in a world of conflicting values, when questions are more common than answers. God's Word provides everything we need to live a God-centered, truth-driven life. Now, here's the Word for Life broadcast, brought to you by Brookside Baptist Church. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Word for Life, a broadcast of Brookside Baptist Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin. My name is Scott Sander, one of the associate pastors here, and I'm joined by our senior pastor, Pastor Ken Keltner. We trust you all had a very Merry Christmas celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We pray that you know him and trust him as your Lord and Savior for your salvation. If you don't have a church home, we'd love for you to join us at Brookside. We have services this Sunday, which is New Year's Eve. We have our normal nine o'clock and 1015 services and Sunday school. And then come back at eight o'clock at night. We're going to have a time of fellowship and refreshments. We'll show a godly film. Then we'll be celebrating the Lord's supper. We'll be taking communion to ring in the new year. And Pastor Ken, I can't think of a better way to start a new year than by celebrating the Lord's table. Exactly. I mean, the memorial, again, of what Jesus Christ has done for us is we remember Him and communion is all about in remembrance of Him. And I see more people do not want to take communion. A lot of times they, right when, you know, they're at the service, but communion starts, you see them get up and head to the back. They don't want to, and friends, that is something very important. It's good accountability for us because we come to the table and we need to, to be able to have some self-confrontation of, am I right with God or not? Am I right with my fellow man? Well, again, I trust you had a great Christmas, and we're thankful you're back with us. And thankfully, we weren't at the real sewer part of this passage of Scripture until after Christmas. But if you've joined us, Judges 19 is not a pretty picture. And it's just, again, showing the spiral stair-stepping down into just gross sin and immorality and ungodliness and just wickedness. And we said there would be three statements that we would really kind of be the heading for this chapter of Judges 19. The first, permissiveness leads to depravity. And the second one we're on right now, disobedience encourages compromise. That's verses 10 through 21. And the first aspect we saw there was societal insensitivity. That's in verses 10 through 19. And then we looked, secondly, that there was insufficient hospitality in verse 15. they went into Gibeah, which would be kind of like a suburb of Jerusalem, and they're in the open square, but no one would take them in. That was usually the sign, hey, we're traveling, can somebody take us in? And in the Old Testament, in Leviticus 19, they were commanded to be hospitable, but now where lawlessness is abounding, the love of many has gone cold. And we're going to see here today that lawlessness prevails in the city, there's no love lost here, not even to the fellow countrymen. So now we're into this, the second aspect of disobedience encourages compromise in verses 18 to 21, where we're going to talk about just plain street indecency. You know, I mean, streets aren't safe. Again, will that preach today? Yep. He's telling them you cannot get caught out here at night in the city. You better be inside someplace where the door is locked. I mean, we in our day see a lack of civic justice. There is fear of people at night. In fact, I think it's growing even, Scott, during the day. People don't, if they're in a bad neighborhood, they don't even want to get out during the day. I mean, it is getting fearful. And I have to be honest with you that when I was growing up, you didn't hear as much about kidnapping and murder as you hear about it today. Many of you possibly grew up never even locking your doors. That was my parents' generation. They never locked the doors. Another sign that we're going to see here is not only in judges in Israel at the time, but even within the 21st century, wickedness is in the streets. But what happens is there's an older man that demonstrates care and safety for these visitors. So here we see it again. An older man comes in from work. He's hospitable to the strangers left standing in the city square. He says, it's not safe for you here coming to my house. Now, I don't want you to be like one of those old guys talking about the younger generation, but let me just act like one of the old guys for just a moment. Listen and watch how young people respond to authority today. There's no sense of courtesy, no sense of modest dress or even decency. And I want to stop some young men sometimes and say, young man, pull your pants up. Let me ask, do you believe in decency, courtesy, and civility? Because they've dropped in our society. It's dropped in the church among believers today. We've compromised to meet the approval of the world. And whenever the world comes up with something, we Christians invariably will follow along. The world wants to have kind of a hippie movement, we'll just have a Jesus hippie movement. The world wants to have just a rock concert, give us time and we'll have our own Christian rock concert. You go into some churches and wonder, was I a church? If the world decides to have a women's lib movement, just wait, we'll have women preachers, and we have it today. We have so long compromised with the world that we've become so engulfed in its materialistic viewpoint and its economics and its style of life that there's little possibility that we can even understand what an uncompromising life really means. I mean, we fight to be separated from the world and yet we're unable to define what that separation means because we've been brainwashed. I mean, we've accepted the world's thought patterns, we've accepted the world's value systems, we've accepted the world's attitudes and lifestyle. You can't even begin to