Father, you are faithful. Your righteousness is very, very practical. You are consistent. You are dependable. You are loyal. And on and on we could go. This topic that I've taken on today in one little verse, I could preach for the next year. It goes from Genesis to Revelation. But help us to focus in on a specific need that our country has regarding us as believers, to teach us. And if it's appropriate, Father, help us to make changes and to conform to the image of your son, and to work with your Holy Spirit, to be righteous in our lifestyles, just as you've made us righteous in our position in Christ. Thank you for this opportunity. Use it for your glory, I pray. Thank you, in Jesus' name, amen. Growing up, my dad loved to make pies. So I want to stress that so the men aren't left out here as I talk about this. But when you go to make a pie, it takes a recipe. Now, some of you are really good. You've done this for a long time. And a little of this, a little of that, and every pie is a little different. But most of them taste good. But if you were to substitute by mistake, because somebody had mismarked it, a cup of salt instead of a cup of sugar, how would your pie taste? Salt pie, you've had that before? Maybe. So a little salt goes a long ways. That would not work. The recipe has very specific things that are required for it. And it's the same thing true about a nation that can be exalted. It is run by a recipe, and the recipe is entitled righteousness. The recipe for America right now is out of whack. Not only is salt being substituted for sugar, and I don't mean salt in a good way that's preserving, salt in a bad way that is actually destroying. There are a lot of other ingredients that are being thrown out, and the world thinks they have a better idea, and there's one reason they do that. It's because of us. See, righteousness exalts a nation, but the unrighteous cannot be righteous. We're looking at the world with morality, or with politics, or with education, or a variety of other things. You throw out there whatever you think is the cure to America's ills, and we think that's gonna fix it. And we as believers who don't wanna be persecuted, who wanna enjoy life, who don't want to go broke trying to help other people, we hide out in what's called a holy cluster. That's what a lot of churches are. We take our time, our energy, our money, and we stay around those we feel comfortable with. When in reality, you see that one of the command scriptures is to make disciples. That requires us going out into the world. That requires us getting involved in the world. And so as we think about the idea of righteousness exalting a nation, we come back to this one little verse of Proverbs 14, 34, and we realize that when Solomon recorded that, he was pointing out the fact that it's only when the church, or in that case, Israel, was obeying God, was following his commands, was in tune with God's way of doing things, that the nation could be exalted. You may have a lot of frustrations right now. I have no doubt that the election is very, very flawed. I don't know what the outcome's gonna be, and I have to adjust my passions, my emotions, as I watch and see what ultimately will take place. But the reason that the election is flawed, again, goes back to us. I could ask you how your righteousness is thriving in America today, and you, first off, would have trouble defining that word. And yet when I went and started doing a study on this, I realized that I had opened up not a can of worms, but a whole warehouse of worms. And it was like, how am I gonna narrow this down and zero in on just the part I wanna talk about? Because the issue here that I'm coming back to repeatedly right now, to make sure you don't miss the point, the reason our country is in the shape it's in is because of us. And I give you a couple good examples. The effective prayer of a, Righteous man can accomplish much. How are we doing in our prayer life in regards to our nation? I'm not talking about five minutes. I'm not talking about mentioning it when you're praying over a meal. I'm talking about taking your Bible and going out into the woods or into a quiet place or wherever it may be that you can, depending upon what time of the year it is, and crying out to God. tearfully on our knees asking God to help us. That's what's gonna turn our nation around. You may be frustrated and have a lot of anger that we're not allowed to have in the wrong way, as Jim's been talking about in Sunday school, over what's happening. No, that's not right, no, they shouldn't have done, oh, they're stealing this and they're doing that wrong. And the reality is, how long have I taken that, or taken with that problem to spend before God? and ask him to use me as salt and light in the right proportions to make a difference on our world. I'm not taking it seriously. Some of us have reached the point even of being disgusted. And we want nothing to do with it. We're almost asking God, come in and judge them. They're all so bad. And when I look at scripture and I look at this verse, I'm realizing the only one God's really looking at is me. I'll come in and judge when my people, as the Jews were in the Old Testament, who were called by my name, are not doing what I told them to do. I'll come in when my people, the church, who have the name of Christ as Christian in it, are not doing what I told them to do. Yeah, this is one of those messages. First one of the year, but it's a warning and a challenge. We need to take God seriously. As you go into this passage here, it's the word of God that gives us spiritual guidance, that gives us this perfect authority that we can go by. When we look at little verses like, and it's like I said, I was everywhere, all over the scriptures trying to narrow down. But when I go to Matthew, and I come to one little verse that you may have memorized, Matthew 633, what does it tell me? Seek first, who's he talking to? Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. What is the order in America today? Seek all these things and eventually maybe you'll get around to God's righteousness or Christ's reign over our lives. So you back up a little bit in Matthew and you look back to chapter five and verse six where he starts this sermon on the mount and he explains to them, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Righteousness, who are those people? They're not unbelievers. The whole point that he's making here in Matthew five, and I know Brian's been covering that on Sunday nights, he's talking about those being poor in spirit, spiritually bankrupt. They're coming to God because they acknowledge their need. They mourn in verse four. They show this meekness in verse five. and then the hunger and thirst for righteousness. That's us. That's not the world. You can't fix the world politically. You can't fix it morally. It can only be fixed when the church is acting like the church is supposed to be and then influencing the nation, not necessarily, politics are not a bad thing. You can be a politician. I think you can, right, Bernie? Okay, depends. But it's however God wants you to serve, but your real impact is going to be living Christ-like in front of your friends and family and neighbors and coworkers. And what do we do instead? Now I get down to the nitty gritty. We're acting like them. We're greedy. We're lying. We're lusting. We're putting our needs first. When's the last time you prayed for an hour for your employer? Or for anybody that doesn't know Christ? You go do a study on prayer and you'll be amazed. It's like righteousness. It's everywhere in the Old and New Testament. It is commanded. It's a lifestyle to be devoted to prayer, to pray without ceasing. We're not doing it, folks. And that's just one of many things that would take over in the life of a righteous individual. So you look at this little verse, and let me go back to the basics here, and then come back out of that to apply it. In Proverbs 14, 34, and I hope I can get this done in an hour. But he says, righteousness exalts a nation. The word righteousness here, and I gave you a lot in your bulletin so you wouldn't have to write down definitions and little explanations, but it's the idea of justice, but it's justice in conformity with the law or with God's commands. So it presents an uprightness. What is right in the world? That comes from God, it doesn't come from man. We're allowing man's morality to be our righteousness. It doesn't cut it. It doesn't even come close. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Turn the other cheek, and I only have two cheeks, so the third cheek, wham! I'll let them have it. But he's trying to point out here this righteousness. So the next question you ask, as we sang our songs this morning and the word righteousness showed up, it was one aspect of righteousness. Righteousness comes in three stages in the life of a believer. Package deal, if you get the first one, you're gonna get the second and the third one. But there's still three stages to righteousness. The first one is positional. It's being justified in our spirit when we place our faith in Christ. We are legally declared righteous, is what the word means. So if you really come to Christ, if you have really received that free gift of eternal life, if the Holy Spirit really has taken up residence in us, and we've become new creatures in Christ Jesus, and that's fuzzy today as to who's in and who's out. And the reason it's fuzzy is whose fault? The church's fault. In the past, we got big enough here that it got difficult, but in the past, we used to break up into small groups of prayer. Six, eight, 10 people. Maybe if we get in the auditorium, we can do that again, where you have some room to spread out. I actually had a family or a couple leave the church because that embarrassed them. Now, that made me feel bad, not because they left, and not because of the issue, because what it told me was they were not saved. They were more interested in how they looked in a group of people. I didn't tell them, and we often, and again, if you've been here for a while, you may not know, we would tell people, you don't have to pray, just listen, pray silently along with whoever's praying, and we encouraged the regulars to mix in to where others didn't feel pressured. And what this person did, I can't even share with you, because you might remember who it was. They prayed, they prayed the only thing they knew. It wasn't Father, now I lay me down to sleep, but it was close. And then they let me know, not happy. And I'm looking at Scripture and I'm going, wait a second, who doesn't talk to God as a believer? Why am I afraid to have a conversation with God? What am I more focused on if I will not open my mouth out loud? Myself, I look back at my life and I realize as a 16, 17 year old, I don't remember exactly, it was right in that summer that I turned 17. I remember the first time I prayed out loud. Because somebody offered me 50 bucks. No, I'm just kidding. I realized it was important. I realized from scripture, it's what God commanded. And you can see corporate, they'll say, oh, you don't have to pray out loud in the Bible. I can show you many places. In fact, we did a study from Matthew through Revelation, and I've got all the verses and everything organized and laid out, and I'll be glad to show you. Don't give me excuses. Get busy doing what God has told us to do, because that's what righteousness is. When we're at work, or you're at some job, and you're... I'm trying to think, either your employee or some fellow worker has a serious crisis, just got off the phone and found out that somebody in their family just died. What's your first response with them? Hopefully there's some sympathy, that's appropriate. How often do we ask them, may I pray with you? I'm not saying you don't do that, but I'm saying that should be normal. Because that's what we're doing in our lives, right? So it's really easy for me when I'm practicing that all the time, it just comes out. And they may be offended later and I may get fired because thou shalt not pray at work. I don't know where that verse is. It's missing in us. And so it's missing to the world. And so they think they can do whatever they want. And this recent election has been a brazen attempt to be unrighteous. And I'm not trying to be political. God is still gonna decide how this is gonna turn out. But I need to recognize that my lackadaisical compromising attitude is having a major impact on my own nation. Because righteousness exalts the nation. And the idea of righteousness here is what I receive positionally when I receive Christ. I am declared righteous like Abraham was in Romans 4, 1-5. That is my spirit being made just. But then there's a second part of it. Practically, I am justified by works as you see in James 2. You can't say that. were justified by faith. Well, it says that in James 2, 21 to 26. Abraham justified by works, Rahab justified by works. What does he mean there? He's not talking about your salvation in the positional sense. He's talking about your salvation in the practical sense. How do I know you had a new child? In about a month and a half, Lord willing, maybe sooner, a new baby will enter into the world. How will you know they had a new child? You probably will see the child. You may be asked to babysit the child immediately, along with three or four more, because it's just the end of it. It can't take anymore. But you will recognize the