Dr. White Speaks On The State Of Our Culture

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It is an honor to be with you. It is interesting, I have been here twice, and both times in this room.

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So I just figured this is where you always are, and so this is pretty normal for me.

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This is also normal for what I wear on a Sunday. I will have to shoot straight out that back door in not too long to get back to church.

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I have to go pick up my wife, and then we'll be going back to church. We have Lord's Supper this evening, so they would sort of like their elders to be there, generally.

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On time helps as well, because I do the scripture reading and things like that. So I'm sorry that I won't be able to hang around and fellowship, but that's just sort of what it means to be on the other side of the, well, not the complete other side of the valley, but a little distance away.

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But it is an honor to be with you. I didn't know whether the newest addition to my family would be here today or not.

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They're not, but I did get to visit for a few moments with the little one.

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Those little things make such interesting little noises, don't they, you know? Those first, when they're less than a week old, you know?

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But she's actually a pound heavier than Clementine was, and she's eating much more and sleeping more.

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So you keep doing that, she won't be the little sister for long if she keeps that up.

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So we rejoice with Thad and Summer and the birth of January, who will be spending her entire life explaining why she was born in November.

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But my daughter said, yes, but you named me Summer and I was born in January. So, you know, you have only yourself to blame for this,

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I suppose, but that's okay. But I do expect the next time that I'm here that their beards will be gone, you'll all be wearing bow ties, that'll be really cool.

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So the problem with having really cool bow tie if you have really long beards, you can't see it.

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And so it sort of really destroys the purpose of it. I think it would be sort of funny to see

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Jeff in a bow tie. To make it visible, it'd have to be one of the real big ones.

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And with the hoodie jacket and the jeans, I'm just not sure how all that would fit, but it would start pushing the very edges of fashion orthodoxy to be able to do that.

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And I do want to point out that I have a feeling that what Jeff did is he asked Pastor Samson, John Samson is in the back of the room today.

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He brought him in and I figure I've got about 15 minutes and then I'm gonna get it up or down.

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And if it's a down, I gotta quit and Samson will take over from there. So I need to stop the introductions and get to work here.

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So if you'll turn your Bibles please with me to the Psalms, the book of Psalms, but it's not

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Psalms 12. If you want to make me upset, miscite the Psalter.

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How many times, I was reading in Psalms 39. Do you turn to hymns 39? No, you turn to hymn 39.

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So it's always the singular when you're citing a particular one. So, but it's the book of Psalms, but it's

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Psalm 12. Psalm 12 will be our text for this afternoon into the evening time.

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This is a text I have turned to a number of times, primarily for the last verse, but that won't be the text we're actually focusing upon.

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But as any text without a context is a pretext, I do want to look through the entirety of the

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Psalm and then focus upon a particular aspect with you. Hopefully this will be useful to us in our study today.

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Psalm 12, now let me just mention to you, I generally, not always, but generally utilize the

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Tetragrammaton when I'm reading from the Old Testament. In other words, when you have the word LORD in all caps, that is the

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Tetragrammaton, Yod -Heh -Wau -Heh -Yahweh. We slaughter that in English as Jehovah.

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I normally utilize that because it is simply a Jewish convention and a Jewish tradition not to pronounce the divine name.

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It's very obvious that in the days of the apostles that was not the case. And so I'm not really sure why most

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English Bible translations have chosen to follow that tradition, but they have. But I think it's good to see the covenant name of God, to hear the covenant name of God.

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And obviously if you're doing Jewish outreach, I would suggest you not utilize the

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Tetragrammaton and say it out loud. As you may know, your Jewish friends will say something like Hashem, which means the name, or Adonai, the

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Lord, something along those lines. If you want to completely offend them, do what I'm about to do. But in Christian worship,

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I think it is good to know this, especially because the New Testament then utilizes that name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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It's one of the key proofs to the doctrines of Trinity is the fact that we know the Father is

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Yahweh. It's Yahweh that lays our sins upon the Messiah, for example, in Isaiah 53.

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So the Father is correctly identified as Yahweh. But very importantly, the

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Son is identified as Yahweh, the number of key texts in the New Testament.

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And of course, the Spirit is the Spirit of Yahweh. So when I say, help Yahweh, I'm not reading from some strange translation.

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I just want you to recognize that that is the Tetragrammaton. Help Yahweh, for the godly man ceases to be, for the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.

