Everything Created By God Is Good 2

So this morning, we're back in 1 Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 through 5. We studied this passage a couple of weeks ago, and we focused in that time on verses 1 and 2. Today, we're going to be focusing on the rest of the passage, verses 3 through 5. I want to begin by asking you a question, and the question is a fairly simple one. Do you want to please God? And you might think, well, that's kind of a silly question. It's rhetorical, isn't it? I mean, of course, as Christians, we want to please God. Now there is a sense in which God's already pleased with us. He saved us from our sins while we were his enemies. There's not a question of whether he delights in us as his people. Our desires don't have anything to do with that. Whether a child wants to please his father or not has no bearing on whether his father is pleased with him. Even as our children wander and go astray and do things that we would...

we don't want them to do even as we instruct them and teach them and discipline them not to do it we're pleased with them because they're our children and the same is true with god he's pleased with us because jesus saved us second corinthians 5 21 says he made him jesus who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of god in him we didn't do that god did that and so in this sense god is already pleased to us and it has nothing to do with our desire And so the question, do you want to please God, might seem strange. Because God already is pleased with us, and that doesn't waver or change or shift depending on how we behave or what we do. And so the problem is that not whether God is pleased with us. That's not really the question. The question is, are you pleased with God? And you hear the difference. If I ask you, do you want to please God, you say, yes, I want to please God because I know I should. And I say, are you pleased with God? And all of a sudden it's like, ah.

Not all the time. I know I should be. Which one of us can deny it? Our hearts run all around. They're filled with all kinds of desires, some good, many bad. These desires are with us when we wake up in the morning. They're with us throughout the day and even as we lay down to bed at night. How much time do we spend in our days trying to figure out how to get what we want? How much time do you spend working out contingency plans? Well, if I can't have this thing I really want, what's my fallback plan? How will I get the next best thing?

If I can't have this, then I'll try to have this instead. How much time do you spend trying to wrestle the desires out of your heart? I shouldn't want that. This is a thought Christians have. I shouldn't want that. It's not pleasing to God. I want this thing that's wicked. Help me not to want it. In other words, is there any time that goes by, a day, a week, even an hour, where we are not negotiating within ourselves, making trades, giving to get what we want? I'll do this if I can have that. Negotiation really is how we get what we want. And we're always ready to do it. We're always ready to give to get. The danger with this sort of thing is that we end up thinking that God is the same way, that he negotiates, that he gives us what we want so that he will get what he wants. And what does he want? Our obedience, our praise, ultimately our worship. So does God negotiate with us to get that out of us?

Does he negotiate with us to get worship from us? The answer is no. He gave us his son to save us from our sins so that we could worship him and serve him. That's the transaction. Those are the terms of our worship, but it's not a negotiation. He didn't come and say, well, if I do this, will you do that? What he looked out and saw was death, dead sinners, and he's breathed life into them through his son, Jesus Christ. That's not a negotiation. That's a declaration. That's a proclamation. That's the good news of the gospel. God did that. We didn't have anything to do with it. Now, why do I bring all of this up? I started out asking, do you want to please God? And you say, yeah. And I say, are you always pleased with God? And you say, no. And I say, well, how do you try to please yourself with God? How do you try to find peace with God? And it's through negotiation. We wrestle in our hearts and in our minds. God, I'll do this or I'll want that or I'll stop doing this other if.

I get the thing that I really want. And this is dangerous to us. Two weeks ago, we studied this passage. We studied God's warning against falling away from the faith, apostasy. We saw that apostasy begins long before the time when someone renounces their faith and they say, I don't believe in Jesus anymore. I don't believe in creation anymore, whatever it is that they might say. We saw a few weeks ago that... Falling away from the faith begins long before that. If we were to compare this with literal falling, by the time they say, I don't believe in Jesus Christ, that's when they're going splat on the ground after they've fallen off the cliff. But there is walking up to the cliff, I'm going to go to the cliff, I want to see what's down the cliff, I'm leaning over, and then there's the fall. And if we don't register falling away from the faith until we hear the splat at the bottom, we've missed it all.

