Jeff Durbin || Righteousness Exalts a Nation

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If you would open your Bibles to the book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 14.

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We're making our way through this amazing book of divine wisdom, skill in living.

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How do we live, not simply claims to knowledge, but how do you live skillfully as God's image bearer in God's world?

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The book of Proverbs, wisdom from above. And today we're in Proverbs chapter 14 and verse 34.

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Hear now the word of the living and the true God. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

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As far as the reading of God's holy and inspired word, let's pray together as God's people. Lord, these are your words.

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You alone are worthy of worship. You are the standard of justice and righteousness.

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The sum of your word is truth and all your righteous rules endure forever.

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And Lord, we come together as your people, recognizing our full dependence upon you and your spirit to teach and to guide.

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We pray that the word today would change our minds and our hearts, that you would do something in us by your spirit to bring glory to your name and the nation that you've placed us.

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Help us, God, to see, to understand, and to live the way you call us to.

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Lord, we pray for the healing of this nation. We pray for national repentance. We pray for reformation.

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We pray for a revival, God, according to your truth. We pray that you would get the teacher out of the way today, that these would not be the words of a mere man, but the words coming from your word,

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God, through your spirit. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Proverbs 1434, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

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Seems obvious, it couldn't be clearer. These are the words of God. I think the average professing

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Christian, whether nominal or not, would look at a verse like this and say, well of course that's true.

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Even people who don't have commitments to Jesus and His authority, His lordship, His law, word.

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Maybe people who are engaging in a sort of popular Christless conservatism will look at the nation we're living in today and say something is legitimately wrong, something is clearly wrong, something is broken.

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The change is radical and it is happening so fast in every sphere of life.

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And they would say, yeah, that makes sense, I see a verse like that, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

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The text couldn't be clearer. And the problem though is, is that we live in a time of a theologically weak -minded and cowardly church.

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We lack prophetic vision. And by the way, when you hear that word prophetic vision, you know, people,

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Christians tend to think of prophecy in terms of the foretelling of the future, because that's in Scripture.

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Prophecy, prophetic. We think about someone saying, thus sayeth the Lord, in this time period, in this generation, this is gonna happen.

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And the Bible is, yes, filled with that kind of prophetic word. This is a foretelling.

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This is before it happens, I'm telling you what God says, He's the sovereign, and there's a foretelling of future events, and the

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Bible is distinct amongst all man -made religious traditions in that when the

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Bible gives prophecy, the standard is 100 % pinpoint accuracy.

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There are no fails, no ability to fail in prophecy, and only God can do that, because He's the only true sovereign who is wielding all of history in the universe, and so you have prophetic word that is a foretelling of the future, and then you have, of course, a prophetic vision, a prophetic word that is more of a foretelling.

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God says, and I'm bringing that to you, and so when I say that we are right now in the midst of a theologically weak -minded and cowardly church in the

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West, and that we lack prophetic vision, I'm talking about that foretelling of God's word.

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Bringing the word of God to the world, we lack that. We won't do it with the kind of courage that is necessary, and you've seen so many times in Christian history.

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We shy away from the authoritative claims of Christ, the goodness of and the commands of God's law.

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We fear men rather than God. We love our stuff and our lives more than God and our neighbors, and so we offer a weak, pathetic, and standardless

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Christ to the world, plunging it into the rot and decay that we see all around us.

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And so yeah, we might say righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach upon any people.

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I agree with that, but what's wrong around about us? What's wrong in the world around us?

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Why is it falling off the cliff so rapidly? The word from God in the same book of wisdom, go to Proverbs chapter 29, verse 18.

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It's a scripture you've heard many times from us before. It's one of Pastor Luke's favorite verses to quote.

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Proverbs 29, verse 18, book of wisdom says, where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint.

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These are the words of God, where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint.

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But blessed is he who keeps the law. Isn't that true?

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Can't you see that all around us? No prophetic vision, no word coming from the people of God, no prophetic vision, people cast off restraint.

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It couldn't be clearer, but blessed is he who keeps the law. Now, there's what the word of God says about the problem.

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But if you look at Proverbs 14 again, let's look at it together again. Proverbs 14, 34, let's unpack the text.

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Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. We have to ask the question, when we see the word righteousness, what does that mean in the word of God?

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It's throughout the word of God, from beginning all the way to the end. It's used in many different ways in many different contexts.

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But generally speaking, when we think about righteousness throughout scripture, we're talking about something that is right, that is just, that is upright.

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Right, just, and upright, righteousness. In scripture, you see

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God's concern for the righteous, the righteous people, the godly ones,

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God's saints. You see God's concern for the righteous in Psalm 34, 15. The text says, the eyes of the

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Lord are toward the righteous, and his ears toward their cry.

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So there are those who are God's people, they're the godly ones, the saints, the set -apart ones.

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And those are the ones that God is looking towards. Those are the ones that God inclines his ear towards.

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And so there are people who are righteous. The righteous ones. Now, of course, we know in scripture there's different categories of thought.

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Scripture teaches there is, what, none, what, righteous. Romans chapter 3.

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That's the category of our estrangement and our alienation from God. We fall short of the glory of God.

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There is nothing in us that can repair this. There's nobody good enough, there aren't enough good deeds, there's no amount of righteousness, because there is none righteous, not even one.

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And that is in terms of our relationship with God as image -bearers in the fall.

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We are not good, we are non -God -seeking, we are not righteous. However, scripture does have another category of those who are called righteous.

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There is the unrighteous nature of all of us in terms of our alienation from God, our need for Jesus, our need for a perfect righteousness to stand before God.

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And yet scripture does say that there is a category of the righteous.

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These are God's people, they are the upright ones, they are the ones who love justice, they uphold justice, they are the holy ones, the separate ones.

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And it says in scripture that he is concerned for the righteous. His eyes are towards them, his ears are towards them.

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But the text says righteousness exalts a nation. So what is that? Well, you could do a lot on this, we could last weeks on this, in terms of unpacking what all the scripture says about righteousness, justice, righteous, but an example in terms of how do you get the force of this.

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There is an example of Hebrew parallelism you see all throughout the Old Testament, where we see this word paralleled with being upright.

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In Psalm 32, 11, the text says be glad in the Lord and rejoice,

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O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

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So you see there the parallelism, the Hebrew parallelism, where you have righteous paralleled with upright.

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And so when you look at the text, Proverbs 14, 34, righteousness exalts a nation.

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What would that look like? It would look like those who are upright, those who walk in an upright way.

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Righteousness exalts a nation. Righteousness is also contrasted with wickedness.

