Our Father in heaven, best of fathers, we come to you this afternoon in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. You made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us, believing sinners. That we, believing sinners, might become the righteousness of God in Him. What a tremendous swap. What an unfair swap for our Lord. He gets our sin, we get His righteousness. But it's blessedly true. It's not a fairy tale, it's the gospel. We come to you in Christ's name asking you to give the Holy Spirit that He might take the words that He inspired and pour them into our souls. That we would not leave here the same. For as much as we might enjoy good teaching, we're not here just to become smarter. We're here because we want the Word of God to impact our heart. We pray that you would do that. We trust you expectantly in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's look at Romans chapter 1 beginning in verse 16. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it, the gospel, is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jews first and also to the Greek. For in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous, or the just, shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Now that's an odd phrase. It says the wrath of God is revealed. And the older New American Standard, the one I originally had when I was just out of college, said the wrath of God is being revealed, which is actually a better translation because it is a participle. Participles are words that end up in I-N-G. What does that mean? It means it's an ongoing action. Walking, crossing, living, dying, those are ongoing actions. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven right now. Paul says, you in Rome, I'm writing to you Roman Christians, do you realize the wrath of God has come upon the Roman Empire? Do you get this? The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. What's the difference between ungodliness and unrighteousness? It's important. Ungodliness says, I will not have God to be my God. I will not let Him rule over me. I will do my own thing. Unrighteousness says, I will not obey His laws and I will not live His way. One has to do with the person of God. I don't want Him in my life, on my money, in my schools, anywhere. Unrighteousness says, I will not obey Him, I don't care about His laws, I'll live my way. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. By their disobedient way of living they seek to suppress the truth. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. People say, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God. The Bible says there's no such thing as atheists. There's people who suppress the truth, but there are no such thing as people who have no knowledge of God. He's made it clear to them, they chose to suppress it. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, that is His divine power and divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, meaning they knew he existed, they did not honor him as God or give thanks. But they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Okay? So people said, I will not have God to be God. I won't think about Him. I don't want Him anywhere in my culture, in my life. God says, fine. And we have here the first giving over, verse 25. Verse 24, excuse me. Therefore God gave them over. Remember we looked at the message not too long ago about God hardening? How does God harden a sinner? He doesn't have to do anything to harden a sinner. All He has to do, so to speak, is put His hands in His pocket and step back. and just let the natural hardening process of every sinful heart in a sinful world take its course. So in giving them over, it's saying, let me take a step back here to see how sin will take over you. Therefore God gave them over in the lust of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them over. He takes another step back. You want to live in sin? You want to see your life, what it's like when it's hardened? Let me show you. For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another. Men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over, this is the third and final giving over, it says in this version, to a depraved mind. In the original King James version, not the original of the Greek, but of the original King James, the 1611 version, to a reprobate mind, a graceless mind. God gave them over to a graceless mind to do those things which are not proper. Now at this point you're going, boy, I can see the downward spiral here, but what's the next nasty level they're going to go to? Starts out here, and then it goes to homosexuality here, and then for years I would look at this and I couldn't figure out, because it didn't seem like the sins that are mentioned are particularly vile or more vile than homosexuality. But what Paul does is he said, no, we're looking at a culture that's completely controlled by sin. Notice how he keeps using the word full of. He gave them over to a depraved mind to do things which are not proper. Being filled with, they're full up of all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, that means you hate people, but that's okay, they hate you back. They're gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, means they talk back, kids who talk back to their teachers. Arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, And this next phrase to you seems innocuous, but to first century people it was a shocker. Disobedient to parents. You've grown up in America in the last 50 years assuming that all teenagers have their flings and they're naturally disobedient. You've lived in a time of aberration. Most of the world for most of the history of the world does not have rebellious teenagers. Being disobedient to their parents is a mark of a culture that's going down the drain. And so what's going on here is he says, do you realize that even seeing the disobedient children among you is a sign of God giving your culture over? Did you know the word teenager wasn't invented until the 1940s? Before that, you either were a child until you got to be 12 or so, and then at 13, you became an adult and you were a young adult until you became an older, more mature adult. But now we have a third class of citizens that don't exist in the Bible, but where our culture says, you get a free pass to live any way you want to. That's how we fought the lie. Disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful. And although they knew the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them. At one point, these people knew this was wrong. Now they do it and they encourage other people to do it. In 1968, our culture was much like today. It was in turmoil. President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he was not going to run for another term. The Democrats had all kinds of people wanting to fill in the vacuum. A man named Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota who was liberal, who was against the war in Vietnam, decided that he would run on an anti-war plank and were going to stop the draft. And all kinds of students thought Eugene McCarthy was a wonderful guy. And in spring of 1968, I, like many other students, went door to door passing out flyers for Eugene McCarthy. You go, really? Did you know what he stood for? No, it