see a difference between believers and unbelievers today. And scripture, my friend, calls us as believers to be different. Come on, let's get back to the Word being our anchor and be distinctive for Christ. In other words, as we said earlier, put some class back into righteousness and right living. That remedy is to compromise is to be courageous. That's the remedy to compromise. So, here we are in this passage, the Levite and his traveling companions are now safe. Well, not exactly. Look with me and see what happens because it's going to be terrible and it's going to be total anarchy. Why don't you start reading in verse 22. So they're safe in this man's home, this older man's home, and we pick it up now in verse 22. As they were enjoying themselves, suddenly certain men of the city, perverted men, surrounded the house and beat on the door. They spoke to the master of the house, the old man saying, bring out the man who came to your house that we may know him carnally. If you look at this, and we're told right away they're enjoying themselves, they're in the safety and comfort of this older man's home. And verse 22 tells us that perverted men, maybe your Bible might say worthless men, are pounding on the door. I mean, is this a picture of Sodom all over again? The word worthless in the Hebrew means son of Belial. Belial was one of the deities of Canaan. In fact, Paul says, how can Christ have fellowship with Belial to the Corinthians there in his second recorded letter that we have. This Belial is a takeoff of the name Baal, or Bael. These men are perverse because they're gods of nature, and they cannot give a person a sense of right, and they can't give a person a sense of right or wrong, but only of weakness and savagery. So these men gather around the house, and here we see the perverse sexuality becomes the norm in society. I mean, again, I look at you, Scott, this morning, go, has that happened? Are we living in it? If you haven't been living on Mars the last few years, this is where we are today, folks. Perversion is normal. Right now in our country, the leading internet sales and marketing is pornography. Someone told me that there are 7,500 pornographic sites that are started every week in the US. So in a year, there are over $750 million spent on revenues and hotels on adult movies. I've been told that between 9 o'clock and 1 a.m. every day in our country, there are a quarter of a million phone calls to phone sex sites and the majority of callers are from the ages of 11 to 17. So sexual perversity, don't make me say it is the norm of our society and that's a fact. So parents, I would say, monitor your children's cell phones, shut them off at night, and leave them by you. But this word, no, in verse 22, is the same word that's used in Genesis when we read that Adam knew his wife. And I believe we kind of understand what this means. These perverted men have taken rule of the city. You look at this, that which is perverse is normal, and the normal guy is being assaulted by the perverse. Their rebellion and depravity is insatiable. It just takes over. It doesn't even stand still. Now keep watching. Look at verse 23. In other words, this older man, this older guy is calling this new morality sin and stupidity. And verse 24, the older fellow is saying, take my virgin daughters. In other words, if you're going to be wicked, be wicked in a normal sense of sexuality, but don't be a sodomite. And that'll preach today. You know why? Because in the book of Genesis, when a nation became a sodomite nation, like Sodom and Gomorrah, God exterminated them. He removed them from the face of the earth. America, Supreme Court justices, You're not listening to the Creator of the world, the Creator of marriage. See also, Benjamites in Judges chapter 20. And verse 25 now is a picture of total anarchy and iniquity. Why don't you read verse 25 for us? Do you know why the men would not listen to this old man? They were no longer excited about normal sex. And that's the way pornography is. There are too many Christian men that have gotten into it and you don't stay and playboy. Even today they would call that soft porn. It goes on and on into the more violent and perverse pornography for stimulation. Pornography and immorality are insatiable. They are fires that burn, they cannot be fed. I tell you now, young person, you give immorality a foothold and it will knock down the door of your life with sex guns a-blazing and it will reap total destruction in your life. I don't know how many young men and even older men I've counseled in my time, Ken, who said, I just wish I never looked at that. first image. That first time, I wish I never did it. And man, if you're having trouble with this, we want to be a help to you. Contact us and let us help you get through this. But here at the end, we see just selfish indifference. You know, you read, you just read verse 27. Can you pick up a lack of care and concern for this woman? You read, when her master arose in the morning, this spiritual leader who's been caring for people threw her out to a mob of perverted men, and he goes to bed. Are you kidding me? God created woman not just from the dust of the ground, but from the side of Adam. Christianity is against the demeaning of women. We are to exalt women. We are to exalt women. We'll stop there for today. We'll look at finishing this in our next broadcast, but thank you again for being with us, and we look forward to the next time that we'll be with you. We hope you enjoyed today's program. If you have a question we can answer, or would like information on the Word for Life, would like to donate to continue to produce this broadcast, or need resources for your Christian walk, contact us at Brookside Baptist Church, 4470 North Pilgrim Road, Brookfield, Wisconsin 53005. You can also visit us at brooksidebc.org. That's brooksidebc.org. or call us at 262-783-6180. That's 262-783-6180. Thanks for listening today, and please tune in again as we bring the Word of God to your life.