Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: I have lived in the same home for 31 years. I moved there in 1984 and I lived in a garage apartment they had there as a single guy. I ended up marrying my wife and we moved into that garage apartment. It was a church home, it was a parsonage. Now, we bought it from the church somewhere in the early 90s. 31 years. Now, in this neighborhood, I know the whole neighborhood is just about 30 or 33 years old, that whole Tyrone area. I live in the Tyrone area. My neighbors, who are in their 90s, remember when Tyrone Mall was a swamp. They remember when they were bringing in all the fill to put people in there and start building the mall.

On my street, 30th Avenue, if you go down 30th Avenue, you find this boulevard there and they have palm trees and grass. It's a nice street to live on. It's busy, but it's nice. Back in the day, there was no boulevard there. There was a drainage ditch there from 66th Street. There used to be alligators living in that. They could hear the alligators barking at one another at night. I don't know if they bark, but that's what they said they did. So there is a long history in that neighborhood.

One of the things the builders did there, they put a lot of different foliage in, some of the same basic trees in every yard. My house had two big cherry laurel trees. These are almost like a weed tree today, but these were big. They were about 60 or 70 feet high. They put a lot of shade in my yard. One day, this is going back about four or five years ago, I was mowing my award-winning lawn. If you didn't know it was award-winning, I thought I'd just add that. What did it win? Well, I gave it the award, so it doesn't matter. I was mowing my lawn and I noticed there was some activity on the tree.

I looked a little closer and there were all these ants coming out of my cherry laurel tree. There's two of them, big old ones, about this big around. I looked a little closer and I put my finger in. A lot of the wood just crumbled and fell. I went in the house and got some bug spray. I thought, "This will fix it." I sprayed some bug spray in there and they all come pouring out, thousands of these ants. Finally, I called some tree guys a few days later. They came out and inspected the tree and they said, "You know, Mr. Kelley, this tree is eaten alive. A tropical storm force wind or a big gust could top it right over." Definitely, my house was in falling range of it.

They inspected the other tree and that tree was about half as bad. They said, "We really recommend you take these down immediately." As they cut that tree up and I was there, it was just eaten alive by these ants. Now, this is the thing: they looked normal to me. They still had shade, all the leaves were still green, they still stood up pretty high. I never even noticed that there was any issue with these trees. Those issues were probably going on for a decade, maybe more, maybe a little less. But the tree looked healthy by sight. When you got closer to the tree, you saw that it was incredibly compromised, weakened, and about to die.

This message is about the church. You can look at a church, not the building and not any local assembly, but the church in America. You can look at it and say, "Well, there are all these churches everywhere and people are showing up on Sunday mornings to go to church. The church is healthy, right?" It's my normal. I get up Sunday morning, I do what I do and I come to this local assembly. I'm grateful that you do. But I look and sometimes, unless we look a little closer, we think that maybe status quo is still going to be status quo and the normal is always going to be the normal.

I brought this series out, this Intensive Care series, because I want to show you the church is sick, very sick. Again, I'm talking about the church in America, not talking about this local assembly or any particular local assembly, but it's sick. Churches are dying. Those trees, my cherry laurel tree, would have fallen soon. Churches are dying. Churches are closing their doors. Properties are just being vacated because the church is sick and we don't see it. We certainly, in many cases, don't know what to do about it.

That's why I'm doing this series. Let me build this up a little bit. Billy Graham said this in his foreword to the book *Storm Warning*. He said, "Now at 91 years old, I believe the storm clouds are darker than they've ever been. This world is changing dramatically." Let me show you a few reasons why, but I want to bring you to the scriptures here first. 1 John 5:18-19 says this: "We know that God's children do not make a practice of sinning, for God holds them securely." And it says the evil one cannot touch them. We know that we are his children and that the world around us is under the control of the evil one.

Who do you think the evil one is? The devil. The devil's the evil one. It says this world... now "world," that's a pretty important term to understand biblically. That particular word there is the word *cosmos*. Sometimes they use another word, *aion*, but they work the same way. They both are talking about the same thing with slight differences. The world system talks about this order. It's universal, it's an order. We know the president of the world system is the devil. 2 Corinthians 4:4, he's the god of this age. John 12:31, the devil is the prince of the world system.

So he has programmed it. He has created its system. He influences its values, its priorities, its emphases, and its prejudices. So we are under the control of the evil one. Now, there are a couple of words for evil. This is important, that's why I want to lay this foundation. One word is this word *kakos*. It means that's evil if I just have this personal thing that I'm doing. It's a personal evil. I'd just as soon keep it to myself, though. I don't want to share it with you. This is my thing I do and it's evil.

