What's Bothering You?

Are there things going on in our culture that irritate, aggravate, and agitate you? Are you fed up with perversion and profanity, truth twisting and mud slinging, money grabbing and crude joking? Are you tired of hearing bad news?

Good! It's good that you're still shockable, still disturbable, still concerned.

In a jaded generation in which we're bombarded by disturbing problems we can't do much about, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Stories about the president's sexual escapades (and congressional wrangling over them) appear routinely on the evening news, interspersed with advertisements for laundry detergent and vitamin supplements. An AIDS epidemic in Africa? A hurricane in Honduras? Mandatory abortion in China? Jack Kevorkian's at it again? "Too bad. Say, what's on TV tonight?" Since we can't solve everything, we settle for doing nothing.

Satan, after all, is an expert at spiritual desensitization. Continual exposure to sin hardens hearts and promotes self-centeredness. People can reach a point where their conscience is scarred and unfeeling, "seared as with a hot iron" (1 Timothy 4:2). "Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more" (Ephesians 4:19).

Instead, God wants us to keep our minds alert, our eyes open, and our hearts tender and receptive to his leading. Lot, who lived amid the immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah, "was distressed by the filthy lives of lawless men" and was "tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard" (2 Peter 2:7, 8). Distressed. Tormented in his soul. It really bothered him to see his society drifting so far from God.

When the apostle Paul visited Athens, he encountered bored, disillusioned crowds who "spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas" (Acts 17:21). But Paul "was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols" (Acts 17:16)—so distressed that he did something about it. He talked about Christ in the synagogue, the marketplace, and among the city leaders of the Areopagus. He was tenderhearted enough to care, stouthearted enough to confront.

Lost people stirred "great sorrow and unceasing anguish" in Paul's heart (Romans 9:2; 10:1). He wept when false teachers lived as enemies of the cross of Christ (Acts 20:31; Philippians 3:18-21). He prayed openly and emotionally for faithful elders and preachers who were trying to lead the church in the right direction (Acts 20:36, 37; 2 Timothy 1:3-7).

God knows we can't change the world singlehandedly. He does, however, want us to brighten the corner where we are. He wants us to reject the devil's numbing suggestion that faith, hope, and love are irrelevant. God expects us to keep doing our parts, large and small, in the body of Christ.

Let’s never become too calloused to care.