Menu
This episode invites you to reflect on the shifting sands of societal values. As standards of good and evil blur, we’re challenged to discern truth in a landscape altered by redefining social mores. Drawing from prophetic teachings and modern commentary, our discussion emphasizes the importance of unity and resilience. Learn how to prepare for a world where traditional anchors of judgement and morality are continuously reevaluated.
SPEAKER 01 :
I don’t think you understand how hard the years ahead are going to be for us. I don’t think we understand how badly we are going to need one another. For a lot of years we escaped thinking about this by postulating a place of safety. All the rest of the dirty, rotten sinners out there in the world would all go through all this disaster that’s going to be striking the world in the years ahead. But us, well, since we were more righteous than they were, we would escape. We would be carried away on wings of eagles. We would not have to go through any of it at all. It’s hard to imagine how we could assume that in the face of so many scriptures. After all, even the children of Israel went through the first several plagues that the Egyptians had to suffer. And then Jesus came along and told the disciples, he said, they’re going to throw you out of synagogues. They’re going to beat you. He said, the time will come that he that kills you will think that he is doing God a service. He told his disciples again in Matthew 24 and verse 8, all these are the beginning of sorrows. Then they shall deliver you up to be afflicted and shall kill you and shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake. And then shall many be offended and and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. It’s hard to get your mind around that. It’s hard in many ways to even believe it, except for the fact that we believe what we read in the Bible. If there should be a place of safety, no one will welcome it more than I. But in the best-case scenario, the road between here and there whether there is the return of Christ or whether there is the beginning of some sojourn in a place of safety, whatever, take your pick. In a best-case scenario, the road between here and there is long and narrow and hard. And it is going to become harder and harder to obey God and to keep His commandments. The prophets saw all this long ago. In Isaiah, in his fifth chapter, and I’ll begin reading in verse 20, said this, Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness and bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to them that are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight. It’s going to become very confusing, frankly, to know right from wrong, to know what is the right thing to do, to know what is the good way in which to walk. Very confusing. And the decisions that many of us are going to face are going to be very hard. Just this last week, I stumbled onto an article in the New Republic by Charles Krauthammer, who is a political pundit. You see him occasionally in Time magazine and other places, a frequent writer. He published an article entitled, Defining Deviancy Up. And it’s a play for those who normally read these publications. They knew immediately the play on words that he was using because Senator Patrick Moynihan had published an article not long before entitled, Defining Deviancy Down. And Krauthammer began his article by citing Senator Moynihan and explaining what it was that he meant by his article, by his title, Defining Deviancy Down. Deviancy is a catch-all word for all the kinds of deviant conduct that you see in our society, that is, deviant from the norm, deviant from acceptable. It has to do with illegitimate births, it has to do with crime, it has to do with sociological problems of all manner, including things even like the homeless that you find on the street. And Moynihan’s thesis was that because we as a society are being overwhelmed by deviant behavior, and we have come to the conclusion that we really can’t cope with it, we simply redefine deviant behavior to make what was previously wrong, right. Moynihan pointed out that since, I believe it was about 1960, illegitimate births in this country have tripled. About one in three babies that are born in this country today, all babies, all races, all colors, about one in three now is illegitimate without a father. So what we have done is we’ve redefined that. Being a single parent now is an alternate lifestyle. So having your baby out of wedlock is simply a choice that you have made, a choice that is just as legitimate as the choice a woman makes to get married, set up a home, have a husband, have children, and rear children in a normal family environment. I couldn’t believe my ears when I was watching last year’s Democratic National Convention when Jesse Jackson told the assembled people there that Jesus was the son of an unwed mother. This is a part of the whole pattern of redefining legitimacy, redefining deviancy, so that we can somehow deal with it in this world. He said back in 1955, he cited all sorts of statistics, and I won’t bore you with them, the number of people who were in mental hospitals around about this country. That number was reduced by something like 80 to 90 percent, depending upon the stage that you were in, in the last generation. Do you think that that’s because we have become much more effective in treating mental illness? No, what we did was redefine mental illness, put all these people back out on the street who were either crazy or sick and allowed them to just go their way until finally they are wandering around, you know, the streets of our cities now with shopping carts and what have you and all their little belongings in them and sleeping on grates and freezing to death in cold weather and dying out