APR 30 2017 | Things Adam Wants to Talk About S1E2

Sea Change Church · Things Adam Wants to Talk About S1E2 · Adam Stadtmiller · April 30, 2017
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Right on. Well, hey, let me just pray and we'll jump into this. Lord Jesus, thank you for a time to look into your word. Thank you for the constant of your word, the anchor of your word that gives us something to go back to, to lean upon and to lean into. We bless you and thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, hey, I am starting, actually we're in week two of a series and I've just figured out the title of the series. It's called Things Adam Wants to Talk About.

And so we have about a month until we start our giant series. The giant series will be looking at the life of King David and as a young boy. And not so much focusing on just the life of David, but all the giants that David had to overcome in his life. And if you look at it, his life was a life fighting giants. He had, he struggled with anxiety and depression.

If you want to have a, or an ally in the fight against those two enemies or giants, David was a great guy to lean into. If you look at the Psalms, he just had so many issues with those things and they could be a place of rest for us. He fought that as a giant. As a, as a young boy, he fought Goliath. And we know that that was a major giant in his life.

He had difficult relationships and friendships. He had a great friendship with Jonathan, but his 30 mighty men, most of them he had broken relationships with. He was a horrible father. If you look at him with his relationship with Absalom, who turned on him, another giant in his life. And we're going to look at this life of what it likes to fight our, what it's like to fight our giants and how, and how we're going to do it.

And what I want to do as a congregation is to, once again, use this term to lock our shields together and to identify the giants in our lives that we really need to go after. I think over the next nine months, I want to go giant hunting, uh, so that we can walk out at the end of this year and say, that has been put to death in my life. It is not something I struggle with anymore. Or if I do, it is something that I have dominion over as a regular basis.

So that's what we're going to do. And I'm excited about that until we start that series, which is going to be in alignment with when our small groups start. Uh, I had to come up with some things to speak about. And so the Adam's favorite topic, it's kind of like Oprah's favorite things, things Adam wanted to talk about. So I wanted to talk about debt. Also wanted to talk about the rise of modern human secularism, which might seem like a big term.

And, uh, if you're not aware of what's been happening in society, probably since the enlightenment, uh, that has been working its way into our culture. Uh, I think we, as believers, we need to be aware. And I think if you're going to understand what's happening in our culture today, uh, you're only gonna be able to truly understand it with spiritual eyes.

To be able to make sure, like John Stott said, when he says, I read the newspaper, I read it with the newspaper in one hand, uh, and the Bible in the other. And I don't think we really have newspapers anymore. I'm kind of dating myself. But, uh, he would read it with spiritual eyes. If you look at things around the world, like, um, you know, uh, the, the, the refugee crisis that is happening and people being pushed into the Western world that is allowing the spread of Christianity through those parts of the world, you'll, you'll see that in, um, Iran right now, you have the fastest growing church in the world.

It's easy to look at a refugee crisis and see it from political lenses, which we see, and miss what perhaps God is doing in the peace. And so as things happen in our culture, as things happen that sometimes can be scary in our culture and can tend to take people of faith and to put them into small waterless pastures cordoned off as, as, um, people that really aren't in touch with society, uh, it can be scary.

And the thing to do is to understand and to see what Jesus said or understand and remember what Jesus said, which was when you see these things happening, look up for what? Your day of what? Anybody know what that is? This redemption is near that when we see things like this happening, we need to keep spiritual eyes on. And so today we're going to be talking about with the context and the backdrop of the rise of secularism, uh, and the, uh, the oppression of, uh, God's people, uh, in the time of Esther.

If you have not read the story of Esther, that is going to be your homework during the week. She was a queen in a secular nation where the Jewish people were, um, enslaved and captured and, and part of, of that, but they were, they were no longer in their home. They'd been taken away and she becomes queen and has an opportunity when Haman rises up and makes a decision that he wants to use his political power to influence the king to eradicate the Jews.

Now, if you look at your notes, you're going to see Mordecai's name a lot. For some reason in the midst of my sermonizing, I took Mordecai's name and it's actually not Mordecai. It's Haman. I preached the entire sermon this morning with notes included using Mordecai. That was actually her relative. That was a good guy. And about 50 people texted me after the sermon.

