155. The Heart of Eschatology (Matthew 24 Finale)

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While Matthew 24 has been fulfilled, the victory of Christ, my friends, is just beginning.

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His reign is not going to end in retreat. The nations are not gonna slip away into darkness.

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His kingdom is going to grow until it expands and until it fills and until it conquers the entire world.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 155, the grand finale of Matthew 24.

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Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Kendall, and I'm thrilled to have you back with us as we wrap up this incredible chapter.

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I've long maintained that if you can peel back the layers of Matthew 24, then you can begin to understand everything that the

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New Testament teaches us about eschatology. And when you strip away the futuristic myths, the doom and gloom dispensationalism, the poison that has poisoned the modern church, then you don't only see that these ideas are wrong, but you also see that they're lies from the pit of hell that need to be repented of.

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They're just not biblical. Now, because we've seen that now for 18 weeks, that Jesus is not promising his people a future destruction and despair and cataclysm and doom, but the fact that he's actually promising that the old world was gonna give way to the new, the inferior covenant was gonna crumble so that the greater covenant in Christ would rise and stand.

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The sacrificial system would be abolished. The priesthood was gonna be silenced. The temple was gonna be dismantled stone by stone.

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We've seen that over the last 18 weeks. This is 19 now, but the question is why?

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Why is Jesus going to all this trouble to talk about the end of the old covenant? And it's because something greater has come.

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Christ is greater. And because Christ has come, Christ reigns. Now, all authority in heaven and earth belongs to him.

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He's the one who is building his church and the gates of hell are not gonna stand against it. He's the one who's called us to be his ambassadors, to take his gospel to all the nations, to bring his leaven to the entire lump, to the entire world with his truth, and to bring every knee to bow before the

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King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. All of this has to happen long before he returns in the future, and this is actually what

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Matthew 24 teaches, that there is a coming of Christ that happens to inaugurate his great kingdom and his final coming is still future.

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And we're not waiting on the end of the world to collapse. We're waiting actually for the church to bring the gospel to the nations.

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Now today, after months of preparation, after weeks and weeks of being in Matthew 24, we're now arriving at the grand finale.

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We're in the final verses of Matthew 24, which is incredible. So thank you so much for being here.

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Next week, we're gonna crack open the book of Revelation and we're gonna begin the biggest series that this show has ever undertaken.

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But before we take that step, we need to close out Matthew 24 with a bang, bringing all of these glorious themes together because we wanna see how they find their grand and glorious conclusion.

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But before we dive in today, I do wanna thank every single body or every single person who's here for liking these videos, sharing these videos, subscribing to these videos, turning on the notification bell so that you never miss an episode.

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I wanna thank all of our members of the show, especially our Prod Squad members who make this show possible.

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And I just wanna say, I truly could not do it without all of you. Without every one of you, your excitement, the way that you've texted me, emailed me, encouraged me, has kept me going throughout this process.

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And my goal in this is just to get this message out to more people. I wanna see the church invigorated.

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I wanna see the church excited again and not ready to just escape the world.

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I wanna see the church ready to conquer the world, to take dominion over the world, to spread to the ends of the earth, bringing the gospel of Christ.

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I wanna see a new reformation, a new revival. I wanna see a new age of missionary fervor.

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I wanna see new publishing houses built so that we can produce more biblically saturated resources.

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I wanna see Christendom again. So in whatever small way we can do that.

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And for me, I'm doing that every week on this podcast. I'm doing it as a pastor in a local New England church.

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I'm doing it in my life. Do it in your life. If we all do it together, we will see Christendom come again.

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Now, one last thing. If you haven't checked out the merch store, it's great.

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We've got some great gear there. I just actually ordered a dad hat on there, a camo dad hat that's gonna be coming to my house in just a couple of days.

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I might even wear it next episode. But I ordered from it. You can go check it out. It's at www .prodthesheep .com.

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Grab some great gear while you're there. Also, we have a product of the month, which is our Martin Luther Bierstein glass.

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Check that out. And with all of that, with that said, since this is our final episode in Matthew 24, before we really dive into the passage that we have today,

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I wanna just paint with very broad strokes where we've been and to give a little bit of a recap, just so that we remember where we are and we take a hundred thousand foot view of everything that we've learned so far in Matthew 24.

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So with that, let us dive in. Series recap,

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The King's Final Prophecy. Now, as you know, for far too long, Matthew 24 has been hijacked by futurists who have twisted

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Jesus's words into a kind of end time roadmap, leading to all kinds of endless speculation, newspaper eschatology, false prophecies about the rapture that is always just around the corner.

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But as I've shown in this series, Matthew 24 is not about the end of the world.

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It's about the end of the Jewish age. And more specifically, it's about the fiery definitive judgment that fell upon apostate

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Israel in AD 70 for their crimes against their God, for their covenant law breaking against their

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King. The context of this is undeniable.

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And it begins in chapter 20. It's defined in 21, 22, and it reaches its zenith in 23.

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And then Matthew 24, once you consider that in the larger context, it makes so much sense that Jesus is not talking about us.

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He's talking about them. He's talking about the people who crucified him, killed him, and murdered his church.

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Again, the context is undeniable. Jesus had just finished a scathing rebuke of the

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Pharisees in Matthew 23, where he calls down seven covenantal woes upon them. And as soon as he does that, he says to them, he looks right into their eyes and he says, behold, your house, that's the temple, is being left unto you desolate,

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Matthew 23, 38. And as the disciples marveled at the majesty of the temple, they heard

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Jesus' words echoing off of his lips. They saw the Pharisees' displeasure, to say the least.

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And they looked at Jesus and they said, Jesus, look at these buildings. How could this possibly be?

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And to their horror, Jesus turned to them and said, do you not see all of these things?

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Truly I say to you that not one stone here will be left upon another which will not be torn down,

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Matthew 24, 2. You can imagine that that statement set the stage for everything that followed.

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The disciples who were fully aware of what the destruction of the temple was gonna mean. It would mean that the old covenant was collapsing.

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It would mean that the sacrificial system would go away. It would mean that there'd be no more priests, no more feasts, no more mosaic

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Judaism. And because they knew the implications of what

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Jesus was saying, as soon as they got to the Mount of Olives, they walked up to him and they asked him three very critical questions.

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They said, when are these things gonna happen? Meaning the destruction of the temple. They said, number two, what is gonna be the sign of your coming?

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Not his second coming at the end of human history, but his coming in judgment against Jerusalem. And then number three, they said, what about the end of the age?

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Not the end of the world. They weren't asking that. They were not saying, Jesus, tell us about when the cosmos is gonna be ended.

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They wanted to know, when is the age of the Jews over? When is the age of temples and sacrifices and priests and the law, the

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Torah, when is that over? That's what they were asking. And Jesus answered those questions very directly, warning his disciples about signs that were gonna come, that were gonna precede this judgment of it, and they were gonna make it abundantly clear for anyone in that generation who was alive and who would see it, that this was the event of judgment that Jesus was talking about.

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He even limits the fulfillment of that to one single generation, Matthew 24, 34, which means that all of these things are gonna happen in the lifetime of his disciples and not in our lifetime.

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And like I said, he gives them several different signs of the end. And as we've said so many times before on the show, he gives them signs of the end, not signs of our end.

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These so -called apocalyptic signs in Matthew 24 are not about us, but they do fit beautifully and precisely into the world where the

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Jerusalem temple is gonna be destroyed. And they show us all of the different events that lead up to its destruction in AD 70.

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So a couple examples of this. For instance, false Christ, Matthew 24, 5. The first century saw a flood of false messianic figures, a false

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Christ of antichrist, of people like Thutis and Judas and Simon Bar -Giora.

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There was a flux, an influx of false messiahs who were leading people astray and Jesus warned his first century disciples that it was gonna happen.

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There were wars and rumors of wars, Matthew 24, 6 -7. The Roman Empire, which for a hundred years had been living under this peace called the

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Pax Romana, was now, as you get into the 60s AD, was starting to break apart.

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There were Roman civil wars, there was wars throughout the empire, and there was the

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Roman war against Judea, which definitively broke the Pax Romana.

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Jesus predicted that there would be wars, there'd be rumors of wars, and there were. And that is very specific to that time period because there were no wars.

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In the 30s, when Jesus was ministering to his disciples and before he was crucified, there was no war, nowhere at all throughout the entire

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Roman Empire. That's what the Pax Romana is. So when Jesus prophesied that wars and rumors of wars were gonna come, he was telling them that something new was gonna happen, something that you've never seen before.

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That has nothing to do with the modern world where there's always wars and rumors of wars.

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Every 10 years there's a new war or a rumor of a war. Because we live in a military industrial complex, that can't be for us.

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Because our country benefits off of defense contracts and off of weapons systems so that we can continually be in wars or start the rumors of wars.

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Again, this is a first century sign, a first century people about a first century thing. That's number two.

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Another one, famines and earthquakes, Matthew 24, 7. We have historical record, and I presented this in our episode on famines and earthquakes, from Tacitus and Suetonius and Josephus of widespread natural disasters that were leading up to the fall of Jerusalem.

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We saw how there was an uptick in famines, there was an uptick in earthquakes. There were writers who were even saying that they could not even believe the frequency of earthquakes in the

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Roman world during that years of 30 to 70, and they believed it was a sign that the gods were angry and that the gods were going to destroy them.

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There was so much earthquake activity, so much more than normal, that it was freaking out the citizens of Rome, and we have actual historical evidence of that.

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So again, first century sign, first century people in a first century context. What about the persecution of the saints,

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Matthew 24, 9 through 10? Jesus prophesied that the Christians are gonna go through a dramatic persecution in the early church, and they did.

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The book of Acts records how the early Christians were beaten and imprisoned and martyred, many at the hands of the

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Jews themselves. Again, first century prophecy fulfilled in the first century.

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Here's another one, the gospel preached to all the nations, Matthew 24, 14. Paul himself declares in Colossians 1, 23 that the gospel had went out into all creation under heaven.

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In Romans, he says that the gospel was declared in all the world. The word world there doesn't mean cosmos, and it doesn't mean planet

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Earth. It means the Roman world. Jesus predicted that before the end of the

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Jewish empire, before the end of the old covenant, the gospel would go out into all the

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Roman world, and it did. Every single one of these signs that Jesus gave occurred within the lifetime of his apostles, just like Jesus said that they would.

