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Battle for the Truth (Part 1)

Individual Topics
Individual TopicsSteve Gregg

In his discussion, Steve Gregg speaks about the decline of truth in society, attributing it to Satan's deception of Eve. He notes that society is becoming more irrational and unable to distinguish between truth and lies, with attacks on fundamental truths such as marriage and gender being a satanic onslaught. He emphasizes the importance of actively seeking and valuing truth, as well as fighting for it, even in the face of opposition and persecution. The battle for truth, he states, is one of spiritual warfare against deception and the devil.

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Transcript

All right, today I wanted to talk to you about something that's been on my mind for some time, and that is the battle that we're engaged in for the truth. The truth, you know, obviously is a word that some people don't want to define. I was going to say they can't define it, but they could if they would.
A lot of people
don't want to. Some people all want to talk about their truth, you know, I'm living my truth. You'll be you, I'll be me, and I'll live my truth, you live your truth, as if there's no absolute truth, which is, of course, the most absurd thing that a position every day.
It's very irrational, but we live in a rather
irrational society. In fact, so irrational, it's losing rationality. You know, it's like it's bleeding out rationality, and it's going to be lacking all rationality before long, unless somebody rises to battle for truth.
Again, because that's what the warfare is about. Five years ago, I would never have guessed that the truth could have fallen on such hard times in such a short time in our society, because I think it was like three years ago, Dennis Prager was on the Bill Maher show. Bill Maher, a very liberal atheist comedian.
He's not so much anymore. Yeah, they say a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, and Bill Maher's been mugged, so he's getting more conservative, and quite a few comedians are getting a little more conservative. They might not say so.
They don't want to call themselves that, I suppose, but that's positions they're taking, because comedians, of course, are those who, if they're really smart and funny comedians, they're funny because they can parody the truth. That is, it's true. What they say is true.
It's so true, it's funny to hear it said. A joke is
almost never very funny if it doesn't have a truth in it that everyone recognizes and laughs at. It's a funny reality, and yet we're in a time now where the society has decided it doesn't really want certain truths, which means they don't want the truth, because you can't pick and choose which truths you want and be rational.
I mean, if I could pick and choose the truth I prefer, I'd
prefer to believe there's about ten times as much in my bank account as there is, but the mathematics won't confirm it. When you get out of touch with truth, you become less capable of operating sensibly and rationally in the world, but the devil doesn't care because he's the liar. He's the deceiver.
He's
the one who deceives the whole world, it says in Revelation 12.9, and Jesus said, of course, in John 8.44, that Satan is a liar and the father of lies. So we know that Jesus said he was the truth himself. So what we have here in the spiritual warfare that's been going on really from the very beginning, from the first time Satan deceived Eve and God had told her the truth, but she chose to believe the lie, and then we got in a lot of trouble from that.
From that time to
the present, deception has been the downfall of people. Truth makes us free and therefore lies, if we embrace them, bring us into a kind of a bondage. But I would mention that Dennis Prager was on the Bill Marshall, what, three years, four years ago maybe, and Bill Maher was still on the very leftist side at that time, and Prager's a conservative Jewish man, and he was talking about, you know, gender ideology and stuff like that and how it's crazy, it's like mental illness, and Bill Maher said, give me an example of what you mean, and Dennis Prager, well, that, for example, that a man can get pregnant.
Well, this is just a few
years ago. Bill Maher cracked up, the audience cracked up, sneering at Dennis Prager, like, come on, no one believes that. You know, I mean, like, that a man can get pregnant? Even the leftists were saying, that's so absurd, but not all leftists were, and the ones who didn't say it was absurd have now won the day.
Now you're
not allowed to say that a man can't get pregnant. In fact, just the other day, my wife and I watched the new Matt Walsh documentary called, What is a Woman? And Matt Walsh went around the world, actually, but mostly around the country. He went to Africa also, and was interviewing people to define woman, and I don't know if you realize why that's a hard question to answer now, is that the gender ideology today, when they say a man can become pregnant, they're not saying that men have changed.
They're saying that women can be men. Only, only people with women's
anatomy can get pregnant, but they believe people who are born with women's anatomy can be trans men, and therefore, if they're trans men, then they're men, and they're, and they can get pregnant. So that's, that's the, that's the idiocracy that we live in now, and, and yet, if you say it's stupid, well, you're gonna be canceled any way that people can cancel you.
Even though only a tiny, tiny
minority of people really buy into this, it's a tyranny of the lives to abolish truth. Now, this didn't come out of nowhere. Christians allowed it to happen.
Western society allowed it to happen, first of all, by moving away from the Bible. There was never a time when people recognized the Bible as the Word of God, or even when they recognized it as wisdom, if they didn't recognize the Word of God. There was never a time when anyone would be confused about what a man is or a woman is, but, you know, when Matt Walsh was interviewing some university professor for this, who is a gay guy who's a professor of gender studies and so forth, and he said, so what is a woman? And the guy says, you know, why do you want to know? He said, well, I just want to know the truth, and the guy says, that makes, that, that threatens me.
And he said, what threatens you? He said, when you say you're
looking for the truth, that's kind of aggressive. And this was pretty much the attitude of almost everyone he interviewed that was on the, on that side of the aisle. They, they didn't want to talk about truth.
They were talking about
the way people feel, and what that means is, to a very large degree, our culture has lost foundation in truth. If you don't have something that is absolute truth to call your foundation for reasoning, then anything can be equally accepted as if it were truth, but it's not. Now, I want to read something from Revelation 20, and I'm not implying anything eschatological by doing so.
I
just want to bring this up. In Revelation 20, we see the dragon who represents Satan, who earlier in Revelation 12, verse 9, it says, that dragon, that ancient serpent who deceives the whole world, okay? In Revelation 20, in verse 1, it says, I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. He took hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal on him, so that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were finished.
But after these
things, he must be released for a little while. Then you skip down to verse 7, it says, now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison, and will go out to deceive the nations, which are in the four corners of the earth, and so forth. That says in verse 9, that the nations, numbering like the sand of the sea, they went up on the breadth of the earth, and surrounded the camp of the saints, and the beloved city.
And fire came down from God, out of
heaven, and devoured them. Now, this is obviously the chapter that talks about the so-called Millennium, and many of you may, many of you do know, and some of you may not know, that I'm, I'm not a pre-millennialist, I'm an amillennialist, and this is the view that was held by the church through most of history. And the idea was that Satan's binding, so he might not deceive the nations, referred to the time when Jesus came, and commissioned his disciples to teach the nations.
