Session 4 - Satan's Design for Humanity: Paganism

Kootenai Church

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You're listening to the expository preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church, located in Kootenai, Idaho.

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We pray that Christ is exalted and your spirit is blessed by the teaching of God's Word.

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For more information about Kootenai Church, please visit us online at kootenaichurch .org.

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In this session, we're going to transition a little bit, and now we're going to think about Satan's anti -design.

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So we have been talking about God's design. Thank you for your attention, by the way. I'm throwing a lot at you this morning, and this is not lo -fi content.

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My wife tells me I'm fire -hosey. That's a term you can use. I'm kind of fire -hosey, so I appreciate you bearing up under all this material.

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We're going to talk now in this session about paganism, and this reminds us that we're not just up against the sexual revolution.

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We're up against something much bigger than just the American sexual revolution, which is a massive cultural force.

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What we're up against is much more ancient than the sexual revolution, as it's often called.

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It's a system I call paganism, and we're going to define this as we go.

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What I want to do with you is just a few things. We're going to look first at Romans 1, 18 -32, because I believe it's in Romans 1 that Paul gives us a biblical unpacking of paganism, of basically living according to your flesh.

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That's what paganism is in a really succinct form. If someone's a pagan, they don't walk in the ways of God.

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They walk according to the flesh. Now if someone's a Christian, they've been freed from the power of the flesh.

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They're no longer a slave to sin, right? Romans 6, is this sounding familiar? If you are in Christ, if you're born again, you're no longer a slave to sin, not because of your own effort or your own will or your own concentrated powers, because of the work of God, because of the work of the warrior

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Savior, Jesus Christ, who by His blood has overcome the power of sin on your behalf.

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And now that has come to fruition in you as the Spirit has regenerated you and given you a new heart.

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And now you've trusted Christ by faith and you've repented of your sin, not as a work that you and I do, not as a merit -based reality, but because that's what people regenerated by the

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Spirit do. If you give a plant life, if you plant it in the ground and water it, it lives.

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That is not because the plant has performed good works that have made it live.

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That is because that is the nature of a plant. In the same way, it is the nature of a Christian.

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It is the nature of somebody born again through the Spirit to live, to trust

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Christ and to repent of sin. And that then means that you have not just a calling to walk in a godly way, you want to walk in a godly way.

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People who are truly born again don't have to be harangued or harassed into godly living.

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We all have our ups and downs, as we've talked about, but fundamentally, born -again people want to follow

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Jesus because of the Spirit's work in our heart. That is really the fundamental marker of a

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Christian, that you want 1 John, really the whole letter, you want to follow

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Jesus because God has given you a love for Jesus. But a pagan has no such instincts.

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A pagan has no regeneration that has happened. A pagan does not have the

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Holy Spirit, and so what a pagan wants to do is walk according to the flesh, live out the desires and passions of their sinful heart.

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And that's not the people out there, that's all of us in our natural state. We're all naturally a pagan.

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This is what Romans 1, 18 -32 maps. Let's turn there and consider, now, paganism.

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Romans 1, 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

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For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

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So they are without excuse. For although they, the Gentiles, knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

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Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

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And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

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And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

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They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

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They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless, though they know

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God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die. They not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

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Let's pray. Father, as we turn to this portion of your word and to the topic of paganism,

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I pray that you would help us to understand and apply your truth for our good and your glory.

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In Jesus' name, amen. I will not attempt a full -scale exegesis of these verses.

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What I will do simply as we begin here is walk through and grab several key realities of this passage.

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In order that we would understand the condition of sinful man with first reference to the group called

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Gentiles. But in reality, what we will see is that even as the

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Jews have fallen away from God, tragically, we all live in pagan ways naturally.

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And so this passage, I believe, applies to lost people writ large.

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Lostness as a condition is expressed in verse 18 by suppressing the truth.

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Suppressing the truth. It turns out, according to the apostle Paul, that no one is an honest atheist.

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Lots of people say they are. Lots of people think they are. But in reality, verse 19, for every human person, what can be known about God, Paul says, is not obscured.