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There's no reason to punch them into the future when we have a perfectly good preterist first century fulfillment.

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What about the abomination of desolation? That's one of the most critical parts of this whole passage, and my episode on that is very detailed.

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You should go and check that out if you haven't seen it. But it's Matthew 24, 15, where Jesus says this. Therefore, when you see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken about through the prophet

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Daniel, standing in the holy place, and then it goes on from there, dispensationalists try to push this passage into the distant future because they say, clearly an abomination that caused desolation hasn't happened.

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Clearly it must be speaking about a rebuilt Jewish temple on the temple mount after the red heifer is sacrificed at some point in the 21st century, right?

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Clearly there must be a revived Jewish priesthood. Clearly there must be a reinstitution of the sacrifice because the

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Bible says that Jesus was the final sacrifice. So why wouldn't we totally abrogate

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Jesus's sacrifice to go back to the blood of bulls and goats, sarcasm included.

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But history proves that this happened in the past, that it's not an expectation that we should think about for the future.

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The abomination of desolation, and again, go back and listen to that episode because it's a very important episode, that abomination of desolation was the

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Roman armies marching into the holy city, desecrating the temple, massacring its people, and sacrificing to their pagan gods right there in the temple mount.

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When Jesus says where the vultures gather, they're the corpses, actually the word there is eagles, the

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Romans brought in their golden eagles, their idols, and they began sacrificing to them, and they polluted the temple.

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That was absolutely against what you were supposed to do in the temple. That was the abomination, the final one, that caused the temple to be left desolate.

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And isn't it interesting that right after the Romans start sacrificing to their eagles, their golden eagles, their gods, their idols, right after that happened, the temple gets set on fire, and then it gets completely dismantled brick by brick by brick, it was an abomination that caused the desolation.

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How much more clear could we be? Why do we keep looking into the future for these things when they've already occurred in the past? And we have first century accounts of this happening by a man named

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Josephus, who describes the horrors of the Romans coming in and doing this, but also of other things that bend our imagination.

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We've talked about them, mothers eating their own children, men eating out of dumpsters, men murdering themselves in the city while the

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Romans sat back and watched, like people being butchered by the Romans right at the altar of God, blood running down the temple courtyard, blood running down the streets of the temple so that the ankles of the horses were stained with blood, the temple itself set on fire,

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Josephus records all of it, and I would recommend if you haven't read

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Josephus in his book, The Jewish War, it's excellent. It goes through line by line, event by event, every single aspect of the

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Roman siege of Jerusalem. It is a hard read, it is something that will turn your stomach at times, but it proves everything that Jesus said that the temple would be destroyed.

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Now, what are Jesus' disciples supposed to do about this? Well, he tells them, he tells them to run, to flee to the mountains.

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Don't go back and grab your coat. Woe to the pregnant woman in those days. Why? Because she's gonna have a hard time getting away from the city.

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This is a localized judgment. It's not for us. I mean, why would

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Christians thousands of years later who live in every country on earth need to flee from Judea?

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If these events are happening in our lifetime, then I would need to flee from the city of Lowell, and you might need to flee from another city,

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Chicago or Los Angeles or Miami. We don't live in Judea. This is a

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Judah -specific prophecy about what's gonna happen in the first century to them.

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We're not gonna be fleeing from Jerusalem to the mountains. We don't live in Jerusalem. Well, maybe you do if you're watching, but most of us don't.

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We're not gonna be fleeing, I'm not gonna be fleeing to the mountains because there are no mountains near where I live. There are several miles away up in New Hampshire.

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Like, that doesn't make any sense. It's not for me, it was for them. It was to tell the disciples, to warn the disciples to run when they saw the

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Roman Empire surrounding the army, and we know that this is the case because Luke in 2120 says, when you see the

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Roman armies, when you see the armies coming, then flee because it's desolation is near.

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Luke is telling a Gentile audience, hey, I know you probably don't understand what Matthew had to say about the abomination of desolation that Matthew was talking about.

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I get it. Let me break it down for you. When you see the Roman army surrounding the city of Jerusalem, run, get away, go as far as you can, and we know from history,

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Eusebius tells us that the Christians did that. None of the Christians died because they did what

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Jesus said. They obeyed his warning. They escaped to the city of Pella, and they did all of that just before the

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Roman siege started and it destroyed everything. It's amazing, actually, that they believed

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Jesus and were spared, and yet so many today think, ah, that clearly hasn't happened yet.

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Like, I can't wait to be in heaven and listening to a conversation of a 21st century dispensationalist who is saddened by how all their life they believed a lie and they're listening to the stories of men and women who were in the city of Jerusalem when that happened, and it was precisely

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Jesus's words that motivated them to flee because they believed what he said.

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Now, here's another aspect of Matthew 24 that we need not forget. I think probably the most important verse in all of Matthew 24, which is this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

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I mean, how much more clear could Jesus have been? The word generation, which is genea in the

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Greek, refers to a group of people who are alive at the time and that are going to be living within a single generation.

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In the Bible, a generation is 40 years. So Jesus is saying within 40 years, all of this is going to happen.

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All of this is going to take place. It has nothing to do with 21st century America, which

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Jesus would have known about because he's omniscient and sovereign, but none of his disciples would have known that there would have been a country named

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America in the 21st century. Jesus looked them right in the eyes and said, within 40 years, everything that I just said is going to happen.

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The abomination of desolation, the wars, the rumors of wars, the famines, the earthquakes, the false messiahs, the false

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Christ, all of it, it's going to happen within a 40 year period of time. And we know that because they believed him.

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Jesus was speaking to that generation, that very people, the one standing right in front of him that they would live to see.

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Some of them would not die until they saw these things take place. And it happened. This verse alone should be the verse that's ended all debate on Matthew 24.

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And the only reason that people still persist in their lies, persist in their false theology is because it either obliterates their eschatological assumptions or because they're under the teaching of pastors who should know better, who've been teaching them a false view of this passage.

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We think about the Jesus coming on the clouds, a very difficult passage,

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I will admit. That's why I said Matthew 24, 34 is the quintessential verse, it's so clear. We talked about though Matthew 24 later in the chapter where Jesus is coming on the clouds, where he's bringing covenant judgment.

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What we saw in that episode that that wasn't Jesus surfboarding down from heaven.

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It wasn't him riding his skateboard down from heaven. It was a sign of covenant judgment.

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It's where we arrived finally in our chapter at this moment of climactic collapse.

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This is what the text says. Then the sign of the son of man will appear in the sky and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn and they will see the son of man coming on the clouds of the sky with great power and great glory.

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Futurists look at this passage and they say, see, that hasn't happened yet. And yet we've explained it.

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We haven't allegorized it, we've exegeted it. Instead of bringing our assumptions to the text, we drew out the meaning from the text.

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And the meaning of the text is not Jesus coming down in the clouds to rapture his church out of here.

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What it is, is Jesus coming in judgment. And there's so many Old Testament passages and Old Testament background that prove this, that prove that Yahweh comes in judgment on the clouds.

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For instance, Isaiah 19, one, Yahweh comes in a cloud to judge the Egyptians. Psalm 18, nine through 12, he descends with the dark clouds and with fire.

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Daniel 7, 13 through 14, the son of man comes to the ancient of days, not down to the earth.

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We talked about this, that Jesus was not talking about a literal descent downward from the sky.

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He was talking about his enthronement as king and his vindication of his people through judgment, through the destruction of Jerusalem, which was a visible historical sign that the son of man was reigning in heaven.

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This series so far, and obviously we can't recap it all, but this series so far has been a relentless demolition of the modern day eschatological cult that is confused and needs to be taught what the word of God says.

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I believe that I've proven this exegetically. I've proven it historically. I've proven it from culture.

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I've proven it from Josephus. I've proven it theologically. I've proven it all over the Bible that Matthew 24 is not about a future great tribulation or a great escape.

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It is about the end of the Jewish era. It's not about a rebuilt

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Jewish temple, but the end of the Jewish temple. It's about the fall of Jerusalem in 80, 70, the destruction of the old covenant order and the establishment.

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The reason why all of that happened, the reason why that Old Testament Judaism needed to be made into a parking lot is because Jesus was bringing something better and more glorious to build on top of that, which is the temple of the living

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God. Christ is the cornerstone of the temple. The apostles are the foundation of the temple.

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And you and I, as first Peter says, are the living stones that are being pieced together into an end time temple that has been being built for the last 2000 years.

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The Old Testament era, the old covenant was made a parking lot so that the new temple of Christ could be erected and built until there is no more work that needs to be done.

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And what is that work when the last Christian is saved? Because if we are living stones, and if we're being pieced together into a temple, then when the final

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Christian on earth is saved, then the end comes and not a moment sooner.

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And here's the best part about all of that. The kingdom of Jesus doesn't stagnate.

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It doesn't have 2000 years of growth from 80, 70 all the way until now, and then all of a sudden

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Peter out. It's still advancing. It's still moving forward.

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If you're in America, we live in a weird time right now where things are waning. But in Africa, it's growing.

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In China, it's growing. And in the Philippines, it's growing. In other countries, it's growing. And for the last 2000 years, it's done nothing but grow.

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While Matthew 24 has been fulfilled, the victory of Christ, my friends, is just beginning.

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His reign is not going to end in retreat. The nations are not gonna slip away into darkness.

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His kingdom is going to grow until it expands and until it fills and until it conquers the entire world.

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That is the end for which God made the world is to fill it full of his glory.

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Dispensationalists want you to believe that the world is getting worse. Jesus tells a different story.

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And the destruction of Jerusalem was not the beginning of the end.

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I want you to pay really close attention to what I'm getting ready to say. The destruction of Jerusalem was not the beginning of the end.

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It was the end of a new beginning. Now his dominion will stretch from sea to shining sea.

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Now the knowledge of the Lord will eventually cover the earth as the water covers the sea. Matthew 24 has been fulfilled.

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It's not in our future. The destruction that it describes is in the past.

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Christ's kingdom is only getting started. And that's why I've been so hard on this defeatist mindset.

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That's why, and maybe you watch these videos and you're like, gosh, he is really hard on the dispensationalists.