No one stopped me in the midst of the sermon. No one raised their hand or anything, thankfully. So wherever you see Mordecai, you can erase. That's what's happening here. I thought that was happening. Uh, wherever you see Mordecai, you can erase it and put Haman. And if you've not read the story of Esther, it's such an inspirational story. And a really inspirational story in regard to God using a woman to save a culture.

Uh, and it's, so if you have nothing to do this evening and there's no good, um, Netflix to binge watch, check out the life of Esther and read through the life of Esther and see what happens. Because Haman ends up with a very ironic ending. Uh, I will give you a spoiler that, uh, that Esther succeeds. But there's a key verse as we're looking into this chapter four.

And the key verse is, you're going to see it on a regular basis, is when they said, maybe you have come for what? Such a time as this. I believe there's been such a time as this many times in history. Whether it be in 1933 when the rise of the brown shirts that became the Nazis began to begin social, uh, um, socialism, democratic socialism is what they called it.

Uh, that rise where Christians had to stand up like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say enough is enough. But we know that as the brown church were rising and Germany was being, um, um, brought under the control of the Nazis, has that changed? Many, uh, religious theologians and, and Germany was kind of seen as the hotbed for the newest thought. Humans loved the newest thought, the newest philosophies, the newest ideas.

And so Germany was seen as this place of the, um, the, theocratic aristocracy, the intelligentsia. They had all the best ideas. And in the midst of all those ideas, some of which were more liberal, it was more elastic than they had allowed the scriptures to be in the past, there was this rising up of a political solution. And, and Hitler would end up calling it the final solution, which ended up once again in the spirit of Haman, trying to eradicate the Jews.

I will say there has been no other group in the world that has been tried, other, um, nations or peoples have tried to eradicate more than the Jews. There's been a lot of different, um, groups that have had issues throughout the past, but as a storied history over and over again, the people of God, even today, were trying to be eradicated. Hitler was one of the last.

And so we see it happening here with this story of Esther and for such a time as this, you know, once again, I, I pointed at history and I want to point at this moment in history. Um, I don't know if it's the end times. I think for a long time, you know, um, Paul, the apostle thought it was the end times. Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought it was the end times.

Uh, there's a lot of end times thinking, and I've never been one to make a prediction on the end times. I kind of feel like every day if we live, it's like the end times, we should be living to share the love of Jesus. And it's really not going to affect hopefully the way in which we live. But I will say that we are at an apex in, in our culture right now.

There's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of global understanding of things happening. And I think people of faith are finally, at least in our Western culture, being asked to live a life of faith that's going to cost them something. Now, people in China understand that the faith has cost them something. People in Iraq, people in Syria, Christians throughout the world have understood, and they had to ask themselves the questions, even if it's under the iron curtain back in the 1970s and 80s, that for such a time of this, will I remain silent?

Well, we're still in the balance right now in a nation that is becoming, I would say, somewhat more hostile, at least a segment of society is becoming more hostile to faith-based thinking, also absolutes, and also a belief in God, God's will over man's will. I want to talk about that today. But more importantly, not to get on a soapbox, not to create another edition of some news program you would see to, you know, Harbinger on certain ideas, but to give you some tools to make a difference in the world.

And let me just give you a spoiler alert. I firmly believe that if we as Christ followers encounter the rich love of God for you personally and are able to experience his love for you as an individual, that will overflow to a place where people, it says, once they see their love, will not be able to deny it and will be able to give glory to God the Father.

I think we've been arguing for the wrong platform. Spoiler alert. That it isn't just about, you know, whether it's about the sanctity of life or issues or all these different things we fight or whether they're going to teach gender politics in schools. I think all those things we have to have a say there. But it seems so often that we start there.

We start with our arguments for whatever rights we think are being infringed upon and we start with our rights. And I think we've lost the power, the spiritually nuclear power of this. Jesus, God loves me. And not only is it a bumper sticker, I've actually experienced it. Like I can look back at my life and there's moments in my life and I think it's hard because we're callous these days and we live in a world of cursing to experience that, but make it our pursuit to experience the love of God.

I know that's one thing that Miss Kim wants to do with the children here is to let them experience how much God loves them. So let me just give a little spoiler alert that I want us to start from that place. What's up, buddy? Yeah, you go, potty. You go, boy. Make it happen. It's going to be in the sermon now. Yeah, online. We just had a kid walk forward, FYI, and wanted to use the bathroom.

