We're going to be looking at specifically the sermon on the Mount, Matthew, chapters five through seven. We spent the last few weeks in the Beatitudes, which is just the first few verses of Matthew, chapter five, but we're going to be looking at selected portions throughout it. As mentioned in that intro video, there's lots of things Jesus touched on, some of them for just one sentence or a partial sentence at a time. And yet Jesus is basically laying forth what his vision for how we might live our lives as his followers. And when we look at the sermon on the mount near, kind of a little past the middle part of it, Jesus encouraged his listeners that were hearing this message.

There was, we think, a few thousand of them that actually came to hear him preach. And he said that you need to find the narrow gate. He says the path that leads there is kind of narrow or compressed is actually the word. It's pushed in. There's not much room.

Sometimes you almost have to squeeze, squeeze through. But what he's saying is it's a narrow gate. It's a narrow passageway to get there. And he says it's not well traveled. Few people find it.

I actually had in mind I wanted to find a video, or even make a video of finding a trail through the woods where there's like a stone gate. But they didn't do a lot of stone gates in Florida. I used to see, like, stone fences in Tennessee when I lived there, where you would just see like, a dry stacked stone wall that's been there for a couple hundred years. There's not a lot of that going on down here. So I didn't really, you know, want to make a trip, a trip somewhere to record that.

But I just, I had in mind this idea of you're just walking along and all of a sudden you find this gate and how cool is that? And you wonder what's on the other side of that gate. You know, why is it here? But Jesus is talking about it in such a way that you're walking on the path less traveled, and you find this gate that few people walk through. He says, everyone else is going down this well worn, wide, probably nicely paved trail, and they're going down that.

Masses of people are, but few people are finding this narrow gate. So for today, in the next couple weeks, we're gonna chase that down in this basic Christianity series, and we're gonna be looking at what does it mean to find that narrow gate? We're gonna be reading today in Matthew, chapter seven, verses 24 through 28, Jesus is wrapping up his message here. So I'm kind of starting at the end of it. But he says to those who have been listening to him for, you know, and this might not be every single thing that he said, maybe he preached for a couple hours, we're not too sure.

But he says to these people, as he wraps up his message, he says, everyone who hears these words of mine and does theme is like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the flood came, and the wind beat against that house, but it did not collapse because it had been founded on rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds beat against that house and it collapsed. It was utterly destroyed.

When Jesus finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed by his teaching because he taught them like one who had authority and not in their experts on the law. Now, before I get into too much of this message, I want you, and if you. If you work better, closing your eyes or whatever it is, that's fine. But I want you to take a moment to think. I want you to think about what foundations your life is built on.

And here's what I mean by that. I don't mean like, what are the principles that you guide your life by? I mean, if you were to tell me your story, the story of your life, the things that make you you, the experiences you've had or the things that have been done to you or said to you that really seem to stick with you, where would you start telling your story? Like, if I was a counselor for you and you were going to start out and you wanted to say, well, you know, it all started with or, you know, really the first memory I have is this. Or maybe the most traumatic thing that seems to have shaped your life is this.

Where do you start your story?

Jesus talked about foundations. He says that there's one that's made out of sand. Now, in Florida, a lot of houses are actually built on some kind of sand. They have to dig down pretty deep, put a lot of concrete in the ground. I don't know.

I'm not an engineer, but they can do it. They build a lot of houses on swamps. I think it's a terrible plan, but they just kind of dig some out and put the dirt over here. And I guess they think, oh, it'll be fine. Well, what he was talking about, their geography, was a little different.

His listeners understood what exactly he meant for us. We need a bit of a geography and meteorology lesson, I'll be brief with it. In the places where Jesus was speaking, they had a lot of regions that were dry throughout the summer, which is kind of opposite from what we experience here in central Florida. When summer hits, that's when we get rain. You know, April is actually a very dry and brown month, and then it starts raining sometime in May or in this year.

It was actually, like, almost the second week of June before it came. It was so late for a rainy season. But the rainy season in the land of Israel comes later in the year, towards the fall, after the crops have been harvested. And so Jesus, his listeners, understood this, and they knew that there would be places where there would be in the rainy season, a stream or a river, but now it's just a dry stream bed. And some people might not even understand that.

That's what they might be sitting in or standing in. And somebody might say, this is a great place for me to build my house. I'm going to build it right here. It's nice and level. It's nice and wide open.

