Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast

Allen Jackson: In many places in our nation, it is Pride Month. June in Tennessee is Nuclear Family Month. Maybe it's the beginning of a movement, and we will see June become a time when we celebrate biblical values, biblical worldviews, and biblical morality.

I think we've got to have the courage to walk this back forward, not in anger, but we've got to use our voices, folks. Talk about it at your kitchen table. Talk about it when you're with your friends. Bring your faith outside of the theoretical and let it fill the words that occupy the space that you live in.

Well, welcome to Culture and Christianity. No guest today, just me and the Holy Spirit. Buckle up. I hope I'm listening. I've had a bit of a bug for a few days, so my voice is still a little scratchy. By the time you hear this, I will be much better, so thank you for your prayers. I trust the Lord will have brought restoration. When your job involves talking, your voice not working is problematic, but the Lord's been faithful.

Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. I've really come to look forward to this time. It's like we get to have a cup of tea and a conversation without the pressure of a fully aligned sermon or complete alignment of all, and so there's a bit of randomness in it. But I think there's some things I want to start by celebrating with you.

We live in a season where there's this tremendous conflict unfolding if you haven't noticed. And it's expressed in so many ways. It's expressed between nation-states, between China and the US, and Russia and Ukraine and Iran. And it's expressed between ideologies, between socialism and communism and capitalism. It's expressed between political parties, Republican and Democrat, and on around the world.

But in reality, beneath that veneer of all those labels that we can identify, it really is a spiritual conflict between the principles of God and his kingdom and Satan, who stands in opposition to God and his kingdom. If you'll allow that conflict to become a part of the filter through which you engage the world, it seems to me that things become a great deal clearer.

One of the challenges is there's things happening that are just unbridled expressions of evil in ways that we're not accustomed to. They haven't been a part of Western civilization in the last several decades, and now they're being celebrated, normalized, and held up. Our children are being preyed upon. All the things—we go through that punch list pretty frequently.

It's easy to get discouraged or dissuaded, or you start grasping at false hopes and imaginary revivals because somebody shows you a group of people who were baptized or where God moved in some pocket of people. All those things are great. Folks, when there are widespread moves of the Spirit of God, they correspond with dramatic changes in cultural behavior. I don't think we're seeing that in those broadspread ways yet. I'm grateful for every life that's changed, for every generation that's impacted.

So we're left in kind of this cauldron where we feel the conflict. Whether you see it or not, you feel it on a very regular basis if you say the name of Jesus out loud. One of the habits I have cultivated, and I've encouraged others to do, and I hope you've joined me, is to build a good news list. On a very regular basis, if not daily, identify the things that you can say God did.

We're having camp for fourth and fifth graders on campus this week. Yesterday they said there was a 90% chance of rain all day today, which is not a great thing for an outdoor camp for kids that want to climb ropes, do ropes courses, cargo nets, and ziplines. What we've ended up having is cloud cover all day. The humidity is a little high, but it hadn't rained all day. Yay God!

It's at the top of my good news list for the day because hundreds of kids and their families got the benefit of that, and all the volunteers working with them didn't melt in the heat and they didn't have to deal with the intrusion of rain. God's faithfulness on those small things of our lives is wonderful. If you don't build a good news list, start. It'll help you overcome the gut punch that the evening news so often brings or your daily dose of updates on what's happening in the globe, wherever you go to get that. You need a good news list to help you stay focused on what God is doing.

Along that line, there's something that's happened on a broader scale I want to celebrate with you. I celebrated with the congregation all weekend. In Tennessee, this is officially recognized as June being Nuclear Family Month. Not nuclear in the sense of bombs or weapons or nuclear power. Nuclear is a sociological term to define family.

I went and looked at the state website to be sure I wasn't misrepresenting it, but it's a way to define really a biblical worldview of family where there is a father and a mother, a husband and one wife, and their biological children. If their family system has included that, it includes adoptive or fostered children. So it's really a celebration of a biblical view of marriage and family.

