Up next on Grace Life Radio is Word for America. God has his elect out there into the world. Now we don't know who those elect are, which means we have to go into all of the world to find them. Where we discuss today's theological topics. Here, let me interpret. Faster, faster, faster. Do you know what I just said? Yeah, I believe what Dr. Luke said is welcome to Work for America. You are good. I got a gift. With host, Dr. Luke. Most people say, well, we don't want no stinking doctrine. We just want Jesus. Pastor Brandon. Yeah, they use the Armenian highline. It's the old sharpie. And our resident Barnabas, Matt Graham. What you talking about, P. Willis? Doctrinal issues? The Word of God is clear that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes in the Jew first and also the Greek, meaning that if anyone is ever going to be saved, it is going to be through the preaching of the gospel. Yeah, we discussed those. Exposing false teaching? Well, Joel, it says you're a sinner. And that's a word that you refuse to use. Check. Keeping Dr. Luke on topic? Everyone in this room has potential. Alright, let's rein Dr. Luke back in. Uh, we're working on it. So get ready for the fastest 28 minutes in radio. Take it away, Dr. Luke. We live in a world that aborts babies by the tens of thousands. We live in a world where if someone really believes that black is white, then it's white to them. We live in a world where two men can engage in what we call marriage. I don't know about anyone else, but I really feel out of place here. You are listening to 90.1 WPGT, where we preach grace and truth. And this is the Word for America broadcast. This is your host for today, Pastor Brandon Ellickson. How about you guys? Do you feel at home in this world where we live in? Not really. Definitely not. No, it's kind of a strange sensation that we've been faced with, and it seems like we've been faced with it more and more over the past several days, especially for those of us who would claim to be patriotic American Christians. You know, on the one hand, we're getting ready to, as a nation, celebrate the 4th of July this coming weekend, and most of our neighbors are ringing off all of the fireworks up into the sky and adorning all of their cars and their yards and wearing the American Pride t-shirts and many are going to celebrate the 4th of July with family and friends and open grills and spend time down at the lake or at the beach or whatever it happens to be But for the Christian who is biblically minded, at the very same time as all of these festivities are going on, if you listen closely you can still hear our stomachs grumbling as a fresh reminder of the attack upon Christianity that took place by the Supreme Court of the United States just last week. So we do have this mixture of emotions that is going on. In talking with you guys and in talking with several folks from the church over the past couple of weeks, it's really amazing how the Supreme Court's decision to legalize same-sex marriage has brought about some clarity on their perspective of where it is that we live. You know, this is a perspective that goes back for hundreds of years, back to the framing of our Constitution. And before that, in the settling of this land for the very first time by some of our Puritan forefathers, they had established this idea of reclaiming a land for themselves and starting something of a Christian utopia, establishing a new Jerusalem as it was. But as we watch the news feeds around us and we see the downgrade of our culture, all around us as things just seem to be crumbling, It's clear that their experiment has failed. You know, the Puritan experiment of building a new Jerusalem here in America simply has not panned out the way that it is meant to pan out. And we still have these leftover ideas that America is a Christian nation. We still have these ideas that the nation of America and the nation of the United States is quite friendly towards our Christian values. But what we have been faced with more and more over the past several days is that this is simply not the case. Is this how you guys feel as well? You know what, I believe you're absolutely correct, Brandon. It absolutely shows that this is not our home. It is nice that at one time it was almost neutral. But as of the rulings and as of the reaction of the media and reaction of the ones celebrating the decisions, the anger and the vile expressions that they have towards the Christian community, it's just seething out of them. Absolutely, and you know, any fuzziness that the Christian had prior to last week when it comes to the fact that this world is not our home, I would say that most of them would have agreed theologically that we are living for another land, that we are a part of another kingdom. But there was still this friendly idea that we are not in a hostile territory, but rather we live in a land that is quite accepting to our beliefs and to our Christian values that we form from the Word of God. But all of that fuzziness as to where we stand in comparison with the world as a whole was shot down once and for all. And for most Christians, they have woke up one morning and realized, you know, I really do not belong here. We talk about this a lot, but we live in the kingdom of God, whereas this world who has rejected Jesus Christ around us, they live in the kingdom of darkness. We are really living in two different worlds even though we share this planet together. I've made this comment before, but I've got to spend quite a bit of time outside of the United States. You take a place like Hong Kong, for instance. When I visit Hong Kong, there's some food that the natives there enjoy to eat that I really can't stomach. There are some things that they really enjoy that frankly just confuses the heck out of me. I don't know how they enjoy doing some of the things that they do. They speak a different language that I don't understand. Well, that carries over into the spiritual realm as well. I begin to look at the world that I live in, I begin to recognize that I genuinely do speak a different language, and my language is based upon the Word of God. And because we have a different language, I can say something and mean something completely different than what they are saying when they say something that sounds an awful lot like what I'm saying. They enjoy things that I can no longer wrap my mind around enjoying. So it's became clear over the past couple of weeks, if it was not before, that we really are living a different land than most of us had grown up