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He says it is plain to them. It is plain to them.

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And he goes on to say, the things of God, the existence of God, is plain to all people.

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Why? Because God has shown it to them. God has made it very clear that He exists and that He is not the creature.

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We are all a creature. He is the creator. God has made that clear.

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Verse 20 goes on to unfold that further. His invisible attributes, namely

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His eternal power and divine nature, have been distorted in the world.

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Right? Is that what he says? No. Have been clearly perceived for all time.

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Ever since the creation of the world, Paul writes, in the things that have been made in the created order. So they are without excuse.

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This tells us, yes, that there are people who fall into a trap of atheism. There absolutely are.

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Don't misunderstand me. But there's nobody who is actually justified in atheism.

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People are not lacking proof about God. People are not lacking evidence about God.

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They say they are, and they think they are, but they aren't. Because God has clearly displayed

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His eternal power and His divine nature. You can see it in the creation, in simplified form here.

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Living in this natural beauty, even as an unbeliever, you know at some level that you are not

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God. And you know that there has to be a God to make this and sustain this.

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That in simplified form is what Paul is saying. This is part of why in seminary training and in the theological teaching

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I do, I try to help people understand that our greatest burden with the unbeliever is not to convince them through proofs that God exists.

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That's what Aquinas and others in the Catholic tradition argued, and there have been a number of evangelicals who have embraced that idea, and they spend a lot of energy and time trying to convince people of these proofs that God exists.

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The proofs themselves, the five proofs, by the way, philosophically, are not necessarily bad. I'm happy to talk about them with an unbeliever.

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But the fact that there is cause and effect in the world, for example, is not what

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Paul identifies as what is needed to convince an unbeliever of the truth of the gospel.

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The unbeliever knows that there's cause and effect. They know in some deep buried sense in their heart that there can only be something because there has been a cause, and they know according to these words, trust

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Paul, not me, that they have seen proof in the creation that God exists.

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So my duty, what I'm trying to say is this, and your duty as a Christian witness, isn't to get really philosophically smart, as if you have to do that, and then handle all these philosophical matters.

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Our duty is to point people to these truths and say, these things may be obscured in your own heart and your sight, but God is real.

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God made you. God exists. God is the ruler of everything in this world.

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And actually, fellow sinner who is made in the image of God, you know this.

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You know that God exists, and you are actively right now suppressing the truth.

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That's what verse 18 says. It says that unbelievers, look at the end of the verse, by their unrighteousness, suppress the truth.

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It's not that they don't know the truth. I don't mean the gospel, but they don't know the

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Creator exists. They do know the Creator exists. We all do. Every person does.

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It's not that we have an information problem, and we need a lot of philosophy podcasts to get us up to theistic levels.

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It's that we have a suppression problem. We suppress what we know to be true.

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As a result of all of this, we have become fools, verse 22. Mankind would rather live as a fool than as a follower of God.

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And not only that, verse 23 indicates that we all are worshipers.

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Our hearts are made for worship. Your heart is not a little bitty Thomas the

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Train steam engine. Your heart is a Japanese bullet train in terms of its power.

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It really is. That's the worship capacity you have in your heart. Every person in this room, including these precious little babies, they have, developing of course, they have a capacity for worship that if you could somehow assess it, it would knock your socks off.

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We have a speeding bullet train of worship in our heart. We are worshipful beings.

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And the question is not whether we will worship, as numerous theologians have pointed out, the question is what we will worship.

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Everybody's worshiping something. A common target of our worship is ourselves.

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That's probably the most common expression of worship in this sinful world.

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But it's not the only one. We will worship just about anything, won't we? You see, it's not that atheists worship nothing.

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It's that in our sinful condition, we all will worship something.

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And we can even end up worshiping everything, which means you worship nothing.

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But atheists don't have their worship capacity, like the little switch right here, this is the worship switch, just so you know, click, their worship switch is not off.

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And ours, as conservative Christians, is on, click, it's on. No, it's that everybody's worship switch, click, you get the sound effects for free.