The state legislature in Tennessee pushed the bill through and the governor signed it. So June in Tennessee is Nuclear Family Month. In many places in our nation, it is Pride Month. Not one of the seven deadly sins, but a celebration of the LGBTQ2S+ whatever alphabet letters they are adding in this month.

That has been pretty pervasive. It's been celebrated in the marketplace, in the public square, by professional athletes, professional leagues, and all the things. I was in Jerusalem—I'm there frequently—but when I was there with the previous administration on the American Consulate there, they had an enormous pride flag draped. I thought, what a horrible message to the world that that's what the United States wants to export in the way of faith and ideology.

So I am very grateful and want to take a moment with you to celebrate Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee Legislature that made June Nuclear Family Month. It's not just Tennessee. There are some other states around us that are doing so. Indiana's Governor Mike Braun has done something similar. Alabama's Governor Kay Ivey has done something similar. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee has done something similar.

Maybe it's the beginning of a movement and we will see June become a time when we celebrate biblical values, biblical worldviews, and biblical morality. Not as an expression of diminishment of anyone else, not as an expression of hatred towards anybody else. I don't believe it need be that at all. It's simply a celebration of those of us who have chosen to endorse a worldview that comes to us from Scripture.

I think we have to have that courage. I was a little interested when we talked about it with the congregation this weekend. There was a little hesitancy, maybe a little uncertainty as to whether or not that was something we should celebrate in church. Some things we talk about like being pro-life, they respond with some enthusiasm. Or that looting and stealing is bad, there's usually some enthusiasm around that. There was a little hesitancy around this.

I think it's important to frame this that saying we're for a biblical view of family and a biblical view of marriage is not an expression of hatred. I think we ought to have a month where we celebrate we don't steal month. Wouldn't that be good? Like "No Fraud This Month" and we're all celebrating the fact that we're going to live upright, honest, integrity-filled lives. It's a fundamental biblical principle.

At the moment it looks like we celebrate fraud. It is so widespread and hundreds of billions of dollars are being looted. Not somebody's random money, that's our money. I think all the IRS auditors and evaluators should be turned around from facing US citizens and their taxes and be pointed directly at the fraud problem until that fraud problem is reduced by 50%. Let's not worry about what people are trying to do legally in paying their taxes until we get really focused on what people are doing that's illegal.

Maybe we have No Fornication Friday. Let's start celebrating biblical values. What if we had a month where we celebrated that adultery is bad? Wouldn't that be good? Just to reinforce in the public square a biblical worldview issue that adultery's not a good idea. The Bible's very clear that if you get engaged in adultery, it's going to bring destruction into your life in so many ways. It's just not a good idea. So I am delighted, thrilled, happy, and excited to take a few minutes with you to celebrate Nuclear Family Month.

At a legislative level, it's no less real or more real because the Governor of Tennessee signs a bill or the Governor of Arkansas, but I do think it brings a blessing to us when those people with authority over us take the time to celebrate biblical worldview issues. Hallelujah!

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I'm very aware that many families that gather with us in worship struggle with the LGBTQ issues. Our families aren't exempt from that. We've arrived at this place where we have men participating in women's sports and Supreme Court justices that are unwilling to define what a woman is and all the corporate shenanigans around transgender confusion. In reality, those things aren't confusing at all. It's an ideology that has been put front and center in our culture. Fortunately, there's been a little reversal of that with the current administration.

But we arrived at that place because of the capitulation of the church. Two or three decades ago, we winked at sex outside of marriage. Boys will be boys and we don't want the women to have any less opportunities than the men do, and so it was just kind of a wink and a nod and locker room talk.

We really didn't imagine there was any consequence. We thought we could ignore God's boundaries and God's parameters, live any way we wanted to live and we would do that free of any consequence because if we were Christians, we just kind of casually go, "Oh, I'm sorry God," and we can be forgiven and the blood of Jesus and its efficacy in our lives and there's no consequence.

