Articles
Coping with Life 21 – Restoring Piety
Coping with Life 21 – Restoring Piety
Mike Willis
If you find the moral decay in our society threatening to your own soul, your family, the local community in which you live, the state, and even our nation, you will ask, “What can I do about it?” The answer is simple. It begins with the individual.
Look at the means God used to bring the slaves who fled from Egypt under Moses’ leadership to become a holy nation. The process began at Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Law. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exod. 20:2-6).
Our generation, like other people before us, needs to enter into a covenant with God, not just any god that each individual may prefer, but with the God who created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1), the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who brought Israel out of Egyptian slavery, and the God who sent His Son to made atonement for our sins. This is the one and only true God and He will not tolerate mankind worshiping any other god: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Have you entered into a covenant relationship with this God? This relationship is the foundation of changing one’s character and lifestyle. Moses followed the second account of the giving of the Ten Commandments by saying, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut. 6:4-9).
King Solomon said that the way to have meaning to your life is this: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Eccl. 12:13-14).
Making a covenant with God changes how one lives. On the basis of the commitment to serve God, a person does not take the name of God in vain, he worships God in the way God wants (without graven images, on the day prescribed by Him (for Israel it was the Sabbath, but following Jesus’s resurrection, saints worshiped on the first day of the week, on Sunday, Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:1-2). The commit to God changes how a person lives. He honors his father and mother, does not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness or covet.
The foundation for the removal of impiety in one’s own life, in his family, in our communities, states, and nation is to make a covenant with the LORD. Instead of making decisions on how to live based on your personal choice, one willingly submits him or her self to the will of the Father, just as Jesus did (John 5:30). Are you ready to make that commitment?