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Everybody's worship switch is on. It's on at all times. It's just a matter of what you'll worship.

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You worship self, you worship the person you find beautiful, you worship images resembling mortal man's, you worship birds, creeping things, nature, rock bands, deprivation chambers, military heroes, celebrities, athletes, novelists, parents, children, and on it goes.

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Everybody is worshiping something. We have very powerful worship capacities in us.

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And to turn this around to positive news for just a second, before we dive back into the darkness here, this helps us understand what happens when we are regenerated.

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When we are regenerated, the bullet train is redirected. It's redirected away from hell and the realm of darkness, and it is shot into the stratosphere to worship

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God and Jesus Christ. You're a way bigger worshiper than you think you are.

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Your capacity to worship God is way bigger than you know it to be, and that is what your soul is made for.

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Your soul isn't made for lesser things. C .S. Lewis is really, with Edwards, the best figure in the

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Christian tradition at expressing this. I disagree with him about a few things, but nonetheless, C .S.

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Lewis understood in a powerful way just how full throttle the human heart is in its capacity for worship.

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We don't have 42 horsepower in this heart, with apologies to those who love cars and car culture.

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This is like, I shouldn't say the word Hellcat. I was going to say this is a Hellcat engine, but that's not good.

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I'm going to say this, that's not good. That's self -editing on the fly in public here. This is a

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Dodge Ram, you know, max horsepower, 800 horsepower engine in us for worship.

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So Christian, you weren't made for lesser things. You weren't made to worship humanity. You weren't made to worship an interest group.

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You weren't made to worship a sport. You weren't made to worship the creation. You were made to worship

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God. You were made to worship an infinite being, and that's where you will find joy, not when you worship yourself or this world, but when you worship

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God. That's where all the joy is in worshiping God. Worship isn't just when there's singing up here.

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That's great. That's a part of worship. That's a key part of worship, the Bible teaches. But worship is all of life.

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And our growth as a Christian is bit by bit, day by day, realizing that more and more and more.

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Wait, my whole life is worship. It's not that I worship when

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I go to church alone. That's corporate worship. That matters to God. That's very valuable. It's that all of life is worship.

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You see, all of life is worship for the pagans. Do you understand that? That's what we're in.

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We're not just in a culture that has featured different stages of the sexual revolution.

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We're in a war of worship. And the question before us is, are the pagans going to out -worship us?

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Or are we going to out -worship them? Said differently and slightly less contentiously, are we going to show the pagans that our

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God is worth giving up their worship for the true worship of the living

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God? And the answer is, to give you the answer key at the beginning of the test, yes.

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This is the only reality worth worshiping. God in Christ in this world is not worth it at all.

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But they are worshiping too. The smartest atheist with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge is a worshiper.

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The celebrity who's living out the perfect blend of work -life balance and is doing all the juice cleanses imaginable and has the perfect, you know, airbrushed home and the kids sitting on the couch smiling, that celebrity on Instagram is worshiping.

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We're all a worshiper. We're all a worshiper. It's just a matter of what we are worshiping.

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The positive form of that, to understand, is that when you are born again, now again, all of life is worship, and that doesn't just mean the easy parts of your life.

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That's how Christians tend to think. Quick word here and we go back to paganism. We tend to think, when I'm happy, when my life is good, as I was saying some in the last session, then

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I'm fitted for worship. Then I'm able to worship. No.

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No, that's the wrong way to think, honestly. We all think it. It's the wrong way to think. Do you know some of the best opportunities for worship of the living

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God? Do you know when they come? Suffering. Pagans worship in large part because they are getting to do what they want.

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Their worship is dependent on their circumstances. Christians worship in good seasons and definitely worship

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God in good seasons. Give thanks for all the good in your life, but Christians also worship

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God in bad seasons. Christians don't just worship when it's the happy wedding day for their child or their kid is doing well and has become a missionary and moved overseas.

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Something happy like this. Christians worship God when a child is sick and is not quickly healed.

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Christians worship God, worship God when a child dies.