There are indicators, there are signs, there are things we need to be keyed into in our own hearts and in our own minds that precipitate, that come before renunciation of the faith. We think in our hearts, maybe if I do this or if I stop that, God will finally give me the thing I want. This is dangerous to us because we're always doing this plotting. We're always scheming to get what we want. And when we take this up with God, we stand in great danger of falling away from the faith because we enter into a negotiation with him, but he doesn't participate. He doesn't negotiate with us.

His word's not like, well, what is it you really want? Okay, well, if you'll do this other thing, yeah, I'll give you what you want. But you'll have to wait a little while. There's none of that. And that's very hard for us. Because everywhere in our life, we have that sort of give and take. But not with God. And so as I said, our text this morning is 1 Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 through 5. Would you please stand now for the reading of God's word? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons. By means of the hypocrisy of liars, seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron. Men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good. And nothing is to be rejected if it was received with gratitude.

for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, as I said, we're going to pick up in verse 3, mostly. Verse 3 starts with two examples of apostasy, two examples of falling away from the faith. So I want you to, I want to say that, and I just want it to soak in a little bit. These are two examples of apostasy. And the sort of apostasy we're talking about here that we need to be most on guard with is not the sort of apostasy that says, I reject the Christian faith and I don't believe in Jesus anymore. There's another type of apostasy, a more subtle, harder to detect, but just as dangerous sort of apostasy. And that is the apostasy of bringing things in to the church, into the faith, without rejecting the Christian faith.

Holding things that don't agree, that don't fit together and saying, this is all one and the same. And so the things that these men are teaching is that people ought not to get married and they're advocating for the abstention of certain foods, meat mostly. And so what they're doing is they're taking two things, marriage and food, and adding restrictions or guidance about those two things, marriage and food, to the Christian faith and saying, we're Christians and we ought not to do this. Now this is a dangerous thing. This is a wicked thing to do. God warns us. In Jesus Christ, he warns us that we ought not to add to or take away from his word in any way. And that's what these men are doing. And it's a dangerous thing for us to listen to and for us to hear and go, oh, yeah, okay. But before we get into these particulars, forbidding marriage and advocating for not eating certain foods, I want us to see what's going on with these examples. What are they meant to accomplish?

Is the purpose simply to say you shouldn't get married? Is that the end? My contention is that that's not the end. Think of it this way. If you were to go and ask a little child, a two-year-old, a three-year-old, any kid here, what they want to be when they grow up, what they will tell you is they want to be just like their parents. Little girls want to be like their mommies. Little boys want to be like their daddies. In my house, my younger kids, Karis and mostly Nico, they play house, right? And I hear this thing where Karis will say things. She'll say, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. And I think she's talking to me. But she's not talking to me. She's talking to Nicodemus. And he's playing the daddy and she's playing the mommy and they have a baby doll, right? So what I want you to see, the reason I bring that up to you is I want to ask you, do those kids see anything wrong with marriage?

No. They think, this is what I want when I grow up. This is a good thing. And we could apply this to lots of other things. If you were to look at young children and say, do they see the distinctions, the sorts of troubles, the sorts of questions that we do as adults or as older people? And the answer is no, they don't. Another example would be if I go down to the daycare during the day. Most of the kids over there are black. And they love me to death. And I love them to death. Little black girls come over and they hug me and they talk to me and they say, look at my pretty beads in my hair and all this sort of stuff. And it changes around second to third grade. All of a sudden they get kind of, they're like, they're more standoffish. They've gone to school. They're a little older. They're a little more aware. But before that, they don't know that I'm not black. They don't care that I'm not black. And I don't care that they're black. I love that they come over and want to hug and snuggle.

whatever else for a few minutes. When I'm having a bummer of a day, I walk down that hall and get my pick-me-up from these sweet little kids that don't care that I'm not like them. And so my point in saying that to you is little kids aren't plagued with the troubles that we are. They see things that are good and they go, well, that's good. And then as they get older, they become corrupted and they go, I don't know if that's good anymore. And that's what's going on here. A little child would look at marriage and they say, that's a good thing. I want to be a mommy when I grow up. I want to be a daddy when I grow up.

