Thoughts On Faithfulness in an Uncertain Future
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We did the program from the Mobile Command Center today as a means of testing things out before I hit the road this weekend. I also wanted to test a touch screen we have obtained that should allow me to do mot of what I do on the Flip Board in the Big Studio, but while traveling. And it worked! But then I started preaching to myself, really, and wandered through an entire discussion about faithfulness in these trying and confusing days. About 60% through the program I started talking to the homeschool kids, really all our kids, but especially those kids, about how blessed they, and how they need to understand the blessings they are receiving. If you have such kids, you might want to find that part. Sometimes having someone else's voice helps to get the message through!
Our next program will be coming from on the road, either from somewhere in Texas, or around Oklahoma City, Lord willing! Prayers for traveling safety appreciated!
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- 00:31
- And greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White, and we're coming to you from the
- 00:37
- Mobile Command Center, which currently is not mobile. Well, it's never mobile when
- 00:43
- I'm actually in here doing this for obvious reasons. It's not safe or functional, but I'm parked outside my house.
- 00:52
- So not on the road yet, leave on Saturday, but obviously it's been a little while since my last trip.
- 01:00
- Had some physical challenges to work through and work through those.
- 01:07
- And so, you know, when you've stored something for a while, especially in Arizona, if you've never lived in a desert, you can't possibly understand the ubiquity of dust.
- 01:23
- You wash your vehicle, and the next day it's a different color because we live in the desert.
- 01:34
- And there are lots and lots of people running around the desert, which means you're kicking up dust. And yeah, so I'm a little bit casually dressed because as soon as we're done here,
- 01:47
- I have to dust everything. And then after I'm done dusting everything, then
- 01:53
- I have to Swiffer the floors and vacuum the few bits of carpet there are hiding here, there, and everywhere, and sweep and do all that fun stuff that you got to do to, you know,
- 02:04
- I'm big time, man. Rich came over this morning. He did his
- 02:09
- Rich the Toolman Taylor impersonation, which does a very good impersonation of Tim the
- 02:16
- Toolman Taylor. But he brought his power washer over and we tried to get the bug guts off the front.
- 02:26
- It's, there are some bugs that once they hit, they never leave.
- 02:33
- Maybe you hit them at, you know, going downhill at 75 miles per hour, and it just, I don't know.
- 02:38
- But yeah, trying to get them off is not, no, it's not easy. So I think once an
- 02:46
- RV leaves the dealership, it just, those become permanent, just badges of honor, in essence.
- 02:55
- I'm not expecting to get a whole lot on this trip. It's the winter, so I don't expect a whole lot of bugs, but you never know.
- 03:02
- We'll find out. But anyways, Rich came over and gave her a good bath, and now
- 03:08
- I got to do the inside, stuff like that, and start getting all my stuff in. We're going to be on the road for almost a full month.
- 03:14
- And we've already announced a number of the things we're going to be doing. Looking outside, there's a school nearby, and here's this poor,
- 03:27
- I don't know, nine -year -old, I would say, outdoors, in the sun, wearing a mask.
- 03:35
- Totally, completely 1 ,000 % worthless, but that's just the next generation.
- 03:41
- Did you see that horrific Canadian video, by the way, of the young kids that have just been brainwashed?
- 03:50
- And what should we do with unvaccinated people? Call the police, lock them away. It is,
- 03:58
- I don't know. I don't have the answers to how this is going to be fixed.
- 04:09
- There's all of us, every single one of us, is thinking through our eschatology right now.
- 04:17
- And a lot of folks are like, this is it. If it doesn't end now, and I've talked about it before, but I think about it every day now.
- 04:29
- I mean, you can't help but experience this level of confusion, in a sense, not confusion about the faith, but about where we are in history.
- 04:43
- Because yesterday, you've got the UK going, you know what, these lockdowns, masks, vaccine passports, they ain't working.
- 04:57
- They ain't working worth a dime, so we're dumping them. Meanwhile, directly across the channel, starting
- 05:05
- Monday, you're basically supposed to just starve to death if you're a
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- French citizen who is unvaccinated. Can I understand why those two realities exist that close to one another?
- 05:22
- I don't. And I know all sorts of dear, dear friends right now that are very, very sick.