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You're right, I am. Not the people. I'm not thinking about specific people when

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I make these critiques. I'm not thinking about John who happens to believe in dispensationalism or Mary or whoever.

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I'm thinking about a system, a theological system that sucks the life out of the church like a man who swam in a pond full of leeches.

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I hate dispensationalism because it robs the church of its joy.

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And I wanna see the church with great joy again. And I wanna see the church standing firm again.

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I wanna see the church advancing again. I wanna see the church believing that Christ has empowered us to reclaim the world instead of hiding like ostriches waiting for the end.

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I want us to actually be the ones that are pursuing, advancing so that the gates of hell fall down again.

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And so that culture bows the knee to Christ again, establishing a new Christendom in America again, and then all over the world.

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And it's because of that motivation that I even started doing this show. Because what

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I've noticed, and if you're a Lord of the Rings fan, great, this will make sense. If you're not, then just bear with me.

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But I've noticed that evangelicalism has adopted a kind of play it safe mentality like we see in the nation of Rohan when they're retreating to Helm's Deep.

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Let me explain. In the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is the only one who saw the danger before it happened.

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Sauron, the once vanquished foe from the second age of Middle -earth has been stewing and brooding and building back his body in the forest of Mirkwood.

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And as his shadow was spreading like kudzu in Georgia, Gandalf pleaded with the

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White Council to strike when the enemy was still vulnerable, to fight him when he was still able to be defeated.

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And he appealed to them. He appealed to Saruman and the others. He urged them to act swiftly, to cut down the enemy while he could still be leveled.

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Because why go into a all -out war for the world when we can defeat him when he is weak?

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That's what Gandalf was saying, but his warning was dismissed. And his warning was dismissed because a treacherous little fox named

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Saruman had wormed his way into the middle of Middle -earth's hen house. Had they listened to Gandalf, the

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War of the Ring would have never happened. Had they listened to Gandalf, there would have never had to be a war, at least not with such devastation.

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But they did nothing and they waited. And in doing nothing, the face of evil grew worse and grew more powerful.

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And then eventually set himself back up in Barad -dur. This brings us to the very heart of what

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I think is biblical eschatology and why the church today is losing. Because too many evangelicals today have treated the state of the world as a call to retreat, as if they're huddled together in our version of Helm's Deep, hoping to survive until the rescue arrives.

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We've buried our heads in the ground like ostriches with our pants wet like terrified turtles.

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And we've blended into culture like chameleons waiting for the danger to pass and we've retreated.

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Some act as if the entire Christian mission is just about enduring the storm, holding on until we can get out of here, waiting for the rapture so that we can avoid all of the pain, keeping our faith as private as possible so that we avoid persecution.

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But Jesus doesn't call us to that. He calls us to something very, very different.

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As history unfolds, no matter how long that unfolding takes, our duty is not to retreat, but to advance.

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Not to wait, but to occupy and to occupy until he comes, Luke 19 .13.

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We're not bystanders in the kingdom of Christ. We are its laborers, its stewards, its heralds, its ambassadors, its soldiers.

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And in the last passage of Matthew 24, Jesus doesn't describe a people who are cowering in fear.

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He ends Matthew 24. He ends this great passage where so much devastation happens and he doesn't describe a church.

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That is trembling, that is shaking in their boots, that has a yellow belly and a flimsy spine.

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He describes a church that's standing strong, patient, waiting, and faithful.

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And that's what I wanna describe today. A church that is faithful while we wait.

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We're gonna talk about the first century church that was literally waiting on the destruction event.

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They were waiting on the armies of Rome to surround

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Jerusalem like the orcs at Helm's Deep. But for us today, we're not waiting on the collapse.

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In fact, actually, we're waiting on the church to actually start living in the victory, to actually pick up our weapons and to advance, to actually start moving and shaping the world according to the image of our master.

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We're waiting for the slaves to become faithful. And with that,

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I wanna read our passage for today. Who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household to give them food at their proper time?

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Blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you that he will put him in charge of all of his possessions.

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But if that evil slave says in his heart, my master is not coming for a long time and begins to beat his fellow slaves and eat and drink with drunkards, the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and in an hour when he does not know and will cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites.

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In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 24, 45 through 41.

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Now that we've explored everything that Jesus has promised in summary form, now

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I want us to see how Jesus closes out Matthew 24. And I wanna show you how he talks about seven attributes, seven attitudes that he wants his disciples to have in the first century.

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And I'm going to apply them to us today, seven attitudes that we are to have today as we live and move and work in Jesus's kingdom.

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And that is the heart of eschatology. And with that, let us begin with attitude one.

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Be faithful where you're at. Jesus begins this passage with a very poignant and piercing question, who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time,

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Matthew 24, 45. This is not a vague idea or some abstract concept or amorphous understanding of what faithfulness means.

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It was a direct challenge to his disciples who were gonna be living through this era and who were standing right in front of him to live faithfully.

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Jesus was calling them to faithfulness in a specific moment of history, a moment that was gonna demand every single thing that they had.

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And they were about to endure the most tumultuous 40 year period of time that the

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Christian church has ever seen. The temple, the beating heart of the

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Jewish religious life was gonna be destroyed. The old covenant system, which has stood for centuries was gonna be torn down.

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The Jewish world was gonna be engulfed in war and the

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Jewish people themselves were gonna be filled with a kind of hatred, a kind of hatred for God, for themselves and for the church.

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It was gonna cause Jesus' people to be scattered, slaughtered, enslaved and the religious elite that perpetrated that were gonna be left holding the hot potato of God's wrath and they were gonna be wiped off the face of the earth.

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That's what Jesus is saying. They were gonna be the wicked slave that was cut into pieces when the master returned and they were.

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But to the disciples, Jesus tells them to be faithful. Don't waver in your persecution.

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Don't compromise if they put a sword to your throat and they try to martyr you or they pick up a stone and try to stone you.

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Work and build. The storm is coming, yeah. But for the disciples, faithfulness meant surviving until the very end.

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It meant waiting for the day of judgment. It meant holding the line, spreading the gospel, preparing the church and enduring all of those different persecutions until Jesus returned and set up his kingdom in full.

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And he did. The abomination of desolation, came just like Jesus said.

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The wars and rumors of wars, they came just like Jesus said. The earthquake, the famines, the persecutions, the destruction, it all came.

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Their job was to preach the gospel to the lost sheep of Israel in the 30s, in the 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s, all the way up until the moment that the

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Romans arrived. Why? Because God is gracious. God was given the

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Jews 40 years to repent of their sin. And none of them were too far gone for grace. Paul killed

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Christians. Paul was at the very pinnacle of the religious elite. He was the establishment.

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He was the swamp in Jerusalem. He was the one who was perpetrating the murder of Christians. And yet God saved him, brought him out of that and used him in a mighty and unimaginable way.

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In the same way, the early church was spending 40 years on mission to the Jews.

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Why do you think Paul went to every single Jewish synagogue in the Roman world and started preaching there?

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Because he wanted the Jews to repent before the old covenant world was destroyed.

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He knew that they weren't gonna have a temple. He knew that they weren't gonna have sacrifices or priest or feast.

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He knew all of that was going away. And more than just their formal religious structures, he knew that they would go away into hell if they didn't believe in Christ.

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So he went to every Jewish synagogue on earth, they beat him, they stoned him, they did all manner of evil against him.

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They eventually arrested him and handed him over to Nero Caesar who cut off his head.

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And yet God told Paul and God told every other Christian in the first century world, be faithful in your suffering, be faithful in your witness, be faithful in your ministry, be faithful in your mission, be faithful in your telling of the gospel, which of course is our mission today.

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We're not laboring to see another judgment like what happened in 80, 70, that's not our mission.

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We're not waiting to see another future abomination or to see another temple destroyed or built for that matter or another cataclysmic upheaval of human history.

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That was their reality, that was their mission, not ours. But for us, we are called to be faithful and our faithfulness looks a little bit differently than it did in the first century.

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It's not the same. We don't labor to survive to the end of the age.

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We are in the final age. We are now laboring to see Jesus's kingdom thrive in history.

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We are laboring to see it built up, to see it advance. We're not waiting for another great collapse.

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We are working in an unstoppable expansion to see Jesus's kingdom take over everything.

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We have to have a vision for what it means for the gospel to overtake everything. And yet too many

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Christians today are missing this point. Instead of working to advance

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Jesus's kingdom, we're spending time chasing in time speculations that have already happened, as if Matthew 24 were about us instead of about them.

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We have people in the church today who are obsessing over world events, who are obsessing over Russia being

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Gog and Magog, who are thinking every war is the war that's gonna cause the end of the world or every disaster or every corrupt politician is now somehow a part of the eschatological antichrist.

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They fixate on blood moons and global conspiracies and red heifers and everything else, convinced that history must inevitably spiral into chaos before Jesus can accomplish his mission.

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That would be like believing that a contractor must blow up the building that he just made in order to finish his job.

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That makes no sense. This kind of Christian, they are Christians, but this kind of Christian has been so deceived about what the end of the world looks like, lives in fear and passivity, acting as if the great commission is nothing more than a waiting around a waiting room, a perpetual sitting in the

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DMV, waiting for the world to burn down and collapse around us. That is not what

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Jesus calls faithful. Jesus never said blessed is the slave who correctly predicts the antichrist or the next global crisis or what the 666 symbol is.

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He said, blessed is the slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes,

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Matthew 24, 46. Not watching, not speculating, not retreating, but working, building, advancing to the glory of God.

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You see, faithfulness is not passivity. It's not sitting around and waiting for another judgment to happen.

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Judgment already came. Our job now is to build, to spread the gospel, disciple the nations, establish the reign of Christ in every corner of the world.

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The world is not heading for a disaster. The world is heading for transformation. Christ isn't retreating.

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His kingdom is not shrinking. He's reigning now, Matthew 28, 18. And we have been called to expand his dominion until the knowledge of the glory of the

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Lord covers the earth as the water covers the seas, Habakkuk 2, 14. So what does that look like for you?

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What does faithfulness look like? Well, it looks like obedience to Christ.

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It looks like learning to obey everything he commanded, Matthew 28, 18. Jesus said, go in all the world, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them how to obey everything I've commanded. So what does that look like in your life?