there. They are people who are crippled psychologically. crippled emotionally, who cannot cope in our society. But we have redefined them to where they are no longer crazy. They’re no longer sick. They are homeless. So that it implies almost that the only thing wrong with these people that you step over as you walk on your way to work somewhere, the only thing wrong with these people who are passed out in a drunken stupor is that they are just homeless. They don’t have any place to live. One generation. hundreds of thousands turned out of mental institutions across the country, I guess in the name of freedom. We can’t hold them here. They have rights. They have a right to be out there. They have a right to go hungry. They have a right to starve to death. They have a right to freeze in the winter, wherever it is. We have no right, they think, to lock them up. If you believe that’s the motivation, then I have some land I’d like to sell you. The truth is, the big motivation was simply budgets. Krauthammer, taking off from Moynihan’s concept of defining deviancy down, said that that’s part of the story in our society, yes. But what they are also doing is defining deviancy up. That is, society not content with lowering the standards of deviant conduct for the criminal area has begun to redefine the standards of conduct for normalcy in ways that I would not have imagined. I want to read you just a very few excerpts, I’ll try not to bore you, from his article, but they are stunning. in their implications. He says Moynihan is right, but it is only half the story. There is a complementary social phenomenon that goes with defining deviancy down. As a part of the vast social project of moral leveling, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. Shall I read it again? I want you to be sure you grasp what he’s talking about. as a part of a vast project of social leveling. Actually, moral leveling is his term. It is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. One of the things I really want to emphasize out of that is the phrase moral leveling, because the whole idea is to bring us all to the same level. And in order to bring us all to the same level, which direction do you suppose most of us are going to move? Down. In order to bring us all into the same basic category where none of us are any better than anybody else. Reading further, he calls this a moral deconstruction. The moral deconstruction of middle class normality is a vast project. Fortunately, and I think he has his tongue in his cheek here, thousands of volunteers are working on the case. And he begins to define in his article the numbers of ways in which they have been working hard at making these things happening. Krauthammer goes on to at length redefining the, I’m sorry, the redefining of relationships in our country, particularly in relation to sex and specifically of rape. one of his quotations here is after he has given us all the statistics about how what real rape is and what a horrible thing rape is what rape how the statistics on rape a couple of generations ago and a generation ago and then all the way down to today trying to help people understand what has been changing he says this of course behind all these numbers and he gives us all of them and I won’t bore you with them behind all these numbers is an underlying ideology of about the inherent aberrancy of all heterosexual relations. Now, do you understand what he’s saying? He’s saying underlying all of the quotations he’s given you out of Feminist’s book and others, out of all the quotations and all the statistics about rape and how these things are changing in our country, underlying all of this is an underlying ideology that says that heterosexual behavior is not the norm. It is the aberrant behavior not homosexual, not out of wedlock, not any of those things. As Andrea Dworkin once said, romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks. The date rape epidemic is just empirical dressing for a larger theory which holds this, that because relations between men and women are inherently unequal, sex can never be truly consensual. It is always coercive. Now this is what is being advanced in our society. Start listening for it, folks. This is a part of what I’m talking to you about, about how the road ahead of us is going to be hard because people are redefining the road, changing the road map, putting up new road signs all the time. What this is saying, folks, is simply that these people are advancing the idea that all sex between men and women, because it is between people who are not equal and is never consensual, it is always coercive. Okay, then for sex to be normal, it must be between people who are truly equal, and what does that mean? Then they must both be of the same sex. That is equal in the relationship, and that is not rape, and all heterosexual sex is, by definition, according to some, rape. Think about that for a while. It’s staggering. What you and I define as normal sex has now been refined by a large segment of our society, a large and growing segment, as abnormal. He goes on to say, or as Susan Estrich puts it, many feminists would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing yes as a sign of true consent is misguided. But then Krauthammer asks, well, if yes is not a sign of true consent, what is? A notarized contract? And if there is no such thing as real consent, then the radical feminist ideal is realized. By the way, that’s radical feminist, not just all feminists. The radical feminist idea is realized. All intercourse is rape. Then he says, well, who needs the studies? The incident of rape is not 25% or 33% or 50%. It’s 100%. Then Naomi Wolf can write in The Beauty Myth that we have today a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events. This is just