- 05:31
- But most of them have had COVID before, and it is that time of year.
- 05:39
- I mean, in 2019, did no one have the flu in 2019, 2018, 2017? I was talking with Jeff, and we were talking about,
- 05:50
- I remember a flu that I had. For some reason, I think it was around 2015. It may have been earlier than that, but I just remember laying on the couch, sleeping on the couch, because, you know, on the couch, you can sort of put your head up a little bit, and you try to control some of the coughing.
- 06:10
- There's one of those situations where every muscle in your body, every muscle in your chest, your diaphragm, everything is on fire.
- 06:18
- It's been pulled, it feels like, and you're just laying there, doing everything in your power not to cough, because you know, as soon as you do, what it's gonna feel like.
- 06:31
- It's gonna kill you. And I remember that very, very, very, very clearly.
- 06:39
- I don't remember anybody on television talking about it. Nobody was ramming a cotton swab up my nose at that point in time.
- 06:51
- And it never crossed my mind as I laid there suffering for at least 10 days that I was gonna die.
- 07:01
- Never crossed my mind how the world has changed and how we think has changed.
- 07:12
- And the next generation has been permanently altered. Thankfully, we know who can change hearts and minds, and we know the power that can change hearts and minds.
- 07:25
- But you look at stuff like that, you look at these poor children, and there are people responsible for this stuff, there really are.
- 07:38
- I mean, this was a biological attack. I mean, if you wanna know what China is really all about, that's what this is all about.
- 07:45
- And their position in the world has been greatly enhanced.
- 07:51
- I can guarantee you that the Chinese and Russians have absolutely no fear of the United States any longer, nor should they.
- 08:00
- Anybody who watched even a portion of that poor man who did a press conference yesterday, who is so completely self -deceived and disconnected from reality, and he's the
- 08:14
- Commander -in -Chief. Well, anyway, so here we are, and this background should look familiar to you.
- 08:21
- You're gonna see it a whole lot more over the next month, Lord willing. I ask for prayers for safety.
- 08:30
- Right now, though, the weather doesn't look bad. Along my route, a lot colder than here, but it doesn't look too bad.
- 08:38
- Doesn't look like we've got any polar expresses and ice storms and stuff like that at the moment. That all can change, obviously.
- 08:47
- But Lord willing and Lord blesses, be back here about a month from now.
- 08:55
- And in the meantime, St. Charles, gonna be doing our normal thing there, except, what, almost two months late?
- 09:08
- Sorry about that. I hope it still counts. And looking forward to meeting folks there.
- 09:15
- We've posted a few other things where I'm gonna be speaking and working on two more along the way that we'll be letting folks know about.
- 09:27
- And, but of course, then teaching at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.
- 09:33
- We're doing apologetics class. And then the debate with Tim Stratton on Mullenism down in Houston as well.
- 09:43
- So lots of stuff going on. Now, one of the reasons that I didn't just jump in the truck and go down to the office today, aside from needing to make sure that I knew where all the connectors were.
- 09:58
- That's just one of the things. You know, you get back from a trip like this and you sort of have to figure out what am
- 10:06
- I gonna leave in here? What am I gonna take with me? What am I gonna put back in the house? What has to go back to the office?
- 10:12
- There's a million things like that. And part of what you gotta think about here in Arizona is what can
- 10:18
- I leave in the unit during the summer when it's gonna be well, it's gonna be triple digits in here pretty much the whole time.
- 10:26
- In comparison to this time where winter was coming. And so, yeah, I don't get in the mid seventies during the day, but then it can cool off in the evening.
- 10:37
- So there's just lots of decisions to make. So we wanted to need to make sure that I've got this light here that I use and the camera that we got that I travel with and the connections and the microphone and make sure everything was working.
- 10:53
- But then one of the things I wanted to be able to do, I've grown rather fond of our flip board in our large studio.
- 11:07
- And this program has always been very biblically oriented. When someone calls me a biblicist, they may mean that as a insult.
- 11:19
- And I know what they're trying to say. And as a person who's taught church history for decades,
- 11:27
- I deeply appreciate those who came before me in the faith, but I have been consistent my entire life.
