My husband, Brad Bright, is a guest blogger today!  I hope you are as challenged and motivated as I was by the article.  The recent killing spree in Santa Barbara is one more deadly reminder of the problem that threatens our children.  The question is:  What are we going to do about it?

OF GOD AND GUNS

“Take away the guns and they will use knives.”

Two months ago I made this statement while speaking to a group in Washington, D.C.  I pointed out that the same day Adam Lanza shot 20 school children in Newtown, Connecticut, Min Yingjun stabbed 22 children in a school on the other side of the globe in central China.

Eerily, twelve days after the event in D.C. Alex Hribal attacked 21 fellow students at Franklin High School in Pennsylvania—with a knife.

The culture we live in has never been so connected due to technology yet so alienated at the same time.  And alienated people are capable of doing terrible things, such as mass shootings—or mass stabbings.

The real problem is our alienation from each other because of our alienation from the holy God who loves us more than we love ourselves. It is a logical progression.  As a culture we are roaring down this path at breakneck speed.

No matter how many laws we pass our children will never be safe if we do not deal with the underlying alienation from God and each other that drives the savage behavior.

God, himself, is the issue: not guns or knives, not abortion, not same-sex marriage, not racism, not the economy.  Until we willingly chose to put God back at the center of our society and our churches our children will all be condemned to increasingly experience the inevitable consequences of our culture’s choice to exclude God.

The only question is, do we possess the courage to inject God back into the culture in the towns and cities where we live?  If we win this single battle we will ultimately win all the others. If we lose this battle we most assuredly will lose all the others.  Our children’s future is literally on the line. The choice has never been clearer—we must make the God who loves us the issue at all costs.  That is the only effective solution to alienation.

–Brad Bright