Nothing compares to the greatness, the supremacy, the mercy of our loving Father in heaven. We ask you, Father, that you would be with us by your Holy Spirit throughout this service and you would be glorified in it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, we're gonna shake up the program today, big time. We're gonna turn to Matthew 16. Matthew chapter 16. We're putting the series on fast forward for this Sunday. Matthew 16, the first four verses of Matthew 16. I'll give you a topical sermon this morning. Don't tell the other Reformed churches that I bowed down and did that. Even though every time I go to a conference or something and they teach on They teach on expository preaching as the biblical way to do it, but in order to do that they have to give me a topical sermon on expository preaching. So this morning, a topical sermon on discerning the signs of the times. And so Matthew writes, then the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and testing him, asked that he would show them a sign from heaven. He answered and said to them, When it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather today for the sky is red and threatening, hypocrites. You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times. A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign. and no sign shall be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah and he left them and departed and we know that elsewhere earlier in Matthew he talked about the sign of the prophet Jonah as being the fact that Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish and the son of man must be three days and three nights in the bowels of the earth and of course no one knew of that and what that meant and no one knew there was a sign of Jonah So he left them all really guessing. Father, we ask that you would add your blessing to the reading and proclamation of this, your holy word. And we pray again in the name of your son, Jesus. And so we've skipped over a couple of chapters here, and we'll return to those. But I thought this was an important moment for us in our time and for some of what we wonder about and struggle about in our thinking. And I think that scripture always points us to the right path if we'll turn to the right page. And so verse one, we read, the Pharisees and Sadducees came and testing him, asked that he would show them a sign from heaven. Friends, let's remember the times that we're in here. That time, there was Messiah fever in the first century. I mean, wise men came from the East knowing that something was going on in Jerusalem, right? So there were signs, there were signs all around them. The virgin birth was a sign, right? The carnage that Herod put on the Bethlehem districts was a sign. There were all these signs. Jesus and the family absconding to Egypt was a sign. Wise men from the east was a sign. There was Messiah fever really at this time. John the Baptist came out. all of a sudden, out of the pages of history, silent for 400 years, and claimed that, behold, the Lamb of God, the one that takes away the sin of the world, and everyone that ever sacrificed a lamb at Passover, which was all of them, knew exactly what that had to mean. And so here he is, walking out, as I say, out of the pages of the Old Testament, and appearing before them. And so here we're well into the ministry of Jesus by the time of Matthew 16. He has preached and taught for many days. He is renowned. There was a great revival at that time and many were following after him. He healed the multitudes in some very conspicuous ways. One guy, he spit on his eyes. He offered various encouragements and rebukes. He indulged the masses with lengthy sermons. He fed 5,000 from a packed lunch basket. Many were healed by a mere touch of his garment, Matthew 14.36. And he even walked on water and bid Peter to walk after him, Matthew 14.29, although that particular miracle was only for the 12 apostles that were in the boat. But all these things happen. Now, if you saw all these things and were traveling around with Jesus and saw him heal lepers and raise the dead and make the blind see, would you say to him, what would be the first thing that would come into your mind? The first thing that would come into my mind is, heal me, Lord. I have this, or I have this thing that plagues me. But certainly the first thing that would come into my mind, I would hope, would not be, show us a sign. And yet we find that there's no shortage of vociferous, that means noisy, loud, detractors who ask for more and more credentials. The Pharisees and the Sadducees, friends, imagine they're colluding together in a conspiracy against Christ. They couldn't be more theological disparate from one another, and yet they're willing, according to Matthew, to team up against Jesus and look for a sign. Friends, Sadducees are They're like the liberal church and the Pharisees of the zealous right-wing church, if you will. They had no business teaming up together against Christ. They each had seats on the Sanhedrin. The Sadducees had control of that body, the ruling body of the temple, for several decades by this time. But they all came out against Christ and came out there to what? To test him. The context clearly reveals to us the intent of his detractors is to test him, which