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The text of Psalm 37, 12 says, for the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the

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Lord upholds the righteous. So you see there, they're putting contrast to one another in terms of what is righteousness, what is the righteous, what do you look like?

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Well, it's actually contrasted with the wicked, with those who depart from God's ways, which is really the meaning of the word wicked, those who depart from.

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And so we have righteous, wicked. We have righteous and the upright. The text again says righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

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So what's the problem? Why the fall off? Why so much decay? Why so much rot and brokenness all around us in a place where there was a lot of gospel blessing, this nation?

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There's no utopia behind us at all in the history of the church. There's good moves, blessings, transformation, and face plants throughout church history.

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But in this nation, in this place, there was a lot of gospel fruit, a lot of gospel fruit in terms of the message of the gospel and reconciliation and peace with God.

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A lot of the blessings of the law of God in culture all around us. And so what's wrong?

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How do we get to this place? Well, I think there's a number of things that could be said in terms of, well, how do we get here?

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What's broken? Because we want to get to that righteousness exalting a nation. So I think that our problem is that we are confused today as the church, as God's bride, as God's help meet to bring his gospel to the world, to bless the world with the message of eternal life.

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We're confused as to what the standard of righteousness is. And we don't seem to think today that God is concerned either.

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We're confused about what the standard is. And we seem to think that God isn't very concerned with the way the world is actually running.

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We don't really think that there's a telos, a goal of Christian history where there is the meek inheriting the earth.

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We don't really think in terms of Christ having dominion from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth.

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We tend to think like, again, the popular view today is, well, it's all going to go bad anyways.

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We lose down here anyways. What's the point? Yeah, that's true. Righteousness exalts a nation, but we can't necessarily anticipate any nation really looking like that.

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And I think that, again, there's two problems in terms of Christian thinking. One is we don't seem to know what the standard of righteousness is.

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And two, we don't think that God is really concerned. Now, just to quickly address the issue of Christians today and the law of God, we tend to think today, right, in evangelicalism, like, well, the law doesn't really apply anymore, right?

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I mean, we've talked about this many times at Apology of Church. We tend to think about God in the Old Testament as very concerned with righteousness.

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It's everywhere. Very concerned with justice. Very concerned with equal weights and measures.

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Very concerned with not showing partiality. Very concerned with loving God, loving neighbor, keeping his statutes.

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And boy, oh boy, aren't we glad that we have Jesus now, who delivers us from that very harsh and, like, law -keeping

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God. And that is just not the message of the Scriptures. At all. It's one unified message.

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Same God, same gospel from beginning to end. And you will not find that perspective on the law of God coming from Jesus or the apostles.

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They assume the abiding validity and goodness of God's law. Are there changes in terms of the new covenant?

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Are there changes in terms of the law? Absolutely. And those are explained in the New Testament. How come we don't have a temple anymore?

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Because Christ is our temple. How come we don't offer sacrifices anymore? How come we're not doing the

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Day of Atonement anymore? Because we have a once -for -all sacrifice, amen? Never to be repeated.

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It's all finished. How come we don't have a line of priests anymore? We're not having one rise up after another because we have a high priest forever who's in the right hand of God who intercedes for us forever, amen?

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So yes, but here's the thing in terms of the law of God. We still have sacrifice today, don't we?

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But it's a once -for -all sacrifice. The law of God is still valid. It's still abiding.

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We still have a temple. We still have a priest. We still have mediation. We still have a blood sacrifice. It's just fulfilled in Jesus.

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The law of God is good and it is abiding. But again, Christians tend to think today like, well, thank

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God we are finally rescued from that really mean law God who cares so much about justice and righteousness in the earth and now we just have

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Jesus who saves us from all of that and we get to just maybe escape from here one day to go off into heaven.

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That's really the goal of history. Not according to the Bible. The kingdom of God is the central theme, one of the central themes throughout

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Scripture. The rule of God in the world, heaven, coming to earth again and filling the earth with the glory of God.

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And so, we think the law of God doesn't apply. Or if it does apply, Christians will tend to say, well, no, okay, yes, the law of God does apply.

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But it applies to me. It applies to my family. It applies to my church huddle, my church family.

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But the law of God isn't necessarily something that God is imposing or expecting out there in the world, which of course is contrary to the words of God themselves.

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I mean, Scripture talks a lot about this in terms of the accountability of all mankind to God's law and His standards.

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I'll give you just some examples to work with. Again, we're doing this quickly today. Just as an example of what's broken, go to Romans chapter three to see this from an inspired apostle.

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Romans chapter three. Again, this is in terms of when Christians will say something like, well, yeah, it matters to me, but those standards aren't necessarily something

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God requires of the world or is expecting from the world in Romans three, verse 19.

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Just after the apostle Paul explains this universal indictment upon all mankind,

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Jew and Gentile, that's everybody, he then says, 319, now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God.

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So does God expect that His standards, His statutes,

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His law will be something that the whole world is accountable to? It couldn't be clearer.

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God expects all of mankind to obey His law, to act like an image bearer of God, to look like God in their uprightness, in their character, in how they speak.

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The whole world will have their mouth shut by the law of God. They'll all be accountable to God. Now of course, again,

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Christians will tend to say, well, yes, but now we have Jesus, He's paid for all of our sin, and so the law of God doesn't really, doesn't really count anymore.

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Like they'll say, you've heard this so many times, tell me, I mean, how many times have you heard this? It's like threadbare now.

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This is just common. People will say things like, well, now we have Jesus, and so now really what

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God requires of us is to love God and to love our what?

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Love our neighbors. And so that's really it for the Christians today, is that's it, right? Love God and love neighbor.

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And I love when Christians say that. It's, I get so excited. And the reason why is because it was

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Jesus Himself who said that loving God and loving neighbor is what all of the law and prophets are built upon.

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So when you say, as Christians under the new covenant, we are saved and we are just called to love

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God and love neighbor, I say, thank you, you just gave me the entire law. Because all the law and the prophets are built upon love for God, love for neighbor.

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And so in other words, if you want to know what it looks like to love God and to love neighbor, you go to the

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Torah, you go to the law word of God, where it's explained to you how do you love

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God and how do you love your neighbor. But we tend to think, well, it's not even important anymore, we're saved in Jesus, we're declared righteous.

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And the answer is yes, Paul says there, no human being will be justified in his sight through the law.

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For through the law comes the knowledge of what? Sin. But then he explains after the propitiation of Jesus and we're forgiven and all that beautiful story,

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Romans 3, 31, he says, what about the law? Do we then overthrow the law by this faith?

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By no means. On the contrary, we establish the law. So I made an argument at the beginning of this.

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Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach or a disgrace upon any people.