a redefining, folks, of the way relationships work, of how people get along with each other. And this is going on in our society all the time. New Republic is a respected journal. Charles Krauthammer is not some wild-eyed fanatic. He’s a respected pundit, well-known. You can see him probably most Sunday mornings, I mean, frequently on Sunday mornings on Meet the Press, talking with the guys at that time. He goes on to explain that the next step in the project is thought control. The campuses have gone far beyond dress codes. You know, we used to kind of be a little bit defensive in Ambassador College about the fact that we had a dress code. You know, we expected students to be neatly dressed when they came to class. We expected them to be neat. We expected the guys to have haircuts and all this type of thing. It’s gotten to the place now to where our major universities, state-supported universities, are paid for by your tax money. They’ve got thought police out there now. They have not just dress codes, they’ve got speech codes. You can’t say certain things. One of the most fundamental values of this country, that is the freedom to say what we think and to think what we want, is being eroded in, of all places, the place where academic freedom, thought freedom, freedom of thought, freedom of expression has historically been held up, a bastion of it, the one that would always, we thought, stand, the colleges and the universities. But that’s the way the thing is going. Quoting Krauthammer again, he says, there is, of course, the now famous case of the Israeli-born University of Pennsylvania student, who called a group of rowdy black sorority sisters making a noise outside his dorm in the middle of the night, water buffaloes. His rough translation of the Hebrew, vehema, he was charged with racial harassment. So everybody gets excited about it. A host of learned scholars was assigned the absurd task of locating the racial antecedents of the term. For if a white student leans out the dormitory window and calls black students a name, it must be Somehow racially based. It might not have anything to do, of course, with the fact that water buffalo bellow and they were bellowing like a bunch of water buffalo. But nevertheless, they were all out looking for the racial antecedents. And they found none. He said they should have asked me. I would have saved them a lot of trouble. My father called me behemoth so many times it almost became a term of endearment. And I don’t think he was racially motivated. Nonetheless, the university, convinced that there was some racial animus behind that exotic term, and determined not to let it go unpunished, tried to pressure the student into admitting his guilt. Penn State offered him a plea bargain. Proceedings would be stopped if he would confess his guilt and allow himself to be re-educated through a program for living in a diverse community environment. Tell me something. Do you know what we would have called this back in the 70s? Brainwashing. Remember the term? Brainwashing. If you will just apologize, plead guilty to this cause, and if you will just let us brainwash you, we’ll drop the charges. Otherwise, we’re going to take you in, we’re going to go through proceedings and expel you from the university. All of the work you’ve done is lost. All of the money you’ve spent is lost. All of the work here is lost. This is nothing short, Krauthammer concludes, and I have to agree with him, nothing short of thought control. He says, this may seem ironic, but it’s easily explained. Under the new dispensation, it is not insanity, but insensitivity that is the true sign of deviant thinking. Deviant thinking. Not insanity, but insensitivity. This is the kind that requires thought control and re-education. The one kind of deviancy we are prepared to live with, the other we are not. Indeed, one kind, psychosis, we are hardly prepared to call deviancy at all. As Moynihan points out, it is now a part of the landscape. What a shame. You know, this is the mindset. This is the mindset. If you will just confess, we’ll drop the charges. And if you will just confess and you’ll go through this course of re-education, This is the mindset that ultimately could lead to your arrest and your being subjected to reprogramming because you’re not thinking the way you ought to think. As I say, I don’t think we understand how hard the road ahead can become. How hard the prophets tell us that it’s going to be. We want to believe what the Bible tells us, but we really are simply not equipped to believe it because we have never lived in such a world. We’ve never experienced such a world, and the changes that are going on around us are going on so gradually that much of the time we have no idea what it all means. And Krauthammer, with his tongue in his cheek somewhat, with some sarcasm intended here, summarizes it this way. The mentally ill are not really ill, they just lack housing. It is the rest of us who are guilty of disordered thinking for harboring beneath the bland niceties of middle-class life, harboring racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other corrupt and corrupting insensitivities. Ordinary criminality we are learning to live with. What we are learning we cannot live with is the heretofore unrecognized violence against women that lurks beneath the facade of ordinary, seemingly benign, heterosexual relationships. The single parent and broken home are now part of the landscape. It’s the Ozzie and Harriet family, rife with abuse and molestation. That’s the seedbed of deviance in our society. The rationalization of deviancy reaches its logical conclusions. The deviant is declared normal. The normal is unmasked as deviant. That, of course, makes us all that much more morally equal. The project is complete. What real