means what? They want to trip him up. They want to give him a gotcha question. See, the Messiah wouldn't have faltered if we asked him that. But this man falters. And of course, he never did. Despite all the signs, friends, despite all the healings, the unmistakable display of divine wisdom, these demand a sign from heaven as though the miracles he's performed are insufficient. The Lord, of course, is wise to their tactics. He sees through it. And he answers their arrogance with one of his famous rebukes. A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign. I guess he labeled them pretty well. And no sign shall be given it. You gotta be careful raising your children in the faith. I remember one day when our good Christian brother John Crutchfield made a sign for the church, the one that you see up at the top of the hill, and he gave it to me just in time for us to open our first Reformation fair back in 2014. So I had this great sign that is up there now, but it was up to me to put it in the ground and display it. So I shook one of my kids, Joseph, and I woke him up, and he wanted no part of digging holes that early in the morning, so I said, Joseph, I gotta put the sign up and I need help. And he looked at me and said, an evil and adulterous generation looks after a sign. And he rolled over and went to sleep, but I dragged him up the hill and he dug the holes. Be careful what you teach your children, friends. Jesus will in no way list his obvious credentials. He's not going to say, oh, you guys, you want to sign? Listen, I've done a number of things. First of all, my mother was a virgin when I was born. You think Jesus is going to do this kind of thing? You know, it's kind of like when you see one of those congressional hearings and they bring the guy in that they hate and they're asking him all these questions and they say to him, yes or no, give me a yes or no answer. They won't give a yes or no answer. They know what's going on here. Jesus is at least that smart, right? So his detractors come out to test him, and he sees through it. Recall the different treatment that Jesus gave when a friendly question is asked. John's disciples ask, are you the coming one, or do we look for another? Of course, you see, John was out of the circulation for a while in Herod's prison, and it seems to me he just wanted things to move faster. I preached on this a few weeks ago. Why did John seem uncertain suddenly? But he asked them to come out and ask him a direct question. And he gladly points to the signs. Jesus gladly tells them what's going on. Go tell John the things you hear and see. In other words, be witnesses of me. Tell him what's been going on. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who's not offended because of me. And he probably looked at the Pharisees when he said that. Today's passage clearly shows that though the Lord is happy to answer friendly questions with friendly answers, he'll not answer fools according to their folly, according to Proverbs 46.5, and we ought not to either. He's not going to cast his pearls before swine or give what's holy to the dogs that are just out to depreciate the fact that the Messiah is in the land. Verses two and three, he answered and said to them, when it is evening, you say it will be fair weather for the sky is red. And in the morning it will be foul weather today for the sky is red and threatening hypocrites. You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times. In other words, Jesus expects something of us. We discern the signs of the times at our convenience. And he knows this. I have seen, I come in here on Sunday mornings, I get so many weather predictions from people who tell me how bad it's going to be this week. People are always looking to the sky in our culture. We all know the weather. And Jesus said, if you're concerned about the weather, you ought to be concerned about the spiritual climate in your nation as well. You already, what he's saying here is you already have enough information to make an assessment that these are special times and your Messiah is in the land. You already have that. And you come out to me as hypocrites to ask me for something that you already know is happening, but you hope it's not happening. And so you're trying to trick me and trip me up. Of course, he doesn't say all that. He doesn't bother. So what is he saying to us, though, to the church? He's saying, look at the data. There's things that are available to us to consider. Consider the miracles. Listen to the testimonies. Assess the character and the wisdom of this Nazarene that was untrained and uneducated, but wiser than all of the wise men of the land. And perhaps the answers to your questions will be obvious to you. Just open your eyes, is what he's saying. They were certainly obvious to others around you. It's up to you now to decide to see. You know, in the final analysis, you have to make a decision to see. to see. You have to make a decision to see and be edified or to be blinded by human arrogance or personal ambition. Friends, what have I told you? Always suspect envy. These religious leaders didn't like the real religious leader usurping them and having the popular approval that he had, at least at that moment in time. And as to weather prediction, We have a form of this adage in our time, don't we? We say, red sky at night, sailors delight. Does anyone know that saying? Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. It's good to have a responsive reading with the great teachings of history. So some of the things are obvious and ought to be readily recognized for what they are. And it's the same today, friends. I mean, they had a particular time, not like ours. I mean, Jesus was physically in the land, and all of history had to come together to bring that about. So it's the same today. We're still expected by Christ to witness the events going on around us and make some biblical conclusions about them. It's the very same thing in every generation since the coming of the Christ and the publication of the gospel. We have the stuff we need to make an assessment. And you can keep fighting it if you want, but it's a losing battle. It should have been obvious to anyone paying attention in that time that Jesus came with divine power. It's like the testimony of that blind man in the Gospel of John. He's not named Bartimaeus in John. He's named Bartimaeus, I think, in Mark. But he seems to be the same gentleman, and he's blind from birth. And he goes through some intensive interrogation after he receives his sight, because everyone knew him as the blind man. And so the Pharisees say, this is a marvelous thing. Or he says to the Pharisees as they're interrogating him intensively, who is this man? And so the blind man says, he's opened my eyes. And since the world began, it's been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. So he's assessing the data of the moment, and he's telling them the historical import of the fact that something's happened that is impossible to happen, and he's the beneficiary of it, and they want him to speak badly of Jesus, and the man won't do it. And he pays the price immediately. He gets thrown out of the synagogue. And so it's the Lord's contention here that we, we, believers and unbelievers alike, have been given enough information to assess the nature and the gravity of the moment we are in. We have enough information, and Jesus is requiring us to come to some conclusions about truth and reality. It seems to me, he's speaking in a social context here. There's an old song from Chicago. Does anybody really know what time it is? And then he asks the convicting question, does anybody really care? Friends, it seems to me that's where we are in life. Chicago hit it right on the head. Tony would be glad. Tony's a big follower of Chicago. What's that? Does anybody really care? Is our society so apathetic they don't even care about eternal things? I think so, friends. I think the song lyric hits upon a crucial point with regard to the Lord's statement. We have all the information about the things happening around us. We can see the condition of our culture, friends. You can either accept it and try to fix it or try to be part of the solution and not part of the problem by your moral development and moral repentance. You can either try to be the solution because we can all see the same things that are going on in our very violent culture today. We can see the violence, we can see the immorality among us, we can see the moral confusion, and we can long for better days, but longing won't bring them. I longed for better days all my life. We all need to make an educated guess about the things pertaining to the character and nature of Jesus Christ. Every man whether he accepts it in this life or not, will be brought to that place where that's the only decision left to make. What about Jesus Christ? It seems obvious to me that the further our culture moves away from the basic principles of Christ, the closer we come to our own civil destruction. I'm talking about civil destruction, cultural destruction. And so the question becomes, does anybody really care? Friends, a man has no power to control what might happen in the future. All he has is the moment, and the reality that confronts him today. All he can really do about tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, or eternity itself, is to hope for good outcomes. Well, things usually work out pretty good for me. I've got a pretty good record, so I guess my future's pretty secure. I mean, people think this way. All we have is the power to say, if the Lord wills, James 4.15, we shall do this or that. And so if the future is solely in God's hands, does it not behoove us to take note of the signs that portend the outcomes? Shouldn't we consider it unwise to not care? Isn't it unwise to just not care about the prevailing winds of the moment? Isn't it the wise thing to do to consider such things as truth and untruth? Isn't it wise to know about truth and untruth? What things are true? What things are untrue? Isn't it good to contemplate good and evil? Some things are good and some things are evil. And by what standard are we using? The condition of our heart before God is another consideration we ought to take up. The preservation of our souls beyond this life When is the right time for a person to consider the consequences of a life well-lived or a life thrown to the winds of time and blind chance? When's a good time for that? And so it seems to me that the singer of the song is correct. And