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I made the argument, I think, and there's probably more, you can add to this yourselves, we've got a lot of wise people in here that can say,

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I think there's probably also these steps. I think there's at least two massive problems in terms of what's going on out there with so much darkness, rot, and decay.

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And number one, Christians don't seem to say today or understand today that God has a standard of righteousness.

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He explains what it looks like. What does it mean to be upright? What is justice?

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We don't tend to think that God really has anything to say there, so we don't have a prophetic vision.

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We have nothing to say to the world because we have cut off all of God's commandments and his word regarding what righteousness and justice even is.

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And it's just in this white noise of the culture saying, sure, righteousness is good, but what is a version of righteousness for you may be different for me.

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We don't really know. Has God spoken? Does God say something? And again, the second thing is that we tend to think today that God isn't concerned with his standards being obeyed by those who don't know him.

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But back to the law of God, Matthew 5, 17 -19 is Jesus' statement on the law of God.

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Does the Lord Jesus, God incarnate, God among us, God with us, does he believe that under the new covenant, the law is irrelevant?

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Jesus says in Matthew 5, 17 -19, do not even begin to think, me namaste, don't think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

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I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Couldn't be clearer by Jesus.

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Jesus, are you coming to do away with the law? Are you going to undo it and abolish it? Is it gone? Do not even let it enter your mind.

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Don't entertain the thought. Don't even start thinking that I've come to abolish it.

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I have not come to abolish it, but to fulfill it. And Christians today, right, we look at that and we tend to read it like this.

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Jesus, right, he says that he didn't come to abolish the law, but he came to abolish it. Right?

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That's how we tend to think about it. He didn't come to abolish the law, he just completely removes it and all of its requirements.

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So he came to abolish the law. Jesus says, if anyone teaches anyone to disobey even the least of these commandments, you will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

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But he says, whoever does them and teaches them shall be called great.

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So what is Jesus' perspective of the law of God, God's standards of righteousness and justice and uprightness?

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He says, do them and teach them. You want a world that looks like that? You want a nation that knows what righteousness is?

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God has spoken. What does God say? One more verse for everybody. Psalm 119.

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Let's read it together. See, nobody here is a theological nerd because I just said let's read

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Psalm 119 together. We would be here until 10.

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I thought it was funny when I prepared the joke. Psalm, okay, Psalm 119,

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Psalm 119, 160, Psalm 119, 160, there's so much.

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By the way, just do this. Look, if you want to see what the word of God has to say about God's standards of righteousness and justice and uprightness for your life, for your family, for your kids, for your church, for the nation around you, if you want to see what

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God says about his law and whether it's relevant always, just read

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Psalm 119. Just read it. It is just one statement after another about the goodness of God's law and the enduring nature of God's law.

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You can't overcome it. It's the word of God. It says what it says. But here is a powerful one. Psalm 119, 160, the sum of your word is truth and every one of your, here it is, righteous rules endures forever.

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How do we overcome that as Christians, right? Oh, the law, it's not relevant anymore, it's not abiding anymore, it's not applicable anymore to really my life or the nation around me.

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Every one of your righteous rules endures forever, endures forever.

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It's powerful. So the question, next question, I made two points. One is Christians don't seem to know what the standard is.

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Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach upon any people. It's a disgrace. But what's our message?

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What do we have to say to the world around us? We just join in the subjectivity around us and we just sort of invent things as we go along and just say, well, what do you guys think in your group?

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What is righteousness? What is justice? Because, you know, there's people out there who think that their sexual perversion is noble and righteous and beautiful.

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Is the Christian message that our voice, our word, our standards is just one standard amongst many other valid standards?

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What is the righteous standard? Christians again say, well, I don't know if we really have a standard and I don't know that we can actually bring it to the world with authority.

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I mean, they're not Christians. Who says they have to live like Christians? But the second point

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I made was this, is that we tend to think that maybe God's not really concerned with the world around us.

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He cares about the church. He cares about what's going on within the church. He speaks to the church. He renews the church, grows the church.

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The church is expected to live this way, but not necessarily the world around us. I mean, God isn't today concerned with like historical judgments, right?

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I mean, I mean, aren't things going to go along as they have been? I mean, is, is God really concerned with injustice in the courts and a corrupt government and sin within the church?

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And is he really concerned or is it really just about getting people to escape this world? Is God concerned about his law?

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Is it just for his people? Does he exercise his judgments upon the godly and the ungodly?

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If you would turn to Leviticus, Leviticus 18,

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Leviticus chapter 18, starting in verse one.

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I'd love to hear those pages turning. Leviticus 18, starting in verse one.

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Listen to the words of God here. Here's what God says. And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel and say to them,

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I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which

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I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them.

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I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules.

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If a person does them, he shall live by them. I am the Lord. He keeps repeating that.

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Remember who's talking to you. Remember who I am. Remember my authority. And notice the contrast. He's saying, they have statutes and rules.

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They have their own version of righteous living and what is good and true and lovely and beautiful.

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They have their own version, their own ethical system. He says, don't do what they do.

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Don't adopt their standards. You shall keep my statutes and my rules.

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I am the Lord. Now this particular section, it's not normally like the, the verse you would, you know, you know, put before the, the, the supper time and, and read before like the small kids.

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Kids gather around. We're going to read Leviticus chapter 18, verse six. There's a lot of stuff in this next section having to do with sexual immorality, perversion,

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God laying down standards about how he made us and how he calls us to live with one another in an intimate way.

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And so you have, of course, the prohibitions and the commands in this text against intimacy with family members, mothers, fathers, daughters, people you're related to.

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And of course you have the famous section we're all familiar with 18 verse 21.

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You should not give any of your children to offer them to Moloch. And so profane the name of the

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Lord of your, of God. I am the Lord. You should not lie with a male as with a woman.

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It is an abomination and you should not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it.

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Neither shall any woman give herself to any animal to lie with it is perversion. Now you think if you look at this and you think, isn't that obvious with an animal?

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Does it need to be stated? And the answer is obviously yes, obviously yes.

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We are so broken and so foul and we so don't understand the goodness of the way that God made us.

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We would rather go, what is that statement? We would rather go eating mud pies in the slums than having a banquet in heaven.

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But God says male with male, woman with woman, not with animals.

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This is toivah, it is an abomination. And then God says in verses 24 through 29, do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things for by all these, listen closely, for by all these, what?

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These sexual sins, these perversions, these things. Don't walk with them. Don't do what they do.

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And here's commands about how you live a beautiful life of intimacy. Don't do these things.

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These are abomination. These are detestable to me. And then God says, do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things for by all these, the nations

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I am driving out before you have become unclean. And the land became unclean so that I punished its iniquity and the land vomited out its inhabitants.

