The Shofar is the ancient trumpet which called the people of God to prayer, repentance, sacrifice and war.

VIOLENT CRIME - SOWING AND REAPING

By the grace of God, Christian Voice was able to send the message below to all those attending the Labour Party conference.  We pray for repentance in the heart of the Queen’s Ministers and up and down our United Kingdom.

There is a Biblical principle that we reap what we sow.  It applies to nations as well as to individuals.  What politicians sow, the people reap.  When politicians sow evil, the people reap misery, and the poorest reap it the worst.

The Divorce Reform Act 1969 and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 introduced divorce on demand and no-fault settlements.  The ease with which Parliament said marriages could break up sowed the idea that the promises made in marriage did not matter.  The people have reaped a covenant-breaking mentality in which being divorced against your will or any kind of justice is taken for granted and the sum of human misery is increased.

Around that time, the state began to encourage teenagers to have sex with the only moral message being to use a condom.  That resulted in profits to manufacturers and an explosion of teenage pregnancy.  Now we have the disaster of teenage infertility.  Every government initiative, including the HPV vaccine, will increase it, but as all the targets revolve around pregnancy, no-one in power cares about those young people they have made sterile.

An increase in the size of the state meant heavier taxation, and big business wanted a feminised, non-unionised work-force.  So mothers were driven out of the home into paid employment.  That bit of sowing increased the pressure on families and the poorest reaped it the hardest.

Taken together, these anti-Christian measures mean around half of children are now growing up without their father.  Parliament has just said fathers aren't even needed in families.  How is a mother on her own supposed to restrain an adolescent son?  How is she supposed to know what her teenage children are doing between the end of the school day and the time she gets home from work?  Is it any wonder we are reaping massive disaffection among the young, showing itself in drunkenness, drug-taking, illicit sex and lawlessness?

And with the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 and the Abortion Act 1967, Parliament removed the death penalty from the guilty, by the state, where it belongs, and imposed it on the innocent within the family, where it does not.  With those two measures, our politicians sowed the belief that innocent human life, made in the image of God, has no value.

We are now reaping a shocking callousness and brutality in society of which the growing trend of violent deaths of teenagers is the starkest evidence.  And it is among the most disadvantaged sections of society that these deaths are having the greatest impact.

No doubt the parliamentary reformers of the sixties were carried away with secularist motives, determined to destroy the family and overturn the hated Christian morality, but did none of them stop to think, or care, that ordinary people, those they were supposed to represent, would be the hardest hit when society broke down?

The prophet Isaiah pronounced woe on those who call good 'evil' and evil 'good'.  And woe on today's politicians, who are so in love with their own importance they cannot humble themselves and seek the Lord.  Rather than reject the sixties secularist paradigm, they stumble around trying to put sticking-plaster on burst arteries.  March offenders around hospital wards, have metal detectors in clubs and continue to embrace evil, with the mayor, the police and armed forces parading at the head of London 's annual display of immorality.

If God has mercy on us, He will remove from office those intent on evil, and replace them with men after His own heart.  If not, we shall continue to descend into a mutual hell-on-earth of the politicians' making.  A nation which has just legislated that Christ may be blasphemed is not one which can expect to enjoy His blessing.  So our message to those in power is the same as it was in the days of the prophets, and the same as in the days when God incarnate walked this earth as the Lord Jesus Christ: Everything you try in opposition to God will fail.  Repent, turn to Christ, stop doing evil, start doing good.

Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds! when the morning is light, they practise it, because it is in the power of their hand. (Micah 2:1)

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, (Matt 6:33)