envisioning that we were going to live in. And it's a bit depressing in one area because as Matthew brought up there was a time in which we really believed that the land that we lived in was at worst ambivalent towards our beliefs and our values, but it's becoming more and more that God is removing all of that religious veneer and God is removing all of this idea that this is a Christian land and what has happened is we began to see things from God's perspective now for quite some time here in America we have enjoyed some not so common grace from God and that the world here in America was quite friendly towards the Christians but what we failed to realize during that whole time is that was entirely due to the grace of God and not because of the land that we live in but rather during that time God had kept the world from engaging in the hatred that they actually have for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. But now what has happened is that that veneer is no longer there and we're beginning to see things for how they actually are. You know, I've made the statement a couple of times to friends of mine in conversation over the past several days that I have kind of this dual thought about what's going on. You see, on the one hand, I realize that throughout church history It is during these times whenever the light and the dark become extremely clear and during these times wherever God really does begin to show what is true and what is false. Throughout church history this is when God has genuinely grown his church and it's when also he has purified his bride and all of the the false and all of the chaff has been destroyed and passed away and at the end of this time the church grows stronger so I don't know about you but I'm actually encouraged to see what God is going to do through all of this and even though it is very weak at this point it seems as though the seeds of persecution are at least there so I'm excited to see what God is going to do with that on the other hand All of us who are in this room, and likely many of you who are listening to this broadcast, have small children. I'm not really excited about my kids being raised up in this generation where it appears that God has let us go and is allowing the culture to engage in the sin. that their hearts desires. So I guess my question would be today, how is it that we are going to prepare ourselves and how is it that we prepare our children to face this onslaught of this culture that is completely against our Christian values that we are seeking to instill upon them? Well, the short answer is we must stay in the Word, and we have to teach our kids diligently that the Bible is our ultimate authority. I mean, that's the short answer anyway. That's not the radio answer, that's the short answer. That's a good answer, though. That's a great answer. Stay in the Gospel. Preach the Gospel. You know, we are now considered bigots at every turn, but Really, I believe that we are the loving ones, teaching, you know, telling people that if you stay, no matter what sin, if you don't repent, you're gonna face the wrath of God. Right. And also, you know, Brandon was talking about persecution. That persecution is here and on a lot of levels because I'm sure some of you have heard, you know, some of these preachers, street preachers that are speaking out at some of these pride parades are getting pummeled physically. So it's persecution is here. Oh, definitely. Well, and the persecution comes, of course, because when someone stands up in the public square and pronounces that a particular lifestyle, whatever it happens to be, or a sin in general, whatever that sin happens to be, is something that is a sin, then what we hear from the crowd most often is going to be Matthew chapter 7, judge not. You know, you Christians are just being a bunch of judgers, and you know, you're just sinning like I'm sinning because the Bible says that you are not to judge. How do we respond to that rebuke upon us when we say that something is wrong? Well, I think we just have to go back to the Gospel. Tell nobody that lives on this planet is perfect. Everybody's a sinner. I'm a sinner. I'm just repenting every day, all the time. And I'm trusting in the promises of God, and I trust in the shed blood of Christ. Yeah, you know, and the thing is, here's the dirty little secret that those who rebuke us for rebuking them fail to realize. The fact of the matter is, no human being has the right under God to judge another human being in and of his own self and through his own authority and by his own standard. Matthew does not have the right to judge me in that way. However, the problem is, whenever a Christian stands up in the public square from the pulpit or on the radio, whatever it happens to be, pronounces because it is the hot topic of the day not because I'm just picking on this sin but it is what we are talking about when someone says that homosexuality is an offense in the eyes of God and it is a sin. Well the rebuke comes to me that I'm a bigot and I'm a homophobe and that I am judging individuals. But the secret is that I have not passed judgment on anyone. You see, what has taken place is that whenever God inspired, by the Holy Spirit, individuals to write down His will and His mind in the Word of God, God passed judgment on that lifestyle at that moment in time. What I am doing is not passing judgment upon them. I am simply making the judgment which God has already passed known to them. So it's out of a heart filled with love that I say homosexuality is wrong. Because look, the fact of the matter is when they stand before the Lord on judgment day, God himself is going to pronounce a judgment because of that crime that they have committed against him, that they have sinned against him by not following his ethics of Christian purity. And what I am doing in pointing out that this is a problem and that you have sinned is actually not passing judgment, but I'm simply saying that God will pass judgment upon you if you do not repent of that particular sin. By the way, when we're talking about that particular sin, I've heard this rebuke quite often from people in the LGBT community over the past week is that, why do you Christians always pick on that sin? Why don't you ever talk about the man and the woman that are shacking up with one another and they are not married at all? Why do you just pick on us? How do we respond to that? we should be pointing out anything that is, you know, unbiblical. I mean, we should definitely address if we see it and if it's in our