Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that he loved us and he gave himself for us. We thank you that we have that message to share with the world, and we pray that you would help us to be faithful in that regard. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. You made your own religion, question mark. You know, a lot of people make their own. A lot of people in the United States make their own. Some countries you go into, like India, they say, we have 200,000 different religions. Sometimes I think the United States of America has 200,000 different religions too. We just have a whole bunch of little variances and things of that nature. Somebody said something about thinking, so we're gonna do some thinking tonight. Jeremiah 25, six and seven, go not after other gods, small g, to serve them and to worship them, and provoke me not to anger with the works of your hands. You know, you can make God mad. And when you do, you're gonna get hurt. If you do not promote God to anger with the works of your hands, he says, I will do you no hurt, yet ye have not hearkened unto me, saith the Lord, that ye might provoke me to anger with the works of your hands to your own hurt. When you make God angry, you're gonna get hurt. Whether you're a saved person or an unsaved person, you're gonna get hurt. Sooner or later, it's gonna hurt really, really, really bad. I heard about the guy that went to the doctor and was talking to him about an operation. And he said to the doctor, I want to make sure that this isn't going to hurt at all. Either the operation or the recovery. And the doctor said, that isn't possible. And he said, well, forget the operation then. A lot of people are that way. But a lot of people are blind in the fact that they think they can do whatever in the world they want, and they're not going to get hurt. And that's not true. As you read through God's book, You'll find out there's a whole bunch of times when people made him angry and they got hurt. The nation of Israel made him angry with their gods and they got carried off into captivity. 42,000 of them got carried off into captivity. Do you realize how many people were in Israel in David's lifetime and how many actually went into captivity? What happened to the other couple million? They were dead in the streets. But God had warned them through his prophets about that. Now we're gonna do something pretend. How many of you don't know what pretend is? How many of you aren't gonna raise your hand no matter what I say is what I think. We're gonna pretend for a few minutes, okay? Suppose we got together tonight to make our own religion, okay? Because we don't like any of them that are out there. So we're going to make our own. This is a pretend thing, OK? If you don't understand pretend, don't go out here and say Mahavira's making a religion. Because it's a pretend thing to illustrate something to you that we never think about. You can borrow from anything at all, OK? Any religion, anything you've heard about, any philosophy at all, anything at all. You can borrow, and we'll throw it in. So who gets to decide what we're gonna believe? We're gonna decide that. All the religions in the world, except for Christianity, had a person just like you and me make it up. Do you understand that? They're no different than you. So therefore, whatever they came up with, you can come up with something too, and yours is just as good as theirs. Right? So we have our religion, and we've got to figure out who will be our God or Goddess. Any volunteers for God? Any volunteers for Goddess? I don't have any volunteers. I don't know what we're going to do. We're not going to have a God or a Goddess. Who can change what we believe? People do that to Christianity. They change what's been established by the living God creator. They say, I can change that. I don't like that. That doesn't make sense to me. I think we can do better. How do we explain the universe, the world, and life? We have to explain where all this stuff came from, right? How many like the Big Bang Theory? How many like the long age theory? How many are like, I don't know where it came from? That's what some people do. How many believe you are a monkey, but now you're a people? You were amoeba, but now you're a, no. How do we explain evil? Where did that come from? What is evil? What is bad? You know, a lot of times you talk to people and, well, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So everybody has their own concept of evil. Is anything evil? Is there really anything bad? In the United States of America, we live in a country that doesn't believe that there's anything that's really bad. If it's good for you, it's good. If it's bad for you, then it's bad for you, but it's not bad, period, for everybody. So everybody can make their own decision about what is good and bad. That's what people in the United States believe. A lot of people believe that. What is good? If there is no bad, is there a good? Or is there a right? Or is there not a right? Or is nothing good or right? You're establishing standards. Well, that's what religions do. They establish standards. Who gets to decide what is good and evil? What happens if someone breaks our laws? I got an idea, if they break our laws, we'll douse them down with gasoline and put them in a cage and set them on fire. What do you think? Oh well. How do we get people to join with us? Is it an open invitation? Or is it a threat invitation? In other words, you either join with us or we're going to whack off your head with a sword, you know. It's called freedom of religion. If you don't believe the way we do, you lose your head. We've got that kind of world today, you know. You know about that one. If someone leaves us, how are they to be treated? Take them up in the tallest building in town and pitch them off the top of the roof, right? I'll teach them. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Do we believe in life after death? It always amazes me that reprobates and people that don't believe in God, like Pastor mentioned on Wednesday night, some certain fella, and when they die, guess where they are? They're in heaven. And they said there was no heaven. And they said there was no hell. But you know, when those people wake up in an eternal place, they're going to say, I was wrong forever. What would life after death look like? So we make something up, whatever. We can make it good. We can make it not so good, or we can make a whole series of things that you have to go through before you actually get to a nice place. Would you be able to move from a bad place to a good place if you ended up in the wrong place, but you didn't think the wrong place existed, but after you died, you find out that it did exist? Do you understand that? I don't understand that either. I don't believe anybody that ends up in hell is going to think they're going to make heaven. Remember the rich man that died, he didn't say, when am I going to get out of here? Did you ever notice that? He never said that. He never said, how long do I have to be here? He said, can I have one drop of water? You know why he only asked for one drop of water? He knew he didn't deserve one drop of water. He knew he was going to be there forever. Do you believe that any person ending up in heaven will say, God, I don't really like it here. I don't like the singing here. I don't like the love here. I don't like you here. I don't like all these people that are here. Could I go to that other place? You think anybody's going to say that? There's nobody going to say that. Who decides where one goes? If you're a god or a goddess, you get to decide, right? What is to be the basic motivation of this religion? God is love. It's not what he does, it's what he is. But a lot of religions have fear as their basic motivation. In other words, we can have all kind of fear, you know, put people in a cage, set them on