I'd like for you to join me this morning. Turn your scriptures to the Old Testament book of Second Kings, to chapter nine. This is a very exciting section of the scriptures. It's exciting to me because there's a lot going on that, well, it's just a fun story to me. And maybe that's because my mind, like, is a little bit dark sometimes.

I don't know if you're kind of, like, horrified by certain things in the Old Testament where people were done away with by a king or an army, you won't like this as much as I do, but there's a good reason that we're going here. And actually, I was at a point this week where I was at home, and I wasn't really thinking about the message or the sermon, but I was listening to something. And God just immediately put my mind on this passage. And I think you might find out why. As we read it, we're going to look at two kings, chapter nine, starting in verse 17, reading down through verse 24.

Now, the watchman was standing on the tower in Jezreel and saw Jehu's troops approaching. He said, I see troops. Jehoram, who was the king, ordered, send a rider out to meet them and have him ask, is everything all right? So a horseman went out to meet him and said, this is what the king says, is everything all right? Jehu replied, none of your business.

Follow me. This is one of the times where I dislike this translation a little bit. A good translation will say, jehu, is it peace? And he says, what do you have to do with peace? Fall in behind me.

So the watchman reported the messenger has reached them, but he hasn't stopped, started back yet. So he sent a second horseman out to them, who said, this is what the king says. Is it peace? Jehu replied, what do you have to do with peace? Follow me.

The watchman reported he also has reached them, but he hasn't started back. And the one who's leading in the lead chariot drives like Jehu, son of Nimshi, for he drives like a maniac. Is that any of you guys like that didn't start? Yeah, Ed's shaking his head. He's like, yeah, I do like.

That's not anything new. They were doing this back in the chariot days, it turns out. And not only did they recognize that this was maniacal driving of a chariot, but they recognized the driver by his driving style. And I say, there's a true man of God right there. So anyway, they said, he drives like Jehu son of Nimshi.

So Jehoram ordered, hitch up my chariot. When his chariot was ready, King Jehoram of Israel and King Ahaziah of Judah went out to meet in their respective chariots. They met up with Jehu in the plot of land that once belonged to Naboth of Jezreel. When Jehoram saw Jehu, he asked, is everything all right, Jehu? Again it should say, is it peace, Jehu?

He replied, how can there be peace as long as the harlotries of your mother Jezebel and her idolatry are filling this land? Jehoram turned his chariot around and looked up, took off. He said, ahaziah, it's treachery, Ahaziah. Jehu aimed his bow and shot an arrow right between Jehoram's shoulders. The arrow went through his heart and he fell to his knees in his chariot.

Let's pray. God, we just thank you for this story. We might not know why to be thankful yet. We might need to dig into it a little bit more. But God, I believe this story speaks to our lives and our land today.

God, I believe that this story hits us maybe a little more squarely than we'd like for it to hit. So God, I pray that you would prepare our hearts this morning for what your word has for us. Give me the courage, the strength and the boldness to proclaim it as it needs. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

This story for sure needs a little bit of background if you're not familiar with it, if you're one of those folks that's like, you know, I really like the New Testament. It's easier for me. I don't understand some of these things. I'm going to try to be brief here, but there's this guy named Ahab. And Ahab had been, he'd been a king in Israel and he was very, very wicked.

King Ahab was known for taking Israel into like, new levels of idolatry and sinfulness. He had blazed a trail that no one had gone down before in Israel. It was his goal not only to increase the idolatry at which they had already been devoting themselves, but to bring in new methods of idolatry. One of the ways he did this was his main wife. The main queen that he had was this woman named Jezebel.

Jezebel was the daughter of a king of the Sidonians named Ethbaal and Ethbaal, whose name means with Baal, which is usually spelled b a a l, or maybe there's apostrophe between the two as, or you might pronounce it Baal, depending on who's saying it, eth. Baal was Jezebel's father. He was the king of the Sidonians, and he was a priest of the goddess Astarte. Now, she was one of three goddesses, along with one that we know a lot more famously as Asherah. In fact, one of the things that Ahab did was built an Asheropol and also set up all these worship centers for the God Baal.

