Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast

Allen Jackson: Welcome back to Culture and Christianity. I've grown to look forward to these conversations. It's like an opportunity to have a cup of coffee and visit with some friends in a format that's not as structured as a sanctuary and certainly not as produced as a television show. I hope it's a blessing to you. If it is, share it with a friend, like it, share it. That helps us in many ways.

As I sat down to do this today, we are just a few days into a war with Iran, and the president, I think, is now calling it a war and not just an action. Every day I have multiple requests, inquiries, and questions about the appropriateness of it or the inappropriateness of it, or Israel or the Jewish people or the Middle East. I wanted to take a few minutes with you and see if we could respond to that and put it in a bit of a context.

I think there has been a passivity from Christianity for a few decades now, really corresponding pretty much with my adult life and certainly with my ministry life. I think it goes back to seminaries and how we were trained. I think it goes back to the way we have looked at the world, our emphasis on personal salvation, and really anything beyond personal salvation hasn't been discussed. We have very little obligation to the world.

Things like evangelism and certainly missional evangelism have been so downplayed in recent decades. They've been labeled and lumped in by secular historians with colonialism and colonial attitudes. There hasn't been an emphasis amongst evangelical Christians for quite a season now to do serious missional work. There are some exceptions to that, some notable exceptions to that, but as a general attitude that has prevailed amongst the Christians, we've wanted to get our personal salvation in place, and then the rest of it was just kind of not our problem anymore.

That's a very serious breach with, I think, New Testament expressions of our faith and certainly with historic expressions of our faith. We need to understand why we have arrived at that place. Is it appropriate? Is it helpful? Is it not? All of that is a part of this conversation. If that's of interest to you, maybe you want to add another 10 minutes to your treadmill or whatever you need, but I'll start with the war with Iran.

People have been saying to me for days, it's kind of split. People have different opinions. Some hate it; some say it's awful. Most of them hate President Trump and his team, and if he cured cancer, they wouldn't like it. I haven't been overly engaged with that particular point. I think the dismantling of the Ayatollah Khamenei and the brutal, violent, murderous empire he'd put together had to be dismantled, or it was going to change the course of civilization.

I think left unimpeded, nuclear weapons were a foregone conclusion. If Iran is nuclear, the Saudis have to be nuclear. So now both the Shiites and the Sunnis are nuclear. We have a nuclear Middle East. That region of the world has demonstrated for many decades an inability to police themselves, to monitor themselves, to curb in the most radical elements amongst themselves. If that was a nuclear part of our world, it makes us all exponentially far more vulnerable and the world a much more dangerous place.

I think Iran had to be addressed before they got the nuclear weapon. We had been more than four decades with the Iranian regime, a terrorist-sponsoring regime, and no American president had the appetite to do what President Trump is doing as we speak. I'm grateful to him and his administration and Pete Hegseth and the Department of War. I'm still learning to call it that, but in many ways, I think it's a helpful relabeling. A lot of language is manipulated and I don't like it, but I think that relabeling has a purpose.

I think maybe fundamentally, since this is a Christian podcast, war is awful. There's no other way. There's much harsher language to use, but that's the most family-friendly language I can use. By definition, it's about death and destruction, and it's an awful thing. It's obviously a last resort. When everything else fails and evil continues to destroy and to plan increasing destruction, then war becomes a legitimate consideration and response.

That's not just my opinion; it's not just a military opinion; it's a biblical opinion. I can show you that. I can do it briefly; we could do it in an amount of extensive detail. You can't simply look at a war and go, "God wouldn't be for that." There are just wars, and there are times it's not only a possibility; it's a necessity. I'll substantiate that from Scripture here in just a moment.

I want to take a minute with Islam and violence. Christians have lost our—the polite way is heart, the more just—we've lost our guts. We have lost our hutzpah. Whatever you say, we want to just say, "Well, you can believe whatever you want to believe, and maybe it has a little difference on your eternal outcome, but our worldviews are really all the same. The problems we have are because religions compete." I've heard that ad nauseam, particularly in academia.

