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Guest (Male): Welcome to *Connect with Skip Heitzig*. We're so glad you've tuned in today. At *Connect with Skip*, we're passionate about helping you grow in your relationship with Jesus. That's why we share verse-by-verse Bible teaching that's both clear and practical so you can live out God's truth wherever He's placed you.

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Skip Heitzig: In 1 Corinthians 15:33, Paul writes this: "Do not be deceived. Evil company corrupts good morals." It's an interesting thing to say because Paul has been dealing with the resurrection in that chapter, but he also knows that people are worming their way into the church who are denying the resurrection and some of the Corinthians are giving ear to what they were saying.

So, he pulls out a saying that actually comes from a secular source. A Greek philosopher by the name of Menander is the one who said evil company corrupts good morals. Paul decides, "I'm going to quote him because everybody in this audience is going to understand what this means." It's a very famous saying at the time.

What he is saying to them, the Corinthians, is don't hang out with these guys. Don't listen to them. Don't give them your ear. You are being influenced by them. If all of your friends are people with worldly morals, you risk mimicking their behavior and their morality.

You risk that. What happens when you're around a group, if there's a lot of them and only one of you, there's a little thing called peer pressure, which is very powerful. You get tempted to compromise and to act like them. When you are surrounded by wrongdoers, doing wrong comes easy.

Check your friends list. You're going, "I can't believe I keep doing this. I don't know why I keep falling back into this." Check your friends list. Who are you hanging out with? There's an old saying: "If you lie down with dogs, you rise up with fleas." Same difference.

Let me give you a better example than a little axiom. This is from Proverbs 22:24-25. The writer says, "Make no friendship with an angry man and with a furious man do not go, lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul." In other words, you're hanging around these people all the time. These people are people who cuss people out and flip people off and write nasty stuff in social media, and you're going to do that.

These are truths. I laugh a little bit because I'm reminded of my childhood. I remember my parents telling me this stuff all the time. "You need new friends, you need new friends." There was this one friend they knew was trouble. They warned me about Richard Wilhite. Richard Wilhite.

In fact, I think anybody in the community who knew all of us would have said, "Be careful of Richard Wilhite," but my parents especially said, "He's trouble. Don't hang around with him. Cut off ties with him." And I didn't listen to them, but they were right. I won't tell you here what happened to him and what happened to me and him, but they were right. He exerted an influence on me that wasn't good.

Let me spin this into the positive now. I'm telling you how to backslide. I hope you're seeing this as how not to backslide. If you find that you are struggling in this area of companionship, let me give you a few takeaway truths or things to do.

Number one, guard your influences. Make sure that those in your inner circle closest to you are the right people because those are the ones that are impacting your life. If you're associating with those who exert bad behavior and bad beliefs, it will erode your moral compass. So, guard your influences.

Number two, here's a helpful tip: be more outspoken about what you believe. You go into a group of friends, just get that out sooner rather than later. You may even want to lead with that. "Hey, you guys, just want you to know I am a born-again Christian and I believe the Bible." That's going to take care of a lot of your associations immediately.

People are going to go, "I don't want anything to do with you." Good. I hope I can influence you, but you're just going to separate the chaff from the wheat when you are more upfront and unashamed about what you believe in. Be more outspoken about your beliefs.

Finally, just get better friends. Get people who support, encourage, and build you up in your faith. You're making a good start. You're here. You're at church. Your next step for some of you is to join a connect group to surround yourself with a smaller family of people that week by week can support and encourage you.

Let me give you a third way to backslide. Just misarrange your priorities. Just make sure that what's important is no longer important and what is urgent takes precedence or what's not important takes precedence. Misarrange your priorities.

We are not going to read all of the verses, but verse 10 all the way down to verse 22 are the broken promises they made in chapter 10. Remember chapter 10? They signed the document. They signed the covenant. "Man, we're going to change. We're going to turn. I'm writing my name on the dotted line." They made a wholehearted commitment to make certain priorities in their lives. They're no longer important.

In chapter 10, they had been shaken to the core by what happened at the Watergate. The Scriptures were being read. The nation realized we were judged for our disobedience. "We're going to get back to God." But over time, their passion turns to passivity.

Ever find this to be true? I bet some of you feel that that is true in your own life. You don't have to raise your hands, but all of us are weak where our passion turns to passivity. Our passion for Christ, for spiritual things, we become passive.

This last week was, among other things, the 24-year anniversary of September 11th. We all know what happened on that day. It's a matter of history. Some of us remember it vividly. Let me take you back, if you remember, not to September 11, 2001, but to September 12, the day after.

Remember what that day was like? Everybody was praying. Everybody was singing. Everybody was in church. Everybody was worshipping God. Remember that? Then it went away very quickly, and it went in the opposite direction where people are running from God and bad-mouthing God and divided once again.