- 11:35
- I analyze what those who come before me have said in light of the scriptures themselves, knowing that there have been great men in the past who had wonderful insights into certain aspects of the faith.
- 11:57
- And yet, because of their context, for example, because for centuries, because of the impact and influence of origin, there were wonderful believers with whom we will share eternal life in the future.
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- And who viewed the inspired words of three quarters of the
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- Bible in a lesser way than is appropriate and is proper.
- 12:36
- It's not because they weren't trying to be rebellious. There's a lot of places where you and I are gonna discover someday we had some kind of a blind spot tradition.
- 12:58
- And it wasn't because we tried to be rebellious. It wasn't because we didn't want every aspect of our thinking and beliefs to go to the
- 13:05
- Lordship of Christ. We may have lived in a time when there was less attention being paid to a particular aspect of biblical truth.
- 13:19
- And you see that in the past and you deal with it from there. So we clearly focus upon the word of God as being sufficient.
- 13:37
- I don't have my brown one at the office, but this is normally the one that I carry.
- 13:45
- This is actually a 77 NASB. And of course it's a Jeffrey Rice Rebind. And you'll notice the beautiful Cairo on the front that he did for me.
- 13:57
- And this is actually a 77. The one that I have at the office, the brown one that I showed you that has the solos on the spine.
- 14:04
- That's a 77, but it's a new printing. There's still one publisher out there that prints the 1977.
- 14:13
- NASB and people sometimes ask me why that one? Partly because I'm getting older and I like older stuff,
- 14:23
- I guess. But partly because of this particular one that I'm holding, it's a large print.
- 14:34
- Can't really tell from there, but sort of washes out, but it's large enough for me to read fairly comfortably.
- 14:44
- And you can tell I had a long time ago because there's my library imprint thingamabobby on it.
- 14:54
- And I didn't write in the front. I wish I had as to exactly when
- 15:00
- I got it, but this was the current NASB when
- 15:06
- I got it. I probably got it somewhere between probably around 80 -ish, 1980 -ish maybe.
- 15:15
- Had it for a long time and it had held up really, really well. And then I sent it to Jeffrey to be rebound so that it would last a lot longer.
- 15:26
- And some people ask, so part of it's that, part of it honestly is I don't mind the V's and vowels in the poetic section.
- 15:35
- It's not necessary. It's not more spiritual. But I just like how it reads along those lines.
- 15:48
- And so all of that wandering about here, when
- 15:54
- I'm back in here, there's stuff that distracts me right now because it's like, oh yeah, I remember that. Anyway, one of the things
- 16:01
- I wanted to do was could I in some way re -enact, enact, recreate while on the road, the
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- Flipboard. Could I get a monitor? I think it was only last week.
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- We were in the big studio and for some reason it crossed my mind, you know,
- 16:25
- I'm really gonna miss having this. To be able to pop a cord and stuff and grab the pen and go over there and circle stuff and this over here and notice this.
- 16:35
- And so I put the word out to our guys in our
- 16:41
- A and O chat thing. It's not the old chat channel. It's something much more encrypted.
- 16:54
- And someone came back with a suggestion. And so what we've done and one of the reasons we're doing this program is to test this is
- 17:07
- I have a monitor here. It is a touchscreen monitor.
- 17:13
- You can see there's, don't worry, that's not how it's gonna work. That's like, nah, that's not really gonna cut it.
- 17:19
- It's light, it's USB -C connected to my Mac.
- 17:26
- And so what I can do and what we hope will work real well, is
- 17:32
- I will share the screen and then
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- I will be able to use a little program that I have called
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- Presentify and use my marker here.
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- And so I happen to be in Isaiah chapter 44 and I will be able to write.
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- So for example, so here we go.
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- The ones fashioning a graven idol. Placentes is from, this term here is the same term that is used of God when he fashions the world when he fashions, and that's what man does when he's fashioning a graven image here in, so Yetzir is the
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- Hebrew for that. And they will be put to shame, the same term that's used in the
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- New Testament for being put to shame because of what they do.
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- Even their own witnesses fail to see or know so that they will be put to shame.
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- So I, and here's, and it's literally, here's to know, to know in their hearts.
- 19:08
- And so I will be able to go into various texts and I haven't put it up yet, but be able to also have a chalkboard type background where I'll be able to just write and to do things like that as well.
