Growing up in the ’70s, I remember my dad telling me one time, “You want to know the two things ruining our country—lawyers and Dr. Spock.”

Wikipedia’s entry on Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-1998) reports that he was “the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals, whereas the previous conventional wisdom had been that child rearing should focus on building discipline, and that, e.g., babies should not be ‘spoiled’ by picking them up when they cried.”

Just yesterday Jordan commented in his Sunday evening study, “Don’t you think for a minute that as our nation—we call it becoming ‘secularized’ . . . When you look at the culture we live in and what’s happened to it, it’s been paganized and caught in the clutches of a false religious system that won’t honor God’s Word but wants to be spiritual. It’s chic and popular to get in touch with your spiritual side today, just not through the God of the Bible.”

As we were all reminded with Jerry Falwell’s death last week, he drew tremendous ire following 9/11 when he made the observation, “The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians — who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle — the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.’ ”

Visiting the Barnes & Noble the other day I noticed Newt Gingrich has a new book on how America’s abandoned its Christian heritage, called, Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History.

On this same subject, Jordan once said, “There have been nations down through history, as our nation has experienced in its short history, who have exercised, and recognized, and been founded, and carried forth on the principles of divine establishment for nations and reaped the benefits of obedience to those principles.

“My friend, it isn’t because God in some special way carried them out; it’s because they were obedient to Him. Righteousness exalts a nation.

“And just as our nation has reaped tremendous blessings and liberty and freedom and ability—spiritually, economically, socially and politically—by following the divine mandates for the establishing of a nation . . . Just in such measure, when you fail to do that, and you sow to the flesh and you go away, sin is a reproach to any people and our nation can fall just as quickly—in fact, it can fall much quicker than it rose to any kind of special position in the world by just disobedience to the principles.”

*****

After I wrote on May 5 about how we’re not going to be floating around heaven in clean white underwear, I had a friend email and ask, “Then what will you wear?”

The simple answer is light. As Jordan once explained it all in a study, “God was clothed in a garment of light and He gave that same clothing to Adam.

“When Adam walked around, he was clothed in the same clothes God was clothed in. There’s no doubt that this guy’s got a special connection. They’re all dressed alike. They’re in the family. Same family.

“But do you ever notice in Ezekiel 1 that God’s clothing—the light God is clothed with is not a bright white light like that; it’s said to be like a ‘bow.’ We call that a rainbow. Now a rainbow is light that is refracted; it’s bent. You see all the different shades; all the different colors of light.

“Adam was clothed in the original coat of many colors; it started with Adam not Joseph. And he was given a uniform to wear so everybody knew whose army—whose family he was in; who he represented.

“You and I are going to be given that ability to have that outward display of who God is, but more than that, when Jesus Christ in Matthew 17 was glorified on the Mount of Transfiguration, it’s said that the light shone out of Him.

“Now, you see me here—the light shines down, bounces out to you; that’s reflected light. The moon’s reflected light. The sun—that’s self-generated. That light comes from within it.

“You and I literally are going to have inside of us, in who we are, the light of the glory of God shining out through us. It’s not going to be reflected off of us, it’s going to be who we are.

“But isn’t that who we are now? He’s given the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and deposited that in earthen vessels. And right now, we have it in that veiled form because of our lack of completion of our salvation. Out there (in heaven) it’s going to be finished and that’s what God called you for.”

Romans 8 says about the “redemption of our body” that we’re “conformed to the image of His Son.”