Let's just dip into the text and notice a couple of things. I'll take you to verse 10 of chapter 13, and before we get into it, let me tell you what we're going to read. The secular had become more important to them than the spiritual. The secular over the spiritual.

Verse 10: "I also realized that the portions for the Levites had not been given them, for each of the Levites and the singers who did the work had gone back to his field." They're not supporting the house of God any longer. It's about the city, not about the sanctuary. It's about the secular, not about the spiritual. They're neglecting the house of God.

Verse 11: "I contended with the rulers and I said, 'Why is the house of God forsaken?' And I gathered them together and I set them in their place." I put them in their place. Then the next thing I want to take you down to is verse 15. Not only is the secular becoming more important than the spiritual, but profit is becoming more important than purpose.

Verse 15 says, "In those days, I saw in Judah some people treading wine presses on the Sabbath." It's a day of rest. "And bringing in sheaves and loading donkeys with wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day on which they were selling provisions."

"Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish and all kinds of goods and sold them on the Sabbath to the children of Judah and in Jerusalem. Then I contended with the nobles of Judah. I got in their grill and I said to them, 'What evil thing is this that you do by which you profane the Sabbath?'"

Let me just take you back without turning there. Chapter 10, this was one of their priorities. "We're going to keep the Sabbath from now on. We're going to keep the Sabbath." A few years later, we're not keeping the Sabbath. Profit became more important than purpose.

This happened very quickly in this nation. They are backsliding. There was a business executive who was speaking to a group in Southern California of business executives, and he said, "I find the two most difficult things to do that I have to do with other people in terms of business is to get them to do number one: think, and number two: do things in order of their importance." Priorities. Keeping priorities.

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When you give today, you'll receive *City in Shambles*, Pastor Skip's complete 18-message study through Nehemiah on CD plus digital download. These messages will help you understand how God works in times of confusion and instability, how revival begins in the hearts of His people, and how to move from passive concern to courageous faith in action.

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Skip Heitzig: Learning your Bible matters. I'm committed to teaching God's word and I want you to understand the depth of Scripture for yourself. That's why I want to invite you to join me in a 90-day through the entire Bible reading challenge using the YouVersion Bible app. We call it Jesus People Grow. For 90 days, we're going to read together God's word. We're going to learn it, receive it, and let it shape us so that we can also be faithful in sharing good teaching with others. Join me. Let's learn our Bibles and grow in the Word of God. Now, here's more from Pastor Skip.

Skip Heitzig: To think and then do things in order of priority are the two most difficult things I find I struggle with in dealing with other leaders. Some of you have misarranged your priorities, and because of that, your life is chaotic. You're wondering, "Why is my life so chaotic?" Could be that you have priorities that are out of order.

What do you do? Get them back. Reprioritize. Here's what I'm not going to tell you to do. I'm not going to tell you that you ought to make a list of one, two, three, four, which is pretty typical. Make a list: God, family, job, hobbies, whatever. I'm not telling you to make a list because I don't know that it's that profitable.

What I am going to ask you to do is to think in terms of a solar system. It says "God" on the left, but that's the Sun. We know how the solar system works. There's orbits of these planets in different velocities and time dimensions around the Sun. They rotate around the Sun.

If you place God as the Sun in the solar system, the center, so that your marriage, your job, your friendships, your church revolve around what's just most important, everything's going to fall into order. Usually, what happens in our lives is the Sun is not God. Who is it? It's us. Me. The Sun is me.

My job revolves around me. My family revolves around me. My friendships, it's all about me. My marriage, my this. That's the problem. But when God becomes the center of your solar system so that you just revolve everything, "What would God do? What does God want?" It'll just naturally fall into the right order.

The reason I say it's not profitable to make a list is because everybody has different priorities, different seasons of life, different callings, different time constraints, so there's a lot of flexibility. It's better just to say, "Do what Jesus said to do. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these other things will be added to you." That's why I say it's more like a solar system. Make God the Sun and all the planets will just naturally take their proper orbit.

Quick note before we go on and end this thing. What day are they violating? Sabbath. What are you supposed to do on the Sabbath? Nothing. Rest. They made it a day of hustle, labor. I don't know if they're thinking, "You know what? I can make a couple extra shekels on the Sabbath. This is a profitable day. Nobody else has their business open, so I'm going to keep my business open."

I just want to say this: caring for your body, your mind, and your emotions is not selfish. It's stewardship. In fact, God loves you so much He put a commandment in the Old Testament to say, "Take a day off because you need it. You need to refuel. You need to recharge. You need to do nothing. You need to unplug. Get off media and just recharge."

Up to this point, we've learned that if you are neglecting Scripture, hanging out with the wrong crowd, and your priorities are messed up, you are not trending in the right direction. You're not walking forward, you're sliding backward. But if you place God at the center of your solar system, things are going to just start taking their natural, correct orbits.