just seemed like a cool, fun thing to do when you're in college and don't know anything. So that's what I did. Got kind of bit by a dog for my trouble, but other than that, didn't have much excitement. And as the 68 went on, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. The riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention were horrible. Mayor Richard Daley put it down like a thug beating up a little old lady in an alley. And the nation was in turmoil. And the talk was, is there going to be a revolution? Is there going to be a mass rebellion? It's true that as the next year went on, I could choose almost any day to go to a demonstration at one of the nearby college campuses. After lunch, I could go, let's see, do I want to go to a demonstration or a riot or go to the library? Guess which I chose. Anyway, it was a very scary time. In the fall of 1968, after taking classes about the history of the world and looking what was going on in my world, I came to the conclusion this is a pretty messed up world. And then a few weeks later, it came to my knowledge that whatever was wrong with the world was in me. And if it ever came down to you and me, buddy, it was always going to be me. And why was I that way? I might say, I might read a book and say, well, these are nice noble thoughts, but I couldn't live those noble thoughts. And then by the grace of God, I was converted in early 1969. And my whole world changed. My whole understanding of the world changed. And this commitment to politics and putting a different party in power and what man is going to be raised up to save us from ourselves just fell into a pile of ashes. And I saw that the only person who could change the human heart in all of human history was Jesus Christ. And you can talk all you want to about change. The philosophers talk about change, but the problem is who's going to do the changing? Who is going to change the human heart? Our nation is in rebellion against God, His character, His ways, and His word. We refuse to bow the knee to our Lord. We refuse to obey His word. And the sad part is we've become clueless and in denial that our nation is going down the toilet in our lifetime. And I choose the word toilet advisedly. Our nation is going down the toilet in our lifetime. Sins that were once rare or to be grossly ashamed of are now bold in the streets and these sins demand that their sinful behavior is not only right but must be affirmed by everybody. We find ourselves now under the curse of God experiencing the wrath of God in a temporal way leading up to the final wrath of God on Judgment Day. Could you see America in Romans 1? Could you see what Paul was saying about God's wrath coming on the Roman Empire was the same thing that he would say about us today? We fit that bill perfectly. The downward progression, the being given over to stuff that people hadn't seen before. I'm not sure if it's apocryphal, but the story of the top four problems in the public schools in the 1950s when I was in elementary school, you know the top problems in the schools were running in the hallway, having your shirt tail untucked, dropping pieces of paper on the floor, and chewing gum in class. What teacher would say, I've died and gone to heaven if that's my school compared to today? Sadly, Americans place their faith and remain committed to this tragically naive understanding of human nature and the world around us. We don't get it and the nation is being destroyed and we don't get it. Americans want to believe that man is basically good at heart. We want to believe that whatever man needs, man can get on his own. You've been taught that. You watch the Olympics, listen to them talk. You can be whatever you want to be. We believe that American science and American money and American hard work and a brief passage of time can solve any problem. We believe that politicians and political parties can lead us out of our hard times and create a new society where people are healthy, secure, and as successful as they want to be. Americans are regularly told by their parents and teachers, the media, and the government that whatever you want to be and whatever you want to do, you can do it. I would say if you're 4'6", your chances of making the NBA are probably pretty slim. If you're 5'6", and weigh 150, your chances of making the National Football League are kind of slim. There's all kinds of things we can't do, but the culture says, no, whatever you want to be, just apply hard work and ingenuity and you can do it. And that's not true. We can't overcome who we are and how God made us. The sad thing about all these assertions is that they're lies, but we believe them. Whether Democrats or Republicans, Libertarians or Independents, each group believes and communicates and functions as if human beings and human government can fix whatever's wrong with our nation and its people. Just put us in power and we will fix it. I'm here to testify before you today that there are four things that Jesus Christ can do for you that no government, that no political leader can do for you, and that being Jesus Christ, man or woman, being His disciple is vastly more important than any political party or any politician. The four things that Christ can do for you that civil government cannot. First of all, civil government cannot help you with your biggest problem. The wrath of God is pronounced upon all sinful rebels and all those who have not bowed the knee to Christ. Not the wrath that's being played out in time and space history like we saw in Romans chapter 1 that's going on in our culture now, but the final wrath of God when you have to stand before him and give account of your life and he says to the angels, depart from me, I never knew you and they carry you out and throw you hand and feet into hell. Government cannot do a thing to stop that or avert that. Number two, government cannot help you with your critical need of a new nature, a new inner disposition, a new you. If you wanted to live the rest of your life as a different person, you can't make yourself a different person. And government can't make you a different person, but Christ can. Three, government cannot help you with God's command to love your neighbor as you already love yourself. If a family's to work, if a society's to work, people have to learn to live together, and that means learning to love my neighbor as I already love myself, as the scripture puts it. But government can't help you that way. It can pass laws to tell you you should do it, that this is a hate crime. Really, I didn't know there were any fun crimes, but apparently some are hate crimes, and this is really bad. But government can't make you love your neighbor. Government cannot help you with your need to know God and find your true self in knowing Him. You were created to know God, and government can't do a thing to help you to know God. It stands in your way, but it can't do a thing to help you to know God, but Jesus Christ can. Okay, let's look at each of these in some more detail. The government cannot save you from the wrath to come. If I was to write down or have you watch the news for this week or if we just took a poll here, what would be the number one problem facing our nation according to what we are told by the politicians and the