I don't see any neighbors. Great idea. You know, sometimes I'll look at real estate online just because I always think about buying some land somewhere, and I realize I can't afford, like, even a tiny bit, let alone the kind of acreage that I want. But if you say, like, how many acres do you want, Pastor Nick? I would say all of them.

You know, like, I just. I don't want anybody. Like, I just want to. I want to be able to get a bulldozer and just dig a giant hole and not have anybody say, why are you digging a hole? Because I feel like it.

Because I can. Because I have a bulldozer and land. That's why. If you don't understand that, I'm sorry. That's the brain of probably most men.

We like digging things. We did it when we were little, and we just always want to dig things. But anyway, um, the, uh, you know, when you see a piece of land that's been for sale for a long time and nobody's bought it, it's either because it's priced way too high or there's something wrong with it. Like, it floods, you know, every year when the rainy season hits. And that's why nobody's bought it, because they realize that's a terrible place to build a house.

And so Jesus is talking about this, and he's saying, listen, if your house is built on this sandy area, there'll be a time when the floods come because the rains, a lot of times would start up in the hills in Judea. They would start in the mountainous areas, and the rains would start there. But down in this lower area, the rain hadn't hit there yet. And so all of a sudden, very quickly, these flash floods would come as the mountains start shedding the water off of them, because as the ground has been dry for so long, the soil actually becomes hydrophobic, unable to absorb moisture. So it just runs off.

And as it runs off, it gains so much speed coming down the mountain and filling up these once dry riverbeds that if you find yourself caught down there, you could be swept away with it. And so they would actually have people that would make, like, they would bang these drums and sounds up the hills, and it would echo down through the canyons and down into the plains and the flatlands so that people down below could know. They might blow a Ram's horn, trumpet, things like that, that they could do to alert people that their floods are coming. And so if you happen to have your house built there, you don't have a house anymore, like, get what you can and get out. It's coming quickly.

It's going to be on the ground. And so, in much the same way, Jesus is saying, if you don't base your life on the foundation of my teachings, you might think you've got a nice house. Until the floods come and it all wipes away and it comes to a catastrophic ruin, he says it will be utterly destroyed. Rain is good, but when it comes in those sudden torrents and downpours, it can be quite dangerous, and foundations matter. Jesus is saying, if you build it up on the rock, it's safe.

It will be. Stay away from those. It'll be a solid foundation. And he said that his words are that foundation that we can build our life upon. So many times our life's foundations have been built on circumstances or things that happened to us or things that people said.

It might be some time where you were criticized or picked on as a child or as a teenager, and you didn't realize it. It might be something that a parent said, a sibling said, a neighbor said. It might just be something you saw in a movie or on tv, and it just stuck with you that you didn't want to be that person or you wanted to be this person you've chased after that or run away from that your entire life. Could be something somebody did to you that harmed you or abused you, and you haven't been able to shed that. And everything in your life is built on that foundation, Jesus is saying, it's never too late to build on a good foundation of his teachings.

Now, a lot of people in Jesus Day were giving their teachings. The entirety of the teachings of a rabbi was called their yoke. We think of a yoke like what they would put on oxen, and you could team up two pairs of oxen together, and this wooden harness would go over them, and it would pull a plow or some piece of equipment behind it, some kind of sledge or something, and they could do their work with that yolk, hooking two oxen together. But Jesus, he gave his teachings like other rabbis in his day did, and the entirety of the teachings of a rabbi was considered their yoke. In other words, how did they interpret all of the Old Testament law from what they call the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, and Deuteronomy?

And so Jesus gave his yoke. But interestingly enough, the people, it says that they were amazed by the way that he taught, because he taught as one who had authority. Now, again, we need another brief lesson here on this, because what it means having authority is similar to when we say ordain a pastor. We ordain them. We lay hands on them, and we say, you know, we see that God has called you to this, and so take authority over the church, preach the word, administer the sacraments, like communion and things like that, and, you know, you know, oversee the well being of this organization of people.

But what they did was a little different. They had their teachers of the law called scribes, and they were. They weren't scribes, like, writing things down. That wasn't their job so much as it was. They were actually more like biblical lawyers.

They were like lawyers trained in the law of the Torah of the Old Testament. And so they would. They were allowed to only teach the standard accepted interpretation that the rabbis with authority had presented. In other words, they weren't able to come up with their own ideas, these scribes. All they were allowed to do was just kind of teach straight from the book, if that makes any sense.