Because in the Bible, there's a distinction between Israel and
the nations. In fact, the word nations is the word goyim, which is the word for Gentiles in Hebrew. The nations are the Gentiles.
Israel was always in contrast
with the nations. And it was understood that God had revealed himself only to Israel, through the law and the prophets, and God was dealing with Israel. And Jesus came to Israel.
In fact, during his lifetime, he said, I'm not sent to anyone
except the lost sheep of Israel. He came to Israel first, because they had a relation with God. But the whole world outside of Israel, all the nations, had been left totally in the dark.
God had not interfered with them much. On one
occasion, he sent Jonah to talk to some Gentiles, saying, if you don't repent, you know, in 40 days, none is going to perish. And they got saved.
But this is a rare
occasion, a very unusual for God to send his prophets or his word to the Gentiles, because Israel was the people specially chosen to know him and to make him known in the world. But that changed. When Jesus gave the Great Commission, in Matthew chapter 28, in verse 18, he said, all authority in heaven and earth is given to me.
Not just Israel, certainly, but all the, not even just the planet. In
heaven and in earth, everything, all authority is given to me. I'm the king now of everything.
Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, of all the
Gentiles. This is the first time there was any such commission to include the Gentiles in the evangelistic effort. Even when Jesus had sent out the twelve, two by two, back in Matthew 10, he said, don't go to the way of the Gentiles.
Just go to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But now, for the first time, the word of God, the light of the gospel, the truth, was being sent out to the devil's territory. You see, in those days, the nations weren't like our modern Western nations.
They
didn't know God. They worshipped demons. They sacrificed their babies to demons.
They were horrible cultures that you wouldn't recognize. We haven't gotten that horrible yet. We're on our way.
But the devil was no longer able to claim
the nations as his dominion. He couldn't deceive the nations as a block of humanity. He could deceive people.
He could always deceive Jews and Gentiles,
both. Satan's never been unable to deceive individuals. But this is saying he won't deceive the nations anywhere.
That is, the whole, all the nations prior
to this, prior to Jesus, were in the dark. They were Satan's territory. They worshipped demons.
They knew nothing about the true God. And then Jesus says, now you go to
all the nations and you disciple them. And this is his announcement that the nations are no longer delivered over to Satan for deception.
He can't deceive the
nations in the sense that he did before. But after the thousand years, which frankly, the longest-standing view of the church in history was that this thousand years is symbolic for the age of the church. That Jesus, in a sense, bound Satan, not in a literal sense, but in the sense that he no longer could control the nations without the kind of interference that he now has from the gospel.
But at the end, Satan is loose again. And he goes out and he deceives
the nations again. And he brings them all, like the Sanhedrin Seizure, from all nations, against the Beloved City.
Now in Revelation, the Beloved City is the
church, the Bride of Christ. You see that in the next chapter. John says, I saw the heavenly Jerusalem coming down dressed like a bride, for harassment.
That's the church. In the New Testament, the church becomes the habitation of God instead of the temple in Jerusalem. And the church is the people of God.
When I say the church, I don't mean institutional churches.
I'm not talking about institutionalized religion. I'm talking about the body of Christ, the community of Christians worldwide, is the habitation of God, the city on a hill that cannot be hid as Jesus spoke of.
The heavenly Jerusalem, the Mount Zion
Hebrews, refers to the church as. Now, the Beloved City in Revelation is not Jerusalem on earth. In Revelation, that's the Harlem.
In Revelation, it says that
the two witnesses are slain and their bodies lie in the streets of that great city, which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where our Lord was crucified. Now, geographically, where our Lord was crucified is Jerusalem. But in Revelation 11a, it says that city is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt.
This is how
Revelation views the city of Jerusalem. It's Sodom. It's in Egypt.
It's a
pagan nation. But the Beloved City is now the Bride of Christ, the faithful bride, not the harlot who rebelled against her husband, which is what Israel in Scripture has always said to have done. Now, I say that because this speaks of a time when Satan is loosed again to deceive the nations as he did before he was bound.
You see, this confuses people. I'm not trying to confuse anyone who doesn't know this particular viewpoint. But before Jesus came, before he said he had bound the strong man, which he did say he was doing, he said he had bound the strong man, he was plundering his house, Satan's house.
Before that time, Satan had free
reign over the nations and they were all in the dark. Jesus came, he sent the truth out, the light has gone to all nations, disciples of all nations be made. But if Satan is loosed again, in the sense that he was before he was bound, that's like the nation's going back totally into darkness again, into deception.
He's
released to deceive the nations as he did before. Now, this makes it sound like the church, which has been advancing throughout the world unstoppably for, you know, the whole age of the church, is now, you know, digging in to preserve the gains because the city is besieged. The Beloved City is the people of God.
So it's
like the church is now on the defensive. And the nations who were not as deceived are now deceived again. And they come to fight against the church.
Now, whether
you're premillennial or postmillennial or amillennial doesn't really matter. The point is, all views have to see that Satan is loosed a little bit at the end to do the same kind of damage in deceiving the world that he did before Jesus came. And I don't know, like I said, I'm not here to talk about eschatology.
I'm
not going to say we are living at that time. I sometimes wonder if we are, because there's never been a time when people were as deceived as they are now. There's never been a generation before, before say 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that didn't, that was unwilling to say what a man or woman is, that could not define marriage.
Every society practiced marriage, and they all had pretty much
the same definition. Some of them had polygamous marriage, but it was always, marriage was the forming of a family to have children and to perpetuate the race for another generation. That's what marriage was.
And no society, pagan or
Christian or Jewish, no society had any problem knowing that. Now, ask anyone to define marriage. They can.
You know, sometimes when the same-sex marriage
laws got passed and approved in this country just a few years ago, which could never have been done 10 years earlier than that, you know, many people say, well, you know, we're redefining marriage. No, they're not. They didn't redefine it.
They just abolished any definition. There is no definition of
marriage anymore. And marriage is the fundamental unit that God created for human society.
The difference in genders God created as a fundamental reality, a
truth that even little children never had any trouble knowing what a woman is or what a man is. Now, a college professor can't tell you what they are. Can't or won't.
I don't know. I don't know if they're as stupid as they pretend to be or
if they're terrified to say anything that might get them canceled or fired or whatever. In any case, these people who are either stupid or terrified are the ones teaching the next generation of college students who are going to come out and run the businesses and the government and things like that in the next generation.
