Tolerance

When I moved into a large city, every street noise kept me awake, but within a year I heard none of them; when I later moved to the mountains, the coyotes howled nightly, yet soon even they disappeared from my awareness. We grow accustomed to anything. That is precisely why our feelings and experiences are worthless as moral standards: we quickly develop a tolerance for whatever surrounds us. In one generation we have become desensitized to pornography, corruption, profanity, and open sin; what once shocked families or ruined politicians now passes without notice. Our personal sense of outrage dulls rapidly, but God’s standard does not. Isaiah therefore commands, “To the law and to the testimony,” for if people do not speak according to God’s Word, “there is no light in them” (Isa. 8:20). The tragedy is that as we become more tolerant of sin, we inevitably become more intolerant of God and His uncompromising truth.