They were only allowed to teach what was already the tried and true accepted interpretations. But then you would have these rabbis. Some of them were like Pharisees or Sadducees, which are kind of their little clubs or little sectarian groups, but you would have rabbis that would teach their own interpretation. They had authority. Somebody had laid hands on them.

It was called. And I don't have enough, like, phlegm to say the whole word, but it's like smicha. I was trying to get it. Smicha, smicha, smica, something like that. And so they were given this authority to by the laying on of hands with a witness present, and they would then be allowed to give their interpretation of the scriptures, their yoke.

And so the people, when they heard Jesus teaching, they said, he teaches as if he's one who has authority, which implies that he didn't. He hadn't been given this authority by another rabbi, and yet he was given it by his father at the moment when he was baptized. And the heavens opened. And the father said, this is my son whom I love. With him.

I am well pleased. Listen to him. In other words, he has authority to teach my ways to you. And Jesus is saying that his yoke or his teachings is worth basing his life upon. Basing our life upon.

He gave some examples that show us what somebody with authority would do, especially in Matthew, chapter five. In that part of the sermon on the Mount, we see this makeup or this phrasing that says, you have heard that it was said blank. But I tell you, blank, that phrasing would be something that somebody with authority is saying. Like, you've heard this interpretation for years, but now I'm telling you this. And later, he gave authority to his apostles when he said, whatever things you bind on heaven will be bound on earth, or whatever things you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.

Whatever things you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. He was giving them permission. He was giving them authority to interpret his words and interpret the scriptures to the generations to come. And so jesus had authority, and he gave it to them as well. You can see a couple for instances of what this authority style of teaching looked like.

In the sermon on the Mount, for instance, Matthew 531, jesus talks about the topic of divorce. He talks about it a couple times later in his ministry when people will question him, but he brings it up simply to say, you've heard it said that if you want to get a divorce from your wife, just write her a certificate of divorce and send her away. Which we think, oh, they just kind of let anyone get a divorce for any reason. Well, yeah, that's how they ended up living that Torah commandment out, because Moses had given them that commandment. But really, it was a revolutionary commandment thousands of years ago in the day, because before that, if a man didn't like his wife, he just kicked her to the curb.

Maybe physically, I don't know. But he just sent her packing. Now she's still legally married, but yet she needs the covering of a man, the provision of a man. That's how, you know, economy worked and society worked. And without that, she's not able to provide for herself very well.

And so what the law gave them was at least, if you're going to send your wife away, at least send her with a certificate of divorce so she is eligible to be remarried again. So she's not legally bound in that marriage. She's able to at least go and get remarried again. And so Jesus said, you've heard that it was said, if you want to send your wife away, give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you.

And so he changes it. And he says, actually, if anybody sends their wife away, if anybody divorces their wife for anything other than her being unfaithful to the marriage covenant, you know, for her committing adultery, any other reason than that is a sin. In other words, you're sinning if you send your wife away. He reminds people later in his teaching that he says God originally created marriage as a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, be joined to his wife, and they become one flesh. He says that's how God created it to be.

Now, Jesus understood that. He says, your hearts were hard. In other words, you had sin in your hearts. And so Moses allowed for this, but it wasn't the best case scenario, the best plan that God had. So Jesus is reformulating the understood teachings of the day and creating his yoke of teachings.

In Matthew 523, he talks, for instance, about if you're coming to bring a gift to goddesse, some type of offering to God, but you're having a fight with a brother or sister of yours, somebody, a fellow believer that you've got an argument with or dispute with. He says, you can't bring a gift to God if you've got a problem with your fellow believer. You're acting in unbelief. If you bring a gift to God who has forgiven you, but you won't forgive your brother. So he says, if you want to bring your gift first leave it at the altar, don't even try to give that to God yet.

Go be reconciled to the one that you have a problem with, then you can come and give your gift to God. So he's giving us some of these examples. Another one this famous people still quote today. They say, well, eye for an eye, and they don't even know the context of it. They don't even say eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.

They just say, well, you know, eye for an eye. Well, here's the deal. Jesus was quoting something that comes up a couple times in the old testament, and it was basically if people were fighting and that fight bumped over into someone and hurt them or harmed them, especially if it was a pregnant woman and she gave birth prematurely and the baby was harmed, then it says, whatever damage was done to the child, you shall, you know, turn back over to the person that harmed it, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, limb for limb. In other words, it's not saying, like, literally, if the kid is deformed, you got to deform the guy that did it. It's saying he has a financial responsibility to compensate for the inability for that kid to worked with a full range of, you know, body.