So there you go. And that's allowed during the service here. So unlike when I was a kid, just wait. Story of Esther, three things you'll see in your notes. The first is this. The story of Esther chronicles a woman living during an historical apex tasked with the proposition to risk personal welfare for the salvation of others. This is a great question.

How much of your own personal welfare would you risk to follow Jesus? It's a great question that we haven't really had to think about, but Christians seem to do a lot better under persecution than in power. If you look at the persecuted church in China in different places versus when the church had power during the Spanish Inquisition, during the time of the Puritanisms with our great witch hunts, we do not do very well with power.

David himself, as you will see, was better as a child on the run from Saul or fighting Goliath or even running from his son Absalom than he was as a king. He did some great things as a king. But if you want to see the greatest stories of the things that David did, the majority of them happened when he wasn't actually in this kingship seat. Church is the same way.

And the reason is because people struggle with power. Whether you are a secular humanist or whether you are a Christ follower, that one thing is true for both of those ideologies, philosophies, thoughts is this. It's full of people that are following those beliefs and people get corrupted by power. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely. As you're going to see here, oftentimes people will take it to the point where they'll start legislating morality.

The church has been phenomenal at this. We have had witch trials. We've done the whole thing. What you can and can't do, we've tried to legislate morality. This is what Haman was trying to do in the time of Esther, passing laws to legislate morality. We see a shift in morality in our country. And what you're seeing is the law, there is a fight in the courts now to legislate morality, but no longer under the banner of the Ten Commandments, but under the banner of what I would say is advanced secular humanism.

We'll talk about that in a moment. So cross out Mordecai and write Haman, the enemy of the Jews, was seeking to use political power to eradicate God's people. I do not believe that every person in our nation that wants to put in new laws that are based on secular humanism are trying to eradicate believers. But I do believe that the enemy of the cross, Satan, would love to do everything he can to eradicate the message of Christ.

So I'm not ringing the fire bell. I'm not going to go in and take street, you know, and protest and march. I just want us to be aware of what I see happening. And so we can counteract it with what? The love of Jesus. Because that has to be the platform. And so the context of everything I'm saying tonight is asking you this. Do you regularly encounter the fact, and not more than the fact, the actual presence of the love of Christ in your life?

Asking you this. When was the last time you actually felt washed over by the love of God? Now maybe you remember your first crush as a middle schooler or whatever it was, high schooler, or maybe you were an early riser and it was in fourth grade. Whatever it was for you. So I remember Lana in kindergarten, a little Hawaiian girl, and I looked across and I don't know what was happening, but Lana was looking good.

She was, you know, we were in kindergarten. She had beautiful black hair and just, oh man, she's from Hawaii and she wore these little Hawaiian dresses. I'll just leave it at that. We were both in kindergarten. There was no love story beyond that. But I remember I came encountered with this feeling. It was more than a feeling with God because I've had so many times where God has met me and showed me like he did in my seat today, you know, he loves me.

It is seeking to understand that. So once again, everything that I say today has to be wrapped or packaged in the idea of have you encountered the love of God? And my job here or my mission here is to provide a platform for every one of you to encounter the love of God here as a group so that you can be equipped to go out and change your world.

We are a congregational empowering church. That's what we are all about. We're not about me being a rock star. We're not about the band being the stage, being the star. We are about you encountering God, being equipped through, you know, things like spiritual gifts, teaching, training, but to go out and to change your corner. Number three, Esther undergirded all that she did with humility and supernatural resources.

Supernatural resources are the antithesis of humanism. Humanism says that there is no spirit. There is physical. Everything is physical. There is no spirit. There is no heaven. There is no God. It is an absolute faith that God does not exist. One of the reasons I believe that secular humanism is a religion is because you have to have faith that in a God that does not exist and that you cannot prove that he does not exist.

People say to you, can you prove God exists? Absolutely not. I've never tried to get up and convince people that God exists. He's going to have to do that. I want to preach and speak about the love of God, but I can't prove God to you. I know that. I can't prove it to my children. I've never tried to prove God to my children. They are going to have to experience God on their own.

He is going to have to be gracious enough to show himself. But at the same way that we need to have faith that God does exist, in order to be an atheist or away from God or not believing in God, you also have to have faith. So I regularly speak to my atheist friends and I say, man, you have so much faith. I can't believe the amount. How can you look at the stars and say there is no God?

It just all just happened, right? You have so much faith. They hate when I say that to them, but we just go like to banter on occasion. One of the things that Esther did was when she was sharing this story, when she was getting ready to go and speak to the king at perhaps her own suffrage, that she undergirded what she did with fasting and with prayer.