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Are you baptized? Good, if not, get baptized. After your baptism, then what?

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Learn how to obey everything Jesus commanded. And when you realize that Jesus commanded not just what he said in the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but Jesus was the one who commanded

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Moses to write down the Torah, he's the one, according to Matthew 24, that says that all of the entire

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Bible is about him, for him, authored by his spirit.

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So when you realize that you now need to learn how to obey the entire Bible, and then now not only that, teach others to obey the entire

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Bible, teaching them how to love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength, Matthew 22, 37, then you realize that the world is not about a collapse, but the world is about a transformation where we become more like Jesus.

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And as we become bigger, we make churches, we make societies, we make countries that are now under the banner of the lordship of Jesus Christ, where we love our neighbors, where we care for them with the same kind of intensity that we love ourself,

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Matthew 22, 39. This looks like proclaiming his reign, announcing his kingdom,

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Acts 1, 8, in the power of the Holy Spirit. It looks like storming the gates of hell, knowing that they're not gonna prevail against the advancing church,

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Matthew 16, 18. That's our charge, not speculation, not retreatism, not defeatism, not all the charts and all of the fears about the

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Antichrist and all of that, none of that, the timing of his return at the end of human history really actually doesn't matter because I look around at the world and I say, okay, the lump hasn't been fully leavened yet.

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The mustard seed hasn't grown to fill the entire earth yet. Every tribe, tongue, and nation doesn't know Jesus yet.

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It doesn't matter to me when Jesus returns. What matters to me is that when he returns, he finds me working.

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He's either gonna find you hiding, waiting, and wasting your life on distractions, or he's gonna find you working in his fields and doing what he said, and that is the faithful servant that he talks about.

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That is the one who he says, well done, good and faithful servant, not the one who's constantly got their bags packed, ready to be raptured out of here.

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We've gotta repent of that defeatism. Jesus says it. The master goes away for a long time, and when he returns, he wants to find the one who is working.

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The choice is ours. Will we spend our life on a thousand distractions?

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Will we spend our life building our castles instead of his kingdom, or will we spend our life submitted to the lordship of Christ and building what he told us to build until he returns?

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The choice is ours. That's attitude number one, and that leads us to attitude two.

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Serve sensibly while you wait. Now, Jesus continues his charge to his disciples who are gonna be living through this tumultuous period of time by not only telling them to be faithful, but also telling them to be sensible.

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Faithfulness without sensibility is recklessness. Sensibility without faithfulness is cowardice.

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Jesus is calling for both. He's telling them to be faithful and sensible, but what did that mean to the first century disciples?

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What did that mean to the original apostles? Well, for the first century church, serving sensibly was a matter of survival.

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The disciples were not in a position of earthly power. They were a marginalized, persecuted minority who were despised by the

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Jewish elite. They were hunted down by the Roman armies. They had no military power, no legal protection, no political representation, nothing to shield them from the violent hostility of the world.

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They were quite literally slaves in a society that viewed them as nothing more than dung.

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That's why Jesus uses the word slave, doulos, meaning bondservant or slave.

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That's not accidental here. It perfectly describes their condition that they were living in in the years 8030 through 8070.

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The world saw them as nobodies. Rome crushed anyone who dared challenge their rule, and the

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Jewish authorities considered them heretics, blasphemers, apostates, worthy of death.

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And yet these slaves were entrusted with the most important mission that had ever been given in human history to preserve the true faith, to spread the gospel in the midst of persecution, and to prepare the world for the greatest judgment event that had ever been seen, and to prepare it for the unveiling of the greatest kingdom that had ever been.

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They couldn't afford to be foolish. They had to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, Matthew 10, 16.

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They had to discern the right battles that they were gonna fight and the right moments for them to act. They had to establish a church that would not only survive the coming catastrophe of 8070, but was gonna thrive beyond it.

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When Jesus said that a faithful and sensible slave gives food at the proper time, he wasn't speaking metaphorically about spiritual nourishment.

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He was calling them to timely strategic action. They were not to be reactionary, impulsive, or careless.

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They were to build wisely, choosing their moments, preparing for hardship, and structuring the early church in such a way that it could actually withstand persecution and exist on into the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and on centuries.

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Jesus warned them, when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near, then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains,

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Luke 21, 20 through 21. That's exactly what they did and why they fled.

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They fled as a act of sensibility. No one could have argued if the

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Christians decided to stay in Jerusalem and continue to evangelize to the bitter end and every single one of them in the city of Jerusalem died.

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They could have been faithful doing that. But Jesus was also calling them not just a faithfulness, but sensibility.

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He was calling them to be Christians who were sensible, wise, shrewd,

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Christians who did not hesitate to preserve the church. They left literally everything behind in the city of Jerusalem and they fled to Pella.

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And because of that, they didn't perish in the slaughter of Jerusalem because they served Jesus sensibly.

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They prepared well, they served well, and they fled well. And they acted in all of those things with wisdom.

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That was their mission, but their mission is different than ours. We're not waiting on another 80, 70 catastrophe where we get to run away.

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We're not waiting on a rapture where we get to run away. We're not waiting for the world to get worse and worse and worse and worse until we run away.

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That was their mission, not ours. That judgment's already happened. The temple's already gone.

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The old covenant is finished. The kingdom of Christ is now reigning, expanding, not collapsing.

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This means that while they were sensible to run away, while they were sensible to prepare for the coming disaster, you and I would be foolish for doing that because we are called to serve sensibly in a different time, not in a time of destruction, but in a time of dominion.

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The early church was running on the fumes of the old covenant world, clinging to the promise of a better covenant that was coming, building an arc before the flood of judgment came.

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We are different. They hid in their homes and we plant churches. They ran out of their cities.

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We disciple the nations. They braced themselves for war, and yet we're preparing for greater victory.

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Their sensibility meant avoiding destruction. Our sensibility means building new civilizations, building

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Christendom. And yet, so many in the church today adopt the first century mindset and try to apply it to a 21st century world and think that that is the most reasonable and sensible thing, this foolish posture of running in a time where we ought not run.

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See, wisdom is not only doing the right thing, but it's doing the right thing in the right time. In their time, the right thing to do was to flee because the disaster was coming.

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In our time, the right thing to do is to stand, to fight, and to continue to push forward because fleeing in this time period where Jesus' kingdom is advancing is actually stupidity.

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Wasting our time chasing down conspiracy theories about the bloodline of the

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Rothschilds or whatever Illuminati or whatever else and how that applies to the

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Antichrist, it's pure stupidity. Living in isolation, living with your tinfoil hat on, refusing to engage in real culture -making efforts because why would we do that?

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To hell with this world, we're going to heaven. That's stupidity. Acting as if prudence is a license to fear.

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Compromising when you should stand firm. Going silent when you should be speaking boldly.

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Abandoning the public square because it's too hostile and it doesn't even belong to us anyway.

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None of that is true biblically, and none of that is biblical sensibility.

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If we are to be faithful slaves and sensible slaves, then we must understand what sensible looks like in our time and in our day.

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Sensible service prioritizes what matters in the current moment. Sensible service knows when to fight and when to build.

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It's strategic, which means that if we are senseless, then we're going to squander our energy.

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We're going to squander our witness. We're going to squander our opportunities.

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We're going to miss the mission that Jesus has called us to because we're so convinced that all we do down here is lose.

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The disciples' mission was about survival and preparation. Our mission is about conquest and dominion.

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It's different now. That means that we can't waste our time with foolish distractions.

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We can't waste our time giving poor energy or thinking that we're always losing the battle, and which would lead us not to advance the kingdom.

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We don't spend hours on online outrage websites instead of getting out into the real world and having a real impact.

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We have to be focused. We have to work. We have work to do. We must, brothers and sisters, know our time because the disciples knew theirs.

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They had a very short window before judgment fell, and you and I have a very short window before we meet our king.

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I'm 41 years old. I have 30, 40 years left of really going hard for the kingdom of God.

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I don't want to get before my king and be ashamed of the pitiful effort that I gave.

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I need to know my time, and my time is not a time of losing, and my time is not a time of retreating, and my time is not a time of cowardice.

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My time is a time of courage, advancement, and dominion for the kingdom of Christ, and if I don't do those things, even if I, as an excuse, avoid that thing for some other good thing,

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I think I'll be held accountable to the Lord for that. I think we're supposed to act, not like we're getting ready to be zapped out of here tomorrow.

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We're not supposed to live like defeat is lurking around the corner. We are to live sensibly, which would lead us to work.

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We work for generational impact. We work for our children.

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We work for our grandchildren. We work so that they will inherit a stronger kingdom than we did, not a weaker one.

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We work so that they will have more resources to spread Jesus's kingdom than we did, not less.

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We don't have a boomer mentality where we're gonna burn through all of our resources just before we die and live some cush, fat, happy life.

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No, we are faithful and sensible slaves who do what the master told us to do when the master told us to do it, and we know our times.

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What has Christ commanded you and I to do? What has Christ commanded? He's commanded us to disciple the nations, to take dominion, to not retreat into our

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Christian ghettos and grottos, but to build a world that reflects His glory, honor, and majesty, not to complain about how bad things are, but to get out and actually transform them by the power of the

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Spirit for the glory of Christ and obedience to God so that the world looks like Christ. The church has got to wake up.

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We're not in a holding pattern. We're not waiting for Jesus to return to rapture us out of here.

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We're in the middle of the greatest expansion that has ever happened in human history. His kingdom is growing.

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His reign is increasing. His enemies are falling. What are we going to do? Are we going to serve with sensibility?

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Are we going to waste our time on meaningless debates? Are we going to build institutions that are going to last for 1 ,000 years?

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Are we going to build things that are going to fall apart in just a decade? The sensible slave understands the time that he lives in.

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It's not the times that we've been given. It's what we do with the times that we've been given that really matters.

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The foolish slave is either going to waste his time and abandon his post, or he's going to use his time to build for the glory of Christ.

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And you have to answer the question, what kind of slave are you going to be? And that leads us to attitude three, talk like he owns the place.

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Jesus says, who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household.

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When Jesus spoke to his disciples about the faithful and the sensible slave being put in charge of his household, he wasn't talking about a mere spiritual reality.

