Martin Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) offers a sobering warning from the grave:
If the West goes down and is defeated, it will be for one reason only: internal rot . . . If we continue to spend our lives in jollification, doing less and less work, demanding more and more money, more and more pleasure and so-called happiness, more and more indulgence of the lusts of the flesh, with a refusal to accept our responsibilities, there is but one inevitable result—complete and abject failure. Why did the Goths and Vandals and other barbarians conquer the ancient Roman Empire? Was it by superior military power? Of course not! Historians know that there is only one answer: the fall of Rome came because of the spirit of indulgence that had invaded the Roman world—the games, the pleasures, the baths. The moral rot that had entered into the heart of the Roman Empire was the cause of Rome’s “decline and fall.” It was not superior power from the outside, but internal rot that was Rome’s ruination. And the really alarming fact today is that we are witnessing a similar declension in this and most other Western countries. This slackness, this indiscipline, the whole outlook and spirit is characteristic of a period of decadence. The pleasure mania, the sports mania, the drink and drug mania have gripped the masses.
Your Thursday sermon of the week is 
When the sun is under a total eclipse, it loses nothing of its native beauty, light, and glory. Yet it appears to us as a dark useless meteor. When it frees itself from the lunar interruption, it again manifests its native light and glory. So it was with the divine nature of Christ. He veiled His glory by assuming our nature as His own and taking the “form of a servant,” a person of mean and low degree. But now this temporary eclipse is past, and His glory shines forth in the infinite luster and beauty that belong to the exaltation of His person. . . . Let the world rage while it pleases; let it set itself with all its power and craft against everything of Christ. We have this to support us and to oppose all their attempts–what Jesus says of Himself: “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death” (Revelation 1:17-18). 
The Gospel tells us that Christ died not for good people, who never did anything very bad, but for lost and godless sinners, who never did anything good.
It is not the job of the 
Care not so much for [your children] being mighty in the catechism as for their being mighty in the Scriptures.
Christ Alone Wyoming 