Folks, the Bible's equally clear that God isn't mocked. And so we walked through that and we really didn't say much. We walked through seasons where just biblical marriage in general was kind of set aside. We saw all the statistics that said that marriage was less of a value and people were living together because you needed to understand if the relationship was really durable enough.

I can't tell you how many families I engaged with that gave one version or another of that where they gave their blessing to that, covertly if not overtly. "Well, they're going to get married anyway." And I'm grateful for that, I'm grateful that they have that intent, but I think anytime we flaunt God's boundaries and live in disobedience, we open our lives up to consequences. Forgiveness of sin does not eliminate all the consequences of sin.

We watched what that more open attitude towards marriage brought. We moved marriage for the most part outside of churches. Now we all want venues and unique events. Again, I don't think that's evil, but we kind of diminished the centrality of God in the midst of those things and marriage became more about a party with our friends and a celebration and an expression of our individuality and our creativity and less of a covenant that was made between a man and a woman in the sight of God. At the end of the day, that's what a wedding and marriage is, or it's the beginning of a marriage.

We moved right through those boundaries as Christians with really very little angst. We didn't talk about it much in our churches. I would have these conversations with good families that participated in church and they'd say, "Well Allen, I've got three kids and they're all living with their boyfriends or their girlfriends, but if we say something about it, it's going to disrupt Thanksgiving and that's the only time we all get together." We were really casual with the boundaries that God gave us.

Then we added into that, kind of rejecting any gender roles from Scripture. We didn't want to get caught into those discussions. So we were saying men can do anything women can do and women can do everything men can do. No folks, we're fundamentally different. Not lesser or greater, but we're different. That's just a biological reality.

So that all got blurred into now where we find ourselves where we don't even have the courage to say what a man or a woman is. We have men competing in women's sports not because they are able to typically dominate in men's sports, but because they can't. They're looking for a venue where they can participate, so they identify as a woman. Because we deconstructed those boundaries decades ago, we forfeit a lot of the moral authority to come back and say, "Wait a minute, this is absurd."

So now we find ourselves living in the theater of the absurd so that a governor of a state recognizes a bill that this month we're going to celebrate family between a man and a woman and their biological children. That doesn't seem like a very deep biblical revelation, but it is a fundamental foundational building block to the well-being of our lives, our family systems, and our society.

If your family doesn't meet all of those standards in a perfect way or it's touched by ungodliness in some way, it is not a condemnation. It gives you a place to begin to pray, "God, help bring my family into alignment with your will." I would have said the same things if your kids were living together or your grandkids or if you were playing sloppily with God's boundaries around sexual activity.

God's not a prude. He made sex, it was his idea. He knew a lot more about pleasure and sex before any of us did. But he gave us the boundaries through which it brings fulfillment to us and contentment to our lives. And he identified the places where it brings great destruction.

One of the great misunderstandings amongst Christians is we think if we live through sin, we've avoided any consequence from that. So maybe we had a season of our life where we engaged in ungodly behavior and we stopped. We got to a place where we changed our attitude and we began to comply with God's boundaries.

But we never went back and talked to the Lord. We never really repented. We never asked for forgiveness and the cleansing. We never did our spiritual homework to be sure that any spiritual influences that may have come to us because of our ungodliness were ever addressed. We just thought we would live through it. We buried it in the past. We're making better choices now.

While I'm grateful for good choices and a realignment of our lives, be sure that you give the Holy Spirit permission. Take Psalm 51 and pray it. If there's any harmful way in me, let me see it. Give the Holy Spirit permission. Read Psalm 51. It's the psalm attributed to David after his sin with Bathsheba is exposed.

We've got a lot of good things to celebrate. God's moving. Good things. God's bringing freedom and redemption to his people. If you've got those chapters of your life and you've left them just in the shadow of history, bring them back into the light of the Holy Spirit. You don't have to rehash them and confess to everybody around you, but you and the Holy Spirit get your Bible out, invite the Holy Spirit and say, "I want to repent."