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He was talking about a real world transfer of authority. The household in view was not a small isolated little community or a farmhouse somewhere out in the country.

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It was the entire world that Jesus was about to purchase with his own death, burial, and resurrection.

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See, at that time, the world belonged to the devil. Jesus was getting ready to wrestle it out of the arms of the devil by dying on the cross and by rising again to life.

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Jesus was not preparing his disciples, therefore, for some invisible, irrelevant, hidden kingdom that existed only in the heart.

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He was actually reminding them that they were getting ready to walk into, step into dominion.

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The disciples understood this in a way that modern Christians often miss. Jesus had been speaking for years about the coming shift in power, that the kingdom of God was at hand,

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Mark 115, that he was gonna receive all authority in heaven and on earth, Matthew 28, 18, that all the kingdoms of the world would become the kingdom of our

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Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ, Revelation 11, 15. The cross was not merely the payment for sin, it was the legal transaction in which

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Christ claimed ownership of the world. The resurrection was his payment.

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The resurrection was his vindication as the new true king of the world. And the destruction of Jerusalem in 80, 70 was his eviction of the last remnants of the old covenant order.

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The squatter Satan was cast out. The thief had been bound. The usurper had been dethroned.

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And just like a man who buys a dilapidated house, kicks out the homeless people who are living there, and then puts in charge his people, his contractors, to begin making it a habitable house,

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Jesus rose from the dead, he cast out the original squatter, and now through his church, he's renovating the world to conform to his vision.

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And what is that vision? That the world would become the Eden that it was destined to be.

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The world was made to be a garden. In the beginning, there was a garden, but it wasn't the whole world.

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It was in a region called Eden. And the goal was that as man was fruitful and multiplied and spread out, that he would spread the garden out.

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And that he would continue to spread the garden out until the garden filled the entire world. And that that garden was filled with fruitful, multiplying,

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God -loving people. So that it would be overflowing with righteousness, peace, and with joy in the

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Holy Spirit. But unlike Adam, who failed in that mission, Jesus Christ is going to accomplish that mission.

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He's gonna accomplish everything that he set out to do, and being the true and better Adam was one of them.

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This is why he told his disciples that he was putting them in charge of everything.

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Let me say it very clearly. Jesus died, Jesus rose, Jesus ascended to put his church in charge of the world.

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He installed us as his appointed rulers in his newly conquered domain.

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That's what Jesus is saying in Matthew 24, 45. He wasn't just telling his disciples to hold on tight until the world ends and to hide from the powers that be so that you don't get in trouble with them or whatever.

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No, he's putting them in charge of the world. He's putting them in charge of the household of God.

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Not just the temple in Jerusalem, but the earth as his footstool now belongs to the church.

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And maybe you're asking yourself, well, what does this mean for us? What does this mean for us who are living today in the 21st century?

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What does it mean that that righteousness is gonna spread to the very ends of the earth?

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If everything belongs to Christ, if everything in the cosmos, if he's Lord over all, and he's put us in charge of what he owns, then why do we act like we are so powerless?

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If he said all authority in heaven and on earth now belong to me, now therefore go, what he is doing in the

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Great Commission is he's saying, I own everything. There is no authority outside my authority.

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Now you, my people, you go in my authority. You go in my unrivaled power.

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You go in my dominion. There's no king on earth that has more authority than a

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Christian, none. Yeah, they may have some authority within the state, but we have authority from Christ who actually owns the world.

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Why do we talk like we're so defeated? Why do we talk like this world is in charge of us instead of us being in charge of the world?

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I mean, if your boss puts you over a project, wouldn't you take ownership of it until you hand it back to him?

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If a friend asked you to watch over his house while he's gone on vacation, wouldn't you go over there and stop the crackheads from moving in and turning it into a squatter's den?

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If you were appointed as a police chief over your city, would you sit back and let the criminals run wild in the street?

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Of course not. So why do we as the people of God, why do we as the people of Christ, who he gave us charge of this world to be his stewards until he returned, why do we not act more faithfully and more sensibly and instead let evil run amuck on earth like we do?

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The greatest failure of modern Christianity is not that we lack numbers.

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It's not that we lack money or influence or power. It's not that we don't have big media or whatever.

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It's that we lack boldness. We talk like the world doesn't belong to us, that it's some sort of pagan space that belongs to the devil, that we're just renting space here in a hidden room, riding out our time until our king returns.

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Jesus owns the world. And he has not made us guests in the world.

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He's made us co -heirs of this world, Romans 8, 17. We are a royal priesthood, 1

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Peter 2, 9. We are his ambassador, 2 Corinthians 5, 20. We are not here to ask permission to simply exist.

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We are here to establish the rule of Christ in every sphere of life.

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And yet many Christians today have bought into the pernicious lie that we are losing.

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They act like we're supposed to stay in our lane, keep our faith private, and that we are supposed to just hope that Jesus comes back soon and rescues us out of here.

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But that is not our mission. Our mission is to be his stewards, his ambassadors, his soldiers.

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That is what we're called to do, not act like defeated men. A steward is someone who speaks with authority.

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And he doesn't say, well, you know, we can't impose our beliefs on the world.

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No, he says the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, Psalm 2 or Psalm 24, 1. A steward who speaks with authority does not say, well,

01:08:42

I don't want to offend anyone. I want to make sure that I'm winsome. I want to make sure that people like me. He doesn't say that.

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He says every knee is going to bow. Every tongue is going to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, Philippians 2, 10 through 11.

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A steward who speaks with the authority of Jesus does not say that we're just, we just have to accept the world as they are.

01:09:04

They're getting darker. No, he says the knowledge of the glory of the Lord is going to cover the earth as water covers the sea.

01:09:09

You either get on board with that mission or you will be crushed underneath the feet of our King, Jesus Christ.

01:09:16

We are not beggars in the house of Christ. We are his appointed stewards. We're charged with bringing every inch of his dominion into this world so that it would obey him.

01:09:26

We have to speak like that, act like that, talk like that, walk like that, carry ourselves like that, and command the world that that is what this world is, a world that belongs to Jesus, not them.

01:09:41

That means that we have to abandon the kind of soft, effeminate, apologetic, permission -seeking attitude that has infected the church for far too long, and we have to actually act like we are in charge.

01:09:55

The world doesn't need us to whisper about Jesus as if we're embarrassed about him. It needs us to declare his lordship and his authority over every square inch of territory that exists.

01:10:05

It needs us to walk into every industry, every institution, every hall of power, every nation, every sphere of life, knowing that we belong there because Christ owns the world.

01:10:18

The time for mush -mouth evangelicalism is over. The world lies in rebellion against this king because of the weakness of the church.

01:10:32

It's trespassing on his land, and we haven't had the decency to tell them.

01:10:38

It's using his resources, which they will be culpable for, and we haven't told them that our king's gonna hold them accountable.

01:10:44

They've been breathing his air, rejecting his law, and going about their life with apathy as though he does not exist and his reign doesn't matter.

01:10:53

Our job is to warn them, instruct them, and to call them to repentance so that they will submit to the rightful king before he returns in judgment and cuts them into pieces.

01:11:06

If they refuse, as the passage says, they are gonna be the ones that are left weeping and gnashing their teeth.

01:11:13

That's not our problem. Our problem that we actually need to own is whether we will be found faithful when our master comes back or whether we will be found as cowards.

01:11:24

The world belongs to Jesus, church. Talk like it, walk like it, act like it, and declare it.

01:11:31

The world needs to hear that message, and that's attitude number three. Attitude four, we feed them

01:11:41

Jesus. Jesus says, who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time?

01:11:55

When Jesus described the faithful and sensible slave as the one who feeds the household at the proper time, he was not giving a very generic call to charity and hospitality.

01:12:08

He was telling them that he wanted them, the disciples, the ones who were actually gonna go out and change the world to define the mission of the early church by feeding

01:12:18

God's people. They were to take the bread of life and they were to feed it to a starving world.

01:12:23

And in their time, the ones who were starving the most were the lost sheep of the house of Israel, the first century

01:12:30

Jews who were clinging to their dead system like Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to a piece of floating drift raft.

01:12:38

The Mosaic Covenant, the temple, the sacrifices, the Levitical priesthood, everything that they had known for generations was on the brink of collapse, but they didn't see it.

01:12:52

And they trusted in the flesh of blood or the flesh and blood of bulls and goats,

01:12:57

Hebrews 10 .4. They were convinced that the old sacrifices could still atone for their sins.

01:13:02

They refused to believe that the Lamb of God had already come, that the final Passover had already been offered and that the bread that they truly needed was gonna be found in the temple courts, not in Christ alone.

01:13:16

And yet, that's why Jesus made it so clear in John chapter six, when he said, "'Truly, truly,

01:13:24

I say to you, "'unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man "'and drink his blood, you have no life in yourself.'"

01:13:33

John 6 .53. The apostles understood the scandal of the statement. They knew that it was not about cannibalism.

01:13:41

It was a covenantal. It was about abandoning the old covenant system and embracing something that was better.

01:13:48

It was about walking away from the temple and the festivals and the obsolete sacrifices and coming to the true altar, the altar where it's not the blood of bulls and goats, but the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

01:14:01

And so, as they went into every street, every synagogue, every village, they were proclaiming the bread of life.

01:14:09

They were bringing food at the proper time. They were bringing food to a starving Jewish world.

01:14:17

And they were basically saying to them, leave your temple, leave your priesthood, leave your sinking ship, leave your apostasy, and come to the bread of life.

01:14:27

The only bread that you need is not the bread that was in the holy place in the temple of Jerusalem, the show bread.

01:14:34

The only bread you need is Jesus. If you do not eat from him, you are going to die in your sins.

01:14:43

That's the message that they were telling them. That was the food that they were offering.

01:14:48

They weren't offering material provisions. They were offering the gospel itself, that Jesus is the bread of life, that he's the manna that came down from heaven that fed their ancestors.

01:14:57

And now, if they don't eat from him, they're gonna be starving and dying like them, like their ancestors.

01:15:06

They weren't called to just be distributors of crackers. They were ambassadors of a feast that was far greater than what

01:15:16

Judaism could offer. It was the wedding supper of the lamb. And you maybe ask yourself, well, how does this apply to us?

01:15:24

Well, the command to feed the household of God didn't end with the apostles. It continues on.