media? The national debt, unemployment, the latest flu pandemic. If it's not the Zika flu, it'll be swine flu, bird flu, something. It's AIDS. No, it's racism and social injustice. No, it's poverty. No, it's government's too big. No, it's radical Islam. It's Russia. It's illegal immigration. And all of these are minor. They're like feathers compared to an anvil of the reality that you will have to stand before God. Every man and woman, every little boy and every little girl is going to have to stand before God and give an account of your life. And if you are without Jesus Christ, you'll be judged forever. The greatest problem facing America dwarfs all these other ones. It's greater than all of the rest of them combined. We read in Romans 1 16, the wrath of God is already being poured out. Can you see it in Romans 1? Do you believe God doesn't tell the truth, where He says in other portions of Scripture, there is a day coming when all will have to stand before Him? And the judge will be none other than Jesus Christ. He says, all judgment has been entrusted to me by the Father. Such that if you reject Christ as your Savior, you will meet Him again as your judge, and you will have no one to stand by your side as your advocate. Placing our personal and national hope in government is only going to hasten our judgment because government wasn't created to help us to know God. Government was created to keep a lid on sin so that society can be reasonably normal and we can have the freedom to worship and that we would have an ordered life. But if we put our trust in government that somehow it's going to help us to deal with the wrath to come, we're sadly deluded. Governments come and go but they have no power to stand up to the coming wrath of God because the governments themselves are under the wrath of God and governmental leaders. Every politician in the history of the world is going to have to stand before God. They're not going to have a word to say to you on Judgment Day. They're not going to give you one iota of help because they themselves will be quivering in fear and anxiety because they're standing before Almighty God. Look back with me at history for a second. Think of the mightiest empires and the most powerful rulers and none of them can avoid the wrath of God and civil rulers and civil government today haven't done any better. Ancient Egypt had its pharaohs. Babylon had Nebuchadnezzar. Persia had Cyrus. The Medes had Darius. The Greeks had Alexander the Great. Caesar was from Rome, the barbarian warlords of the northern tribes, the ancient kings of China or India, the divine right kings of medieval Europe, Napoleon, Shaka Zulu in South Africa, Kaiser Wilhelm, Woodrow Wilson, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, none of these, none of these are going to give one iota of thought to you and help you along the way because they have to stand before God themselves. None of these leaders and their lofty dreams and dazzling promises will be able to do you any good on Judgment Day because these leaders themselves are under judgment. If they do not have Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord, They'll never even think about you. They'll never even think about their presidential or leadership responsibilities. Please turn your Bibles to the book of Revelation chapter 6, a portion of God's Word that I found very enlightening and encouraging. Revelation chapter 6. There's a picture of Judgment Day here. verses 15 through 17. This is a revelation that's been given of what's coming at the end of time. It says in verse 15, then the kings of the earth and the great men, you know, generals, CEOs, and the commanders, and the rich, and the strong, but it's not just these people. And every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains Now what are they hiding from? And they said to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand? I'd rather a mountain fall on my head, I'd rather a boulder crush me, than have to gaze upon the holy gaze of Jesus Christ, or God the Father. It's judgment day, and these people can't handle it. But it's not just the rich and the powerful. It's everyday people. It's normal Joes and the small people of the world. The reality of judgment. Years ago there was a movie called Deep Impact and the only good part of the movie was the special effects. When finally this meteor hits 800 miles off the eastern coast of the United States and a giant wall of water 800 to 1,000 feet is coming ashore. How far inland in the Carolinas and Virginia would you have to go before you're above the wave crest? And people, and all the people fleeing to get to the highlands in the Shenandoah Valley or the mountains of West Virginia, and would you make it? But it was just a movie about a theoretical possibility. What if instead of that wave being water, what if it was the wrath of God rolling ashore in America? Where would you flee? and having to stand before Almighty God and His Son Jesus Christ, you'd rather a mountain fall on your head than have to look Him in the eye. Jesus Christ alone is God's only appointed means to avert the coming judgment. Only Christ can save a sinner from the wrath to come. We read what Paul said in Romans 116, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it, the gospel, is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes. And everyone is in anyone. Put your name in there if you're not a believer. I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it's the power of God unto salvation for then your name who believes. Do you believe? Are you trusting in Jesus Christ? Is there something that God's going to require of you on judgment day that Christ doesn't provide? And the answer is no. You know, sometimes people get incredibly naive. What do you think the basis of Brandon standing up here and preaching to you is, or myself? Well, they're pastors, and they're pretty mighty guys, they're pretty awesome people, they're probably a step above us spiritually, and they're Baptist pastors. They're Reformed Baptist pastors. Do you think that cuts ice with God? Do you think God cares what your background is? If I don't have Jesus Christ as my Savior on Judgment Day, I'm doomed. I have His righteousness, though, because of what He did on the cross. For God made Him who knew no sin to become a sin for me, a believing sinner, that we believing sinners might become the righteousness of God in Him. The great swap. My sins go to Him. His righteousness comes to me. If I don't have that, I'm doomed on judgment day. I think about sometimes, what if I should be killed in a car wreck? What if, as I'm getting older, my final sickness comes and I die? What will I look to? Jesus Christ. He's my only hope. He is my only hope. I'm not going to claim anything else. I don't have a little pocket thing here. Here's all my good deeds I've committed. I'm just going to whip these out and impress Him on Judgment Day. Really? Does anybody think I'd be so incredibly stupid and naive to think that? Father, I am a sinner saved by Your grace. There's nothing that You require of me that Jesus Christ hasn't provided. I look to the Lord Jesus, and why is He called an advocate? Because He speaks up for you on Judgment Day. On the cross, Jesus was counted as the worst sinner, the total