Maybe you take a list and you put the names down of the people or the circumstances and ask God for his forgiveness. Forgive those people you need to forgive. It's summertime, it's growing season. We're working on that as a congregation at Community of Faith. I'm working on it with my friends all over the country. I would invite you to let the Holy Spirit help bring that cleansing to you. It's a great season.

Talk to your friends about Nuclear Family Month. If your state hadn't done that yet, start to pray. "Lord, give us a governor and legislators that will let Nuclear Family Month come to the state where I live." Let's make it a trend that reaches beyond the states that are already on board.

Along that line, I got an email today I want to share with you. It's from the Family Research Council and Tony Perkins. They have put together a pledge as a part of our 250th anniversary as a nation, defending our freedoms, celebrating those things. There was a quote in it that I thought was really good, from John Adams. This is the quote, he said, "Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone."

I think when the conversation comes around to things like family values and biblical values and biblical worldview, sometimes we lose our voices because we understand it will, in some settings at least, put us in a minority. I want to encourage you to stand on your biblical principles even if you stand alone. But Tony and his team at the Family Research Council have put together this pledge. I thought it was so good, I wanted to share the highlights with you.

They've written it in a very formal way. You can go to the Family Research Council's website and you can get the pledge and sign it so your name gets attached to it. But there's a handful, half a dozen things that they are committing themselves to. I commit to keeping God first in all areas of my life. And they use Matthew 22:37. I commit to fighting for the unborn.

Wouldn't that be good? That the scourge of abortion be turned back in our nation. Folks, it's not a legal issue, it's a heart issue. For years we hid behind the thing saying it was legal and when the Supreme Court overturned that, the abortion rate in our country really didn't change, in fact it may have grown some because it never was a legal issue, it was a heart issue. Let's determine to be a voice for the people who can't speak for themselves yet.

Then he said, "I commit to honoring the institution of marriage and proclaiming God's good design of it." Again, not a condemnation of anything, just an embracing of a biblical value, a biblical worldview. I commit to standing for God's creation of male and female and will not yield to the culture. Matthew 19:4. I commit to voting in accordance with God's word. First Corinthians 10:31. What a notion that we don't bring idolatry into the voting booth, that we commit to biblical values.

The awkward part of that and the part to be candid with you that is really tiresome to me is how we manipulate Scripture. We argue all over some of these cultural issues from biblical perspectives. I saw something just yesterday that said it's the 50th anniversary since the Episcopal Church began ordaining gay priests. They're having a big celebration around it, that it's such a milestone for them. I think that's extraordinarily unfortunate.

I saw a social media post that someone had made about Franklin Graham and they showed a video of Franklin endorsing a biblical view of marriage and family and values and asking people to pray because our nation had begun to behave in such a blatantly ungodly way and embracing all sorts of alternative lifestyles.

The person that had made the post, they went on to overlay it with a video calling Franklin Graham all sorts of very unkind names and saying how unscriptural he was and unbiblical he was, that Jesus never said the word homosexual. Jesus never said the word jet airplane. I mean it's just such a farcical way to approach Scripture.

Jesus came to fulfill the law. In fact the Scripture says that Jesus was the end of the law as a means of righteousness, that our right standing with God is no longer established by the Mosaic Law. But it doesn't mean God's changed his mind. It just means that our right standing with God comes to us through a gift by receiving by faith Jesus' redemptive sacrifice for us.

But God's moral boundaries haven't been reduced. God didn't say, "Oh, just steal when it's in your best interest," or "Commit adultery if it's more fulfilling to you." Jesus made that very clear in his teaching. He said according to the law of Moses, if you're angry enough and you murder someone, you're guilty, but I say to you, if you're angry enough that you want to commit murder, that you're guilty.