difference is there between us? And that is the point. Defining deviancy up like defining deviancy down is an adventure in moral equivalence. Now, where we were In Isaiah, the fifth chapter, beginning again in verse 20. Woe to them that call evil good and good evil. This idea of the redefining of standards in society so that we can all be good and so that no one can be looked upon as bad. No one can be considered a failure. No one can be considered as beneath anyone else. This thing is as old as the king of Israel and much older than that. Woe to them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to them that are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight. Look, we know. We don’t need some set of standards outside of the human mind and human heart. We don’t need a God to tell us these things. We don’t need a law from that God to tell us right from wrong. We are the wise. We know. Woe to them that are mighty to drink wine and men of strength to mingle strong drink. And he’s talking about doctrine and ideas, not really fermented alcohol. “…who justify the wicked for reward and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.” Notice that? They justify the wicked for reward. But is there a righteous man? Yeah. But they reach out and they take away the righteousness of the righteous from him. “…a woman who has maintained her virginity all the way until she meets the man of her dreams.” He who takes her as a wife and they establish a family together and he goes out and earns a living and she bears children and they build a home together and she considers her career to be the building of a home. She’s the Proverb 31 woman who goes out and buys a field and develops that. She makes cloth and sells it to the merchant. She has her own business interest too. But nevertheless, it is a family unit with a father and a mother and a children. Oh, that’s righteousness, or at least it used to be righteousness. But there are those who would take the righteousness of the righteous away from it. Therefore, as the fire devours the stubble and the flame consumes the chaff, so their roots shall be like rottenness and their blossoms shall go up as dust. Why? Because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Our society, beginning with the preachers, has abandoned the law of God And they don’t know right from wrong anymore. And your children can go to school starting with the first grade. No, no, nay, start with kindergarten. And go all the way through, through high school. Go off to a state-supported college. Graduate after four years with a Bachelor of Arts degree. And never in the whole period of time they are there really be told right, that there is a conduct that is right for all men and a conduct that is wrong for all men. that is based on any other kind of standard other than which we set for ourselves. We’ve long since lost track of who this nation has and who they are. Now they’re losing sight of who God is, and our government does not want God in the picture because our government has taken the place of God. The seeds of it, as I said, were sown many years ago, first in the churches, then in society, especially the schools. Remember a time there was an expression and there was a phrase that came out back in the In the 60s, I believe that there are no absolutes, no absolutes, no right, no wrong, just that way. Prophets, they saw it long ago because God decided to speak to Israel when Israel had taken the same road that we are in the process of taking right now. God sent prophets and talked to them. A few pages back in Isaiah 5, I’d like to read a passage to you. Sorry, not Isaiah 5, Isaiah 59 in verse 1. I slipped on my notes. He says, beginning in verse 1, “…behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save. His ear is not heavy that He cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you that He will not hear.” You’re in a classic dilemma. You’re in trouble. Nothing is working. And so when nothing is working and your society is coming apart, you go on your knees to God, you pray to God and says, why is it that God won’t hear us? Why will he not save us? Why won’t God do something for us? He said, God’s hand isn’t short. His ear is not heavy. Your problem is simple. Your lawlessness has separated between you and your God. Your sins have hid his face from you. He won’t hear. It’s not that he can’t. He refuses to. For your hands are defiled with blood, your fingers with iniquity, your lips have spoken lies, your tongue has muttered perverseness. We have exalted violence. Murder touches murder. The blood runs together and touches it. The blood from one murder touches the blood of another murder in the streets. The violence is everywhere. And he says nobody calls for justice. Nobody pleads for truth. They trust in vanity. They speak lies. They conceive mischief. They bring forth lawlessness. Passing on down to verse 7, he says, “…their feet run to evil. They make haste to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are the thoughts of iniquity, wasting and destruction are in their paths, and the way of peace they just do not know.” There is a way. There is a way of peace. You might think of it in terms of a simple road that’s laid out, you know. It’s been carved out of the trees and out of the forest and it’s been graded and compacted and maybe paved over a little bit. It may not be wide, it may not be real easy, but there is a way that if a man will actually get on that road and will walk down that road, it is a way that leads to peace. And he says they don’t know what that way is. They don’t know where it is. They do not have a clue. They’re lost. The reason they don’t know is because they assume that, well, we can go all manner of different directions and arrive at the same place. There are many