child. There's mannerisms. The child will have a face and a body, Lord willing. You can't assume anything today. We don't know, and so I shouldn't put it quite that way. But the child will come in alive or dead. They call that a miscarriage. That's God's decision. And then ultimately, if the child comes in alive and you see the child, they'll be moving, crying, doing other things that you'd rather not. They spit up and need a diaper change and whatever may go on. But you're watching real life take place there. You're seeing the position of them being alive practically revealed in their works, in their movements, in their growth. Look at Patrick. It's changed a lot, hasn't it? And he has no idea what's coming. He will be dethroned forever, Patrick. I've been there. All of a sudden, the littler one takes all precedence. And whatever they don't take normally, they will take selfishly. So you're having this struggle in our lives. Positionally, we're justified. Practically, we're being justified. We call that sanctification. This being habitually righteous. James 2 point out two individuals, Abraham and Rahab. But then you go over and you realize in 1 John 3, another verse that I brought up recently, verse 10, and it's in a bigger context, by this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious. Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God. I didn't stutter. I don't want to water it down. God has said it's black and white. God has said it's obvious. You look around today and you try to figure out who's saved, who really knows Christ, and you go, why don't we know? You know what's missing? Righteousness. And so we wanna give them the benefit of the doubt. We wanna hope and wish that, well, I think they're saved. They made a decision, they walked an aisle, they prayed a prayer. I think they're, okay, well, what about the practical side of it? Which is what John's trying to bring up. The gospel of John is about salvation. The epistle, the first epistle of John is about fellowship. The first epistle of John is talking about what believers look like in contrast to unbelievers. He says, John speaking, that the children of God are obvious. Is that how you see people? If you don't see people that way, once you get to know them, obviously you may be walking down the street, you're not gonna know. But if you don't see them that way, one of two things has happened. Either you have watered down your responsibilities as a believer to where you are just kind of lackadaisical and, eh, it doesn't really matter, and so the unbeliever can look just like you. Or you have raised them up to a position where you're trying to ignore and you're saying, I don't see their lying, I don't see their stealing, I don't see their immorality, I don't see those things. In fact, in our day and age with our country, it's being encouraged. And what do we say about it? I don't want to get in trouble. Okay, I need to focus on God's righteousness. Political correctness can be done by a non-believer. What is the believer doing? That's what this is all about. I'm gonna go back into Romans for a few weeks, I'm gonna talk about your relationship with your children, I'm gonna go on from there to preach, but this message I want it to ring in our ears for the rest of your life, if possible. Righteousness is a legal term, as I mentioned there on the second part. It's the good outcome of a verdict. When you're declared righteous, you are declared innocent, cleared of all charges. But we go from this positional just get or declared righteous justified by faith in our spirit to this practical justified by works where we're habitually righteous in our soul, our mind, our will, our emotions. And then we end up physically justified by faith. We're delivered righteously in our body. Positionally is a gift from God. Practically is guidance from God. Physically is glory from God. When you receive a new body and you are shining forth, Matthew 13, 43, the righteous will shine. We're not helping our country by watering down. Well, I don't want to offend them. The good thing Jesus went around offending people. Peter, Paul, many others that gave their lives. What does it mean, I don't want to offend them? I don't want them to not like me, is really what you're saying. So you want them to go to hell liking you, is that what it is? This is what it's coming down to. It's righteousness that exalts a nation. When you look at the idea of righteousness here, it's truthfulness, obedience, justice, innocence, honesty, uprightness, positive legal status before God, doing what is right in God's eyes, loyalty, generosity, faithfulness, being honorable, upstanding, law-abiding, pleasing God. People are described as being pious and devout and godly, Christ-like, citizens of heaven. We are supposed to look different. We aren't supposed to make people feel comfortable. We come from another country. We speak another language. We have totally different customs. They're gonna think we're weird. I was reading a story this week, and I didn't bring any of them on purpose because it would take too long, but the gist of it was a woman that wanted to write an article about homosexuality. and how to help them. She was a believer. She wanted to write an article to help them. She said, the best way I can get information is go to a homosexual and ask them if I can interview them. So she found somebody that she knew. She sat down to interview, and basically the guy said, I hate you Christians, and went on a rampage to tear her up and spit her out. And right there in her mind, she said, I'm not doing this. I quit. But she realized that's not what God wants me to do. So she humbly took the abuse and followed through and said, are you willing to answer some questions? Yep, I will. And again, the gist of it is in the course of time, weeks, months, he finally turned to her one day and he says, is what you believe real? I see it. And shortly before he died, because he had AIDS, he received Christ. And the woman realized, and again, as you look at the story in general, that it's gonna cost me to get close to somebody and to spend time with them and to be able to interact on a level where they can see Christ in me, but that I also am not attacking and throwing everything to the curb and just beating on them for all of their sins. Nobody likes that. Another story I read, and read too much this week, an alcoholic. He'd come home, and the first thing his wife did was nag, nag, nag. Didn't have supper ready, didn't keep it warm, didn't do anything for him, just nag. Why are you always drinking? Why do you always come home drunk? Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Finally, she came to Christ. She started loving her husband. Within about two or three weeks from my memory of this story, her husband finally came home one night drunk. He says, why are you treating me nice? Why are you making my meals and changing my bed and cleaning up my putrid clothes from throwing up and from everything else? Why are you doing this? And she explained to him what had happened. And he became a believer. And so I started looking for instances where righteousness exalts a nation. Righteousness has an impact, but they need to see us. They need to be around us. We're running away from them because we think they're so bad. We're asking God to judge them and don't realize that means us. I don't want them to go to hell. I wanna lay down my life to make a difference because righteousness exalts a nation. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in Genesis 6, 9. Abraham was righteous obviously by faith and by works. Watt is declared as being righteous, his nephew living where? In Sodom and Gomorrah, his righteous soul was vexed in 2 Peter 2, 7. He wasn't living perfectly. But he'd been changed. He'd been changed positionally. And I'm not saying he was living like them. He would have thought like we are today. Well, I'm better than they are. I'm being moral. I'm done. I'm not doing all those sins that they're doing. But God had to deal with that and judge it. Moses, faithful to God. Elijah, righteous prayer life brought out in James 5. Peter, he gives a confession of his righteousness. Paul lived with God with a good conscience before God. Jesus himself is described by the centurion hanging on the cross as a righteous man. Why would he say that at that point? What was he seeing in him that told him he wasn't like all the other hundreds of criminals and murderers and thieves that we've crucified? Because he wasn't hanging on the cross for himself. which is why he said, Father, forgive them. He was hanging on the cross for us. That's how righteousness lives out with those around us. Now, I'm not asking you to make all these promises. It's New Year, we need all these resolutions. Let's fix it today and say, I'm gonna do this, this, this, this. You have to work that out. But I'd encourage you one thing. I'd encourage you, between you and God, to make prayer a priority. Just start there. Because if I'm on my knees before him and I'm crying out to him and I'm praying for the problem people around me, then God can get my heart to redirect it, to really love them. But then in turn, to get into the Word is the second one I would throw out there. My priorities would be a genuine faith that has a relationship with God, and then genuine works that show submission to God's ways. But this righteousness here has made us free positionally from the penalty of sin, practically from the power of sin, physically from the presence of sin. If you're a believer, you have been positionally saved, declared righteous, passed. If you're a believer, you are being practically made righteous, habitually, present. That's called sanctification. And if you're a believer, ultimately, we will be physically changed, delivered, righteous, Philippians 3, 20 and 21. We go from a ruling of righteousness to a relationship of righteousness to a renovation of righteousness, but it's a package deal. And so many people have never known Jesus Christ. They have done religious and moral things. They don't know him. And we keep saying, well, they did the right thing 20 years ago. What have they done since? Where's the evidence that they did the right thing? We have to make it up. Well, they don't beat their wife as often as they used to. They go to church on Easter and Christmas and some other times. You know, whatever we may throw out there. Where's the obvious? Where is the righteousness that is proof that God made a radical change of a person into a new creature in Christ Jesus? And so now you're seeing it lived out. And some of you have evidenced that to me in recent days. that God's at work. The first one's by faith, God does it all. The third one is by faith. He's gonna change my body one day, but the middle one, the practical one, I work with Him. I choose to do the right things, to be truthful, to be obedient, to be just, to be innocent, to be honest. upright, all the things he wants to lay out there, that's what matters to God. That's what righteousness is. That's why in 1 John 3, 10, it's obvious. The children of God practice righteousness. So you may be sitting there right now or listening to me and going, ah, that's not me. Then by all means, I would tell you, you need to sit down with the scriptures, maybe with a true believer, someone that you can look up to that will help you with the scriptures and figure out where you're at. Don't guess about your eternal destiny. You realize America claims something like 80% Christian, and I've told you before that I think it's more like three to five, and now I would probably say it's two to 3% that are real. Why do they feel comfortable? They didn't feel comfortable around Jesus. Peter, ultimately crucified, from what history tells us. Paul executed 2 Timothy, his last letter he wrote, What's it cost in you to be a believer? If all you ever wore were white clothes and you lived in a muddy society, no paved streets, the good kind of mud, clay kind of mud, what would your clothes look like? They wouldn't look white, would they? And you'd get used to it at a point and say, well, this is just how it looks. You can't get them quite clean. And that's what Christians are doing today. This is just how we look in America. Really? Is that what God meant by righteousness? Did Jesus Christ get dirty? Bloody, but he never took on sin. You could never say about him that he was unrighteous. Every time we sin, make a decision to do something that is out of God's will, literally the idea here of, well, when I get to the word sin, which I'm gonna, the rest of this will go pretty quickly. This is the focus of where I want to spend the time. But I realize that sin is missing the mark. God has set up a target, and we think, oh, I'm just not a very good shot, or I'm not very strong, and I can't pull the bull back. That's not what it means to miss the mark. You see the target, and it's plenty big, and you're close enough. You can't miss if you don't want to. You're purposely going. I don't want to hit that target. That target means I have to tell the truth. I don't want to love my neighbor. I hate them. All they ever do is cause problems to me. or whatever it may be. I am choosing to not hit the mark when I sin. Hopefully that clarifies maybe something that you've seen before. But he says if you have this righteous lifestyle, if you're genuinely positionally declared righteous by God, because you have by faith received Jesus Christ, you've