He said Moses said that if you commit adultery, you're guilty. I say to you that if you look at a woman with lust in your heart that you have committed adultery. Jesus wasn't diminishing the standards, he was raising them. It's just nonsense to suggest that Jesus was advocating for some sexual boundary or family boundary different from what's been introduced to us.

And I think we've got to have the courage to walk this back forward, not in anger, not in belligerence, not filled with resentment and certainly not with violence, but we've got to use our voices, folks. Talk about it at your kitchen table, talk about it at your holiday table, talk about it when you're with your friends. Bring your faith outside of the theoretical and let it fill the words that occupy the space that you live in.

I had a professor at Vanderbilt many years ago in their graduate school of religion. He was not living a godly lifestyle, but he was a brilliant biblical scholar. I remember him saying that in the Hebrew Bible, it was clear that the people who wrote the Hebrew Bible thought that words were tangible. It was as if they had a tangible quality like a rock that could hit you, words could impact you. I remember sitting there thinking, I wasn't a scholar of any significance at the time, but I remember sitting there thinking, "Well, yeah."

I live with this notion that I live in the midst of words, that they are reverberating all around me all the time. I want to live in the midst of words that honor God and honor a biblical worldview. I want to live in words whenever possible that promote kindness and mercy and forgiveness, but I also want them to communicate truth and integrity.

I don't like to live in the midst of words that are deceptive or dishonest or manipulative because I think all of those words around you, if they're not godly and God-honoring, invite things into your experience, your life experience, that are really disruptive and destructive.

Being a spiritual person doesn't make you weird. I've known too many people weird that tried to convince me they were spiritual and they were just weird. The most practical people I've ever known have been the most intensely spiritual.

So use your words to honor the Lord and it will bring the blessings of God to you and your good news list will grow day over day and your focus on what God is doing will grow and your awareness of what the devil is doing will be diminished. It'll diminish your fear, it'll diminish your anxiety, and your health will get better. It's just phenomenal what that will do to you. Your voice may disappear once in a while, but your health will get better.

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Ah, I got a couple minutes left. I want to turn this a little different way. I had a conversation with some friends over the weekend that I'm in a small group with and we were processing some choices and life changes and these decisions about how we learn to follow the Lord and how we work that out in our lives.

The practical part of following God is more difficult than I would like it to be. In fact, life in general is more difficult than I would like it to be. And God is a good God, and our lives are lived between those two statements. The fact that life's more difficult than I would like it to be in no way diminishes the fact that God is good. But I've gotta figure out how to live between these two realities.

And so we're having this conversation, and they had heard me talk about another season in my life. I left home when I was 17 to go to college. I made the announcement before I ever started school at all. Before I started elementary school, I made the announcement I was going to be a doctor.

My dad was a veterinarian. He went back to vet school when I was, I guess I was five when he started vet school. I have memories of him going through vet school and his studying. So I made the announcement somewhere along the way that I was going to be a doctor, but I wasn't going to go to school like my dad did.

So my whole academic life was pointed towards that objective. I used to shadow doctors and I'd go to other states and do that. I worked in a microbiology laboratory at UAB one summer. My academic career in college began in the basic sciences. I mean, that was just my ambition. I liked the challenge. I still do. I like the challenge of medicine. It was always like a puzzle with me.

My dad, when I lived at home, was an equine veterinarian. He only treated horses, which meant most of the time you went to see the patient. You had to get in the car and go to wherever the horses were. I developed a habit really early on, usually my dad would give me some part of the paraphernalia he would need to do the exam and I'd be carrying that along and we'd be going to see the horse.

Then I would hold the horse while he did the exam. He'd listen to the farmer or the owner or the horse trainer, whoever gave the symptoms. Then he'd do an exam. Then while we walked back to his car, his vehicle to get whatever the treatment was, he would usually explain to me what he was going to do.