paths to peace. There are many ways of arriving there. And if we can perhaps enter into negotiations, if we can somehow talk our way through this problem, or we can think our way through it, or we can rationalize our way through it, Well, it’s thinking and negotiation and rationalization that has brought us to where we are today. They don’t know the way of peace. There is no judgment in their goings. They have made them crooked paths. Everybody that goes in their ways will never know peace. Therefore, is judgment far from us. Neither does justice overtake us. We wait for light, but behold obscurity. For brightness, but we walk in darkness. You know, for the first time in my life, I have lost confidence in the jury system. I grew up in this country. I took civics in high school, and I learned what a great country I live in, and I love my country. I love our system of government. I look forward to God’s government, but I would rather live here under this system of government than anywhere in the world I know of. And one of the pillars of our system of government was always that if a man is accused of a crime, he can come before a jury of his peers, and they will evaluate the evidence and arrive at a decision. I have lost confidence in the jury system. Now, it’s fair for me to say that the black people in this country lost confidence in it a long time ago because they weren’t being treated fairly. They tumbled to the fact that there was a loss and a lack and a decay of justice in this country before some of the rest of us did. But we’ve been treated again and again and again recently to the classic weakness of our justice system. You know what’s really wrong with it? It’s the fact that we’ve turned our back on God. We’ve turned our back on the standards of right and wrong. We’ve become confused about where the road marks are. The people have moved all the ancient landmarks. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know what we stand for anymore. Our people have lost confidence in their own capacity to know right from wrong. And when you have a people that don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and you pull in this giant jury panel in which you’re going to try to collect a group of people, and you ask them, can we judge according to the law? And they, well, yeah, we can judge by the facts. And they get up in the jury box and they haven’t a clue. They do not even realize that because they no longer really know right from wrong, that the process of sitting in judgment of their fellow man, be he black, be he white, be he Hispanic, be he Asian, has been corrupted probably beyond recall. And the Bible speaks of this over and over again. It’s a recurring theme throughout prophecy. And that is that my people have corrupted judgment. They don’t plead the cause of the widow. They don’t take care of the people who are broken down. You can buy your way out of a situation. And you’re just in a whole lot better situation going into court if you’ve got a lot of money than you are if you’re poor. Is there anybody that really doubts that in our country? When you see what’s going on, oh, there are exceptions along the way. Yeah, some rich people finally do get caught. But the truth of the matter is we all know that you’re at enormous advantage in this country if you have wealth. And you’re at a great disadvantage in this country if you are poor when it comes to judgment. It’s just the way we have become. And you want to know something? There’s not a thing in the world wrong with the system. What’s wrong is with the hearts of the people. The people who turn their back on God, the people who do not know right from wrong, People who have become accustomed to letting the government make decisions for them. And the government defines what is right and what is wrong. It’s a terrible tragedy. In verse 10 it says, We grope for the wall like the blind. We grope as if we had no eyes. We stumble at noon as in the night. We are in desolate places like dead men. We roar all like bears and we mourn sore like doves. We look for judgment, but there isn’t any, for salvation, and it’s far from us. This is not something way off in the future, folks. We’re on the threshold of it right now. As Jesus said, this is the beginning of sorrows. It is going to get worse. And that’s what I mean when I say that the road ahead is hard and difficult and it’s going to be confusing. It’s because we’re no longer, you would assume that if you got into trouble, you would assume if you began having difficulties that you would be judged fairly. You can forget about that, folks. You can forget about that. that day has passed. For our transgressions, he says, are multiplied before you. Our sins testify against us. Our transgressions are with us. As for our iniquities, we know them. In transgressing and lying against the Lord and departing away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood, Judgment is turned away backward. Justice stands afar off. And truth is fallen in the street. Boy, what poetry. What powerful poetry. Judgment is just turned away backward. Justice stands afar off. Think of it. Imagine this imagery as though they were personified. Judgment has turned away backward. Just turned his back and walked away. Judgment is standing way over there. Truth? Truth has fallen in the streets and is lying in the dust. The three pillars, frankly, of any society. Judgment, justice, truth. In our case, they seem to be gone. Truth falls or truth fails. And he that departs from evil makes himself a prey. And it’s exactly that that I was talking about when I say I don’t believe. we understand how hard the road ahead can be, is going to be, because those of us who have tried to make some kind of an effort at turning away from evil are going to become increasingly, I