Now, Baal was a God that was known for many different things. He was known or thought to be one of the greatest deities that existed in those days, controlling a lot of things, like such as lightning, you know, sending fire from heaven. And so when Elijah had the showdown with the prophets of Baal and said, call down fire from heaven, in other words, isn't this the territory of your guy? Like, isn't your God the one that can do this, call out to him, have him rain fire down from heaven, and consume the offering? Which never happened.

So there was a lot of things that Baal was known for, or believed to be known for, and between Baal and Ashtaroth, which was kind of his mistress, his girlfriend in the deity world, they would supposedly, when they would get together and do things that promoted fertility, it would promote fertility on earth. This was the belief. And so the worship of Baal involved things like having these, what they called sacred rituals, which were basically sexual orgies that you would do with a cult, prostitute, male or female, at these worship sites that were spread all throughout the land. And they would worship this God there because they believed when they did so, that the gods would then provide for them. And so Ahab had married Jezebel in order to kind of promote this throughout the land.

So what she did was she would play both sides of it. She would sometimes talk about the israelite God, whose name was Yahweh. She would talk about Yahweh in certain ways. Like sometimes, for instance, when she wanted to kill a guy named Naboth because her husband wanted Naboth's vineyard. And she said, well, you're the king.

Just take it. And he says, well, I can't just take it. So she said, well, I'll take care of it. Don't worry. So she took Ahab's signet ring, wrote some letters, sent them to some scoundrels in the town, and said, prepare a fast, a fast to Yahweh, prepare a religious fast to God.

And then when we have a festival or a feast afterwards, have scoundrels set up on either side of this guy named Naboth and say that he has cursed God and the king, and then that way, we'd be able to. To basically execute him because of the accusations, and then the king can just go take his land. So that's what they did. So Jezebel played off as if she still worshipped Yahweh, and yet she really didn't care. She would just use that to her advantage.

I don't know if you've ever seen people do that today. I've seen where there were preachers that did that. They talk the talk. They outwardly make it look as if they're following God and honoring him. But then something turns out that we see this whole other side of their life, and we realize they weren't following God at all, that they weren't living for God at all, that they were just kind of playing his name to their benefit.

But really they seemed to place their worship somewhere else. And so Jezebel would do this throughout the land, and she promoted so many things in the worship of Baal and Asherethe, and also, at the same time, was killing off the prophets of Yahweh. She was killing off God's prophets and raising up her own prophets of Baal and Ashtareth. So the thing that ended up happening was there were some prophecies that God had against Ahab and his entire house. One of the things was how he was guilty in the bloodshed of Naboth.

And he said, your blood will drain out on the same ground that you have shed blood in order to receive the land. In fact, that did happen where he was killed in battle. And they washed his chariot out and the blood washed out onto that very plot of ground to fulfill what God had said. But Jehu was around at a point where also a prophet had spoken, an oracle against the entire household of Ahab, and said that God would put this evil dynasty to an end. Because one of the things that they were doing, it wasn't just how Jezebel had the prophets murdered or had Naboth murdered or how she brought in idolatry.

It wasn't just that they were worshiping other gods. It was also the fact that part of the worship of these gods was how they would offer up their children, their newborn babies would be offered up to this God as a sacrifice. They believed that in this culture of worshiping these idols, that if they gave up their children to this idol, in a way sacrificing their future, that if they sacrificed their future to this God, that it would honor him or her, and that those gods would then give them increased fertility throughout their land, their own bodies and their animals. This was what was going on. And the idolatry and witchcraft of Jezebel shaped at least two, probably three generations.