I've got a friend that used to work at a factory line, and one of the, one of the phalanges on one of his digits got mashed in a, in a piece of equipment. He still has it, but it's pretty mangled up. And so they just kind of had a standard amount for, like, what each knuckle is worth on each hand, and they just, like, stroke him a check. It was like, I don't know, 25 grand or something. I'm like, that's not bad.

You know, like, I I don't really need that fingernail on this finger, you know, like, that's kind of cool. And he was able to put, like a down payment on a house, you know, in his twenties. You know, it's like good stuff, you know, and he, you know, I think he came out pretty good on that deal. And that's kind of how it was. It's like, here's the value of this limb or this eye, you know, over the course of life, if you're like this, you've got less, you know, ability to work one less arm.

And so it's like we have to write a check for that amount kind of thing. And Jesus was saying, that's the law, but I tell you, don't try to get even with those who oppress you. Don't try to get everything that's owed to you. Work towards forgiveness. So what Jesus was saying wasn't teaching eye for an eye.

He was saying, actually, you need to learn to forgive. These are some of the ways that Jesus taught with authority. It was revolutionary. It was ahead of his day, so to speak. It wasn't like anything that anybody else was teaching.

And so as he's saying these things, that people are amazed that he teaches this way, but he taught it without any hint of hypocrisy or anything like that. And so when Jesus talked about the way that he's trying to help people find this narrow gate, and when he says that it's narrow and tight, he's basically saying, it's not an easy route, it's not an easy life. If you want to follow my teachings, I'm not promising you that it'll be gentle and easy. I'm telling you it will be full of difficulty. But don't just take the easy path that everyone else is taking.

In proverbs 1412, it says, there's a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it might lead to destruction. Jesus is thinking about that, I believe, when he talks about this and he's saying, the world tries to tell us the way to live, the world will try to give us a path and a way of living that they say, oh, do it this way. This is the right way to live. And they'll try to tell us those things, but that way might lead to destruction. We need to search for that narrow gate.

We need to search for that path that leads to the narrow gate. It takes work. It takes intentionality, but we need to be about that. The people who leave this wide and well traveled road, a lot of times we get mocked. We get told somehow that maybe we're a fool, that we're bigoted, that we've got something wrong with us, that we follow an archaic religion.

But I'll tell you what. I look at the way the people of the world are living, the people that might mock our christian values and lifestyle, by the way, don't just have christian values and then not live the lifestyle. Do what Jesus said. Don't just say you believe it. Live it.

At this point, here's where I'm at. Any place that these war mongering, food supply poisoning, child mutilating, family destroying, murderous, satanic media, music and movie crowd, anything that they glorify, I'm not going to do that. I'll do the opposite, thank you very much. And if you wonder why I'm saying all those things, I'll bring my notes to class and I'll talk about each of them. There's a lot of stuff afterwards we can talk about in Sunday school.

But I'm telling you what, this world is full of all kinds of evil things, and we don't just need to ignore that. We need to identify it as what is plaguing this world and say, I'm not going to live according to that. I'm going to live according to the teachings of Jesus. I'm going to allow him the authority in my life to build my life's foundation and rest my life on that. Because if you don't allow Jesus authority in your life, your foundation is being built by some other means.

You have to be willing to be continually perfected by the Holy Spirit of God, but you must maintain firm convictions based on his word. And when the Holy Spirit guides you into new truth or into further levels of truth or convicts you of sin, you have to be willing to agree with him on that. Okay. I want to call out some things in the world. I want to identify that wide path.

But, but there's something that I think we need to do first before we do that. So, like there's times the church has gotten things wrong. I'm going to narrow it to evangelical Christianity. In the last 50 to 70 years, over 2000 years of history, there's a lot of things we've gotten wrong as christians. Amen.

Like we have, we can agree to this, right? Like history proves that we don't need to deny it. But I'm going to narrow it down to that. But I'm going to confess a few things that we've gotten wrong. Just an evangelical Christianity in the last 50 to 70 years.

So some of that is time before I was alive. And so I generally hate, like denigrating things that happened before me. Like I don't like pointing fingers at what somebody else did because the generation that comes after me will also do the same to mine. So I at least want to be fair. But I'll tell you, the world doesn't ever point out their hypocrisy in the way that they do things wrong.