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But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you for the people of the land who were before you did all of these abominations so that the land became unclean, less the land vomits you out when you make it unclean as it vomited out the nation that was before you.

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For everyone who does any of these abominations, the persons who do them shall be caught off from among their people.

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So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs that were practiced before you and never to make yourselves unclean by them.

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I am the Lord, your God. Here's my point. Is scripture clear about the holy and righteous sovereign only

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God executing his righteous historical judgments with his people and those who are the wicked or the unbelieving?

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The text is clear. He's saying don't do what they did. The land was polluted, they became unclean, and the land literally vomited them out.

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And so will God judge a nation? We tend to think in such honestly broken and foul ways as Christians even about the nation that we live in today, right?

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We have an idolatrous commitment at times to this nation. Now don't get me wrong, I am proud to be a part of this nation.

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This nation has blessed the world with so much truth and so much goodness, but we tend to think of our commitments in terms of Americans as a commitment that is so strong and unmovable.

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It's really, it's a commitment that at times can become, honestly if you see it, you see it in so many rallies, it's something that's idolatrous.

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We should think about our nation in terms of what does God say about righteousness and what does

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God think about the state of our nation today? What should we be saying to our nation around us?

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What should we be doing? How should we be bringing the message of the gospel and the truth to the nation around us?

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How should we live in the light of where we are today? Our standards need to be first biblical and our commitments need to be premierly towards the authority of Jesus Christ, amen?

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First and foremost, above anything else. And so God's word does say that he executes historical judgments upon even the pagan nations for what they do.

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So the text of God's word says righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach upon any people.

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God's standards of righteousness and justice are a divine gift meant to bless the world.

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Scripture teaches that clearly. So if we say again, the text says righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace or a reproach upon any people, we have to ask the question, what is righteousness?

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Has God spoken it? And what's the nature of it? We think of the law of God as oppressive because there is an aspect in scripture that speaks about our relationship to the law of God in a way that is not good, right?

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So we tend to think of the law as condemning us, amen, yes? So the famous, my friend, Ray Comfort, have you ever lied?

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And you say, told a lie. So what does that make you? And you say, I'm a liar. Have you ever looked at a woman with lust, he says, and then people go, well, yeah,

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I have. He says, what's that? Jesus says, if you do in your heart, you're an adulterer. So what's that make you? Well, I'm a lying adulterer.

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Great. Have you ever hated somebody in your heart and you say, yes, well, that's murder. You're a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer.

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And we think about the law in that way as, yeah, the law condemns. Because in terms of the standard of God's righteousness, his holiness, being right with him,

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I have nothing to offer because I am an adulterous, thieving, lying, covetous murderer.

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And so I have nothing to offer. So yes, the law of God condemns when it's out here coming down towards me because I'm guilty of violating it.

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And there's no way back except the peace that God has done through Jesus, amen? But that's an aspect of the law of God.

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It's the character of God on full display. It's how we're called to live. And I am guilty and I can't fix it.

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It's completely broken. If you keep the whole law, James says in James 2, and you fail in one point, you're guilty of all of it.

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And so it feels like a weight to the sinner, to the broken.

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However, scripture doesn't speak about the law in disparaging ways in terms of God's standards and the goodness of his law.

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I want you to see that. Because if we say righteousness exalts a nation, we better know what that looks like.

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We better have a prophetic vision and know what to say. And so the text in God's word, Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 5 through 8,

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God says some things about his law that I think we need to embrace as Christians in the

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West today. Our forebearers understood this, many of them, and we've lost it.

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Deuteronomy chapter 4, starting at verse 5, it says, See, I have taught you statutes and rules as the

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Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

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Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who when they hear all these statutes will say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

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For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the

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Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so what?

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Righteous as all this law that I set before you today.

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So, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace or reproach upon any people.

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What is righteousness? God has spoken. We know what his standards are, and his law word says that his statutes, his rules, his rules of righteousness are actually a blessing to the world.

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They are good for the world. Christians have said to the world, it doesn't matter anymore. All those things in the

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Old Testament, righteous rules and statutes, all those standards, we don't need that anymore because we have Jesus.

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He doesn't care about that anymore. And so we have nothing to say. And we say, well why is our nation so unrighteous today?

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Why is it falling off a cliff? Why is there so much darkness all around us? And the answer is there.

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We have no prophetic vision. We have no voice. We don't even, we say bad things about the law of God, that God's not concerned anymore.

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And God says this, the world is supposed to look in at the people of God and the word that he's given to us, and they're supposed to say, that's amazing.

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That is just. Those are good standards. Those are standards that bring freedom.

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Those are standards that bring reconciliation when somebody is violated. Those are standards that bring peace and blessing and prosperity to the world.

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This is an amazing God. These are righteous rules and statutes. And the Christian church in the

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West today, contrary to so many of our forebearers in the faith have abandoned this word and the prophetic vision.

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So if righteousness exalts a nation, we need to know what that standard is.

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And I think that standard is clear, abundantly clear in God's word. There's such a lack of prophetic vision, salt and light, but this idea today is foreign to us.

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It's foreign to us. If you were to, I think poll, and I hate polls. Is it crazy to you that like, when you see the news today, every poll coming from Biden is like,

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Biden's winning, Biden's winning. You just knew poll. And you see Trump and it's like, poll's winning. He's winning at everything.

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And it's like, you look at both, it's like somebody's lying. Somebody's telling tale or polls are stupid.

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You're polling like your crew or something. I don't know. So poll. Okay. But so as much as I hate polls, if you were to poll

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Christians and ask them generally in the West today, evangelicals is even solid ones, solid denominations, strong denominations, theologically sound,

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Trinitarian, Sola Fide, all that stuff. If you were to ask, is the law of God abiding and relevant today, is it like something to be like prophetically brought out to the world?

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I think the vast majority would say no. And I think we're gaining ground today as post -millennial theonomists, amen, yeah, we're growing.

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But I think the vast majority would say, nah, it's not relevant. All we need is Jesus and we just want to go to heaven one day.

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That's it. Thankfully, things weren't always this way.

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And you can see the remnants of a mind toward God, his authority and his word still, still stamped into things all across this nation.

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So recently I went to represent our church body for one of our bills or a bill in the

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Missouri. It was a bill of abolition, was ultimately killed by the conservative party and the pro -lifers as usual.

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But I got to speak at this point, I got to speak inside the Capitol, which by the way,

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I've spoken now to a lot of capitals across the country and sat down on legislatures across the country. Arizona's Capitol is lame.

