I Wasted My 20s Ruling A Fake Kingdom

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All right, so if any of you guys were watching Reform Jellicle last night live, me and Matt were talking about the idea of Christians losing well and how

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Christians are supposed to be losers and all of this kind of stuff, and we were laughing about it and really countering it with the many

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Bible verses that talk about Christians being conquerors and kings and reigning with Christ.

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And I want to share with you, as soon as the camera went off, I kind of sat with myself for a moment, and I had a moment of extreme shame that I want to tell you about, and hopefully you can use my shame as a way forward and as a way to avoid some of the mistakes

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I've made in the past. Yeah, so let me tell you about what

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I was ashamed of, and it's something from my past before I was a Christian, and you know, there are aspects of it that I even kind of struggle against today, and you know,

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I want to encourage you in your fight, in your own personal walk with Jesus, that this is something that you need to watch out for in your activities and your actions and stuff like that.

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And I want to use as a springboard 2 Timothy chapter 2 verses 11 and 12. This is one of those verses that we read it so often we almost have it memorized, but sometimes we don't stop and think about what it really means.

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Like, if we really internalize this truth, it blows my mind what this verse actually says.

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This is what the Word of God says, The saying is trustworthy, for if we have died with him, we will also live with him.

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If we endure, we will also reign with him. Reigning with Christ, that is something that is amazing, and there's a sense in which we have this right now, and then there's a sense in which it'll be fulfilled at the end.

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At the end, we'll be reigning with Christ, we'll have our thrones with Christ, and we'll be enjoying the fullness of what it means to reign with Christ after the resurrection and all of that kind of stuff.

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But there's a sense in which that's something that we're supposed to be doing right now. In fact, in the book of Genesis, God gives

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Adam dominion over everything that he's created and stuff like that. And now we know that in the fall, we gave up that dominion, right?

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And so that was a horrible decision that mankind made at that moment, and we lost the dominion over creation, the authority to sort of fulfill the vocation that Christ had given us in the creation.

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But then when Christ came, when Jesus came, he's the second Adam, and now we have that back, right?

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And so when he gives us the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations, what he's telling us to do is to share in his kingly office, in the sense that, you know, we fight against the devil, we kick down the gates of hell, we defeat his minions, we reign with Christ over creation, we get that mandate back.

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And that's an amazing, amazing thing that we need to recognize and we need to internalize in our everyday lives, like we're reigning with Christ right now.

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We're reigning with Christ right now. And so we understand that Christ has commands that he gives his people.

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We don't have authority in and of ourselves, we have authority through Christ, right? And so in our spheres of influence—me and Matt talk about this all the time—in our spheres, in our families, for example, we need to reign with Christ in our families according to how

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God has told us to reign in our families. And so that's something that every

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Christian man needs to take very, very seriously. Every Christian pastor, likewise, needs to reign according to God's rules in his family, and needs to lead the church and rule in the church according to God's commands and things like that.

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We also often talk about the civil governing authorities as well, that they need to reign with Christ, and they need to understand that they have authority given to them by God, and they have to do things according to God's commands.

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That's what, you know, the Great Commission is talking about—teaching them to observe everything that I've commanded.

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That means rule and reign with Christ according to Christ's commands in the areas that you have influence.

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And so for many men, like I'll just talk about myself for an example, and then you can kind of relate to this in whatever way you want, for many men some of us have a small piece of property, right?

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We have our own home, we have our own families and our own situations, and so we ought to be using that property, whatever it is, if it's land, if it's a house, if it's a condo, whatever it is.

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Or even if you don't own a piece of property like that, but you do own certain things—a car, whatever it is—you should be using those tools for Christ's kingdom.

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You should be taking ground and advancing the kingdom and obeying everything He commanded in those areas of influence, those spheres of authority.

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You should be the king of those things that you own, right? You should be ruling and reigning with Christ according to His commands in the areas that—and it might be smaller, it might be larger, you might have an estate, you might have a lot of property, you might have a little bit, but whatever it is, you need to be showing yourself faithful, ruling and reigning with Christ in the areas that you have authority over, whatever that looks like for you.

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Now, here's what I'm ashamed of. So, when

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I lived in New York City, I made a lot of money. And, you know, just to kind of give you an idea,

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I had an apartment in Midtown. It was a small apartment, but it was an expensive apartment, and it had a view of the

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Empire State Building from the apartment. It had a deck and a wood -burning fireplace.

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Like, it was a ridiculously expensive apartment. I could technically afford it, but it was way too much money to be spending on an apartment, given my situation.

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I was living a lifestyle that was indistinguishable from the pagans. And so, what

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I was doing—and I've come to terms with this since then—but I was going to the best restaurants, and I was spending tons of money on that.

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I was going to bars, and I was having drinks served to me, and stuff like clubs, you know.