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They speak falsehood to one another. With flattering lips and with a double heart they speak.

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May Yahweh cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that speaks great things, who have said, with our tongue we will prevail.

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Our lips are our own. Who is Lord over us? Because the devastation of the afflicted, because the groaning of the needy, now

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I will arise, says Yahweh. I will set him in the safety for which he longs. The words of Yahweh are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.

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You, oh Yahweh, will keep them. You will preserve him from this generation forever. The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.

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My mind often turns to this particular psalm in our day. Every verse is, in fact, relevant to what we see every day, but I know the first verse that really attracted my attention was that last verse.

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The wicked strut about when that which is vile is honored amongst men.

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And certainly we see that in our land today, and it's good to know that we are not the first generation that has experienced that kind of thing.

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But the entire psalm begins with that kind of thinking. Help, Yahweh, for the godly man ceases to be.

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Here is a psalmist who is crying out for help to Yahweh, and he cries out because he sees around him, amongst the sons of men, judgment from God.

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And that judgment comes from the fact that God's blessing is being withdrawn. The godly man ceases to be.

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The faithful disappear from among the sons of men. Having godly men and women is a blessing upon any culture.

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Any nation is experiencing God's blessing when God causes the godly to multiply in their midst because those individuals will exercise a tremendous positive influence, and the rest of the culture, even those who do not worship

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Yahweh, experience blessing in the presence of those who know God.

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They shed light throughout the society, the way that they behave, the way that they act brings a blessing upon a society.

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So here is a psalmist, and he says, Yahweh, the godly man ceases to be. We see a declining number of godly men amongst our people.

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The faithful disappear from among the sons of men. And so there is a growing apostasy, and there were many times, of course, during the history of the people of Israel where we read in the historical documents, we read in the historical books of the

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Old Testament, many examples where these types of times took place.

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And the godly cried out to God during that time, and their hearts were troubled.

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And I don't know about you, but I need to be reminded that my heart needs to be troubled. I cannot become accustomed to living in a land where the very words of the godly are mocked and derided on a regular basis.

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And I can become accustomed to that in the sense of just simply withdrawing, stepping back, and no longer feeling the pain that I should feel when

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God's truth is denied by the people of my society. But I need to pray that God will keep my heart sensitive even though it's an everyday thing.

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I mean, if you take the time to keep up with the events in our society, every morning

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I get up and I am faced with moral insanity after moral insanity, moral outrage after moral outrage.

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And the temptation is to just give up. The temptation is just say,

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I'm just not going to expose myself to this kind of thing anymore. And obviously, we do have to be balanced.

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I mean, you can become just overwhelmed with it. But I need to be reminded that the psalmist gives us an example,

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I need to cry out to the Lord. I need to cry out to the Lord. And it's not that he doesn't know what's going on, but I'm expressing my desire that God would, in fact, cause the godly to increase, that the faithful amongst the sons of men would increase.

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But then there's a description, a description of what is happening in the society. They speak falsehood to one another.

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Isn't that interesting? It's one thing for men to speak falsehood. It's one thing, obviously, a person who wants to be like God and recognizes that God is truth is not going to be a person who is going to desire to speak falsehood.

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The desire for honesty, the desire for integrity, again, comes from a changed heart.

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But here in this society, they speak falsehood to one another.

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It has become the very matrix in which they live. Matrix, by the way, is a perfectly good word that has nothing to do with particular movies that might be of knowledge to certain people in the group.

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Matrix is a wonderful word, and it refers here in my use of it to an environment where people are willing to speak falsehood, and it becomes the normative thing.

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It becomes the thing that marks their conversations with others. Is that not what we expect in our society amongst politicians?

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Is that not the expected thing? I mean, we hear people speaking, and the natural expectation, the part of every single one of us is, it's probably just saying that to gain some support amongst this constituency over here, that constituency over there.

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And in fact, in certain spectrums of our political life in this nation, we just recognize, if that person's mouth's moving, they're probably lying.

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If they're breathing, they're probably lying. And that has become an expectation.

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Folks, that's not a good thing. No nation that experiences that for long -term is experiencing the blessing of God in a great way.

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With flattering lips and with a double heart, they speak. Now, we know the

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Scripture says much about the tongue. We, as creatures made in the image of God, have been given a tremendous gift in that we are able to communicate with one another.

