Jesus’ instructions concerning discipleship involve both substance and sequence: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23; emphasis added). Elsewhere, Moroni declared the need for us to deny ourselves “all ungodliness” (Moro. 10:32), thus including both large and small sins. While boulders surely block our way, loose gravel slows discipleship, too. Even a small stone can become a stumbling block.
King Benjamin and Paul both stressed the congenital weakness of the natural man who is turned away from God and who regards spiritual things as “foolishness” (see Mosiah 3:19; 1 Cor. 2:13–14; Col. 3:9). Thus, putting off the views and appetites of the natural man is such a large part of denying oneself, a process sometimes accompanied by scalding shame and the reflux of regret (see JST, Luke 14:28).
Even so, in today’s world, individual appetites, far from being denied, are actually celebrated! As one writer noted, this mantra has its own incessant “beat,” and it goes “Me … Me … Me … Me!” (Daivd Frum, Dead Right, New York: BasicBooks, 1994, p. 203, quoting Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” in Purple Decades, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982, p. 293).
Yet sensory happiness is illusory happiness. Even legitimate pleasure is as transitory as the things which produce it, while joy is as lasting as the things which produce it!
Of all today’s malevolent “isms,” hedonism takes the greatest toll. It is naïve to say that hedonists merely march to the beat of a different drummer. So did the Gadarene swine!
A quarter of a century ago historian John Lukacs perceptively warned that sexual immorality was not merely a marginal development but, instead, was at the center of the moral crisis of our time (see John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970, p. 169). Some thought Lukacs was overstating it, but consider the subsequent and sobering tragedy of children having children, of unwed mothers, of children without parents, of hundreds of thousands of fatherless children, and of rampant spousal infidelity. These and related consequences threaten to abort society’s future even before the future arrives! Yet carnalists are unwilling to deny themselves, even though all of society suffers from an awful avalanche of consequences!
Consider this sobering forecast: “About 40 percent of U.S. children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live” (David Blankenhorn, “Life without Father,” USA Weekend, 26 Feb. 1995, pp. 6–7).
Some estimate this will rise to 60 percent. This same commentator has written, “Fatherlessness is the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime to adolescent pregnancy to domestic violence” (ibid., p. 7). Such outcomes, brothers and sisters, unfortunately, constitute America’s grossest national product, produced in the slums of the spirit created by spreading secularism!
In Proverbs, we read, “For the commandment is a lamp” (Prov. 6:23). Once darkened, a society loses its capacity to distinguish between right and wrong and the will to declare that some things are wrong per se. Without the lamp, our world finds itself desperately building temporary defenses, drawing new lines, forever falling back, unwilling to confront. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything!
Therefore, recognized or not, the public has an enormous stake in private morality! Yet today there is so much hedonism and shouted justification with so little quiet shame. Bad deeds are viewed as nobody’s fault and everything as excusable on one basis or another.
Amid such inversions, no wonder victims are often neglected and the guilty sometimes glorified. Likewise, in place of real confessions there are fluid variations of “I hope I can forgive myself.” In contrast, the inquiring Apostles knew the direction in which they faced; all anxiously asked Jesus of the impending betrayal, “Lord, is it I?” (Matt. 26:22.)
Gross sins arise ominously and steadily out of the swamp of self-indulgence and self-pity. But the smaller sins breed there, too, like insects in the mud, including the coarsening of language. But why should we expect those who “mind the things of the flesh” to mind their tongues? (Rom. 8:5.)
For some, their god “is their belly,” as are other forms of anatomical allegiance! (Philip. 3:19.) A few hedonists actually glory in their shame, and there is even a “greediness” in their “uncleanness” (Eph. 4:18–19). Sadly, too, a few envy the wicked. Still others complain that the wicked seem to get away with it! (See Prov. 23:17; Mal. 3:14–15.)
Ironically, in all their eagerness to experience certain things, hedonists, become desensitized. People who wrongly celebrate their capacity to feel finally reach a point where they lose much of their capacity to feel! In the words of three different prophets, such individuals become “past feeling” (see 1 Ne. 17:45; Eph. 4:19; Moro. 9:20).
When people proceed “without principle,” erelong they will be “without civilization,” “without mercy,” and “past feeling” (see Moro. 9:11–20). Such individuals do not experience real joy, such as being quietly and deeply grateful to a generous God, or of helping to restore those who “droop in sin” (2 Ne. 4:28), or of gladly forgoing praise and recognition so that it might flow, instead, to parched souls.
You could have helped me out by not quoting anything other than the bolded parts. And like I said, it talked about the 'natural man', teen pregnancies and fatherless homes. So... this creates a hedonist? A pregnant teen? A home with a father absent? And a 'natural man'? And I have NO idea what a 'natural man' is really?