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It is so embarrassingly bad. I mean, I, I don't know,

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I don't know who we talk to about this, but it is really embarrassing. When you go to some of these other states like South Carolina or Missouri, I mean, it is this like monument to like beauty and glory and the creativity of God is like, whoa, like even a place that's

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Denver, Colorado, you're still like, this is beautiful and you are weird people here. So but I was in Missouri and I got to speak right in the middle of the, of the

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Capitol. And as I'm, as I'm speaking, that message is up somewhere. But as I'm speaking all around me, like into the wall, carved into the wall are scriptures about the triune

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God of Holy Scripture. They're all into the wall, right?

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Everybody there, the legislators were all afraid just to take a stand on Jesus, right? I'm going to do this.

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I'm going to establish justice. We're going to be righteous and just for the sake of these children because we're

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Christians and Jesus is Lord. And those legislators are like, we can't be that explicit in our commitments because we're legislators, you know, and we can't be all about, you know,

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Jesus is Lord and this is the final authority. And we just really can't be that explicit in our Christian commitments. And I'm standing there in the middle of the

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Capitol going, you're violating what is in the walls of your

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Capitol. The people who built this place understood the authority and the Christian of Christ and the

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Christian worldview better than you. They weren't cowards like you are. The words of God stamped into the rock all around me.

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You guys know one of my favorite stories in history because we have such a strong heart for the

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Hawaiian islands and the desire to see all of Hawaii to once again come under the gospel and the message of Jesus.

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But you know the story, right? The Christian missionaries go to the Hawaiian islands and they give everything up like they're from the

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East coast, these people. So that's, that's a lot of work to get across country at that time in the 19th century to get there like 1820 and get across the country, go across the ocean.

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Like, I mean, you're saying goodbye to everything, right? You're giving everything up. You're giving your life completely up for the sake of these people to know

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Jesus. And the story of the missionaries that went to Hawaii is just such an amazing thing that within 20 years of missionary work in Hawaiian islands, from 1820 to 1840, within 20 years of missionary labor, over 90 % of the

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Hawaiian islands are professing faith in Jesus Christ. Professing faith in Jesus Christ. Hawaii was

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Christianized in a matter of 20 years. So Christianized and so affected by the gospel that in the sovereign

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Hawaiian kingdoms documents of law in their constitution, it says that no law of the

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Hawaiian kingdom will be at variance with the laws of, listen to the word,

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Jehovah God. That's specific.

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That's pretty explicit in terms of where their commitments were. Oh no, we're not talking about some general

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God, some general deity. The one who rules over the Hawaiian islands is the

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Christian God. And no law of the Hawaiian kingdom will be at variance with any of his laws.

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And so righteousness exalts a nation. They understood that. They understood that.

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That if we're going to be a righteous people, if we're going to be a people that receive the blessing from God's hands, we need to be a people that uphold his statutes, his truth, his justice.

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They understood that. More recently in our history in terms of the remnants of this mindset,

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God's standards, God's justice, God's law, the authority of Jesus. Anybody get a chance to see that, the coronation of his majesty,

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King Charles. Did you get to see that, anybody? Where were we? Luke, were we in Scotland?

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Where were we? Belfast. Belfast. That was on the COVID trip though, wasn't it?

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So my mind's all mixed up the last couple of years, but one of the trips we had taken to establish churches in Northern Ireland and the

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Republic of Ireland to go and save lives and to establish justice there was a trip where they did the coronation rite for King Charles.

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Nobody saw that? Who? Raise your hand if you saw that. It was only a couple of you. It was so fascinating. If you get a chance, go and look it up later and watch it.

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It's just fascinating. Here's why. When it was happening, we were in a place where there's some tension surrounding, you know, the

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King of England and Ireland and Irish people. There's still a bit of a, and we felt some of that when we were there, but I was watching it and I was watching it with some secular news channel platform talking about it.

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And it was amazing because you couldn't escape. You cannot escape the completely

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Christian nature of this whole coronation. And it was so thick and so Jesus and God and gospel and law that I think that some of these secularists and humanists who were like doing the media thing were feeling the weight of this feels off.

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This is really, really like thick Christianity.

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It is all Christian language, Bible, word of God, gospel. And so many of these secularists were like, this seems kind of old and outdated, right?

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This is the King of England in modern times. What are we doing talking about Bibles and law of God and gospel?

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And they were like really taken aback by it. And I'm looking at it going, here are the remnants, the vestiges of this

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Christian transformation in the world and the understanding that we had not very long ago about what righteousness and justice is in the world.

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So I wanted to read some of it to you if I may. So in the official coronation rite, and again, this just happened recently.

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The first is the greeting of the King. It says,

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Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the

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King of Kings. I wonder who they're talking about. Who is that?

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Right? Is this some general deity, some general creator? Oh no, we're talking about Jesus, very specific.

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And then of course, there's a lot more beautiful things. I encourage you to even go pick this up, read it online.

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There's a greeting and introduction. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the

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Holy Spirit be with you and with thy spirit. Alleluia. Christ is risen.

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He is risen indeed. Alleluia. Dearly beloved, we are gathered to offer worship and praise to Almighty God, to celebrate the life of our nations, to pray for Charles, our

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King, to recognize and to give thanks for his life of service to this nation, to the realms and to the commonwealth, and to witness with joy his crowning and anointing as he has set apart and consecrated for the service of his people, and it goes on.

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And this I love. He's then presented with a

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Bible. And here's the word. Sir, to keep you ever mindful of the law and the gospel of God as the rule for the whole life and government of Christian princes, receive this book, the most valuable thing that this world affords.

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Here is wisdom. This is the royal law. These are the lively oracles of God.

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I don't think that I could have written something that in your face. This just happens.

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And then, finally, the archbishop says, in terms of the oath, listen to the oath, listen to the oath, hear this.

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Will you to your power cause law and justice and mercy to be executed in all your judgments and the king says,

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I will. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel?

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And the king says, all this I promise to do. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach, a disgrace upon any people.

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It wasn't long ago that people understood the foundation to all of the world in life is the authority of Jesus Christ, God's standards of righteousness, and God's standards of justice.

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And so Proverbs 14, 34 says, but sin is a reproach to any people.

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Sin is a reproach or a disgrace to any people. How? Well, there's a number of ways.

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Some of you guys could probably fill in more, but when I was thinking about this in terms of how is sin a disgrace, how is sin a reproach to any people,

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I think clearly sin is a disgrace because we don't look like God.

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We don't look like God. That's what's so wrong and broken about sin in the world.

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It's not just a rule that you bended or broke, some arbitrary standards, some set of rules you're supposed to follow and you, you failed and you don't look so good.