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Language is an amazing thing. Language is an amazing thing. I never expected to travel as much as I do, but I'm doing a lot of traveling.

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I just got back from South Africa a few weeks ago. There are 18 official languages in South Africa.

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And most people there can communicate in at least three to four languages.

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It's an amazing thing to listen and to recognize the gift of language and how it separates us from,

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I love all the time people are trying to find ways in which, well, you know, orangutans can speak too.

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Yeah, okay, well, let's get them up here and let's have a debate. Let's see how well that goes, all right? Yes, there is communication amongst animals.

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But when I think of what we can do in communication, and I'm not talking about tweeting, okay?

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This isn't, no. That actually is sort of a demonstration of how our means of communication can be degraded down to 140 characters.

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But when you think of the great works of literature, when you think of the ability that we have actually to communicate and the subtleties of it, those of you that have studied

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Greek, for example, when you consider that wonderful language and the specificity of information that it can communicate, it's an amazing thing.

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That didn't come out of just a bunch of chaos, folks. The one that gave us that ability had to have that ability himself.

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It's amazing when atheists want to try to question God's ability to communicate with us.

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And they're using, of course, their minds and their communication to be able to enunciate their objections, and it's like, where do you think you got that ability in the first place?

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Someday you will find out when he speaks to you with great clarity. You will find out.

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But with flattering lips and with double heart, they speak. They speak false to the mind of others.

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This all is the realm of speech, the utilization of the tongue. And notice, with flattering lips, and so there is a intention to deceive, knowing that if you speak to someone, oh man, that's a beautiful scarf that you're wearing.

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I love the jacket you have, it's a beautiful hat. See, it's real easy to get somebody to, you know, you start talking about somebody, and oh,

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I just love the shoes you're wearing. It's real easy to flatter, and then to try to utilize that as a means to then deceive that person.

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Salesmen are taught to do this. I just, I hope you already knew that. If you don't already know that, you probably own seven houses and 14 cars you don't really need.

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That is a mechanism that people utilize, flattering lips and a double heart.

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It's a very interesting phrase there, a double heart. Literally, it's two hearts.

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And what that means is you say, you profess one thing. Oh, my heart is saying this, but you have a second.

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And it's that which is your true intentions, but that's the hidden one, you see.

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And what your speech represents, that's a false heart. You're saying it's really what you're all about.

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And again, I can't help but think of, why on earth do we allow elections in this land to last for as long?

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I'm already sick of this one, and we're still a year out. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's amazing.

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And you see these people, and you know that they're speaking with such emotion, and it's a double heart.

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That's not really what they believe. That's not really what their motivation is. A double heart, flattering lips, a double heart.

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Now, the psalmist says, may Yahweh cut off all flattering lips. The tongue that speaks great things, as reprehensible as it is to our society today.

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The godly person desires justice to be done, and justice will eventually require judgment.

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It will eventually require judgment. Now, we proclaim a message of salvation to the nations, but we also recognize that the day will come when judgment will come, and the one by whom that judgment will come is the perfectly equipped person.

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The one person who can truly bring justice and judgment, because he's king of kings and lord of lords, but he's also the

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God -man, and he lived a perfect life. And when he brings judgment, it will be perfect judgment.

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And the desire of the heart is that in the final analysis, we want to see flattering lips silenced.

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We want to see the tongue that speaks great things, that claims to have such great knowledge, but is speaking actually against God, we want to see that tongue cut off and silenced.

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And in fact, in reality, that's what each one of us have experienced, we who have bowed our knees to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

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When you see that picture in Romans chapters two and three of the sinfulness of man, and you get to chapter three, and you have that tremendous listing of the sinfulness of man, and then how does it all wrap up?

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It says, God has revealed these things so that every mouth may be stopped, silenced.

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It's the picture of that person who stands before the judge, and instead of all the, no judge,

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I'm not as bad as that person over there, and you see all the good works I've done, you see that all the time, don't you, on those judge, they still have those judge

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TV shows, I saw so many of them that I stopped watching them, but every once in a while you go get your, why is it that every time you go to your oil change, there's a judge thing on TV, have you noticed that?