And then, in a way, it shaped many generations to come. In fact, what it ended up doing was it damned her entire family who followed in her footsteps as she did this, as she lived this out. It didn't just affect her and her family, it affected the entire nation of Israel, because they followed the culture that she had set, they followed the religious practices that she was putting into place. And as this was going on, we see that she was not only doing that, but she was promoting witchcraft as well. The Bible doesn't talk too much about those details, but we can understand what witchcraft is.

And she was known for these things.

Kind of reminds me of some people these days. Oh, I know some of these a listers, some of these politicians, they don't just come right out and live like that. They're not putting people to death. They're not assassinating, necessarily. They're pastors and priests and things like that.

Although in some parts of the world, that does happen. If you're a Christian in certain nations, it's almost a death sentence for you to be a Christian out in public. But I don't know about that. I don't live there. You see, I live here in this country, and I see some things that are going on in this country.

And as I read this scripture specifically, I see some things that are very alarming to me. I want to tell you that I believe the spirit of Jezebel is alive and well today. Now, I know this is supposed to be a sermon series about living in peace, but as I read the scripture, the part that God had brought to my mind was, how can there be peace as long as the spirit of Jezebel is alive and well today? You see, in the book of Revelation, we see also that it was alive and well. In Revelation chapter two, there was a church that was there.

Actually, I think it's chapter three. I don't know. I can't remember for sure. But the church of Thyatira was where there was this woman, metaphorically named Jezebel, who was leading the people into sin and idolatry still. And God said, as long as she's tolerated within the church, you can't expect this church to grow into the type of people God is calling them to be the spirit of Jezebel is still alive and well today.

You see, we can look around and we can think. There's a lot of things, like a lot of we might call idolatry. And let me define idolatry for you. Idolatry is like, when you take something that you believe will give you a benefit of some kind, something that you think will somehow promote something good in your life, and you look to that thing and you devote your life to it in some way. Maybe not completely or totally, but a little bit.

I mean, it might just be things like you're looking for, like, just something for fun, for pleasure. Like, you know, you want to say, oh, well, I love this sports team, so I'm going to go to every game, I'm going to buy all their merchandise and wear their jerseys and all that stuff and root form and all that. I heard that, you know, up in Tennessee where Amy and I came from, she was just showing me a clip, where Vanderbilt beat which one? Alabama. That's a big rivalry.

And Vanderbilt beat them, and so they tore down the goalpost and carried it down Broadway, downtown Nashville. Like, that's probably not the best idea. You know, that's not cool. I mean, it's hilarious, but it's not really a good idea. Somebody's gonna have to probably get fined for that, you know, and I think, okay, well, that's like, that's our smallest form of idolatry, and I can pick on it because I really don't care about sports.

I'm terrible about throwing a ball and. Or catching it, so I just don't play it and I don't really care about the teams. I can watch it and enjoy it to some degree, but I don't root for anybody. So I can poke at you guys that do, but then there's all these other things, like people that follow what celebrities do or say, what politicians do or say. They look after things to benefit them, like money.

I mean, we all need money to some degree or their jobs, but they pour into these things or look for the next dollar every time because they believe that that's what's going to provide for them. They look to political leaders, especially in this election season, where we say, okay, this is what's going to fix us. This is what's going to save us or make us better, is if we vote this way or vote for this person. And believe me, I believe we should be voting. I believe that even though there's a lot of times where it seems like, or there's proof that some of these cases, these elections, on small levels and on large levels, are rigged, whether that's with voter fraud, ballot fraud, or just the simple way that they run the campaign financing and all those things, whatever it is, there's a lot of different things that seem like your vote may not matter.

And yet one of the ways your vote matters the most is on local elections, local elections in the cities and in the counties, on the school boards. Your voice can be heard the most on those things, and that's where it's most needed for the ways that affect your life. It's not only a right and responsibility you have, but I believe it's our christian duty to research the things that are on the ballot and to say, what is it that I should be voting for as a Christian? And the weird thing is they tried to say that this is christian nationalism. Have you heard anybody say that lately?

