He Is God, There Is No Other Besides Him

This morning, now, we're going to be continuing in our study of Deuteronomy chapter 4. Our text this morning is a series of questions that Moses asks the people. These questions are very simple. They're rhetorical. The questions are not hidden. They're very obvious. And the reason Moses asks the Israelites these questions is so that they would be warned against idolatry. He says, is this true? Is this true? Is this true? Okay, so if these things are true, then you ought not to do that. That's the point of our text in a nutshell. The goal is to protect them and to help them to honor God. And so my hope this morning is that God will grow us in our maturity and our conviction of how God reveals himself to us in the Bible and in our daily lives. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 32 through 35. Indeed, ask now concerning the former days which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and inquire from one end of the heavens to the other.

Has anything been done like this great thing? Or has anything been heard like it? Has any people heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of the fire as you have heard it and survived? Or has a God tried to go and to take for himself a nation from within another nation by trials and by signs, by wonders and by war and by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm and by great terrors as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown. that you might know that the Lord, he is God. There is no other besides him. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So we're going to work our way through these questions that Moses asks the Israelites. The first, he tells them, gives them a time frame. He says, I want you to think from right now all the way back to creation. Now concerning the former days, he says, which were before you since the day that God created man on the earth, inquire from one end of the heaven to the other. He's saying, okay.

Everything you've ever heard, everything you've ever known, everything that has even been rumored to have happened, I want you to think about that and call that to mind. And then he asks them this first question, has anything been done like this great thing? Or has anything been heard like it? The simple answer to that question is no, nothing like this has ever happened before. But what is this that he's referring to? Moses is referring to their exodus from Egypt and everything that led up to that. was unprecedented. Do you remember when Moses went to the Israelites or went to the Egyptians, went to Pharaoh and said, you need to let my people go so that we can go out into the wilderness three days journey and we need to make sacrifices to our God. And Pharaoh says, no. And then God sends a plague. And then Pharaoh says, you can go. And then he changes his mind. And Moses comes back. And this goes on and this goes on and this goes on 10 times. Early on in those plagues, one of the things that was happening

was that as Moses was saying, if you don't let us go, this is what's going to happen. He's going to turn the water into blood. He's going to send locusts. He's going to send gnats and all these types of things, these plagues that were going on. One of the things that was going on was the Egyptian magicians or their priests were also performing these miracles. They were doing the same sorts of things. But as it went on and as there became more and more plagues, there became a point where the Egyptian magicians were no longer able to do things. In Exodus 8, 18, it says the magicians tried with their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beasts. In the next chapter, Exodus 9, verse 11, it says the magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils were on the magicians as well as on all the Egyptians. And so up to that point, up to those chapters, the Egyptian magicians were able to do the same things, either by trickery or some sort of dark power.

manifest. But the point came where they couldn't replicate them. You have to ask yourself, why was it important that they could replicate them? Why did Pharaoh want to know if his magicians could do the same things that Moses was sending? The reason is because if they could do it, then it meant that he, Pharaoh, was as powerful as the God that Moses was invoking. And that when his magicians could no longer replicate what was going on, God's power and his supremacy rose above Pharaoh's. And so when Moses asks them, has anything like this been done? Has anyone heard of it? The answer is no. They've tried. Pharaoh tried. But there came a point where they were unable to match the power and the supremacy of God. When that happened, God's strength was on display.

They were incapable of ignoring that fact. I think many times when God does something, a very common response is simply to ignore it and to just go, oh, yeah, okay, well, whatever. You can think how that happened how you want, but I don't really want to worry about it. But these plagues were of such a nature that they couldn't be avoided because there were gnats, because there were boils, because there were locusts. You couldn't just go in your house and forget about it. There was no water. You had to do business with why this was happening. You had to wrestle with it. So why did God send those plagues? Well, there are many answers to that. One would be as a judgment against Pharaoh. Another could be to demonstrate the truthfulness of what Moses was saying. I mean, you have to think of Moses coming to Pharaoh and saying, you need to let us go. They've lived in the land hundreds of years. They've come to the point where now they're slaves in Egypt. And Moses comes to him and says, you need to let us go.