the answer to the song lyric that asks, does anyone really care, is a resounding, not so much. Society just really doesn't care. My fear is the church doesn't care anymore. We get this, it's all about me sort of thing. We're very individualistic in the church. It's, you know, it's like, you know, Jesus saved me and I don't care about anything else. Well, he left you here for something. He didn't just take you home when you got saved. Jesus expects that we become cognizant of the signs of the times. We got to walk through life with our eyes open, friends. And he's dismayed with us that we dare not venture to recognize the signs that are as obvious to men as the redness of the sky. He expects us to be observant. He expects that the saints would be expectant. He said he's coming back. We ought to expect that. We know not what time, right? He commands that we would be discerning, hence the word hypocrite. In other words, you're observant when it suits you. You need to know the weather so you're observant of things. We know when the weather pretends bad things, right? We had a prayer request about it this morning. Big storm hitting our southern coast, right? We know when our retirement funds are getting low. I don't because I don't have one. We know when winter is coming and what to do about oil in the tank or wood in the shed. We know that. We know when our spouses are angry with us, there's some unmistakable signs of that. I understand. But we don't know the source of true wisdom and power when it's openly observed and openly proclaimed. We don't know the big things, we only know these little incidental day-to-day things. And so we say with the formerly blind man, this man opened my eyes and you do not know where he is from. Rhetorical question. Arrogance, friends. That's human arrogance that does that. We always blind ourself. Arrogance will always blind us to our own sin. How dare you judge me? I'm not judging you. God's already done that. I'm just observing what God judged in you. Friends, arrogance will blind us. It will blind us just as surely as it blinded them. Sin blinds us, friends. Lust blinds us. Power and ambition and desire blind us. Arrogance blinds. And make no mistake, apathy blinds us certainly as these other things. If I just don't think about it, it'll go away. That's apathy. And so we see the point of the passage. They were blinded. And so we could all go home knowing what Jesus meant there. But then what about the application? What about us and our blindness? Or our ability to see? What of the churches of God? Do we miss the signs too? Do we even look for the signs? Are we as responsible as they were to discern the times? I think we are. We're supposed to discern our times too. In some ways, I suppose the answer is no. We're not as responsible as they were because they had all those biblical signs that led up to the birth and ministry of the Messiah who walked physically in this earth. So it's a little different. You might say a little more obvious for them, but it's still incumbent upon us to look at the times and to predict the spiritual climate that is going on around us. It was yes for them and no for us because the Lord was born in their time and not in ours. He walked their streets, He healed their sick, and He quarreled with their wise men. And so unlike then, He's not physically present. But the word is still with us, friends. Truth is still the same yesterday, today, and forever, although we are always trying to tweak it, aren't we? The things that the Bible says are bad, we found out they're really not that bad. The things that offend God, we say, ah, my God's a loving God. He doesn't get offended easily. The gifts of the Spirit are still here to edify us and to glorify the one true God whom we've recognized for who we is. We've looked to the horizon, friends, and saw wrath over the mountains. I see wrath over the mountains when I peruse the horizon. I see fire in the sky. Look at this sinful world and try to convince yourself that wrath is not coming. As surely as a red sky portends a storm, friends, wrath is coming on the horizon. I look at a nation that in my short lifetime has gone from bad to worse to unspeakably evil in the moral realm. And it has exponentially increased even in the last 10 or five years. It's amazing to me what we do with gender and sexuality in our country. It's a form of insanity that we dare not take part in, but the churches take part in it. Start with the commandments of God gone unheeded. There was a time, friend, when I was a kid, even in high school, I think, Route 44 was a ghost town on Sunday. Nothing was open. Everyone knew it was the Lord's Day, and everyone heeded it. I remember when the shopping center near my house was closed, and the parking lot was empty. My street emptied out into a big parking lot of a shopping center in Brockton. And it would be closed and empty. It would be our place to ride our bikes because we didn't care about the Sabbath either. And if the neighborhood kids were looking for something to do, we could always go to the drugstore fountain. And why was the drugstore open? That's because of Jesus too. Because he healed on the Sabbath. And the healing arts were to be available to people on the Sabbath. Because people get just as sick