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It's really weird, I guess they just keep them on reruns at Jiffy Lube or whatever it is, but you've got those people, and they're just making excuses left and right, and everybody likes to see the judge slap them down, and all the rest of that kind of stuff, but then, very differently from that person, is the one who just stands there, and the head is down, there's a recognition of their own guilt, a recognition of the propriety of sentence being uttered upon them, that's where we have been.

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If you're a true Christian, you have stopped with the self -righteousness, you've stopped with the excuses, you know what it is to stand before a holy

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God, and to recognize your own sin, and you've cast yourself upon His mercy in the person of Jesus Christ.

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No more flattering lips, no more double tongues, than is a description, a description of what these people in the society are saying, who have said, with our tongue, we will prevail, our lips are our own, who is

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Lord over us? I'm gonna come back to this verse, but let me just mention in passing, here, you have a description of the type of speech, it is rebellious speech.

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Here are creatures, their tongue and the gift of speech comes from God, but they say, with our tongue, we will prevail, we have the capacity and the power to prevail even over the judgments of God, because we have autonomy.

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Our lips, literally, our lips are with us, is literally what the Hebrew says, but it's a proper translation to say, are our own, they are under our control, no one has control over what we say, we have absolute freedom of speech, and then you have the question, who is

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Lord over us? Who is

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Lord over us? Who is Adon, Adon, Adonai, Lord?

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Who is Lord over us, they ask? Then the psalmist says, because the devastation of the afflicted, because the groaning of the needy, in other words, when a society is filled with people like that, there is going to be devastation, there is going to be devastation, there are gonna be those who are gonna be afflicted, justice is not gonna be done in a society when people are thinking like this.

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The needy are going to be ignored, because of the groaning of the needy, now

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I will arise, says Yahweh, I will set him in the safety for which he longs, and so Yahweh recognizes that in this situation where apostasy runs rampant and men are claiming their own authority, and they claim to have the ability to define their own reality, that our lips are with us,

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God is going to step in, and he's going to promise to set in safety the needy and the afflicted.

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And then the psalmist says, the words of Yahweh are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times, you, oh

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Yahweh, will keep them, you will preserve him from this generation forever. So there's a promise of God that he is going to preserve, he is going to, his eye is upon the needy, his eye is upon the afflicted, he's made the promise to set him in the safety, and so then the psalmist says, well those words of Yahweh, those words of promise are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times,

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Yahweh will keep them, his words of promise, you will preserve him, that is the afflicted and the needy, from this generation forever.

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Now there are some folks who take that particular passage, by the way, and my King James Only friends take that text and think it's talking about, well the

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King James Version of the Bible, and so it's tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times, and of course you all do know that there were five editions of Erasmus' Greek New Testament, Stephanos' and Beza, those are the seven they used to translate the

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King James New Testament, so there it is in Psalm 12. Now some of you who don't recognize sarcasm,

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I was being sarcastic there, but I've heard that people make the argument, and sometimes

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Christians go, so how do you respond to that, it has numbers in it, that must be right, oh my,

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I hope you recognize that kind of argumentation is not appropriate for Christians to be engaged in by any stretch of the imagination, but in the context, the point is,

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God is going to be faithful to the promise that He has made, God will preserve the needy and the afflicted from this generation forever, and then there is the observation of verse eight, the wicked strut about on every side, they're open when that which is vile is exalted among the sons of men, what an observation, what an observation, there have been times when those who engage in wickedness did so in secret, behind closed doors, when there was something in a society called shame, but when that which is vile, when a society gets to the point where that which is vile, that which is disgusting in God's sight, when that is exalted among the sons of men, when people say, that's a good thing, well then the wicked no longer hide in the shadows, they parade down the middle of the streets, and they campaign for office on the basis of their wickedness even to the point of saying that that which is good is evil and that which is evil is good, we're seeing it, we see it every single day, and the danger is that we will become accustomed to it to the point where we will not be praying appropriately, we will not be shedding tears, praying that God would bring repentance to our land.

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Now that is the text that I normally focus upon, is verse eight, but I want us to go back to verse four.

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And my thoughts today are especially in the last phrase.

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As we mentioned, here we have the people in this society where the godly man is disappearing, the faithful are vanishing from amongst the sons of men.

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Well, what takes their place? When God doesn't give to a people, men and women who speak

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God's truth, who speak of God's sovereign rule and who reflect in their lives and in their activities and in how they interact with others, what it means to be a godly person, something's gonna move into that vacuum.