Anybody say that something is called christian nationalism? And they try to say, this is a bad thing. This is a horrible thing. I don't even know what christian nationalism is. I know that.

I love how this country used to be. I hate how it is now. And I'm a Christian, and I want to see us get back to some ways that God would call us to live. Amen. You vote how you want on that.

Research the candidates and figure it out. I'm not telling you, telling you red or blue this or that. I'm just telling you figure it out on your own. I believe in some cases, it gets pretty obvious, and on some cases, it gets really muddied. Trying to figure out, does this candidate or does this amendment on a ballot line up with scripture or with the ways of God is really tough sometimes.

Sometimes it's nearly impossible to figure out. I just don't know. Some of those times I have my own thoughts and feelings, but that's not what I'm here to share with you guys. I'm here to encourage you to use that right and ability you have. I believe that if all of the people sitting in every church this morning around this country would be the ones who would get out and vote, that we would see a godly change happen on a leadership level.

And when we start voting out people who aren't following God, then they will start putting in candidates who do honor God, because you might not like who you see on the ballot this time. So once you let that be known, but with your vote, we start seeing other people step up and say, okay, I'm willing to do it. The Christians are voting again, I'm willing to run. I'm willing to be in that place on the ballot box. But you see those little things that we talked about, the leaders, the celebrities, the money, the fame, success, substance abuse, sports teams, whatever it might be, those are what we might call the household gods.

Household idols. You see, people, in old days, they had these household idols. They might have been little, small idols, and they didn't really put their entire stock of their life into that. They didn't rest all of their hope on these household gods. They didn't think that that was going to be the be all, end all in their lives.

They just kind of put them on the shelf and said, hey, sometimes I'm going to use this, but not all the time. But then what ends up happening is they would have the big gods, whether it was Yahweh or Baal or whoever it might be, and they would lean on them. They would worship them. They would give all of their lives over to them. Those were the big gods.

Those were the big idols and the big idolatry that Jezebel brought in and that we still see in our culture today. Some of this idolatry, this spirit of Jezebel style of idolatry that we see in our world today. Some of it, you think, is it really that big? Is it happening that much? I tell you, yes, it is.

I'm going to start with a couple easy ones. The first thing is the stuff that you might go to a little shop, or maybe you're at a festival, and somebody's got a booth there, and they do tarot cards or palm reading or a horoscope or things of that nature. People that look in the newspaper for their horoscope. We were sitting in the dentist office the other day with Emma, and. And there was these women talking about what sign they were, you know, Leo, Capricorn, all this stuff.

And I just rolled my eyes. I'm like, oh, my goodness, what does it even matter? Oh, well, he's a Leo, so he's gonna be that way. This one's stubborn. I'm like, what?

Everyone's stubborn. Are you kidding me? Like, I've never met a non stubborn person. There's some that are more stubborn than others, but everyone has a sticking point where they're stubborn on it. But if you're always looking for what sign somebody is, you're going to attribute those things to them.

Any psychological study you do that says, like, what letter code you are, what thing are you? Or what enneagram number or any of those things, you're going to read it and you say, oh, yeah, that's me to the t. Except when you start looking at it, you're like, well, but not this one. And, well, not this one. And then you start reading another one and you're like, well, I'm these things, too.

And you realize these people are making a whole lot of money off of telling you a whole bunch of stuff that has no basis in reality. But it's not just the tarot or the palm reading, the fortunes and the horoscopes. You see, there's these pagan things that they were doing where they offered their children up to these gods. Now we think, oh, we're not that barbaric today. And of course you think, oh, well, he's going to talk about abortion.

He's going to talk about the abortion thing in our country. You're right. I am, by the way, on our ballot in the state of Florida, coming up at the election time next month is going to be amendment four. They're going to make it very trickily. The wording on it, like always, is going to be very tricky to make you think you got to vote one way or the other.