Of course, Pharaoh doesn't want to let them go. He doesn't want to get rid of them. He doesn't want to allow them to leave. And so God sends those miracles to confirm the truthfulness of what Moses was saying. What did Moses say to him? He said, God told us, told me, told us, we have to go out and worship him. It's no longer sufficient for us as a people to stay here in your land in Goshen. We have to leave. And Pharaoh's like, no, you don't. You don't have the authority to do that. You don't have my permission to do that. And so God sends these plagues to say, yes, they do. There's one more powerful than you. There's one supreme over you who's requiring this of this people. In Exodus chapter 3, Moses is being enlisted for this work. And the Lord tells him, you with the elders of Israel will come to the king of Egypt and you will say to him, the Lord, the God of the Hebrews has met with us.

So now please let us go a three days journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. Pharaoh wasn't persuaded. Pharaoh wasn't willing. And so God sends these plagues on them to say, I'm stronger than you, Pharaoh. I'm more powerful than you. These are my people and they have to do what I'm saying. They don't belong to you. And that is the purpose generally of miracles is to reinforce or undergird or support the things that are being said. During Jesus' life in ministry, what did they say about him when he was performing miracles? They said, nobody else can do this stuff except God. Meaning, not only are the things he's doing, but the things he is saying are coming to us from the mouth of God. So we ought to honor them. We ought to listen to them. Why else did he send those plagues? Well, I believe he sent those plagues to convince the Israelites that they should follow him. That this was God's first overture.

so to speak, toward the Israelites that they ought to become his people. He says, I'm going to do these things for you, and I'm going to lead you out. They needed convincing. In fact, in this passage that we're studying this morning, as Moses is reasoning with them, he's still trying to convince them that they ought to serve God. This is a perpetual need that we have. This is a perpetual need, not just that they needed way back then. but that we still need today. We still need to be reasoned with. We still need to be convinced that we ought to serve God. Now, many of us would say, well, I serve God. I love God and I trust him. But if we looked at our lives or in our actions, we'd say, perhaps not as well as I should. Certainly not as well as I should. So what's lacking? What's lacking is that we're not convinced as thoroughly as we need to be.

Now, there is a difference between what Moses is asking them and what's being presented to us. They saw these things with their own eyes. They lived through it. We can't say that. We didn't live through the plagues of Egypt. We didn't live through the deliverance through the Red Sea. We didn't live through the mountain shaking and quaking and the thunder and the fire and all of the rest. We didn't live through that. They did. Nevertheless, we have to answer the question. When we read in Scripture this account, And we know that they were firsthand witnesses to it. Should they believe it? Should they believe and do what God requires of them because of what they'd seen? And the answer is yes, they should. And then the question comes to us. Do we believe that God did those things? And if they should have obeyed based on what they saw, should we obey based on what we've read? If we believe that it's true, what then does it require of us? Simply to give assent to it and to say that's true and it happened.

There are Christians, there are people who would deny the truthfulness of the miracles in Scripture or of creation or of the flood or of the parting of the Red Sea. They would have all kinds of explanations as to why it didn't happen just like it says in Scripture. But to you, if you're a Christian, you say, we believe these things to be true because God has said that they are true. How then should we live? You see, the point of these questions is not to teach them something they don't know. It's to take many things that they've known and many things that they've seen and to put them together in such a way that what's required of them is now inescapable. Did you see what God did? That's what he asked. Did you see what I did? Has anyone ever done what I have done in bringing you out of the land of Egypt? The magicians did for a short time and on a small scale replicate what I was doing, but then they failed. Pharaoh, through all of his strength and all of his might, tried and I killed him.

Has anyone done it? And he even goes so far as to say, has there even been a rumor of it? Like maybe no one saw it, but has there been tell of it? Has anything been heard like it? And the answer is no, nothing like what you have done has ever been accomplished in the world. No one's even thought to start a rumor about it. Egypt at that time was incredibly wealthy and incredibly powerful. And God laid them low with almost no effort. He consumed their entire army in a sea in one fell swoop. And not one of the Israelites was harmed or killed. In fact, there was nothing that the Egyptians could do to prevent this. In fact, they brought it upon their own heads because of the choices that they'd made, Pharaoh primarily. And so, no, there's nothing like this that had ever been done. There'd never been anyone talking about something like this having been done. Then he asked them another question.