So this is an assault on basic truth by a satanic onslaught. Now,
if it isn't what is talked about at the end of Revelation 20, I can hardly imagine how bad that will be when it comes because I can't imagine people being very much more deceived in general. Now, Christians aren't all deceived, but there are Christians who are.
There are progressive churches. There are pastors
who say they're deconstructing their faith. They're just really following the woke crowd.
Churches have always had those who want to follow the
liberal agenda of the left, even throughout the 20th century, too. I mean, liberal churches, every denomination began to adopt liberal ideas that said, oh, the Bible, that's not really the Word of God. Yeah, Jesus really probably wasn't born of a virgin.
We don't have to believe that. He didn't really rise from the
dead, literally. This was the church trying to be intellectually acceptable and instead made themselves contemptible.
By giving up Christianity's true genius
and its true distinctives, the salt loses its savor, and it's good for nothing but to be trod underfoot of men, Jesus said. And because some churches gave up their saltiness, gave up their distinctives, and said, well, let's be more liked by the world by becoming more like them. Well, frankly, those churches are pretty small now.
The liberal churches hardly have anyone in them these days.
But now the big evangelical churches, some of them are going woke, and they're still pretty big at the moment. I think a lot of them are going to lose their members, too, because people who love the Lord aren't looking for a church that mimics the world.
They're looking for a church that stands for the truth. They're looking for
people who aren't going to just buy into the lies because they're popular lies. And yet, people who aren't Christians honestly don't have very much incentive or very much reason to stand against error, especially if it's going to mean your job, promotions, acceptance into a college, being allowed to stay in a college, being able to stay out of jail.
I mean, there are pressures
being brought against the truth in our society right now. And I believe everyone in this room and many, many, many other Christians, I think millions of Christians probably in this country and elsewhere, are standing against it, but we're in a very tiny minority. And because of the minority status, there are Christians who are not strong and are not as committed, not willing to forsake all or to lose all for the sake of standing for the truth.
And this battle
for the truth is what I want to discuss. We're called to a battle. I think everyone knows we're in a spiritual warfare, but the warfare is a warfare between truth and deception.
And the battle lines are so clearly being drawn
now. In a way, they weren't as much in, say, my parents' generation or my youth. The world wasn't Christian, but Christianity was still influencing Western civilization to a degree that we can only dream about now, you know, if we're old enough to remember it.
It says in Isaiah 59, where Isaiah is talking about
the problems in his country, which was Judah, one of the complaints that God makes through Isaiah, in Isaiah 59 and verse 14, is he said, truth has fallen in the streets, which is, I suppose, meaning to say that it's like being depicted as a warrior that's been slain and dead, bleeding in the streets. It's something that's no longer going to have any power or influence in the society if it's dead and lying in the streets. That's Isaiah 59, 14.
And it says, justice is turned
back and righteousness stands afar off, for truth has fallen in the street. Now, notice, it's because truth has fallen in the street that justice is far off and righteousness stands afar off. Justice is turned back.
I think one of the things
we've noticed in very recent times is that the whole concept of justice has been lost in society. Justice means a person gets what they deserve. That's justice.
Now, and that's colorblind, by the way. You know, a black man, a white
man, Asian man, Hispanic, doesn't matter. A human being gets what he deserves in a just society.
But now we have social justice replacing justice, and it doesn't
reward people on the basis, God bless you guys, it doesn't reward people on the basis of individual merit, but what group they belong to, what race they are, or what victimized group they belong to. Social justice basically dishes out status and privilege to people who are viewed as disadvantaged groups. It doesn't matter if the individuals of the groups are good people or bad people.
They're in the group, and that's all that matters. And
that's why, for example, there's been a law just, I think it's in San Francisco just last week, the mayor said she's allocating, I think it's $6 million, it might be $60 million, to aid transgender homeless people. Now, less than 5% of the population are transgender, and there's a lot of homeless people that could use help.
But to allocate a special budget just for the
transgender homeless people, not for homeless veterans, not for homeless people who are sane and normal, but no, it's a virtue signaling act. But the thing is, it's rewarding a group, not because they do anything good or bad, and it's punishing another group, not because they do anything good or bad. It's not individual merit.
Justice is always based on individual merit. That's why
the Bible says when God judges, everyone will receive the things done in his body. That's what he did.
Every time the judgment of God is mentioned in the Bible,
it's everyone will be judged according to his own works. Not what group he was in, not whether he was oppressed or whether he was a victim, but what did he do? And that's justice in the Bible. And it's always been what justice was in Christianized society.
But now it's no longer that. Justice is turned back.
There's a new law in Chicago schools this week, too.
They've made a law that says
that teachers cannot penalize black students for misbehavior in the school, nor for doing no homework, nor for failing tests. A black student gets the same privilege as if he had passed the course, even if he does nothing and doesn't pass the course. Now, white students, they don't get that privilege.
Now, this is social
justice, when a group, because they are a group, get rewarded not because they're good people or bad people, but because they just belong to a group, a victim group, as they are perceived. And so justice is...we've lost the concept of justice in our laws, and in law enforcement, and in education. And Isaiah says, well, justice is turned back and righteousness stands afar off because truth is falling in the street.
Truth is the foundation that a society has to accept.
I mean, I remember back when I was young, new age, people began to say, well, there's no absolute truth. Ever heard that one? And yet, that was an absolute statement.
You know, we say, well, is there absolutely no truth?
Because, I mean, that's a black and white statement, isn't it? Either there is absolute truth or there's not. And they say, there's not. Okay, well, that's an absolute statement that there's no absolute truth.
But it's like when you
dislodge yourself from love of the truth and from commitment to the truth, you begin to be irrational and stupid. And you become a mockery until the whole society dislodges themselves. And then they mock those who have the truth, and they mock those who are rational, and they mock those who say, hey, we don't want to move away from reality.
And so, it says in Jeremiah 8, 9,
this is an important verse. In Jeremiah 8, 9, the prophet said, or God said, the wise men are ashamed. They are dismayed and taken.
Behold,
they have rejected the word of the Lord. So, what wisdom do they have? King James says, what wisdom is in them? Rhetorically, none. They're wise men, but they're fallen, they're ashamed, they're ridiculous, they used to be respected, but they're absurd because they've rejected the word of the Lord.
When a society respects the word of God, they maintain some understanding of certainly basic realities because the word of God is in tune with reality. And the best thing the devil can do to get a society to go into total chaos is to undermine in their minds the validity of the word of God. And that's what our educational institutions have done, even our seminaries to a degree.