So I'm at least willing to confess our sins before pointing at them. In other words Jesus talked about, he says, do not judge. And in the way you judge, it'll be judged unto you. He says that now talking about believers, judging other believers, he says it's not your job. You're basically a hypocrite when you do that because he says you think they've got a little speck of sawdust that got stuck in their eye that's kind of affecting their vision, but really you've got a plank stuck in your own eye.

He's making a kind of a joke. He's painting a picture saying there's a board sticking out of your eye and you're trying to judge the speck in your brother or sister's eye. I don't think so. He says, first, though, clear out what needs to be cleared out in your life. Repent of your sin, confess your sin, and then you'll see clearly for the sin in somebody else's life.

So even though he's talking about christian to christian judgment, I'm going to still apply the principle and say, I'm not going to judge the world until we've taken a fair look at ourselves. Okay, are you ready? Is that good? Is that fair? Okay.

I wrote a few things down because I knew I wouldn't remember all this. One of the first things is I was thinking, what have we gotten wrong? Is we've treated a lot of pastors as celebrities. They're all over tv, they're all over the Internet. They get a large audience.

They actually have arena tours where they bring their worship team, and they say, we're going to play our songs and our pastor is going to preach. I think, wow, we've turned them into celebrities, rock stars, if you will. And a lot of times, I'm not saying everybody that you see that's famous, but a lot of pastors that have amassed a large, let's say, crowd or following a lot of them end up thinking that they're kind of above the law or above the word of God. They end up abusing, a lot of times, women and kids and teenagers, and so many times the churches have swept that under the rugs and not held them accountable for it or responsible for it. We've desired an easy, feel good message, kind of a low entry bar.

It doesn't have much buy in, not much that you've got to commit to. And sadly enough, we pastors have gone along with that. We've given you exactly what you asked for. Again, I'm talking broad evangelical Christianity. I'm not just talking this room.

Okay, just to be clear, we've addressed waning attendance figures by making busier and busier church schedules that fill up your calendar, but rob families of quality family time. We made our churches all about entertainment and flashy appeal, and we replaced making disciples and teaching the Bible with entertainment value. It was quite interesting. I put these basic letters up here, and my daughter wanted to turn the little spotlights on there to kind of point it at them, but she wanted them on this flashing motor circles through all the colors. I said, I really can't do that, no matter how cool it looks, because I'm literally saying, don't do that in the sermon.

So I can't do that. But we've rightly discerned sinful behaviors in people's lives, and yet we've wrongly ostracized the people living those things. Let me say that again. We notice a behavior, a sinful behavior in the lives of some people. That's right.

To understand that, yes, this thing is a sin. But then we take the people living that, and rather than connecting them to Jesus, we ostracize them. We say, there's no place for that here. There's no place for you here. And we end up kicking them out.

Effectively, we stood for the right for the life of the not yet born babies, and that's noble. We shouldn't stop doing that. Yet we've ostracized unwed, teenage or young adult mothers in shame. We say, you must carry that baby, but not here. I think we've gotten better on some of these, but that's in our history.

Okay. The church has supported political positions that draw our nations into war and war conflicts around the world. Forgetting that Jesus said, and we just learned over the last couple weeks, Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers. We've abandoned God's commands dozens of times in the Bible, where he says to care for widows, orphans and sojourners, and we've just left it to secular politics to decide their fate. On top of all that, we've accepted a culture of gossip and backbiting, gluttony and laziness.

And then we have the nerve to judge outsiders for their lifestyle when the primary thing that they need is to build their foundations on Christ. The Holy Spirit will work on all the incidental things in their lives. But so often we were so busy judging the world that we forget about the plank of wood in our own eye, and we want to clean them up when we ourselves need some work. So I'm going to pray a prayer of confession and repentance on our behalf. And I wonder if you might, silently, however you want to do, if you might have something in your life that you realize you need to confess.

Some area in your life where you've gotten away from the teachings of scripture and said, okay, God, I've gotten this wrong, but I want to be on the right path. I want to build my foundation right before we move on. And I still have a few more minutes. We're going to take a time of prayer and confession. I think we need this.

The church needs this, and our country needs this. Let's pray.

Lord, by no means is this an exhaustive list of things.

It's hardly even a personal one. It's easy to get a big wide paintbrush and paint in broad strokes. And to say, yeah, it's those churches, it's those big ones, it's those other ones. We look at it and say, oh, well, it's not us. We're doing things right.