Has any people heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of the fire as you have heard it and survived? This is referenced back to Mount Sinai. Remember that Deuteronomy is given at the end of the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. Mount Sinai happened at the beginning of those 40 years. He says, has anyone stood face to face with God in his strength and in his power in the midst of the fire and lived to tell about it? Again, this is another unprecedented event, and the obvious answer to it is no. No one has ever come face to face with God and survived it. Now, you might want to quibble and say, well, Abraham did, and there were angels that came, but God in his fury and God in his power being displayed, has anyone come and stood before him and lived? No. No one has. In fact, they were afraid, as Eric talked about last week in his sermon, they were afraid that because they were dealing with God in this context, that he was going to consume them.

that they would not survive. They petitioned Moses and they said, Moses, will you talk to us? We can't have him talk to us anymore. We're going to die if he speaks to us. And so Moses asked them, has anyone gone through what you've gone through and not been consumed, not been destroyed? No, no one has. Even when they made a golden calf and then lied about it, they were not consumed. Even when they grumbled about the food and about the water, they were not consumed. Even when they refused to go into the land, They were not consumed. The reason Moses is asking this question to them is to call to their minds, look at all the things that you've done that are worthy of death. And it is true that at any of those occasions, there were people who were killed. All of the men over 20 years old were killed as a result of them not going into the promised land. But the nation wasn't wiped out. There were those when they grumbled and complained about the food who were struck down, we're told in Numbers.

And that they were buried in the valley called the Valley of the Greedy because they went out and they wanted quail and they wanted meat such that all those who went out and gathered way too much themselves, God killed them. And so there were those who died as a result of their sins. But didn't the whole nation deserve that fate? Were there any among the Israelites who could say, well, I don't deserve to be treated this way? God was merciful to them even as he disciplined them for their sins, even as he purified them. and prepared them to go into this land. No one had come face to face with him in the fire and survived it. Then we come to the question that I think is the most helpful to us and extraordinary. He says, Or has a god, notice, small c god, not referring to himself, but some other god, some other idol, some other god of another nation. Or has a god tried to go to take for himself a nation from within another nation?

By trials, by signs and wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes. And the answer again is no. This has never happened before. So what is going on when God brings his people out of Egypt? At that time when they lived in the land of Egypt, they were not Egyptians. In the sense that they didn't live amongst the Egyptians and live in the same ways that the Egyptians did. They were put in an area, Goshen, sort of a low-lying land that was fertile. And that's where they lived. And it was because of their food and their dietary laws and the things they wouldn't eat and wouldn't do, they lived over there in Goshen and a part of the land. And so in that sense, they were not Egyptians. But if they weren't Egyptians, who were they?

It'd be easy for us to say, well, they were the nation of Israel. And I say, they weren't a nation yet. They weren't a people yet. They had grown, but they were slaves. God hadn't set them apart. God hadn't marked them. God hadn't claimed them as his own. He was beginning to do this. And so what we see going on when God calls them out of this nation, as he births his nation out of this larger wicked nation, is that he's establishing something for the first time. He's establishing a new people. And in establishing them, he is making them distinct from all the rest of the nations. They're going to be different, and they're going to be a people. As God plucked them out of Egypt by the plagues, by parting the Red Sea, At Mount Sinai, he's making them a people. You remember at Mount Sinai, he asked them a question. What question did he ask them? He proposes to them that he would be their God if they would be his people. If they would agree to obey him and submit to him and do everything that he commanded, then he promises to be their God. That is him establishing his people as a nation. And we should understand that nation being established as being the church in the Old Testament. Okay?