sinner, the consummate sinner, in our place as our substitute that we might go free. You know, you've heard this illustration I've used before, but four years ago in Prescott, outside of Prescott, Arizona, there was forest fires in the mountains and plateau, high plateau of Arizona, and 19 firefighters were killed when there was a backdraft and the fire changed direction and went a different way than they expected and they were caught in a place they couldn't do anything and 19 of them were consumed. A friend of mine is a pastor and the mayor of Prescott and had to do several funerals and visit several families. It was a terrible time. Now, Georgia, thankfully, has much more rain than Arizona, so we don't struggle as much with the threat of forest fire. But if there was a forest fire, do you know where you would run? I mean, look at all the combustible material around you. Look at all the fields. Look at all the woods. Imagine that was dry tinder. Where in the world would you go? Well, the only place you can go that you're definitely safe is the spot that's already burned over, because when the fire gets to that, There's nothing combustible. There's nothing that will burn, so it will stop. What's the only place on the planet where God has dealt with sin on a once and for all basis? The cross of Jesus Christ. If you go to Him, God has already nuked your sins on Christ. God made Him who knew no sin to become sin. He became sin incarnate, so to speak. God the Father judged Him for our sins. And we receive His righteousness in the exchange. Number two, the government cannot help you with your critical need of a new nature and a new disposition. You know, governments have tried over the centuries to engineer human behavior. I can tell you stories about things that our government has done in the last hundred years that would curl your hair, experiments done on living people in Massachusetts, in New Jersey, in Alabama, and people were nothing more than guinea pigs. Using their scientists and educational institutions, many nations have sought to create a new society with model citizens who would make the country better, whatever better is defined by the rulers. Science has been harnessed by government to medicate, elongate and otherwise manipulate the human condition, but science has found no way to change our human nature. People are still people. I watched a special on how in Russia they tried to find out if people had souls and back when Russia was controlled by exclusively by communism, they would weigh a person as they're dying. In the very millisecond they died, they'd weigh them. And then they'd weigh them a few minutes later. They weigh the same! See, there's no soul here, because they weigh exactly what they did before they died. Christianity has never taught that the soul is material and has weight. It's an immaterial thing. Oh, but they were weighing bodies and comparing the weights and showing definitively there's no such thing as a soul because all they were were materialists. They believed that all that existed was matter and energy and time. And so if a person had no weight difference in their life, that meant they had no soul. How pathetic. They would take human brains and they would put it on a slicing machine and they would get it even thinner than paper thin so we can look into the brain and see if we can discover what makes people human. They never did. The educational establishment has taught us that ignorance and lack of higher education were the problems that have ruined societies. The problem is we need more education. I'm not against teachers and I'm not against education, but education is not a magic fix for our culture. Education is not a magic fix for what's wrong. The most educated nations on the planet in the 1930s brought about World War II. The nations that had the highest education were acting no better than the nations that were mere tribes or had no formal education. They were just killing people more efficiently. Higher education has taught us to be more clever sinners and more educated rebels. It's utterly failed to change our very nature, our inward disposition. Politicians and governments have promised utopias. Men can become perfect. We'll usher in a new society. Hope and change, baby. A new race of people. But for all their social engineering, government programs have failed utterly because they were programs designed in hell. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich worked to create a perfect Aryan race, and he killed men, women, and children, soldiers, and noncombatants to get his way. Emperor Hirohito in Japan wanted to make Japan the world power of the East and subjugate all peoples in the East to Japanese rule. Between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Hirohito's Imperial Japan, some 80 million people worldwide died through combat or diseases caused by the war. 80 million people for your screwed up dreams. Joseph Stalin in Russia followed the works of Marx and Lenin in creating a new order of people, the communist man who would naturally want to give up his own concerns about himself and sacrifice for others that they might do better, and particularly the communist leaders. And he killed 45 million people in his miserably failed social experiment. Mao Zedong tried to make the social philosophy of communism work in China, and he was going to make it work, and he killed 65 million of his fellow Chinese trying to create the new state inhabited by the new man. And as we're all clacking our tongues, I'm not Chinese or German or Japanese or Russian. In the United States in the 1960s, we were told that free love and free sex and cheap drugs would usher in utopia. The government initially fought against these ideas, but eventually most of the culture embraced them. So men and women were free to have sex when they wanted, with whom they wanted, and however they wanted, and a woman's body was her own to do with as she saw fit. To incorporate the new morality of the 60s and the new views of marriage and sex and childbirth and a woman's rights, all these together have brought about the death of over 65 million unborn children in America. In a group this size, there probably are some of you that have had abortions. I'm not here to rip off old scabs. I'm not here to paint you as the world's worst sinner. I'm saying multiply your pain and misery and the guilt that you knew was there for your sin and multiply it by 65 million and you see the state of our culture. What's more, couples who wear designer jeans and suits now custom order their babies and dispose of children with minor birth defects or sometimes no defects because of sinful selectivity. We wanted a girl this time or we wanted a blonde child with blue eyes. And if the embryo that was being fertilized didn't have that, they destroyed it. Our deaths tied to sexually transmitted disease and drug use added to what was, we've already mentioned, has pushed the total of over 70 million people that have been killed in America by our sins. So it puts us right up there with Stalin, Hitler, Hirohito, and Mao Zedong. The spill blood of the innocent unborn aborted in America cries out against our nation every day before the throne of the holy God. So we see that we've not only failed to create this wondrous new