For A Thousand Generations

praise the Lord everybody good to be with you one more time thank you again uh enzi family for being so kind and welcoming to my wife and me and uh the CLC church as a whole You've I mean if you've introduced yourselves to me and shared a little bit about your life and I enjoy listening I stand up here and talk forever and the least I could do is hear what you have to say so thank you thank you for the warm Hospitality everybody uh for the Coffee Starbucks and the fellowship time together the fabulous ministry that's here the Pastoral Ministry youth ministry family ministry the music team my goodness you've got you've got it you've got it good you've got it really good thank you amen my text tonight comes from Deuteronomy chapter 7. and I'd like to read a few verses starting with

verse 9. Moses said know therefore that the Lord thy God he is God the faithful God which keepeth Covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his Commandments to a thousand Generations that is he keeps Covenant and mercy upon these people for a thousand Generations and equally he repaeth them that hate him to their face to destroy them he will not be Slack to him that hateth him he will repay him to his face Thou shalt therefore keep the Commandments statues and the judgments which I command thee this day to do again please notice he's extraordinarily generous to those that love him thousand Generations God was overlooking many of the things that the descendants of David did because he remembered David on the other side his Wrath it is not poured out upon a thousand Generations but it does only take one generation

I'd like to teach this morning on the subject for a thousand Generations and I ask you if you would pray for me pray for me that I would teach this in the according to the spirit of Christ father in the name of Jesus I ask for your help I am upon what is often unfamiliar territory with this subject tonight and I ask for your grace that I would be as gracious as your heart would allow me and I pray also that the prophecies that are contained within your word would be understood clearly with blinding Clarity tonight in Jesus name we pray and everybody said amen and thank you for standing you can be seated my subject might be a bit unusual at least for this kind of forum and I I ask for your patience with me but my subject today is human population reproduction

and family from a Biblical perspective after generations of population growth world population is plateauing and in fact is trending downwards this might come as somewhat of a surprise given all that we hear about population growth climate crisis Etc but if this population Trend continues by the middle of this century human population May begin to fall off of a cliff Science Daily projects for instance that the population of South Korea will fall from 53 million to somewhere around 27 million within the next several decades in Japan the situation is even more bleak for Western Europe the population of countries like Portugal and Italy and Spain are expected to be halved over the same period and you might think well you are talking about a couple of European countries but you used specific stats coming from Southeast Asian Far East to Asia however it must be understood

that for the last 100 years the West has been extraordinarily successful at exporting its philosophies ideologies World Views to the East and then those ideologies being adopted by the East and put into action right away this happened with Marxism where it was adopted in the Far East long before it was really adopted in the West in any significant form the same holds true here the situation in the United States appears to be a little different but I would say that the key word here is appears in fact if you look under the hood at the data birth rates are dropping at the same rate as the birth rates in other countries but our population numbers are merely being propped up by Massive immigration these projections as sobering as they are may actually be on the optimistic side They Don't Really account for the consequences of

an increasing political and social hostility especially in the West in the wealthier countries the hostility that has now been adopted towards child rearing what we're facing is the prospect of you know if I could draw you a picture in the not too distant future massive sprawling cities disintegrating into ghost towns on a scale you might only see in dystopian fiction imagine howling winds whistling through the broken windows of abandoned skyscrapers and vacant Parks broken fountains and toppled monuments and empty playground swings stirred in the breeze as if by the Phantom memories of children once luxurious high-rises stripped of every useful item down to core structure standing upright against the Horizon like serrated surgical tools a few dim lights flickering in forgotten Office Buildings the skeletons of subway cars fixed with rust tracks that lead now to dark Subterranean Caverns filled with toxic pools derelict fairies

washed upon blighted Shores keeled over sideways their giant props facing the sky Watchmen the ancient Prophet cried what of the night why is this happening and I want to go through a number of social factors that are leading us here economics it's the first Factor they're the driving force of birth rate our current economics are driving middle and lower class Americans to become by necessity not luxury two income households this typically means that each household gives 18 to 20 hours a day to the corporate world I hardly need to say that children in this scenario become not only financial burdens but also a significant drain upon the average adults already depleted energy Reserves those who do have children very often drop them off at daycare to be raised by stressed out low-wage strangers and so often the only one in these children's lives that gives

them their undivided attention is Netflix and Disney Plus if you think of television and streaming services as the most present parents in America today consider the profile of these parents they're designed to make themselves perpetually necessary it shouts 24 7. look at me look at me look at me look at me don't look away this electric parent politicizes every event it has no reliable memory whatsoever of yesterday it speaks in a constant state of attention deficit disorder democracy is dead the ice caps are melting in stock market is about to crash and so on it sexualizes every area of life and if you look at modern media as a kind of parent you're looking at a parent who is essentially a narcissistic paranoid suffering simultaneously from acute Amnesia and a mental breakdown and imagine the psychological and emotional instability such a parent would inflict Upon