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That's how far Christian worship goes. Christian worship, unlike pagan worship, isn't dependent or driven by your circumstances.

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And that, along with the end of worship God, that is the difference.

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And that is a huge part of the witness we are supposed to provide to the world.

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It's not just Billy Graham renting out stadiums, you know, 80 years ago and witnessing to people.

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There was some good in that. Not all, but there was some good in that. But actually the normal form of witness we're supposed to provide as believers isn't anything fancy.

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Most of us aren't going to be a globe -traveling evangelist. The worship the world needs to see from us is worship that is expressed in good seasons, medium seasons, and bad seasons.

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And don't underestimate how powerful that worship will end up being.

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Some of you have seen this on social media, just a quick word here. But there's a family, I believe their last names are the

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Morgan family. They live in New Jersey. The husband is in Christian ministry, strong ministry that he has, reformed guy, and went to Southern like I did.

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And they were just on a sabbatical, pastoral sabbatical, you know, like four months off or something.

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First sabbatical of his pastoral career. Pastors don't often get a lot of that, do they, Jim? A lot of hard work in the pastorate.

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Pastors need sabbaticals, by the way, but I think they should have them. Anyway, they go to Maine to my home state, just happened to go there.

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I don't know this family or have any connection to them, but they go to Maine and they have just begun their sabbatical and the kids are playing and they're by the lake and everything is good.

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This is days ago. This is all true. This is days ago, like a week ago. And the kids are playing badminton or something like this in the backyard.

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And there's some kind of terrible freak accident and a piece of the racket splinters and goes into the skull of a little girl named

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Lucy. Lucy, this pastor's daughter.

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And so immediately the family swings into action and they go to Maine Medical Hospital.

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I know Maine Med in Portland, Maine. And over the next three days, they storm heaven with their prayers.

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And this pastor, last name of Morgan, asks for people to pray on social media and writes several blogs.

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He wrote them days ago, hours ago. And long story short, just a couple of days ago,

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Lucy died. So this pastor and his wife are finally getting a break, finally getting a sabbatical.

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They go to a beautiful place to rest and relax and not have hardship happen, right?

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That's the whole point is to like, pastors don't just need sabbaticals.

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In some sense, Christian families all need them to some degree. So good for us.

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That's what they were doing. But little Lucy in a freak accident that no one could have prevented, as I understand it, has part of a racket go into her skull and she dies.

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And they have returned home from their vacation with one less child in the back seat.

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That's their sabbatical. And they are crushed as you would be and I would be.

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But here's the point. In everything this pastor has communicated, he's expressed trust and faith in God.

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And so the worst possible moment in their life has become, you understand the point? It has become an opportunity for worship of the living

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God. It has become in a way they never would have planned for, never would have asked for, an opportunity to worship

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God. To show that God is greater than anything in this life. And to show that even when circumstances truly are at zero of a hundred in terms of goodness, yet God is good.

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Isn't that the message of the book of Job? Job loses everything including his children, his precious children.

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He's a good father. He offers sacrifices for them in an old covenantal form of worship. If they have done something and he doesn't know about it, he's such a godly plugged -in father.

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But even all that godly fatherhood does nothing to save his kids, their physical lives.

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They're all killed. Satan attacks Job. Satan attacks Job's family in order that Job would curse

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God and die. And that's exactly what Job's wife sadly says to him. She says in her own absolute despair, curse

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God and die. And we all can understand hitting that low. Paul himself says in 2

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Corinthians 1 .8, that he despaired of life itself at points in his ministry.

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Paul knew going into the abyss and looking down it and almost walking off the cliff.

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Paul knew that. It's not nihilistic to acknowledge that you can get to that place even as a believer.

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Paul did. He despaired of life itself. That's dark. That's low.

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He was right beside Job. He was right beside Daniel in the lion's den, shoulder to shoulder.

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Have you gone there? Are you there? Has someone you know been in that pit?

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Some of us may be called in days ahead to go to that pit and stand shoulder to shoulder with those men and many women we could name.

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But the Christian by the grace of God does one thing different from the pagan.