And so what are these men teaching? What are they doing? Why are they forbidding marriage? What they're doing is they're trying to assail or afflict or strike at your conscience. They're trying to get you to wonder about things that are settled. Is it okay to get married? Should we get married? Is it more godly not to get married? Are you guys aware, just in our day and age, the promotion of singleness, it's a good thing. You hear people talk about, I wonder if I have the gift of singleness. I wonder if that's a good thing. Some of you are smiling, some of you are frowning, and you're going, I don't know about that. And some of you are going, yeah, it's terrible. It's a bad question. Have you ever wondered, why is it that in our culture, people are wondering this? And why is it in Christian circles specifically, there's a question of whether it's better to be single than to get married? Where'd that come from? 1 Corinthians 7. If we were to make a case for it, I suppose that's where we would go. Paul saying, I wish you all were even as I am. Nevertheless, if you look around, the vast majority of people,

Get married. They get married, and they always have. So where did this idea that singleness was a thing, and we ought to wonder if singleness was something that we should consider. Am I called to singleness? Is my desire to get married good or not? Where did we get the idea that that question would even be a question? Well, because somewhere along the way, we were around forbidding of marriage. And now our consciences used to be settled, but have been unsettled by... Men who are, as the scripture describes, seared in their own consciences as with a branding iron. They're hardened. They're not sensitive to the Lord and to his word. They're not concerned about protecting our consciences, men's consciences, women's consciences. And so in turn, what they do is they exploit them. They take advantage of them. They corrupt them. How do they do that? They do it by questioning the goodness of God in his creation. We know from reading in Genesis that God made marriage.

He instituted it in the Garden of Eden. And one of the reasons that he made marriage was what? Adam came, was there, and the Lord brought all of the animals to Adam. And Adam named all of them. And what does the scripture say after Adam had named all of the animals? There was not a helper found suitable for him. And that's what precipitated, that's what came before the creation of woman, of Eve. Because the scripture says it's not good for a man to be alone. Therefore, I also make a woman suitable for him, a helper suitable for him. And then the Lord made Adam fall into a deep sleep, took out a rib, fashioned him into a woman. Eve presented him, and Adam goes, look at that, a woman, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Eve. This is the institution of marriage. It's before the fall, and it's good. It's good. The scripture tells us it's not good to be alone. It is good.

to be married. Okay? This is a very basic, simple thing that we need to hear and we need to not just go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. We need to believe it. Marriage is a good thing. What if my husband sins against me? What if my wife's a shrew? What if we can't have kids? What if, what if, what if? Marriage is a good thing because God made it. Okay? Marriage is a good thing. And so anyone who sets themselves up as forbidding marriage is... setting themselves up above God and passing judgment on his creation, saying, no, actually what he made and declared to be good is in fact not good. Now, where have you seen this sort of thing happen? Well, you see it in the Roman Catholic Church. Okay? They're clergy. They're nuns. They can't get married. They're not allowed to get married. It's entirely one of them to forbid marriage from men and from women. It's wrong. To suggest that serving God

and marriage are at odds with each other is the height of stupidity. It goes against all of creation and nature. We are made to reproduce and to bear fruit for our God, not to be sterile. And it leads to a whole host of sins, the forbidding of marriage. It's to say that what God made and said was good is in fact not good. It'd be very easy for me to stop there and say, boo, boo, boo, hiss the Catholic Church for what they did. And they're wrong. But is this warning for us? Do we need to be warned against the forbidding of marriage? Do we need to keep an eye out for it? Yes. How? Well, that's what we're going to talk about. When you get these sort of prohibitions, some of you might be sitting here thinking, who would forbid marriage? Well, the reason you ask that question is because it never comes across that simply. You may never get married. Because if someone said that, you might pick up on what's going on and be like, I don't think that's right.

So it doesn't come that way. It's like boiling a frog. The water's comfortable, and you turn the heat up a little bit, and you turn the heat up, and all of a sudden, the frog's cooked. But it didn't happen over time, because if it had happened all at once, the frog would have jumped out of the water. So when we speak of forbidding marriage, I'm not saying that you have churches that are coming out and saying, you may not get married, it's bad and wicked. If they do, they won't be around for long. Because most people will look at that and go, that is not right.