So I started this game in my head. I'd try to make the diagnosis before he told me. I'd see if my diagnosis lined up with the real doctor. I did that for years and got pretty good at imitating a veterinarian. Not in practice, just in my head.

So I go off to college to be a doctor and I'm working through that. When I left home, I had made a commitment to the Lord. When I lived at home as a young person, I honored God, but I really didn't do it because of my relationship with God. I did it out of respect for my parents.

They'd been kind to me, they'd given me food and shelter and clothing and had helped me get an education. I felt like out of respect to them, I needed to honor their Christian faith. But I also understood when I left home, I wasn't sure I was going to hold that.

I'd made an agreement with the Lord before I left Tennessee that I'd do my best while I went through undergraduate school to figure out who he was. If I got to the end of that and I thought he was real, then I'd be a Christian. If I didn't, I wanted him to leave me alone, because I was tired of feeling convicted. Arrogant is the word you're searching for, but that was the bargain I had put on the table.

As I'm going through undergraduate work and punching through all my classes and getting ready to go to medical school, I began to get this sense of discomfort on the inside of me that God was inviting me to something other than medicine. And I didn't want to hear it. I wasn't interested. I didn't want to do anything else. I had a plan, I had a lifestyle, I knew what I wanted to do.

And it didn't come to me simply. It was Christmas of my junior year, really, before I ever really got to the crisis point. It's a longer story than I'll drag you through today. I'll come back and tell you the rest of it another time because I couldn't get to the point of freedom, I couldn't get to the point of making any changes until I dealt with the hatred.

Pre-med, at least back in the day, was about attrition. There were hundreds and hundreds of us that were pre-med when I started. The department's objectives were to create as much attrition as possible. So by the time we got to our junior year or so, there were only those people that were really committed to the process that would do the hard work to make it on through graduate programming.

So there was an enormous attrition rate and my friends are dropping out and they'd come to my room and they'd cry and say, "Professor so-and-so says I'm too stupid to be a doctor." And I'd look at them and say, "You go back and tell Professor so-and-so to kiss your ring." It got very personal to me. I made up my mind that they couldn't make me quit.

It just didn't matter how unfair it was or how they managed the schedule or how much pressure they put on us or how many exams they would stack or whatever they did, because they did some crazy things. But what that became for me, my motivational edge, was hatred and resentment. They were a barrier between where I was and where I wanted to go, and I wasn't going to let them win.

If I needed to study late or work through a weekend or there was some sacrifice demanded of me, I'd use the resentment and the bitterness as my leverage. And I thought, "I won't let them win." Through a variety of circumstances, God put this godly person in my life that had been a missionary to Cuba. At the time I thought she was 1,000 years old. She probably is my age, but at my current age.

I got in a space where I had to spend some time with her, and she was asking me about my academics and what I was doing and I told her. She very kindly said to me at the end of the conversation, "You're a very angry young man." I said, "Yeah, but it's helpful." She said, "Well, you know if you'd be willing, you could be free of that."

I remember thinking, "I'm not sure I want to be free of that." But she stayed with me. She was persistent enough in that conversation that she helped me acknowledge it was wrong. I repented. She showed me how to get free, how to take those things to the Lord and really not just casually say that, but I got emotionally free from the hatred and the resentment and the bitterness.

When I did that, all of a sudden, I realized it was like my hearing got restored. For the last few days while my voice has been a little messed up, my ears have been stopped up. When you can't quite hear as well as you want to... well, I was that way as a young person. I couldn't hear God very well because my hearing was impeded by my own disobedience and ungodliness. Again, there's consequences when you choose to ignore the Lord.

And so when I got to that freedom... at that time, I grew up in the church where all the ministers wore black robes and vestments and I knew I couldn't do that. I knew if I got that job, I'd get fired in 48 hours. I said, "God, you know, I don't know what to do, I don't know how to serve you, I know I couldn't be a pastor, I don't like church, I don't really like Christians all that much, but maybe if there's something I can do."