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The Christian worships God. The Lord gives and the

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Lord takes away. Job says, blessed be the name of the

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Lord. That's worship. God work in us.

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God work in us that we would offer that kind of testimony in that kind of darkness.

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And some of you may have. Some of you may have done this. Praise God if you have. We are all worshipers.

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The pagans, verse 25, have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and they worship and serve the creature rather than the creator.

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The stakes are very high here. And then following the God giving them up in verse 24,

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God has given up the pagans in the lust of their hearts to impurity. Verse 26 has a second giving up.

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There's three in this passage. For this reason, verse 26, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

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And what follows there is all sorts of sexual aberration, initially in a heterosexual form and then in a homosexual form in verse 27.

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And because of that, verse 28, they did not acknowledge God. God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

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And now follows a Pandora's horrible box of every evil imaginable that floods the world.

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And all of this is because they did not see fit to acknowledge

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God. And that points us to just how high the stakes are with acknowledging

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God and giving thanks to God and seeing the 14 ,999 instead of focusing on the one in our lives.

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If ingratitude is allowed to seep into our life bit by bit by bit, like a tide coming in as the day goes on imperceptibly, quietly.

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If bitterness and anxiety is allowed to creep into our heart bit by bit by bit, quietly, what will end up happening is that we will not acknowledge

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God. We will not give thanks to God and we will not worship God.

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The stakes are high, as I am at pains to say. And all of this will mean that we have a debased mind.

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And that is what paganism is militated to creating. It wants to create a debased mind because behind paganism is not

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God, but is the anti -God, the devil. Behind these developments in American society that we've been talking about and will continue to talk about is not

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God, in terms of one who wants these things to happen. God is sovereign over it all.

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But the one who is wanting this wickedness to increase is the devil.

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And so, as the old biography of Martin Luther captured, we are caught between God and the devil.

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Every human person is. And it's a matter of whether we will worship and follow the devil, or whether we will worship and follow

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God. So, this is where we are. We are amidst the worship of mankind.

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We are amidst worshipers of the flesh. It's not just that people are confused about their gender.

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The body of ideology that is targeting our children and our college students is demonic ideology.

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It is trying to get us to live out an alternate design of God's design.

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We've talked about God's design for manhood and womanhood. We've talked about God's design for sex and sexuality already.

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Satan's design is the opposite of all that. Satan doesn't teach one man, one woman marriage for life.

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Satan teaches marriage can be anything you want it to be, not just with one person, but with any amount of people, whoever they may be, man or woman, that you would prefer.

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So, God creates and Satan perverts. God creates and Satan twists.

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Satan is fundamentally the twister. He is the one who doesn't necessarily undo creation.

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He is the one who comes into creation and warps it. And he wants to warp the minds and the hearts of our young people today.

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The Bible teaches biblical manhood. Satan teaches warped manhood, where men are either too weak or too strong.

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The Bible teaches biblical womanhood, a woman as a nurturer and a helper. But Satan teaches what we call today feminism, which is not the biblical ideal of the woman.

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The Bible teaches that sex is for marriage, but Satan teaches that you can enjoy sex with whomever you would like at any time.

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The Bible teaches that there is one man, one woman, that there are two sexes. That's it in the creation.

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And you can't change your God -given sex. But Satan says you can change your sex.

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Has God actually said there's just man and woman? No, there's this thing called transgender.

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And there's many different gender identities. And so however you perceive yourself to be, that is who you are.

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The Bible teaches what we call heterosexuality as a design. But Satan teaches that homosexuality is good to the degree that, verse 32, back to Romans 1, they know

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God's righteous decree. They know God's righteous decree, Paul says. That those who practice such things deserve to die.

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The pagan knows that what they're doing deserves death. They know it. As they're celebrating

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Pride Month right now, don't be confused. They know at some level that this is wrong and that it's the way of death.

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But they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

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What we are seeing with Pride Month is the flowering of this, isn't it?

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Take pride in your flesh. Take pride in homosexuality. Take pride in transgenderism.