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And sin is a disgrace and it's a reproach because this is God's world. And because you and I are in the very imago

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Dei, we're in the very image of God. God's light and life is supposed to be coming out of us into the world.

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We are supposed to image God into his creation in the world that he made. We're supposed to look like God, we're supposed to look like him.

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And sin is a disgrace because it's God's world. We're his image bearers and we don't look like him in the world.

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We don't act like him. We hate others. We're prideful. We love our sin.

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We love darkness rather than light. We live in ways that are completely broken. We would rather serve the creature rather than the creator himself.

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We would rather find pleasure and wholeness and beauty and goodness in substandard things.

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We go for bootleg worship rather than true worship. We'd rather go for the substandard pleasure and joy that is a fiction anyways.

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We'd rather go to that than go to God where it says in his word, in your presence is what?

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Fullness of joy. In your right hand there are what? Pleasures forever.

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We choose the other way. And so sin is a reproach and a disgrace because we don't look like God.

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Sin is a reproach and a disgrace because ultimately, to put it bluntly, sin is stupid.

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It's stupid. It doesn't work. It never satisfies, pretends to, never satisfies.

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It always breaks. It always falls apart in every possible way.

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In our thinking, in our relationships, in our marriages, in our sex lives, in how we live with each other.

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Sin will always come in and entice and look like it's going to offer you something, but it comes with complete betrayal.

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It's like J .C. Ryle said, right? Sin will never come to you in its truest colors saying,

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I'm your deadly enemy and I want to ruin you in hell forever. Sin comes to you like Judas with a kiss.

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Or like Joab with an outstretched hand and flattering words. Sin deceives.

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It lies. And it's stupid. It's stupid. And stupidity doesn't work.

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It's a reproach. It's a disgrace. You have so many examples in history, in the last 2 ,000 years or so of Christian history, of so many examples of great transformation and blessing of particular nations and how

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God used particular groups and nations to bless the world with the Christian worldview and the gospel itself.

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But in our nation, we used to be, in the world, a standard of Christian rules and statutes.

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People understood. We know what those people basically believe. We know what their commitments actually are.

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And now, if you think about our reputation in the world today, it's a very bad reputation.

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It's a poor reputation. There's a lot of people that hate us. And let's be honest, there's a lot of people in the world that hate this nation, not just instinctively because I hate your team, but they hate this nation for right reasons.

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And when I say hate this nation for right reasons, I mean in terms of the immorality pouring out of this country into theirs.

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The things that we feed the world in terms of the new sexual ethic or how we should live or how we should dress or how we should act or how we should behave.

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There are nations out there that aren't even fundamentally Christian in their commitments and they look at us and they say that is an abomination, that is foul, that is disgraceful.

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And so, in many ways, we've become a reproach in our own nation to the world around us.

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How we live is a disgrace. In terms, we could go all day on this and I don't want to belabor this too much, but our nation is a disgrace and a reproach to the world in how we engage the world with warfare.

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We are unjust without Christian commitments and without Christian standards in terms of how we actually do war.

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We have a military presence all over the world. We involve ourselves in conflicts that are not our own.

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We enslave our children and our grandchildren with debt. It is slavery.

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It is debt to our children to actually do wars that, according to a

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Christian worldview, we should not be involved in. Christian worldview has a commitment to warfare that is just war theory.

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When I'm going to send somebody out to die for something, there better be a good, godly, righteous, just reason for doing so.

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The Christian worldview, praise God for it. When you think about, listen, look at the blessing of the

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Christian worldview. When we say today there is such a thing as a war crime, where's that come from?

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Where's that come from? War crime. Where's it come from? Atheism? Atheism does not give you the concept of a war crime.

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Something that is wrong to do even in war. Where's that tradition come from? It comes from the

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Bible and Christians actually thinking through warfare in a fallen world and how do we do it as Christians and honor

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God. So Christians developed just war theory. But now today we engage in conflicts that are not our own.

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We engage in warfare that is not ultimately defensive. We engage in even offensive warfare.

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This is an entire sermon I can give on just war theory that we probably will be doing in light of current events at some point.

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But Christians used to have a mind on if we're going to do war, it had better be according to God's standards of righteousness and justice.

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And guess what? I was going to explain this over like two or three minutes and then I saw that my good friend

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Zach Launschlager is with us today. You'll have to forgive him. He's Presbyterian. Joking.

01:00:02

You know, I have to dig something about the Presbyterian. So he's going to come up today and explain to us how Credo Baptism is right.

01:00:09

And I'm just joking. Yeah. He's going to.

01:00:15

Zach's going to come up. He's one of my favorite historians actually. He's going to explain to us the difference in terms of the thinking today over against the time for the war for independence and how

01:00:26

Christians thought about warfare. So just, he said, I said, just like three minutes. He said, is this a Jeff Durbin three minutes

01:00:32

I have? I said, stop being mean. Stand your ground.

01:00:43

Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.

01:00:50

So said Captain John Parker, commander of the training band in Lexington, Massachusetts.

01:01:02

Early on the morning of April 19th, 1775.

01:01:09

He was one of the old dogs he had fought in the French and Indian War. He had tuberculosis and could not be clearly heard if there was a lot of noise, but they clearly heard him then.

01:01:21

The sun was just coming up. The birds were just singing on a beautiful spring morning. And they knew that the

01:01:28

British regulars were marching to their town. To capture and imprison

01:01:36

John Hancock and Sam Adams, who were now leaving their pastor's house just down the street where they had been staying that night, and Captain Clark told his men,

01:01:52

I'm positioning you here, not in between the oncoming soldiers and their objective, which doesn't matter anymore, not in between them and the stores of arms and munitions that is owned by our town, which if the

01:02:10

British want to take, they are welcome to try. We've already moved them. We are not here to fight.

01:02:16

We're simply here to demonstrate that this town is defended. And that we stand here and will not allow you to burn down our town, shoot our citizens, capture and enslave honest men.

01:02:32

But if you're willing to leave us alone, you may go on your way. They recognized that this is the king in the body of his soldiers.

01:02:42

That is how it was recognized. Now, you don't know that the term trained band or training band is a

01:02:48

Puritan term. It goes back to the late 1500s in England.

01:02:55

It was Cromwell. These are the great grandsons of the

01:03:01

Puritans in America. And they are not about to start a war and displease God. They openly said, if we fire first,

01:03:10

God will not bless us. And so they stood their ground. They did not fire until fired upon.

01:03:19

And eventually the British did open fire. And the Americans turned around.

01:03:25

They were leaving the field out of a sign of respect to the king when the

01:03:31

British opened fire on them because they refused to put down their guns. That was not a lawful order.