fire, chop off their heads, throw them off the top of a building, you know, walk into their house and say, wouldn't you like to accept Christ as your savior and pull out a gun and say, I really mean you need to accept Christ as your savior like right now or I'm going to shoot you, right? That's the way we'd, that's not going to work, okay? But there have been a whole lot of crazy religions. I read about one a long time ago and it said flirtatious fishing. You don't even want to hear about that one. Is our god or goddess personally concerned about us? Now if one of us picked out to be the god or goddess, would you be able to be concerned about everybody in the world? You wouldn't even know everybody in the world, okay? Neither would I. But we have a God that knows all of us. Is our God a God that's able to help us wherever we are in the world? Only the God of heaven can do that. All the rest of the religions and all the rest of their adherents and all the rest of their gods, and all the rest of their prophets can't help everybody in the world when they need help. Because they're just like you and me. They're just regular people. Does our God or Goddess know what is going on everywhere in the world? Now, we're doing a lot better with the internet and television and satellites and all that kind of stuff, but nevertheless. Can our God or Goddess do anything about what is going on in the world? God can step into any situation that he wishes and change it. Some people say, why do evil people do evil things? Because they're evil people. Suppose you wanted to rob the bank. Is God going to stop you? No. A policeman may stop you. When the bank security system goes off, if you don't get out of there in a hurry, he's gonna get you. But could you rob the bank? Yes. Could God stop you from robbing the bank? He could, but in most cases he wouldn't because he allows evil people to do evil things. It's part of our free will. But he could stop a person if he chose to, and I've heard some interesting stories in that regard, should what I believe affect my lifestyle? A lot of people say, I'm a Christian and I believe in what the Bible says, and they live a completely different lifestyle. And some religions accept that and some don't. So when we're making our own religion, we can do whatever we wanted in that regard. Now we're done pretending. Every religion and every variation of every religion that has ever walked the face of the earth, except for Christianity, was developed by a person just like you. They were nothing special. just like you, developed a religion. Sun Yun Moon, Koresh, Mohammed, Mary Baker Glover Edison, Mary Baker Glover, whatever the name is. Yeah. Just regular people. decided that they would make another religion. And thousands and millions of people have followed the other religion to hell. Only the God of creation developed what we call Christianity. Do you realize that all the people of any religion that you can name that developed the religion never said that they were a God? They never said they were a God. They may have said they were God's prophet. They may have taken some of God's word out of our Bible and added it to their quote unquote Bible or their religion, but none of them said that they were a God. Some of them, after they were dead and gone, people called them gods, but they were never gods. They never said they were god. Thus were they defiled by their own works, and went a-whoring with their own inventions. Notice their own works. in their own invention. In other words, I'll invent my own, okay? I drive past Grace Baptist Church in East Flat Rock, but I don't like what they preach there, so I'll make my own. I'll invent my own. I'm okay on my own, they say. Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and put them in the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made, every nation in their cities wherein they dwelt. Every nation made gods of their own. People, regular ordinary people, just like you and me, decided that they would make their own religion, like we were pretending a little while ago. Notice the word pretending here, okay? But it took off. And some of them still exist, and some of them self-exterminated, which is a good thing. Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings. What did they do? They took God's word and they took little gods and plugged that in wherever. One of the passages of scripture said, and they still took with them the gods of Egypt. In other words, when they left Egypt and they were supposed to leave the Egyptian gods behind, they carried the gods with them. Joshua said to the people, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And the people said, as for us and our house, we're going to serve God too. And Joshua said, okay, here's what we need to do first. Get rid of the little gods. You can't serve God and serve your little God, your variation of God's way of doing things. You can't do it by your own way. Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, thus saith the Lord God, because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God. I sit in the seat of God in the midst of the seas. Yet thou art a man and not God. None of us can make our own religion because none of us are God. You can make your own religion, but it's not gonna do anybody any good at all because you're just a man or a woman and you're not God. Elias, Elijah from the Old Testament, is the word in the New Testament, was a man subject in like passions as we are, and it means he was just a fellow mortal. And all the people that make a different god or a different religion are just fellow mortals. Thing is, you and I had enough sense not to make our own. Right? They don't have enough sense not to make their own. That's their problem. You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish out from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you. God has given us his word. It is forever settled in heaven. And you don't get to take anything out of it. and you don't get to stick anything else into it because then you're making your own religion. And if you do that, whatever religion you make isn't worth anything. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. The end book of the book is Revelation, and God again emphasizes the fact, no additions. You and I don't get to come along and say, you know, I think God could have done better in this particular passage of scripture. You know, he could have done better, so I'm going to help him. God said, if you do, I've got more plagues for you than you want to deal with. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city and from the things which are written in this book. God said, this is it. You don't get to stick anything in. You don't get to pull anything out. And that's God's word. And that's the way God set it up. And that's what we believe here. But when you talk to people and you hear them start describing to you what they believe, you know what they believe? They made their own religion. And that's what they believe. You know what they did? They tweaked God's Word a little bit. They tweaked it. They said, well, you know, it just needed to be fixed a little bit here. So I believe it. Here's what I fixed it with. If you tweaked it, you made your own religion, and it's worthless. It's not gonna help you. It's not gonna help anybody else. Shall we pray? Our Father, we thank you for your word. We thank thee that it is forever settled in heaven. We thank Thee that it was made by a God who loves the people that He created. We thank You for that. We thank Thee that through Your Holy Spirit, You have given us Your Word that is forever settled in heaven. We pray that we would live in obedience to it, that we might hear from Thee in the day of judgment, well done, good and faithful servant. Enter Thou in the fullness of the joy of Thy Lord, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.