Conference Message: Christ or Chaos

Well, good afternoon, OSA. And I'm glad it's picking me up. I was setting up earlier, and I was like, well, this mic was made for Rusty and not for someone my size. So hopefully, we're good to go there.

But I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity to speak to you all today. When it comes to this fight to end abortion, I owe everything to Rusty. I mean that he's my father in this fight. And I wouldn't be in this fight if it wasn't for him.

And I'm so thankful. And it's an absolute honor to even play a small part in this bittersweet weekend for Rusty. Just I love him dearly, and I'm thankful for the opportunity. But the main verse I want to look at is from 1 Corinthians 14 40, which says, but all things should be done decently and in order.

And there's a Presbyterian pastor. His name was Peter Marshall. He lived from 1902 to 1949. And he famously said this. The choice before us is plain, Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration.

I am rather tired of hearing about our rights and privileges as Americans. The time has come. It is now when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship. America's future depends upon her accepting and demonstrating God's government.

That was 80 years ago that he said that. And it could not be more true today. So the name of this message I've titled Christ or Chaos, and I'm going to talk about that. But before I do, I'll go ahead and pray.

Lord, I'm so thankful again for this opportunity to be here today and to speak to pastors, Lord, and to admonish them to be in this fight, Lord. And I ask that you would get me out of the way and speak through me, Lord, and use me, use this message for your glory.

Use this to help end abortion in our nation, Lord. And we ask this in Christ's name, amen. So again, Christ or chaos, we've probably all heard this phrase. But I'm not sure that we have all thought through the implications of what it really means.

The idea is that there is no neutrality in this life. We must view all things through either the lens of Christ or through the lens of chaos. We must either presuppose order or disorder. I'm going to talk a lot about what that means today.

There is no in-between. We cannot attempt to appeal to both sides. I've actually had this conversation a number of times recently with some brothers and sisters who are frustrated with the pro-life industry for continually trying to end abortion from a neutral position.

This fight to end the slaughter of our pre-born neighbors can only be won under the authority of Jesus Christ through the proclamation of his good news by the power of the gospel. This is ultimately a spiritual battle.

And not only it cannot, but will not be won through mere information. We will not prevail through the changing of minds only, but through the changing of hearts by the regeneration of the spirit. We must put to death this neutral thought by placing the gospel at the forefront of this fight.

This is a war for worship. It is a little known fact, but a fact nonetheless, that many abortion mills actually have satanic altars in them. As Christians in Christ, we find our Sabbath, we find our rest, we find our comfort.

Unbelievers are also looking for Sabbath rest. They too desire comfort and know that a sacrifice of innocent blood is required to achieve this comfort. The problem is that instead of submitting their lives to the God who is comfort, who sacrificed his own innocent life, they are willing to sacrifice any and everything, including their own precious children, to Molech, the cultural false God of comfort.

Have you ever noticed that there are very few instances of demonic activity in the Old Testament? But the moment Christ arrives in the New Testament some 400 years later, you see demons everywhere. Specifically here, I wanna look in Matthew 18.

You see a demon-possessed man, and he approaches Christ and cries out, what have you to do with this, O son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time? Why do you think this is? It's because they know what the arrival of Christ means.

They know what the implications of the proclamation of the gospel is for them. It marks the undoing of their temporary reign.

Over the earth.

Christ made that clear in Matthew 12, that he had come to plunder Satan's house. And as my dear friend Andrew Sandlin has said, we live in a cosmic war zone. Being faithful to this mission means trying to regain Satan's territory.

Attempting to end abortion means engaging in a spiritual war for worship. So to be clear, again, oops, sorry, I already said that quote. This is a battle not for physical, but also spiritual life and death.

If you remember earlier, I mentioned that neutrality is a myth. Proverbs 8, 35 through 36 says, for whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord. But he who fails to find me injures himself.

All who hate me love death. This culture that worships comfort hates God, so they therefore love death. They love everything about death. The taste of it, the smell of it, the color, the way it looks.

They love to watch death in 4K HD and long to romance the idea of it. Death, of course, is the result of chaos and not of order. But why is this? Why is the culture obsessed with death, scripture is pretty clear why.

First Corinthians 15, 25 to 26 teaches us that Christ must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Did you catch that? Christ is currently reigning and will do so until every enemy has been put under his feet, the last being death.