She reached into heaven and said, I am going to undergird all that I do. And I'm going to say, as you're going to change your corner, because that is what we're calling you to. We're calling you to change the place that you live, whether it be your college campus, whether it be in the Navy, whether it be wherever you are, wherever you go, we want to see you equipped to change.

And in order to do that, you're going to have to somehow harvest through the roads of prayer, through the roads of God's word, through the roads of, or the pathways of forgiveness. All these things are supernaturally charged in order to bring more results and more impact into everything you do. If you're going to go speak to your neighbor and invite them to your potluck, like one of our people was challenged, they said, we want to change our relationship.

Corner, I'm going to have a potluck for all my neighbors. And she recently had a potluck and she had gift bags and she put little hearts and said, you know, you're loved, pass this on. She's going to be sharing in a couple of weeks. And so she had all of her neighbors over and she gave them all gift bags. She said, take this little heart and pass it on.

And then she got ahold of them all afterwards and said, who'd you give the heart to? And she's heard stories of how the hearts went on. When she did that, she spent a month prior to that event praying and infusing that event with prayer, believing supernaturally that God was going to work his mojo through that. That is faith-based understanding.

That is believing in what cannot be seen and what separates us from only believing in science. Not that we don't believe in science. You don't want to have Christians that don't believe in science, but I don't want to be like Nacho Libre's wrestling partner. You know, I hate orphans. I believe in science and only science. I want to understand the Haman spirit.

Once again, cross out Mordecai, right? The Haman spirit and the rise of secularism. Haman was a man who sought to use political means to eradicate the people of God. Using politics to regulate morality is nothing new. I've said that already. The modern Haman spirit and the rise of what I would call now is happening puritanical secularism. My word, my term.

Now, maybe you remember and you've studied the Puritans back in the day. Puritans were a form of congregationists like us, congregational believers and Christians that began to flourish when the nation was coming to its origins and to its beginnings and began to have political power and began to have so much political power. They were affecting the court systems.

They were doing things like chasing down people that they didn't think were Christian enough. If you dressed, you know, if you didn't dress right, you would be given, you know, like, maybe you've read the Scarlet Letter, the woman who had to wear the A, you know, for adultery. You'd be given names. You'd be castigated, put aside. And they were trying to make a separation that there were godly people.

And then everyone else will be ostracized from society. We will call them adulterous. We will call them witches. We will find them. We will hunt them down. And it was a really bad time, not only in our nation's history, it's a bad time for the church. And I just want to call that out, that the church has been really good at trying to regulate morality.

It's interesting how God has never done that, that I have seen. He's oftentimes, what I see in the scriptures, come to me. You know, it is a choice if you want to. He's given us a choice to follow him. But what I see happening today is the same playbook that was used by the Puritans is being used by many people who are in secular humanism. Or people that are pushing the idea of man first.

Humanism being the idea that man supplants God. What is secularism? Look at your notes. It's an indifference or a rejection or exclusion of religious and religious considerations. I would say, I believe that secularism and atheism is a religion. One of the things I regularly have discussions with my atheist friends about, and I have multiple friends.

I'm just saying that I have a guy I play basketball with. I have another friend I play basketball with at a different place. And almost one out of four times we start talking about faith and this idea of faith. And I continue to try to push that what you're doing, it's a religion. Perhaps you have seen the atheist society that has church now here once a month in San Diego.

They all meet and they sing songs from the Beatles. I mean, it looks a lot like church. They have food and Kool-Aid and all other kinds of things. Kool-Aid, I just threw that one in there for fun. Maybe we're around in the 80s. In 1933, as the rise of Hitler was happening, there was a group of humanist thinkers. They were theologians, they were professors, not theologians, excuse me, they were professors, they were the intelligentsia, they were scientists that got together and decided they wanted to take the next step on what had started with the age of enlightenment.

Age of enlightenment being that knowledge and reason have led us to a place where we no longer need God. Now, this is not new. If you go back to Genesis, you're going to see the original temptation if you go on to your notes a little bit further. Where, you know, the enemy Satan comes to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, 5. And he says, for God knows that when you eat from the tree, that your eyes will be opened.