a Child but if a child is raised by media don't be surprised when the child grows up to trust TV more than his parents and live by their values for economic reasons the average family is being weakened and drained of energy throughout our land children are no longer fitting into the budget the problem is even more pervasive than TV and media even if you Shield your kids from conventional media all the child has to do to find something terrible is log on to Instagram Tick Tock and God knows what else and they'll find the the very devil thousands of influencers driven by economics expert in the art of targeting the affections of children and turning children's affections away from their parents it's only two clicks away even the very careful parent will find him or herself staring down an enemy Who Says with Wicked relish

We Are Legion most people use therapy today the way humans were are meant to connect with our five safety net systems which in the west were retained up until even 100 years ago the immediate family the extended family family friend Network local community religious community but all five of these are now broken second driving force is the sexual Revolution in My Grandparents Day there was a reason that there were very few children born out of wedlock and that reason wasn't that people were more virtuous back then they weren't the actual reason was that Society was structured in such a way as to make sexual permissiveness a kind of death sentence abortions weren't available but neither was contraception even those who tried to create and distribute male or female contraceptive products were treated the way China Now deals with drug dealers the shame and stigma attached

to impregnating a woman out of wedlock was meant as a punishment but the shame functioned primarily as a strong deterrent a deterrent that channeled all but the most incurable members of society towards finding fulfillment within the bounds of marriage what this social system lost in being on the strict and sometimes severe side it more than made up for by ensuring that children generally didn't grow up to be the kind of maladjusted lost souls that we see everywhere today drug use is directly proportionate to sexual promiscuity in 2022 an average of 300 people a day died of Fentanyl in the United States alone and most of these Souls were the products of broken homes and single parents since 2000 nearly one million young people have died of drug overdose the 2023 federal budget of the United States for drug control is 35 billion dollars 38 million

Americans aged 12 and older are drug addicts 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 to 25 are regular drug users the real Legacy of the sexual Revolution is the millions upon Millions now of homeless men and women living like zombies in the richest richest country that has ever existed on this planet to our great misfortune Sigmund Freud more than a century ago convinced society that judeo-christian sexual taboos were forms of repression he argued that repression is unhealthy and once this theory was accepted it began to act like an enzyme breaking down human bonds at an almost Atomic level few could have predicted a few centuries ago that applied freudianism would not only lead to a more permissive towards non-monogamous heterosexual relations but would also lead to the view that monogamous heterosexual Bonds were suspect and likely unhealthy and so in our culture today

oftentimes the traditional nuclear family is depicted in media as normal on the outside but deeply deeply neurotic on the inside women were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of the sexual Revolution it was supposed to free her from the excessive burdens that Society placed upon her it was intended to enable her to have sex without consequence now if you've ever wondered why there is such demonic energy surrounding the subject of abortion if you wonder how a seemingly normal human being can defend such a monstrous practice with the kind of ferocity that we see today just remember that abortion is the guarantor of the doctrines of the sexual Revolution you lose one you lose the other things rarely work out the way we intend women are I would argue the greatest victims of the sexual Freedom Movement women are finding fewer and fewer marriageable men men

who are willing to do the hard work of developing the kinds of high standards for character that women generally find attractive sex is so freely and immediately available that immature men see no reason whatsoever to grow up access to abortion has created the very culture of sexual permissiveness that worldly men desire most the Stark reality of the so-called women's Liberation movement has turned out to be a men's Liberation movement after all there are roughly 95 million males between the ages of 15 to 65 in the United States 95 million nearly 40 million adults in the United States visit pornography sites daily this means and the by far the greatest number of those are are men this means that out of those 95 million males in the United States almost half visit porn sites regularly my God I can't overstate how devastating this is for women

socially the sexual Instinct in human beings acts like a computer hard drive silently running in the background of everything younger men do compelling them to compete for excellence virtue strength and competence but at the same time it also drives them to submit to a woman's higher standards but pornography essentially dampens this effect upon men it dulls their instinct to strive for excellence pornography men can simply remain at the maturity level of a 15 year old boy and have the simulacrum of the physical intimacy they desire you know it might not be the intimacy they would fully desire but they're willing to forego the full satisfaction of real intimacy for being free of the painful demands of maturity and responsibility our world has junk versions of just about everything important the junk version of Love is convenience the junk version of friendship is popularity on Instagram