society, we've destroyed a whole generation of people who aren't yet born, only to keep our free and lovely lifestyles. Now, it's just a matter of time before euthanasia comes down the road, because we've got all these old people sucking up resources when we don't have the money to pay for it, because we have 70 million less people than we should have had to pay bills, but we don't have them, so we're going to have to cut back. You and you and you and you and you and you, why don't you go out and die, because you're getting in the way. We already had the governor of the state of Colorado suggest that old people die and get out of the way, so why not the federal government? But what government and science and education cannot do, the cross of Christ can do. Jesus Christ can change a person's nature. You don't have to have a great new society. You don't have to have LBJ's grand society. You don't have to have hope and change thing. Jesus Christ really does give such a thing as an inward change. It's called the new birth. Inward change is possible because God is the sovereign creator. He's the Lord of the impossible. Jesus taught that a whole new nature must be implanted within you, within your sunken, fallen, sinful disposition, if you're ever to know or see God or change. Something has to happen to you and you can't do anything about it. When Jesus commanded Nicodemus in John chapter 3, you must be born again, He wasn't stating, this was not an imperative, He's just stating a reality. Look, if this doesn't happen to you, You're done. You're the leading teacher in Israel. You're the leading scholar in Israel. And you don't understand the new birth. Go back and read Ezekiel 36 and 37. It's all there. If this doesn't happen to you, Nicodemus, you're undone. He's not commanding him to be born himself again. To be born again is passive. It happens to you. You don't do it. He's saying, Nicodemus, if God doesn't intervene in your life, no matter all of your degrees, you're cooked. You have no hope. This supernatural new birth can only be brought about by God Himself. So what Jesus does on the cross enables the new birth to happen because He deals with all of our sins and gives us His righteousness and sends the Holy Spirit to make us new. It's a supernatural work. Jesus says in John 3, you can't see it coming. It's like the wind coming. You can't see the wind coming. You can see the trees start to bend and the leaves rustling. You can't see the wind coming. I can't see the Holy Spirit working in your hearts now. And I've learned as a pastor you can make some really dreaded wrong mistakes. Like one man was sitting in the front row and his arms were folded and his face was red and he had a scowl all through his sermon. Boy, I wonder what I said that he didn't like. So afterwards I Stop in the hallway, you're an officer in the church, and you've got a scowl on your face, a red face, your arms are crossed, you just look ticked the whole morning, what's the deal? He goes, oh, three of my boys had soccer games yesterday and I didn't wear any sunscreen, I got really broiled, and I pulled my back too, and so the only way my back feels good is if I sit with my arms crossed. I thought, really stupid. Duh, doesn't it say that you can't see the work of the Holy Spirit, but I was trying to see the Holy, aha, there's a guy flopping around over there, that must be the Holy Spirit working. It's an invisible but a real thing. It is supernatural. What does supernatural mean? It's not a crummy TV show. It's a reality that God works above nature to change a person's heart, a disposition. Only Jesus has the power to totally redo a person from the inside out. Imagine a new you in a book put together by a sociologist at University of California, Berkeley. He interviewed this one woman and ask her some questions about Christianity and the new birth, and he himself is not a professing Christian, I don't believe. But she said, you mean I don't have to do what I don't want to do, but I keep on doing? No, you don't have to. Change is possible, but you can't change yourself. Only God can do it through Christ. Radical Jew Saul of Tarsus was himself the recipient of the supernatural life change, and he was never the same again. I mean, public enemy number one. Saul Bin Laden, so to speak, becomes a believer. How does that happen? Well, he teaches the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 4-6, the God who said, let light shine out of darkness. Well, when did God say, let light shine out of darkness? At the beginning, Genesis 1. The God who has supernatural power to bring into existence things that don't exist. He says, there's not a sun or a moon yet. That's a couple of days out. I'm creating light anyway. Let light shine out of darkness. The God who said that made His light to shine in our hearts that we might finally behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Why did you suddenly get it? Why did the penny fall? Why did you finally understand? Why did you change? Because God uttered your name and spoke and the Holy Spirit gave you a new nature, a new disposition. You suddenly got it. You might not have been looking for it. You might not have been depressed, or drunk, or suicidal, or miserable, or a whole number of things. You were just lost and clueless. And God intervened in your life to change you. Again, he says in the next chapter, chapter 5, verse 17, If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away, all things have become new. I wish I'd become a Christian earlier, but I'm thankful that when I did become a Christian by the grace of God in my 20s, I could look back and see what I was like before, and then I was watching my life change. It was like, whoa, this is so strange because I'm not trying to change myself or become this way. I just am. But I was a new person. I was a new creation. I could bring before you countless people today. Throughout history, you've had their lives supernaturally changed by the great God because of the crosswork of His Son, Jesus Christ. If people are to be changed, if this country is to be made livable, if marriages are to work, if families are to stay together, then somebody has to change human nature, and nobody and nothing can do that but Jesus Christ. Third, the government cannot help you obey God's command to love your neighbor as you're already loving yourself, but Christ can. Now the actual commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself, but it assumes you're already loving yourself. There was a movement in the 80s and 90s which was horrible. I'd like to love you, but I'm still learning to love myself, so I'll get back to you later. You need to learn to love yourself. Really? I was already pretty good at that. They think it's called being selfish, narcissistic, self-focused. But that was a dodge that was foisted on the culture and many people bought into it. Pastor, I'm working on loving myself. I can't really worry about loving other people. I'm worrying about loving myself first. No, you're just foolish and you've been hoodwinked. God created a good world that's gone bad. Sin has marred everything. You've never met a normal person. Look at the people around you. Families are marred by sin. The environment is marred by sin. We ourselves, inwardly, psychologically, are