UNBELIEF
Two fishermen were driving along a highway when they came to a crossroad with a “Closed” sign blocking the main road. They noticed fresh tire tracks leading around the sign, so they decided to follow the tracks and disregard the sign. They had gone some three miles when the road ended at a broken bridge. The only thing to do was to turn around, and on passing the road block again they observed this inscription on the reverse side of the sign: “It was really closed, wasn’t it.”
During the Franco-German War of 1870–71, two unexploded shells were found near a house. The homeowner cleaned them up and put them on display near his fireplace. A few weeks later he showed these interesting objects to a visitor. His friend, an expert in munitions, suddenly had a horrible thought. “What if they’re still loaded?” After quickly examining the shells, he exclaimed, “Get them away from the fire immediately! They’re as deadly as the day they were made!” Without realizing it, the homeowner had been living in grave peril.
UNITED STATES
James Russell Lowell was once asked by Francois Guizot, “How long do you think the American Republic will endure?” Lowell had no trouble with the answer: “So long as the ideas of its founding fathers continue to be dominant.”
We have been recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven … but we have forgotten God … intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us.
—Abraham Lincoln
Our greatest danger is not from invasion by foreign armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by compliance with evil. Or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior.… These evils have defeated nations many times in human history.
—J. Edgar Hoover
In his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon discussed five reasons for the fall of that empire:
1. The rapid increase of divorce; the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society.
2. Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public monies for free bread and circuses for the people.
3. The mad craze for pleasure, sports becoming every year more exciting and more brutal.
4. The building of gigantic armaments, when the real enemy was within—the decadence of the people.
5. The decay of religion—faith fading into mere formalism; losing touch with life and becoming impotent to guide the people.
Many of these same things are evident in the United States today.
UNITY
You may tie the tails of a cat and a dog together by a rope and have union, but you surely don’t have unity!
The reason mountain climbers are roped together is to keep the sane ones from going home.
Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers (meeting) together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.
—A. W. Tozer
If two agree on everything, one of them is not needed.