I'd had lunch one day in the cafeteria. I had a few minutes before my afternoon classes started and I went back to my dorm room and I was leaning against, we had a little day bed, I was sitting on the day bed. And really, for about the second time in my life, I heard the Lord on the inside of me.

And I heard the voice of God say, "You can go." I knew exactly what he meant. I knew he meant that the doors that I needed to get onto graduate school and what I wanted to do next would swing the rest of the way open. I thought they were already pretty much open, but I knew that the future I wanted was completely available to me.

You should understand in my desire to honor the Lord, I'd been quoting Scripture to God, I'd fasted and prayed. I was trying to twist God's arm with his word. And so I hear God say to me, "Okay, you go." For the first time in my life, it gave me these really cold chills because I understood something: that I'd been throwing a fit to get my way.

I had never one time—not one time—had I ever said to the Lord, "What would you have for my life?" because I didn't want to know. I didn't care. I wanted God to bless me in what I wanted to do and the way I wanted to do it and the timeline I had for it. I was willing to be godly and pay my tithes and read my Bible and comply with the moral boundaries. I was willing to do my part to be a good Christ follower. But I had no intention of saying to God, "What would you have for me to do?"

I walked around that way for a few days. I didn't really know what to do with that recognition. And so I finally said to the Lord, "Lord, I'll do whatever you want me to do." I still didn't have any idea about ministry or being a pastor, but I knew I couldn't stay in that lane. I knew that if I didn't do something, the inertia would pull me right into that graduate program. I went and found my advisor and said, "I can't go to the next level. I at least have to interrupt it."

That was the beginning of putting my feet on a new path. There were a lot of versions of that and variations and some good news and some really difficult news as I walked through all of that. But as we were having the conversation in our small group over the weekend, back to the story, what I realized is that pattern that got put in place when I was 20 years old, I'm still living with. I am trying to do what I can to stay as clean as I know how to stay with the Lord. And that requires consistent attention.

I had a shower this morning. I'll probably have another one tomorrow. It wasn't that I wasn't practicing good hygiene today, but tomorrow's a new day. You and I have to practice spiritual hygiene. I still have to give attention to that in my heart and in my life, but I also have to be willing to lay down my demands that God perform my will.

I knew how much money I wanted to make. I remember wrestling with this at 20. I was like, "God, I can't choose a career that would limit my earning capacity. Nobody does that. I'd be foolish to do that and I'm not foolish. I'll be generous with you." You'd bribe God with your stuff. I find myself now decades on the other side of that decision.

I'm so grateful because I can make choices today for the Lord that I couldn't have made at 20. They're because of that track record and those patterns, those little simple decisions that I began to wrestle with. I don't know where you are in your journey, I don't know what the challenges are, and I don't know what you think is going to bring you fulfillment and contentment and joy.

Maybe you've segmented your life and compartmentalized your life and you go to church and you sing the choruses and you do all the God things at church, but then you go live for you. I'm not telling you that your Christianity's in jeopardy. I'm telling you that is such a diminished life.

The grandest life you can live is a life to honor the Lord, and that has nothing to do with being a professional Christian. My dad led more people to the Lord as a veterinarian than any pastor I've ever known. You can make an enormous generational impact for the kingdom of God without being a professional Christian. In fact, being a professional Christian, I think, makes it harder.

We're celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What a wonderful privilege we have. God has blessed our nation with so many good things. People say to me, "Well, our whole history's not good." Well folks, my history's not great, and your family history's not perfect, but you love your family and your children in spite of our weaknesses.

Our nation hadn't been perfect, but through that whole story, the goodness of God is evident. It still is. Let's ask God to bless America again. I believe he will.

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Allen Jackson: Put the practice in place of saying yes to the Lord. "I want to be who you want me to be. I want to do what you want me to do." You see what I discovered, I was terrified to say that to the Lord because I thought he was going to make me go down the Amazon and live in the jungle and eat bugs. I thought God wanted to do something that was punitive to me, that would be sacrificial. I'm decades on the other side of that, and the Lord has been so good to me. He has been so good to me.