01:15:30

And in the same way earlier that we saw that the household means something larger than just our homes.

01:15:39

When we see that in the first century, the household actually was a word that referred to Israel and then even more largely to the world, we realize that our job is to feed the world.

01:15:55

Our job now in the new covenant, not in the old covenant, but in the new covenant, is to feed the household of the entire planet with the only food that matters, and that's

01:16:07

Christ alone. Brothers and sisters, the world is starving just like the first century

01:16:13

Jews were starving. The world is starving, not for new philosophies and not for better political theories and not for new iPhones and computers and gadgets and whatever else.

01:16:26

The world is starving, not for theories, not for empty religious rituals.

01:16:31

The world is starving for the bread of heaven, for the bread of life. And yet, so much of what the modern church is doing is leaving the world in a starvation ration, offering them only scraps instead of the feast.

01:16:50

Many churches today have abandoned their role as stewards at the table of God. Instead of calling people to eat from the body of Christ, to drink from the cup of the

01:16:59

Lord, they give them empty calories of platitudes and Christian niceness instead of the gospel that will save their soul.

01:17:08

They preach self -help sermons, watered -down messages, ear -tickling things instead of offering them the gospel.

01:17:15

They offer them moralism instead of Christ. They hand out entertainment instead of sacraments. But what did

01:17:21

Jesus command? He said, take, eat, this is my body, Matthew 26, 26.

01:17:27

He said for us to feed the world. And that is what the church is meant to do.

01:17:32

That's what the church is meant to give to the nations. That's what, that's the, as faithful slaves,

01:17:38

Matthew 24, as faithful slaves, that's the food that we are to give at the proper time. Not worldly wisdom, not gimmicks, not therapeutic deism, but the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of the

01:17:50

Lord's Supper. The faithful slave is supposed to feed the world,

01:17:56

Jesus. And how do we do that? We do that through the word and through the sacraments. We preach

01:18:02

Christ, the word, the gospel. And it must be proclaimed, for it is the power of God unto salvation,

01:18:09

Romans 116. And the nations are not gonna eat Christ unless they first hear the gospel of Christ, Romans 10, 14.

01:18:17

That's why the church is commanded after that we've preached the gospel, to baptize the nations, to teach them everything

01:18:24

Jesus commanded, Matthew 28, 19 through 20. Every pulpit, every household, every street corner is to be filled with the call to come to the table of the

01:18:34

Lord Jesus Christ. And once we've taught them, and once we've baptized them, we are to welcome them to the

01:18:40

Lord's table. The world doesn't just need to hear shallow Christian platitudes.

01:18:48

They need to feast on the Lord himself because they're starving.

01:18:54

The Lord's supper is the most important meal on earth.

01:19:00

It is the meal of the kingdom. It is the covenant renewal where Christ himself feeds his people with himself, strengthening them, nourishing them, causing them to be strong so that they will advance his reign.

01:19:17

That's why the nations must come to the table. That's why being a good and faithful slave is bringing people into the local church so that they can feast at the table of Christ.

01:19:28

That really is the great vision of Revelation 22 where John says, on either side of the river was the tree of life bearing 12 kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.

01:19:41

And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations, Revelation 22 too. This is not a picture of heaven because if it were heaven, then why would the nation still need to be healed?

01:19:51

Why would the nation still need to come to the tree of life to be healed? In heaven, you don't need that because you're already healed.

01:19:57

This is a metaphor for what the church actually is, what the church actually does. We invite the nations to the table of the

01:20:06

Lord Jesus Christ for their nourishment and for their healing. We offer them the cup of the

01:20:11

Lord, which is a cup of blessing. We offer them the bread of life, which is a loaf of blessing.

01:20:17

That is the new covenant reality that's unfolding in history, not that we give them a few spoiled rations, not that we give them a few

01:20:24

Christian tropes, not that we even let them to their own devices continue to think that politics and ideologies are gonna save them.

01:20:32

No, we tell them to come to the table of the Lord Jesus Christ to eat from the tree of life, which is

01:20:39

Jesus Christ himself. If Jesus has put his church over his household, it is our responsibility to feed it.

01:20:48

If the church is the bride, then the church is also the mother of the world. And as the mother, we bring the food to the children.

01:20:57

And if the entire household belongs to Christ, and if the church is the bride of Christ, the mother of the nations, then it's our job as the church to feed the nations.

01:21:10

It's our job to call them to come to the table. It's our job to invite them and to call them and to compel them to come to the marriage supper of the

01:21:23

Lamb. We don't have the right to serve anything other than what our

01:21:29

Lord has commanded. And that is his body and his blood at his table.

01:21:38

The church has to take a long, hard look at what we're actually doing right now and what we're actually feeding. We have to have the courage to banish any cheap substitute that the church of Christ has been peddling because the world's hungry.

01:21:52

The nations are waiting. The master has commanded us to feed the world.

01:21:58

The question is, what will we feed them with? And the Bible says, you feed them with Christ.

01:22:04

And you feed them with Christ at the Lord's table. That's number four.

01:22:10

Number five, the attitude of slavery. Jesus says, blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes.

01:22:23

Jesus declares, blessed is the slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes. The word blessed there means happy.

01:22:29

It means fortunate. It means deeply satisfied. To be a slave of Christ is to be happy in Christ.

01:22:38

I find it so interesting that this idea of slavery is absolutely married to this idea of happiness and blessing because it's funny.

01:22:51

We live in a world that recoils at the very notion of servitude. We live in a world that recoils at the idea of slavery and it's like a dirty word.

01:23:01

And yet Jesus proclaims that the only true happiness that can be found in the universe is by being a slave of him.

01:23:13

If you're not a slave of Christ, Jesus is saying you won't be happy. But if you want to be happy, you must be a slave of Christ.

01:23:20

That is exactly what Jesus is saying. That is the bedrock of every disciple's joy.

01:23:25

It was the bedrock of the first century's Christian's joy. Even as they marched into the most brutal moment of persecution in Christian history, it wasn't theory to them.

01:23:37

It was reality to them that they were slaves of Jesus and they were blessed. They were happy.

01:23:43

They sang songs in prison. They were infinitely more blessed than the richest high priest in the entire

01:23:50

Mosaic economy. They were more blessed than the kings of Israel who ruled over them for centuries. They were more blessed than all of the rulers and the elite who sat in their palaces and ate their grapes and got fat and sick and whatever else by overeating and gluttony and drinking too much wine.

01:24:06

No, they were more blessed than that. They were happier than that. They were more fulfilled than that.

01:24:12

Why? Because they had been transferred out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light. That is why

01:24:17

Paul and Silas sang in prison, Acts 16. That's why James and John rejoiced when they were flogged with 40 lashes.

01:24:28

Some of their bones were probably exposed because their flesh had been ripped off of their body.

01:24:33

And the first thing they thought to do is instead of having a sanctified pity party about it, they rejoiced and said, praise

01:24:40

God that we've been counted worthy to suffer for the name of Christ. Why? Because being a slave is where you get pure and true joy.

01:24:47

That's why we can, like James says, count it all joy when we experience trials of various kinds because slavery to Christ leads to happiness.

01:24:55

Because being a slave in the kingdom of Jesus is better than being a king or a queen in the kingdom of man.

01:25:01

The disciples understood this. They knew with their own eyes.

01:25:07

They had watched the Pharisees cling to their decaying halls of power as the rulers of Israel rejected their one and only

01:25:15

God. They watched as the old world collapsed beneath its corruption and defeat.

01:25:20

They knew that that, even though it was fancy buildings and wealth and full coffers full of money in the temple precinct, they knew that that was death.

01:25:31

They knew that that was collapsing. And they knew that even if they were poor with Jesus, that they were better off than the richest man on earth.

01:25:38

They knew that in Jesus, he had set them free. He had brought them into a better covenant. He is a better master.

01:25:45

They had a better inheritance. They had a better future. And because of that, they worked.

01:25:50

They didn't retreat. They didn't mope around and complain about all of their problems.

01:25:56

They didn't sit around lamenting the sorry state of the world. They labored and worked their tails off, and they did it happily and joyfully because they knew they had a better master.

01:26:06

They knew they had been given a better mission. They knew that he wanted to establish his great reign on earth to bring more people into joy, more people into blessing, more people into happiness.

01:26:17

They knew that when he told them to disciple the nations, that he wanted them to be found working joyfully, whistling while they worked to bring about his kingdom on earth, and they did it.

01:26:30

And when Christ came in AD 70, bringing an end to the old covenant, they were the faithful slaves who were vindicated, who joyfully worked until he returned.

01:26:42

Today, the church has lost this mindset, and it needs to be recovered.

01:26:49

Instead of being found working, if Jesus were to return today, what kind of church do you think he would find?

01:26:55

Many Christians are standing around passive, fearful, and distracted. The modern church looks like a construction site where four or five different men are watching one man hold a shovel.

01:27:09

Instead of a kingdom that's on offense, we have pastors who are apologizing for preaching the truth.

01:27:17

We have Christians who are acting as if they're trespassing in their own culture. We have churches that are functioning more like therapy centers than battle stations.

01:27:29

This is not the attitude of a faithful slave. This is the attitude of the wicked, cowardly servant.

01:27:37

Jesus says that the faithful slave will be found working when he comes. That means the church must stop standing around, waiting for permission, and start acting.

01:27:49

The time for passivity is over. The time for gospel coalition, winsome

01:27:55

Christianity is over. If we truly believe that slavery to Christ is about obeying him unto blessings, then we must live like his slaves, working, obeying, building, advancing, and doing all of that with urgency.

01:28:12

It means rejecting lazy, slothful, apathetic evangelicalism, the kind that shows up for church for an hour on Sunday, and then goes and lives their life for the rest of the week as if none of that even mattered.

01:28:25

It means rejecting cowardly Christianity, the kind that avoids confrontation and compromises the truth, and bows to every cultural god of the age.

01:28:33

It means rejecting defeatism in every form, the kind that spends more time whining about the state of the world than actually doing anything about it.

01:28:40

A faithful slave is not caught off guard when his master comes back to inspect the house. A faithful slave isn't found wasting his time, indulging in distractions, or sitting on his hands.