the junk version of religion is politics the junk version of Truth is relevance the jump version of marital intimacy is tender in OkCupid in pornography many men women find themselves in their 20s moving from relationship to relationship and every time hitting a wall with men at the same point in their relationship and that point in the relationship was where she demands that he grow up turn off the Marvel movies get off video games quit blowing their money on toys and hanging out with the boys constantly more still real women in a relationship find themselves having to compare to the models who make porn videos as the real life woman walks down the short Road to middle age and past physical prime which lasts about nine to ten years she must compete with women who are not only without shame but also by the miracle of

video they are ageless and I wonder if this isn't the era that takes the lowest view of women that any society has ever had the view of women is so low now the deranged men are taking over women's Sports women's Beauty contests women's Awards women's bathrooms you name it through unrelenting propaganda our world has achieved the idea that a woman is not something one is Born to Be but something one can achieve through makeup and surgeries and that's it Womanhood is just something one can accessorize Womanhood is being cheap and to the point that now a man can buy it with a few visits to the surgeon a regimen of pills and a trip to Macy's I hear a lot of complaining these days about the patriarchy we're told that we live in an oppressive Society run by men we're told that women are oppressed

by men in what is sometimes called toxic masculinity but I don't actually think we live in a patriarchy that would require men to take actual responsibility we live in an infant in phantocracy if you will the adult father the Raging uncontrollable man the incompetent male when voices sneer at the patriarchy they unwittingly tend to be sneering at its absence not at its presence and what I'm at pains to say is that birth rates are plummeting in part because Society is doing everything possible to disincentivize women from having children they are pressured to find meaning and purpose only outside the home and if they still cling to the old-fashioned idea that raising a family is perhaps life's great vocation they're very often discouraged from doing so on account of the Nationwide juvenalization of men a third Factor in declining population in 2012 one year after the

Supreme Court's Landmark wins United States versus Windsor which codified gay marriage into law Gallup began tracking the number of Americans identifying his gay lesbian or transgender Gallup found that 3.5 percent of Americans in 2012 identified in this way in its most recent poll Ten Years Later this number has more than doubled in just again 10 years but even this surprising numbers misleading the latest Guardian survey showed that more than 20 percent of Americans born after 2000 they identify as homosexual or transsexual to think of that in a room full of kids under 22 one in five or perhaps even one in four believe themselves to be some form of homosexual so from the word go one in four one in five is likely sentenced to a life of loneliness unhappiness and sterility and from a human population perspective this is absolutely catastrophic these numbers are

I think highly inflated but not because of the polling of polling's errors or polling strategies but because children in America are at this very moment being subjected to a kind of political pincer from the earliest days of childhood in a thousand subtle ways they're taught to regard themselves along the lines of social what's called social intersectionality without getting too much into the weeds this simply means that they're taught to rate themselves according to a social hierarchy in which white heterosexual able-bodied Christian males are privileged and therefore inheritors of the sins of Oppression historically on the other side of the Divide are the oppressed and in this social hierarchy black disabled non-Christian transgender females are the most oppressed and most powerless individuals okay that's according to any intersectionality chart that you see but the word privileged and the word oppressed are tricky words in our current

corporate and political climate being privileged means having inherited a deeply sinful and destructive family history and a deeply flawed nature being oppressed means having inherited a noble family history a history of having endured the degradations of History's villains so what this means for instance is that people who've been historically oppressed can do and say racist things without being considered racist and people of privilege can do and say inclusive Multicultural things and still be considered racist the second part of the pincer applied to children comes along to work in conjunction with the first move once it has been firmly established in kids Minds especially in the minds of white children or young black males that they're guilty of being the bad guys and that their parents and grandparents in everything they represent are irredeemably stained with the shame of being history's brutes the cause of most

of the suffering in society um then once it's been firmly established that the marginalized are the real heroes of society and the righteous angels of the human race these are the oppressed the Earthworks the large psychological Machinery is ready to transform a child's entire identity for kids the world is black and white good and evil and all that sort of thing the first thing they want to know when they hear a story is who's the bad guy who's the good guy in life they want to be the good guy the child doesn't want to be one of the so-called privileged he wants to partake of the Halo now of the oppressed he wants to be saved from his sin low he says I was conceived in sin shapen in iniquity what must I do to be saved he asks in a thousand different ways as

a child glad you asked says the public school system and there are two ways to be saved the first way puts you in purgatory you'll be among the saved but you'll spend a lifetime having to be purged of your sin the first way to be saved is to become an ally of the oppressed that is you'll have to confess constantly that you're an oppressor you'll still have to confess at the end of the day that you're a bigot and you'll have to cut off all relations with your bigoted family but if you throw your whole self into defending the oppressed if you'll viciously and ruthlessly attack and cancel everyone less committed than you you can be forgiven of your sin sort of but really it'll be more like the Israelite sacrificial system rolling the sin ahead to the next day of atonement but the second