- 19:27
- And so we were testing this, I don't have as many colors to play with, so I can, oh,
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- I was thought, let's see if, oh, it's still blue. There we go, there's a green.
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- So I've got basically a pink, a green, and a blue are my options there.
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- But the point is I will be able to share these things and I'll be able to utilize these things and go into these various texts.
- 20:04
- And hopefully that will be useful to everybody. And what
- 20:11
- I'll have to get better at is handling something that's down on my lap.
- 20:20
- And there we go, something that's down on my lap and make that all work at the same time.
- 20:29
- I hopefully will get better at that with the passage of time. But it's worked and we're excited about that.
- 20:38
- And it's also extremely lightweight. So my engine is excited about that too.
- 20:45
- It would not be a good thing to try to bring the flipboard along on the trips.
- 20:52
- I sort of figure when you think about it, this poor little unit, if you can imagine what it's like to be in here when it's bouncing down the road, especially on I -40 across New Mexico, which is just, it shouldn't be described as a road.
- 21:11
- It's a mess. So any type of electronic equipment, this isn't the best place to have it.
- 21:20
- I will admit that. But anyway, so I'm excited about that and I hope you are as well.
- 21:33
- So what are we gonna talk about on the rest of the program today? I'll have to admit it is a strange thing to have to think through what you're free to say and what you're not free to say, depending on what forum you're on.
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- Now we're on Odyssey right now, so I can say what I want. But the point is that I think back literally only a matter of months to a time when that was not a filter that I had to run through my mind.
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- We have so much going on right now that demands of us.
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- And look, I understand folks, I get tired too. And as I'm talking with my fellow believers, we are entering a new time period where, yes, and I'm talking to my fellow reformed believers, we will need to be disciplined and to cultivate a spiritual reliance upon the spirit of God to energize us and to cause us to persevere in doing good that we did not have to cultivate in years and decades past.
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- It's spiritual, it's a spiritual battle. And yes, reformed people believe in the spiritual battle, not the weird silliness of TBN, but here we have a situation of spiritual battle.
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- And that is we have to invest the energy to continue to do good.
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- And it is a good thing as a believer to seek to honor
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- God in the way you think about what is happening around you.
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- We don't think as often as we should about the reality that God is glorified when we, his people, seek to have the mind of Christ and to think as he would have us to think, to be disciplined in our minds.
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- God is glorified when you seek to properly and appropriately recognize
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- God's sovereign purposes in what's going on around you in light of what he has revealed in his word.
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- God is glorified in that. And really when you really dig into it and think about it, a believer under the dominion and foot of an oppressive anti -Christian government, literally imprisoned, freedom's taken away, earthly belongings taken away, who continues each and every day to seek to view the world around them and to speak to those that God gives them opportunity to speak to, if you even have anybody to speak to, in a way that's glorifying to God is truly something that does glorify
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- God. From the world's perspective, you're just a slave and what goes on in your short life is irrelevant.
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- But from the perspective of heaven, the fact that God is supernaturally sustaining an undeserving but now redeemed sinner so that they are seeking
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- God's glory in the very way that they think and act has eternal value that the world can't even begin to understand.
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- So put down a deep stake right now, no matter what happens, no matter, because look, remember the 7 ,000 days of Elijah?
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- Remember how there were these faithful people and even
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- God's prophet didn't know they were there. They had no webcasts, they weren't publishing any books.
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- They were just faithful believers and they had been kept by God through all the judgments that God brought upon the people of Israel.
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- Now, they were kept faithful, but they didn't have as much food to eat as they had had before and they probably had to sell off any things that they had obtained in their lives to be able to just get food and nourishment and it was just as difficult on them as it was upon the unbelieving
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- Israelites that were in rebellion and engaged in idolatry. And when you're a part of a people under the judgment of God, life can become very, very challenging and difficult, but they were kept faithful.
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- God was the one that kept them. I've reserved them to myself and we want to be amongst those 7 ,000.
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- If we are, as many of us feel, in a culture that is under the judgment of God and that this judgment may become really severe and do
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- I really need to just start walking through all the reasons for this? Abortion in and of itself would be enough.