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Take pride in polysexuality. Take pride in having sex with whoever you want to have sex with.

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Excuse the direct language, but that is the flowering of paganism.

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And this is the system of worship of paganism. This is how you worship according to Satan.

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That's Satan's book, worship according to the flesh.

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That's what he wants us all to practice. This is nothing less than an ideology that culminates in basically a worldview.

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It's a worldview. It's how people are being deceived to live.

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All of this alternate worldview that I just mapped with all those differences, those distinctions, all of that is trying to get you to deny the goodness of God's design.

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Where the gospel calls you to honor the goodness of God's design.

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The gospel calls you to want to be a man to God's glory. The gospel calls you to want to be a woman to God's glory.

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The gospel doesn't just call adults to this. The gospel calls 10 -year -olds and 13 -year -olds and 7 -year -olds and 18 -year -olds and 25 -year -olds to live for the glory of God.

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The gospel makes us a worshiper of Jesus Christ. That's what the gospel does.

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And in making us a worshiper of Jesus Christ, God overcomes the power of the flesh that Paul has mapped out in Romans 1.

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You and I still have pagan instincts to different degrees. Everyone in here, let's get real for a sec.

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Everyone in here has a certain wildness in the heart. The heart is not a neat and tame reality.

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The heart is not a hallmark heart, okay? A little heart on a card. I can't, now men do this in public, like soccer players.

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And like European soccer players will do this to the camera after they score a goal. And I'm like, I said to my kids the other day,

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I try to be balanced and nuanced. And I said, men should not do the little heart in public. I'm sorry, I apologize for being a legalist.

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But I don't think that men should do a little heart in public. You can do it to your daughter or something. Okay, anyway, let's move off of that.

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God's glory is in us living in these ways. But Satan has this alternate ideology and this alternate worldview that he wants us to live.

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What should we do in this kind of context? I'm going to conclude this session earlier than I have a few of the others.

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So I'm going to just rip through five ways we respond to paganism. Five ways we respond to paganism.

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As you're prepping that, hear that last thought. Let me just say a quick word about that last thought.

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It's not just that the pagans have these instincts. It's that we have these instincts.

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This is why you hear the reports about some pastor who has had a seemingly very sound ministry.

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I don't mean in far off circles. I mean like in our circles. And all of a sudden his marriage blows up and he leaves his wife and children after 20 to 30 to 40 years in the

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Christian ministry. And you're like, how could that happen? It can happen because he has a certain wildness in his heart that we have in our heart.

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The power of sin is overcome by the cross of Christ. That's good news. But we have to live carefully, don't we?

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Isn't that what Paul says to Timothy? Watch your life and doctrine closely.

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This is a young man trained by an apostle. If anyone has good preloaded software, it's

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Timothy, right? The apostle Paul has mentored him. It's a pretty good CV reference for the church to call when you're interviewing for a pastorate.

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Who are your references? Well, Jim from the next town over, this weird guy

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Owen, and then the apostle Paul. Okay, okay. All right, we'll call your references. Apostle Paul is a good reference.

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It's to Timothy, Paul says. Watch yourself. Careful. That's not because we are pagans as Christians.

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That is because we still are battling the flesh. We're still battling it.

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We all are battling it. All of us. A lot of sin to battle until we die.

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And we have to watch ourselves carefully. We all have the seeds within us of our own destruction, man and woman alike.

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And that applies not just when we're young, but all throughout life. So what do we do?

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What do we do? What do we do? First, first, help people understand lies.

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Help people understand they're living not under one lie. They're living under many lies today.

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There are lots of lies that are being sold to us in America in the West in 2024.

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And here is a major part of Christian witness to calmly, temperately, steadily unpack those lies for people.

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I don't mean in a shouting match at work or your neighborhood. I mean, as you get to know each other and you build a relationship as a

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Christian witness, you're talking things through and they say, well, I just think it's wonderful now that we've moved into a more inclusive society.

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And you say, what do you mean by that? How do you define inclusivity? Do we include everything?

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Do we include pedophilia in what we affirm today? Do we include, you know, murder?