And yet it's still a danger to us, this idea of forbidding marriage. So how does it happen? How do you get to a place where marriage is being forbidden? Well, it creeps in over time. And it shows up, as I mentioned earlier, when you're wondering if there might be more to consider to the question, I wonder if I'm called to singleness. That question comes from years of chipping away at the goodness of marriage. Are you guys familiar with the idea or the phrase or the hashtag, pro-family? I'm pro-family. I'm pro-marriage. You're not. Do you think that marriage is oppressive to people? Okay, does our society think that marriage is oppressive to people? Is it unfair? Yes. You guys have to know the times you live in. Maybe I'm not asking the questions well, but you have to know that the idea that you would be like, marriage and kids are good, is an explicitly Christian...

confession of faith at this point in our society. Okay? To say, I want to get married and have kids is to have a third eyeball in your forehead. So how do you deconstruct someone's view of marriage? Well, you start by pointing out, well, you know, not everyone gets married. In fact, there are some people who aren't even able to get married. And there are even those who don't want to get married. And for you to be pro-marriage and to be all about it and just say that's God's plan for creation is to be oppressive, to be offensive, to be unloving. It's to hurt their feelings. You wouldn't want to hurt anybody, would you? You're a good Christian. Yeah, maybe that's a better way to say it. Have you heard of a discussion of the family being idolized? Idolizing the family. It's a good thing. Can it be idolized? Yes. Is a desire to have a family.

Idolatry. No. Okay? It's not. We don't call what God says is good evil. And yet we don't want to be hurtful. You don't want to be offensive. What if you've got a friend who wants to get married and can't find a spouse? A woman can't find a man to marry her. It's a tragedy. This is what Abram says is a tragedy. You could apply the same thing to children. What do you do with barrenness? Are you supposed to say you don't love children because God in his wisdom, in his infinite wisdom and power, has decided not to give children equally to everyone? That's not your doing. You didn't do that. But there's pressure on you to not appreciate and not to love and not to believe the truth of God because there's pressure from outside to say, well, if everybody can't have it and if everyone doesn't want it, then you can't delight in it. That is forbidding marriage. That is prohibiting it. Okay? It's bad.

Now, is my intention to give you a mallet to go whap somebody on the head with who doesn't agree with you? No. That's not the point. We're to speak the truth in love, but first you have to know the truth. And the truth is that marriage is good. And the sad part is that not everyone who desires to get married is able to get married. And it's also sad that those who ought to get married are unwilling to get married. Men who are unwilling to take on responsibility. That's a tragedy. That's a perversion of God's goodwill for our lives. And so you start to wonder about marriage. Well, maybe I shouldn't get married. If I'm too happy about my engagement or my marriage or my baby or my whatever, you're on the track to being open to thinking that your children, it might be better for them not to get married. Has anyone thought with all the stuff going on in our society that you might not want your kids and grandkids to grow up in this? No?

Okay, well, maybe I'm just out in front of you. You're going to think it. And I want to tell you now. You think of how hard life is. You hear people say, oh, it's not like it was when I grew up. This is what our grandparents said to our parents, and this is what our parents said to us. This is what we say to our children. And so it follows that this is what our children will say to their children. And at what point do we say, I don't know that it's good to keep bringing people into this misery, but not to get married. Scripture even acknowledges this difficulty.

When Jesus is warning about the destruction of Jerusalem, what does he say? He says, woe to the women who are pregnant and nursing and who are caring for little ones in those days. Woe to them. Why? Because they're not going to be able to get to the hills in time and they're going to be consumed by the destruction. And so your inclination that having children in a difficult time increases vulnerability and will be more difficult for them is right. And yet, you may not forbid marriage. That can't be your answer. And so we do actually feel this pressure to forbid marriage. Now, one other thing about talking about forbidding something or prohibiting something is we think of it in terms of it being definite or indefinite. It is forbidden forever. Prohibitions, you know, being forbidden from doing something is hardly ever forever. Think of the drinking age for a minute. Drinking age in America, in Indiana, is 21. You're prohibited. You are forbidden from drinking any alcohol until you turn 21. But then you turn 21 and you can drink alcohol. It's not forever.

And so it's not only do we need to concern ourselves with marriage being forbidden indefinitely, but even for a time. Why don't you wait a little longer to get married? Why don't you go live a little bit? Why don't you go enjoy life? Why don't you establish your career? Why don't you make some money? Why don't you? Why don't you? Why don't you? This is forbidding marriage, okay? This is forbidding marriage. And you might think, well, why can't people just wait? And I'd say, because they are incapable of being pure, okay? They're not capable of dating for two or three years and staying away from fornication. It doesn't happen. That's why scripture tells us it's better to marry than to burn. And so if parents put pressure on their children not to marry because of their lives needing to get ahead of them, those parents, some I've even heard of saying it explicitly, but if not explicitly, then implicitly is, I'm okay with the fornication. Now, some of you are probably upset with me.