01:03:38

The British opened fire. The Americans turned around and fired back very poorly in that because they had already dispersed.

01:03:47

And then the British charged them and bayoneted several of them. Jonathan Harrington was shot in the chest with a musket ball and was able to crawl back to his house, which was on the border of Lexington Green, and died on his doorstep in his wife's arms, his children around him.

01:04:08

Now, the battle continued and they marched on to Concord where the main body of arms and munitions were stored.

01:04:15

These were owned again by the town of Concord. This was not some band of renegades.

01:04:22

This is the officially commissioned town militia, the training band, organized under the laws of England and their commander, on whose farm all of these arms and munitions were buried.

01:04:36

And they had been working feverishly through the night to disguise them as newly planted corn. They went out and they buried them in rows in the fields.

01:04:45

And then he took his men up on a hill where they could see what the British were doing and he told them, we are not going to go down and fight with the

01:04:50

British. We have not yet heard what's going on. There's rumor that they fired on our troops at Lexington.

01:04:56

We are not going to engage. We are going to stay up here. And eventually a fire broke out in town.

01:05:02

It was unintentional. And the young men who were gunning for a fight asked him, are you going to keep us up here while they burn the town?

01:05:09

And he said, no, we will go down and see what's happening. In order to cross back into town, they had to cross the

01:05:14

North Bridge, what we know as Concord Bridge. And again, they approached the bridge peacefully.

01:05:22

And the British opened fire. This time without effect.

01:05:28

And the Americans wheeled and fired with deadly effect. And the

01:05:33

British broke and ran. And this is the start of the war for independence. Not so very long ago, on July 1st of 1943, the 80th anniversary of the

01:05:51

Battle of Gettysburg was celebrated. My grandfather's generation was there as Boy Scouts as part of the official celebration.

01:06:01

You can see these boys and their uniforms there to honor their grandfathers who fought at the

01:06:08

Battle of Gettysburg. My grandfather, who

01:06:14

I knew, was there to see his, not my actual grandfather, but his generation was there to see their grandfathers and to honor them.

01:06:23

These men who had fought at Gettysburg sat down and around the campfires, we have records of them telling stories of the stories their grandfathers told them.

01:06:34

Those were the guys at Lexington and Concord, their grandfathers. Now my generation is now becoming grandfathers.

01:06:47

Young grandfathers are my age now. And I'm really looking forward to that eventually here.

01:06:57

So I know that time marches on and continues, but sometimes it's hard to connect with this and to think about it and to recognize it was seconds ago.

01:07:06

You are only two grandfathers, three grandfathers removed from John Parker, from Lexington and Concord, from Paul Revere.

01:07:19

You look at it and you think perhaps it was so long ago, it's so different today. No. The perversion that you see in America is bare minutes old.

01:07:33

The Puritan ethic that you will not fire first, you will not displease God, you will not use force that is evil unless it is in defense, is not only thousands of years old in earth history, it is thousands of years old in your culture.

01:07:54

And that is your heritage. So it's good to have

01:08:06

Zach here. He has served alongside and fought with our church for the last couple of years across the nation for some of our bills of abolition.

01:08:19

And so I wanted to just point towards in terms of sin being a disgrace, a reproach upon any people, there are a number of ways we can get at this, but one way that is dramatically affecting us at this very moment is in how our nation sins and is disgraceful in how we engage in warfare or participate in warfare.

01:08:41

And it is affecting you and I now. We are being expected to pay for things that we ought not to be involved in.

01:08:47

It is going to be slavery and debt upon our children and great grandchildren.

01:08:53

It is immoral and unrighteous and it is a disgrace. Christians used to care about how we engage in warfare.

01:09:02

We are a disgrace nation. We are a reproach with our sexual perversion.

01:09:11

Today, OnlyFans models are respected and celebrated. Look how much money they make.

01:09:17

Isn't that wonderful? We have full and free access to the most perverse pornography imaginable.

01:09:27

It is coming through every device with ease and freedom and without price ultimately to all of us.

01:09:39

We're numbed by all of this. You ever see pictures of people on the beach in the 1930s and 40s?

01:09:51

You ever see the difference in swimsuits between 1930s and 2024?

01:10:00

People will dress in a way in public that would have been undeniably shameful just decades ago.

01:10:09

Because we have been worked on. We have been changed. We are just used to it. Christian women today will dress in church today the way that prostitutes used to dress on the streets just decades ago or a generation ago.

01:10:27

Yeah, I said it. If the standard is righteousness and justice,

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I need to say it to be faithful. We're a disgraced nation with all these perversions, the free access to all the pornography.

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Sex trafficking is a booming industry as a result of our sexual immorality and I believe the pornography itself.

01:10:51

We're a nation that is a disgrace and a reproach because of all of our gender bending.

01:10:58

Homosexuality today is seen as virtuous. It's a virtue. It is a beautiful thing to engage in this lifestyle when in reality it was not very long ago a crime officially on the books, legislatively a crime in many states across our union.

01:11:18

It wasn't very long ago where it was a criminal act to engage in homosexuality in this nation.

01:11:25

We're mere decades away from that. That's how fast that this has turned in our nation with the lack of prophetic vision.

01:11:33

Have you ever seen the PSA, Public Service Announcement? It's in black and white from,

01:11:38

I believe it's the 50s or early 60s. The title of it is Boys Beware. You ever seen that?

01:11:44

Boys Beware. It's a public service announcement. It was produced by the Inglewood Police Department and Inglewood Unified School District.

01:11:54

Boys Beware. Beware of what? Well, it's a public service announcement for boys to beware of homosexual men, which were considered dangerous and a threat to young men.

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This was within a generation ago. It was on television, funded by the police department and the

01:12:16

Unified School District of Inglewood, warning children against the homosexual man.

01:12:24

That's within a generation. We have become a reproach because we have a culture of baby daddies, baby mommas, happy promiscuity, side chicks,

01:12:40

Pride Month, drag queen story hours for children, and of course many of you have seen, if you've had your eyes open at all, during Pride Month, the filthy and perverse

01:12:55

Pride festivals and parades where you have men, naked men, in front of small children doing all manner of evil things.

01:13:06

Sin is a reproach. It is a disgrace upon any people.

01:13:13

Righteousness exalts a nation. We have become a reproach through our view today of marriage.

01:13:25

We have a culture of no -fault divorce. We have fatherless families.

01:13:34

And we have, because of feminism and the denial of the goodness of the

01:13:39

Christian worldview in terms of roles for families, we have so lied to women about being career women and career moms, and now we have women who are saying now publicly, feminism destroyed my life.