Back in the early 1900s,
the seminaries, many of them began to teach that the Bible is not really the word of God. That was not given to the commoner, that was the pastors that were trained there to teach that. But that has trickled down to, in the past century, obviously, the common person.
Of course, they're getting it from Discovery Channel
and they're getting it from History Channel and these other media things that undermine belief. Oh, this Bible story, it's not really true. So it's like people have picked up by osmosis this skepticism about the Bible.
But when you no longer
accept the word of the Lord, there's no foundation for wisdom. They've rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them, it says. In Romans chapter 1, Paul talks about a society that has lost its way by dislodging itself from the truth.
In Romans chapter 1, actually in verse 8, it says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven... 18. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. But it says in verse 21, but although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, and they became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Professing to be wise,
they became fools, and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made of corruptible man, and so forth. They've exchanged the truth of God for something else because they didn't want to honor God, they didn't want to be thankful to God, they didn't want to be subject to Him. And I was just listening to an audio book yesterday about someone who was quoting some of the atheists that wrote popular books back around 2006, Richard Dawkins, you know, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Hersey's atheist writers, and they frequently said something like, the God of the Bible is a tyrant.
Well, he's a king,
but he's not exactly tyrannical. He never gives any instructions or orders or commands that aren't good for people. Every command God ever gave, He said, I do this for your good.
This is for your good. I mean, God knows best what's good
for people, and He gives commands according to that. But people who don't want to do what God said, to them that's tyranny.
And there's always been
people who didn't want to obey God, obviously, but now people write books saying that God is a tyrant, the God of the Bible is a tyrant. And so they don't want to believe in God, because they don't want to submit to God. And because of that, they have to exchange the truth of God for some kind of a lie.
You know, the Apostle Paul, when he was speaking his testimony, which was a
truthful one, Agrippa said, or it wasn't Agrippa, it was Felix, I guess, who said, Paul, you are mad. This is in Acts chapter 26, and it says, verse 24 and 25, it says, Now as he thus made his defense, Festus, it was Festus, not Felix, said with a loud voice, Paul, you're beside yourself. Much learning has driven you mad.
But he said, I'm not mad, most noble Festus, but speak the word of truth and
reason. Now, Paul is speaking truth and reason, but to the one who rejects the word of God, that's madness. No, no, I'm not the one who's mad.
I'm not the one
who's a nut here. What I'm speaking is truthful and reasonable. These are words of truth and reason.
It sounds like madness to you, from your perspective,
because you don't stand on a foundation of truth. And that's how our society is now. If you say certain things that everybody agreed were true 10, 20 years ago, you'll be considered to be crazy or evil or a hater.
That's evil. But the
strange thing is that those who are sane are now considered to be the ones who are insane. And, you know, it's the lunatics that are running the asylum now.
And, you know, people used to say that, and it was in measure true. In my lifetime, which is almost 70 years now, it's never been as true as it is now. Not even close.
I mean, it's always been a little bit true. Now it's like almost entirely
true. There's a little bit of blowback, a little bit of, you know, resistance coming from the forces of decency and truth.
But for the most part, the ones in
the quarters of power are the ones who've gone mad. And so they're the ones who get to define who's mad. And if they don't define themselves as mad, it's going to be us.
They're going to call, we're the mad ones. Paul said to the Galatians in Galatians 4.16, have I become your enemy by telling you the truth? I'm sure all of you have had this experience, if you've ever been honest with a friend who needed to be corrected. You know, they're going the wrong way.
They're going to marry the wrong
person. They're going to make some bad choices here. And you try to point it out to them, and all you're saying is truth.
And they don't want to see you anymore.
They don't talk to you anymore. You're the enemy, because you told them a truth they didn't want to hear.
And so that's how it is. We now have a society that
largely doesn't want to hear truth. When I was young, the hippies, they were kind of philosophically curious.
They were kind of challenging Western
assumptions about monogamy and their experience with drugs and things like that. They're trying to, they're kind of, I mean, they weren't just doing this as hedonists, though there was, I'm sure, plenty of hedonists among them. Many of the ones I knew and that I met were looking, exploring, trying to find out if there's some deeper truth than had been fed to them by Christian civilization in their younger years.
And many of them reached out to Eastern religions
and philosophies and stuff like that, and weird cults, because they were looking for truth. And that was really what at least everyone would say they were looking for, and I think many of them were. I don't think you'll find anyone in the secular world today who says they're looking for the truth.
Truth is not a
category that even exists in their thinking. It's my truth. It's your truth.
You know, I'm living my truth. I think I'm a dog, so, I mean, you have to recognize this is my truth. Well, okay, it can be your truth, but keep it to yourself.
It's not my truth that you're a dog. It's not my truth that a man can
become pregnant. If you want that to be your truth, feel free, but I have a different definition of truth, which raises the question of what is truth.
Well, the simplest answer is simply that truth is that which conforms to reality. That's the long-standing definition of the word truth. There is a reality, and everybody either recognizes reality, or they substitute it with something that's unreal, which is, in other words, for a fantasy, or if they think it's real, a delusion.
You know, you can be in sync with reality or not. Now,
again, some generations ago, I knew people who were, they hadn't found Christ yet, but they were looking. They still were raised in a society that still had some respect for Christian values, although they were trying to challenge the borders of those, but they still had enough Christian societal influence in them to know that truth exists, and that truth is something that they really ought to find, even if it wasn't what they thought, or were raised to believe it was.
But now, I mean, you sound like a bigot. You sound aggressive. You tell someone, I just want to know the truth.
Oh, that threatens me when you say truth. Don't
use that word. That's an aggressive word.
Well, okay, I never thought of it as an
aggressive word. It would only be seen as aggressive to somebody who doesn't want truth, obviously, in other words, someone who wants lies, someone who wants to be deceived. But in our society now, there's not so much respect for truth as to even care to avoid being lied to.
You know, tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies.
You know, just tell me what makes me happy, what makes me feel comfortable.
Yeah, it tickled my ears. And I guess there's always been people like that. It's just that the society and those who are running the society, and maybe I should say those who are running the educational institutions and the entertainment industry and the political sphere, are the ones who now, they just want lies.
And I don't know if they'd deny that. If they said, what you want is a lie,
I think they'd say, yeah, what you think is a lie, maybe, you know. To me, it's the truth.
The Bible does address that, right, where he says that they switched the truth for a lie? Yeah, they traded the truth for a lie. That's what it says in Romans 125, actually. It says they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.