I would never say that to my kids. That's not what I want and that's not what I think. And I go, well, then maybe there's ignorance there. But my goal is for the ignorance to be removed and for you to see what's really going on here. Young people have to fight tooth and nail to be pure. And they have to get married so that they can avoid falling into that pit and having to deal with the consequences of it the rest of their life. And so forbidding marriage in young people so that they can get their feet underneath them in life is very, very wicked.

How did we get to this point? I know that the things I'm talking about are what we've all grown up around and what we've all seen. How did we get to this point? That's a fair question, right? How did we get to the point where we're like, well, you can get married once all these other things are in order and nice and neat and in their place. How did we get there? How did we get to forbidding marriage? Because that's what we're doing. How did we get there? What? Greed? Somewhat. Yeah. Here's what I think. A long time ago, decades ago, when our parents were kids, our age and younger, the church stopped dealing with fornication. They didn't discipline it. It became something that as long as you didn't get pregnant, it was okay. How many of you would even have thought, I wonder if my parents were pure before they got married? How many of you know they weren't? If they were Christians, was there anyone in their life telling them, no, you may not do that. That's not good for you. That doesn't glorify God.

How many of you who are older had that in your life? Someone saying, no, you can't do that. You're a Christian. Keep your hands off of her. Propose and get married. It's been a long time since the church was engaged in that battle in the lives of her people, God's people. The church has given up forbidding divorce a long, long time ago. What does the church have to say? What instruction has it given to her people regarding divorce and the wickedness of it? That God hates it. It's gone. It's been gone a long time. And where it's not gone, the churches that deal with that stuff pay for it because the people are not willing to hear it. Maybe I married the wrong man. Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe we'd be better off alone.

And Christians say this stuff, and they don't even bat an eye at it. Why? Because the church has never told them, you may not say that or do that. When you get married, it is until death separates you, and you're in it for the long haul. You're in it for the good times and the bad times, for better and for worse, and there will be hard times, there will be good times, but you may not get off this train. The church doesn't do that. Not anymore. The church has given up forbidding unlawful remarriage. One of the questions that we ask if a couple were to come in here, and I've had this happen, and if you want uncomfortable, just put yourself in my shoes. A couple shows up and they want to get married. And one of the questions I ask them is, have you been married before? And they look at me funny and they go, what's that have to do with anything? And I'm like, well, because the Bible says that there are circumstances in which it's not lawful, it's not right for you to remarry. To even suggest that there's such a thing as an unlawful marriage is to speak as though I am insane.

Who are you to even question my desire to get married? This is what I hear. This is what I get back. You realize this is difficult. This is uncomfortable. These aren't fun conversations, but they're necessary conversations. Why do I bring up fornication? Why do I bring up divorce? Why do I bring up unlawful marriage? Well, because it's all of a fabric with forbidding marriage. The whole idea of what it is is gone and what it's supposed to be. The church hasn't done her work. She's been asleep at the wheel for a long time now. And the result of that has been, I wonder if I'm called to singleness. No, it's okay if we fornicate as long as I marry the person in the end. Or God will forgive me for it. I don't want to get married. I just don't want to get married. That's not a good thing for a Christian to want. Unless they are called to singleness, which is exceedingly rare, that's not a good thing to want. It's not a good thing for them to say. They should be told, that's not normal. God made marriage and it's good. Why don't you want to get married? What happened?