on Sunday as they do on Monday. And so our society followed the teaching of Christ, even in the small things that matter, day to day. And then the other day, I've already told you this, I was with my wife and Daniel, and we happened to be watching the local news, because they were, the sculptor that we know very well, who molded the big Tom Brady statue at Gillette Stadium was there giving a presentation so we thought we would watch and Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, gave this great speech dedicating this idol to all of the football fans and so he extolled the greatness of the athlete and he added the statement that Tom Brady made Sunday sacred again and right away I knew The church hasn't had the effect of society that I thought, at least in that area, it would have had. And so far as I'm the only voice that has rejected the premise. I haven't heard any other preacher say anything about it. It was God who made Sunday sacred, friends. It was God who made marriage a sacred bond. And the monogamous human family, the way to build godly societies, that's how it's done. That's God's plan. Marriage was given to glorify God, to simulate the relationship between Christ and the church, and to produce children. And why to produce children? When it was asked of Malachi, he answered, because he seeks godly offspring. God made marriage to propagate godly children. He wants it to be a generational mandate to the churches. That's why he did it. Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the psalmist wrote. The fruit of the womb is his reward. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth, and happy is the man whose quiver is full of them. Marriage and children, these are God's ideas. And friends, they're God's gifts. But what have we done with it? So the Lord's Day is sacred, and our families are the gift of a benevolent creator. So why does the church rival the world with our divorce rate? If marriage is sacred, why do we rival the world with our divorce rate? Stats on such things are negligible though. It's hard to consider the, it's hard for pollsters to consider the divorce rate of the church. You know why? Because most people who profess to be Christians don't go to church. Stats on such things are negligible because so many skip the marriage thing altogether today. Sexual intimacy no longer requires a covenant between before God and man. Today the two sort of become one. Friends, let me give you some statistics. 50% of all marriages in the U.S. will end in divorce or separation. 41% of all first marriages, 60% of all second marriages, 73% of third marriages will end in divorce. The U.S. has the fourth highest divorce rate in the world with Russia, Belarus, and Gibraltar leading the pack. Every 42 seconds there is one divorce in America. 86 per hour, 2,046 per day, 14,364 per week, and 746,971 per year. There are nearly three divorces in the time it takes for a couple to recite their wedding vows. There are 172 divorces and at time it takes a couple to watch a romantic comedy. I have a great sin to confess to you this morning. I like romantic comedies. I have a couple of favorite ones. Can I get away with that? Yeah, all right. But there's 172 divorces that I'll never be able to enjoy a movie again. 15% of adult women in the United States are divorced or separated compared with less than 1% in 1920. Friends, when the church was at least nominal, the culture was more pleasing to God. So look at the sky. I say it's red and threatening. The average first marriage that ends in divorce lasts about eight years. We can only stand each other eight years. And all this regardless of the fact that the Lord God of Israel says, God hates divorce, Malachi 2.16. The professions that have the highest divorce rate, they even study this, dancers. I don't know what that means. I don't know if dancers means strippers is what I'm saying. Bartenders, go figure, bartenders are getting divorced. Massage therapists. Gaming cage workers and gaming service workers, in other words, casinos contribute to divorce, friends. The lowest rates are found among, get this, farmers. Now that's a hard life. I could imagine a woman saying, I didn't sign up for this. You break the ground. You get the drought. Nothing happens. We borrow more money. I hate this life. But no, farmers don't get divorced. Podiatrists don't get divorced. I can't think of why that would be. Foot doctors don't get divorced. Clergy don't get divorced. Well, they're probably too scared. Optometrists don't get divorced. They have very good sight. Agricultural engineers have a low divorce rate, friends. Divorce rates among evangelicals is increasingly difficult to determine because most who profess to be evangelical are non-participating. In other words, they don't show up to worship God. And though I can happily report that divorce is considerably lower among devout believers because we take it seriously from God. A Pew Research Center study found that 58% of white evangelicals believe that cohabiting was acceptable if a couple planned to marry. We've downgraded what marriage means, even in the churches. And this view has grown among young believers who would have had disagreed in former years. And so just as surely as people have jettisoned the authority of