01:28:50

A faithful slave is found working, laboring with joy, working his hands to the bone, knowing that his efforts are not in vain.

01:28:58

This is the blessing of slavery that Jesus has given us. It is a joy knowing that your work matters, that your life matters, that your labor matters.

01:29:07

It is a privilege to serve the King of kings and the Lord of lords, knowing that his kingdom's never gonna end.

01:29:15

It is an assurance that no matter how much you suffer in this world, no matter how much pain you go through, no matter how much the world rages against you, no matter how costly the mission seems, that your reward is certain.

01:29:28

Your reward is in heaven. You consider these present sufferings not even worthy being compared to the glory that will be revealed.

01:29:35

Therefore, you labor faithfully, not in vain. The master is gonna return one day and inspect his house.

01:29:43

Some slaves are gonna be found wasting their time. Some are gonna be cast out with the hypocrites and others are gonna be found working, faithful, sensible, and unshakable.

01:29:54

The question is, which kind of slave are you going to be? That's attitude number five.

01:30:02

Attitude six, the church as steward of the earth. Jesus concludes this section in Matthew 24 with an extraordinary promise saying this, truly

01:30:14

I say to you, he will put him in charge of all of his possessions, Matthew 24, 47.

01:30:21

Again, it's not a metaphor. This is a royal decree that the faithful slave, the one who was found doing the work of the master will be given dominion over everything that the master has done.

01:30:30

What does the master owns and what does the master own? The entire world. The disciples who are steeped in scripture would have understood the weight of the statement that Jesus was making.

01:30:41

He was not speaking in isolation. He was speaking about the fulfillment of things like Daniel chapter seven, where the son of man ascends to the ancient of days and is given a kingdom and a dominion and a glory.

01:30:52

And what happens next in Daniel seven? This is what it says. Then the sovereignty, the dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven will be given to the people of the saints of the highest one,

01:31:07

Daniel seven, 27. Jesus is using passages like this to say, hey, the world's gonna be given to you.

01:31:15

The kingdoms of this world, the nations under heaven are gonna be given to the people of the saints of the highest ones.

01:31:23

You are the steward of the world. Jesus was telling them in unmistakable turns, you will reign with me.

01:31:30

The entire world that is reigned by pagan kings is gonna be handed over to you. This was not empty platitudes or comfort.

01:31:40

It was a commission. The disciples were about to witness the end of an age, the collapse of the old covenant world, the destruction of the temple.

01:31:47

But this was not a tragedy. It was a transfer of power.

01:31:54

The Jews had forfeited their stewardship of the world. And now the church was gonna be appointed as the new and the rightful rulers of Christ.

01:32:02

The apostles understood this perfectly, which is why they spoke like kings and they acted with confidence and they labored with urgency.

01:32:10

That's why Paul told the Corinthians, do you not know that the saints are gonna judge the world, 1 Corinthians 6 .2?

01:32:16

That's why he says in Romans 16 .20 that you are gonna crush Satan under your feet.

01:32:22

Because why? The world belongs to Christ. And he's put his church in charge of the world. He's put his church in charge of the mission to bring the nations underneath his supremacy and rule.

01:32:32

That was the mission of the first century church and they embraced it without hesitation.

01:32:39

Now, what does that mean for us? Well, we're not waiting on a collapse event.

01:32:45

We're waiting to extend this to where it's fully extended. There is nowhere else that the kingdom of Christ can go.

01:32:52

The stewardship of the earth didn't end with the apostles. It's fully here. The church has given authority over all of Jesus's possessions.

01:33:01

That means the world. Christ is over everything. Therefore, we are his stewards to extend his reign over everything.

01:33:07

And yet modern Christianity has forgotten this. Too many believers act as if we're squatters in Satan's territory, as if the world still belongs to the devil, as if we are waiting for Jesus to come back and take us out of here so that then after some fantastical collapse, then finally then

01:33:25

Jesus's kingdom will come. That's not true. The world doesn't belong to Satan. The world belongs to Christ.

01:33:32

And he's put you and I in charge of the world under him, in his power, with his authority as his ambassador, stewards and slaves.

01:33:44

We're not waiting on a future kingdom. We're living in the kingdom now. We're not waiting for expansion.

01:33:51

We are the ones who are called to expand it now and force it now. Christ's government is already here.

01:33:58

Isaiah 9 says that the increase of his government will know no end. We are in the moment right now where the increase of Jesus's government is increasing.

01:34:08

And one day it will increase so far to where it knows no end. You and I have a mandate.

01:34:15

You and I, our life is not about how much money we can collect in our 401k. Our life is not about how many promotions we can get or what kind of cars we have or what kind of toys we have or how many children we have or whatever.

01:34:28

Our life is about the kingdom of God. Our life is about extending his kingdom to the nations.

01:34:35

And that might mean one neighbor's house at a time, one family member at a time. That might mean bringing justice to one unjust situation at a time.

01:34:44

That might mean tearing down wicked institutions, building up righteous ones, planting Jesus's flag in every dominion corner and nook and cranny of the world.

01:34:53

But what it doesn't mean is that this is somehow optional. It's not optional.

01:35:00

This is not something that we can sit out of, opt out of or act like doesn't apply to us.

01:35:06

It applies to every single Christian made into a royal priesthood of Jesus. This is our mission.

01:35:12

All of us, every one of us, and all of us have to find our part in that. And you may say, well, what does that look like?

01:35:19

How am I supposed to participate in the advancing of Jesus's kingdom? How am I supposed to participate in the war to win the world?

01:35:28

How do I exercise dominion? Well, it's not through military conquest. It's not through jihad.

01:35:36

It's not through earthly tyranny. It's through spiritual warfare. It's through cultural transformation.

01:35:42

It's through gospel proclamation. You see, the church's weapons are not swords and spears.

01:35:51

They are truth, righteousness, and obedience to Christ. This is what Paul says in 2

01:35:57

Corinthians. For the weapons of our warfare are not flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.

01:36:06

These are the weapons. These are the weapons. If you wanna be in the war, if you wanna fight, if you wanna battle, if you wanna be a soldier of Christ, if you wanna see his kingdom advance in your life through your sanctified,

01:36:18

Holy Spirit -driven, God -glorifying, Christ -glorifying effort, this is what you do.

01:36:23

Pick up the word of God because it's the sword of truth. It's the sword that tears down the lies that this world proclaims, and it's the sword that establishes truth,

01:36:33

Ephesians 6, 17. And while you're at it, preach the gospel of Jesus. Preach it to men, women, and children who do not know him so that they will see him, believe in him, and come to know him through the power of the gospel,

01:36:46

Romans 1, 16. How about this? Worship and pray. The acts that are gonna overthrow demonic strongholds are not bows and arrows.

01:36:55

They're not stinger missiles. They are men and women gathered together in the power of the Holy Spirit who sing, who sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs so that the foundation of this world actually will be shaken out of its place.

01:37:09

That's our weapons of warfare, is singing psalms to God, and then he does the work.

01:37:15

How about this? Raising up Christian families who have generational faithfulness. We have to stop raising our children up to be stolen by the world.

01:37:26

We are the ones that have children, and the world is the ones who are hoping that they can steal our children.

01:37:34

Well, how about we have a strategy for making our children steal -proof? How about we have covenant households that raise up godly children who are gonna grow up and inherit the land?

01:37:45

Deuteronomy 6, six through nine shows us how to educate our children, disciple our children.

01:37:51

This command is to help our children take every thought captive for the glory of God, to replace the lies that the world is trying on overtime to teach them and to teach our children the wisdom of Christ, 2

01:38:03

Corinthians 10, five. How about righteousness and justice and civic engagement?

01:38:08

Our duty as Christians is not just to sit in our homes and sit in our churches.

01:38:13

We're to be salt and light in the world. So that means there's some of you watching who need to run for office so that we can establish godly laws, where we can build godly institutions, where we can overtake the tyrannical secular government that exists in our country and produce a kind of government that reflects the righteousness of God, Proverbs 14, 34.

01:38:38

What about preaching? Every time a Christian pastor preaches the word of God, every time a parent trains up their child in the

01:38:48

Lord, every time that you tell your friend or coworker about the only gospel, which is

01:38:54

Jesus Christ, every time we sternly, boldly, joyfully, gloriously declare his truth in the public square, we are taking dominion.

01:39:07

Too many Christians act like employees in a company that they don't own, instead of stewards in a world that they've been given.

01:39:17

Christ has not put us here to rent space, to bide our time, to twiddle our thumbs until we get our paycheck and we leave.

01:39:28

He's put us here to govern the world. That is why this defeatist attitude in the modern church must die and it must die soon.

01:39:40

The church has way too often surrendered her authority. We've surrendered our authority to the state.

01:39:48

We've surrendered our authority to the media. We've surrendered our authority to pagan academia.

01:39:53

We've surrendered our authority to cultural elites instead of exercising dominion. We've retreated instead of advancing.

01:40:01

We've ensured that things collapse instead of building. We've abandoned the world to the enemy instead of advancing the kingdom for Jesus.

01:40:11

And we've adopted that loser mindset that I've been railing against. But brothers and sisters, life with Christ is not about losing.

01:40:20

His kingdom is not shrinking. His reign is not retreating. Again, the knowledge of the glory of the

01:40:26

Lord will cover the earth as the waters covers the sea, Habakkuk 2 .14. That's not possibility.

01:40:33

That's not remote chance. That is certainty. The only question is whether or not you and I are gonna believe it.

01:40:41

The master has put you and I, his church, over his possessions.

01:40:47

The world belongs to us. The question is, are we gonna act like it? Are we gonna work like it? Are we gonna fight like it?

01:40:54

Are we gonna take dominion like it? Or are we gonna be the lazy slave sitting back and watching the world collapse and unprepared for our master when he returns?

01:41:06

There's no neutrality. You're either taking ground for Christ or you're ceding ground to the enemy.

01:41:12

There is no other option. Which one will you choose? That's attitude number six.

01:41:18

Attitude number seven, the modern day wicked and lazy slave. Jesus ends the chapter of Matthew 24.

01:41:28

He ends this glorious chapter that we've been looking at over 19 weeks now. He ends it with a passage that is very severe.

