Nuggets 27:  The Best Kind of Security
 
 
There is a place where I love to retreat.  The church chimes toll each hour and play a hymn.  You can hear them all over the small town.   There you can still leave your doors unlocked.  Almost all the people are decent, kind and neighborly, looking out for one another.  They would not think of hurting you or bothering your property.  This is because the community still shares an old time set of values based on scripture and the Christian faith.  This kind of security, the product of inward conscience, you cannot buy with money.  What would our country, our world be like if everybody everywhere feared God and respected each other from the heart?
 
Lacking that, we have to depend on another kind of security, the outward kind.  We walk barefoot through metal detectors.  We are asked to report suspicious behavior.  We try to keep our computer firewalls updated ahead of the hackers.  We drive with our car doors locked.   There are places we no longer walk alone.  Our children cannot safely walk to school or use the Internet.  We keep adding police and building more prisons. The less people are guided by an inward conscience, the more they are willing to harm others to get whatever they want. 
 
There are times and places where society has lost the race with human depravity and life has become an oppressive jungle.  Or people have had to trade their freedom for security and ended up under despotism.  Here in America we still celebrate our unparalleled, God-given freedom.  But freedom can only exist when individuals govern themselves.  And that comes from an inward moral conscience based on a set of beliefs including accountability to God.  Our country is rapidly turning away from the faith that made us free.  For there to be any hope of reversal, people like you and me must immediately take our faith seriously enough to live transformed lives--lives so different and Christlike that they become contagious and change society.

Leviticus 26:1-6;  Psalm 33:12;  37:3;  Proverbs 10:27;  11:11;  14:27;  19:23;  25:28;  Isaiah 32:17,18;  1 Timothy 2:1-4

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Copyright 2006 by G.B. Shelburne, III.  May be freely reproduced or forwarded for non-commercial purposes provided content is unchanged and this copyright notice is included.  These shepherding messages are sent to members and friends of New Beginnings Church (www.nbchurch.com), to students and alumni of South Houston Bible Institute (www.shbi.org), and to other interested persons. 

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