Now, the wicked have lost touch
with the truth in stages. It says in 1 Timothy 4.4, they shall turn their ears away from the truth and are turned to fables. Turning from the truth is the first stage.
It's someone who knows the truth, has seen the truth, and they
decided, you know, I don't want that. I don't want that lifestyle. I don't want that Christian, you know, restrictions on my life.
I don't want that to be true, so
I'm going to turn away from the truth. Now, turning away from the truth is one of the most dangerous things a person can do, because the Bible says that when people turn from the truth, you know, God sends them a strong delusion because they didn't receive the love of the truth. It says in 2 Thessalonians 2.10. But the first stage of decline is turning from the truth, when you have seen it, and you've known it, but you decide against it.
Okay, that may be true, but that's not
that's not what I want to be my truth. I want something else. So they turn from it.
Second, they have to suppress the truth, and that's what Paul said in Romans 118. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in their unrighteousness. Now, turning from the truth is one thing.
Suppressing it is another thing. When you know the truth,
and you try not to know it, and you're trying to turn your back on it and pretend it isn't there, it keeps calling out to you. It keeps nagging your conscience.
It keeps presenting itself and its reasonableness to your mind, and
you just have to put it out of your mind. You have to suppress it, hold it down. And Paul said that the Jews were suppressing the truth when they were forbidding him to preach to the Gentiles, because he was preaching the truth to the Gentiles, and they were trying to suppress that in the in the Roman Empire.
They didn't want that getting out. Once you turn from the truth, the truth is a threat to you, and therefore you begin to make war against it. You try to keep it silenced.
You try to cancel it. You suppress it. And the next thing you read
about is resisting the truth.
So not only are you suppressing it, but when it does
emerge, you fight against it. You make yourself an enemy of the truth. It says that in 2nd Timothy 3.8. Paul said, Now as Janice and Jambres, these are the Pharaoh's magicians that resisted Moses, as Janice and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth.
Men of corrupt minds disapprove concerning the
faith. Now resisting the truth would be where you're actually arguing against it. Suppressing the truth is trying to keep it silent, trying to silent its voice.
But
if it's going to emerge anyway, if it's going to be speaking anyway, then you try to resist it with with arguments. You try to fight it off, because again, it's aggressive. Truth is aggressive.
Truth is threatening to people who don't want the
truth. What was that famous line from A Few Good Men? You can't handle the truth. Yeah, that's right.
That's a famous quote. A lot of people don't, they can't handle
the truth. They could if they'd surrender to it, but if they're resisting it, it's a great threat to them.
And so people turn from the truth, then they try to suppress
it, then they resist it openly, and then they have to exchange the truth for something else. They have to insert a new truth that isn't really truth, but something to fill the void that exists because they've eliminated truth from their thinking. There is something in the human soul that looks for conviction, for meaning, for truth.
And once you've decided that traditional truths or God's
truths are not, you know, not okay with you, then you have to fill that void with something else. And that's where it says in Romans 1, 25, they exchange the truth of God for the lie. They accept a lie because they have to have something there.
They can't just walk around with a void in their head, thinking nothing. They
have to think something. And they've eliminated the truth from a possibility for them.
And so they have to find something, a pleasing fantasy. In one of
my books, I quoted a guy named Ashley Brilliant. He's not a Christian, but he's actually a comic writer.
But one of his books is called, I've Abandoned My Search
for Truth, Now I'm Looking for a Good Fantasy. And that's, you know, I saw that book cover with that title on it back in the 80s. I thought, oh, that's hilarious.
That's pretty good because that's what people were doing, but they
wouldn't usually say so out loud. But now I think people wouldn't be ashamed of it. Yeah, I'm not looking for truth.
I'm looking for my truth. I'd like a fantasy
that works for me. You know, it doesn't have to correspond with any reality outside of myself, because I'm just looking for my own truth.
They should
say I'm looking for my own lie, but I mean, we can recognize it for what it is. In Jeremiah 9, 5, Jeremiah is talking about the, again, the same prophet who said that truth has fallen in the streets and so forth. In chapter 9 of Jeremiah, in verse 5, he says, everyone will deceive his neighbor and will not speak the truth.
They have taught their tongue to speak lies. They weary themselves to
commit iniquity. They've taught their tongue to speak what lies.
Your
tongue doesn't naturally want to speak lies. It usually speaks what you know to be true. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
If you know things are
true, you're likely to slip up and say them honestly and correctly. They have to teach them, like the pronoun issue thing here. You know, once you decide, I guess I want to go along and not offend some of these people who have their own preferred pronouns.
I forget what they are, but I need to teach myself. I need to condition
my mouth to call that person zer or them or something else, because it's a lie, but it's the lie that we're going to go with. It's the lie we need to teach our mouths to agree with and to affirm.
I said I was going to quote Governor Chauncey today.
When Chauncey, Chauncey's out on the street confronting people all the time about, you know, wokeness and stuff, and he does that as sort of a career. When he says he won't call somebody by the wrong pronouns, he says, because I love you and you don't lie to people you love.
You know, I'm not going to lie to you. You don't lie
to your friends. You want me to lie to you? No, I respect you more than that.
I'm
not going to do that. I'm not going to teach my tongue to speak lies. That's a compromise I'm not willing to make.
You can call yourself that. I'll try not to
laugh, but I'm not going to teach my tongue to speak those lies to. That's what people do who've already compromised the truth.
They've gotten so far. They've
turned from the truth. They've suppressed the truth.
They've resisted the truth.
Now they've exchanged the truth for a lie, and now they're teaching their mouth to speak what they know to be lies. This is how the society gets to where it is today from where it used to be.
Now, I just want to talk about our fight against
error, our battle for the truth. We know that Jesus said he is the truth, but he also said his witness is the truth. When Pilate asked him, are you a king, Jesus in John 18, verse 36, Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.
If it were of this
world, my servants would fight, but now from now on it's not from here. He says, and Pilate says, then you are a king. He said, well, for this purpose I have come into the world, come forth from my father into the world.
He says to bear witness of the
truth. Of course, Pilate famously said, well, what is truth at that point? And famously walked out of the room without waiting for an answer, but Jesus said that he came to bear witness of the truth. He is the truth.
He's the truth
personified in a human being. His words are the witness of truth. Of course, Jesus said that about the scriptures in general.
In John 17, when he's praying to
his father, he said in verse 17, sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth. And the psalmist says that too in Psalm 119, verse 160.