So all the while, marriage is being torn down, what's growing up in its place is homosexual marriage. Support that. Church, don't worry about the men and the women who want to get married. Don't worry if they fornicate. Don't worry if they divorce. Don't worry if they get remarried. Leave them to themselves. Make room for the homosexuals to get married. Support it, encourage it, condone it, because you wouldn't want them to go against their desires. All of this. regarding marriage in the church today while maintaining an outward appearance of love and service and obedience to Jesus Christ. These things do not mix. They cannot fit together. They don't work. We are surrounded, surrounded, drowning in the forbidding of marriage and all the things that attend to it. What can we do except ask our Father in heaven to help us to repent of the ways in which we've been complicit in it?

to have mercy on us for where we've departed from his truth, where we've brought in lies and mixed them with the truth with regard to marriage and say, it's the gospel, guys. It's not the gospel. That's marriage. Paul also warns against the advocating of abstaining from certain foods. I want to read to you a couple of scriptures to set a baseline for you about what scripture says about food. Genesis 129, God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth. and every tree which has fruit yielding its seed, it shall be food for you. Before the fall, God comes to Adam and says, everything in here yielding fruit, you can eat it, except for one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, except for that. And there's no meat to be eaten because there's no death. Then you have the fall. Then you carry on, things get wicked. Then you have the flood. Then they get off the boat. And God says to Noah, every moving thing that is alive,

shall be food for you. I give all to you as I gave the green plant. And so there's a specific address to us about food. You can eat all of it. You can eat the plants and you can eat the meat. Why? Because God made all of it and it's all good. Then the dietary laws came in with the ceremonial law, right? And there's certain sorts of food they're not supposed to eat. We're not supposed to have pork and you're not supposed to have this kind of meat and that kind of, you're not supposed to eat. animal if it died this way or that or how you have it. And so the good Jew says, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to obey the law. I'm going to do what I'm supposed to do. Then Peter, the apostle Peter, has a vision in Acts chapter 10. And it says a voice came to him. This is Acts 10, 13 to 15. It says a voice came to him. Get up, Peter, kill and eat. And he's seeing this sheet spread out before him. And on this sheet are all these animals. They're not supposed to eat. And a voice comes to him and says, get up, Peter, kill and eat. But Peter said, by no means, Lord.

I have never eaten anything unholy and unclean. And again, the voice came to him a second time. Well, God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy. This happened three times and then it all went and then Peter's vision was over. So God says in the garden, eat the plants. Then after the fall, he says, eat the meat and the plants, but not these meats later. Then he comes in the New Testament and he says, eat it all. And don't worry about it because I made all of it. And if you'll remember back to the sermon I preached about our conscience and about meat sacrifice to idols, there was an argument that went back and forth. Can we eat meat sacrifice to idols? Some people said no. Some people said yes. The answer is yes, you can. Unless the people that you're eating with are doing it as an act of worship, and then you shouldn't. But it's not because of the meat. It's because of the people's perspective on the meat. But as far as going there and buying some and bringing it home and throwing it on the grill, have at it, Christians. God made it all, and it's all good.

This is the argument that we read from scripture. And so in Corinth, they had this issue. Don't eat certain meat. The Roman Catholic Church, again, same issue. Don't eat meat on Fridays. Why? Why? As an act of penance for the sins that you've committed throughout the week, take away something that is good. Don't have it as an act of penance. That is to set yourself up in judgment of God and to call what he has declared to be good, evil, and it's wrong. Now, Do we have this trouble ourselves? Do you not eat meat because you're worried about, like, penance? No. Why don't you eat food? Gluten, GMOs, calories, refined sugar. In a nutshell, it's not healthy. It's not healthy. And if it's not healthy, I mean, can you even pray and ask God to bless Froot Loops? You all laugh because every one of you has had that question. You're like, this food's so bad for me. Like, God couldn't possibly be pleased by me eating it. Yes, he can.

And he is. Because it's not sanctified by its nutritional content. It's sanctified by the word of God and prayer. That's what our passage says about food, okay? Nutritional content is not what makes good food pleasing to God or not. Now, we could go off and we could talk about the health and whether you should eat this kind of food or not, or whether it's good to drink Mountain Dew and eat Twinkies for breakfast. We could have that discussion, okay? But that's not what's being dealt with here. What's being dealt with is that in our hearts and our minds, we bring in things from outside of God's word and say, well, this is actually what real good Christian people do. And it's wrong. All the food that we eat has been provided to us by our Father in heaven who loves us. Is some of it unhealthy? Yes. So what? Can I say that to you? Health is not the ordering principles regarding food.

