I heard something yesterday which I found quite interesting about peer pressure. It's probably something that most people realise but it made me think.
Peer pressure in the past for older generations took a more verbal form, where verbal statements are made to persuade someone to engage in behaviour that is most often understood to be wrong.
Peer pressure in more recent times has taken on a far more potent and influential form. It now often takes on a nonverbal and implied influence that pressures someone to engage in behaviour that a large number or majority of people in the world think is all right.
The world has been moving in a direction of individualism and and relativism, where an individual's perception and experience negates the need for clear standards and truths.
Truth has become relative without any absolutes and I have regularly debated with people who claim that truth can't be absolute because everyone has their own perception and no one can say for sure whether anyone's perception is right or wrong.
The one question they have been unable to answer is why their claim that all truth is relative is an absolute truth. And suddenly their surety in their statement is challenged by the very thing they want to argue for.
There has to be standards and truths that go beyond the bubble of human comprehension and perception. Truth and moral standard cannot be limited to a fallible and imperfect humanity. If it is, then there is no hope for us.
OK, I've gone on a tangent from what I intended to write. I'll end the post with this.
In a world where moral signposts keep moving, what the world propagates does not make it right, even if the majority of people support its stance. There is an unchanging and unmoving standard of morality that can be referred to: the person of Jesus and His word.
Self-regulation according to one's own perception and sense of morality is just not going to cut it. Demonstrated even in the global financial markets, maybe leaving people to their own devices and individualism without clear boundaries is not the best solution.
The law of the bible ultimately liberates rather than restricts humanity. It liberates us to be the people that, at heart, we want to be. It liberates us to achieve the purposes that God has planned for our lives. It liberates us to receive the blessings that come from obedience and living under the covering of the Holy Spirit.
Are we ready to make a stand?
Labels: General, inspiration, Random, Thoughts
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