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What are the limits of inclusivity? Are there any limits as you understand this? And then as the conversation goes on in steadiness and love, you are clear.

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You look back at this person made in the image of God and you say, these are lies. These are lies that we've been fed.

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These are not true. This is not God's truth that you're believing. Some of you know the story of Rosaria Butterfield.

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Who knows that name? Just quickly. Rosaria Butterfield, quick example of this, professor of queer theory.

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How about paganism there? At Syracuse University, massive platform, very gifted woman, very smart.

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Hundreds and hundreds of students in her classes. And this local pastor reaches out to her through a variety of circumstances.

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And Rosaria ends up, she's a curious person. So she's like, I'll go talk to a Presbyterian pastor, even though I'm as far away from that as I can possibly be.

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And they end up starting a friendship. They have dinner multiple times. She comes to his house, Christian hospitality and involved in gospel witness there.

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And long story short, through a very winding process, this professor of queer theory is born again.

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The kind of person you look at and you're like, they're never going to cross the line of faith. I don't have the resource.

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Maybe like some apologist out there that we could fly in. That guy could be a witness maybe to these people, but this person, but not me.

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No, no, no. It's not about your background. It's not about your credentials.

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It's not about your qualification. It's about the power of the gospel. It's about the spirit in you.

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So that's a wonderful example of how that pastor didn't just share the gospel.

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He did, but he walked through lies. He exposed the lies of godless ideologies.

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That's what Paul talks about in second Corinthians 10, three to six. We destroy strongholds.

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He says, we destroy strongholds. Destroying strongholds is walking people through the lies.

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Satan has entrapped around them like those horrible, horrible, horrible spiders, massive spiders in the

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Lord of the Rings movies that just, you can barely stay in the room. You're like, ah, Peter Jackson made these spiders.

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So freaky. We want to introduce our kids to the Lord of the Rings films, but I have one daughter who is so freaked out.

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I don't know that she's going to come back from seeing these spiders. So we're still, we've delayed. Okay.

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But anyway, we have to do that unpacking work because people are not living free and clear and living their life in actuality.

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People are trapped in a spider web, a spider web of Satan's making, and they're in thick and they can't get out.

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And so we come to them with the sword of truth, Ephesians 6, and we slash that spider web in love to get them out as God works.

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Second, we have to help people understand lies. Second, we have to show the distinctness of Christianity.

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We have to show the beautiful distinctness of Christianity. We've talked about this at length.

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I won't go into it here, but that's where the doxological effect of our life takes place.

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That's where you're worshiping God, not just when you go to a worship service, but you're worshiping

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God by living a Christian life in your community, in your neighborhood, around your peers, around your coworkers at school.

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That's what is needed. We don't need a Christian prince. We don't need a huge celebrity to come and make

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America right. We don't need 10 more Billy Grahams. I mean, God may give who

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He may give. If He gives us an amazing evangelist in this generation, praise God. But that's not what the

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New Testament tells us to expect. Do you know what our world needs? Do you know what America needs?

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It needs a whole lot of Christians who are normal, steady people who just live a Christian life. That's what's needed.

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But I don't just mean the ideal. Do what's right, Christian. I mean people who make clear to fellow sinners.

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I'm just a forgiven person. I've taken to saying that in our family times when we read

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Scripture and we have some song nights in my home. And I'm trying to help my kids understand.

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Christians are not perfect people. Christians are forgiven people.

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That's a Christian, a forgiven person. And so we need to help people around us who are not forgiven understand the line between them and us is not we're really consecutively performing righteous people.

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It's forgiveness. We've got to show the beautiful distinction of Christianity in love.

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Third, we need healthy churches that preach these truths in love.

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We need healthy churches that preach these truths in love. Churches that aren't fundamentally angry at the world and scared of the world.

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There's a lot that is fearful in this world. We need something better than fearful

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Christians. We need Christians anchored in the truth of God who are secure in God so they can go out and they can be salt and light.

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Fourth, we need Christians who see themselves as salt and light individually. I just talked about that, but just to line it out here.