Here's the fourth and final step. If you want to backslide, mismanage your family. This happens to be one of the great sins of the United States. There are so many fatherless families. There are so many families that are left untended. Just mismanage your family and you'll make sure that not only you but they will have horrible lives.

Go down to verse 23: "In those days, I also saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod," that's a Philistine city, not very far away from them, "Ammon and Moab," that's on the east side of the Jordan River, their next-door neighbors. "And half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod and could not speak the language of Judah, but spoke according to the language of one of the other people."

Wait a minute. I just want to refresh your memory. Chapter 10, they're signing their name to the covenant and one of the things they promised is this: "We promise not to let our daughters marry the pagan people of the land, nor to let our sons marry their daughters." That was then, this is now. They obviously didn't keep that because he discovers this.

Verse 25: "So I contended with them." He gets a little salty here. "And I cursed them." I don't want you to picture Nehemiah cussing them out or using profanity, but the idea is I pronounced curses upon them. That would have been Deuteronomy 29. God Himself pronounced a curse on them if they turn from His commandments. I think he's just quoting Deuteronomy 29 to them.

"I contended with them. I cursed them." But then it says, "I struck some of them and pulled out their hair." He's going overboard, but this is very Middle Eastern. "And made them swear by God, saying, 'You shall not give your daughters as wives to their sons, nor take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves.'"

Here's what makes Nehemiah really mad. What is making him most mad, or madder, is what they're doing to their kids. Their kids can't speak Hebrew. They're speaking the language of Ashdod. If they can't speak Hebrew, how are they going to read the law of God? If they can't speak Hebrew, how are they going to participate in synagogue services?

If they can't speak Hebrew, how are they going to go to the temple and be able to participate and enter into the sacrifices of worship in the temple? How can they be a part of a nation if they don't speak the language of Zion? They realize now, because Nehemiah makes them realize, you are losing a generation. If you lose this generation, your nation has no future.

When families break down, a nation breaks down. You want to build up a nation? Build up their families. Get people serious about the family again. "I'm going to love my wife. I'm going to love my husband. I'm going to be devoted to the family. I'm going to be devoted to launching kids to be ready to meet the needs and concerns of this world."

There's an old Chinese proverb that says this: "One generation plants the trees, the next generation gets the shade." What kind of shade will our children and grandchildren have? What are we planting right now? What are we doing to protect our kids and grandkids from the disintegrating rays of the secular sun? How are we preparing them?

I want you to think a hundred years down the road. In a hundred years, it's not going to matter what car you're driving. It's not going to matter what house you live in. It's not going to matter where you went to school or what's in your bank account or if your kid got the straight A's. In a hundred years, the world may be a little better because you trained up a child in the way that he should go. You planted the trees and you gave them the shade.

I remember when Nathan, my son, was born and I held him. My first thought, this is going to sound really goofy, I'm holding him and I go, "Man, I hope I don't drop him. That would really be bad if I dropped this baby, my son." I said that because he was so light. It would be very easy to drop. I remember I had that thought, but then immediately after that, I had this thought: "I have a heavy weight of responsibility." It just settled on me of what am I going to do now?

I realized that I had a short time to shape a personality and to launch him into the world. I discovered that a parent is just a partner with God in making disciples of his children. That's a parent. A parent is a partner with God in making disciples of his children.

I'm out of time, but I have a thought. You never backslide from a place, you always backslide from a person. It's never positional, it's always relational. You don't backslide from church, you backslide from God. You don't backslide from the Bible, you backslide from the Author of Scripture. You don't backslide from Christianity, you backslide from Christ Himself. It's always personal.

Because it's always personal, I'm just saying to you, get personal. Turn to the person of Christ, not the institution of the church or the institution of Christianity. Turn to the person of Christ. Give Him your life. Surrender your life to Him. Recommit your life to Him. When He becomes the Sun, everything else revolves around that.

Guest (Male): We're so glad you joined us today on *Connect with Skip Heitzig*. Before you go, here's a reminder. When you give $50 or more this month, we'll send you *City in Shambles*, Pastor Skip's complete study through Nehemiah on CD and digital download as our thanks. These messages offer practical biblical insight for anyone burdened by the brokenness they see in the world around them, helping you respond with faith, prayer, and hope instead of fear or despair. Your support helps keep this Bible teaching ministry on the air, connecting more people to God's word. You can give today at connectwithskip.com/offer or call 800-922-1888. See you next time.

Guest (Male): Ready to go deeper in your faith and discover your calling? The School of Ministry at Calvary Church in Albuquerque is designed to equip you with practical Bible teaching, hands-on ministry training, and real-world experience. Whether you're called to lead, serve, or grow, this is your next step. Classes are forming now. Visit calvarysom.org to learn more and apply today. That's calvarysom.org. The School of Ministry at Calvary Church: your calling starts here.