And yet, Lord, when we hold ourselves up to the mirror of your word, there's so much that we've missed. There's so much where we've, in our quest for living according to your word, we've valued the wrong things in your word and it's pushed people aside. I'm not saying we ignore those parts of your word. I'm just saying we forgot about the thing that you said you cared about most. It wasn't sacrifice and offering.

It was grace and mercy and justice. So, Lord, help us to value the things that you do in the ways that you value them. Forgive us, Lord, we know that you've offered us your mercy and your forgiveness. But, Lord, as that, as we ask for that forgiveness, what we're asking for is to be reconciled to what's right, to be reconciled to the way that you want your church to be, the way you want us to live. And, Lord, for anybody here that has a personal confession, Lord, help them to know that they're forgiven.

And for anyone who carries anything against a fellow believer, Lord, we pray that they would find forgiveness towards them this day. In Christ's name, we ask. Amen.

All those things are shifting sands. They're bad foundation. There's not a foundation for the church of Christ to be built on, nor for our lives to be built on. Jesus said something built on that bad foundation will fail. But we've cleared our eyes.

There's no planks left. I hope, I pray the first thing you need to know about this wide path, the path that leads to destruction that Jesus talks about, the first thing you need to know about it is that you're taking part in an ancient battle. This is a battle that goes all the way back to the beginning of human history. This is a battle that goes back to Satan coming into the Garden of Eden, speaking to Eve, speaking to Adam, convincing them to leave God's plan. You see, Satan has one goal.

If he had a, if he had a. I don't think Satan has a, like a headquarters, like an office. But if he did, like, if he had a desk behind him, behind his desk would be this nice big logo, this seal, whatever's on it, you know, probably some kind of dragon serpent thing. Who knows? There would be these words on it around the edge and it would say, steal kill, destroy.

That's all Satan wants to do, is steal, kill and destroy. In fact, what Satan really wants for you, you know what he wants you to do? He doesn't want you to follow him. I remember a teenager saying that one time, oh, Satan wants us to follow him. I said, no, he actually doesn't.

He just wants you to follow you. He just wants you to do everything you want to do, every evil, wicked desire that pops in your heart. He's fine with you doing that. What he really wants for you is he wants you dead, but he wants you specifically dead. Apart from faith in Jesus Christ, he wants you to die apart from this godly lifestyle that Christ is offering us.

So I'm about to describe this well traveled way at least as best I can in the time that we have well traveled path that the world goes down and tries to convince us to follow. And by no means is this a complete list. I just wanted to highlight a few things and give you a couple examples of how they look. The first and biggest destructive. Remember, this is a battle.

A battle is a concentrated effort. A battle has a battle plan. There's we're going to do this thing, then we're going to do this thing, then we're going to do that thing. If you're going to fight a war, you undermine the enemy. You work for their people to turn against them.

You try to cut off their supply chains, you drop leaflets. Back in World War Two, they'd fly over and drop propaganda through leaflets. Now they just use social media and they use music and they use all kinds of things to try to change the way we think. This is a concentrated effort. And the first step, the first step in this plan of destruction that Satan has is to convince you that you don't need God.

That's his oldest tool. He told Adam and Eve that they didn't need God and they didn't need God's oppressive commands, that really what they should do is just follow their eyes and their heart's desire and their stomach's desire and to go ahead and eat that fruit and be able to be like God themselves and judge for themselves the things that they believe are good and the things they believe are evil. And so what he does is he tries to convince us of the same things. You don't really need God and you don't need to submit your life to God, that you can just kind of live how you want to live. I think of recent things, I wish I'd never seen it.

Somehow it just got in front of me the opening ceremony of the Olympics. If you saw it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you didn't see it, it's one of those things like, don't even bother. You know, there's a lot of people that said, well, this was them trying to make a mockery of the lord's supper painting by Leonardo da Vinci as it was painted by him. I'm not sure that's what it was.

But the interesting thing was I saw these people online that claimed to be christians, and what they started doing was actually trying to, like, you know, take up for them and say, oh, it wasn't mocking the Lord's supper. It was just paying homage to the God Dionysius. Oh, so that's better. Okay, so we're, like, resurrecting greek gods, you know, and basically worshiping them at our opening ceremony on this worldwide stage for the Olympics. I don't know that that's any better.

In fact, it might be worse. I'm not sure about that, but it's pretty terrible. And the idea, and there was so many other things. I'm not trying to get into this whole thing. I'm just saying they did these things that are showing us that Satan is trying to say, you don't need God.