marred by sin. The world is not the way it was supposed to be. And one of the things that's happened is, I don't want God to tell me what to do, and I don't want to obey His laws, thank you. The number one song on that jukebox of hell is, I did it my way. And you can have a whole host of different people sing it, but it's the number one song on the jukebox of hell. I don't want God to rule over me, I did it my way. But because we can't live in anarchy, civil government passes laws and outlaw crimes that will destroy society. Murders bad, rapes bad, robbery, theft, arson, jaywalking, speeding, bank fraud, insider trading. A whole host of things are outlawed by our culture. Does that mean that people don't do it? No, it means if we can catch you, we'll put you in prison for it. But it doesn't stop people. It doesn't impact the heart. Man-made laws, like the very laws of God, don't penetrate the hardened human heart. They have no power to create the motivation or the ongoing performance. Who's going to start the loving? You know, years ago we would have speakers and we would go into classrooms and lecture on different subjects from a Christian point of view. And that speaker would say, how many of you want to find the love of your life? Everybody raise their hand. How many of you want to be loved? Who's going to start the loving? You or the other person? And most people thought about, well, I'm kind of like the other person, they kind of show me they love me. And who's going to keep it going? See, you can listen to all the songs on the radio you want to, but they're all lies because nobody is going to start the loving and keep it going except God in your life. Every person you commit yourself to is a failed sinner like yourself, and they have their own needs and weaknesses. I was shocked when I went off to college And I discovered that my educated fraternity brothers stole from me. Imagine that. They were in college. Well, duh. But anyway, they stole from me. They stole from each other. I was just the newest victim on the block. Now, guys had their way of getting back at them, sometimes unintentionally. One of the guys, his girlfriend got in a big row and who dumped who is not known at this point, but he sent her some nasty gift and she sent him what we thought was a nice, oh look, a whole shoe box full of homemade chocolate chip cookies. But he left it on his desk and was gone for the weekend. Now the brothers helped themselves to the chocolate chip cookies and they were all gone by Monday morning. But unknown to the brothers, those weren't chunks of chocolate. That was Ex-Lax in those cookies. And we didn't see several of the brothers for a few days because they were indisposed. But what's this all about? Stealing? Did they not know they shouldn't steal? You can go to any library. You can go to seminary libraries today and they have these big monitors when you leave so you can't take books out that are not checked out because people steal from seminary libraries and regular public libraries. The reason why man's social institutions such as government, education or science can't solve the problem of the loveless heart is because none of them have the power and they don't go to the root of the problem. Who's going to make me loving and who's going to fill up my love cup? Mankind is so flawed at its core, its very nature, government can't touch your heart. Education can't touch your heart. Science tries to examine your heart. Even psychologists, they can't see your heart, they can't see your mind. They ask you a bunch of questions and trust that your answers are supposedly legitimate, but they can't really see what's going on inside of you. Christ is radical enough as God to make us lovers of God and then lovers of one another because he goes to the root of the human condition. Something needs to fundamentally change me. And don't smirk, something needs to fundamentally change you too. Now, when I was in college, as it was dawning on me that the world was messed up, and that included me, it was very sobering, very painful. Now, I didn't use the word sin because that would make it religion and God and Christ and salvation and damnation, and I didn't want to go there. But I was beginning to recognize this is a messed up world, and I'm messed up. And then, as I began to explore Christianity a little bit more, Jesus Christ said, He didn't come to do a makeover, He came to change you from the core, from the inside out. Christianity is not putting a picture of Jesus on one wall and the Ten Commandments on the other and go, like the little engine that could. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. No you can't, no you can't, no you can't. You can't change yourself. Can the leopard change his spots? Can the Ethiopian change his skin? No, neither can you who are sinners change your nature. But God can. He changes natures. He changes dispositions. He fills people's love cups so they can love others. I was at an event that was hosted at the Greenbrier Country Club in the mountains of West Virginia. My son had won a trip there and he wasn't married, so as a significant other he invited his old dad to come with him to this week getaway for free. And one of the nights they had, before dinner, they had some kind of mixture and everybody went to the cash bar and bought their stuff. And we had our little drinks with little umbrellas in it and we're just sitting there drinking. And this gal from England who my son worked with on the phone and by computer but had never met, they kind of connected and we're standing there talking. She goes, who are you? And I said, well, I'm dad's Matt. Well, I'm Matt's dad. I'm Matt's dad. Hello. And he goes, what are you doing? And she goes, what are you doing here? And I said, well, Matt doesn't have a significant other, so he was gracious and brought his dad. Oh, that's really sweet. What do you do? Well, she asked. I'm a pastor. Really? What's that all about? How'd you become a pastor? Well, you ask. So I shared my testimony. And she started listening really intently. I said, you know, if I was dating you in college in my BC days, I might have told you all kinds of really sweet things. And I looked her right in the eye and I said, but if it ever came down to me and you, it was going to be me every time. Do you understand what I'm saying? She goes, oh yeah. She looks at her boyfriend. Did you hear what he just said? Did you hear about how he changed? I want to share my testimony on how God changed me. And she was living with this guy in England, but they were having all these problems and she didn't know that God could really change the heart and change your disposition. What's going to make me loving? Am I suddenly going to take a loving pill? How am I going to treat my wife as Christ would have me to treat her? I can't take a loving pill, but I can be Christ's man and he will give me by the power of the Holy Spirit the ability to love my wife. Our husband, our wife, our parents, our children, our next door neighbor, our co-workers, our fellow students, the lady down at the Department of Motor Vehicles, bless her heart, the man at the ticket counter at the airport, they can experience the new me. Christians find themselves with a new ability to love God and to love their neighbor as themselves. 