They're going to say, you have to vote yes on four, because on four, you know, if we don't pass this, then women who are, their lives are in danger, this child is going to kill them inside of them, that they won't be able to get medical help, that somehow you're denying women the right to medical care that they need. That's simply not true. First of all, the amendment doesn't provide for that. That's not it at all. Second of all, what's really at stake here is not that this tiny percentage of women who might possibly have a medical reason that they and their doctors believe is necessary for this.

What's actually at stake here is they're trying to make it not just available and common, but they're trying to promote this as a way of life, not in this state alone, but in pretty much every state in our nation. The trend is that they are trying to make it not even like a thing that's rare and doesn't happen often. They're trying to make this common. And I could get into a lot of reasons why I believe that is the biggest reason I believe, is that Satan came to steal, kill and destroy. And one of the things he wants to destroy is not just our bodies and not just our, our unborn children, but he wants to destroy the family as it is.

And one of the best ways you can bring destruction to a family is to encourage them to not have children. I mean, that simply eliminates families in general. And what this ends up doing is it drives, no matter what they say, it drives a wedge right into the very soul of the mother that is having this. And I understand that there are people who do this because they feel like there's no other hope, that they have no other choice that they have in the matter. But I'd like you to know that there's been this idea in the christian ethos or the christian understanding all the way back to the time of Christ.

There's this document called the Didache. It's Didache. The Didache was this early, like, first century christian document. It's not in the Bible, but if you read through it, it only takes about 20 minutes to read it. If you read through it, it sounds a lot like the Bible.

There's a lot of things that sound just like a quote that's in scripture. And when you read the Didache, one of the things that it talks about was how the pagan world would give up their children both having abortions. They did this. They had, you know, back in the first century, they had medical ways of doing this, but they would also abandon children that they did not want. They would literally leave them out on the rocks to die.

If you were a girl and the family didn't want a girl, this was their option, because they might not know it was a girl, so they might wait until term for the child to be born and then they would realize, well, we don't need this kid. We can't afford to feed another mouth. That's a girl. She's not going to produce anything in the family business. We need to have a boy.

We need somebody that will grow up and be strong. So we'll just let this child die. Or if it was a child with a deformity, they would say, well, we certainly can't have that around our house. So they would leave that child out to die. But you know what the Didache tells us?

Christians were going out and they were ransoming these children. They were picking them up. And when people would abandon their children, their newborn babies, the Christians were going up and they would take that child, no matter how unwanted it might have been, and they would pick it up and they would raise it as their own. They would adopt it. Do you know what difference that makes when we're reading the scriptures and we hear that God the Father has adopted us as sons and daughters?

To know that some of the people that heard those words in scripture said, I was adopted, too. I was adopted by my christian parents. But you're telling me that God also has adopted me. It's such a beautiful thing. And we wonder, how do we live at peace in this world when there's all of this stuff going on?

How do we live at peace? One of the ways we do that is we work as the agents of peace that God has created and called us to be. The didache tells us that christians don't do as the pagans did, aborting or abandoning their children. They raised them. Did you know that even today, though, you expected I would go there, but you didn't know this.

We have infanticide alive and well. That's a terrible choice of words. We have it happening in our country today. Infanticide is still going on, but they don't call it that. You see, what they call it is a child that's not necessarily wanted.

They will leave it without any medical care or attention in the hospital, and they will leave it to its death, and they dub it comfort care. This isn't, of course, in mainstream media because they don't want to admit that it's happening, but it is, and it does. And medically, ethically, this is a terrible thing. But to a christian, it should break our hearts to say this is happening right under our noses. The question is, what am I willing to do to change that besides yakking from a church pulpit?

Another thing, another idol that we have in our culture and society today is the way that we've been worshipping. And I mean that seriously, are gender ideologies? Oh, I know the church is known for speaking out against it, as I might be doing right now. But I'm not talking against individuals who find themselves being dragged into a conversation that they really don't feel equipped to walk through. People who feel that they're actually struggling with something inside themselves.