Why then as Christians are we so surprised that the God-hating, chaotic, comfort-loving evil forces behind the demise of our culture promulgate death? Why are we shocked that death is their selling point?

Because they know full well that death is the last thing they have to hold on to. They know what the scriptures say and believe it. They know what Christ intends to do and they fully intend to fight tooth and nail.

First John 3, 8 says, whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. Now catch this, the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.

Let me repeat that. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. Christ did not come just to save us from hell but also to vanquish Satan and his works. And again, my friend Andrew Sandlin said that Christ's work on the cross was designed to reverse the effects of sin in every single area of life and thought and culture.

Christ is currently and actively defeating Satan and we should not for one second think that his minions of disorder will at any point give up without a fight. They will literally fight to the death of death, attempting to bring as many as they can with them all while appealing to death as something righteous or something good.

So the only way to defeat this is by proper orderly worship. So I've described what false worship looks like but what does proper worship look like? And I'm not necessarily talking about Sunday worship in a public setting but daily worship with our lives.

In our current day and age, we daily feel pressure from the culture to disrupt our worship. But what separates us from the pagan culture? I often say that culture is nothing more than religion externalized.

So what defines our worship and what defines worship for the unbelieving world? For the believer, worship starts with God and is ruled by order. For the unbeliever, worship starts with chaos and is ruled by apparent order.

We all know, believer and unbeliever alike, that the world is broken and needs to be repaired. The problem for the Christian is ethical. The world is broken because of sin and rebellion. Civilization is fragile because of the sinful hearts of men.

The only solution is the gospel and right orderly worship. The problem for the unbeliever is that civilization is also fragile but because of chaos and structural defect. The world essentially is built upon a foundation of chaos.

The unbeliever has no ultimate standard for order. His only hope is to drive things back further into chaos, hoping to get lucky for better order on the next go around. This is what chaotic worship, chaotic religion must do out of necessity.

The desire to burn everything to the ground is driven out of this delusion. Christians want to live ordered lives because we serve the God of order. Pagans want to live chaotic lives because they serve the gods of chaos.

This is why proper and ordered worship is so important to everything that we do. Foundationally, God created the world for us to dwell in and to dwell in it in such a way as to make it more and more orderly.

Likewise, he wants us to worship him in such a way as to repair the broken world. So the key verse I mentioned again is 1 Corinthians 14, 40 and this is our duty. It says, but all things should be done decently and in order.

As Christians, excuse me, we should want nothing to do with disorder because it is contrary to God's created order. Orderly worship must start with the individual. It starts with self-government and moves to family government and then to church government and lastly, to civil government.

If we look quickly at 1 Timothy chapter three, this is the qualifications of an overseer. Verses four through five, Paul says, he must manage his own household well with all dignity, keeping his children submissive.

For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? This is precisely what I'm referring to. Proper orderly worship begins with the self-government of the head of the home and then is incorporated within the family governmental structure.

It is very telling to me that Paul realizes that there can be no orderly worship within church government if the overseer of the church is unable to maintain order at home. Christian worship, whether it be self, at home, at church, or in the public sphere, should be disciplined.

It should be intentional. It should be trained, powerful, and lastly, reverent. The pagan world, on the other hand, wants everything reduced to chaos. But we, as Christ's bride, are the dam holding back the chaotic waters of destruction.

We stand as the barrier between creation and chaos. And just as babies are being torn apart, limb from limb, in their mother's wombs, the gods of chaos will be slain, and it's going to be Christian worship that ends it.

We want to introduce order into the chaotic world, while at the same time, the pagans want to flood our ordered world with chaos. And just like faithful Gideon and Judges 6, we need to tear down the culture's grisly idols to the chaotic gods of comfort and rebuild them in a way that produces orderly worship to the god who defeats chaos.

God has established his church and promises us that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. We, as Christians, often get this promise wrong. What do gates do? Go ahead, somebody say it. They defend, they protect.

They're not offensive, but defensive. So many times, Christians, I think, view this passage as the gates of hell being offensive, that the gates of hell are attacking the church. That's incorrect. The gates of hell will not prevail against us because they will not be able to withstand our offensive charge.

We do not defeat the gates of hell by keeping our worship within the four walls.

Of our churches.

We defeat the gates of hell by charging forward, bringing our right orderly worship to the unbelieving world until those gates are left no stone standing. So I've shown you why we must choose either Christ or chaos, not just in this fight to end abortion, but really in all of life.