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- The profaning of marriage in and of itself would be enough. The injection of hormones into eight -year -olds because of the narcissistic rebellion of individuals who hate how
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- God has made them and abuse children as a result. All of these things would be more than sufficient given the light that we've received.
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- So your eschatology will determine where you see this going in the long run.
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- So for a lot of people, it's like, you know, we're out of here. For other people, maybe, maybe not, don't know.
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- For other people, Christ must put all his enemies under his feet.
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- And, you know, this is where I am. This is one of the greatest enemies, secular rebellion, secular insanity is one of the greatest enemies that has ever reared its ugly head to oppose the claims of Christ.
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- The C4, the legislation in Canada. Think for just a moment with me about that preamble.
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- I read the preamble in my sermon.
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- And I think most people probably did in their sermons. But here you have a government that was blessed with a tremendous amount of light from God and blessings from on high and natural resources and just the common law and the foundations of Christian society that made these nations flourish.
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- Now identifying those same fundamental truths as myths, as falsehoods, as lies, as things that harm human beings.
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- Secularism is a horrific denial of everything that Christ stands for.
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- How does this, how is this enemy going to be placed under the feet of Christ? Now, again, eschatologically, some people might say, well, it's just gonna be done by the massive miraculous exercise of divine power at Armageddon type of a situation.
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- And yet if what is happening in history is the building of the kingdom and the growth of the kingdom and the submission of these enemies over time, then obviously if this is the greatest enemy that has ever arisen, its subjugation, its destruction must be complete.
- 32:32
- Some people thought that that had happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Atheistic communism, persecutor of the church, falls apart between 89 and 91.
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- Berlin Wall falls, Soviet Union collapses. We now know that they had simply, they had destroyed the nations that they were in, had used them up.
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- And so they did a backdoor parachute operation. They invaded the rest of us through our universities.
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- And now they're back in charge. It's very clear, very plain, that many people in the
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- United States government are just as radically leftist as Khrushchev was.
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- They have the same views of mankind, the same secularism. And so that battle hasn't been ended.
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- Even after 70 years of seeing what happened under Stalin and Mao, over 100 million people dead, either shot, frozen to death in the
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- Siberian wilderness, starved to death in Ukraine, all of these things.
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- And that wasn't enough, we didn't learn. We didn't learn.
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- So it seems to me one possibility that needs to be taken seriously is that the destruction of secularism will be on such a level that it will never raise its head again.
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- And so I look at the technology that is now to be had, the ability to monitor everything everybody says, the ability to manipulate the genetics of mankind, becoming implantation of devices into the body to interface electronically with the world around us.
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- And apart from faith, I would not even know what to say.
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- I would not even know how to have hope for the future.
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- I truly would not know. But could it be that there will be a lengthy period of time where this kind of, yes, the recycle guy just,
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- I could have reached out the window and fist bumped him as he went by. But it could be a lengthy period of time.
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- But the fall has to be complete. It has to be something we'll look back on. We can never do this again.
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- Look at what it did. Look at how destructive it was. So that's one scenario.
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- If it is the lengthy period of time, then that means my children and my children's children are going to be called to be lights in a very deep darkness.
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- Part of me says, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Another part of me looks back at church history and goes, it really seems the people that we appreciate the most and view as the greatest trophies of God's grace are the people who endured the most.
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- They were the most like Christ. They were most purified. How many times, friends, just think with me, how many times have you in honesty sat back and in asking yourself the question, why am
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- I not more like Christ? Why do
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- I not experience the, sanctification that I desire to experience?
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- Why is that? Most of the time, the meaningful proper answer to that is because we love the things of the world.
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- All the stuff that takes up our thoughts and our, it takes up those places in our hearts that should belong only to God.
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- What if God takes it all away? Takes this webcast away, the ability to have a computer.
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- Yeah, I might have to in my lifetime.
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- I mean, unless something happens, looking at my family's genetics,
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- I could have another 30 years on this planet. Long time. And all this stuff could be gone.
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- And I may be so much more like Christ as a result. As long as I have it,
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- I am to use it as a steward. No question about it. But at the same time, someday we're gonna discover saints, saints we never heard of, who were so Christ -like in life, but we never heard anything about them because they didn't have the stuff of the world.