And if it causes there to be a conflict or a problem between you and your church family or you and your neighbors or you and unbelievers or whomever, they're not the ones with the problem. If something doesn't sit well with you, dairy doesn't sit well with you, don't eat it. Don't eat it. I'm not saying you have to get miserable and sick to be a Christian. What I'm saying is that's not the gospel. Paul tells Timothy, take a little wine for your stomach. You've got this problem. You've got this ailment. Do something for it. If you have trouble, do something for it, but don't make it godliness because it's not. And don't listen to people who tell you that food is really a thing that, you know, well, you know, good Christians, this and that, and they don't, this and that. No, it's not true. Some of you don't want to eat gluten-free or gluten. Some of you don't want to eat non-organic food. You know, some of you like chicken breasts that are three inches thick, and some of you...

want to shoot at yourselves. That's fine. It's fine. Some of you can raise chickens and kill them yourself, and others of you can go buy them by the case at Sam's Club, and we can all love Jesus the same, okay? No abstaining. No oppressing other people. These things, marriage and food, were given to us by God to be gratefully received and shared and enjoyed by who? By those who believe and know the truth. God's people are the ones who can see these things clearly. They're the only ones who can see these things clearly because they're the only ones who have God's word, who believe God's word, and who submit their own opinions and their own fears and their own desires and their own preferences, their whole lives to what God has said. So Christians can see this stuff clearly where everyone else is going to be stumbled by it. So these two things we need to be aware of, right? We could talk more about marriage. We could talk more about food.

I'm happy to if you want to. But what I want to end by saying, the final point I want to make, is that these are just examples of the sort of thing that corrupt us and lead us to falling away from the faith. That lead to apostasy. So the question is today, not, am I forbidding marriage? There's no question. You are, and we need to repent of it. Okay? Do you have issues with food? Yes, you need the warning. We need the warning, you know? What else is there? What other problems do we have? You know, how you school your kids. You know what I think is just absolutely front and center and oppressive to all of you right now? Black Lives Matter. This is a truth being held up and it is divisive. And if you don't agree with whomever is saying whatever they're saying, there's the threat of violence to you, to your family, to your business. And it's real and it's present and it's now. And the church is all going, well, we don't know what to do.

What are we supposed to do? How are you as a Christian supposed to interact with this in such a way that you not fall away from the faith? Because I'm telling you, that's the danger of Black Lives Matter, the movement. It's that it would lead you away from the truth. It would lead you away from Jesus Christ. Because there's some truth in there mixed with some lies, and it's being sucked in by the church. And no one knows what to do with it. So I want to talk to you about what to do with it. Okay? Black Lives Matter as a movement is entirely wicked. It's entirely wicked. You should not support it. And I'm white and I'm saying it. You can't support it. Everything about it is opposed to God and his word. You cannot support the movement. That has to be settled in your mind. And I know that has a cost to you, but guess what? There's a cost to being a Christian. And you have to love the truth of God more than you fear your reputation among the world.

Okay? That being said, black lives do matter. And white lives matter. And pre-born babies' lives matter. And elderly people's lives matter. And people with severe handicaps who have to be on feeding tubes their whole lives matter. Why? That's right. Because they've been made in the image of God. That's why life matters. Okay? And the fact is, here's the truth, okay? You don't like black people. Why? Because they're not like you. I'll tell you a secret. They don't like you either. Why? Because you're not like them. Culturally, you are not the same. You have different priorities. You speak differently. There's this misunderstanding that goes on with cultures, and we like to be around people that are like us. You remember a few weeks ago I said, you know, I want to get rid of people on my Facebook feed who don't post things I don't like. Why? Because I want to live around a bunch of people who agree with me.

And I don't like living around people who disagree, who say things that I'm like, well, that's stupid. They're stupid. I'm stupid for being their friend. I know what I'll do. I'll unfollow them. This is what we do. Why? Because we like being around people who are the same as us. That means there's a danger, an inherent danger in all of us to despise those of different race, different sex, different religion, different socioeconomic status. We just all want to be in a homogenous group. And that desire to live amongst people who are all the same is the danger. That's the danger to us. You say, well, it's uncomfortable. I don't know what to do around black people. I get scared, and I go, okay, let's talk about it. I can tell you, I grew up in a black neighborhood. All my friends were black, and I have the problem. And I know if I have the problem, you have the problem. Because when I listen to white people talk about black culture, they don't know what they're talking about.