Academia in America as it currently stands, the overwhelming majority of it is godless. It isn't just godless; it's anti-Christ. It opposes biblical principles and scriptures. There are exceptions to that, pockets that should be celebrated and should be lauded, and I'm very grateful for them. I'm an advocate for education. Up until recent years, I always told younger people to get all the education you can afford. I believe that. I love to learn, and I'm grateful for it, but our academic settings right now are godless institutions.

What's come out of that is this notion that the religions are the problem because religions aren't passive enough. If we were just more passive, the world would be a peaceful place. What a bunch of garbage. You're smarter than that. I've been asking you now for months and months, years actually, to watch, to listen, to think, and then to act.

The reason there's conflict is not all religions represent the same worldview. They don't have the same fundamental beliefs about humanity, of God, of our relationship to God, our relationship to one another. We are different. It's convenient for those that stand outside to lump us all together. Those are the same knuckleheads that said men and women are the same. Remember them? PhDs, university-supported. There was no difference between men and women.

What a load of garbage. My father was a veterinarian. I've helped hundreds of things be born; you can tell the difference. Then you can tell the difference when those same animals mature and grow, the difference between male and female. I watched a ballgame the other night; it happened to be a women's game. There's a difference in the athleticism. Everyone involved is an athlete, whether it's a men's game or a women's game, but there is a difference in the athleticism.

In the same way, those same knuckleheads in the universities are trying to tell us there's no difference between religions. Don't believe it. The reason we believe Jesus is the answer for the world today, to borrow a line from a song from a whole other generation—thank you, Andraé Crouch—is Jesus brings something to the human being and to the world that no one else can bring. It's why I call Him Lord. It's why I serve Him as King. It wasn't because I couldn't find another day job.

One of the fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam is Islam in its current version in the world today is a global sponsor of violence. There are peaceful Muslims. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but the Islamic world has either been unable or unwilling to police themselves and to address those amongst them who are sponsors of terror. Iran has been for more than four decades a global sponsor of terror and violence.

Thousands upon thousands of Americans have been killed because of Iranian-sponsored violence. Hundreds of thousands of other people around the world have been murdered, and there's no apology, there's no hesitation, there's no reluctance. In fact, what Iran has continued to say is, "We will secure nuclear weapons so we can wreak violence on a much grander scale." They have said repeatedly over many decades that they intended to destroy Israel, the little Satan, and America, the great Satan. I think we have to pay attention.

You don't have to look far to see that our economy is in real turmoil. Our nation is 37 trillion dollars in debt. Inflation rates made it hard to buy and sell a house, even a car. We're all feeling it. When you go to the grocery store and you spend that extra dollar or two on every item, that gets personal in a hurry. The most important thing we can do during uncertain times is to invest ourselves in knowing God better. Read His word, pray. That's the only place we're really going to find stability we need for the disruption that I'm pretty certain is ahead of us.

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I want to talk about the Iranian people before we go. I think there's a parallel to the Iranian people and the modern-day church in America, and I'll see if I can highlight that for you. I don't think that there should be animosity for the Iranian people. There's been a very small group of people in Iran that have controlled that nation in the most brutal fashion, and I'm grateful that President Trump had the courage to say now is the time to do something about it.

It would have been much, much easier for him to have looked away, for him to not have noticed. He could have taken a vacation to Hawaii and soaked up some sunshine and enjoyed some fresh seafood and pretended like he didn't notice the Iranian evil that was there. That has certainly been the habit of many who have preceded him. His political future, in many respects, I think the future of this second term he has in office will be linked to what happens with Iran in these next few days and weeks.

It was from my vantage point a courageous choice to try to bring a different stability to the Middle East and the people there. I pray that we don't get involved. Ultimately, if the new regime is the responsibility of the Iranian people, they'll choose their government or they'll choose their leader. There is no record in the current Islamic world of self-government, of democratic egalitarian one-person-one-vote, the kind of freedom that we imagine. There's no record of that in the nations that are predominantly Islamic.

I don't imagine that's what's coming to Iran. There'll be some form of authoritarian leadership there, more than we would certainly, I hope, be comfortable with, but the people will have to use their opinion. They will have to do what's necessary to see that emerge. That won't come from America or Washington, D.C.