fear, the object of attention in many areas in this country. In Micah, the seventh chapter, there’s another interesting little passage, if you’ll turn back to the minor prophets, Hosea, Jonah, Micah, actually Hosea, Joel, Amos, Micah. In Micah, Chapter 7, beginning in verse 1. Woe is me, for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the grape gleanings of the vintage. There is no cluster to eat. My soul desires the first ripe fruit. The good man is perished out of the earth. There is nobody upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood. They hunt every man his brother with a net. What an incredible description of the kind of a world this thing could become as we make our way down to the end. Now, you know, let me put it this way. If you knew that hard times were coming, and I’m talking now, let’s say, economically. If you knew we were headed into another period of time like late 1929, 1930, 31, 32. If you knew that, would you prepare yourself? I would. I would. I’d be down at the library trying to understand exactly how that worked. I would be interested in knowing exactly how money, what happened to money, the value of money during that time. I would want to know precisely what I ought to do with what little money I’ve got. I mean, where do you put it? How do you be secure? I mean, some people, the people in 1929, if they actually took their money and put it in the icebox in about somewhere early October of 1929, they would have been better off than any investment that most of them could have been in at that time. good old cash in the refrigerator or the freezer or the icebox or wherever it could be where it was secure. Because after the fall of the market, after that all began to come unglued, cash was king. If you knew, you would want to be ready for it. If you know hard times are coming, you prepare yourself for them. Now the question is, we read the prophets. We have Jesus’ own words for this. We have what Paul said. We have what Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel say. And we all know that these prophets were prophesying relative to the end time. How do you prepare for the things that they were talking about? Well, I have some suggestions. One is, know that there is an absolute right and absolute wrong and that you cannot change what those two things are to suit your own conduct. You understand what I’m saying? Know this, there is an absolute right There is an absolute wrong, and you can’t change that. You can’t think it through. You can’t analyze it your own because, in fact, any kind of standards that are set by yourself are no standards at all because you can change them just as easily as you set them in the first place. How do you do that? You study the law. You study your Bible. You read Christ’s words. You begin to inculcate them into yourself so that there is a standard that you know is right and that you will not depart from. And you know that there’s a way of life that is wrong and you have chosen that you will not walk in it. And you are committed to it. You’re not one that’s going to be blown around or wavering when the time comes. The way is going to be hard enough. It’s going to be very confusing. And there are going to be times when you’re not going to have a clue as to what to do next or what really is right or wrong because there’s going to be a determined effort to confuse the whole country about what right and wrong is. Is it a conspiracy? You bet it is. It’s not a human conspiracy. You’ll search this country from one end to the other to find the person or persons who are responsible for all this. It’s a conspiracy at a spiritual level, though, and it has been profoundly effective, and it is going to destroy this country. Know God and know His law and establish your relationship with Him. Jesus said, watch and pray always. that you may be able to escape and to stand before the Son of Man. Somehow, somewhere, sometime, every one of us is going to make a turn in our lives to where we decide, you know, it’s time for me to pull up my socks. It’s time for me to draw near to God. It’s time for me to establish a pattern of behavior that’s going to hold me in good stead for the times that are ahead. But the truth is, You will probably live in the last day before Jesus Christ comes, your life, exactly like you are living it, like you lived the last 24 hours that you lived. Unless you make a change, unless at some point in time you’re willing to make a decision that you’re going to draw near to God so that he may draw near to you, he will return and you still will not have done it. Draw near to God and know him well. and know His law. It is the only way you can avoid the confusion that’s settling in on our people, and it’s going to get worse rather than better. There are also some other important considerations. I want you to turn back to a parable that Jesus gave, which is a little funny. A lot of people don’t understand this. It’s in Luke the 16th chapter. Luke chapter 16. He said to His disciples, there was a certain rich man which had a steward, and the same was accused to him that he had wasted his goods. Well, he called him and said to him, how is it that I hear this of you? Give an account of your steward, for I may fire you. I want to complete accounting. You’re going to come in here and show me what you’ve done. The steward said to himself, what am I going to do? He’s going to fire me. I’m not strong enough to dig. I’m ashamed to beg. I’m not going to get out there with a cup in my hand and beg from people. What can I do? I know what I’ll do. I’ll do this so that when I am fired, put out of the stewardship, that there will be somebody who will receive me into their house.” In other words, I will have a friend. I’ll have somebody who will help me. I’ll have someplace I can