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You'd go to the club. I don't know if you've ever been to a club. There's a very good chance that people that watch this channel have never been to like a

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New York City club. But they've got private sections. You get a table. You pay for this table, and they serve you drinks, and this and that.

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And I've been to places that no man should ever go to. I'm talking about places, strip clubs, and things of that nature.

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And I'm ashamed of all of that. And I've only recently come to terms with what exactly it was

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I was doing. I was taking drugs. Every indulgence of the flesh that you could imagine,

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I was taking part in. I used to do cocaine. I used to do other kinds of stimulants like that.

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And I was just living like a disaster. And it's like, well, why was

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I doing that? And I think what happened there is that I was attempting to rule and reign, but not with Christ.

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I was attempting to rule and reign in my own way. And all of it was just an illusion.

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Like I was making a lot of money, but I was always spending a few steps ahead. I maxed out credit cards, and all kinds of stuff like that.

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I was always living ahead of where I was making money. So I was making good money, but I was always living ahead of it.

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This is how I came to myself, by the way. I was like the prodigal son. I was just spending like there's no tomorrow on all kinds of indulgences.

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And what was I doing? Well, when I went to the restaurant, I was being treated like a king. I was ordering the best foods.

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They would send me a menu of all these foreign foods, and I would pick whatever I wanted. They'd make it for me.

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They'd come out with the white towel on there. How was it? Was it to your liking?

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Would you like a more drink? I was being treated like a king. When I went to those bars, and I was doing drugs and stuff like that, what was happening there?

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They were treating me like a king. Someone that was important. Someone that was influential.

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I was paying them for this service, but they were doing it. It was almost like a counterfeit way to be a king.

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Being a king according to the pagans, though. That's the thing. When you watch movies about pagan kings and stuff like that, what's going on in those movies?

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What's going on? They've got feasts. They've got smorgasbords of all kinds of foreign foods and fruits and all kinds of drinking and stuff like that.

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They've got magicians and sorcery going on, which is essentially drugs. That's what sorcery is.

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It's using different psychedelics and things like that. All these things that I was doing. They've got women dancing around and things of that nature.

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I'll tell you right now, that's what I was attempting to recreate when

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I lived in New York City. I was recreating it, and so I would feel like a king on the weekends.

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I'd work all week, and then on the weekends I would go to bars, restaurants, these clubs, and I would feel like I was somebody important.

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I would feel like I was ruling and reigning. All I had to do was sign a credit card statement at the end of the night, but I could feel like a king the rest of the time.

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It was counterfeit. I wasted so much time and so much money on the feeling, the counterfeit feeling of being a king.

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But you see, the reality is that that desire to reign is not necessarily bad.

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The thing is, though, you need to reign with Christ. You need to reign according to Christ's principles.

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You see, what does the Bible say in the psalm? King David writes about God.

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He writes about the Lord, and he says, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy.

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At your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. You see, I was trying to use a shortcut to get to the places that I wanted to be.

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I wanted to get the pleasures forevermore, but I didn't want it according to God's principles. And so what

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I did was I exchanged it. The real stuff, the good stuff, the stuff that I'm living right now,

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I exchanged it for a counterfeit. And all that counterfeit did was dig me into a further and further hole, more and more into depravity, more and more into debt, and it was all counterfeit.

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I recently looked back at some of my expenses back when I was living in New York City, and it was just insane the amount of debt that I got into.

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I was able to get out of it fairly quickly because, you know, God was very kind to me, and I was able to, you know,

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I had a good job and all that kind of stuff, but it was insane. I would be in such a better position right now had

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I not done that back then, if I had just ruled and reigned with Christ instead of according to whatever

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I thought I wanted to do. You see, I was trying to live like a pagan king back then, and what

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I did was I just faked it for a while, and eventually I couldn't keep up with faking it anymore.

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I came to the end of myself, and then I converted to Jesus because I understood that what I was doing was was wrong.

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It was sinful. It was awful. I remember I even did something that pagan kings used to do back in the day, like pagan kings back in the day.

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Even godly kings did this kind of thing. They would try to take other people's wives.

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They were never satisfied with what was theirs. They would take other people's wives. King David did this, and that's one of the worst things

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I ever did was I had a girlfriend that was married. She was married, and then she broke it off with me, and I felt like, how dare she?

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How dare she do that to me? That was twisted, and I remember at the time I wasn't even upset.

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I was breaking up a family. I was upset that she had ended it. Like, how dare she do that to me? Because I was pretending that I was like this influential king.

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Like, how could she do that to the king? That's shameful. That's shameful, so I would suggest that if your life is in a situation right now where you're doing a lot of things that make you feel like a king, but they're actually not the things that God says a king ought to do, that you kind of re -evaluate some of that stuff.