taken that free gift of eternal life, then you will practically, according to 1 John 3, you will habitually show it in your life. just like us as children. When we got out of line with our parents, what did they do? If they loved us, they disciplined us. Now, it may have varied on the degrees of how you got it, and how bad you acted up, and how often you acted up, but if they loved us, they disciplined us, because they're trying to keep us on the right track until we receive Christ, develop convictions of our own, and then made our own choices. And so the same thing with God is what he's doing in our lives. He's trying to direct us. But if you're not saved, God is not directing you. God is not spanking the unbeliever. They're in big trouble. So I go back to the issue here. Righteousness that comes from God's people, genuinely saved people, exalts a nation. It honors or lifts up to a higher plane the nation. It's an imperfect, it's unfinished business. It's never completed. The person who is righteous is constantly exalting their nation. Always leading to a position of honor, strength, power, prosperity. I've been watching American One News lately. I gave it up on another station. I saw too much for too long. Not that this other news is believers, because they're not. I've seen enough to know, but they're honestly giving me the facts, and that's all I want. So I watched the Georgia discussion with their Senate and their House as they had this open hearings, and I listened to one person after another after another. I was impressed with one thing to start with, their attitudes. I didn't see many get up there that were angry, or vindictive, or trying to hurt somebody. They're just laying out the facts. And they'll make a decision, and Georgia will have an election, and on and on it goes, and life will move on, and 100 years from now, what are you gonna remember? Not much about that. Everything about God. But as you watch these things, you're realizing that my position, and I had to believe that some of those people testifying were believers. And they were showing it by their attitude. They didn't hate their enemies. They didn't hate those who were trying to steal an election from them, although they were giving you fact after fact after fact after fact. And who in their right mind would sit there for a couple hours and listen to the facts besides Jack and a couple others of you? I want to know the facts. That's how I make decisions. That's why I study scripture. I go in to get the facts and then make decisions from there. And so when I look at it and I'm realizing that the only way to honor our nation, to exalt it, to lift it up is the idea here, is to be righteous. And that righteousness then provides this benefit. Successful economy, successful culture, success against enemies. You're watching all of that begin to crumble. And you're gonna watch it crumble really bad this next year. And your first thought is, where can I put my treasures that I don't lose them? Is that your first thought? First thought should be, as a righteous individual, on my knees before God, God, how do you want me to respond to this? And for some of you, he may tell you, give it away. I think the Bible says that somewhere. To lay up your treasures in heaven. to invest where moth and rust cannot get in there and destroy it, to make God be first. That's a righteous person. That's what they do. It's not about me. It's not about me stocking it all up for my personal benefit. It's me recognizing that if everything crashes, how am I gonna help my neighbors? How am I gonna feed the people that live around me? A non-Christian doesn't think that way. So as he's wrestling with this, it's righteousness that exalts a nation. Righteousness exalts it by bringing God's blessing to that nation. And then a successful nation is God-fearing, God-honoring, God-obeying. We look back on the history of America, and some of us are old enough to realize that Ozzie and Harriet weren't all they were cracked up to be. And Bev and I have been watching some older things here and there that slip up. and you realize what people were like. We just watched the Shackleton adventure where they tried to cross the South Pole and what he went through, risking his life, and things that people said, you can't do that. But he did. 800 miles in a little bitty lifeboat to get to another island in order to get people to come back with the ship to get his men. It took four months. And meanwhile, they're sitting on the rock that he left them at. And you sit there and go, how did they survive in minus temperatures? Why would you do that? Why would you risk your life? Why would you tell your men what you're doing and then you actually went and did it? He got to the island, he was safe. They all looked at him like it was Jonah coming out of the great fish. Where did you come from? because they'd cross over land to get to the city that they finally made. It was impossible odds, and yet it reminded me as I was watching that, that's what Christ did for me. He gave up everything. That's what righteousness does in exalting a nation. I lay down my life, and the first thing that I can do, and nobody can take it away from me, ever, is I pray, and I pray, and I pray, and I pray, and I turn things over to God, and I go to scripture, and I ask, what do you want to happen here? How can I get involved? Maybe you should become a politician. Sorry, Bernie. Not to force your will down somebody's throat, but to bring it back to righteousness, where people aren't lying or stealing. Remember the Ten Commandments? Those used to be popular. Go down the list. They're breaking all of them. They're not honoring their parents. They're murdering, committing adultery. And we shouldn't use that word. They're committing immorality in that general picture of what that would have covered. Coveting, they're lying. As he looks at this, it's righteousness that exalts, lifts up a nation. The nation here is simply a country, the people of a specific territory, united under a single government. You have the United States, you have Canada, you have Mexico, et cetera, and what are they trying to do with that today? Blend it all. God didn't tell them to do that. Nations are good. The limitations that are there, the description here, a group of people sharing economic life, distinctive culture, common language, unique border. God says to work within that framework. And what they're trying to do is destroy that framework. They've worked on the three entities that God has created. He created marriage, right? He created government and he created, I shouldn't have said that one, yeah. It was the nation of Israel and then the church later. But those entities that he's working through a unique