He said, you know, the sum
of your words is truth. In other words, we do have truth. I mean, in many truths we can learn without the Bible.
We can learn the boiling temperature of water by
experimentation. We can learn how many trees are in this yard. We're going out and counting them.
I mean, there are ways, there are truths, realities that are
accessible to us by natural means, but the unseen things we can only know by the testimony of Christ and of God, and when people reject that testimony, they have dislodged themselves from truth so that even the things they can see, they can lie about. They can say, these demonstrations are mostly peaceful, you know. Yeah, sure, a few policemen have been hospitalized with bricks to the back of their head, and a bunch of business has been burned to the ground, and police cars have been demolished and burned, but this is mostly peaceful.
Yeah, don't believe your
lying eyes. You can see different, but if you don't, if you come to a place where spiritual truth is something you won't accept, you simply don't have any commitment to truth of any kind. Even visible truth, you can deny them.
You can
just say, no, that's not happening. I don't believe that, and there's, I mean, there's plenty of people, even Christians, who sometimes lie to themselves about things that are unpleasant truths, things that aren't revealed in the Bible, but just are, you know, the husband is cheating on his wife, you know, and he's been seen doing this, and she gets told she won't believe it, you know, because she doesn't want to believe such a thing. I mean, there's people who just won't accept certain truths, even if they're things you can see and things that people know are true, but when you've given up on the Word of God, you have no grounding to be committed to any particular truth.
You give up the truth
of God, no truth is sanctioned after that. So, let's talk in the time I have left, which is just a few minutes here, I want to talk about how we are to respond to the truth, and one of my favorite verses in Proverbs is Proverbs 23-23, and there Solomon says to his son, buy the truth and do not sell it. Now, I knew a ministry that I think misunderstood what he was saying, they said they won't sell their materials because it says don't sell it, don't sell the truth, and I, you know, more power to them, I don't think, the more you can give away the better.
You know, I don't, I think it's good not to sell the Word of God, I think
it's great if you can give it away, and I commend them for that, but I think they didn't understand what this verse is talking about. It says buy the truth and do not sell it. What he's saying is you need to obtain the truth at whatever cost and do not sell it, don't part with it for any cost.
It doesn't say how much it costs
because no matter how much it costs, you've got to buy it and you can't sell it. No matter what anyone offers you to compromise what you know to be true, don't part with it, don't give up the truth, don't sell it. Judas sold Jesus, who is the truth, for 30 pieces of silver.
I think there are
Christians who've sold the truth for less than that because they were intimidated or, you know, it was gonna make them unpopular or they're gonna lose their job or something like that. There are certainly people who are tempted, Christians too, who are tempted to be silent about the truth or to give it up, pretend they don't believe it. No, don't part with the truth for anything, it's the most valuable thing.
I mean, that's not an idolatrous thing to say
because Jesus is the truth. He's the truth in human flesh, but we have the truth in human flesh, we have the truth in Scripture, and there are other truths too, but not any that are anywhere near that important, but all truth is important. As soon as you know something to be true and you're willing to say it isn't, you've dislodged your own conscience from reality and once you've started that slippery slope, there's nothing to hold on to.
I have actually
met people who are habitual liars and I know the temptation to lie when the truth is gonna make you look bad, you know, I mean, when you tell the truth and you're embarrassed about the truth and you'd rather lie your way out of it, like when Cain was confronted about killing his brother and God said, where's your brother? I don't know, you know, my brother's a keeper. You know, the truth would be self-condemning and of course, when you're gonna lose something by telling the truth, I understand, but I've known people who have become such habitual liars, they'll lie when there's nothing to gain from it. One of my best friends who became a pastor said before he was a Christian, he used to just love to lie to people just to fool them, just to deceive them, just to see if he could do it.
I had another friend who, even after he became a Christian, I don't know if he
realized this happened, he exaggerated things all the time, even when no one cared. You know, he'd lie about things and I don't know, why are you lying, you know? It's like, we all know that's not true, but, and we're not impressed, you know, it's not getting you anywhere, but lying becomes something people have no conscience about. They just say what they want about anything and truth is not a governing factor.
Now, we need to buy the truth, meaning if it's expensive to stand
by the truth. It may cost you friends, it may cost you a job, it may cost your life, but buy it anyway. Pay what it costs to stand with it and to not part with it, and don't sell it for anything.
Now, that involves a number of things and one is
that we seek the truth. We don't just assume we're gonna trip over it and find it. We need to seek the truth.
There's so many lies out there, so many alternatives
claiming to be truth. We really have to do some critical searching for truth. In Jeremiah chapter 5, God says to search through Jerusalem and see if you can find anyone there who seeks the truth.
This is Jeremiah chapter 5, verse 1.
Jeremiah 5, verse 1, God says, run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem. See now and know and seek in her open places. If you can find a man, is there anyone who executes justice or judgment, who seeks the truth? And I'll pardon her.
Here's a
city that was going to be invaded by the Babylonians and wiped out. That was Jeremiah's message through his book. You're gonna be wiped out because God is so angry at you, but he says, if you can find a man who's seeking the truth, maybe I'll pardon the city.
You know, it's like if God had found ten righteous in Sodom,
he would have spared Sodom. He was ready to spare Jerusalem if he could find a man who seeks the truth. Now there were some, like Jeremiah, who sought the truth.
And he had Baruch, his friend, who was seeking the truth. But he's saying, just go pick a man in the streets. Go find a man in the streets and look at him.
Ask him if he's seeking the truth. If you can find a random person who does, that's a better sign than I think you're gonna find in this town. And it's much more difficult now to find people who want the truth.
You know, when Dana and I
got married, she had a lot of friends from her church that she was going to before. And she, you know, invited a lot of her friends to, you know, go to our website and stuff like that. But there are just not very many who really want to go there.
And I think partly because maybe they've heard that maybe they'll find,
hear something there different than what they've been taught. Some have. Rocky's here.
Some people have, but some people, they just don't want to hear anything
different. Now see, I've always been kind of, when I was young, if I heard that somebody had a different view on something than mine, I wanted to read what they had to say. I wanted to hear it.
Not like I was, you know, being tossed to and fro
by every wind of doctrine. I read a great deal of things I don't agree with, and I didn't agree with them after I read them either. But I wanted to check them out.
I
remember being a Baptist growing up. I don't believe in infant baptism. I still don't.