1 John 4.10, this is love, not that we first loved God, but He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation, the one who takes care of our sins. The fruit of the Spirit, the New Testament says, is love, joy, peace, patience, etc. Nine fruit, but the first one is love. If you're a Christian, you should be characterized by some degree of love. Jesus, you know, let's think of Jesus as our example. What is the leader whose name we follow after? We're Christians. What does Jesus come across like in the New Testament? Do you see him using people and disposing of them? Is he a user and a taker? Well, no. He's a sacrificial lover. He's a giver to people. Well, Jesus replicates his life in believers by making them what they weren't before. Christians are to be first and foremost lovers, sacrificial lovers, and it begins with our nearest neighbor, whether it's our wife and kids, our parents, students, co-workers, whoever. Ironic thing is that politicians, government officials, educators, and scientists are human beings who have high ideals, but they're ruined by their very natures. Everything they touch is ruined by their sin. I can't change you, and if I engineer some program to change you, that'll ruin you. all these people, government officials, scientists, educators, or rebel sinners themselves. They know nothing of the love of God in their heart. They have no love for Christ in their heart. They're ignorant and blind to their true condition as they promise to lead us into a better world. We go, oh sure, we'll follow. They think they can legislate, vote, breed, mutate, educate, or dispose of people who are unloving and unloved lives. They can do what needs to be done to give us a new society, and they can't. A man with Christ on the throne of his life and a woman with Christ on the throne of her life are not going to fight, bicker, make snide remarks, attack, counterattack, for Christ will not war against himself. The statistics got as high as 52% back in the 70s of divorce in America. But statistics by a Harvard sociologist that were Christ was on the throne of the husband's life and Christ is on the throne of the wife's life, the divorce rate was one out of 1,015 marriages. Now, I didn't crunch the numbers percentage-wise, but 52% are a minuscule percent. He didn't say professing Christians didn't get divorced. He said Christians that where Christ is on the throne of this man's heart and Christ is on the throne of this woman's heart, when they're following Christ, He will not war against Himself and they're not going to end up in divorce court. Only Christ can change a mean, self-centered, rebellious sinner into a loving, sacrificial giver to others. Only Jesus Christ can do that. And finally, the government can't help you know God and find yourself in knowing Him, but Christ can. The greatest thing in all of eternity is to know God through Jesus Christ. the one true and only God that really exists. Jesus is praying in John 17, and John had enough wisdom to memorize it and then put it to paper. He says in John 17, 3, Father, this is eternal life to know you, the one true and living God, and your Son, Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. This is eternal life. Just in knowing you, we have life. When a man or woman, a boy or a girl comes to know Almighty God, their life explodes with new potential, new possibility. It says in Ecclesiastes that God has put eternity in our hearts. We know that our life calling is more than just walking around the planet, eating up time until we die. God's put eternity in our hearts. We know that we're created for something more than just 75, 85 years on planet Earth. We are creatures of destiny and purpose. Now the culture may say, you're just a nobody on your way to becoming nothing. You're a dumb ox turning a gristmill in this life. But that's not what the Bible says about people who know their God. To become a Christian is to experience the reason why God created you. Life with meaning, purpose, dignity, nobility, love, and possibility. We find for the first time in our lives real joy, real love, real awe in the presence of God. Life is bigger than us, grander than us, more stupendous than us. There is a God and it's not you, but this God is knowable, and to know Him expands all reality. I was coming home from a class, night class, my spring of my senior year, and I've been a Christian about a year, I was walking across campus and Yankees, you know, people who live up there, they can't wait for the spring because the thaw comes and life is beautiful, while Southerners can't wait for the fall and turn off the air conditioners and just breathe low humidity, regular air. Well, this was the spring up north. The leaves were on all the trees. The trees were big on the college campus. The stars were out. The moon was out. I was walking home and I looked at all that. And I thought I wouldn't have had for many years since childhood, but certainly not as when I got to be older. It dawned on me, the God who made all this is my father. What kind of potentiality exists in knowing the God who owns all this, made all this, sustains all this millisecond by millisecond? What does that mean for my life, my future? The God who made everything is infinite. He's personal, and He's holy, holy, holy, and He's our Father. At the great expense of His Son, at the sacrifice of His Son, at the death of His Son, God showed the world that He wouldn't change His character, but He would send His Son to rescue guilty sinners and give them a new life. Everyday life isn't humdrum for the Christian. It doesn't have to be. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and give thanks. Now the non-Christian gets up and says, good Lord morning. The Christian gets up and says, good morning Lord. Whole different difference. When a person becomes a real Christian, the things that rebel sinners get stuck on can now seem so childish beneath us in our new position as children of God. How can I lower myself to indulge in such fantasies? How can I lower myself to play such games? How can I lower myself to spend all that time in such mindless diversions when I know the King of Kings and have a life laid out before me that I should live it to His glory? Am I going to pour my life down a rat hole? Does my life mean nothing to me? No, my life means everything. God created me, for by grace you are saved through faith, and not out of yourselves. It's the gift of God, not as a result of works that no man can boast. For we were, what, created in Christ Jesus unto good works. God saved us because he has a life of good works planned for us. Government science education cannot show you the glory of who you are. Science believes that you have evolved from energy and matter over eons of time, and your life is worth no more than that of a gnat. You are a creature of chance with no meaning, no purpose, no goals, no future, no beauty, no nobility, no greatness. So go on now and enjoy your drab, empty, brutish, and short life or what's left of it. That's what science says if you take notes in class. In downtown London in the 80s, Edith Schaeffer was crossing the street with her 10-year-old grandson. They had come from a small village in Switzerland to do some things in London. And the fashion of that day