To come back to this notion of warfare, in biblical terms, war is judgment. There are some exceptions when war is just seen as an expression of evil. Some of the nations that attacked Moses and the former slaves of Egypt in their journey to the promised land, God saw that as unwarranted aggression and punished those nations historically. When the response to their aggression was given, in God's term, the war that was launched against them was His judgment.

As a general principle, just wars are expressed in scripture as judgment. I think you should know if you don't, because we tend to think—people talk to me and say they don't like to read the Old Testament because it's so harsh. The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God, or our faith is illegitimate. You can't bisect that. You can't talk Old Covenant and New Covenant and act like you voted in new leadership.

Either the God that in Genesis 1 created the heavens and the earth is the God of Revelation that will establish a New Jerusalem and a new heaven and a new earth—that's one God, or the whole story unravels and it's incoherent and it makes no sense. If you've been living because of whatever reason with kind of a bifurcated—you had a God of the Old Testament, God of the New—I would invite you to begin to prayerfully, don't just take my word for it, get your Bible out, begin to prayerfully invite the Holy Spirit to help you reconcile that the God of the Bible is the God of the Bible.

We meet in the Hebrew Bible especially, "the Lord Almighty" is a phrase that is used in English frequently, particularly through the Book of Psalms. The literal translation of that is "the God of the armies." The word that's translated "Almighty" is the modern Hebrew word for the modern army, the Israeli army. He's literally the God of the angel armies. Now, the word "angel" isn't always in those places where it's the Lord Almighty, but it's clear typically from the context that He's the God of the armies of heaven.

God is willing to present Himself in the context of warfare for His purposes in the earth. In fact, most Christians, not all, but most evangelical Christians at least are willing to have a conversation about spiritual warfare and principalities and powers and the battles in the heavenlies. Why would you imagine that there's spiritual warfare and that God would always remove Himself from physical warfare? It's illogical.

I think much of the physical warfare in our earth in the present age has a lot to do with the principalities and powers, the spiritual forces that lead us to that. But be legitimate enough in your faith, be integrated enough in how you think about God and your Bible and what you trust God for, to imagine the strength of God engaged in changing the course of nations and peoples. God's not just passive. God sends His people to war.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of the Promised Land, a land that flowed with milk and honey. When God was ready for His people to occupy the Promised Land, it was already occupied. There were people living there. They had walled cities and vineyards; they had the whole thing. In fact, when Joshua sent the spies into the Promised Land, they came back and they said, "It is true what you have said and what God has promised. It's a land that flows with milk and honey, but the people who live there are giants. We look like grasshoppers in their sight."

They said, "It's too hard for us. We don't want to do that." God was so angry with them because they didn't have the courage to go to war that He said, "You'll all die in the desert, and your children will go to war in My name, and they will occupy the Promised Land." God was sending them into the Promised Land knowing it was a conflict. He engaged the first city they conquered after they crossed the Jordan River.

He stopped the Jordan River the same way He—in a similar way to the way He parted the Red Sea, so the conquest of the Promised Land begins with God supernaturally stopping up the Jordan River at flood stage, which is a significant event, so the tribes of Israel could cross. I've studied in liberal theological institutions. They change, they don't like the conquest; they hate the word because they don't like the imagery of it. They don't like that part of the Bible.

They do everything they can to diminish it, to say it was ineffective, that they didn't really conquer the Promised Land. They hate the idea. When I was in graduate school of religion, we had chapel services. They weren't mandatory; they weren't that committed to chapel. But they still had authority over the chapels. They wouldn't allow us to sing the classic hymns of the church, like "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Any language that had battle or conflict or warfare in it, even if it was a historic hymn of the church, was not welcome in a chapel service.

What I'm talking to you about is not something new. It's not like the woke church that's arisen since COVID. We have been protecting this in our midst, this bad theology, this passive approach to faith, the ambivalence towards the uniqueness of Jesus as our Redeemer and King, for decades. The first city they came to when they crossed the Jordan River was Jericho. The instructions were they were to walk around Jericho once a day, and at the seventh day to walk around it seven times and then shout, and God would topple the walls.

