Yesterday's mail brought me a letter from an organization concerned about morality in the public media. The object of their immediate concern was the lyrics of a song that is currently on the top ten of rock hits, a song that has sold well over 500,000 copies. They had the words printed on the back of their letter and it was so bad that, even in the privacy of my study with nobody else around, I blushed to read them. I wouldn't even read them to another man, much less in mixed company. Those words represent the bottom of the moral garbage pail out of which millions of our young people are eating.

Jesus offers a better way than that. It is not just a better way; it is the only way and Christmas is a string around our finger to remind us that in this moral wasteland in which we live there is a way -- His way.

Finally, every Christmas is a reminder that the majority is not always right.

If Judea had been a democracy, Jesus would not have been elected president. He wouldn't even have made it on the ticket. The world crucified truth then and it still does, but as many as received Him to them gave He power to become the children of God.

The revolution going on in Eastern Europe is positive as a rejection of atheistic materialistic communism but, once they have thrown the rascals out, who or what is going to take their place? Unfortunately there are some democratic rascals around. There is something darkly sinister about the human mind and it still loves darkness better than light, and people still abuse power, abuse privilege; and this is true not just in totalitarian governments but it is also true in ours.

How tragic it is that we often don't recognize that human nature at its very core is oriented away from God. Not only is this true in the spiritual realm, but it has been true in the realm of social and scientific discovery that anybody who comes along with a new idea, anybody who comes along with a new understanding of the truth of the way the world works, is often derided by those who are rooted in the old way of things.

On my desk sometime ago I came across a script about Adam Thomson of Cincinnati, Ohio, who filled the first bathtub in the United States during the year 1842. Doctors predicted rheumatism and inflammation of the lungs from such a new-fangled idea. A ban on bathtub exercise was published by Philadelphia from November 1 until March of that year, and Providence and North Hartford set up extra water rates for anybody who had one of those contraptions.

In 1896, England still had a law prohibiting any power-driven vehicle from traveling over four miles per hour on a public road. Furthermore, it required that such a vehicle should be preceded by a man bearing a red flag. Samuel Morse had adverse criticism from the press and congress, but today we talk around the world over his invention and it is so sophisticated now that even he wouldn't believe what we have.

McCormick's first reaper was derided the country over as a cross between a chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine. When Westinghouse proposed a railroad train with wind -- what we know as Westinghouse Air Brakes -- he was also called a fool. Goodyear was booed by everyone but his wife as he worked for eleven years on vulcanizing rubber. Edward Jenner was jeered at when he said he had discovered a vaccine to protect people from smallpox. Serious-minded men went so far as to say that all the animal diseases would be transmitted to the human race, and some people said that horns had actually grown out of the heads of innocent people who had been injected. Yet, Jenner eliminated the smallpox scourge by using his vaccine.