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When I was a kid and I’d get a little rowdy, my Dad would often say, “Now son, I’m laying the law down to you.”  And then he’d go on to explain what I could or could not do.  I knew what he meant by “laying the law down”.  He was making plain the boundaries for my behavior, and I understood I’d better not step outside those boundaries or I would suffer the consequences—not the least of which was his belt applied to my rear end.  I learned through that discipline that I could live “by the law”.

I’m amazed at how many people think we can’t live by law anymore.  They say by their actions, if not their words, “You don’t have to keep any law.  I determine the law for myself.”  In other words, there is nothing “set in”, which is what the word law means.  The boundaries for behavior shift depending on what the individual wants in a given situation.  But is this good?

The Bible says, “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” (Hosea 4:6).  We are being destroyed today because we don’t know or don’t believe what the Bible says.  God didn’t write the Ten Commandments and the words of Jesus because He wants us to have a hard life.  He wrote them to let us know He has a plan for these lives we thought were our own; and if we’ll walk in those laws we’ll fulfill the purpose He has for us.  And in doing His purpose, we find that we get spared the misery that most experience today.  The growing drug epidemic that steals the lives of so many young people is one notable result of this ‘life without law’.  How much heartbreak would have been prevented if parents had known the way of God and taught their children His boundaries expressed in His law.  If those children had grown up loving Jesus and knowing He had a plan for their lives, they would not have turned to the drugs which snuffed out their lives by an overdose or a car wreck, or even worse—suicide.

Also, consider the devastating effect which living without law has caused us in the realm of sexual expression.  Because we’ve often reared our children without teaching our sons that they are not to look at women who are dressed immodestly, or teaching our daughters that they are to dress modestly as little girls and not develop flirtatious ways, we have opened them up to destruction.  By not teaching them the boundaries of God’s laws, we have given them over to destruction by satan.  They now reap in their bodies the death of sexually transmitted disease.  Indeed, one in four teenagers in America now carries a sexually transmitted disease.  Millions have reaped the emotional pain of divorce because they grew up without the instruction of God’s boundaries concerning sexual activity.

These are the result of living without law.  The Bible says, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked, whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” (Galatians 6:7).  The Bible says, “… the wages of sin is death…” (Romans 6:23).  Trying to live without law only destroys us.  It will destroy us, and through us, our families.  Through disordered families, the nation itself is destroyed.  America’s Founders understood and taught their children that you could not be ignorant of God’s law and remain politically free.  License and liberty simply do not go together!

The Father of America’s original education method, Noah Webster, taught children:

“The virtue which is necessary to…render a government stable, is Christian [morality], which consists in the uniform practice of moral and religious duties, in conformity with the laws of both God and man.”

Are you teaching children to live by the laws of God?  Can you quote the Ten Commandments?

Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you—and for your children!  And you won’t like what that brings to you.  I’m Don Pinson; this has been Think About It.