God was engaged in the conflict to the point of He made the city vulnerable, and then the instructions to Joshua and the Israelites were to go into the city and kill the inhabitants. There's a Hebrew word for it. It's *herem*. It means to devote to the ban. It's as if the whole city was offered to God as an offering to Him. God said that the Canaanite inhabitants of the Promised Land had to be removed because they had filled up the cup of the vengeance of God. They had been given decades and decades and decades to reconcile themselves to God.

You don't have to have a preacher and a church to reconcile yourself to God. Romans chapter 1 says that every person knows there's a God, that it's revealed to us from God's creation and from His unmistakable power that is made available to every human being. Every human being in the earth today and throughout history has had a revelation of God. Alongside that, the Bible says that we'll be judged according to our knowledge, that to whom much is given, much is required.

I'm not saying that those of us that have access to stacks of Bibles and argue about translations and have churches readily available to us and Christian broadcasting and Christian podcasts and all the things, I'm not saying that the standards won't be different than those people who have little access to electricity, but every human being has an awareness that there is a God and is given an opportunity to choose to acknowledge Him.

The Canaanite cities, if we go back to Joshua's conquest period, had exhausted the grace of God. God's grace is not infinite. There's an end to the grace and mercy of God. If that weren't true, Jesus wouldn't have had to die on a cross. If there was no end, if God's grace and mercy were limitless and He could just always say, "Oh, don't worry about that. It'll be okay. I forgive you. Just go on with your bad self," then Jesus wouldn't have had to die on a cross.

Jesus had to die on a cross because ultimately there's an end to God's grace and mercy and there's a consequence to ungodliness. This is a message for the American Christian community far more than it is for anybody else on the globe. God's involved in the war in Jericho. He tears down the walls. He sends the Israelites in to kill the inhabitants of the city. The word is *herem*. It's been devoted to God, and that word is used multiple times.

Things committed to God that have to be addressed, the principle is not subtle in the scripture that if you allow the evil to flourish in your midst, it will corrupt you and bring destruction to your children and your grandchildren, so you have to address it today. Wherever a generation is given that assignment and they fail to address it, and they tolerate it, and they accommodate it, and they make peace with the evil that God has said to remove, it brings destruction to their children and their grandchildren, the generations who follow.

I'm not trying to say that the war with Iran is a holy war. I'm not trying to drag God into this at all at that level, but I am telling you from a biblical perspective that if you negotiate with evil and make peace with evil and let evil grow in greater power, you are trying to ignore the difficulty of the challenge and you're forcing your children and your grandchildren to deal with it. I'm grateful for President Trump and his courage to address the destructive evil and hate of Iran.

I believe it will bring something better to our children and grandchildren. Again, I'm not trying to equate the conquest or the defeat of the Iranian Ayatollah with the conquest of the Promised Land, but I am saying that you can't simply dismiss war as something which God has nothing to do with or that He's unaccustomed to. That's a level of ignorance, willful ignorance, disobedience. You're simply hiding the facts. Please don't give in to that.

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It's hard to eat enough protein sometimes as you age to maintain the muscle that we want to maintain, and those supplements have been very helpful for me. They've been gracious enough to give those of you who are listeners to our program—if you'll use the code FUEL26, you'll get a 26 percent discount sitewide on ancientnutrition.com. Let's make choices to be healthier, and maybe we can limit the pharmaceuticals we'll be dependent upon. That would be a God thing. God's moving in the earth, and we can be a part of it by what we put on our fork and not just the pills we take.

The Book of Revelation is God's judgment upon the nations. Have you read Revelation lately? It's not a peaceful book. It really isn't. I brought you one passage which I know is incomplete. I don't have the time in a single podcast to unpack the whole Book of Revelation. If you want to do that, we'll do that on another series of podcasts.

Revelation 6 and verse 15, I'm going to read three verses—15, 16, and 17: "The kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand it?'" That's really a pretty good thesis statement for the Book of Revelation.

Do you ever think about the Lamb of God? That's Jesus in the Book of Revelation. Have you ever thought about a wrathful lamb? We always see them in such pastoral settings, a shepherd has a lamb draped over his shoulders. We think of them in a peaceful way. The most powerful people on planet earth are hiding and begging the rocks to fall on them rather than face the wrath of the Lamb. That's our God.