form of social salvation is the Supreme form the Salvation that will completely purify you today young man you can achieve salvation from being privileged by becoming yourself one of the oppressed you can't change your ethnicity but you can do something better historically says the teacher gay and transgender people have been even more or at least equally oppressed and so children are therefore strongly encouraged to identify themselves as gay or transgender why because then they get to LEAP across the divide and reap the benefits of being a minority moreover kids who've been taught to be guilty for their very birth get to be celebrated teachers will host coming out parties you'll go from Center to Saint in one Brave move the kid has one concern though what will my parents think the teacher says yes that's a big problem but don't worry see this is a

rite of passage for you if your parents get mad and try to ground you or send you to a therapist or your Church's youth pastor you'll get to feel what it's like to be one of the oppressed congratulations you've been initiated by baptism into minority status so in some this intersectionality theory creates an existential crisis in the mind of a child then homosexuality or transgenderism swoops in to solve it and this is probably the primary reason for the surge we're seeing in these numbers in our polls and though much of it's socially engineered it's extremely effective when I was growing up teens were not able to grasp well the long-term implications of having premarital sex getting pregnant youth today are not able to grasp the long-term implications of homosexuality and sex changes and becoming sterile the difference the difference though was in my day fornication

wasn't being celebrated by adults as a civil rights cause and at this very moment there are children barely old enough to know their middle name but egged on by voyeuristic adults they're undergoing irreversible surgeries and taking drugs that will forever prevent them from living a decent life in the public school system is treating boys like defective girls and then raising girls to act more like boys if I didn't know better I would say this is such an embarrassment of evil that even the devil caught standing in the vicinity of the shattered glass and feeling fearing guilt by association it's tiptoeing away on June 28th of the Year 1278 after Christ there was a report among the people of a Belgium Village that a few folks had been dancing in public and screaming and making obscene gestures for hours and were dancing still word spread that

they believed and they were dancing because they believed that Saint Vitus a third century Christian martyr and the patron saint of epileptics had plagued them with the curse of dancing until they had sufficiently paid for their sins apparently this compulsion to dance began with a sense of guilt as the report spread through the village crowds gathered to watch very curious but then some members of the crowd seeing the sincerity of the dancers and reflecting upon their own lives began to wonder if they too were being prompted to dance as well alas everything that occurred externally and internally every ache every flutter of the heart every memory every bird that flew across the sky were taken as signs maybe that Saint Vitus was prompting them to dance for their sins too 200 men and women started dancing through the village by the end of the day

until they reached a bridge over the river and the bridge collapsed on the same day one century later another outbreak of ecstatic dancing made its way from auchen France to Cologne to Flanders to Mets to Strasbourg to Utrecht and some of the villages towns as far south as Italy people everywhere started succumbing to this Mania by the time it passed many had broken bones suffered heart attacks many died the explanation is it seems that Saint vitus's dance is an acute psychogenic or sociogenic Mania to put it more simply it's a matter of mass Hysteria watching people succumb to strong emotions and extreme displays of erratic behavior for extended periods of time can be socially contagious people here that a group of people other people are experiencing sickness or disorientation others begin to check themselves measure for symptoms vulnerable people especially young girls in chronically frail

adults are prone to interpreting every problem in their life as resulting from the malady they're just now hearing about they then find Solace only in the radical Solutions offered by the latest craze next thing we know we have a social hysteria on our hands this is I believe what we have with the homosexual and transsexual movements kids have to deal with a lot of mental struggles as it is they're insecure almost by Nature they feel like Misfits constantly I'm just remembering what it was like to be 13 right now I felt like I was constantly having this many people looking at me so when the teacher says that the reason for their problems is that their true identity is being suppressed by a Christian home kids can hardly help but believe them I would call the current popularity of homosexual causes homosexuality causes a mass

hysteria it's just another form of Saint bidus's dance and my look at how many are dancing to the music played by government corporation the University but low they approached the bridge the modern world has essentially made a deal with the Devil they were told that they could have freedom from responsibility and Duty they didn't know when they made that deal is that when they gave away responsibility and a sense of Duty they were also giving away a sense of meaning and significance they were told that they did they don't need to believe in God if there's no God there's ultimately no responsibility to anything we weren't created they say because that would mean we were made according to someone else's design someone else was choosing our gender not us the trouble is that belief in God even if it were to turn out false seems