But I always wondered why do some churches believe in infant baptism? It's
not in the Bible as near as I can tell. So I, you know, the Catholics and a lot of Protestants, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed people all believe in infant baptism. And so I got several books written by Reformed people about infant baptism, promoting it.
I wanted to read and know what they thought.
Well, I wasn't persuaded by their arguments, but if they'd made better arguments that I saw as more biblical, I would have been, I would have changed my mind. I, you know, it's not like I wanted to change my mind, but I want the truth.
You know, I'm, I'm willing to believe something different than, than what I believe. And, you know, when you've been in a particular theological camp and you've got friends in that camp and everyone you know is in that camp, it's really hard to even want to see something different. When I was at Calvary Chapel, for example, I, I began to have questions in my mind about some of the eschatology that was being taught there.
And, and it was scary to consider it
because everyone I knew held the same view and it mattered to them. It was a very important view to their movement. And I began to have some questions about it.
And I remember the pressure to not go there. You know, it's, it's easier just to
repeat what everyone believes. But I didn't want to do that because I began to hear things that made me suspect maybe, maybe there's something else that's more accurate.
And we've got to have the commitment to say, I want the truth, even
if it's an uncomfortable truth, even if it turns out to be different than what my friends or my pastor or I would prefer that I believe. I need to seek it. In Proverbs chapter two, this is a, this is a place I always think of when I realize how much we have to be committed to seeking the truth, not just kind of be somewhat interested.
In Proverbs two, verses one through five, it says, my son,
if you receive my words and treasure my commandments within you so that you incline your ear to wisdom and apply your heart to understanding. Yes, if you cry out for discernment and lift up your voice for understanding, if you seek for her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. Now, you know, you want to have the knowledge of God, you want to know the truth.
Don't expect it to just
come and smack you in the face. You've got to seek it like you'd seek for hidden treasures. I mean, if you knew where a treasure ship had sunk and you're the only person who knew where it was and you had opportunity to get a crew together to take a ship out there and dive and get it, you'd probably do it unless you're not interested, you know, unless you don't need any money.
But, but
I mean, if you thought, well, Captain Kidd's treasure is to be found at this spot, I think you'd kind of make a priority of, I think I'll take a vacation for my job, you know, I think I'll go out there and get some divers, we're going to find this thing, and we're going to search until we find it, if I really believe it's there. And that's how you have to seek the truth. You've got to have that kind of commitment, that kind of drive to, to find the truth, and especially now in an age where finding the truth is going to be a very unpopular thing to do.
You have to
love the truth, not just seek it. You have to love it. You have to love truth more than anything else because if you don't, you'll sell it for whatever.
You know, if
you've got a price, the devil will pay it. You know, if you'll sell out on Jesus and give up on the truth for any price, the devil knows what that price is, he'll find it. You know, you don't want to have a price.
You've got to be at that
place where I don't care what else happens, I'm not, I'm not releasing my grip on the truth that I know. And this is what it says in 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2. It talks about how the man of sin will deceive people and it says about him in verse 9, the coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan in all power signs and lying wonders and with all unrighteousness, excuse me, unrighteous deception among those who perish because they did not receive the love of the truth. It's not that they didn't receive the truth, they didn't receive the love of the truth, they didn't care about the truth, they don't value the truth, they don't love it.
And it goes on to say, and for this reason
God will send them strong delusion that they should believe the lie. So if you don't love the truth, God says, okay, you don't deserve the truth. You can't handle the truth.
If you loved it, I'd let you find it, but in selling it, it'll send you a
strong delusion. If you don't love the truth, that's an insult to God. And he says, if you're that uninterested in truth, then I'll make sure you find something else instead.
That's a judgment. That's like hardening Pharaoh's heart or giving
him over to a reprobate mind in Romans. God judges people that way.
But here's a
verse I really like in Jeremiah. It's actually a criticism, but by the criticism you can deduce what it is that God's looking for here. Jeremiah chapter 9, verse 3, it says, and like their bow they have bent their tongues for lies.
They are not valiant for the truth, truth, for the truth on the earth,
for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says the Lord. Now these people who've acquiesced to the lies, they are not valiant for the truth. That's an interesting word.
Valiant means you've got to be courageous. You've got to
be a warrior for the truth. Why? Because there's a lot of opposition to the truth.
You've got to be a hero. You've got to be one of God's heroes who says, I'm gonna stand for the truth if I'm the last man standing or the last woman standing. I'm the last person saying this.
I know it's true. I don't care if all forsake me. I'm
gonna stand by the truth.
And Paul of course said in Galatians 1 10, if I
was pleasing men I couldn't be the serpent of Christ. I'm not gonna, you know, be like Jesus said John was. He said, when you want to see John, what did you think to find? A reed, you know, swaying in the wind? No, he was a man who had some moral backbone enough to get himself killed for it.
And that's what we need to
be. We need to be valiant for truth, fighting for the truth. Not fighting physically, but fighting in the realm of ideas, in the realm of truth, in the realm of persuasion.
And in Galatians 2 5, Paul said, to whom we did not yield by
submission, even for one hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue to be with you. Paul's talking about when he came to Jerusalem and there were Judaizers there trying to tell him and other Christians that they had to be under the law of Moses to be saved. No, that's not the gospel.
That's not the
truth of the gospel. He said, I won't yield to them for a moment. Now it would have been a lot easier for him too because he was the outsider coming into Jerusalem.
This was the Jerusalem Church and some of the apostles in Jerusalem were not really standing up against this. And here Paul comes in, I'm not gonna yield to these people. No, not for a moment, not for an hour.
I want the truth to
endure. He was valiant for the truth. Now just a couple more points and we'll be done here.
I realize we've gone a little late. But in Acts chapter 4, we find that
the apostles were told by the Sanhedrin not to speak the truth about Jesus anymore and told them it could cost them their lives. They had already gotten beaten and they were threatened it'll be worse for them if they keep doing this.
So what did they do? They backed down. Well, not even a little bit. It says
in verse 23 of Acts 4, And being let go, they went to their own companions and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them.
So when they
heard that, they raised their voices to God with one accord and said, Lord, you are God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, who by the mouth of your servant David have said, why did the nation's rage and the people plot vain things? The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ, for truly against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed both Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the people of Israel were gathered together to do whatever your hand and your purpose determined before to be done. Now, Lord, look on their threats and protect us. No, they didn't say look on their threats and protect us.
They didn't pray for protection, said, but grant to your
servants that with all boldness, they may speak your word. It's a little hard to be bold when you're facing someone who said last time you saw them, they're gonna kill you if you keep doing it. But don't let us be intimidated.