Again, we've had a squishy attitude about God that has not helped us maintain attitudes of holiness and purity and godliness. If you believe in the wrath of the Lamb, you'll talk to the people you love about the truth of God and obedience and humility and repentance. We've lost that for too long. We've had too much sloppy agape.

Pray for our president. Pray for those young men and women in our military who are in harm's way. Pray for their families. I can't imagine the stress of that, their willingness to walk towards trouble, to walk into trouble, to face hatred and violence and brutality so that other people can know greater freedom and liberty and so that you and I can know a security because of their courage and boldness. How dare you hide behind some farcical understanding of scripture and not take your place and pray for them on a regular basis. Are you fasting and praying? Are you seeking God? Don't sit at a table and listen to nonsense.

Somebody said to me—somebody I respect, somebody that has tremendous biblical knowledge—said there's going to be a horrible repercussion from President Trump because he's been so crass. I listen to them with their threats, and I said, "Well, I agree with you on one point. I think there will be a response to what President Trump has stood for, but not because his language has been coarse." It's because he has stood against principalities and powers and spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

If the people of God don't fill that space that President Trump has opened by being willing to say marriage is between a man and a woman, that there are only two sexes, that we shouldn't mutilate our children and our teenagers—if we're not willing to stand in that space and hold that at our kitchen table, in our holiday table, in our communities, then there will be evil unleashed on us, but it's not because of his language.

There's another piece of the war with Iran. I don't think you should understand it or I should understand it principally as being about Israel, which is a popular thing right now. You can get clicks, hating Israel and hating the Jewish people has been a bit of a tsunami in recent weeks. I don't respect it. I think there'll be enormous repercussions for that. But we've talked about that in some other settings. I'm not going back to that today.

Will Israel benefit from the Ayatollah Khamenei being removed? I certainly hope so. He has been a sponsor of Hezbollah, of Hamas, of the Houthis, of ISIS, all terrorist organizations. He has not only helped recruit for them; he has funded them; he has provided weapons for them, or the regime has, which has cost thousands and thousands of Israeli lives, has cost an enormous amount of time and effort. Four decades of death and destruction have resonated after the Ayatollah secured his place.

Their relentless sponsorship of murder and terror being removed—those things being removed from planet earth, that's not primarily about Israel. That's for the well-being of all of us. All of us. More than 1,500 Iranians are known to have come across our border during the Biden administration. They are lost in the country. No papers, nothing legal. We don't know if they are representing Hamas, Hezbollah, if they are terror cells.

I think one of the challenges we'll have in the days and the weeks ahead is there will be expressions of violence in America from people that have affiliations with the Ayatollah. We'll have to continue to pray and seek the Lord. The reason I ask you to pray for our young men and women that are on the front lines is you're going to want God's protection for you and your life. Saying if we hadn't done anything with Iran we'd be safe, that's insanity.

If you have violent, murderous terrorists amongst us, you will never placate them into becoming good citizens. They have to be addressed, dealt with, removed. You don't negotiate with evil. You don't bargain with evil. The only thing evil will yield to is a power greater than itself. I've said it dozens and dozens of times. So I think what President Trump and the Department of War have done in Iran will bring greater security to us, greater security to our homes and our communities, to our churches.

We shouldn't be afraid in our own nation because of the threats from violent extremists in other places in the world. We've accepted that as normal. We should not. When I talk to you that we are a Judeo-Christian nation, it isn't that we've ever been uniquely Christian or that we want the government dictating our religious beliefs. That's not at all what I'm saying. But the values that framed our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—the values that framed our legal system, our historic educational system, have all been distilled, derived from scripture.

So they express a set of values that is dramatically different than Islam. You can't maintain Sharia law and be a good citizen of the US because you can't succumb, you can't yield to the authority of our Constitution and the Sharia at the same time. We've got to be a bit more sophisticated. Not more angry, not more belligerent, not more violent certainly, but we've got to be willing to engage the evil that is amongst us. Again, every Muslim isn't violent or a terrorist. I'm not suggesting that at all. But there has to be an expressed willingness amongst the Islamic community to deal with that portion amongst them who are.