They had lived, they had existed, they had grown, but it was at this time as they were brought out of Egypt that they were established. And the promises that were given to their fathers centuries before were now being enacted. We're going to take you into the land that's going to be your own. Up to that point, they did not have these things. In calling them out of Egypt, in God's claiming of them, he says, I'm going to give you a place, I'm going to give you laws, and I'm going to give you myself. I'm going to be your God. Not the God of your fathers, your God. Not that those things are in competition, but that he's going to actively now be engaged with them in leading them and pulling them out. They are no longer to be wanderers. They're no longer to be slaves. They are to have a place. They're to be a people, God's people, the one who delivered them from bondage. And so all of this is aimed at saying, don't go back to Egypt.

Or don't go forward into the land of the Canaanites and take up their worship. I'm going to become your God and you are going to become my people. Is that still true today? Does God still claim people as his own? Does he still claim groups of people and say, these are my people? Yes. God's people today are the church. And I've talked, as we've worked our way through Deuteronomy, I've said to you, We're not so much more holy than they were. I've asked you, would you have liked to live at this time? Would you have liked to live in this nation? And I don't mean to be superficial and ask, you know, would you like to go without your iPhone or social media? But I mean, would you like to live among a people that were immoral like they were? We don't know. And then we have to ask the question, well, why did God want them, these immoral people, to be his people?

And what was it going to take for them to become his people? The church today are God's people. The reason I'm making a point of saying that the church is God's people is that I want you to recognize a few things about this. There is not a nation. There is not an ethnic group of people who are God's anymore. Okay? Christians, the whole point of the Great Commission and of the persecutions that sort of fanned the Great Commission into flame. were to cause the people to spread out, to disperse the Christians into everywhere, and to make them go live in places that were obviously not Christian places. God's desire wasn't to keep them all in one place and to cultivate a greater and greater and greater concentration of them simply through having children. His goal was to send them out into places where they would be the minority, where they may suffer.

They were to carry the gospel seed with them and take it out and plant it there. By their words and by their lives, this was their work. It's not a nation anymore. Peter says this about the people of God. In the Old Testament, it was the nation of Israel. In the New Testament, it's the church. He says, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. For you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God. You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against your soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may, because of your good deeds as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. Now there's a little bit that we have to understand here.

At the time that Moses is speaking to them, he's gathering together a people. He is concentrating them. That is no longer the plan. That changed at the resurrection. That changed as Jesus gave a great commission to his church. It was no longer gather together. It was now go out into the nations and make disciples from every tribe and every tongue and every nation. That's the new work. It's like turning the shirt inside out. It's going the other direction now. If you had lived at that time, would you have wanted to do it? I don't think anybody would have wanted to do it. I believe that it took the persecution of the early church to drive them apart, which is to say that the impulse that they had at that time was the same impulse that the people had when they tried to build the Tower of Babel.

We always want to surround ourselves with people who are just like us. That's our impulse. And it's not all righteous. It wasn't good when they built the Tower of Babel. And this desire to only be around people who are like you is no longer the plan. And to desire it and to work to cultivate it is foolish and ungodly. Does that mean that all desire to be around people that are similar to you is every desire? in that direction bad? No. But you don't need to be told the good parts. You need to be warned against the dangerous parts. You shouldn't be seeking a nation. You shouldn't be seeking an ethnic group to be like you. That's not what God's put us here for. I mean, why would anybody go and be a missionary? Why would anybody go do that work? Mary, what was it like going to Africa? Sweet little white girl, wonderful little white family. Not great.

Not great. And Mary's not going to say any more of that, but it's an understatement to say not great. It was incredibly hard and difficult to live among people who weren't like you. Language, food, culture, sins, all different. Mary's a missionary kid, if you didn't know. What would lead you to take your family into that sort of environment? The idea that you want to fulfill the Great Commission, that you want to go to the people who are different than you, who haven't heard the gospel. And so I just want to say to you plainly that if your desire, your conception of Christianity is a growing and increasing number of people who are just like you being around you, then you don't understand the Great Commission or why you're here. It's not actually the point. Will it be more comfortable? Yes. But in many ways, that comfort is a sinful sort of comfort.

