidance. Starting in the Enlightenment period, men heard the ideas of Kant and Jean- Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau taught to look within your heart for guidance. Kant taught to look inside your mind for guidance. Forget God and look to yourself. This idea is prominent in education today. We allow children to follow their passions, emotions, hearts, and minds without guidance. Now Rousseau did have children, but all four were born by a slave and he disowned all of them. Some parent he was yes? So why do we look towards his philosophical thinking and teach it today? Why are his philosophies more prominent than those of Jesus?

Then we have Friedrich Nietzsche who came along later to teach perfectionism, self-will, and calling your own shots. You don’t need anyone to tell you what to do. You can rule your own life. You dominate the weak and control. Freidrich Nietzsche states,” The strong have the right to rule anyway they see fit.”

It’s no surprise that Adolf Hitler adopted this thinking. The sad part is this philosophy is alive and well in education today.

“What’s in the classroom today, will be in the home tomorrow.” ~ Dr. Ed Young

So you see the darkness that prevails today, that most people want to close their minds to and ignore, began during the Enlightenment period. Parents have not absorbed this fact. The scale is tipping to negative and dark territory as time passes.

During the 60’s and 70’s, the heat was turned up, and we had the Haight-Ashbury’s Love-In. Free love, free sex, free food, drugs, and the turning away from values. These people are ruling today. Do you see the direction and why we are where we are at now? John Lennon was bigger than the world at the time and everyone loved his music. Lennon was embraced with great fervor. Is John Lennon really that great and an authority on parenting? Let’s take a look at what Julian Lennon said about his father.

“I know that Dad was an idol to millions who grew up loving his music and his ideals. But to me he wasn’t a musician or a peace icon, he was the father I loved and who let me down in so many ways. After the age of five, when my parents separated, I saw him only a handful of times, and when I did he was often remote and intimidating. I grew up longing for more contact with him but felt rejected and unimportant in his life.
… … While Dad was fast becoming one of the wealthiest men in his field, Mum and I had very little and she was going out to work to support us. Dad was about peace and love, but could not show it to the ones who were supposedly most important to him. ~Julian Lennon

Without question, the greatest victim of Lennon’s character failings was his oldest son, Julian. John Lennon clearly resented the young boy whose conception had forced him into a marriage he didn’t want and trapped him in a domestic routine he was too immature and narcissistic to sustain. Simply, John Lennon made up his own life – exaggerating, embellishing, and outright lying when it suited him to do so.  People tend to see Lennon as some sort of divine guru of peace and love because of his political activities in the early 1970s. The reality is John Lennon was politically clueless and only took photos with a bunch of radical groups.
John offered no parental guidance. So why do we look at him as some great hero when he is a failure in regards to parental guidance?

In a UCLA teen survey that was ten years apart, the first in 1997 and the second in 2007 we see the stark change in teen values over a ten-year period. The teens were asked what their top values were.

In 1997: community, tradition, acceptance, image, and benevolence.

In 2007: fame, achievement, image, success, and popularity.

So we can see there is less caring about others and more about the “ME.”

Do you see the progression and how we are failing as a society? It all starts at home. Fathers and mothers are failing because they give no parental guidance. Fathers are especially weak because they are not leading their houses. The woman is not the leader. The man is the leader. Men step up!

The funny part about Kant, Rousseau, and Nietzsche and the whole enlightenment is that God talked about their ideals in Jeremiah. There ideas were nothing new and God spoke of the problems those ideas bring in the following verses:

 

 

 

 

¹⁴ Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed;
    save me and I will be saved,
    for you are the one I praise.

God searches the heart and the mind we just need to follow him and his teachings. We need to look up instead of looking to our own hearts and minds.

There are men and women who seek to be corporate icons and heroes making all the money that they can, but at the end of their lives they often state,”I wish I could go back and be a better parent and raise my children.” IT’S TO LATE!!!!

What AMERICA needs so desperately right now is men and woman who are FAMILY ORIENTED and not CORPORATE CLONES.

²⁵ For whoever wants to save their life^[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. ²⁶ What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? ²⁷ For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.

The best parental guidance one can give is time to your child by listening, learning, working with them, and loving them. Do not let their friends or outsiders be their source of knowledge. Many important people today have the worst advice in the word because their minds are reprobate.

Don’t lose your children because you choose to live for the world. You will gain nothing!