face, but in that case, I guess it would be—it's not even really, in my case, It's more of a warning. This is what God says. I love you enough to tell you and I'm going to take the rebuke from you because I want you to know the truth. Here's the other side of that and how we can respond to that rebuke. whenever we pass judgment upon a man and a woman who are living together in sin outside of the bonds of covenant marriage, they are certainly engaging in a sin. They are doing something that God has condemned. They are not following through. They are, as it were, trying to have some of the benefits of that without having the the covenant and the responsibility of that covenant God has placed upon that. But whenever we condemn homosexuality, we're not just condemning the fact that they are not even able to actually become married. And that's one of the problems here is that we live in a culture that has not just rejected biblical truth, but they have rejected truth altogether. Whenever we understand that someone is married, whenever we say that someone has been married, Our definition for that word comes primarily from the Bible. We get our definition for marriage from the book of Genesis, and what we find is that a marriage is constituted of a man and a woman who are in covenant with one another and in covenant with God. So if the state wants to legislate that two men can have a civil union with one another, I suppose there's nothing wrong with the state doing that in and of itself. They have the rights within the Constitution to do that if that is what they want to do. The trouble that I have is when they say that it is a marriage. It's not a marriage. And whenever we condemn this act of homosexuality, it's not just that we are condemning the fact that they are saying that they are married, when in fact the Bible never even gives them the option of doing that. But we're also condemning the homosexual act as well. And the reason that we pick on this so much is the fact that they are taking something that God has commanded all the way back in the Garden of Eden, and they're using it for their own pleasure, they're using it for their own gain. Whereas that was never the intention, even of the sexual relationship as established in the book of Genesis. And it's not that we are picking on that as much as the fact is that the world has determined that they are going to push forth this agenda and make this okay. And it's not just that they want us to celebrate it, or it's not just that they want us to accept these acts, but they want us to celebrate it. And for the Christian, this is where we have to draw the line. Right. Yeah, that's where the rubber meets the road. In fact, to be honest, people with I guess, same-sex attractions, could always marry. They just chose not to marry somebody of the opposite sex, of an appropriate age, outside of their family. And that's the definition of marriage. It was one man, one woman, that's not in your family, that's of a legal age. They had that right. They just chose not to. Their desires were for something that is not marriage. Yeah, absolutely. And the rebuke, I suppose, that we would have to that is, well, this world is difficult to live in. There's so few people that actually find genuine love. How can you condemn someone that has found a life partner that makes living in this world easier for them? I mean, how could you be so mean as to condemn something that makes them so happy? Well, God condemns that. But the whole thing is that if you look at it anatomically, the parts don't match, you know? One part is made for another part. You don't use two of the same parts in the same relationship. Sorry, that's pretty graphic, but what do you think, Justin? I have nothing to add to that. Nothing at all. Okay, as we digress. All right. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. How do we handle this? You know, since this is not our home, where do we go from here? How do we react to a fallen world that initially was based on, you know, Judeo-Christian values? We have Moses on the front of the Supreme Court, but obviously that does not matter anymore. You know, so how does a Christian now react because we are obviously aliens in this world? Well, one of the things that we don't do is we definitely don't turn into a bunch of evangelical jerks. And that's the knee-jerk reaction, no pun intended, to these types of things that take place in our culture is we have these Christians who, they have their emotions stirred and they realize that this is wrong and they realize that this is a offense in the eyes of God. But rather than handling these things in the way that the Bible is prescribed, very often they just become mean-spirited and demeaning when they are trying to engage the culture. And we see this with certainly not all of the street preachers, but we see this with some of the street preacher guild who believe that it is fulfilling the Great Commission to go and to stand outside of these rallies and say that God hates all homosexuals and God hates homosexual sin. Well, while that might be true to a certain extent, that's not the fulfilling of the Great Commission. You know, the Bible is clear that the message that we are called and commanded by God to take to our culture is one that they will find offensive. The gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing. The gospel is a stumbling block. It's a holdup to the people that simply do not and will not accept it. Our burden as a Christian is to handle these things and to handle these emotions that we have in such a way as to, if there is an offense taken, they will have this offense towards the gospel that we are called to go to them with, and not to the person who is taking the gospel to them. So we have the responsibility to handle things in a way that reflects the love of Jesus Christ, even to the unbeliever. There's a certain way that we are to speak to these issues. There's a certain way that we are to conduct ourselves when we are engaging the culture. There's a certain love that we are to have even for the lost, even when they are rebelling against God. But that in no way means that we should be silent. One of the things that the church must not do at this point is be intimidated by all of the media coverage. We must not be intimidated by the fact that even the White House of the United States, where our president lives, was lit up in the rainbow colors on the day following this, which by the way was a giant slap in the face of God. I mean, I'll never forget my feelings when I saw that