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- They didn't have fame, they didn't have notoriety. So when
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- I say I wouldn't wish that on my children and my grandchildren and my great -grandchildren, no, you want the best for them.
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- But then I sit back and go, what's the best? Is the best
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- American churchianity? Is the best no sanctification, a settled mediocrity?
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- Point is, as we think, as we look, none of us, unless you're living in a lead mine, and if you're watching this program, you're obviously not living in a lead mine.
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- Unless you're living in a lead mine, you, and it just struck me that some folks that may be a very obscure example, lead, radio waves don't travel through lead.
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- So you live in a lead mine, you don't have television, radio, back in the olden days, or even 5G.
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- We're coming to you, by the way, by 5G ultra wide transmission, yes.
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- We're using my phone right now as our internet connection and Verizon kicked the
- 41:03
- C band on here in Phoenix. And so I've got a
- 41:08
- UW next to my 5G now. So I'm undoubtedly being fried in my brain right now or something by my phone.
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- Anyway, unless you live in a lead mine, you cannot help but see what's going on.
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- And as a Christian, it's not appropriate, it's not right to not seek to think in a way that honors
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- God about what's happening around you. He's placed you at this time. And I think there is a real biblical case to be made that one of the greatest,
- 41:53
- I wasn't gonna be going here, I wasn't gonna do something deep today, but I think one of the greatest problems
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- I see in our society right now, in our church right now, in the church as a whole, is connected to something
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- I have bemoaned many times. And that is our disconnection from the past. We don't care about those who came before us.
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- And therefore we have zero thought about where we stand in the big picture of history.
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- And as a result, we don't think about our futures in the sense of our children, our grandchildren, our great -grandchildren, our great -great -grandchildren.
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- Now, of course, in secularism, why would you? You're a cosmic accident.
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- You're startups. You are random chemical aggregations that will break down very quickly once you die.
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- And that's it. There is no future for you. And there really wasn't any past.
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- It's just, it's all been random. There's been no purpose. There's no meaning to your genetic makeup.
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- It's all random. And humanism is so, secularism is so anti -human.
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- My heart breaks as I think about this poison being poured in the minds of young children.
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- I am so thankful that my son -in -law and my daughter are raising my grandchildren to appreciate
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- God's truth and to know God's truth. And I pray for God's mercy upon them and for them to realize,
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- I, kids, I don't know if you'll see this, but I hope you realize how blessed you are.
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- Because God holds us accountable for the blessings he gives us. To whom much is given, much is required.
- 44:21
- And so to my grandkids and to all, we have a lot of homeschool families that watch this program.
- 44:29
- Maybe this'd be a section to listen to. Do you, do you kids realize how blessed you are?
- 44:39
- If you have Christian parents who are instructing you in the way of the Lord, they have, if they've told you young men that it is good to be a man, it is good to be a male, that God has called you and equipped you to do certain things, and he'll hold you accountable for them.
- 45:05
- And young ladies, if your parents have been telling you that you are special, that you are beautiful in God's sight, that motherhood is a high, high calling, that you mean much in the kingdom of heaven, you have been blessed.
- 45:27
- If you don't realize, because some of you go, well, you know, we have to do so much work and we're homeschooled, and the kids go to the regular school, they don't have to do the stuff that we do.
- 45:36
- And it's real easy to complain about those things. But you need to realize you are blessed.
- 45:46
- You cannot know at your age the blessing that has been given to you.
- 45:54
- And you should be on your knees every night before you go to bed thanking God that he has been merciful to you.
- 46:03
- Because all you gotta do is look around the world and see other people your age, and they're committing suicide.
- 46:15
- They're burning their brains out with drugs. Why? Because they have no hope. They have no future.
- 46:23
- They're being told in the government indoctrination centers that they are mistakes, random mutations, no past, no present, no future.
- 46:38
- They have no hope. And if you have been given the ground upon which to stand to realize my life has meaning,
- 46:50
- I can look at my life and I can analyze what gifts
- 46:59
- God has given me. And I can be sure that God will bless me in the future when
- 47:07
- I use the gifts he's given me to his honor and glory. I have promises from God.
