Modesty is not shame. . .

The world loves to gloat over what they deemed the prudish shame over nudity, vulgarity, and sex acts.  The presumption is that Christians are ashamed of God's creation of people as male and female and the call to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.  It is an easy but false charge.  The constant barrage of naked images, of the basest and crudest of language, and the flaunting of sex acts (otherwise known as pornography) has done nothing to elevate us as people and everything to diminish us and cause us shame.  Modesty is not shame.  Modesty honors what God has made.

It is no wonder that the times in which our language has devolved into the most vulgar words we can invent and nudity has become the standard fare of media and sex acts between actors that leave nothing at all to the imagination, the self is suffering.  We no longer know what it means to be a man or a woman and so we entertain this uncertainty as evidence that the body and soul are at odds in some people.  We no longer know what it means to be husband or wife or married and so the young have chosen to remain single even while their loneliness contributes toward a pandemic of depression.  We no longer value children or view the child as anything more than a choice and so young people choosing not to marry are already choosing to sterilize themselves to prevent them from changing their minds.

Sexual liberation has become a curse that will destroy any notion of nobility, beauty, and goodness left in our secular world.  Our failure to master language has left us with little choice except to substitute crudity for erudition and vulgarity for eloquence.  Our fascination with sex acts has not taught our hears to love but to fear any intimacy except that which is staged for our amusement.  This is our shame.  Christians who laud God's creative grace in making us male and female are not prudes but they have learned that excess is not the path of respect, self-respect, and self-esteem but a detour to destruction.  Christians who love words because they confess the Word made flesh and the Savior who works among us still by His efficacious Word are not trying to shut up anyone.  Instead they are trying to let the voice speak that can do something about what ails us.  

With our loss of modesty has come a casualness about our live and a loss of shame that do nothing to help and everything to hurt.  We do not cover our nakedness because it is ugly but because sin has taken God's goodness away from us and left us with lust.  We are not against vulgarity because of the way it sounds but because of what it does to us as people and how it deprives us from the Word that is our rescue and hope.  We do not turn away from the portrayal of sexual acts because the acts are corrupt but because our corruption of God's gift have soured us on the context and blessing of sexual intimacy -- children!

We have sexualized our children and made them part of our fantasy of lust -- in the process stealing away their childhood and leaving them with adult sized pain, problems, and psychological disorders.  Look around our world today.  Our kids are wrestling with challenges that are beyond their maturity and should be beyond their experience.  This is child abuse as well as the physical and sexual abuse that ordinarily fall under that definition.  The end result is that they are broken, fragile, fearful, and filled with despair.  If all of our libertine efforts were benefiting our children, why are our children having such deep seated and serious problems?  Why is suicide so much on their minds?  Could it be that the liberation of adults has become the prison of children?

We have stolen from marriage anything and everything that would make marriage anything more than cohabitation for convenience.  In the end, working so hard to make sure that there is no difference between those who shack up and those who order their lives together in vow and promise (especially before God), has done nothing to help those cohabiting and everything to destroy marriage, family, and the home.  Our young people are not rejecting marriage so much as they are rejecting the idea that they need a God or a marriage license to sanction a relationship of convenience, little more than friends with benefits.  Their rejection of the false image of marriage prevents them from learning that this is neither real nor true but only a fake characterization of the treasure created for us and that we were created for...

The vulgarity that passes for humor and communication does nothing to ennoble us and everything to demean us.  Even worse, it deprives us of the real use of words to speak hope in the midst of despair, life in the face of death, and peace that passes understanding.  Absent the gifts that the Word incarnate has come to speak into us, our corruption of the language can only shock, offend, and divide us.  Worst of all, we have become so accustomed to this base and crude form of language that we end up working harder than ever to shock and offend because we think this is what leads us to understanding and appreciation.

Christians know better.  But too many Christians have surrendered their hearts and minds to the reality of the world around them.  We dare not.  We cannot ignore these excesses any more than we can join them.  We must take up the cause of modesty not because of fear but for the sake of love.