And you what? You'll be like God, knowing good and evil. You see, mankind has always desired to not only be like God, but perhaps to be God. You're going to see that today where the decisions, and this is what many of the battles are happening in society today, the decisions that many theists believe that should be up to God, whether it be when you die, whether it be if you can be born with the pro-life movement, things of this should be man's decision and not God's decision.

We'll talk about a few of the ways that this is happening. But before we do, so I want to read the beginning of the Humanist Manifesto. Once again, let me give you some homework. It won't take you long. Go read Humanist Manifesto 1, 2, and 3. There's three of them because the ideas of humanism are set to a core belief that they change as new revelation comes.

So unlike the Word of God, secular humanism is something that will change as you go. But at the beginning of it, they stated that humanism was a new religion and that the time had come for a new religion. This is actually an updated one that doesn't say it as much, which is from 1933. It says the time has come for the widespread recognition of radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world.

What they did there was say that this, they were saying that we need new religious beliefs based on knowledge and science. Now, Humanist Manifesto 2 and 3 changed that because they realized it was a mistake to call it a religion. They wanted to separate themselves. I'm not letting them off the hook. I'm going to go back to number one and hold them to it nonetheless.

And it says the time has passed for mere revisions of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted old beliefs. That's true. Religions around the world are under necessity of coming to terms with the new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience. So human knowledge and experience are kind of the core from which we make our decisions.

In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism. In order that religious humanism may be better understood, we, the undersigned, desire to make certain affirmations which we believe the facts of our contemporary life demonstrate. If you want to know the end of that, read it. It's not long.

It'll take you about eight minutes to read it. But it's phenomenal as you look through it. You will see every argument you see happening in our society today will parallel with these humanistic beliefs. I'm going to show a few things that have happened in it. I'm going to skip this part on the definition of religion because I believe that religion, well, I will read it.

The definition of religion, which I think fits with secular humanism, is a personal set or institutionalized system. Attitudes, belief, or practices. That's what Webster calls religion. You are going to see that if you read about secular humanism. Religion does not need to be a god, in my opinion. But when it does have god included, it's called theistic religion.

So the reason you're here today is because you're a theist, hopefully. You believe there's a god. You believe, hopefully, that he loves you and you know him. We can intimately know him. He created the universe. It wasn't arbitrary. It didn't just happen. Everything you see, the mathematical calculations it would take for all of this to happen, didn't just happen.

That there is a divine creator god. I would say that if you remove that, you can still have a form of religion that is absent of god. And this is one of the cultural arguments, is that atheism is a form of secular religion with faith being replaced by science. Science. You can look up the history channel. They have a whole thing on secular humanism where you can watch as they talk about science.

Here's what we see happening in what I call secular puritism. Or secular humanistic puritism. Here's a few things that have happened. First, God's will has been replaced by man's will. It's the abandonment of absolutes. So whatever man wants, man should be able to have. I think gender politics is where you see probably the most extreme view that you can see of this.

That if a person no longer, even though scientifically would say that gender is related to biology, now they're saying it's not related to biology. There's actually an identity. And so man's will trumps science. Even though science is the main core for secular humanism. You'll see that there's an abandonment of absolutes. That the more we learn that truth will never be known, is what I was reading the other day.

It'll always be a moving scale. That the more we learn, the more we know it'll be a new truth. One of the scary things about that is when we come to certain truths like humans have done in the past, that a certain race or a certain group of people should not exist because of a new truth that is found. One of the comforting things is being anchored to a scripture that has been tested through time.

And that the Bible is an anchored word of God that we believe is authoritative. That's one of the major differences between theistic religion and secular religion. Is that there is an anchor. And you'll see the lack of an anchor today that there are no absolutes. There's absolutely a push in our society to have zero absolutes. Whatever a person decides, as long as it doesn't what?

Hurt someone else is okay. So it's wrong to kill somebody because that hurts someone else. But if the person asks you to kill them, it's okay because it doesn't hurt anyone else. And so we see that shift where no longer God is God, but man is God. Moving on. Sin has been replaced by a new word, hate. So there is no such thing as sin anymore, but there is such a word as hate.

Hate is the new sin. And one of the ways that this is perpetrated on people is if you were to tell man that he cannot have what he wants. If you tell a person based on a steadfast, anchored, absolute word of God, putting yourself in submission. Second humanism puts itself under no one's submission except the will of man. If you put your submission to the will of God and the word of God, then you will allow God's word to guide your life.