But the next word here is *poneros*. That word means this is an evil that's not content necessarily in its own. It wants to influence others. I want to bring other people in. I don't want to be alone in this evil. I want my evil to influence you. Jesus called Satan the *poneros* one, the *ponero* one, in Matthew chapter 6 just before the Lord's Prayer. The *poneros* one because he's not content in his own evil and his own wickedness. He wants to infect other people into his wickedness. He wants you, and of course the world, we know from 2 Corinthians 4:4, is already under the influence, unknowingly, of his evilness.

Galatians 1:4: "Jesus gave his life for our sins just as God our Father planned in order to rescue us from this evil world in which we live." There's that same word, evil world. That particular word is *aion* there. John 7:7: "The world can't hate you, but it does hate me because I accuse it of doing evil." Let me just stop there. This is important. The devil doesn't really care about you. He doesn't. Not that you're not a great guy, but he doesn't care about you.

What he cares about is Christ. He hates Christ. The reason why you're the recipient of his stuff is that Christ loves you. You are the recipient of God's love and because you're the recipient of God's love, you become the target of the devil's wrath and the devil's attacks. In a sense, you're an innocent bystander, but that's where the hatred comes from. That's what Jesus said. "The world can't hate you, but it does hate me because I accuse it of doing evil." John 15:18: "If the world hates you, remember, it hated me first."

Now, the world is that word *cosmos*, that word I told you about. "The world would love you as its own if you belonged to it, but you are no longer part of the world. I chose you to come out of the world, so it hates you." That's strong language. It's not the world saying, "I don't like you very much." "I hate you," the world says. "I hate you, Christian." That's why I entitled this morning's message "Hated."

Do you remember what I told you? A slave is not greater than the master. Since they persecuted me, naturally they will persecute you. And if they listen to me, they would have listened to you. So if I'm going to undergo persecution, he's saying to his people, that would be you and I, you too will undergo persecution. Now, I could take this message to the Third World, I could take this message to an Islamic country or someplace like that and we could prove that pretty clearly.

You think the Christians are maybe hated in America in some ways? Look what happened in Oregon a few days ago. "What's your religion? Are you a Christian?" They didn't ask about Muslims, he asked, "Are you a Christian?" In fact, I'd venture to say, my friends, the world doesn't hate Muslims. I'll show you that in a little bit. The world hates Christians. We don't tell you that before we ask you to get saved. It's a little bait and switch.

Matthew chapter 5, verses 11 and 12: "God blesses you when people mock you and persecute you and lie about you and say all sorts of evil things against you because you're my followers. Be happy about it. Be very glad, for a great reward awaits you in heaven. And remember, the ancient prophets were persecuted in the same way." So let's dive into this host culture that we're living in, this "tribe," which I like to refer to it in this series, the tribe of America. This is our tribe we're called to.

Again, if I was going to Papua New Guinea, I would learn a culture, I'd learn about that tribe so I'd know how to minister to them. This is our tribe. We're missionaries, we know that. We've taught you that, we're ambassadors. This is who we're called to. The United States, my friends, is not shifting into a postmodern country. It's not going to be in a post-Christian age. It's there, and it's been there for a while. We are a post-Christian country.

We are in a postmodern nation. We're no longer who we used to be in the 50s and the 60s. We're no longer in the 70s and even the 80s. The moral majority is no longer coming back and let me tell you something: the next election won't change it, whoever wins. This is our world in which we're living. We brought out last week, if you listen to the news and especially in these election cycles, Christians are 60 to 70 percent, depending on what poll you want to read, they profess to be Christian. Another 50 to 60 percent profess to be born again.

However, when you drill down on those numbers, those people who believe in the Bible to be the Word of God, who believe you have to have a salvation experience with Jesus Christ to gain eternal life, those who believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the only way for eternal life, that number goes to 7 to 8 percent. 7 to 8 percent of Americans believe the Bible's the Word of God. 7 to 8 percent of our country believes the Word of God is infallible and can be trusted.

7 to 8 percent believe we need the cross of Jesus Christ and accept the sacrifice of that cross on our behalf to be sealed with the Spirit to the day of redemption. The basic evangelical message, if we want to put that term on ourselves, that's what we'll call ourselves: evangelical Christians. 7 to 8 percent. We're no longer as big as we used to be and we're not gaining, we're shrinking. 10 years from now, we'll be down considerably even more.

Cultures are changing faster than ever before in human history, mostly because of communication and processing information just incredibly faster. George Barna wrote in his book *Futurecast*, he said this: "America is undergoing significant changes and the nature of those changes is both complex and chaotic. The historical foundations on which our society was developed are facing some severe challenges." Like getting those Ten Commandments off the wall of the courthouse. It's not easy to be the kind of Christian that Jesus longs us to have as his ambassadors in this place at this time.