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We need Christians who see themselves as salt and light. When you see a skittle -haired person, when you see somebody who is clearly transgressing the bounds of their

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God -given sex, you know, you've got kids, your kids will nudge you. Dad, is that a man dressing like a woman?

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The way you respond is so important because it is right to see that as not good at all.

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To see that as pagan rebellion, fleshly rebellion. That's Satan's system that person is living in.

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Make no mistake about it. Call a spade a spade. But what you're trying to train your kids to understand is not that, oh, get out of the restaurant now.

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That what you're trying to help kids understand is hopefully we can talk to this person. Hopefully we can befriend this person.

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Hopefully we can invite this person to church. Hopefully they'll show up and hear the word preached. That's success.

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That's faithfulness. That's salt and light. There won't be a shred, as point one tried to articulate, of buying into that person's system.

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We won't affirm their sin. One bit. Just like we don't want our sin affirmed, right?

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But what we do want to do is be like Jesus, who was called the friend of sinners.

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And I'm going to cut it straight with you right now in our Reformed community. We don't have enough of this right now.

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We have a lot of the instinct to withdraw from the world, to not go to Disney, to boycott this outlet, to cut the cord with Netflix.

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And some of those things maybe we should do. That's Christian freedom. That's liberty. You may have very good reasons for taking some of those actions.

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Certainly there's a lot we don't watch and there's a lot of places we don't go as believers, right? Absolutely that's true.

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But we have too much withdraw instinct and not enough engage instinct.

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Don't buy the lies of the culture. But you and I are called to press into the darkness, not to retreat from it and wait up on a hill somewhere until Jesus returns.

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We got to press in. Is it easy to do that? It's easy to say this. Is it easy to do?

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No, no. It's hard to stay in the restaurant, in the line, right behind the person living a lie, a man dressing as a woman.

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You feel very uncomfortable. You're uncomfortable for your child. And of course, there are all sorts of ways we are careful.

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And we do shield our children in particular from these evil ideologies. But in terms of people, at some level, we don't want to leave.

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At some level, we pray to stay and engage this person just like we were engaged.

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And God saved us. They're no worse than us. They may be expressing their depravity more publicly.

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They're a sinner just like us. We've got too much withdraw right now in the reformed community. We've got too much withdraw in the conservative evangelical world.

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We need more. We're not a military garrison over here. Just hold away in our fortresses, okay?

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You have to have garrisons, don't you? But we have to think of ourselves more as forward operating bases.

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That's what we are. We come back in the walls. We need the walls. We protect our kids in our homes.

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We absolutely do. We shepherd our kids. It's not a free -for -all in our homes where anything goes, right?

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Absolutely not. Absolutely not. We live according to God's design by the power of God's grace in our homes.

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We have. We have shelter, baby. We got shelter. These kids live under our protection.

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We fathers and mothers, we love these kids. We are plugged in. We are engaged. We communicate with them.

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We love them. But then that's not it. Then we go out on missions, on missions to save sinners as God works.

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We're forward operating bases. We're not static garrisons.

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Fifth and finally, we've got to preach the gospel and we've got to do so confidently.

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Satan makes you feel so weak when you preach the gospel. All you're doing is preaching the gospel.

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That's all you're doing. That's the power of God unto salvation. Romans 1, 16 and 17.

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That's the power of God. The power of God is not called in the New Testament, civil law.

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The power of God is not called philosophical persuasion. The power of God is not called a great personality.

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The power of God is not celebrity that you then can use with your platform to reach everybody.

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The power of God is the gospel. That's where the horsepower is. So that's what we need to be.

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We need to be people who are confident, not in ourselves, but in the gospel. And do not fear the world.

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And that is witness. We need people who out worship the world, not in our own strength, but by the grace of God.

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Thank you for listening to the latest podcast from Kootenai Church. If you'd like to learn more about Kootenai Church or to donate to our church ministry, you can do so online by visiting kootenaichurch .org.

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We hope you enjoyed this podcast and pray you'll join us again next time.