picture for the very first time. I mean, what's going on inside of my mind is, why don't we just take a red marker and draw on the map and say, God send the fire here. I mean, it's a complete open rebellion against God. So one of the things that we must not do as a church is think that because all of this positive media coverage and everything else is supporting these decisions, we must not remain silent. The Bible is extremely clear as to how we are to handle these things. And frankly, as Dr. Albert Moeller has said, in a sense, last Friday, everything changed. But on the other hand, nothing has changed. Nothing has changed about our purpose here on the earth as the local church and nothing has changed about the mission that Jesus Christ has given to us. The way that we combat these things is through the proclamation of the gospel and living out the implications of the gospel in the eyes of these people who are in open rebellion against God. Yes. You know what? It's so obvious that this particular issue that we're talking about is the current one. It's all over every magazine, every television. It's the talk around the water cooler or however you want to discuss it. But it's just another sin that people need to hear the gospel about. And like I had heard earlier, our bodies are not a body with a soul. It's a soul with a body carrying it. I don't know, maybe, was that you that had... I said it, I don't know who I got it from. But it absolutely fits. This is not our home. Our soul is waiting for our body to perish so that we can move on. You know, and the amazing thing is if we look back through church history, what we find is that just now the American church may be entering into a season of normal Christianity. You know, you look back through church history and the church has always existed in a hostile environment. We look around the world even today and we recognize that so many of our brothers and sisters have been living for years with this type and even far worse persecution upon them. God has been gracious to the American church and that we have not experienced a whole lot of this in many years. But just now, because we are, this doesn't mean that we give up and this doesn't mean that we give in. In fact, this is what normal Christianity has been for the majority of the life of the church that has been lived around the world. These are the types of things that Christians deal with, and these are the types of things that the New Testament letters, especially the book of Revelation, the book of Hebrews, the book of James, these are the types of things that those books prepare us. They are preparing us for this onslaught of the worldliness that will come up against the church. That's our responsibility as the local church and our responsibility as fathers and parents in our household is to prepare our children. You know, in the past, we would go through a season of preparing and we would train to send people out to the mission field and we would explain to them, this is the kind of thing that you can expect there. This is the type of persecution which you might encounter there. And then the idea was that they could come home to this peaceful utopia where Christianity was just loved and accepted by all. Well, what we have now is we don't have the luxury of just sitting back and waiting for our child to say, well, I'm going to go to the mission field to begin preparing them for this culture that they are going to come up against. But we live in the day and age when this culture has come up against us. And I think that one of the healthy things that this has done is that there has been, you know, for as long as this nation has been blessed by God, there's been this unhealthy sense of idolatry, American idolatry, to where we believe that somehow this land has been insulated from the effects of the fall, and somehow this land and these people have been insulated from the effects of sin. And what we have discovered over the past couple of weeks has become more and more and more clear that america is a wicked nation just like every other nation which means we must shine the light of the gospel into this nation is the only hope uh... of of a sanctuary from the wrath of god which is to come right you know what just thinking about it that way you know how many christian brothers and sisters in the middle east or in china would love to come to the u s to just battle social issues I mean, they are persecuted there. It's illegal to be a Christian there. It will, you know, in a lot of cases, mean your death. And, you know, instead of hiding under a rock and saying that this is it, we do need to step it up, get out there, preach the gospel, because it is not illegal here. You know, you might get spit on. You might get hit. I mean, but imagine what the early Christian church went through for 100, what, 300 years before it was even legal to be a Christian. And the light shines so much brighter in darkness. You know, that's just something that we have to think about, and just as the verse says, we have to be salt and light. You know, maybe for the first time there are some Christians who are seeing all of these things unfold on the news channel who will begin to see the towns and communities that they live in as a mission field. You know, for so often people have just assumed that everyone that lives around them believes the same way they do, and for so often people have just believed that everyone who lives in the South and carries a Bible around is a Christian. Well, as we see these lines begin to be drawn, more and more around us, I think that one of the healthy things that is happening is we will be able to see the difference in the true and the false around us. So although this is certainly a time for lament because God is being faced with open rebellion now, what we also understand that this is normal Christianity. Christians have endured and survived this for thousands of years. And now we as a church have a responsibility to uphold the truth of the gospel in a context that is not going to be friendly to it. So I anticipate that the Lord will do wonderful things and also anticipate that so much of the false gospel in so many of these false churches, even here in America, simply will not withstand any type of persecution at all. So I believe what the Lord is going to do through all of this is a purification of his bride, and there will be a clear line drawn towards what is true and what is false. Well, we are out of time for today. You are listening to 90.1 WPGT, where we preach grace and truth.