God over their lives in the area of marriage and Sabbath keeping, they have turned their backs on sexual mores of all sorts. There's just no walls anymore. It's called intersectional. Homosexuality is increasingly accepted in many Protestant churches, regardless of God's repeated and adamant prohibition of such things. And what of so-called gender identity? The devil is plowing new ground in our time, friends, and we've fallen for all his schemes. We were browbeaten into believing that tolerance of sin is the same as love. We speak of love as unconditional, and in some cases it should be, friends. It should be in marriage. It should be with regard to God. We speak of His unconditional love, but our actions reveal that we do not reciprocate unconditionally. John writes of such things. He says in 1 John, by this we know that we know Him if we keep His commandments. He who says, I know him and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. 1 John 5, 3, he writes, the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not burdensome. We don't find them burdensome because we're happy that God is happy and pleased. So my question becomes, has the salt lost its flavor? And I'm talking about the church. Christ was talking to his disciples when he asked the question. You're the light of the world. You're the salt of the earth. But what happens if the salt loses its flavor? If the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? So I've come today with the only viable answer to the Savior's question. How shall the tasteless salt be seasoned? seasoned with love again, seasoned with righteousness again, seasoned with truth and faith and hope and respect. And the answer is only by an act of God. That's why we prayed for revival all these years. God needs to revive the church. And many of us are already guilty of all this sinfulness and praise God Jesus died for our sins and we have a new slate and begin again in Christ. So repentance is one of the ways the church gets back its flavoring. Friends, where is culture if the church isn't leading the way morally? If the church isn't leading the way morally, who is? I have to believe the church lost its respect over the years, and people look to other moral authorities than the church. The tasteless church may only be seasoned, or that is re-seasoned, from the top down. It takes a movement of the Holy Spirit not unlike what took place in the upper room at Pentecost. It takes a movement not unlike the Great Awakening of the 1730s right here in New England. Colonial America. It takes a movement not unlike the Moravian Revival in Hernhat in Germany in 1727. It resulted in a prayer meeting that went around the clock seven days a week for a hundred years. So if the salt, friends, which is the church, has lost its flavor, if it's lost its respect and its honor and its power, then it can only be seasoned from the top down. Now, I've been talking with the members about this very thing. As you know, how shall we assess the face of the sky in our time? It's my opinion that to a great extent, the church has lost its influence in our culture. The nation grows continually more sinful. We hear of wars and rumors of wars. We see preachers in prison in some of the most civilized democratic countries of the world, like Canada and the UK. and Australia arrested for the very thing I'm doing right now and do every Sunday morning and will do whether prison hangs in the balance or not. Whether it is right to obey men rather than God, you decide. And then we saw one of the greatest apologists of our time shot through the neck for conducting meetings with his political and theological detractors. He went out to those who were for him the Pharisees and the Sadducees. His life was snuffed out in order to what? Silence his message. And the media today is talking about the loss of free speech because some comedian got put off the air. Our church has gathered for the last six years to pray for revival from the top down. And I hope we're seeing it. We prayed for the nation. We pray for our national government, our national leaders, and for the churches of our society as we do every Sunday morning. that God would pour out of the windows of heaven a blessing of wisdom and of love of Christ that would remake our culture in a way that is pleasing to God. Just as George Whitefield, an Englishman, came over to America in the 1730s. He was in colonial Pennsylvania. He hit up a friendship with a man named Benjamin Franklin who was not a believer. He was an unbeliever, but he's a man who came to respect the power of God, a man who said of God before Congress in 1787 that the same God who brought us through the contest with Britain, quote, was being ignored of late. In 1787, an unbeliever, Benjamin Franklin, was concerned that our nation's leaders were ignoring the mandates of God. He spoke of the God who got us through the revolution and made us a nation. And he asked on the floor of Congress, he said, have we now forgotten this powerful friend? And he went on to ask, or do we imagine we no longer need his assistance? You know, when people come into a great trial, they fall to their knees. Even unbelievers do this. There's no atheists in foxholes, right? They fall to their knees when they're in trouble. But when the