01:41:38

It's so jarring that it should send shivers down the spine of anyone who claims to follow

01:41:43

Jesus but refuses to do his kingdom work. This is what he says. This is how the chapter closes.

01:41:49

This is how our finale of Matthew 24 ends. This is what he says. But if that evil slave says in his heart, my master is not coming for a long time and begins to beat his fellow slaves and eat and drink with drunkards, the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him.

01:42:10

And at an hour which he does not know and will cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites.

01:42:19

In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 24, 48 through 51.

01:42:28

In Jesus' day, there were many who claimed his name but didn't believe in his words.

01:42:34

There were many who would come to him on that day and say, Lord, Lord, didn't we do many miracles in your name? And he will say to them, depart from me,

01:42:39

I never knew you. They heard his prophecy and yet they doubted. They were told to prepare for his coming and judgment and yet they mocked his urgency by choosing to live licentiously.

01:42:55

For 40 years, from 8030 to 8070, the faithful church was supposed to be a church in preparation.

01:43:02

A church that was spreading the gospel, enduring persecution, standing firm in the face of Rome and in the face of the corrupt

01:43:09

Jewish establishment. But many of those, many in the church, many who claimed

01:43:15

Christ outwardly and yet denied him inwardly began to drift. There were many in the church in the first century that grew complacent while they waited.

01:43:25

They acted originally as if Christ's words were true, but after they waited for a long time and they didn't see those things coming to pass, they acted as if his words were untrue.

01:43:38

And in their arrogance, they began to abuse the faithful. They began to persecute true believers and they began to live just like the world, which is exactly what

01:43:47

Jesus said. Jesus was clear, don't be like the faithless slave who does that.

01:43:57

Wait until the end, be patient until the end and then you would receive a reward.

01:44:03

Those false disciples, Jesus is promising in this passage, were not going to escape the judgment.

01:44:11

They would be cut into pieces right along with the Jews. They would be thrown into the same ruin and destruction as the rest of apostate

01:44:19

Israel. This was not theoretical or hypothetical for Jesus, it happened. When Rome obliterated

01:44:25

Jerusalem, those who were the faithless ones, those who had abandoned their first love were swallowed up either literally in the carnage of Jerusalem or they fell headlong into hell for rejecting the

01:44:37

Jesus that they said that they had worshiped. Because when

01:44:43

Christ calls a man to follow him, he requires faithfulness to the very end.

01:44:50

It's not about starting the race well with Jesus, it's also about finishing the race well.

01:44:56

For those who are truly Jesus's, they will finish the race well, but there are many who call upon the name of Christ who do not really belong to him who will not finish well and they should have no hope that they will be with Jesus in eternity.

01:45:13

The modern church today is filled with this kind of wheat versus chaff reality.

01:45:21

We have many tears in the field, you could say. There are many today who are not, they call upon the name of Jesus, but they're not the good and faithful, sensible slaves, they're the wicked and the lazy slaves who spurn the name of Christ, who don't believe his words, who don't get involved in his mission, who do the kinds of things that Jesus is saying in this passage and they will be caught unaware.

01:45:47

We have a church today that's filled with people who claim to trust in Jesus, but ignore the reality of what he has done.

01:45:53

Just like the first century false Jews, there were first century false disciples as well, just like them.

01:46:01

There are plenty today in the church who actually don't take seriously what

01:46:06

Jesus said in this passage. One of them is the modern day dispensationalists.

01:46:13

They refuse to take Jesus at his word. They believe like the faithless, lazy slave that he's not coming for a long time.

01:46:23

Do you get that? Jesus said that the one who's wicked in this passage is the one who believes that Jesus isn't coming back in a short time, but his coming is delayed.

01:46:33

The one who believes that Jesus' coming is delayed is the wicked and lazy servant. That's exactly what dispensationalism is built on.

01:46:40

It is built on the fact that Jesus' coming is delayed. 2 ,000 years, in fact.

01:46:48

They believe in a postponed coming. They insist that the very judgment that Jesus promised didn't happen already, and it's gonna happen at some point in the distant future.

01:46:59

Let me be blunt here. That is the exact same attitude that Jesus is condemning in Matthew 24 when he says that the wicked slave says, my master's not coming for a long time.

01:47:12

That's what modern day dispensationalism does. They say that Jesus hasn't come yet, that maybe he's gonna return at some point in our lifetime, 2 ,000 years after the fact.

01:47:23

They twist Jesus' words, they reject Jesus' timeline, and they act like the generation that was alive at that time doesn't matter.

01:47:32

That the words Jesus gave to them don't matter because they were given to us because we're somehow more important.

01:47:38

That's not faithfulness to the text. That's not sensible exegesis.

01:47:45

That is wicked, lazy slavery to Christ. The first century church was told to prepare for 80, 70, and they did.

01:47:54

They worked, they labored, they advanced the kingdom, but the modern day dispensational pre -millennial church who sits on its hands, who does nothing but watch for signs, that fears the future, that acts like chicken little, running around like its head's cut off, saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling, who wait for an escape to materialize so that they can get out of the world instead of transform the world.

01:48:17

For those who have the fear of the future and are waiting for an escape plan, stop.

01:48:25

Jesus is going to return at the end of human history because we're not full preterist here, but he's not coming back in the same way that he came before.

01:48:36

The first coming of Jesus was in his incarnation. The second coming was when he put

01:48:41

Jerusalem to judgment and burned their city to the ground. The next time

01:48:47

Jesus comes, he's not coming back for calamity. He's not coming back for a defeated, cowardly church.

01:48:56

He's not coming back to a church that avoids the world, that is constantly meddling in speculation, who's constantly defeated by the state of culture.

01:49:06

He's coming back for a faithful, victorious, obedient bride who did what he said.

01:49:14

Read Matthew 25. Right after this, he gives a parable of 10 virgins.

01:49:20

Five of them were faithful, five of them were lazy. The five who were faithful are the ones who he gives the world.

01:49:27

The ones who are lazy and wicked are the ones who are shut out of his kingdom. Matthew 25 is also talking about these same things.

01:49:36

A church that is faithful is a church that builds. It's a church that works. It's a church that's wise.

01:49:42

It's a church that prepares. It's a church that conquers. It's a church that establishes his reign on earth as it is in heaven.

01:49:50

The question is, what kind of a church, what kind of a people, what kind of citizen of this kingdom are you gonna be?

01:49:58

Are you gonna be the wicked slave who wastes your life waiting for an escape? Or are you gonna be the faithful servant of Jesus, the faithful slave who is found working, fighting, and advancing

01:50:10

Christ's kingdom when he comes? The world doesn't need more Christians who are predicting the next global disaster.

01:50:17

It needs Christians who take action, Christians who plant churches, Christians who disciple nations,

01:50:23

Christians who establish businesses that honor Jesus, Christians that take over institutions, Christians that train up the next generation of warriors for the kingdom of God, Christians who dominate the arts, dominate the medians, dominate the culture,

01:50:37

Christians who preach the gospel with authority, without fear or without compromise, because Christ is king and his kingdom is growing and his rule is spreading.

01:50:48

The only question is, are you working for him or are you gonna waste your time and be held accountable for that when you stand before the king of kings and the

01:51:00

Lord of lords? And that leads us to our conclusion.

01:51:07

19 episodes, 19 weeks of exegesis, 19 weeks of historical deep dives and relentless demolitions of the modern eschatological doom and gloomery, and now here we stand at the end of this journey at the book or at the chapter of Matthew 24, the hinge upon which all biblical eschatology turns.

01:51:33

If you have followed along in this series, I just wanna say thank you. Your hunger for truth, your rejection of the defeatist mentality and the paralysis that has plagued the modern day church has been an encouragement to me.

01:51:47

I've been so blown away that so many people wanna learn what eschatology is so that we can see

01:51:53

Christ's victory unfold all over the earth. I'm so pumped that Christian optimism is back.

01:52:01

We are so back, but the work is far from finished. We're not spectators.

01:52:07

We're waiting on the world to burn. We're soldiers. We're laborers in the vineyard. We are people who believe that Jesus will take our labor and use it for the glory of God.

01:52:18

Post -millennialism, which is what we are on this show, is not about passivity. It's about action.

01:52:24

It's about Jesus's kingdom advancing. And we're gonna see that, not just in today's episode, we're gonna see that next week and in the weeks ahead as we dive into the book of Revelation.

01:52:36

But today, we're finished for today. I wanna say thank you so much for everyone who's been here.

01:52:42

Everyone who's watched these videos, everyone who's liked them, shared them, given them to their great

01:52:47

Aunt Bertha or whoever else. I wanna say thank you to all the members who signed up to be members of this channel to help me financially be able to do this show and to be able to send it out to more people.

01:53:01

I'm thanking you for that. Thank you for anyone who's went to the merchandise store, prodthesheep .com

01:53:06

and got some great gear. Let me know what other stuff you want. I wanna make the kinds of things that you wanna wear. We're walking billboards.

01:53:13

If I can wear a shirt in public that says Jesus wins, maybe, just maybe, that will help me strike up a conversation with someone.

01:53:20

If I wear a shirt that dispensationalism will eat your joy, maybe that will strike up a conversation.

01:53:26

I can tell people about the hope I have in Christ. Thank you so much for all the ways you've supported this channel.

01:53:31

Pray for this channel. And more than anything, I pray, my prayer for you, is that we would not sit idly by and watch the hourglass, the sands in the hourglass fall down and do nothing.

01:53:45

I pray that with the one life that we've been given, we would be consumed and captivated by a holy passion to do the work of Jesus.

01:53:54

Our lives matter because of Christ. It does not matter how many

01:54:01

TV shows I watch. It doesn't matter if I'm up to date on the coolest new thing.

01:54:06

What matters is that my life was poured out in service to Jesus. It matters that the kingdom advances in my lifetime.

01:54:14

It matters that Christ is glorified. And I pray that that would become your all -consuming passion, your all -consuming joy, and that every one of us would labor as if our labor is not in vain, and that we would see the kingdom of Jesus advance in our lifetime in New England, where I'm at, and wherever you're at.

01:54:35

Until next time, God richly bless you. We'll see you next week as we begin the book of Revelation, which is gonna be awesome.

01:54:42

And until then, God richly bless you, and we'll see you next time on the broadcast. Now get out of here.