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I've got a couple of minutes; I want to wrap this up. I told you a few moments ago that I thought the best future for Iran would be determined by the Iranian people. I know there's other voices involved, I know that's awkward, but for decades they have been systematically dismantled. Their weapons confiscated, the general population in Iran doesn't have access to weapons. They had no way to defend themselves against the Iranian Guard or the mullahs and their brutal dictatorship. That's why tens of thousands of them have been slaughtered in the streets.

Well, they've spent decades under that. I pray we're never so foolish. But ultimately, they will determine their future, the kind of leadership they want. Pray for them. I think ideally we would pray for a regime in Iran that would be tolerant enough and make space for the gospel of Jesus Christ to be shared amongst the people of that nation. I know there's an underground church in Iran. There's some varying opinions, many of them very positive about how robust it is. My prayer is that we will see in the months ahead of us that the church in Iran is no longer underground. It's no longer secret.

If we don't believe our faith is strong enough to compete with the other ideologies in the fresh sunlight of opportunity and liberty, then we don't have much confidence in our faith. That's my prayer for the Iranian people. I hope you'll join me in that. It's not realistic to imagine that Islam is going to be abolished from the Persian people in the weeks immediately ahead of us, and I'm at peace with that. But my prayer for the people there is that there would be a regime in place that is reasonable enough that it would allow a free exchange of ideas. That's my prayer for this nation.

People have to choose ultimately God, and we have to come back to this realization that biblically there are consequences to evil. If you choose evil, you choose God as an adversary. I don't care where you sit on Sunday morning or what creed you can recite or what song you know the words to or, honestly, how many verses of scripture you can quote. If you choose evil, if you align yourself with evil, if you choose to practice evil, you choose God as an adversary.

I think those of us in the church have lost that. We've lost the courage to engage our family members who we love when we see them dabbling with evil because we don't want to disrupt a relationship. It's much better to challenge the boundaries of a relationship than to relinquish somebody you love to a place of darkness. We've got to find the courage to walk forward.

President Trump and his efforts to restore our nation are remarkable to me. He's tried to do it economically, to bring manufacturing back to America. Even his tariff system, which everybody said was going to bring gloom and doom, trying to get something that looked like fairness back in global trade and diminish the tsunami of globalism that demanded the diminishment of America and the diminishment of American economic power and our energy freedom and liberty.

All the things they were doing, it was like what could I do to weaken you, to diminish your strength, to drain you of energy, to keep you from having any ability to respond to any threat. That's what's been happening to our nation for decades across both Republican and Democrat. This isn't political, folks; it's spiritual. The diminishment of the United States with our advocacy for the gospel of Jesus Christ has been intentionally being dismantled for decades.

President Trump, for whatever reason, and I'm willing to acknowledge a remarkable determination on his own part, and I believe in many respects God has called him to a season to bring economic strength back to us, manufacturing back to us, the sovereignty of our borders. Please don't be against the deportation of people who are here illegally. It can be done in a legal and orderly manner if we would stop fighting.

It's completely illegitimate to say you're a sanctuary city or a sanctuary state and then demand federal funds. If you break federal law, you don't get federal dollars. If a governor can decide that, if the mayor of a city can decide that, if a city council can decide that, why shouldn't you and I be able to decide that? Declare ourselves sanctuary spaces. I know it's an absurd idea. We don't want to pay income taxes; I'm a sanctuary space. I'm not suggesting that kind of civil disobedience. I'm telling you you're watching something that is absurd and you've accepted it because it's wrapped in some kind of pseudo-Christian something or other. It isn't.

The whole initiative to rebuild our military and then to utilize it. I was a boy when Vietnam was wrapping up, but I remember the narratives of the men and women who fought in the military, and they said that war could have been solved, resolved quickly, expeditiously, but they weren't given the freedom to do so. So young men and women died and suffered and came back into a nation that despised them, brought enormous suffering and pain because our military wasn't allowed to accomplish the assignment they had been given.