And so our desire should be to take the gospel to people who are different than us. In 1 Peter, he says that they're a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession. And then he says this purpose statement, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Well, who in the world are you supposed to do that to? One another? Sure. But anyone else? So the real question I'm asking is, do you want to be around people who aren't like you? Or do you just want to circle the wagons around what's familiar and say, this is how it's supposed to be? There's a lot of talk today about our responsibilities to our neighbors, to loving our neighbors. There's a lot of talk about our responsibilities as citizens or to our country or our neighbors in that context. You know what there's not a lot of talk about today? Our responsibility to our God.

That's not something that gets a lot of traction in society. When you say, God demands this of you. He requires this of you. In this passage, what all Moses is doing is saying, have you ever seen or heard of anything like what God's done for you? And the answer to all of it is no. And he says, then what I want you to do is realize you are separate from everyone else. In that context, that meant he was pulling them out. into a group. And then when Jesus came, he took that bucket and he poured it out on the world. And he said, go. And so for us to want to go back to a time when we're all gathered together, is to try to turn the clock back. If God has saved us and purchased us and made us a people for his own possession, as the scriptures clearly teach us, then what ought we to be doing in our daily lives?

This really is a question of what you spend your life pursuing. What's important to you? You're not free as a Christian, and I'm sorry if it offends you, but you're not free to decide what's important to you. And you're not free to do what you want. To do that is to set yourself up and your own desires as your God and to say, I have nothing to do and no care for what God has to say. I will do what's important to me or what I see as advantageous to me. But it lays aside any of the sinful inclinations that have brought you to that point. You may not have stood there at the Red Sea and seen the waters parted and seen the Egyptian armies destroyed or stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and saw it quake with all the smoke and the fire. But has God done anything for you? If you're a Christian, then you have in your heart the Spirit of God who confirms to you that he has called you as his child and he now possesses you and that you are under obligation to him.

And that when your desires run contrary to what the scriptures say, you are to conform to what the Bible says. You're not to go picking and choosing through the scripture to try to accommodate your fleshly desires. Will you admit that you have fleshly desires that you try to justify scripturally? I do. The whole flow of this passage is Moses saying, if these things are true, then you are to serve God. There is no other God besides him. And so maybe another way to ask the question is to say, look closely at your own life and point to the things that you have done, particularly because you were convinced by the word of God that it was required of you and you didn't want to do it. If there's no place where you can say, I have done this because I'm a Christian and it was contrary to my desire, but I'm convinced by the word of God that this is what God requires of me. If there's no place you can say that, then you ought to tremble.

This is what it means to be salt and light. This is what it means to be a Christian. To be able to point to things in your life and say, I did this because God said so. I didn't do it because all my friends were doing it. Everyone here gets married and has kids. Are those bad things? No. No, they're good things. But if you compete about having kids, it's wicked. It's just wicked. You hear me. If you spend your life comparing yourself to one another, it's wicked. God has not called everybody to the exact same things in the exact same ways. So open your eyes and read scripture and be convinced and convicted by it as to what he requires of you. And it's okay if he requires something of you that's different than what he requires of someone else. There's no shame in it. There's no harm in it. There's glory in it.

You ought not simply to do things because the people around you are doing them, even if they're good things. And do you know why? I'll tell you why. And I'll use kids as an example. My wife and I have 11 kids. None of you have 11 kids. And I couldn't explain to you if I had a whole weekend what our life is like because of that. It's just kind of mind-boggling. We had, this last week, we had all our normal work weeks. This is just the drive-by. Our schedule, okay? And you guys could all do it, okay? On Monday night, we had soccer games. We had one soccer game, and it was nice. We just had one. On Tuesday night, we had three soccer games in two different places, and none of them were in Mooresville. On Wednesday, we had Iwana. On Thursday, we had two soccer games. Friday, we were completely free, except for a movie night at our kids' church, which five of our kids went to, and then it got rained out. And I took my wife on a date because we didn't see each other for the last few weeks.