He's let me travel the world. He's given me the privilege of learning things that help people's lives be transformed by the power of God. He's given me the opportunity to serve with some of the most remarkable men and women of faith in my generation. He's been so gracious to me. He's met all of my needs. I thought I was turning my back on a life of self-sufficiency, and I have learned God's faithfulness in my life. Now, I've had to learn to trust the Lord.

I'm more comfortable trusting Allen if we just get real honest about it. Jesus taught us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." That's not the prayer I like to pray. I want to pray for all the bread I'm ever going to need in the warehouse and the key to the warehouse. But I have learned that God is faithful.

Today I'm making decisions that at 20 would have been impossible for me to make. Trust the Lord in ways on scopes and magnitudes that come from learning to know the Lord in those ways. Wherever you are in your journey, do the things you need to do to be clean with the Lord. Stop carrying the resentment and the bitterness and the hatred. Stop excusing your sin. You'll never make a case to God that's so convincing that he'll agree with you that you're justified in your sin.

You can't hold your bitterness and your anger and your resentment and your hatred. You've gotta forgive. You've gotta release the people. You've gotta turn loose. He'll bring healing to the rejection. When God accepts you, it doesn't really matter who else doesn't vote you onto their team. We belong to the best family in the universe.

I pray that helps you. We had a really fruitful discussion in my small group about learning to trust the Lord. What came out was how many of us in the conversation really were reluctant to say to the Lord—or it never occurred to us to say to the Lord—"What would you have me to do with my life?" We just want God to bless us.

That's not a bad thing. Most kids start out and think that the adults in their life exist to make their life better, which is pretty much the normal childish response. But if you get to 25 years old and you still think the adults in your life only exist to make your life better, that's a pretty broken response to the adults in your life.

God is still searching the earth for men and women whose hearts are turned towards him, and he will help us. He'll help bring the cleansing we need, the freedom we need, and the direction we need. He'll write a story for you that will exceed any imagination you hold. I am living evidence of that. It's not because I've always gotten it right. Folks, if you look up dysfunctional, you'll probably find my picture. But the goodness of God and the grace of God...

Again, we started today saying God's moving in the earth. We're celebrating Nuclear Family Month in Tennessee and beyond. Tony Perkins has got a great pledge that you can sign up for and join tens of thousands of other Christians in our nation, saying we're going to stand for some biblical values and a biblical worldview.

Most of all, we're going to invite the Spirit of God into our lives to help us be the men and women, the husbands, the wives, and the young people—whatever season of life you're in—to have the courage to say to the Lord, "Let your will be done in me. Let your will be done in me."

If we'll do that, I have tremendous hope for the future. That is the essence of culture and Christianity, and it's the antithesis of sitting in church and looking through the windows, being critical of the other churches. Stop criticizing other churches. If you have a church you like, celebrate it and hush your mouth. This conversation is not about lesser or greater.

I think we do so much damage being critical. If the church honors Jesus, if they honor the redemptive work of Jesus, the uniqueness of Jesus, and they honor the authority of Scripture, there's a whole myriad of peripheral things around that that we could disagree on and still go to heaven.

Now, if they don't honor the uniqueness of Jesus or the redemptive work of Jesus, if they don't honor the authority of Scripture, it's not church. I don't care what the sign says. Turn around and run in the other direction. But if they've got those big rock ideas in place, thank God for them. Ask God to bless them and to multiply their effectiveness. We need every good church.

If we'll do that, Culture & Christianity will write a story for our children and our grandchildren that will be a legacy that we'll be grateful for. God bless you. I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic, too. If you haven't yet, be sure and subscribe to Allen Jackson Ministries' YouTube channel and follow the Culture & Christianity podcast. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith. We can change our culture. I'll see you next time.