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What moves into that vacuum? Listen, people who are enamored with their own autonomy, listen to those words, who is

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Lord over us? Who is Lord over us?

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Is that not the very watchword of Western society today?

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Who is Lord over us? Just a matter of literally still hours ago, yet another terror attack took place.

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Now, there have been worse terror attacks that have taken place, like in Africa, but Western news agencies don't really think too much about things like that, aren't overly concerned about things like that.

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This was Paris. I mean, there may have been some tremendous fashion bags destroyed in these attacks.

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There may have been some fashion designers that may have been threatened during this time, and so we go wall to wall coverage, right?

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Let's be honest, folks. The reason that was covered, 128 people, it's terrible.

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However, more people die under Islamic attacks in Africa every day than that, but it doesn't get talked about because, well, that's over there.

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That's over there. They look different. This is the West. And so everybody started praying for Paris.

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Did you see? I posted a cartoon from one of the former

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Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, which, by the way, given the artistic skill they have,

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I could have been a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist. I really, have you noticed that? Did anyone else catch that? I mean, here's this person sitting there, and I could have drawn that.

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In fact, right now, Clementine is pretty much in Charlie Hebdo's range right now, right about the same level there.

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But here was one of the former Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and it said, we want to thank the world for the pray for Paris hashtag, but please stop using it because we don't need any more religion.

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Paris is about love and kisses and joy.

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Paris is about life, not religion. France is a secular society.

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France, as a nation in its laws, has decided to express its utter detestation of God's rule over them.

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France has said, who is Lord over us? Who is Lord over us?

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We will have no Lord. We are secularists. Humanism is our religion.

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Many years ago, there was a man who, in reflecting upon Islam and Islamic militarism, came to the conclusion that God was using

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Islam as a means of exposing the shallow, superficial spirituality of Christians in Europe, and that Islam was the very rod in God's hand bringing judgment against false

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Christian profession in Europe. You know what his name was?

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Martin Luther. Martin Luther. Martin Luther saw the

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Antichrist as having two manifestations, spiritual and physical. The spiritual

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Antichrist was the Pope. The physical Antichrist was Islam. But he saw the

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Turks, which is what they referred to them, Mohammedans, Turks, it depended on, who were knocking at the gates of Vienna, threatening to overrun all of Europe in his day.

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He saw the Muslims as the very means by which God was punishing

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Europe for its false religion of Roman Catholicism and its shallow profession, even amongst those that recognize the errors of Rome.

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What do you think of that theory today? Because let's be honest, since that period of time, because of geopolitical changes,

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Luther's thoughts became an interesting side note in history until the last 20 years or so.

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And now all of a sudden, we're having to think about it again. Who is

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Lord over us? Secular societies are screaming that in our faces every day.

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In our land, a former Olympic gold medalist screamed into all of our living rooms from our large screen

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TVs, who is Lord over us? I am Lord over myself.

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I have the right to determine my reality.

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And God may have made me a man, but I've determined that I'm a woman.

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And our society said, and if you didn't clap along, obviously, if you said, no, you don't have the right to do that, you are a hate monger, you're a hate monger.

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But if you didn't clap, you're also a hate monger. Because you see, our society has come to the point where tolerance is irrelevant.

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You must celebrate, you must think as we do. Who is

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Lord over us? We are Lord over you, is what they're saying.

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Now we have the universities, oh my, oh my.

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To say that the chickens have come home to roost is an understatement, is it not?

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I have to admit, there is a part of me that inappropriately chuckles to see the leftist communists who have been promoting their leftist communism for decades, shocked when their students start to do what they've told them to do, except they do it to them.

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They didn't see that coming for some strange and odd reason. Who is

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Lord over us? The result has been, quite honestly, that we now send people to university, pay tens of thousands, yay, hundreds of thousands of dollars to regress them back to the age of three.

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Because now, instead of being taught to become a mature adult, learn to take care of yourself, learn to do the things you may not like to do, but you know what, that's what being an adult is all about.

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Now, we need to have safe spaces where we won't be offended by what someone else thinks or believes.

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My friends, I remember, I remember where I was.

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I was approximately six years of age. I was in the side yard at 301

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St. Mark's Road in Charlemontstown, Pennsylvania. And I was talking with somebody,

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I think it was possibly my sister, was someone older than me.

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And they looked at me and explained to me, because I was complaining about what someone had done to me.

