2-1-2015 Pastor’s Note

Like many others, I wrote to the leadership of Walmart this week, after learning that the company has begun to carry and sell the book series “Fifty Shades of Grey.” This pornographic series of books, so popular today, continues to feed the addiction that many Americans have to porn. Sam Walton, who founded Walmart, like some of the retail chain giants before him, was a professing Christian, who desired to express family and moral values in his business. Seeing that business become a smut peddler is a sad misrepresentation of those founding values. One discouraging note that was also brought out in the article I read on the issue was that indications were that sales of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” series was happening in the same percentages among so-called Christians as it was in the general public. It begins to happen when we see things we know we ought not to view, but we don’t want to get up and turn it off, or when we hear things we don’t need to listen to, but we don’t bother to switch it off. A Christian can get so used to having trash around that it quits bothering him. How can a professing Christian get to where he’s one of the fans of such sewage as “Fifty Shades of Grey?”—Little by little, just like Lot. I ask that the Lord help us to live in a spiritually cleaner environment, and not get accustomed to that which degrades the soul.