go. I’ll have a bed to sleep in and food to eat. This is what I’m going to do. So he called every one of his Lord’s debtors to him and he said to him, said to the first, how much do you owe my Lord? He said, a hundred measures of oil. He said, take your bill and sit down quickly and write 50. In other words, I’m discounting your bill by 50% right here if you’ll pay it right now. The man sat down and wrote that bill out. Now, he wasn’t going to keep this money. He’s giving the money to his master. What he was beginning to do, though, was to make some friends, to buy some favors. Do you think that this fellow for whom he discounted the bill 50% felt like he owed him one? Why, sure. He went to another and he said, how much do you owe? He said, 100 measures of wheat. He said, take your bill and write 80. Let’s settle it today. You can have a 20% discount if you’ll settle this bill right now. And so the Lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely. Now, isn’t that curious? I don’t know exactly all that was going on, but presumably this man had just allowed these debts to just hang and hang and hang and hang, and the master had come to him and considered that he just hadn’t done his job. So he got busy and began to do his job, but because he also thought he was going to get fired, he handed out a lot of favors to to a lot of people. And his boss realized, even though the man was unjust, even though he was not a good steward, he commended him because he was smart in this particular area. He commended him because he had done wisely, because the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. Now, what’s this all about? Jesus said, I say unto you, make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when you fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitation. Now, what in the world is that talking about? Well, the mammon or the mammon of unrighteousness in the Bible, broadly translated, means commodities. And money, of course, is a commodity in this sense. And generally, it’s money, wealth, possessions, but not just possessions. It has more to do with tradable types of commodities. In other words, you have in your hand certain resources, certain physical resources. And one thing is for sure that mammon is. Mammon is a word for physical resources. It has nothing whatsoever to do with spiritual resources. So he says, make yourselves friends, Revised Standard Version says, by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, so that when you fall, actually it’s not fail, but when you fall, they may receive you in everlasting habitations. I think what he is saying, as I say, it puzzles a lot of people. I think what it means is this. Do good to people. You never know when one of them could save your life. You just never know. It harkens back to Daniel and the Hebrew children and how they attained favor in the eyes of a particular individual who really saved their lives. So it was with Jeremiah when the city fell. He found favor with a certain individual who saved his life. Make yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness so that when you fail or when you have trouble, when you’re up against it, they can actually receive you into their habitations, perhaps. Do good to people. You never know when one of them could save your life. I can, you know, press this out. Don’t make enemies you don’t have to make. You know, we live through our lives these days. I mean, you know, the world’s going on and and there’s reasonable peace around us, and we’re all frustrated by what we see on the news and so forth, but it doesn’t touch our lives very often. And we live very carelessly of our neighbors and our acquaintances, the people we work with and the people we know, very carelessly. And a lot of those people are day by day developing impressions of us, concepts of us, ideas about us that can help us or that can hurt us when the road gets real hard down the way. I was visiting the Tulsa church last week, and they have a really nice facility there, a local church building, which they’ve been able to acquire. I don’t think the cost of it really has run them that much more than what they were paying in hall rental before. Very nice building. As I drove into it, it sets off a little bit isolated by itself. Here’s a big sign out front that says, Church of God International. And it tells the time of services, all of which are, of course, on Saturday. Now, not very far down this way is a row of residential houses, and there are residential houses over here. What do those people think about that church in Tulsa? Not important, I guess, what they think about it. It doesn’t matter what they think about it. Do you think that? They are in a community. Now, they’re behaving themselves. They’re not doing any bad things. But those of you who have been around for long enough know that there was a time when the Church of God, Worldwide Church of God, no, Radio Church of God, was getting established up in Big Sandy and they built this big tabernacle. There were all kinds of weird rumors going around Big Sandy and Gladewater about what they were doing out there. I mean, I think somebody was commenting that those concrete gutters, which were just rain gutters, were for the purpose of running off the blood from the sacrifices that they did. These rumors going around the community. When people don’t know you, when they don’t know why you do the things that you do, they are free to attach any meaning to it they want. And I was talking to people in Tulsa and told them it’s important that they be sure that the people in their community know that they are not a threat to them. And I feel quite certain the Tulsa church is going to have a program about as to what they will do about that in the future. I think if we were in that kind of a situation, we’d want to have a visiting program in the community. Not because we, we might assume we don’t want a visiting program because we don’t think, well, there’s no point, those people wouldn’t come here anyway. Well, that’s quite right. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not healthy to show up on their doorstep and say, hi, we represent the Church of God International and we want to let you know that we’re in the community and that we are here to serve and to be a part of the community. and that you’re always welcome to attend our services anytime if you wish, and here’s a little handout and so forth, just to let people know what you are doing, why you are doing it, so that they will not assume that you are any kind of a threat in the community. And if the community is doing something, be a part of it. If they’re collecting funds for famine relief, be a part of it, because this is making friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that is, of the commodities or of the physical things of life that you can use to create good relationships with the people where you work, with the people who live around you, who notice that you go off to church on Saturday afternoon with your Bible in your hand and your kids and what have you, and that you’re home mowing your grass on Sunday morning. You’re different. People who are different are a threat. If you don’t believe me, maybe you should read some of the history of the Jews. Read what they have said about some of their experiences. Down through generations, When Jewish people who pose no threat whatsoever to the community in which they live were terribly persecuted on the presumption that because they were different, they were somehow a threat. Do good to people. You never know. Don’t make enemies when you don’t have to. Be a good neighbor. If your neighbor down the street is sick, go cut his grass for him. Do those types of things that good neighbors do and let people know who you are and make sure that you’re not threatening to your neighbors. Don’t look like a cultist by withdrawing or being secretive or furtive in the things that you do. Where are you going on Saturday? Oh, well, I’m going to see some friends. It’s a funny thing. Not many of us can really lie very effectively without somebody knowing that something’s wrong somewhere. Just tell people the truth. Don’t tell people that you’re allergic to pork as a reason you don’t do it. Just tell them plainly, I don’t eat pork for religious reasons. But that’s okay, I don’t mind if you do. But to not be a threat, to be honest with the people you deal with. Watch and pray. Now apart from all the physical things like this you could do, there is one thing I think that is very important, and I referred to it openly, I mean, sorry, in the opening of the sermon when I said, I don’t think you understand how hard the years ahead are going to be for us. or how badly we are going to need one another. My most important piece of advice for you is to stay close to the church and to stay close to one another. There is no promise in the New Testament or Old Testament, there is no promise anywhere in the Bible that those of us who obey God, those of us who try to be faithful to God, are going to have clear sailing all the way into the kingdom of God, and you know that. Now, that being the case, I think it’s really important to understand that we are going to need one another in ways that we have never imagined. To me, that says that we should stay close to the church, and that means staying close to one another. It means being interested in one another. It means caring about one another. It means knowing when somebody is missing. It means, you know, someone in one of the local churches got real upset because somebody was taking roles. They thought, well, that smacks of a little bit of over-supervision, does it? Well, you know, if we don’t know, if we don’t take role or do something, if we don’t take some kind of notice of who’s here, how on earth are we going to know the week that you don’t show up because you’re sick? The week you didn’t show up because you were in the hospital and you weren’t able to call and maybe your relative who didn’t know to call and the church never found out they were sick until you were cleaned out of the hospital. And then you got aggravated with us because we didn’t send flowers. My point is, That we have to stay close to one another. We need one another, and we will need one another in ways that we can never, ever imagine. And therefore, the things that we tend to be alienated about, the things we tend to bicker about, the things we tend to criticize in one another, the things that we tend to, you know, loose strings that we want to pull on, that we don’t like what someone else has done, the ways in which we talk about one another, none of these things are really very important. And yet we allow them to divide us. We hurt one another. We allow our feelings to be hurt when they shouldn’t be. We allow ourselves to become alienated from others in the church whom we may in the weeks and months and years ahead need for the salvation of our very life. The times ahead are harder than we think or than we can think. And they are times in which we are going to need a church desperately And we are going to need one another desperately. You know, it seems to me that it’s a worthy objective then for the church to take whatever steps, to plan whatever programs, to hold on to our membership, to keep our attendance up, to try to keep people from dropping out if there’s anything we can do to prevent that from happening. Not so the church can grow for growth’s sake, but because we are going to need all the help we can get. And it looks to me like Time is getting closer than we ever would have imagined that it was.