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And they looked at me and said, why don't you grow up and stop worrying about what someone did to you?

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And I went, oh, that's what maturity is, cool.

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I remember it to this day. Now, I didn't perfectly come to maturity at that point in time, it takes experience.

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But have you noticed, now, I don't wanna offend anybody in here, but have you noticed that people are getting married later and later and later in life?

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You know what the average is for a man now to get married? 28 years of age, 28.

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Now, there's a reason that didn't work real well back, say, during the days of the plague, because you only lived to 35, so not a good idea.

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You got married a whole lot younger back then. When I asked my wife to marry me, we were both 18.

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And I was a old, mature 19 by the time we got married. We've been married for 33 years now.

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I'm awful glad we did that. It seems to me there's a problem, because some of the young men in the current generation, they don't know how to talk to a woman, because all they know how to do is text her.

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That's not enough, not enough, not gonna pull it off that way, no. And maybe it's because of all those hours spent in the basement playing those first -person shooter games, which do not help you to communicate with a woman, unless she is a first -person shooter addict herself.

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At that point, I'm scared for both of you, because once the baby explodes at 2 a .m.

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in the morning, you can't go play a shooter game at that point. You've got duties to take care of.

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And you see, what happens is you get married, and all of a sudden, you have to, that woman changes the man, and that man changes the woman, and you mature, but then the children come along.

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Oh, and that's when maturity, oh my. Every single baby is like one of those packets you find in your vitamin thing that sucks up all the moisture.

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They suck up all the selfishness, because that's what they are. They are the embodiment of selfishness.

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Little January right now does not care about anyone but January. That's just what babies are, and they suck the selfishness right out of us.

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It's a process God designed. And is it any wonder that when we live in a society that is running from everything that is good and godly, the first thing that's attacked is the family?

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Yeah, that's right. Children, the goodness of those things, that's the first thing that goes.

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It's now all about me. You know why Angela Merkel in Germany is committing cultural suicide in Germany.

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You know why she's doing it, right? We need workers, because Germans don't have babies anymore.

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That's why it's happening. You didn't know that? They're looking down the road. They're doing the demographics with abortion and birth control and everything else.

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They're recognizing, disaster coming, we need workers. Well, that wasn't the smartest way to do it, but that's why they're doing it.

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That's why they're doing it. Who is Lord over us? This is the very essence of the claim of human autonomy.

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We know better than God. We know better than that Stone Age book. It was written in the Iron Age by people who didn't have iPads.

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How can anybody who didn't have an iPad know anything? That's the mindset. That's the mindset of this society and this generation.

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And so we know better. We're gonna do it our own way.

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And we have no one who is Lord over us. And into that vacuum steps the almighty creature, man.

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Now, God made us to do many things. He gave us many gifts, but He never made us to be

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Lord over us. And we do a lousy job when we try.

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The result is devastation, affliction, the groaning of the needy.

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And is that not what we see all around us in this very day? When we as believers interact with the people around us and we see them making these claims, we hear them, and you and I have to be sensitive to this.

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When we hear people around us, they may be people in our own families, people in the neighborhood, at school, obviously, the professor, people at work, whatever it is, whenever we are having interaction with those around us, you and I need to be so attuned to the biblical teaching of the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of creation. We need to be so actively each and every day committing ourselves to the

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Lordship of Christ in our thinking so that we will hear when those around us are making this claim, are in essence saying, who is

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Lord over us? Because the only ones that are going to be able to tell them you do have a

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Lord, and if you ignore Him, if you reject Him, it will be to your utter destruction is you and I.

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That's what we're called to do. You undoubtedly know the key text about apologetics in the

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New Testament. This is apologia, church.

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You owe me for that, Jeff. First time I walked into the studio, I went back to the, you know, they've got the cool little thing with all the

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Greek on it. I started reading the Greek, and every time I came to that letter, which we won't mention,

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I'm like, oh, look, Logos. Yeah, and Genao, oh, yeah,

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I wonder how it became Gia. Anyway, I say apologia all the time, and I still am referring to you, so it's okay.

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Can we agree to disagree? It's a good thing, okay. You know the text.

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You know what Peter says, that you are to set aside, sanctify the

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Messiah Christ as kurios in your hearts, right?

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Always being ready to give a defense, a reasoned defense, an apologia, for the hope that is within you, yet with gentleness and reverence.