- 47:17
- And God did not have to be kind and patient with me to put me in a
- 47:23
- Christian family and to give me parents who want to instruct me in the ways of the
- 47:28
- Lord, but he did. He's already shown his love for me. You should be filled with thanksgiving.
- 47:35
- Every single day, I know at your age, it's hard. You don't necessarily have the context to be able to look around and to see what's happening farther away from where you live on a regular basis.
- 47:52
- But I'm telling you, you are blessed. Cultivate thanksgiving now.
- 48:02
- Be thankful for what God has given to you. Be looking to yourself to what gifts
- 48:09
- God has given to you. Those things that you can invest in others, you will find such joy and such fulfillment.
- 48:19
- Think on these things. And no matter what the world throws at you, and the world's gonna be throwing a lot at you, recognize its emptiness.
- 48:32
- I know, I see kids that are given these blessings and they have to be joined with the work of the
- 48:43
- Spirit of God in your life for you to truly understand, for you to appreciate these things. I understand that.
- 48:50
- But you will hear people saying to you that you missed out.
- 49:00
- You didn't get to do this. You didn't get to do that. Let me tell you something. All the activities that others get to do that you may not get to do, actually you get to do stuff they don't get to do,
- 49:18
- I know that. But all that stuff that the world throws out and says, oh, wouldn't you like to try this?
- 49:24
- I'm just like, the cost to you, now and in the future, I'm trying to tell you, it's huge.
- 49:32
- It's huge. And it results in disappointment and emptiness.
- 49:38
- It does. Listen to us older folks.
- 49:45
- We have your best interests in heart. We truly do. Well, that sermon was not intentional.
- 49:58
- But this whole meandering that I've done was not intentional in the sense that I can't help but thinking about what might be right around the corner.
- 50:12
- And what might be right around the corner is a great outpouring of the spirit of God that ignites the church and changes the world.
- 50:27
- It's happened before. We pray for it to happen again. We could have more of the same in the sense of sort of a status quo where powers are balanced against each other and the worst case scenario doesn't happen as quickly as it could happen.
- 50:56
- Or all the stuff that people's talking about, the digitized economy where you don't have money anymore and therefore the government can just simply take everything you own and starve you to death.
- 51:16
- Universal surveillance, it's almost there. The social credit system, it's already here. All those negative things, yeah.
- 51:27
- And I look at that and I go, that would be a really great way for God to destroy
- 51:35
- Western cultures that have expressed their hatred of him. And I and my loved ones would have to suffer through that.
- 51:49
- Might have one one thousandths of what we once possessed. But well, can
- 51:58
- God still sustain us in all of that? Sure can, sure will. Maybe with blessings that we can't even begin to imagine right now.
- 52:12
- It all comes back to do we love the things of the world? If we do, the love of the
- 52:17
- Father's not in us. Same old sermon I keep preaching to myself over and over and over again, really do.
- 52:28
- So one of the things, I love getting a chance to get back on the road and go out to work, but to meet my fellow believers, to look them in the eye, to get exposed to every kind of COVID there is to be exposed to, because I have been.
- 52:50
- I mean, wow, I have been. I was a little, I'll be honest with you,
- 52:55
- I was wondering if I hadn't finally, after all this time, after meeting hundreds of people at G3 and hundreds of people at churches on the last trips and shaking hands and all the rest of that stuff and only doing
- 53:13
- Scottish social distancing, which is just what Scotsmen do naturally. I've not been sick and everybody
- 53:26
- I know is sick right now. And so last night,
- 53:32
- I started coughing. I can sort of feel my lungs.
- 53:41
- And I knew it was one of two things. It was either I finally got nailed.
- 53:48
- Oh man, someone's walking by smoking. Oh, I detest the smell of smoke. I've got the fan on, so sucking it all in.
- 53:57
- Thanks a lot, whoever you are. I could tell you some stories about stuff
- 54:04
- I've done in the past. Back in the days when you could smoke in restaurants, I did some funny, this guy got up to go dancing once.
- 54:14
- I was at this Mexican restaurant. This is late 1970s. That might've been early 1980s.
- 54:20
- Anyways, he left the cigarette sitting there at the table next to us. This was back before non -smoking sections.
- 54:29
- And I reached over. I thought he'd left. Honestly, I thought he'd left. I picked it up and I stuck it in the water.
