Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: You're at a crossroads. All of you are. You don't have to be what you consider superstardom to be confronted with that crossroads. Each of you are in a new crossroads in your life. Some of you are about to walk into the most difficult times of your life and you know it. You're being put in a position where you have to think about how you're going to approach those moments.

Some of you are in a cruise control moment in your life. Some of you might be in a sunburst sort of a moment, like everything is just popping off. You've got this thing in your mind that says, "I've got to be different now so that I can keep the momentum going." It doesn't matter what stage in your life you're in, the question you have to ask yourself is, "Am I being true to what God wants me to be true to?"

Guest (Male): Have you ever had someone tell you that pastors have no business getting involved with political issues? Maybe you even think that yourself. You will want to listen today to Light on the Hill as we hear about a prophet who put it all on the line in order to walk according to God's will and plan. He got involved in politics and was killed because of it. There is so much to learn from John the Baptist. Here's Pastor James Kaddis in Mark Chapter 6.

James Kaddis: Politics emanates from the pulpit. Whatever the pulpit communicates, the politics that are represented by that discussion from the pulpit will always be the politics that you see displayed in front of the whole world. When the church chooses to compromise, especially in a nation like this, concerning what the real biblical and spiritual truth should be, then you will begin to see that flood the world. You will begin to see that affect the whole nation.

When pastors are not speaking boldly, and when they're not speaking out, and when they're not standing up for righteousness, and when they're not doing the things that they should be doing, then you will begin to see lots of compromise taking place and lots of very broken ideas begin to come forward. You will begin to see a self-destruct mode like you've never seen before. I think that's a very important thing to understand and notice.

But look what it goes on to say because this gets really interesting. It says this: "For Herod himself sent forth and laid hold upon John and bound him in prison for Herodias's sake, his brother Philip's wife, for he had married her. For John had said unto Herod, 'It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife.' Therefore, Herodias had a quarrel against him and would have him killed, but she could not. For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man, holy, observed him, and when he heard him, he did many things and heard him gladly."

"And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; and when the daughter of the said Herodias came in and danced and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, 'Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.' And sware unto her, 'Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it to thee unto the half of my kingdom.' And she went forth and said unto her mother, 'What shall I ask?' And she said, 'The head of John the Baptist.'"

By the way, this is really interesting. I want everybody to remember this. When you read the other account of this story in the Bible where it tells us exactly what happened and we get a little bit more detail, understand and know this: this was pre-planned. This was something Herodias had already arranged with her daughter. Herod himself got inebriated. That's the picture that I think is an easy one to draw.

It's obvious that he was inebriated because he's having his stepdaughter basically dance provocatively in front of him. In his inebriation, he makes a promise because he's impressed with what she's actually doing. Within that promise, she goes because, as they had previously discussed, this was something that was pre-planned. She goes back and she asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

By the way, what a sadistic, ugly picture that's being drawn here. Can it get any uglier than that? "Give me John the Baptist's head on a platter." Could anything be more satanically inspired? Is it not obvious that this is a satanic inspiration? It's very obvious what's going on here. I think there's also a lesson as into what inebriation will do to somebody.

When you allow yourself to become inebriated, when you allow yourself to keep yourself from understanding, or when you allow yourself to be given to inebriation, you keep yourself from understanding and knowing and growing. When you're inebriated and you allow yourself to become intoxicated, it takes away from your critical thinking capacity. It takes away from your awareness of the things that are going on.

That inebriation keeps you from being everything that God wants you to be. By the way, one of the number one intoxicating variables that exists besides alcohol and besides the consumption of drugs, those obviously are very obvious things, is sin. If you allow yourself to be given to sin, then you will cause yourself to become inebriated in a way that you can't even possibly imagine.

That's what sin does. Herod's got it all. Herod's walking in a sinful practice. Herod is very likely inebriated with alcohol, and of course, he just says, "I'll give you half my kingdom," like a reckless baboon. Instead, what does he have to do? He takes the head off of John the Baptist, puts it on a platter, and delivers it. It's very, very sad to think about this.