to be emotionally and psychologically and intellectually necessary God represents something higher than ourselves the belief that we ourselves aren't the best thing that the Universe has to offer the belief that there is in fact something good and holy in the universe something in someone Flawless something truly and everlastingly beautiful and when you take that away from people they become chronically depressed and they don't know why but the unbelief manifests itself in drug abuse drinking with almost every meal and the constant consuming of food media entertainment pornography and out of sheer self-hatred sexual perversion so to put all this together we have several forces at once that are leading to a collapse of human population economic realities discouraging birth rates the climate of sex without responsibility breaking down the family and turning men into lifelong Peter Pan's homosexuality is the coup de gras ensuring that a

significant portion of the population are sterile there have been several several religious movements over the last few thousand years that are I would call historical analogs to what's happening now back in the second and third centuries there was a group called the phrygian mountainous and they they were nominally Christians tertullian was one of their number in fact but um that was later on in his life but they had this one rule you you can't you can't have children you can't get married you're to be single and celibate for the rest of your life well when I said the word phrygian mon uh mountainous there were probably two people in here who had ever heard of who these people were now you know why they had no kids more recently we're a little bit closer we're here close to Amish country and Mennonite territory and again

I spent quite a bit of time in Ohio myself but if you go a little farther east get onto the East Coast there was a Shaker movement a group called the Shakers and um uh uh uh in the early 1800s this was the fastest growing Christian denomination in the United States it was spreading like Wildflower fire people were joining the Shaker movement right and left they had such Prestige and such credibility with the American people no one ever thought that they were terrible people they were they had such Prestige that Abraham Lincoln granted them conscientious objector status which is the first time the United States ever granted any group that ability the Shakers were given it that's how respected they were but at about the same time the Mormon movement grew up and they were the opposite of the Shakers everybody hated the Mormons they

tried to get statehood in Utah but the United States would not allow them to get statehood they were so odious to people but the difference between the Shakers and the Mormons the reason why you'll run into a Mormon today but you won't run into a Shaker today is because the Mormons encouraged having lots of kids the Shakers said you had to be celibate for the rest of your life if you joined them so after the Civil War the movement began to dwindle while its Alter Ego the Mormon movement became an international religion and a powerful political force and today the Shaker movement has been reduced to Justice only the Sabbath day Lake Community is left in Massachusetts their respective attitudes towards children made all the difference and as of 2019 is this is the latest information I could get from the group there were only

two remaining shakers left both were around 70 years old Elder Arnold had an eldris June Carpenter that's it I have to say I hold a place in my heart for these last two shakers optimism for this last man and woman would be cowardice now they followed Faithfully the destiny that their people demanded of them for them then their Duty was to hold on without hope like that Roman soldier preserved for 20 centuries in Ash at Pompeii whose bones were found at a front door he died not leaving his post during the eruption of the volcano because his Commander forgot to relieve him such is the fate of every group that is anything but fervent on the subject of family what the Shakers once were the modern secularist movement is today both were and are hostile to reproduction and family I'm telling you secularism in its

current form can't last it can only hope to live on by evangelizing your kids secularists can only look forward to a long solitary future of things coming apart the country crumbling into Oblivion the people who are making the world into a prison will spend the rest of their lives demanding respect for their choices they've made nothing with access to everything they've conquered nothing they can't even conquer themselves so they're tearing it all down and screaming into the void at how unfair everything is they give no regard for their legacy they can only destroy the legacy of others they deface everything and build nothing of Their Own they take their drugs at night to forget their paralyzing anxiety and watch some porn hire doordash to bring their dinner binge watch mature content on Prime arrange a hookup on a dating app have casual sex with strangers

and then they blame the system it's not their fault Utopia the unwritten rule of Utopias is that you will be a part of Utopia whether you want to or not and that you will also submit to its excellence you'll be forced to live inside another man's dreams and like it I think it was Bukowski who said when nobody wakes you up in the morning and when nobody Waits For You at night when you can do whatever you want with your day what do you call it freedom or loneliness I think Western education has under the name of Freedom essentially built chronic and debilitating longiness into Modern Life if you've noticed the ideologies that are hostile to Christianity Today generally share one thing in common the homosexual movement the transgender movement the feminist movement the secular leftist movement the abortion movement the pornography movement the climate

change movement strange and terrible pattern there's an intense hatred for children they see the reproduction of the human race as an evil for the average millennial a great grandmother had eight children their grandmother had five children their mother had three children in the millennial has two abortions and a dog for millions of young college-educated Americans life is low paid drone work at some soulless digital company punctuated only by brunch on the weekends and Netflix and white wine at night a bit of pornography to kill off their natural drives forever until they die alone with no descendants to remember them why do so many young people today view sexual intimacy with the opposite gender with such ambivalence pregnancy is a betrayal of the body and a child as a prison sentence I'm hearing about all these companies who are now offering to pay for their female