There's a more pleasurable way, a better way, this way that's full of life and fun and energy and party. Look at this. It's accepting. It's great. It's wonderful.

It's an expression of who we are. Yes, it is, isn't it? It's an expression of how the world thinks and how the world believes. We see it everywhere, though. It's not just in the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, it's at Super bowl halftime shows where a couple years ago there was one where a pregnant woman mimicked sacrificing her child to Satan.

There was very clear imagery going on there, and this was seen by millions and millions of people. We see it in certain concerts and music videos. Listen, I love. I've gone to several concerts in the last year or two that I enjoyed. I will watch music videos.

I'm not saying those are bad, but there are many of them who are making a concentrated effort to convince us that we don't need God and that we need to just glorify and gratify the fleshly desires that we have. It's all over music and media and movies. These things are working together to convince you that you're okay apart from God. And we've invited it into our lives. The next part of the battle plan is to destroy the family.

Now, if you don't see this right before your very eyes, if you haven't witnessed it in your lifetime, I hope to pull your head out of the sand just a little bit. To me, this is one of the most obvious things that's going on. Do you know that the biggest predictor, if they have one, of how somebody might end up incarcerated. You know what it is? It's not race, it's not ethnicity.

It's not where you grew up. It's not education level. It's growing up in a home without a father. Fatherlessness is the greatest predictor of incarcerations, period. Now, every data set has its own little subcategories or little footnotes, but by and large, when you go into a prison, if you start finding out people's stories, that's the largest, the most common answer that shows up is that they grew up in a home without a father.

Even in homes that have fathers, though, they're under attack. You see, when you go to. I don't care if it's cartoons or adult tv shows or movies, whatever it is, the only strong men you see portrayed are the ones that have a gun that, like the Rambo type characters or John Wicked. What cool hair that guy has, by the way. Anyway, if you don't know the John Wake movies, it's literally just thousands of bullets being shot at people.

Like, that's all it is, over and over and over, literally, because they killed his dog and he just went and killed hundreds of people to get to the top guy that ordered his dog to be killed. That's pretty much the whole four movie saga. It's a great movie set, but it's very violent. But it's like the only strong men we see are, like, over the top on testosterone. You know what I'm saying?

That's not what the Bible shows us. A strong man is. That's not at all the example that the Bible is trying to say. But all we see in media besides that version of manliness is like, we see these weak, watered down versions of men who their family doesn't respect them. They just kind of don't really contribute much to society, to their family or any of this stuff.

And that's all we see on tv. We see that going on. And that's the model that's set before us. And so what they're trying to do, and there's actually laws that encourage homes with no male figure, no father, no husband in the home, and not, we don't have time to get into all that. But they've written laws over decades that encourage fatherless homes.

And we wonder why we're in these predicaments. Satan has a battle plan to destroy the family. He's also got other things besides just that. Pornography, drugs, pretty much all the stuff that we talked about in media. All of it is designed and geared towards destroying the family unit.

And we've invited it into our homes. Then Satan has another part of his plan. I believe it's to dull your senses. To just get you so downcast and depressed that you don't even try to break away from it is to get you just so beaten down that you have no fight left in you. No willpower, no desire to stick your head up and say, there's got to be something more.

You see, Satan's working to convince you you don't need God. He's working to destroy families and to weaken men from what their role was supposed to be as the providers and protectors of their family. I'm not talking male and female roles in the home or in the marriage. I'm just saying men are supposed to provide and protect. That's how God created us.

Women have equally, if not greater roles that are their jobs to do or what it means to truly be a woman of God. But men are supposed to do that. But everything tells us that we just need to be less of a man, less manly, less of all those things that should be upheld. Now the last thing that Satan has, though, is once he's gotten you to understand all that or to agree to all that, it's just to keep you so depressed, so beaten down that you just don't even try to change. We see all the anger around our country.

We've looked at things like riots and protests, the disregard for human life and private property where people are burning down businesses and buildings, flipping over police cars and lighting them on fire. All these different things, the disregard for human life, what it tends to do is it pushes us into isolation and seclusion where we just don't even want to see it anymore. I feel that in my soul lately. I literally just. I keep saying to Amy, I say I just want to move up to the side of a mountain somewhere, preferably with all the acres, as I talked about earlier.

Like, I just. I just want to. I just want to be there and not have to see anyone but those that I love or invite there. Because I see all this stuff in the world and it just. I'm not even sensitive to it.