Lord, you've
seen the opposition we're receiving here. Don't let us cave in. Don't let us be intimidated.
Let us speak the word with boldness by stretching out your hand to
heal and with signs and wonders and so forth. It says in verse 31, and when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and they spoke the word of God with boldness. So he answered their prayer.
They wanted to be able to speak with boldness in
spite of threats. It's interesting that they didn't ask for an easy route. They didn't ask for deliverance from persecution, but they knew that they had to keep, be valiant for the gospel, for the truth.
They had to speak boldly in
spite of the opposition. Now when it comes to speaking boldly, there's a couple of qualifiers here because boldness isn't always an offensive kind of a thing. I mean, some people are going to be offended no matter how nicely you speak because they don't like what you're saying.
But there are people who
will be put off if your boldness is rather obnoxious. And the Bible makes it very clear that we're not, although we're supposed to be bold, which means we're not cowering. We're not drawing back.
We're not compromising what we're saying.
But we're not saying it rudely. It says in Ephesians 4.15, but speaking the truth in love, we may grow up in Christ in all things.
We do have to speak the truth, but
out of love. There's someone my wife was telling me about online who was very on fire for the truth, but his posts were not very loving. His posts were kind of nasty, kind of mean toward people that we ourselves would agree with him are in the wrong.
But he, I think his manner probably puts people off. And we need to
make sure that we are loving. We don't correct people because we are proud and have to have the last word and have to prove that we're right and they're wrong.
It's because lies will hurt them. Truth will make them free. And they need to
hear the truth.
And that's what, when you love someone, you want them to know the
truth because otherwise they're in bondage, but also in humility. And that's what Paul says in 2nd Timothy chapter 2. Paul said in verse 24, and the servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle to all, able to teach those who are in opposition, sorry, patient in humility, correcting those who are in opposition. If God perhaps will grant them repentance so that they may know the truth and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.
We are in a battle for the truth, but the enemies
are not really the people that we're talking to. It's not even so much the people that are telling the lies. It's the people who have been told the lies and have been deceived and come under the snare of the devil.
They've been
taken captive. We're not here to confront the prisoners of war and kill them. You know, we're here to rescue the prisoners of war.
The enemy is Satan. We
don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this age and spiritual wickedness in every places. Our weapons are not carnal, they're mighty through God to pull down strongholds and cast down arguments in every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.
These are the things that our fellow countrymen are trapped by, lies. Now sure, some of them are willingly trapped. Some of them are cowards.
Some of them have
simply caved in when they should because they know they weren't vying for the truth, but they need to be rescued. At least that's our motive. We need to be bold to speak the truth, and if we cower and don't speak the truth because it's unpopular, they'll remain in bondage to Satan.
But if we speak in humility, in
meekness, gentleness against them, it says so God might grant them repentance to know the truth and to be delivered from the bondage they're in. This is a battle that's I think getting more heated. I sometimes think, I mean, I do see signs that there's some resistance coming from the good guys, but it might be too little too late.
I hope not, but it's still a pretty small, a small trickle, you know, in
a flood of deception coming out of the dragon's mouth. And so, so, you know, I didn't want to just say in this message, you know, we need to, you know, know the truth, speak the truth. I want, I want us to be valiant for the truth.
I want us to
be, realize this is a battle for truth because Christ is the truth. His Word is the truth. The gospel is the truth.
And there's never been a time in our
lifetimes, and probably not in the lifetimes of my parents or grandparents in this country, where the truth of the gospel is the target. It's got a bullseye on it, and all the most powerful forces of culture and education and governments are militating to eliminate it. Because the truth of the gospel is what stands directly against everything in the woke agenda.
Marriage is defined in the gospel,
but it's not defined like the woke want it to be defined. Gender or sex is defined in the Bible, but not the way they want it to be. Frankly, the issue is, of course, people, because they've abandoned God, they've got nothing to worship so much as themselves.
And, and then once you decide
to look out for yourself, you can become very defensive because everyone else is looking out for themselves, and maybe at your expense. And so you've got to kind of defend yourself against everyone else who's defending them, their rights against yours. And it gets to be, it just gets to be an ugly world.
It's when you
say, listen, I'm not going to put myself first. If I perish, I perish. I'm going to stand by the truth.
It's better to die for the truth than live for a lie. And so we
need to seek the truth. We need to pursue the truth.
We need to acknowledge the
truth, and we need to fight for the truth because we're in a battlefield now. You know, I've been preaching on spiritual warfare for 50 years and always been saying, yes, the world's a battlefield. And it always has been.
It always has been.
But we are, there's no way I could emphasize the emergency of the times we're living in right now. And it's an emergency that requires people to champion the truth, because it's the lies that are coming in to replace it in the thinking of Western civilization.

Series by Steve Gregg

Revelation
Revelation
In this 19-part series, Steve Gregg offers a verse-by-verse analysis of the book of Revelation, discussing topics such as heavenly worship, the renewa
Foundations of the Christian Faith
Foundations of the Christian Faith
This series by Steve Gregg delves into the foundational beliefs of Christianity, including topics such as baptism, faith, repentance, resurrection, an
James
James
A five-part series on the book of James by Steve Gregg focuses on practical instructions for godly living, emphasizing the importance of using words f
1 Samuel
1 Samuel
In this 15-part series, Steve Gregg teaches verse by verse through the biblical book of 1 Samuel, examining the story of David's journey to becoming k
Malachi
Malachi
Steve Gregg's in-depth exploration of the book of Malachi provides insight into why the Israelites were not prospering, discusses God's election, and
Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
Spanning 72 hours of teaching, Steve Gregg's verse by verse teaching through the Gospel of Matthew provides a thorough examination of Jesus' life and
Torah Observance
Torah Observance
In this 4-part series titled "Torah Observance," Steve Gregg explores the significance and spiritual dimensions of adhering to Torah teachings within
How Can I Know That I Am Really Saved?
How Can I Know That I Am Really Saved?
In this four-part series, Steve Gregg explores the concept of salvation using 1 John as a template and emphasizes the importance of love, faith, godli
The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit
Steve Gregg's series "The Holy Spirit" explores the concept of the Holy Spirit and its implications for the Christian life, emphasizing genuine spirit
Creation and Evolution
Creation and Evolution
In the series "Creation and Evolution" by Steve Gregg, the evidence against the theory of evolution is examined, questioning the scientific foundation
More Series by Steve Gregg

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