And so the only answer that they are being given is that they need to somehow adopt a different gender or a different Persona or a different who knows what, and they're being told these things. The issue that I have, the big problem that I have, I've got sympathy for those people. The problem that I have is that this is another type of idolatry that people like Jezebel are promoting in our land. You see, what they're doing is they're going out there and they're harming children. They're attacking them.

Not only that, they're indoctrinating them in their classrooms, in their libraries, in their schools, in all these different civic and social clubs that they might have. The message that they hear over and over and over is that your only choice or option is to change literally everything about who you are. See, Jesus Christ accepts us where we are, who we are. He says, I love you. You're adopted into my family.

Does that mean that he leaves us there? No. Thank God that Jesus didn't leave me how he found me. But he didn't just say, you know what? You're terrible.

You need to change everything about you, and then you're good enough for me. You see, Jesus accepted me, who I was and how I was. He died for me so that I might have full and complete life. Not living in the confusion of the world that I was in, but being brought into his heavenly dwelling. Amen.

The other thing that's attached to this, and they'll tell you that I'm 100% wrong. And I'll tell you I'm not, is a word called maps. Has anybody heard of this? Tom? I know we've talked about it.

Minor attracted people is what maps stands for. This is not a fake thing. This is not a fringe thing. I haven't made this up. I'm not just trolling around on some weird websites to find these things out.

There are psychologists, there are people, the same people that told us 15 years ago, they tried to say, well, these gender ideologies or these queer, bisexual, homosexual, whatever it might be, that these things, when they switched it from being a mental condition 15, 2025 years ago to being just an identity, when they switched it from that, we said, well, the next thing you're going to do is you're going to tell us that we can have relationships with animals and adults can have relationships with children. And they're like, oh, no, that's ridiculous. That's a mental disease. Guess what they're doing now? They're saying these things.

They're coming out there and they're shaming people like me for saying the things that I'm saying, that this is an evil thing. They're trying to tell us that this is not a pedophile, this isn't a sicko, that this person, that ten years ago, everybody would have agreed they should be locked up in prison for the rest of their life, or some people would say worse things than that about them. That this person now is just somebody who has an attractive. Their attraction is to a child, and that is pure and beautiful. Can you believe this?

The spirit of Jezebel is alive and well today, folks. Religious, pluralism, is running rampant in our country. You know what? We're in a country where we are founded on this idea that you can worship however you please. Now, this was a country that was founded by people who at least in some measure, worshiped God, the creator of heaven and earth, that we believe that Jesus Christ is the savior.

But they also didn't make any laws that established that as a state religion. And they put that into our founding documents and into our governing policies that would say that the government will never tell you who you must worship. But they also didn't say that christians can't be involved in the government. You see, people quote that all the time to say, oh, separation of church and state. Separation of church and state.

Go back and read it, folks. Go back and read what's going on. But you see, the thing here is we see this pluralism running rampant, not just in the world and in the government, but we see it seeping into the church culture. And here's what I mean. Did anybody watch the opening ceremony of the Paris Olymp or the Olympics in Paris?

Was anybody appalled by it? Now, here's the thing that initially, people thought it looked like. They said, well, that looks like they're mocking the Lord's supper, like the Leonardo da Vinci painting, because the way Leo painted it wasn't exactly the way it probably looked in the first century, the way they would have sat around a table. But let's just put that aside for a minute and say, maybe it looked like they were making a mockery of this. But then you got all these people that call themselves a Christian, but they seemed to be kind of siding with this Jezebel spirit stuff.

And they said, well, you know, it wasn't really mocking the Lord's supper. Then they show a picture and they say this was more like the worship ceremony for the. The God Dionysius. Oh, great. So much better.

Now we're worshiping, like, pagan style these days. You know, we're bringing back ancient dead religions to pagan gods that have no power. The spirit of jezebel is alive and well. When Christians, or at least people who take the name of Christ, start saying, no, see, it's okay. You people are just far right.