To tell someone that something is a sin or to go against what they desire for themselves in our society is one of the greatest evils of society. And so now, instead of using sin, secular humanists won't use the word sin, but they will use the word hate. Now let's line this up again with Puritanism. This is the same playbook that the church has used for years to regulate morality.

It's just in the opposite. I will say that secular morality, as I said, is on a sliding scale. Speech has been regulated. Now the Puritans were great at regulating speech. You're seeing that. You know, words do bring life and death. And the hope is to get, I believe, faith-believing people to a place where they can no longer speak what they say is truth without it being legislated.

And you'll see that in certain countries. There's things you cannot say or do. Now, this is something that the Puritans were phenomenal at. Non-conformists to secular thinking have been ostracized. I don't know if you see that, but when somebody says something or steps out of line these days, immediately, I guess Twitter has become a real person because I see in the news, Twitter said this, Twitter did that, so it's anthropomorphic now.

But like Twitter reacts, you know. And all of a sudden, people will be ostracized. Now you remember the scarlet letter, you know, the adultery or whatever it is. We would ostracize people that did not, you know, follow God the way that we thought they should follow him. Well, the same thing happens today, except we use words like bigot. We use other words to put people into corners where they can be ostracized from society.

It's a very powerful tool. It was powerful when the Christians were doing it, and it's powerful now as we see that. And finally, morality has been legislated. I don't want to go any further on that because there's too many rabbit holes, but that is what is happening. And what I want you to understand is that this goes back all, I mean, all the way to Genesis chapter 3, but a lot of it happened during the age of enlightenment.

And for the last 300 years or so has been pushing forward, and most people don't know where it's coming from. The majority of people you meet on the street will not know where their philosophy or their theology or whatever comes from. It'll be a potpourri, it'll be a poultice of a little bit of Buddha's sayings, a little bit of what Jesus said, a little bit of secular humanism of like, people should be able to do what they want.

That makes sense to me. And they kind of mix it all up into this religious, I would think, hodgepodge. My old pastor used to say that we are now the new spiritual doctors where we give a prescription. This is what we feel that we need. So we write ourselves a prescription as opposed to having a constant of something like God's word. I believe we are in one of the best times ever to share the love of Christ.

I believe that with all that's going on in society today, people are looking for truth. Once again, as a spoiler alert, coming into sharing, how does this matter to you? The answer being, if you can get in touch with the love of God and be able to present the love of God to others, it's going to have so much more force. It's going to have so much, like I said, spiritually nuclear authority to change people's lives that we will begin to see the culture shift.

Whereas I see what most, many, not most, many believers have done is separate themselves from society. During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, we were so good at separating ourselves from society while secular humanism began to run rampant in entertainment. And we just separated ourselves. We pulled our kids out of every school. We, you know, had everything that was Christian.

We separated ourselves. And now it's 20, 30 years later, and we're having to re-engage society, re-engage culture. But what is our tool? It can't be a bunch of arguments. It has to be the love of God. We're going to quickly look, and I'm circling the tower now to give you some keys about how Esther was able to change her society. Here's three things.

The first is this, a Christ-centered response. Start, as I said, from a personal understanding of God's love. It says that Esther understood that she was loved and chosen by God. So key. Esther knew that she was God's people. When there was an issue, when there was a problem, she said, go gather who? Go gather the Jews. Why did she say gather the Jews?

Because she understood that she was a member of God's people. She understood her authority. As you look in the scripture, it says the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. To begin to understand your position, let's ask you a question. Do you understand the authority that you have in Christ? If God were to come to you and say, I just want to take an afternoon walk with you, and I want to tell you the change that you can visibly make in this world by harvesting from me the things that I have allowed, that I have put you to have dominion over, that Jesus won these things on the cross, and I want you to know how you can change your world by partnering with me to change the world.

Just you, just one person. Imagine if Mother Teresa had said, you know, I'm just one tiny little woman from Eastern Europe. You know, what difference can I make in India? But she said, for such a time as this, she saw that there was a need, and she stepped into the need that God called her into. I want to say that God has a need for you, a place for you, and he's asking you and saying, hey, for such a time as this in your life, for your neighbors, for the school that you're at, for the place that you go, that understanding who you are, that you are a child of God, that you will not be pushed around by the enemy, and that you understand that wherever we go, whether it be into jail, or whether it be to the stake like Joan of Arc, or anything else like that, that wherever we go, you, that Christ will follow and be with us, or lead us to that place.