So we went to dinner, and then it rained on our walk. So then we came home getting walnuts banging on our car and making us feel like our windshield was going to break. And so then we get home, and then yesterday we had two soccer tournaments, one in Greenwood all day long and one at our school all day long. That's soccer season for us. That's just one week. And that doesn't take into account all of the work that my wife had to do to facilitate us having food and clothes for all of that or trying to keep our house clean or me trying to do my jobs.

If you think our life is easy, you're crazy. Dan told me years ago, he said, if you don't ever have any more kids, I don't remember how many kids we had, he said, if God never gives you another child, your workload is just going to go like this for the next 15 years. And that was multiple children ago. And he's right. He's absolutely right. So should you take your cues and just go, oh, it's just easy, and they do it so we can do it, and that's how it should be. If you're going to do that, at least ask us what our life is actually like and own up to whether you want that life. Because the time and the energy and the financial pressures that exist are real. And that's just our life. Any one of you could say the same things about your life. And what I want to know is, what in your life is marked by saying, we believe scripture requires this of us? And it might be against our natural inclinations. It's nice when it's not.

But if you having agreement with it is sort of the benchmark of whether or not it's right or wrong, you're going to wander and go astray. So go home and ask yourself the question, what do we do because Scripture calls us to do it and we're not convinced in our own desires that this is what we would want to do? And then do it. Do the thing that God requires of you. If it has to do with... your schedule, if it has to do with your finances, if it has to do with your marriage, if it has to do with your kids. Spanking is a great example. Parents don't want to do it. You just don't want to. It doesn't work. No, you don't work. It's hard work. It's hard work, okay? It's really stinking hard work to have kids and to raise them up and to train them. They don't conform to your schedules, your priorities, your weaknesses. They don't care. They don't care. They're going to have their problem when they're going to have their problem. Sorry, JC.

All our kids have done that, honey. Don't feel bad. It's hard work to be a Christian. It's not convenient. And there are things that you're going to have to do because the word of God compels you to do them, not because you're like, well, this is a convenient time for me to do this hard thing. And we can go on and on and on with the examples where God puts something in your life. I didn't want to do that this week. I didn't think that was part of it. And you go, oh, now it is part of it. So does God say, just ignore it? Or does he call you to do something about it?

What do you do because God requires it of you? Where do you discipline your own flesh? Do you ever disagree with scripture? Or does it ever disagree with you? Many ways to ask the same question. If you're a Christian, then you're one of God's people. And you're a member of his church. Okay? And God gives special priority and preference to his church. And he cares more about his church's preservation than anything else. Okay? He cares more about this hundred people here because they're called by his name. And we've professed faith in him. Okay? And he calls us to have the same devotion and the same love that he has. Same priorities. I was in a conversation this past week with Pastor Bailey. Some of you guys know Pastor Tim down in Bloomington. And we were talking about Christian nationalism.

And he and Juergen recorded a podcast that's going to come out. They're going to talk about it. But it's been a big topic of debate now for a long time. And it's increasingly frustrated me. I've not talked about it at all in sermons or in podcasts or anywhere else. I've talked to some individuals about it, but not publicly. So here, I'm going to give five minutes to what I think. And I'm just going to tell you what I said to Pastor Bailey. I said, you know what I think about Christian nationalism and why it's gaining so much traction? I said, I believe that Christians have given up on having a Christian church.

And they're so worldly that they've grabbed a hold of wanting to have a Christian nation instead. But they want the nation to conform to the principles and the values and the morals of Scripture, but they've given up on the church doing it. And am I saying that's true of you individually? No. But the whole idea of Christian nationalism is to push back against sort of the Christians who don't have any care for their nation or for their world. And I'm like, but what about the church? This nation's going to fall. I'm sorry. Call me a prophet or whatever you want to say. We've run our course. Is it going to fall tomorrow? Probably not. But unless God does something incredibly miraculous, that would be, again, unprecedented, and especially unprecedented because it's not with his church now, but with a group of unbelievers. What we should be expecting is something like Sodom and Gomorrah, not something that's going to be comfortable for our kids and our grandkids. And I don't mean to be doomsday or discourage you, but do you know anything about history?