You're alt right. You're some crazy conspiracy theorist. You're all these things. You need to shut up and just kind of be more loving. I can love these people just fine, but it can detest me.

The idea that the flag of the United States of America, the country that I live in, that I was brought up saying, the pledge of allegiance to which says things like, one nation under God, indivisible. Do you hear the things that aren't true anymore of this nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for everyone. Oh, I don't think that's accurate. I don't think anybody believes that's accurate anymore. Liberty and justice for anyone who can afford it.

Maybe here we are, living in this land, and our flag flies over our athletes who had to participate. They spent years to be in that moment, and I wouldn't want to take that from them. And yet they have to participate. Right after that goes on, folks, the spirit of jezebel is alive and well today. And I say, how do we live at peace with that?

That was just the idolatry part. Then there was the harlotries or the fornication that was part of Jezebel's life and land. I think it was figurative language, not just about being unfaithful to God, but also they chased after all the lusts of their eyes, and yet they were never satisfied. You see, that's what lust does. Lust continually is looking for gratification in something or someone else, but it can never be provided or fulfilled by that person or by that thing.

In our land, we've seen total and complete promiscuity. Sure, it started maybe with the sexual revolution a few decades ago, where love was free and everybody was allowed to be with anyone they wanted. And then it moved to where the LGB part of that Alphabet group, lesbians, gays, bisexuals. They said, we just want our rights. We just want to exist.

We just want to live. And so finally, everybody says, okay, fine, you got it. We'll cave that much. We'll give that much that's acceptable. We'll do that.

But that lust was not satisfied then. That lust was not finished. You see, they wanted more, more than just that. And now we have an agenda that's taken place. See, we get dragged into these discussions about this stuff on their terms.

We as christians get dragged into discussions of eternal matters, and we allow them to do it on the terms of those who are bringing in this idolatry and these harlotries and fornications according to the scriptures, these agendas that are targeting our children and our adults that are being trafficked. You know, you've heard, even if you didn't even listen to presidential debates or any of those things, you've heard people talking about immigrants coming across the southern border. And, you know, I don't. I don't personally know anybody that has a problem with people who have immigrated to this country. I don't either.

I've worked with many people who came from other countries looking for some type of a life that was better than the one they came from. I've known people who sacrificed, coming here without their families to prepare a place for their families to move to with them. Some legal, some not. Following the legal process. That's a different argument for a different day.

I don't think that has so much to do with our scriptures as it does to do with the laws of the land. So I'm not getting into that. What I'm talking about is there are people who have come here looking for a better way of life, but there's also people mixed in with all of that. There's people mixed in with this mass just group of people coming across the border from. From Mexico that are coming across, that's coming from places that wish to do us harm.

But I don't think they're wishing to do you or me harm. Specifically. What they're doing is they're trafficking human beings. I think trafficking is way too cleaned up of a term for it. I think if you called them a trafficking victim, those victims would laugh at you and say, are you serious?

That's what you look at me as. I've been harmed, raped, abused, drugged, raped over and over and over again. Abused, drugged over and over and over again, fed, starved, beat around, knocked around, taken from place to place to place, just wondering if I'll ever get out of here alive. A trafficking victim seems a little bit too sanitized to call them that. You see, this is happening.

Meanwhile, politicians are talking about border laws and border rules and fences and all these things, sanctuary cities, the failure of FEMA by giving all these money to them and not supporting hurricane victims in the Carolinas. And we think through all that and we're like, are we really missing the point? People are being taken, promised something. We'll help you across the border. Oh, well, now you owe us.

Now you have to pay what you owe back to us. And just as, almost as bad as that is the number of people who are their customers of these organizations that are abusing these people. This is happening in our country.

The pornography industry is huge. We've got websites like onlyfans where you don't have to go through a corporation to make a film. Girls, maybe there's guys too. I don't know. They can put themselves out there on the Internet.