is before all the piercings, all the things that become fashionable in our day, was to fill your hair with glue and then to pull it out to really weird extremes and put things in your hair. And some of you older people may remember the glue days. And the 10-year-olds were going to, just kind of staying there staring at this guy. Eva Schaffer was so wise and so compassionate, she goes, don't stare at him. He's been told since he was a baby that his life was just a chance configuration of atoms. His life had no meaning and purpose that he's going to die and go back to dust. So if he wants to act a little bit crazy, that fits in perfectly with what he's been told life is. Life is crazy. Life is stupid. Life is absurd. Feel compassion for him, but don't look down on him. He's just believed the lies he's been taught all of his life. Education can't tell you who you are or show you the glory of God. Education has lost its way in the dark. And education says there is no such thing as truth, no beauty, no goodness, no excellence, nothing worthy of praise. In postmodern America, nothing is good and nothing is bad, and gray is the color of this generation. but to know the infinite and personal God. To behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ has been ruled out by the university. No, that's not true and we're not going to go there and we're not going to drag that into the classroom. The best that our narcissistic professors can come up with is gazing at their own image at the bottom of the postmodern well. Science, education and government now work together to tell you that God doesn't exist. So claiming to be wise, we've lost all the glory and dignity of mankind being created in the image of God. We find ourselves as the chance configuration of atoms and energy and time with no more meaning or purpose and nobility to our lives than a slug or a mushroom. Don't go to your professors for counsel on how to live because they're clueless. But the God who really exists is infinite, personable, knowable, The Bible is no longer black words on a white page, but it's God's love letter to you. I had to read the Bible for a religion class, and it was mumbo-jumbo, taught by people who didn't believe it, and let us know they didn't believe it, which I wondered why they did that for a job. I mean, would IBM hire you to debunk IBM all day? But anyway, that's what they did for a living. And then I became a Christian. I had to go back and reread chunks of it for this final. And somebody had changed the Bible. Or actually, somebody had changed me. And I could begin to understand, I mean I wasn't a Bible scholar right out of the gate here, but I could begin to understand what's going on and what these people said wasn't true. Jesus said the most spectacular, amazing, fulfilling, and mind-blowing thing in all of existence is to know my Father. And He said, I've come to save you. So He can know my Father like I've known Him this way for all of eternity. It's that blessed to know Him. But you can't know Him in your current sinful condition, so I will come and save you at the cost of my own life. And you can come to know Him and spend eternity with Him. You know, government will never help you find your way back to God. It will never show you the glory of knowing God. It will never show you the meaning and purpose of being a human being made in God's image. It just can't. Is a mouse ever going to take you by the hand and show you the glory of a cat? No. Is the thief going to take you by the hand and show you the glory of the policeman and the judge? No. But Christians can say with Paul, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it, the gospel, is the power of God unto salvation for anyone who believes. God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of Christ. In the presidential election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson won and Christians swooned. They knew that he was a deist. They knew that he had a cut-and-paste Bible. You know what a cut-and-paste Bible is? You take an X-Acto knife or razor blade and you go through the Bible, everything you disagree with, you just cut it out. Just cut it out. And he had a cut-and-paste Bible. Oh, what are we stuck with, this godless man? And they knew of his dalliances with other women other than his wife, and they knew him to be an immoral man, they knew all these... What in the world are we stuck with? And they were grieved. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson. But they had more grace than most American Christians have had for fifty years. They didn't do this. Well, you know, we need to get together and have a Christian political party. We need to put Christians in the White House, Christians in the Supreme Court, and Christians here and there to counteract Thomas Jefferson. And, okay, so you have Christians in government. Does the government now have power to change the heart? Does government now have the power to do this and that? No. But what they did do is the Christians went to prayer. God, have mercy on our nation. God, send a revival." And the second Great Awakening, which had been kind of dribbling along for about half a dozen years, suddenly took off, and Thomas Jefferson could neither aid it nor stop it. It just went on without him. Who was the king during the great awakening of the 1740s? Crazy King George III. Could he stop it? No. Could he aid it? No. It was a sovereign work of God. The churches were revolutionized. The nation was uplifted. Same thing that happened at the time of 1800 when the Christians went to prayer and God sent a revival. Our greatest thing is not to get Christians in the White House. That's fine. The greatest thing is to get God on the throne of all the hearts of all his people and to multiply the number of people. who have Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. What happened in England was they didn't experience the terror of the French Revolution. They had so many people converted, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people converted to the preaching of Whitefield and Wesley and people like that, that their nation experienced a new birth that went on for a hundred years. Let's follow the example of the Christians of 1800. Let's pray for revival. Let's pray that the thousands of churches in Georgia would experience a revival with the pastors and the leaders and the people, and that they would be salt and light, and that it would go across America, and God would change America for His glory. If government does something, who takes the credit? Well, you've seen photo ops. You know what those are about. If God does something outstanding, God gets the glory. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the patience of these people as I went over this evening. Would you stir up their thinking? Is our last best hope Christians in politics? Or is our last best hope Jesus Christ on the throne of multitudes of new people? Christ on the throne of his people who exist now? Lord, have mercy upon us as a nation. We have choices between cholera and anthrax before us as political options. We pray that you would have mercy on our nation and that you would send a revival. And in your mercy would you bring it by us and would you revive our hearts too. For Jesus' sake we pray. Amen.