But practically speaking, what does Christ versus chaos look like? As the culture actively tries to deconstruct what God has sovereignly structured, what does order versus disorder look like? So I got some practical things I'm gonna describe here.

Order looks like finding our joy and contentment in Christ. Disorder looks like finding our joy and contentment in idolatry. Order is identity in Christ. Disorder is identity in anything other than Christ.

Order looks like the God-ordained biological genders of male and female. Disorder looks like the alphabet people. Order is embracing the way God created you and using that gift to his glory. Disorder is practicing self-mutilation and defiance to God.

Order is proper Christ honoring self-government. Disorder is autonomous self-love. Order looks like the divinely decreed institution of family government. Disorder looks like the deliberate demolition of the nuclear family.

Order is the worship of God through proper sexual intimacy of a husband and wife. Disorder is the worship of sex through improper sexual intimacy outside the confines of the marriage bed. Order looks like taking responsibility for the little lives created through sexual intimacy.

Disorder looks like sexual intimacy without consequences. Order is sacrificing everything for the well-being of your offspring. Disorder is sacrificing your offspring for everything else. Order looks like caring for your children no matter the cost.

Disorder looks like hiring an assassin to butcher your children no matter the cost. Order is loving your baby, even if that means giving them up for adoption. Disorder is hating your baby even to the point of death.

Order looks like rescuing those being taken away to death. Disorder looks like deliberately helping those to stumble to the slaughter. Order is men acting like men. Disorder is men acting effeminate. Order looks like Christ's bride acting courageously.

Disorder looks like the church acting cowardly. Order is having no king but Christ. Disorder is having no king but Caesar. And lastly, I'm addressing pastors here. Order looks like leading the charge to end abortion from the pulpit.

Disorder looks like pastors saying, that's not really my thing. So in conclusion, this is a spiritual battle and we must not be afraid of it. Let's not forget that. And I'm gonna tell a quick story I called Rusty yesterday.

I've been preparing this message for a while and didn't even think about how I might be attacked spiritually while preparing this message, right? So Monday night, welcome all of you, by the way, to Arizona in the summer.

You're surviving, so congratulations. My power went out Monday night. So I'm with a newborn, 3 .30 in the morning, laying there trying not to sweat to death. And it was like, got hit with a two by four.

And I was like, of course, of course this is how this week's gonna start. So that was Monday night. Tuesday night, we're getting ready for bed and my oldest daughter gets stung by a stupid Satan scorpion.

So didn't get a lot of sleep Tuesday night. It's just like, and then Wednesday morning, wake up and Pastor Jeff is supposed to speak tonight. He's got COVID. So it's just like, you know, it's just how this goes, right?

Like we're doing something right. We always say, if the enemy knows your name, you're doing something right. But anywhere and everywhere you look throughout the world is contested territory. But where God is most at work, there we will find Satan working the hardest against us.

We are not just fighting our unbelieving culture, but also Satan, who is currently losing and will ultimately be defeated once and for all in God's perfect timing. So I'm gonna end with this quote from Andrew Sandlin.

I love this quote.

He said, we're going to win. Satan was definitively defeated on the cross. History itself is the outworking of the effects of the cross and the resurrection by the power of the spirit of God, the preaching of the gospel, the authority of the moral law of God and all areas of life.

We are going to win, but we can only accomplish this through order. So pastors, if you are watching and listening to this, it starts in the pulpit. In all areas of life, but especially in this fight to end our modern Holocaust, we must reject every invitation to neutrality and always choose Christ over chaos.

Let's pray. Lord, I thank you again for this opportunity to be here. I thank you for Rusty.

I love him so much, Lord,.

And just an honor to be a part of this weekend. And Lord, again, I ask that you would not just use my message but use this whole weekend, all the events, Lord, for your glory to end abortion, to end this modern Holocaust, Lord, to end the slaughter of our preborn neighbors, Lord.

We trust in you for that. We know that you've already defeated Satan and that you are actively beating him, Lord. And we praise you for that. And we trust in you and your timing, Lord, that this will end.

We ask that you would give us strength and wisdom, Lord, that you would allow us to be courageous and bold and that you would use us to rescue those being led away to death. We ask that through all of this, you would be glorified, Lord, we ask this in Christ's name.

Amen.