They can have people pay them directly for their quote unquote, services. Of the skin that they show, the things that they'll do, and the things that they're willing to perform for. There's all these different apps that we're selling our children through, like TikTok or Snapchat, Instagram, where we're telling them that if you just somehow put yourself out there, promote yourself, look good, everybody will like you, everybody will love you. And yet they find their souls so slowly eroding away. Folks were selling off this generation and the next two to three after it.

And I'm sorry to bring this all in right now, because as I look across your faces, I see the pain. That's appropriate. There are times where I study this. I research it, I read about it, I pray about it, and then I have to put it all away because I say, God, I can't get involved in this anymore because I don't know what to do. I can preach about it to you all.

And then what? What do we do? See, the spirit of Jezebel is alive and well in our country. Voting doesn't fix it right away. Talking about it, I mean, for sure, do that.

Use your voice. Use your voice wherever it is that you have it. When you hear people talking about it, when you hear people saying these things or talking ignorantly about stuff, say, listen, do you know what's really happening? Don't worry that they might say, well, you're into conspiracy theories. Like, no, I'm into conspiracy facts.

These are facts. I just don't know who's behind it. That's the thing that I don't know, but I know these things are happening. I've heard eyewitness testimony of people that have been to these places that talk about what's going on. There's people that keep getting arrested, and yet we hear that they've had these big parties where all these things are happening, but we never see the list of anyone being prosecuted for it.

Clearly, there's something going on in our country, and the very soul of our nation is at stake. And, you know, the thing is, I hear politicians on both sides of this presidential election talking about that, and I don't think that either of them have all of the answers to it, and some of them are causing the problems in it. Use your voice. Speak when you hear lies and call the truth out, because you know why Satan really hates it. Satan hates the truth.

You see, he's been the enemy of truth since the beginning. That's why he turned against God in heaven and why he was cast out of heaven. That's what he started with Adam and Eve in the garden was he started lying to them because he hates truth. When Jesus was on trial before Pilate, Pilate says to him, what is truth? Jesus said, my people are on the side of truth.

Today we talk about truth. You go online and you see everybody saying, well, that was fact checked. We said that that's misinformation. Like, they're the arbiters of truth, folks. Truth.

Truth is out there. Search for the truth, because the followers of God live in the light. We don't hide in the shadows of darkness like the people of this world. Be ready to recognize the spirit of Jezebel today. See, this is one of the ways that we can live at peace is when we begin to recognize the spirit of Jezebel alive and well in our world, and we see it for what it is.

We call out the truth. We recognize the spirit of Jezebel, and we say, not in my place, not where I live. I'm going to stand against that.

The church of Thyatira had the spirit of Jezebel alive and well in the book of revelation. We read about that, and it's a short letter to that church. They had done a lot of things right. The church in America is still doing a lot of things right. And yet there's so many times where we keep giving up a little bit here and a little bit there.

We're okay with the little household idols, the small things. We can tolerate them, okay? But then we end up accepting the large things just one little bit at a time. Folks. What we have to do is be on our knees and pray that God would bring healing to this land, that it would start with a revival in the churches.

Because just like one of the prophets felt at the time of Jehu, like he was the only one, like he was the only prophet of God left in this godless land. God said, oh, no, I've reserved a bunch of people who haven't bowed the knee to baal. And just in that same way that God hasn't just left himself without witness in our land. You see, the way to have peace in our land is when christians live out the loving promises of God in our land, not refusing to hate those who are trapped into these idolatries, but showing them the light and the truth, gently taking them one at a time and leading them into the truth of God's way of life. When we lead people to Christ, when we lead him to that, they realize that there's hope, despite all the things that they've been taught and told we live at peace when we begin to help others find peace in Jesus Christ.

Here's a wire. It activates the enemy. Here's a wire. It activates the enemy. It activates the enemy.

Here is a wire. It activates the enemy. Here is a wire. It activates the enemy. It activates the enemy.