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We all know the text, right? I have an entire sermon just on the first part of that verse because for years, as an apologist,

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I didn't hear what that text was actually saying. That text is the exact opposite of the attitude of these people in Psalm 12 .4.

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They're saying, who is Lord over us? The absolutely necessary condition to be fulfilled on your part to do what

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Peter was saying to do in that verse is to sanctify, set apart, treat as holy

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Christ as Yahweh. Kurios there, if you take it back to the text that it's coming from in Isaiah, is about Yahweh.

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We are to treat Yahweh as holy. The point is the believer in his heart, in the very center of his being, in that which orders all the rest of your worldview, your behavior, your action, your speech, it is to be a daily task on your part and my part to treat as holy the

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Messiah Christ who came in flesh, but we are to see him as Yahweh.

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He is to be our ultimate Lord. And so everything else in our life is prioritized under his

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Lordship. If you each and every day are making that conscious decision that Lord, this is what

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I want to do. I want to treat you as you truly are in all of my life, then your hearing will be attuned to hear whenever those around us say things, and they may not even be talking specifically about a quote unquote religious topic, but you will be able to hear and discern when they in essence, because they're not submitted to the

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Lordship of Christ, are saying, who is Lord over me? Who is Lord over us?

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You'll be able to hear it. And because you hear it in everyday conversation, you will find amazingly effective means of communicating to them who

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Jesus Christ truly is. It's not just a matter of always, oh, well, here,

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I've got a tract right here. Sometimes it can be a completely different conversation, and yet they're showing their fundamental belief that they are autonomous, that they have no

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Lord over them, that they have the right to determine their own reality. And that's when you can say, no,

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I don't believe I have the right to determine my own reality, and here's why you shouldn't believe that either, because that's not the way the world actually works.

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You are not autonomous. That's actually an act of rebellion.

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Rebellion, yes, it is. I was there once too. I was there once too.

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You always want to approach anyone as a redeemed sinner, not as someone who is standing over them, who somehow is better than them inherently.

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We recognize that we have been justified. We recognize we've been made righteous. That's all of grace. Christian truth in the hands of a consistent sinner just becomes an ugly thing.

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It truly does. But you see, if we are making the conscious effort to recognize the need, the world is constantly pressing upon us, constantly seeking to get you and I to think in the same way.

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If they can get us as Christians to start at least living, we won't sing it, but at least living and thinking in a way where we are saying who is

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Lord over us, then they know we have been absolutely incapacitated as a meaningful witness in this culture.

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And so we have to recognize that every single day the world is seeking to conform us to its image, especially in this area.

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We need to set apart Christ as Yahweh in our hearts. And when we do that, then we will be prepared to recognize when people are saying, oh, our lips are our own.

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I can say anything I want. You know what? Someday, every word you've spoken, every tweet you've tweeted, every update you have tapped hurriedly into your phone on Facebook, every email you have sent,

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Jesus said, we'll be judged. Now, if that's frightening to us, it should be frightening to the entire world.

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God has given us the gift of expression, and because He's given it to us as a gift,

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He has the right to judge how we use it, and He has the right to determine the proper way and the improper way for us to utilize what

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He's given to us. And it reflects the heart. It reflects the soul out of the heart.

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Abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. It reflects where people are when they say, who is

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Lord over us? Now, in this room, I hope, for all of us, we answer that not in the way these people did, but when we hear those words, who is

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Lord over us, our first thought is, yes, I have a Lord, and I am so thankful that I know

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Him, and I want to serve Him. And our message to others is, you do have a

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Lord, and if you're not serving Him, someday you will be judged by Him. That is the message.

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That is the message of our text this afternoon. Let's pray together. Our gracious and merciful

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Heavenly Father, we do confess that You are King of kings and Lord of lords, and we embrace that, we rejoice in that, and we are thankful for that.

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But Lord, we know we live in a society of people who are crying out by their actions, by their thinking, who is

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Lord over us? There is none, is what they're saying. Lord, we know that their rejection of You does not in any way threaten

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Your rulership over Your universe. He who sits in the heavens laughs. But Lord, we desire to be used by You to be salt and light, so we would ask that You would give us the opportunity to bear testimony.

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No matter what the cost, may we bear testimony. May You use it to honor and glorify the name of Jesus Christ, who is