What Once Was Saved

One of the vilest sins is now commonplace,
Thanks to television and the big screen;
What once was considered a rank disgrace
Is displayed in ev'ry soap-opera scene!
Chastity was treasured and saved intact
For the one spouse who shared her lifelong bed;
Now girls give away that which they held back,
And boys lose count how far their favors spread!
Intercourse is the national pastime,
Despite what the Lord commanded;
Satan's square-screened box domimates all our time;
Values we choose are soap-opera-handed!
What once was saved, God still expects to be;
Hollywood has destroyed all chastity!

Adultery is sin, and it is committed by every pair who has sexual intercourse, or who imagines it, who is unmarried to each other. Think about it: From every boy and girl who can't wait to be alone in the dark back seat of his dad's car; to the office affair of a married man and/or woman; to the business trip out-of-town when a spouse engages a prostitute; to the idle pause at the newstand for the man to browse the porn magazines; each of these and many more are offenses to God---that is, sins. President Carter, who is and was a Christian during his term, excited media ridicule when he said he had committed the sin of adultery by lusting in his mind; he was completely serious, because Jesus said exactly that in His Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew.

The American people are guilty of many sins, including murder, as in aborting the lives of unborn babies; but adultery is no doubt the most committed sin. The entertainment industry has steadily whittled our moral values into nonentities. Legalized abortion is not only the sin of murder; it has led to more adultery, for abortion furnishes an escape for those who carelessly get themselves pregnant. A girl or woman who is too lazy to compute the 12-hour period in every month when she is capable of becoming pregnant, thus being capable of avoiding pregnancy, is guilty of murder by negligence. The Supreme Court who decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 in favor of legalizing abortion is guilty of 50 million murders committed legally since that time. How do we know that an argument of sociologists about the need for birth control did not influence the decision?

When I began preaching in 1946, no one had a television set. I joined with almost all preachers in warning parents about the risk of inviting Hollywood into the nation's homes. We are reaping the fruit of technology's assault upon the morals of the nation; 60 years of television have counteracted 2000 years of Christianity.