- 54:39
- I stuck it back down on the thing. So it stopped smoking. He had actually just gone to, he's either gotten dancing or it's a restaurant.
- 54:47
- I forget what. He comes back, sits down. It's just, just, what was
- 54:59
- I talking about? I have no idea. That memory from more than 40 years ago just blew everything else right out of my mind.
- 55:11
- Thanks to whoever walked by with the cigarette. See how that works? Smells, smells are really major memory.
- 55:19
- Have you noticed that? Smells are really major memory launchers.
- 55:25
- I guess would be one way to put it. They really, really do remind you of things. And once you get to my age where you don't have much in the way of short -term memory anymore, it's sort of fun to think about things that happened 40 years ago.
- 55:37
- Cause you can't think about anything else because you can't remember anything that's going on. Rich wouldn't know anything about that.
- 55:43
- I don't think. Cause he's actually, he's much older than I am. So, but it doesn't look that way.
- 55:51
- So it's not really fair. But anyway, I was going somewhere. I've lost it. Don't worry about it.
- 55:58
- So we're gonna start wrapping stuff up here. The monitor worked, annotation worked,
- 56:07
- Zoom's working, 5G, ultrawide working. Obviously I can't, there's a couple
- 56:14
- RV parks I've booked myself into. There's one I'm gonna be at two days. I'm really wondering if I'm just gonna get to do a lot of reading.
- 56:26
- It's near a lake. So it might be nice to go walking around and stuff, but I'm thinking 3G, maybe might be about all
- 56:36
- I might be able to pull up there if there's a cell signal at all. But we'll see. We'll see. Most of the places,
- 56:42
- I mean, Houston and places like that will be fine. We'll be good. So last things here.
- 56:54
- What's the name of the... Opened it up.
- 57:00
- Why isn't that working? It's right here. I was gonna mention it earlier.
- 57:07
- Open a trip. Oh, great, okay. So we've already posted the information on being in Springfield.
- 57:17
- It was started with an S. It's Springfield, St. Charles, and Shreveport.
- 57:23
- They all started with an S. That's why it was throwing me a curve. So Springfield, that will be on Tuesday evening of next week.
- 57:37
- Wednesday evening of next week. Then Friday through Sunday at Covenant Grace Church in St.
- 57:46
- Charles. And then we're, right now we're looking at,
- 57:52
- I can't announce it yet because I haven't gotten final stuff. Well, actually,
- 57:58
- I think we can because I think I sent it to Rich. So Monday night, no, no, no, that's not
- 58:05
- Monday night. Skip that. Then it's off to Teach in Conway.
- 58:14
- That's right. And then we've got
- 58:22
- Shreveport in there somewhere. There it is. Shreveport is on Monday, the 7th of February.
- 58:30
- And then we're down to Houston. And I'll be speaking on Sunday at Houston.
- 58:37
- Again, need to touch base with the pastor. And then we'll be heading back.
- 58:43
- I wanted to be able to swing through some of the places I was gonna be, but this is still like, it's gonna be nearly a month.
- 58:53
- And my wife likes to have me around once in a while. And we've got some stuff we gotta do toward that period of time.
- 59:00
- So that's what's coming up. I hope that our folks, our friends in those areas will be able to come out and say hello and that you'll be praying for our traveling mercies.
- 59:11
- I get to cover the entire state of Texas once again, all the way from Houston, all the way across to El Paso.
- 59:23
- And man, that is a big state. And I'll be honest with you, once you get out of San Antonio, there ain't a whole lot to see.
- 59:31
- I'll be getting a lot of audio books done on that particular leg of the trip,
- 59:37
- I think. So anyways, thanks for listening to my meandering and our testing of our materials today.
- 59:44
- And so we will be back with you next week as we travel. Probably first coming to you from Oklahoma City is where I assume the first day
- 59:57
- I will have time to do a program. Maybe a little bit earlier than that, maybe
- 01:00:03
- Amarillo, but Oklahoma City looks like a probability at that point. We'll see. We'll see. First, appreciate it for traveling mercies.
- 01:00:11
- Thanks for watching the program today. Thanks, Rich, for putting it together. And we'll see you next time.