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I know a lot of people that are in trouble with debt and stuff like that, and yet they go out to restaurants all the time.

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There's nothing wrong with restaurants, guys, and nothing wrong at all, but what you're doing when you're going to a restaurant and you're in debt, you can't afford it.

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You're going to a restaurant on your credit card. You can't really afford going to a restaurant. What you're doing is you're pretending to be a king.

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There's no reason to pretend to be a king. You don't need to be treated like a king to reign with Christ, you see, because you can obey 2

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Timothy chapter 2 verse 11 and 12, regardless of how much money you have, because all

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God is requiring of you is to obey him and obey his commands in the spheres of influence that he has given you.

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That doesn't mean you don't try to expand that. Like, you know, you have a certain amount of property or whatever, you want to get more, you want to expand your wealth, you want to have an inheritance to give to your children's children and stuff like that.

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There's no sin, there's no crime in getting after it so that you have an inheritance to leave to your children's children.

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In fact, a righteous man does that, but he does it according to Christ's rules and Christ's commands.

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That's the key here. If we're going to reign with Christ, then we need to reign with Christ. We can't just reign on our own and expect anything to happen because that's how you end up faking it.

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And the thing is, people say you fake it till you make it. Oftentimes you fake it and you never make it. So don't fake it.

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Reign in the areas that Christ has given you as your authority. Don't pretend to be a king in areas where you're not a king, and don't pretend to be a king by disobeying

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God's law and God's commands. That's a recipe for disaster every single time.

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Here's an article that I found about reigning with Christ from Ligonier, and I thought that that this was really good how they ended this.

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It says this, it says the truth that we are kings and queens in Christ is not some idea conjured up to boost our self -esteem, but a present reality that we will enjoy in its fullness at the resurrection of the dead.

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You see, that's the thing. I was attempting to boost my self -esteem by acting like a king on the weekends, and let me just tell you something, it didn't work.

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So let's not pretend, let's not fake it, let's actually embrace what

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God has given us, the callings he has given us, the different spheres of authority he's given us, and let's be kings because we are in those areas.

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Let's rule and reign with Christ according to Christ's command. Anyway, I don't know if you'll find that helpful or whatever, but I'm not looking for anyone to feel sorry for me.

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I have a great life, and I am very content and grateful that God has been as merciful to me as he has.

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So yeah, don't feel sorry for me or anything like that. I thought you might find that helpful, because I know that back when

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I was living the pagan lifestyle, I was just no -holds -barred, just doing whatever I wanted to do, but now

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I'm reigning with Christ. I'm trying to do things according to God's law and God's commands, but still there'll be times when

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I'm like, well yeah, well I deserve that though. Maybe I could, maybe I should do that. I deserve that, and I can start to feel that sort of same feeling where it's like I want to be treated like a king, but it's like I don't deserve that.

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I mean, if I can afford it, then that's one thing, but I don't deserve that. I have to do things according to God's commands, and I'm laser focused right now on providing for my family the way

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God has commanded and providing for the future generations the way God has commanded, and that's gonna require a certain amount of discipline in the here and now for me.

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Maybe it requires more discipline than it would have if I had not squandered so much of my income and wealth before, but I did, and here's where I'm at, so I can't really change that.

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What I can do is work towards that goal in the future. Whatever your area of influence is, however much money you have, however much property you have, however much influence you have, obey

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Christ and, in that way, rule and reign with him. We're not losers. We're kings and queens more than conquerors, so we need to get to work.

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I hope you found this video helpful. God bless. Here's a verse that's directly related to all of this.

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So if you're pretending to be a king, you want to live like a king, you want people to treat you like a king, you can't be doing it the way the pagans do because those are the ways that destroy kings.

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So if you're gonna reign with Christ, if you're gonna reign on judge angels and all of these things, then you need to do that in ways that are productive, ways that are actually establishing thrones, not ways that destroy those thrones.

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And so all the practices that you see on TV, all the indulgence, the feasts, the women, the, you know, just the violence, all that stuff, the sorcery, you got to set that stuff aside because that's not what the

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Bible talks about when it talks about reigning with Christ. Those are the ways that destroy kings. Give not your strength unto women.

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You read about the kings of Israel and the ways that they were compromised and the ways that led to their destruction, and it was always compromising and idolatry and all of that kind of stuff.

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Look, there's nothing wrong with taking vacations and enjoying life. There's nothing wrong with going to a nice club or a nice bar or something like that.

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There's nothing wrong with any of those things, but you have to do them in ways that are congruent, that are compatible with God's commands and God's laws.

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That's always how we do it. You can't follow God's laws by breaking God's laws. And so you got to think about your ways, you know what

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I mean? Think about the things that you practice, the things that you do, and are they ways that establish kingdoms or are they ways that destroy kings?