“Today we are in a hot mess in our culture, in our country, and we’re slinging mops,” Tony Evans told South Carolina Baptists in the closing address of their 201st annual meeting in Columbia.

The church is busy slinging mops, allowing the mess to continue to accumulate, rather than addressing the real problem
by removing the stopper from the sink, Evans charged.

“You and I are living in a day when we are witnessing firsthand the devolution of a nation. We’re watching the unraveling of a society,” said Evans, a popular author and Bible conference speaker. “The dream of one nation under God has become divided chaos apart from Him.”

Evans, pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, pointed to 2 Chronicles 15 in identifying the cause and the cure for the chaos. “It was a time of complete social collapse,” he explained. “In every direction you looked, there was calamity, crises and chaos.”

Like them, America today is seeing personal conflict, familial conflict, urban conflict and international conflict, Evans observed. “We’re living in a time in which people have lost the ability to live with themselves, which has cancelled their ability to live with others,” he added.

He drew attention to a verse indicating it was God who was troubling them with “every kind of distress.” He added, “If God is your problem, you’d better get Him back on your side.”

God was troubling Israel for three reasons, he explained.

First, “for many days, Israel was without the true God,” Evans said. “Do not misread that: Israel was not without religion; it was without the true God,” he said.

Second, there was an absence of teaching priests, Evans continued. “It didn’t say there were no priests; there were no teaching priests,” Evans said. “A mist in the pulpit will always lead to a fog in the pew,” he quipped, emphasizing the danger of compromising the Word of God with human thought.

Third, there was no law. Without a superintending standard, people made up their own rules, Evans explained. “That’s what’s happening today!”
“What we’ve been experiencing in America,” Evans said, “is what it looks like when a nation has been abandoned by God. He is saying [to us], ‘Now you can see what life looks like without Me.’ ”

The cure, Evans noted, is the same now as then. “In their distress, they turned to the Lord,” he noted.

“Guess what? God is going to keep letting this stuff go south until we wake up,” he said. “Is it bad enough yet?”