employees to cross state lines and have abortions on demand for the life of me can't figure out exactly how a generation that Prides itself on being able to find oppression under every Rock can't hear Microsoft or Dick's Sporting Goods essentially telling its low-paid pregnant employees kill that baby and get back in the kitchen where you belong that's what they're saying you know for a moment to a movement to last it's going to have to have children and so these horrible ideologies all have a self-destruct mechanism buried deep within their programming gonna end it can't last this was prophesied by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1. he described The Descent of a pagan civilization there once a culture has become idolatrous has failed to acknowledge God the true God it will eventually be given over to a state which Paul describes as broadly homosexual that is

culture becomes like the mythical character of Narcissus fell in love with a reflection of himself in the water and became so transfixed to himself that he couldn't break away Nothing in life was worth his attention but himself so he died falling into the water narcissus is the ultimate expression of homosexuality a man only being able to love another man something that looks like himself marriage is the bond between two opposites the love of the other for a man to love a woman is to get outside of himself to reach Beyond himself and in loving the other the love of someone completely separate from us God has ordained that this kind of relationship is the relationship that bears fruit and Offspring and only this kind of relationship but in the society that Paul describes because a man loves only images of himself and is unable to

love what is the opposite of himself a woman sterility is the result Paul is not just saying though that a significant number of individuals in such a society are homosexuals that's not what he's necessarily saying by itself it's also he's saying the fact the fact that the idolatrous civilization itself becomes homosexual or narcissistic that is it becomes sterile unable to reproduce unable to procreate unable to transmit anything children art Science History they can't transmit it to the Future this is what the Apostle Paul called the due penalty for their error this is the this means the end of civilization it dies childless should the Lord Tarry the cold hard facts are that secularism at this very moment is lying down like Cleopatra in a soft Egyptian dead and taking the lid off the basket and in despair summoning the Viper Within ultimately all its social

goals are sterile eventually it will run out of other people's kids to colonize and expected them to use state power as a last resort but these will be the signs of a fatal morbidity I would say within the next two to three generations this particular form of secularism will die God's first commandment to the human race was be fruitful and multiply and it still is no movement can defy this order the future belongs to those who have children I have a short note written as a warning to those who prefer human wisdom to the wisdom of God dear friend it's your very intelligence when combined with pride and insecurity that will seduce you into believing smart untrue things especially the intellectual fads fear God today sincerely signed the rich man whose camel didn't get through it was one set of the French generals who lost

three major Wars in a row that there were they were always ready one more late what I'm agitating for is for the church to Value children and to make them the focus of all that we do we're fighting a different war in Hell folks secularism is fighting not only against God but it has also picked a fight with one of God's greatest servants nature and nature hasn't lost the handwriting is on the wall Penny Penny Nickel Dime the bill is coming due and the kingdom of this world won't be able to pay it great days are ahead for the four-sided Apostolic Church and I'm well aware of just how concerned the church is about the future people my age and older hard for us to talk about anything else forgive us kids if it seems we have a one-track mind I say all of this

because I want you to know just how much this current corporate political regime as dangerous as it may now be is a house of cards what the Apostle Paul said long ago I recite today with the profoundest confidence this world in its present form is passing away First Corinthians 7 and 31. if apostolics Will persevere if we will concentrate on the Family if apostolics Will resist structuring their lives and the lives of their families after that which is already passing away if apostolics would be willing to reassess the way we transmit our doctrines to our children in just a few Generations we will have outlasted this present Madness and come out on the other side stronger than ever and I know at the back of your mind some of you and maybe the front of your minds now you're saying but the Lord's coming any

day now I know he might and we always have to live with that in mind but he might Tarry so occupy till he comes plant trees now I confess I'm I'm a bit troubled about a couple things I'm seeing and I want to address those in conclusion I'm I'm troubled though I'm I'm not usually as troubled by what I see in the in the world as sometimes what I see creeping into the church I'm seeing now I'm not speaking of this church but just in general in my experience and I I teach at a school where I dealing with people from everywhere all over the world particularly in the United States this so this is my perspective I'm seeing apostolics adopting what I would call an Apostolic but somewhat sanitized version of the secular trends I've been describing a few months ago I was listening

to a presentation on Apostolic Family Matters the presenter at one point said that he's starting to tell young people they shouldn't be getting married until they have a college education and a successful career in savings and Investments in fact he argued kids should be waiting until they're 26 to 28 to even think about getting married furthermore he said couples should wait three to five years after they've been married to think about having their first child and I've said this before but it's true I thought I might be having a stroke while I was listening to that I was looking around is anybody going to protest this okay nobody is I guess I'll be quiet too I haven't been quiet exactly though I've been telling everybody about it my revenge I pray that I won't be labeled a coward the speaker's rationale was that couples argue

