The shattering of traditional values has had a profound negative effect on the human race
Published 11:00 pm Friday, August 4, 2023
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From the writings of the Rev. Billy Graham
Dear Rev. Graham: What’s the standard used to give advice to those struggling with life, and what modern era has impacted the culture most significantly for the bad? – A.C.
Dear A.C.: The My Answer column has appeared in newspapers for decades and while the answers include illustrations from every imaginable human experience, the answers are from God’s Word – the Bible. Every problem known to mankind has a spiritual origin. Though cultures differ and times change, the Word of God stands forever as an unchanging source of answers that span from questions about God, personal relationships, job frustrations, the universe, conflict, and joy.
The shattering of traditional values has had a profound negative effect on the human race. Those who grew up in the 1960s in America were told by the media, the rock music culture, and their peers, that the values held by their parents and grandparents were old-fashioned. They threw off what they regarded as encumbrances in favor of experimental lifestyles. There was widespread cultural support for their ideas and behavior. Society has created pastimes chock-full of pop culture and is being choked by wild and rank weeds in a moral wasteland.
Rolling Stone magazine once published a survey revealing that those who bought into the ’60s counterculture mentality later developed problems communicating to their own children the necessity of the values they rejected (to their grief). The article claimed that this led the flower children of that era to “embrace psychiatry as something to be relied on.”
The human conscience is often beyond the grasp of psychiatrists. Humans are helpless to detach themselves from the guilt of a heart heavy with the weight of sin. But where humans have failed, God has succeeded. God’s power will help us “lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us … looking unto Jesus” (Hebrews 12:1–2).
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(This column is based on the words and writings of the late Rev. Billy Graham.)