Here's an example. I had a conversation on my way down to Presbytery with some men. And one of the guys was going, I can't believe that some guy got shot because he just bumped into the other guy. They were just walking by and they bumped shoulders. In white culture, I'm sorry. This is our culture. This is what we do. But in black culture, if you hit your shoulder on somebody, it's like punching them in the face. That is how it's processed. That is how it is understood. It's a difference in our culture. It's not good. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying it is. And you need to understand that's how it is. Same thing with staring people in the eye. Eye contact's a real big deal in black culture. I can look at Levi. If he's black and I'm white and I look at Levi and I go walking by him and I'm just staring at him, I look at him, he's going to see that as a sign of aggression and he's going to want to fight. He's not going to want to come say, why are you looking at me? He's going to want to fight.

What do I have to do in that culture to not have that response? I have to look at them and go, sup? And that's it. But if I do that to a white guy, you're like, you don't know what to do. Okay? The cultures are different. My whole point in saying all of that is there are things that we don't understand as white people about being black. And I just want you to acknowledge that. There's an actual difference. We could set aside black and we could use Hispanic. We could talk to Luis about his culture, or Jairo about his culture, and how they come to America, and they're like, Americans?

Weird. And we could look at their culture and be like, Hispanics, what's wrong with you? And, right, even in the Hispanic world, they don't like each other. So what are we to do as Christians with Black Lives Matter? You're to reject the movement and you're to love the people. Okay? Reject the movement and love the people because they're made in God's image. And just because they're different than you and they eat different food and they speak differently and they dress differently than you, you know what? You're just as weird to them. I had someone recently say to me, where are you from? And I said, why? And they said, I'm trying to figure out your accent. And I went, I don't have an accent. Anyway, you're from Chicago, aren't you? And I said, yeah, how'd you know? And they said, well, the accent and your response, you're rude. The problem with mankind is not the color of our skin. The problem with mankind is our sin. Galatians 3.22 says, but for the scripture has shut up everyone under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. And the difficulty that we face right now,

in our society, and you have to be able to see your way clear to navigate as a Christian, is that what's being promoted right now is that there are people and cultures and things that are not sinful that actually are. And you're being told to say, you can't call that sin. You can't call homosexuality sin. You're not allowed. Why? Because it's offensive. It's hurtful. It's unloving, supposedly. You look at black culture and you go, I don't know why they get in a fight over nothing. And they look at you and say the same thing about your culture. I don't know what's wrong with those white people.

All the distinctions that we have in our lives, all the barriers that we observe are man-made. You remember the little girl that I talked about at the beginning, the little black girl? She doesn't see that stuff. She hasn't learned it yet. We've all learned it. And we all are in bondage. We don't know what to do about it. So we want the people who make us uncomfortable to go away. And that is not loving our neighbor. The gospel came, Jesus Christ came into this world to tear down those barriers, to remove those things, so that we would all have... Peace with him and with one another through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. And so when you look at someone who has a different color of skin or a different culture or a different ethnicity or a different religion, they need Jesus. Just like you need Jesus. And you're his ambassador. You're here. Love the people that you're around. Love your neighbors. Tell them the truth. And don't be ashamed of it. This is the truth that needs to be on our lips. I told my friend that I was talking to.

when we were talking about racism and all of this stuff, he says, well, I'm not a racist. And I said, yes, you are, white guy. And he's like, no, I'm not a racist. I'm never going to agree to it. Black people call me racist. I tell them, I'm not a racist. And I say, yeah, I know. And the reason you won't cop to it is because you don't understand black culture. You're a racist. Stop telling them you're not. Say, I'm a racist and so are you. You don't like me any more than I like you. Now that that's out of the way, can we get down to something that actually matters?

Because black culture would actually have more respect for you saying that than being like, I'm not a racist. I love black people. What our country needs in Black Lives Matter is just an Antifa and all these riots and all these statues being torn down and all of that. All of that is just a big, loud, screaming buzzer to you that we need Jesus. You can fight politically. You can argue philosophically. You can spend your life in those debates and in those discussions. But if you don't speak of Jesus Christ, you haven't done anyone any good. So be salt and be light. With regard to marriage, with regard to food, with regard to race, be salt and light. Love your neighbor as yourself. And give God glory. Let's pray.