Do you think God cares about holiness? We're living on borrowed time. The days are short. And so our aim ought to be to redouble our efforts and make sure that we are with Lot when he leaves Sodom and Gomorrah and stop worrying about it. And I hear the pushbacks. Well, don't you care about your nation? And don't you care about these people? And don't we have an obligation as Christian citizens? It's secondary. I'm not saying there's no obligations, but they are secondary. How in the world do you expect our nation to change if the church has given up holiness and given up obeying God? We want the unbelievers to do a better job of serving God than we do? We want leaders who we pray for, but we recognize God's placed them in authority over us. We want them to repent, but not us? That's hypocrisy. It doesn't work. And I'm afraid that it's our fear of losing our way of life that's behind a lot of this.

God doesn't promise you this way of life that you've become so accustomed to that you believe that it's yours or that you've gotten it by your own hand. Look at how easily God did away with Egypt and all of their wealth. He gave it to the Israelites and then he destroyed them. What will you do if he takes away your wealth or your freedoms or your guns? Can you still be a Christian? Can you still have joy? Maybe a better question, do you want your children to be Christians if they can't enjoy those things? Or would you rather for them to keep their heads down and keep quiet and go along?

so that they don't suffer. As Christians, our first love has to be the Lord our God. He is God. There is no other besides him. This country is not going to give you what you want. Money is not going to give you what you want. Having bunches of children is not going to give you what you want. The Lord, he is God, and there is no other besides him. That's our battle cry. That's what we rally around. That's what we believe. That will make you stand out. To the extent that you realize that and you live according to it, it will make you stand out in the world. And I don't mean stand out like you're going to get lots of likes and follows and people are going to sing your praises. Peter tells us a very different story when he's talking about this. He says, I urge you, brethren, as aliens and strangers, to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against your souls. You have to ask.

What fleshly lusts wage war against my soul in America? Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles. And you go, okay, I'll play by their rules. But that's not what he means. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles so that the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, oh, they're going to think poorly of me? Yes, and they're going to say it out loud. They're going to try to do you harm. So that the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may, because of your good deeds as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. What does it mean for the unbeliever to glorify God in the day of their visitation? At some point, the unbeliever will realize the foolishness of his way. It'll be too late. That day of visitation literally means the day of judgment, when the time's over and it's done now. In that day, they will realize the truthfulness of the way Christians live.

and what their priorities were. And it won't be until that day. And up until that day, they'll slander you, they'll cause you harm, they'll make life difficult for you. And so what? And so what? The Lord, he is God. There is no other. To whom else will you turn? You can turn a lot of places for comfort in this life, but you can't turn any place for comfort in the next except to the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus' kingdom, I'll end with this, is not of this world. And if you're a Christian, then you understand what Peter's saying when he calls us aliens and strangers. Okay? It's what I mean when I say you're not going to fit in. Okay? You're going to be different in the ways that God calls you to be different. Maybe you'll be different by being single and actually being pure and not have sex with your girlfriend or your boyfriend or live with them. Maybe that's the way you'll be different. Maybe you'll be different because you don't want to go to the parties and get drunk. Maybe you'll be different because you won't work on Sundays.

Maybe you'll be different because you say, don't take the Lord's name, my God's name in vain. Stop doing it. Maybe you'll be different because you have a whole big clan of children. Maybe you'll be different because when you get cancer or when you have some sort of health defect, you don't become bitter, but you give glory to God. Maybe you'll be different because when you lose your job, you'll say, I deserve this because I wasn't doing my job. Instead of saying, it wasn't my fault and it was my boss and they were just downsizing. It was just a financial thing. Maybe you'll be honest. These are some of the ways that you may be different. There is no other God, and his kingdom is not of this world. And to the extent that you try to reconcile the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth, you will live in constant tension because the two don't match. They don't fit together. And as Christians in this world, you're going to live in constant tension because of that reality. You're going to say, this place doesn't play by the rules I'd like for us to play by. And I'd say, you're right.

This world killed Jesus. Why in the world would you expect it to be hospitable to you and God's commands? Where'd you get that crazy idea? Matthew 6.33, Jesus said, Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all things will be added to you. Let's pray.