That's key. To reestablish, so here's the first thing, in living in a secular culture, because you are. You're living in an incredibly secular culture, where secular puritism is taking over. And is there a chance, because a lot of people are like, well, it's the end times anyways, to hell with it. I mean, seriously, and they mean to hell with it.

Like, they can go to hell, and I'm going to go to heaven, and it's the end times. I'm kind of tired of end times preaching. I kind of feel it can oftentimes cause us to disengage. What I want to say is that in this moment, you know what, maybe God will turn back the tide. You know, in the 1960s, people were looking at the sexual revolution of what was happening, like, it's over.

You know, you look at some of the writings from back then, you know, it's over. But what happens after that? You know, the rise of youth ministries, the rise of an installation, even more young life, that started in the 1950s. There was this revival with youth. There was a worship revival in Vineyard that happened. After World War II, people thought, you know, of all the atrocities that have happened, it would be so easy to say it's over.

You know, the Jews have got their nation back. Jesus is coming back. Look at this prophecy that was fulfilled. Let's just, you know, give up and ride home. But instead, at that moment, Billy Graham comes around in 1951, and there's an evangelical sweep across the nation throughout the 50s. After the 60s, it happened again. In the 1970s, there was the Jesus people that happened.

In the 1980s, there was the youth movement that happened. And maybe it'll happen again if we cannot let go of the rope. You ever been in a tug of war where one group's losing, and all of a sudden, a few people sitting on the sideline, like, run over, and they grab on, and they all start pulling, and then they pull that other team into the mud?

I got to say, you know, I believe that there is that opportunity today if we will reengage. Do we believe that a great revival can come to the world again? There can be another sweep of people coming into the kingdom. Many of you are here today because of those revivals and the things that happened. I want to empower us and encourage us to quit thinking about the end times and live in today for such a moment as this.

Because if it is the end times, the only moment we have is now. And to change it and to understand that you are a child of God and that you have been raised up by God for such a time as this. Second thing, circling the tower now, the wheels of the plane, I've touched the ground once, I've buzzed the tower, I'm coming back around like in Top Gun.

Understanding from this platform of God, I just got this one verse before I go on to the second point. So, Jesus says, a new command I give you, love one another as what? Where's the starting place of loving others? Being known, yeah, or that Christ has loved you. You can't love others until you know how much God has loved you. Do you see the starting point?

A lot of us are starting from this, you know, dry well. Or we feel like we're living this life where we're barely above the surface. We just get a little bit of a breath and we're living on scraps. I know we come through hard times. But what does it take? Do you ever have seasons of abundance and blessing? And if not, begin to seek and ask God. Put yourself around other believers and look for seasons of abundance.

Because I believe that so much of our life, if we're going to make a difference, we've got to be living out of abundance, not out of lack. Second point, start from a platform of faith and harvest supernatural power. I love in verse 16, what does Esther say to do? Does she say, hey, I'm just going to barge into the king's office? No. What does she say in verse 16?

Fast for me. She believed that in a supernatural ability, that we are not just physical beings. That there is a spiritual component. There is a spiritual world. And not everything can be seen. That if there are powers and there are forces and there are things that are happening and swirling around us, that God has given us the ability to tap into and to release.

It says that we can break down strongholds. We can bind and unbind things. Perhaps your family has had hate or unforgiveness for generations swirling about it. But maybe you're the person through prayer, through the word of God, or through forgiveness, or harvesting through worship. Because all these are roads to the kingdom that allow us to harvest the gold of heaven, to be released into the world.

They can come and demolish a stronghold. It doesn't say that we just break down strongholds. We demolish strongholds through these things. To the point like when you're watching the History Channel, they think there used to be a society here. We're not sure, but it looks like there might have been. So that thing that was so strong, that giant in your life that was so big, now no longer looms.

It has been destroyed to the point where it has been demolished. Where you are no longer a conqueror, Christ says you are what? More than a conqueror. You didn't just conquer. You demolished. Resourcing. Maybe it takes some fasting. But when was the last time, and once again to ask you, you decided to use a spiritual resource to attack a giant in your life?

Or perhaps an issue with a neighbor, or someone you want to see saved. You said, you know, I'm going to fast one meal. Or I'm going to pray every day before I walk out. I'm just going to harvest these things of God. That's the second thing. One, know who you are. Know you're loved by God. Two, harvest the power of God into every area of your life.