about money and about moving and in-laws those three things more than anything else getting married after college and after settling on a career and after having the maturity to create some necessary distance from one's parents and after allowing the couple to Honeymoon and enjoy each other's company for a few years instead of having to worry about children will allow these couples to build a more stable home that was the rationale and I too want stable homes that I just couldn't get over how wrong-headed all of this seemed to me at least as a normative practice please understand I'm talking about normative there may be exceptions to the rule but I'm talking about what we normally do the most glaring problem with young men and women declaring that they're going to wait until they're mid to late 20s to get married is that you're under a

righteous biblical mandate to remain abstinate until you are married that's the Christian rule coming from Christ's lips himself if you say I'm not getting married until I'm 28. that's fine but you better remain abstinent until you're 28 and that means all fornication is forbidden no pornography no premarital in intimacy none of it and you might be setting yourself up kids up for failure in your early 20s your god-given instincts are on Overdrive but you're telling yourself now to wait six or eight years and here you might find yourself working against God's created order and what I fear is that under the best of intentions you're leading yourself into temptation delivering yourself over to evil now if my wife and I had used the don't get married until your 28 mentality as a guide my first child would have been born when I was 30. and

if my child had followed this advice too he would become a parent when he's 30. which means I would have been a grandparent finally at the age of 60. today at 47 years old and I updated this today I looked at my life expectancy chart I looked at it to see how much time I have left it said it was my Social Security page from the government it's waiting eagerly for me to die we're running out of money die already I have 30.42 years to live to be exact ly started when I was in my late 20s my grandchild would not have his grandfather at his graduation at his wedding and certainly not for the birth of his first child so I'd never get to see what my father did get to see his son becoming a grandfather moreover I'd never get to give strength

to my son through his crises of middle age as my father has been able to give me I was fortunate to be married in my early 20s in fact I was 20. uh my siblings were even younger when they got married if I recall and my parents as well and my grandparents before them I think I can project myself though with what state of mind I'll be in in my 77th year when according to socialsecurity.gov I shall perhaps lay down to die wait this is way too serious for that so let's crack up but but really I know what I'll be thinking when I'm 77 I know exactly what I'll be thinking my children Lord willing all in their mid-50s at my side I know what I'll say when with my last strength I hold my dear children's faces before me in my hands among

my prayers and blessings and Thanksgiving I will surely give my last look deep into their eyes and say what I would give have five more years to know and love you and if that's true of me I can only imagine how much truer it would be of the man who wanting to have everything settled before marriage Waits until he's in his 30s to start a family all of the reasons for waiting to build a family can distract us from the uncertainty and that is we run out of time if we wait for Success before building families we're not thereby adding extra years to our life we're subtracting years from the very limited time we have to raise children in the fear and the admonition of the Lord and to love them because I was married at a younger age my father has been able to

have a hand in the raising of my children even the development of his great-grandchildren they all get to see like like my grandchildren and my children get to see that their part of a chain going back Generations they get to see what living as an Apostolic means at every season of life it's a powerful thing as for the notion that having a subtle career and all our education behind us before marriage and the idea that it leads to more stability I would argue the reverse again I'm dealing with the general not the absolute there are exceptions just as there's a small window in life in which human beings pick up language easily so there's a fairly brief window in life in which most people are able more easily to lose their identity in the greater identity of marriage waiting until we're successful means missing out

on the gift of two people struggling together scrimping together saving together eking out an existence and learning together and it's often in the hard times that two people fuse together and form a Unity that their wedding vows promised now I'm not using myself as an example because I wisely thought my way through this from the outset it wasn't my own personal wisdom that led me to get married at an earlier day before I had everything settled in fact I didn't think about any of this stuff at all when I was younger I was fortunate to have been born into an Apostolic Church where the real business of life was God and family not Building Wealth and waiting for the next episode of Game of Thrones I assumed because it was just part of the error that we breathed that when I became an adult it

was time to get married ready or not here I come and have children of my own in other words the wisdom wasn't mine I wasn't wise it was the apostolic church that was wise again I can't stress this enough I'm not suggesting that no one should ever get married later in some of these situations I may have described some people under the sound of my voice right now I can't stress enough that parents and pastors and young people have to deal with these issues on a case-by-case basis in some cases waiting later May well be best but I'm speaking about normativity it's my contention that we need to stop treating 20 year olds as children that's worldliness if our sons can go fight and run Patrols in Afghanistan at 18 then they can stay here and balance a checkbook make it to church and learn