Anymore. It desensitizes me so much when instead, we should be at that place where there was that second beatitude. Blessed are those who mourn, who mourn over these conditions of the world. And so what I'm trying to say here is all these things have pushed us to seclude ourselves, to isolate. Covid didn't help very much with that.

See, they told us to go home. They told us to stay inside. They told us to be socially distant from each other. And now, all of a sudden, we wonder why that's going on in this world. Satan has pushed us to be dulled and depressed.

Now we've got one other big thing that's going on. You see, kids are hitting puberty and they're confused with what's going on with their bodies. They don't feel right. That's part of life, isn't it? We've been there.

We've experienced that. But one of the things that they're doing is they're preying on them. They're using teachers, they're using guidance counselors, they're using tv, they're using social media influencers and all these things to convince them that maybe their problem is they were born into the wrong body, given the wrong gender, the wrong set of chromosomes, and all these things that go with it, and that they just need to change and do some things that will irreversibly harm their bodily development for years to come, sterilize them and keep them from being able to get pregnant or to participate in that. And it's going to be cutting off an entire generation of our children. Really.

The thing is, parents have been bullied into accepting this because they'll say, well, would you rather have a dead son than an alive daughter or vice versa? And it's this way of trying to say, well, you only have this option when the truth of the matter is, statistics and studies will prove you won't see this on most things. And if you google it, it won't come up near the top of the results because Google's based and biased against this. But most children that experience this, what they call dysphoria of their body, turns out if you just give them about four or five years, they actually age out of that and they grow into the person that their body is turning into, and they're just fine. But we've tried to push this ideology on them.

And so rather than trying to understand that and trying to have compassion for that, a lot of times we just say, well, I just need you guys to stay over there in your weird little group. And we're going to stay over here, folks. We have a lot of work to do to embrace this thing that's going on in our country. Not to embrace it, but to embrace the people that are living inside of it.

And just when a few of us try to speak up against something like this, we try to help fix it. We try to say, I've got compassion for you and I want to be there for you. But I also know that there's a truth that you're not being told and you're being lied to. Because remember what Satan's motto is? Steal, kill and destroy.

And he uses some very creative tactics to do that. We turn on our tvs and we see the antics of the culture warriors on things like late night tv, Saturday Night Live or news networks or college professors or politicians. We see social media gaslighting us. That's basically they back things up, tell history in a different way. Like they just rewrite history and make you think you're the one that's wrong for believing it, how it actually happened.

And they try to tell you you got it wrong. Some of these people even end up violently attacking others who don't agree with them with guns, knives, explosives. And all of this is going on on that wide path. Jesus is calling us to leave that path and to start walking down the straight and narrow. Sometimes I wonder if that straight and narrow path goes parallel with it.

I don't think he's calling us to just flat out leave the world behind and say, enjoy hell. I don't think he's telling us to do that. But I think that that path that we walk down is visible to the other path. There's many people walking down that and Jesus is saying, make your statement. Walk this path.

Build your life on my, the foundation of my teachings and walk this path. And you're going to find that narrow gate. Few people are going to enter it. But that doesn't mean that it's better to walk with that crowd because what they are walking down leads to death and destruction. Steal, kill and destroy in all this.

What we need to realize is that Jesus is calling to you. Build your life on me. Build your life on my teaching. He says, I give you something to rest your life upon and it's going to withstand the strongest of storms. It's going to withstand the strongest of criticisms.

The thing is, this gate is narrow and it's not popular, but it's the only one that leads to life. And if you're worn out by the foundations of this world, then move to one that's built on Christ. Over the next two weeks, we're going to cover some more of that. They won't be as long of a message as this one was today. We had a lot to cover to lay the groundwork for that.

But I want to encourage you, and this will be our closing thing, that if there's anything that you have in your life where you have allowed these battle plans of Satan convincing you you don't need God destroying the family, dulling your senses, bringing all these pleasures, worldly pleasures, to you, and they still aren't enough to satisfy you, is that way. Because you need to first recognize you need God. You need your life built on the teachings of Jesus Christ. And if there's any place where these things have gone in and threatened that foundation, say, Lord, I want those cleansed from my life, fix my foundation, repair it, and build me up in Christ. Amen.

I hope that this message isn't one that actually causes struggle or pain in your mind or in your heart. I hope it's one that opens your eyes for you to understand what's going on in this world, but that it gives you hope. Because Jesus says, don't fear the world. I've overcome the world.