way. And Satan has gone out of his way to destroy the family, to destroy governments, and to destroy, in our case, the church. Have you heard any gunshots? Any bombs going off? You know any Christians that Satan has caught up to and killed them? How's he work? Very subtly. Very slowly. Ozzie and Harriet, if you went back and found the truth out about that, what they were like in real life never would have been on TV. But they presented this image. America hasn't gone in the last 50 years. America's gone in the last 240 years. They didn't start with perfect men. They didn't start with all righteous men. They made some decisions. They decided they were gonna base them on the word of God. And so you see clearly the three branches of government come right out of scripture. They were trying to follow what God's principles were. That's what a righteous person does. And Benjamin Franklin and some others that weren't believers went along with it. They realized it was good for America, that God's ideas really have some validity. They're really useful. But the problem is the second half of the verse that isn't on the wall. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. Properties are built often in couplets or triplets. Here's a couplet. He's giving you the positive side, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. And he's giving you the total opposite. Who lives in a world of sin? Unbelievers live there. What do believers do? We kind of dabble in it, right? Let's see, I haven't sinned for a week, so what's one little sin going to do? I haven't had arsenic for a couple weeks, I don't think. But what's a little arsenic going to do? It's kind of fun. You ever tasted arsenic? I'm not gonna say try it, you'll like it, because I have no idea. But I'm going, this is what we're doing with sin. We're making excuses, a little bit of sin is okay. No it isn't, look what it says. Sin, all sin is a disgrace to any people. Sin means, as I mentioned earlier, missing the mark. Errors, purposely missing the target. Efforts, purposely failing to obey God. We're coming up short, remember Romans 3.23? for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. This is the idea here. This is what sin does. It intentionally compromises. It willfully neglects and defiantly rebels against God. And what's its result? It's a liability. It's a disgrace. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? Genesis 18, 20 says the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great. and their sin is very grievous. You think the only thing they were doing was practicing homosexuality? No. That just came as a surface indicator, which America is now doing, and all the way to where I just heard it presented in the House of Representatives in some bill. They're cramming it down people's throats. Why? Because the church is accepting it. You understand that? I don't care what they do in their bedroom. That's what some said for a while. Well, then you don't care about them. Homosexuality, well, that's just between a man, you know, one man, one man, or another woman with a woman. No, it isn't. If you know anything about it, the average age for death of homosexuals was 42 a while back. They're improving that now. It's disgusting. on all levels, spirit, soul, body. Unhealthy, unbiblical. It destroys people. And we sit back and go, eh, it's okay. No, it isn't. One of the big problems with them is encephalitis. It's a swelling in the brain along with dozens of other problems that creep up because God said don't live like that. And so physically it has problems, but that's not your biggest concern. It goes into your soul where your mind, your will, your emotions have been given over and rarely are you seeing, they do come out, and you're seeing opposition when somebody says, I used to be a lesbian and I'm no longer. Heard a testimony of somebody this week on the radio. They go after them. It's like, you can't say that. They wanna make that illegal. They want psychologists, psychiatrists to not be able to tell people that you should not become a transgender, that at some point in time, your life's gonna change. And what do we say to people? When we find out somebody's doing that, we don't sit them down and say, could I share with you a couple of concerns? Because I love you. And what you're choosing to go into is going to destroy you. I can't just let it go. I can't pretend like it's no big deal. But see, the problem is, the reason why we don't do that is because we didn't do it when they gossiped to us. When they lied to us, we let that go. Well, that's just what they do. We water down a lot of the little sins, as we want to call them, the white lies and the deceptions that are out there. because I like doing that once in a while. I want to have that arsenic every couple of weeks. And so what right do I have to condemn them if I'm gonna do it? And this is where the problem comes in, is that I am the liability. I'm the one bringing disgrace. This idea is reproach or shame. It's a very wicked thing when you look at it, how it's used in scripture. It brings the nation down. It puts it down, literally. Guilty of serious violation. Proverbs 25, verses eight to 10. Just to pick another proverb here. And I am leaving out boatloads. Boatloads. Because I really didn't know where this would go when I started into it. Proverbs 25, verse eight. He says, do not go out hastily to argue your case. Otherwise, what will you do in the end when your neighbor puts you to shame? argue your case with your neighbor, and do not reveal the secret of another, which is what you're going out hastily to do. Don't gossip, don't tailbear, don't try to get support on your side. It's wrong, because he says in verse 10, when you do that, he says, lest he who hears it reproach you, and the evil report about you will not pass away. What is that? Gossip is accepted in our church. It's accepted in churches nationwide and worldwide. It's what you do. You talk about other people. What does God say about that? How do you like it when you find out somebody was talking about you? Well, that's different. Really. They are monitoring your phones. What you say can and will be used against you. They're also predicting that now your TVs, your modern TVs, they're two-way. So if they want access to you, including your computer, you've already seen where they can look at you and they can hack in and see what you're doing. If I really believed that, would it change my lifestyle? Would I stop talking about somebody else on my phone when I know they're recording it and that may get used against me someday? I guess not. I think if we left gossip out, that phone conversations would drop in half. Facebook would drop in 80%. It's all being used. Sin is a disgrace. It is a put down. It's detrimental. It's destructive. The evil report only tears down. And so as I talk to you right now, you're either going, oh, this is really helpful. Thank you for the reminder. Are you going, are you going, are you done yet? If you have no interest in Proverbs 1434, you better look in the mirror. If you're really saved, you should be craving anything you can get for spiritual growth. And disappointed when it's only an hour. We're the key. We're the answer to God fixing America. It's on the brink. This isn't God's judgment. God's judgment will come and you will see the nation wiped out. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? God's judgment. Nineveh, 100 years later, not in the book of Jonah, where they repented, but in the book of Nahum, wiped out. You see God step in and deal with big cases that are appropriate to him when he says it's time. That isn't what's going on here. This is us bringing disgrace to the United States because we're tolerating sin in our lives. I got on my knees before God this morning about 5.30 at recommendation of my wife, encouraged me to spend more time on prayer on this than on preparation. I'm a preparation guy. And as I sat there kneeling and I'm crying out, again, the reminder comes back to me. What does God wanna do with me? Yes, I have cancer. Yes, I have issues. I have many issues. I've had issues all my life. What does he wanna do with the limited Jack? Who's always been limited. See, I started setting up boundaries. Okay, God, I get to slack off now. I might even use that word retirement. I can't, I said it too many times. It's been recorded and it is already being used against me. But that's not what God wants. He'll tell me when it's time to retire. And it's called the rapture or death. Okay, now you can relax. That's not funny. Sin is a disgrace to any people. And I went back up there. These lawbreakers, it brings disgrace. Any nation, Jew or Gentile, no exceptions. Remember Abraham back in Genesis 20? Abraham was disgraced by Abimelech, this pagan king, because he lied and he told him What'd he tell him? That Sarah was his sister. And then when Abimelech confronts him, the ungodly man, the unrighteous guy confronts the righteous man, and he says, well, she is my half-sister. He's still throwing stuff out there. That's not the point. You turned her loose for him to take her into his harem. God intervened. God stopped that situation because of what he'd already promised to be taking place through Sarah. and because it was immoral. Abraham, what disgrace you brought on yourself. I go back to things, and again, I don't live in the world of pornography, because if I did, I'd be gone. I can't open the door to that, I know. As a teenager, before they ever had any of that kind of stuff, I do. When I had access to a magazine that was inappropriate back in the day, three or four times, I didn't hang around very many people that practiced that. But I found it once in a while and I watched what it did to me. So right now, God and I, no, you can go to my computer and you'll find out there is nothing on there. And it's not that I'm such a great person. I flee immorality when it comes to that. I run, instantly, because I know what it will do to me if I don't. I know what my flesh will desire if it can follow after that. We have to make hard decisions here. But let me get to the bottom line as I close this off. I'm actually closing. I've said too much. I can see the look on your faces. Revelation 2. But I'll also give you an illustration. Revelation chapter 2, he writes to Ephesus. And look what he says about Ephesus. Verse 2. Revelation 2.2, I know your deeds, and your toil, and perseverance, and you cannot endure evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false, and you have perseverance, and have endured for my name's sake, and have not grown weary. How many things was that? Nine. If I got 90% on a test, boy, that was great for Jack. I don't test well. I don't remember things people tell me. I remember what I do. But 90%, that'd be great. Oh yeah, we're cheering. Thank you. That's this message being proclaimed. Then he says in verse four, but I have this against you. This 10% that you have left your first love, your first focus, your first passion, your first zeal. Remember therefore from where you have fallen. What do you mean I've fallen? I got a 90%. You have fallen. And repent and do the deed you did at first or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place unless you repent. He's talking to the church at Ephesus and he's trying to bring up this whole thing about their first love and he tells them to remember, repent, return. Remember, bring God's target back into focus. Remember that thing you're shooting at with the arrow? Repent, change your mindset. Stop shooting where you can't hit it. Stop sinning, and get back to the whole thing of setting your mind on things above, and then return. Do the deeds you did at first. I have many opportunities to be awake these days. I used to be one of those sleepers, give me five minutes, and I probably didn't even need all of it. Gone. Hit the bed, gone. Try to wake me up in the night. Not a good idea. Gone. I could share many stories and I'm not going to. Now? Oh, look it, it's 1230. Oh, look it, one o'clock. Oh, man, 145. 215, 330, 405. And I look at that and I go, what is this? That's what my wife did all of our married life. I don't do that. Why is that happening in my life? And all it comes back to me is, hello, how you doing? Talk to me. Come back to your first love. What I used to love to do when I was a believer before I was ever married and just growing in Christ, I couldn't get enough scripture and I couldn't get enough time in prayer and I'd go out and find ways. I went out in Texas with a friend of mine who's a pastor in Idaho now and didn't know anything about chiggers Or train, train tracks. So we're walking through grass that's about this tall. And when I got done, it was something like 37 jiggerbytes. And if you've ever had a jiggerbyte, it's like a magnified mosquito that doesn't go away for a couple weeks. You can train him, you can get in a bath and do all kinds of stuff to kill him off, but it does not go away for very long. But we did that, a friend and I did that to go out and spend time with God. And even separated from each other for a while. He picked the spot. But then we sat on the railroad tracks together and we're talking and we're praying on the railroad tracks and pretty soon, and the train was like 100 feet, 150 feet away. Couldn't even hear it. You know how they, in the movies, they put their ear down on the track and all the trains come. That doesn't work. They're lying to you. About got ran