how to be a husband or a wife at home having a family means being a servant and the longer we put off having a family the longer it takes to get down to the main business of life one last troubling Trend I see sometimes among Apostolic young adults I think can be perfectly captured by a conversation I overheard it wasn't too long ago it was at a camp meeting three Apostolic young ladies talking to each other one said to the other why are you seeing him right now I thought you were called into the ministry by dating him aren't you worried that you're just giving up on your ministry what we have here is a mirror image of worldliness except that instead of a woman being encouraged to seek a career as opposed to building a family we have a young woman encouraged to seek

a religious career but these are very much the same God's first call to the human race wasn't build a Ministry it was instead be fruitful and multiply in our push for Ministry or secular careerism we're strained close to the spirit of the age and its phobia of the body and sex and obsession with careers I have now lived to see the distant Horizon in which our Apostolic ideals and worldly ideals once perpendicular run almost parallel at points and even converge I recently heard a 30 year old youth Minister tell a 23 year old young man did his courtship of a young lady was getting in the way of his pursuit of God and his ministry these conversations that I'm giving you they they might sound anecdotal but they're really not they're General sentiments that you may well hear in Apostolic circles sentiments that have the

ring of wisdom but in fact may be destructive they need to be reassessed the suggestion in the anecdote is that you can either pursue God or pursue marriage not both but again if this is true shouldn't we recall that after God pronounced it each of the days of creation were good the very first thing he pronounced not good was the man's absence of a spouse it's so interesting to me that God didn't shout down to Adam and say but Adam why do you need a spouse find a prayer line or a prayer room come to the Altar and get prayed through am I not enough you just need more of you more of me more of Me no that's not what God Said he didn't say Adam draw closer to me at least not on this occasion he said instead all right Adam go to

sleep when you wake up everything will be better Walking with God building a family aren't mutually exclusive Pursuits they usually go hand in hand when Judah was taken captive in Babylon there would have been many who believe that the worst thing to do at the time would start a family false prophets were telling them they would flourish but only once they were delivered from Babylon and taken back to Jerusalem start a family I can hear them ask build a house here in Babylon it's not the conditions aren't right our hearts are heavy our future is bleak but once we get back to Jerusalem then we can get back to building families but the Lord's true prophet sent them a letter and he said these famous words Bill G houses in Babylon and dwell in them and plant Gardens and eat the fruit of them take

you wives and beget sons and daughters and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands that they may bear sons and daughters that ye may be increased there and not diminished seek the peace of the city in other words when you're in Exile the most revolutionary thing you you can do when the world's going and saying is build a family don't get caught up in the despair of the world the insanity of the world we might be in Exile from our Heavenly home so what should we do the prophet still says build ye houses and dwell in them building a family in hard times is an act of trust in the Lord and the prophet closed this word of the Lord by saying blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord the false prophets told exiled Judah that they were going

to be delivered right away so they didn't need to tend to the business of Life they didn't need to think long term about the world they were actually living in the Jeremiah upon whom the ends of the world have come we should live with one eye up on the horizon looking for the sudden appearing of the Lord but we should also look to our work here upon the Earth while Barbarians in the 5th Century we're tearing down Roman civilization tradition by tradition and Norm by Norm a North African pastor said to his flock Bad Times Hard Times that's all anybody ever talks about these days but let us live well and the times shall be good we are the times and such as we are such will be the times Live Well the meek shall inherit the earth if we will build families while the

world is tearing theirs down if we'll raise children up while the world is destroying theirs this present Darkness will one day should the Lord Terry die it's slow prophesied death and the mantle of leadership will be taken from its cold dead fingers by whatever is left know therefore that the Lord thy God he is God the faithful God which keepeth Covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his Commandments to a thousand Generations and repayeth them that hate him to their face to destroy them and he will not be slack to him that hateth him Thou shalt therefore keep the Commandments and the statutes and the judgments which I command thee this day to do them wherefore it shall come to pass if you hearken to these judgments and keep and do them that the Lord thy God shall keep thee the Covenant

and the mercy which he swear unto thy fathers so Church may we love our families love our children and love our Doctrine and pass them down if necessary to a thousand Generations blessing be upon us praise God praise God praise God Glory Jesus Lord help your church help your people give wisdom strength and courage if any of these problems that have been described here tonight have made their way into an Apostolic home I pray for your strength your wisdom to heal and to give hope bust out the darkness Jesus I pray that your church would never despair that we would keep doing what we know to do and not build upon shifting sand praise God would you come and pray tonight come bring your families bring your friends come down to the altar here and let's pray and we're going to sing a song together

not I but the congregation song you know the song of the blessing amen I'd like us to pray and sing this song as a prayer to the Lord hallelujah