Every time you get fear, God help me. I need you. Just dump hope on me. Give forgiveness to me. Give your worth and your mercy to me, God. And finally, don't remain silent. You know, Esther, it says, if you remain silent at a time like this, God's still going to get his job done. I love that. It's like, it's not all dependent on you. But God wants to co-labor with you in it.

And are you going to remain silent? I'm not saying we have to protest. People always say, well, why don't Christians protest? I think one of the reasons Christians don't protest is because we have an outlet like prayer. We have an outlet like worship. When you have no outlets, oftentimes you'll want to go do things like protest. Now, I think Christians need to protest.

And they've done great things in the past. In South America, when there was a whole bunch of the poor were being oppressed, it was Christians who stood up. When it was slavery in England, it was Christians that stood up. And they protested. And they marched. And they did all those things to bring a light, to shed light. And if we need to do that, I think we need to do that.

But what is God calling you to do? You know, are we just silent, just basking in the love of God? The love of God is meant to be shared. The love of God has the ability to change the world. And I want to say that if secular humanism has science and all these other things, the one thing it doesn't have is love. I was reading or watching a show recently.

And they were talking about love. And they said, where does love come from? And the scientist said, well, love is just a chemical reaction in our brain. I'm like, really? I don't have the faith for that. I don't have the faith to believe that love is just a chemical reaction. I don't have the faith to believe that beauty just showed up. Where does beauty come from?

It just happened? I just, God, give me the faith to be an atheist. I don't have the faith to be an atheist. As I look at those things, I see that Esther was not willing to remain silent. She was willing to say, you know what, I'm willing to take a risk. I want to say every one of us needs to take a risk, not on a daily basis, maybe, but on a regular basis, where you are risking something that is sacred to you.

Maybe it's your pride. Maybe it's saving face. Whatever it is. Maybe it's not wanting to say you're sorry. Whatever it is, where we are stepping out into unknown waters. I want to say, if you're only living your life within the confines of what you can do on your own, why follow God? God, the point of following God is to step out 1% beyond what you're comfortable with, whether it be in your giving, whether it be in your forgiveness, whether it be in your risk.

You see, that's when God shows up. We want to live lives that call God to show up. We want to live beyond the boundaries of what we can do on our own, or else who needs God? She was willing, or she could have sat back, she was willing to say, I will go before the king and risk my very life. I think we might get to a place, and I'm not ringing alarm bells, but we might get to a place in our society, who knows, because we've been there before, where people of faith lives will be at stake.

We saw that just 40 years ago with the Jews. Do I think it can happen in our society? Yeah. Watch history. History, you don't have to read much history to see how fickle human beings are. But whatever it is, whether there's a great revival, and God seems to swing this nation, and not just our own nation, because can we stop just caring for our nation?

I want to see the four corners of the earth changed. Not just us, or not just this generation. We go to churches sometimes, it's always this generation, God, this generation. What about the 90-year-olds, that generation? Like, let's not forget, we're multi-generational. And so to say, God, what are you going to do, and to be willing to be a part of it?

We are a congregational, empowering church. We want you to encounter the love of God, and equip you to go out and change your world. That's what we do here, and that's what we want to see happening. So in the rise of human secularism, to understand that these things are happening, but do you know God loves you? Do you harvest his power, his love, to share with others, and do you not remain silent?

That is the answer, and I believe that is the only thing that will bring revival. Amen? Amen. Let's stand, and we're going to sing one more time. Through it all, if you would. It is well, I'm sorry. And as we sing this, we're going to just lean into this song, and if God spoke to you today on any of these three things, maybe some of you need to, you haven't felt God's love for a while.

I know that was me, the last two weeks. I woke up last night, I got ready to go to bed last night, and I thought to myself, I've been running a church, great things are happening, and I haven't experienced the love of God for a few weeks. I thought, what's the point? I might just well start a company, you know? Giving campaigns going good, we're building a deck, helping orphans, giving money to the pregnancy resource center, people are getting baptized, but I'm not experiencing the love of God.

I personally need to experience the love of God. Maybe that's where you are. You've never really felt it. Maybe you had abuse in your life, and you're afraid to experience the love of God. That's what I had to walk through. Does God really love you? That's a great question. Ask Him, do you really love me? Maybe you need to have the willingness, some boldness to step out.

In this song, let these three things resonate with you as we sing. Chris, lead us away.