over by the train and you see the engineer up there like, what is with you people? You're sitting on my train track. I have to honk my horn and you're making me keep an eye out for you so I don't run over you and make a mess. But I remember the day, partly because of the chiggers, partly because of the train, but I remember the day the priority was, let's pray for a while. Is that a priority in your life? Or have you left your first love? When you first came to Christ, if you really did, and this is another thing I want you to examine, If you really came to Christ, then it was like your engagement. My wife and I, I had like almost $300 phone bill one month. Because she was away at school. Talk, talk, what are you talking about? Talk, talk, talk, I still talk. She got the wrong guy when it comes to that. But it's like you invested. I didn't care about that $300 phone bill. Didn't even bat an eye. whatever it cost in gas to go visit her at school, whatever it cost to take her out to dinner or to do things together, it was like oblivious. How are we treating God today with his money that we are stewards of? Have we gotten away from our first love and we're not really putting God first? There are many people today who are religious, patriotic, moral, passionate, but they have gotten away from their first love. And I don't want that to be me. And so I told God even this morning, as I'm increasing my prayer life, and he's helping me to increase it in a variety of ways, that I need to spend time with him again. I used to go out on Tuesdays. It was a habit of my life. Four hours a day, had the police show up one day asking me why I'm sitting out in the woods, and then realized it was one of the... Yeah, he was a game warden, but I just lost his name. Yeah, one of the ring boys. And so we had a good talk for a while, but it was putting time away from everything. And again, you're saying, well, I got so much to do, I got so much to do. And it's like, and cancer has kind of distracted me and I need to get back to doing that. I need to make sure that my values are what God wants. So I think as I close off this, I'd like to share a little story. So I once heard of a child who was raising a frightful cry because he had shoved his hand into the open of a very expensive Chinese vase and couldn't pull it out again. Parents and neighbors tugged with might and main on the child's arm with the poor creature howling out loud all the while. Finally, there was nothing left to do but to break the beautiful, expensive vase, vase as you might want to say. And then as the mournful heap of shards lay there, it became clear why the child had been so hopelessly stuck. His little fist grasped a poultry penny, which he had spied in the bottom of the vase, and which he, in his childish ignorance, would not let go of. You know how they catch monkeys today? Take a coconut, get a right-sized hole after a hollowed-out coconut, put rice in there, and the monkey goes in to grab the rice, and he won't let go. and the coconut's attached and they can't escape. This is how people are in America today. We're grabbing onto that paltry little penny, onto that little handful of rice, and it's mine, mine, mine. I'm not letting go. And God is saying, give me back my money. Give me back my time. Give me back my energy. Give me back my love. If you're really righteous, put me first. Our life is a vapor. You can see it coming to an end even in the United States of America. I've been telling people this for 20 years or more, and now it's becoming a reality. We're literally on the verge of collapsing as a society from how it was originally created 244 years ago or whatever it was. How are we responding? We're hoarding? We're pulling in, we're figuring out how to protect our resources, how to protect our families, more ammunition, more guns. I'm not against guns. How am I responding or am I recognizing, God, I drifted from you? I've left my first love, that love where in Multnomah, I used to go into the chapel and just pray for an hour before breakfast. Of course, there was a cute girl that started showing up there too, She wasn't the one for me. And you only see her for a second because you go to the chapel and they had little cubbies and places where you could hide out and pray. What are we doing with our professed love? Is it real? If it's not, you better fix that. It's appointed on a man once to die and after that the judgment. Don't play games with God because he doesn't play games. He's not like the judges of today where they kind of water things down. Oh yeah, we'll let you off for that. In fact, we're gonna let you out even though you committed murder. We don't want you to get sick or anything, you know, with COVID-19. Go kill somebody. And who are they locking up? Christians. How dare them meet in defiance of our orders? How dare them put God more important than us? Do you know Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Savior? If so, it'll be evident in your life. Righteousness will ooze out of you. The Holy Spirit will spank the living daylights out of you if you go wrong. He will keep pressing you toward as he perfects you until the day of Christ Jesus. It's fixed. If that isn't happening in your life, you don't know him. I don't care how religious you are, how moral you are, how much your church tells you you're good. I don't tell you you're good, that's between you and God. But I can watch for the evidence. And there's been people I've had to confront. Righteousness exalts a nation and it comes from us believers. We need to stop compromising and to get serious with what God has commanded us to do. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your patience. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for not being willing that any should perish. Thank you for spanking us when we're out of line. And I pray, Father, that that would become a lot more obvious. That the true believers who are missing the mark would be brought up to give account. But Father, help the unbelievers who are being deceived and are deceiving others to see Christ in us so that we at least get their bad reaction where they hate us and persecute us instead of no reaction because they think we're one of them. But may we only be sharing with them because we do love them. May they see Christ in us daily, moment by moment, because it isn't just a Sunday morning thing that we do. It's our breath, our spiritual breath that we take in every moment of every day. We love you, we thank you for our salvation. We ask you to use the remaining time that we have, the remaining freedom that we have to reach unbelievers for you and to help believers to grow up in Christ as we prepare for his return. We thank you in Jesus' name, amen.