I'm grateful at the moment at least it looks like our military is being given permission to destroy the ability of the enemy to destroy us. That makes sense to me. What Senator Kennedy and those that are working with him to help make us healthier, they are bringing freedom and liberty to generations of young people. I believe we'll be celebrating them in the weeks ahead, and it wasn't as if it wasn't known; there was no will to do the right thing. If you know what will make a group of people healthy and you hide it, you don't speak for it, you don't work for it, you're evil. We have watched that for decades. I'm grateful for what they have done.

But in the same way, there are Israeli and American aircraft flying over Iran as I speak, and there are warships in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf. If the Iranian people don't stand up for freedom, they won't gain very much. My best understanding of where we are right now is if those of us who imagine ourselves as Christ-followers, if we don't stand up for the gospel of Jesus Christ—and I don't mean simply with our church attendance, I mean if we're not willing to stand for what we know to be right and wrong, good and evil.

This isn't political; this is not about parties or candidates. The delivery systems for the blessings of God are seldom perfect because He works with people. King David was an adulterer, a lustful, violent man, and yet the Bible says that he was a man after God's own heart. God recruited Gideon, and up to that point, all the information we have, he was pretty much a coward. I mean, He used Moses; he was a murderer. He used the Apostle Paul, who became the Apostle Paul; he was a violent, murderous man.

God works through impure vessels. Please don't look away from what God is doing and use the imperfection of the vessel. Look at the outcome. How does it line up with the purposes of God, with the character of God as expressed towards the good of people? If we do that, I'm grateful for this current administration. I'm thankful for President Trump and for his courage and his boldness and the freedoms and liberties and opportunities that he is giving to us and to the generations who could follow us.

But the outcomes of this will be dependent upon us. If we don't take our stand, whatever victories are gained in this very brief window of time, and it is a brief window of time, will be readily lost. They will be forfeited. Please don't let that happen.

May I read you one more verse of scripture? Two verses, Titus chapter 2, verses 11 and 12: "The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say 'no' to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age." Rather than worry about the moral fabric of others, what if we began to say to ourselves at our kitchen tables, at our holiday tables, in our spheres of influence, in our peer groups, that we are determined collectively—we're not going to be silent with this.

This isn't about personal salvation. We're going to do this collectively. Have these conversations at the table, have these conversations around coffee and dessert, have these conversations while you're walking or working out or whatever you do for recreation. That we will say "no" to ungodliness and "no" to worldly passions, and we will begin purposefully as never before to live self-controlled, upright, godly lives in this present age.

I can't think of a better pathway forward for us. I know too many segments of the church are woke. I know too many seminaries are woke. Stop worrying about it; go find a church that isn't. Let's decide we will be the difference-makers. There's some things you have to establish: biblical authority. Read your Bible, believe it, act like it's true. The sovereignty of God. God can do what He wants, when He wants, the way He wants, and He doesn't need anyone's permission.

Establish it in your heart. Stop saying God's not just. "Well, I just don't know how I feel about God." When I feel that coming out of me, what I know is certain is I don't understand something about God, but I know He's just. So I know how I feel about God: He is just, He's faithful, He's true. I have trusted Him with my future.

Let me make a suggestion: if you're going to trust God with your eternity, it's insane not to trust Him with your journey through time. If you can't trust God with today, why would you trust Him with your eternity? God is sovereign; you can trust Him. The nature of evil. Evil exists in the world, and it has to be addressed; you can't overlook it. Our need for redemption. We need a Savior. We don't need just to be cleaned up, polished. We don't need to be better dressed, our vocabulary to be more sophisticated. We don't need another course on whatever. We have to be transformed. The only thing that can bring transformation to a human being from the inside out is the power of God.

Folks, God is moving in the earth. He's bringing down an evil, violent, murderous regime that's been in place for more than four decades. The Iranian people have an opportunity for freedom and liberty they haven't known in generations. I believe the outcome of that will have a great deal to do with the prayers of God's people. Do we care enough about them to pray? Or are you so hopeful that President Trump will fail, you're wishing for something else? God forgive us.

God's moving in the earth. Let's determine to be the people of faith. Let's choose to say "no" to ungodliness, to say "no" to worldly passions, to live self-controlled, upright lives, and let's see what God will do. He's moving. I want to move with Him, and I know you do too. 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 and Christianity podcast. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith. We can change our culture. I'll see you next time.