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Like, I'm in my 40s now and I wish I had children, I wish I had a husband. I was lied to. I was told that this was the best way, this was the thing, to be a strong, independent woman and a career mom and a career woman, and now

01:14:05

I've lost everything. Now I can't have children. Now I want a husband. I was lied to, and we've become corrupted.

01:14:13

Our education system is godless, secular, humanistic.

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It is also, because it is not fundamentally Christian, very low quality, not producing what it ought to.

01:14:26

It is anti -Christian. We have today taught in our academic institutions, once before,

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Christian seminaries and institutions, whether it's Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Brown University, all of these amazing institutions that were given to the world by the

01:14:44

Christian faith to glorify Jesus, we have these old institutions that taught so faithfully about Jesus and the

01:14:50

Christian worldview teaching things today that a generation ago, we as a nation were at war with.

01:14:58

Mention Marxism in the 50s and see the reaction on the face.

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Mention communism in the 50s and see the reaction on the face of the common

01:15:10

American citizen. Today, these institutions, because sin has become, it's reproached because we are this nation that is so far from God, we don't uphold his standards, now you have tenured professors in these institutions who are openly

01:15:25

Marxist, openly communist, promoting and teaching and engaging and discipling the youth of our nation to believe these abominable things that destroy the world, and it's all around us.

01:15:38

When I ultimately took my kids out of public school, it was after really learning from Dr.

01:15:46

Greg Bonson about the centrality of Christ and our knowledge and our thinking, I was already really there, but I had my young kids in like, you know, first grade, kindergarten,

01:15:54

I think is what it was, and of course I began to see, oh my goodness, education is not neutral, you're either with Christ or you're against Christ, and this is totally not

01:16:03

Christian, and I, these people are discipling my kids in a non -Christian worldview, and I need to not let that happen, and I was already there, and the turning point for me was,

01:16:13

I'll give you one of the things, was when my kids came home and said that they had read the book Heather Has Two Mommies in school, and that for me was like, well,

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I'm already there, and that sealed the deal, see you public government education, Heather Has Two Mommies, it's indoctrination, it's teaching them a worldview, it's teaching them an ethical system, and it is a reproach.

01:16:36

There is injustice in the courts, we could do that for days, there's partiality, unequal weights and measures, the abandonment of the assumption of innocence, low standards of justice and accusation that violate

01:16:48

God's standards and God's law, there is injustice and evil and sin in terms of the media itself, lie upon lie upon lie upon lie, we could do this for days, have you seen the hearings about Fauci and the

01:17:02

CDC and what was going on during the whole COVID thing, how behind closed doors, they got this now only through Freedom of Information Act stuff, behind closed doors, when that pandemic started, they were saying, this is clearly something that was lab made, lab born, this can't be done in nature, this shows all the marks of being created and all the rest, that's what they were saying behind closed doors, and then they came to the public and said, that's not true, if you say it, you'll have your account shut down, we were silenced, the public was told, that's not true, and behind closed doors, they were saying, it can only be true.

01:17:40

Media, lying, the acceptance of lies, and no one's ever accountable for it, or how about this week, yours truly, boy, it's been a weird week for me, you guys see some of the articles, the

01:17:54

Biden regime this week posted on their official page about yours truly,

01:18:01

Arizona pastor wants to execute women who have abortions, and what they did was they pulled from a

01:18:08

New York Times interview that I did, where the New York Times actually treated me very fairly, they let me talk, they let me do a whole explanation, they actually did a great job, but the

01:18:18

Biden regime didn't care about accuracy, so the Biden regime cut off my comments, shared that this

01:18:24

Arizona pastor wants to execute women for having abortions, and disconnected it from the entire conversation that I had.

01:18:34

Lies, misrepresentation, mischaracterization, and then that was picked up by MSN, USA Today, where else did it go, guys,

01:18:42

I don't even, it's all over the internet right now, I'm like internet famous right now, I'm like a Kardashian right now,

01:18:47

I'm just joking, okay. Just joking. But it's a reproach, because lying doesn't matter anymore in our culture, it's fine to lie about people, it's fine to abuse people, it doesn't matter, as long as you get what you want, sin is a reproach to any people.

01:19:07

Proverbs 14, 34, the word of God says righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

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What's the way back? I think I've already said, I think I've already said at least a path forward in terms of if righteousness exalts a nation, we have to know as a church what in the world that is.

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What's it look like? What's the standard? When we go off into the world, do we have a prophetic vision, do we have something to actually say in terms of, these are the words of God, God says, do we come into the world like the early church did in the book of Acts, do we come into the world with a message that looks like them, or is ours very different?

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Does ours placate to the fallen person? Does our message show fear of man rather than fear of God?

01:19:51

Do we come into the world like the Apostle Paul, surrounded by idolatry, at the

01:19:56

Areopagus, saying that Jesus is going to judge the world, and he says, now God commands men everywhere to repent.

01:20:04

Here's the message of Jesus, here's what he's accomplished, and now God commands men everywhere to repent.

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Do we have that kind of message, or do we love our stuff and our things and our lives so much, we have so much of a fear of man that we will not speak the truth out there because of the consequences?

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Oh, and there will be consequences for telling the truth, and will we do it? So I want to propose at least two things, brothers and sisters, as a church.

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First, preach the gospel. First, preach the gospel. The gospel is the what?

01:20:40

Power of God for salvation. The gospel is the power of God for salvation, and so the message we have out there is the message of the apostles and the

01:20:49

Lord Jesus. We call people to turn to God and by their faith in Jesus Christ for the gift of eternal life to be reconciled to God.

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That's our message to the world out there, and we need to do it with boldness, clarity, without pulling punches.

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We're broken, we're foul, we're sinners, our only hope to be at peace with God is through faith in Jesus Christ. He's the only way to salvation.

01:21:13

It is exclusive only through Christ. It is only His righteousness, His perfect life and death and resurrection.

01:21:19

That is all that will save us, and that needs to be the message we say out there, that Jesus is

01:21:25

Lord. He is King of kings and Lord of lords. That means He is Lord of lords and King of kings over every area of life.

01:21:32

He has authority everywhere. We call people to repent and believe. And the second thing is, is brothers and sisters, if righteousness exalts a nation, we had better know what it is.

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What is it to be upright, to be just, to be right?

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What is it? And scripture is abundantly clear. The sum of your word is truth, and all of your righteous rules endure forever.

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Amen? Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for your word.

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I pray, Lord, that you use this message to glorify your name. I pray, Lord, that you'd use us as a church to bless the world with your truth and your gospel of peace.

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We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. And now we come to that table to remember our Savior.