trouble is over, they usually forget to even thank God. Do we imagine we no longer need His assistance as a country? Can we endure as a nation without the same respect for God and Christian morality that the founders had? As preachers, we're always under the scrutiny that we do not confuse God's purposes with man's purposes. And I, for one, am very mindful of that. A preacher must never present political solutions as final solutions. We're not saved by the people we elect, but only by our omnipotent God. And at the same time, we're to be that salt and that light to the cultures in which we are placed. And we're supposed to affect our culture for the better, so we dare not be silent on social issues. We're the compass, friends, of the world. Where will it be without a righteous church? And you know, there's a long biblical history of this. Read the books of the kings. I mean, Israel and Anoth were blatant idolaters. They worshiped golden calves and Dan and Bethel that Jeroboam sent up. He took away the priest. He cancels God's priesthood. And he made them worship in an Egyptian fashion. And they had 19 kings in a row, all of them bad, all of them did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And he thrust them into captivity under the Assyrian nation. But he saved Judah, Judah in the south, because they were still worshiping God. They were still practicing Passover. They were doing all the things that God said that a righteous nation must do. But they too didn't last forever. They had 20 kings. Twelve were bad and only eight were good. But God withheld his wrath for a couple of hundred more years before Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came in and took the whole thing. This has made a climate in the country where preachers don't talk politics and politicians don't talk religion. But in the Charlie Kirk memorial we saw that rule be thrown to the wind and political leaders gave some rousing gospel sermons and personal testimonies of faith and loyalty to higher causes than national interests. It was a good moment. My fear is it might just be a moment. We should not ignore this as a sign of the times. It's the thing our church has prayed for to see for many years, so I cannot discount it as a movement of God and a reinstatement of Christian belief and culture among the powers that be in our land. I don't want to discount it, and so I don't. Many of you have said the same thing. To hear our Vice President and our Secretary of State speak about the love of Christ, the supremacy of God, the God of the Bible, and a thing we have not seen since the time of our founding, And Charlie Kirk's whole message is Christianity is good for the nation. Without Christianity, you would have never founded a free nation. So we did bring all of these things in together, just as God did with the kings of old. Not ignoring, however, does not mean that we stop assessing. I'm not ignoring it as an act of God, but I'm still assessing it is what I mean to say. There's another rule of life from a great philosopher of old. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, see, this is new. It has already been in ancient times before. Friends, historians, I've always said, make the best prophets. We know what's coming because of what has been. And so I'll say to you that the revival spurred on by the death of a Christian martyr is a real revival from the top down, and I mean the very top. At the same time, I'll say this, stay tuned. Because the best students of history have always made their assessments on revivals. They begin well. They even pack the churches as they did in New England in the years of our awakening. But the inevitable always comes in to some extent. And that is that while the masses are claiming Christ in the moment, the preachers have to eventually teach on the harder sayings. The things that challenge our preconceived notions about the character of deity and the demands of a supreme God. Eventually the preachers have to come around to the hard sayings and the hard truths that God demands of a godly people. Recall the defectors of the faith from scripture. The Lord said, whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. And then we read this. Therefore, many of his disciples, when they heard this, said, this is a hard saying. Who can understand it? And from that time, many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more. Just as there's a true church and a false church in all ages, there are believing disciples and unbelieving disciples, and unbelieving disciples stay until the teachings of Christ become inconvenient. There are always two Christianities walking side by side. And it's my contention that both are good for society, as I said in my remarks this morning. But only one will bring you to the presence of God. There are two kinds of disciples, believing and unbelieving. And the ongoing preaching of truth will weed these out, and the word of God will separate the sheep from the goats. And in the meantime, though, we can rejoice with the psalmist who said, this was the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. Our father, we ask that you open our hearts and minds to this, the teaching of your holy word. Let us be nourished by it and grow. Thereby we pray in Jesus name. Amen.