Verse 26: "And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner and commanded his head to be brought. And he went and beheaded him in the prison and brought his head in a charger and gave it to the damsel, and the damsel gave it to her mother. And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse and laid it in a tomb."

I just want to stop for one second to talk about the cost involved for John. I really want to do that. I want us to examine the type of life that John lived. I want us to think about the type of man that John was. He was very different from everybody else. He did not fit the mold that everybody wanted him to fit into. He didn't talk like everybody else. He didn't look like everybody else. He didn't act like everybody else.

But the one thing that John knew, and I think the one thing that John understood and the one thing that John was completely aware of, was that God made him a specific way and God made him that way for a specific purpose. He knew what that purpose was, and he took that completely to the fullest. I want to just throw this thought out at you, and I want to stop here because there's so much more to examine.

What is it that's happening in your life right now that you are not allowing yourself to complete or go through or walk in its fullest because you're listening to the pressures around you? What are you ripping yourself off from? What are you keeping yourself from experiencing? What are you cutting yourself short from doing? That's a very important question to be asking.

I've known it my whole life. It's something that I've walked very comfortably in for a long time. Yes, I'm being confronted with it on multiple occasions again and again and again, and I'm being asked the same thing and God is requiring me to answer it the same way. What is it about you that's keeping you from becoming everything that God has called you to be?

What are you denying in yourself to become through your actions in the current moment and in the current day? Are you allowing yourself to compromise in a very specific area because you just don't want to deal with it? Are you allowing yourself to go down a different road because you don't want to go down the road that you know will bring confrontation? Are you walking in fear?

Are you saying, "I don't want to do this because I don't know what the next step is going to bring me"? What is it in your life that's keeping you from moving forward in the very thing that God has called you to move into? I'll be very real with you. I get it on a lot of angles. There's a lot of different angles where I hear this.

People come to me for a lot of different reasons trying to pull me a lot of different ways, and they make all kinds of statements that if I listened to them the way that God did not want me to listen to them, then it would pull me in a way that God never wanted me to be pulled. I would be doing things today that would literally destroy all that God has for me. I've been confronted with those forks in the road a lot.

I remember before I ever started making videos, there was a point in time where I saw it. I knew what was coming. It wasn't just what happened with COVID, but it was what I knew was going to happen as a result of COVID. When COVID came into play, the churches started to be shut down. What was beginning to happen was people were beginning to reinvent in their mind what church should look like, what interaction with people should look like, and who God actually should be.

They began to reinvent all kinds of things that were going on. I began to watch a change in the Calvary Chapel movement that I never thought I would ever see. Yes, I know that some of it started when Pastor Chuck passed away. I get it. I understand it. But what began to happen was actually pretty scary because for the very first time, I stopped watching a group of people who were crazy, wild, outrageous, nuts, different, or whatever you want to call them.

I watched a group of people who stopped marching to the beat of a different drummer and became unified in their decision to be non-confrontational. They became unified in their decision to stand together in an alliance that literally glorified their comfort and not the God that they serve. I would go into churches and I would begin to see or hear from churches, and I would begin to see a lack of power.

There was no willingness to stand out, no willingness to be open, and no willingness to say the things that they were saying. Before long, it wasn't too much longer I began to see people jumping on the bandwagon that the world was beginning to create for them to jump onto. The church became more used to the idea or more succumbing to the idea of all of this woke nonsense than they cared about the things that God was saying.

I watched a Calvary Chapel pastor sit down with a group of people on video who were Black saying, "We're hearing you. We know you're going through a tough time. We know things are hard. We saw what happened with George Floyd. We're here to tell you that we're listening to you right now. We're listening."

I'm thinking in my mind as I'm watching this: What you probably should have been doing is you probably should have shut every single person out. You probably should have gotten on your knees and you probably should have said, "Holy Spirit, I'm listening to you right now. What do you want me to do? How do you want me to act?"

Instead, what we began to do is we began to see churches take compromises and make compromises that were so insanely crazy it wasn't even funny. There's one Calvary Chapel that I can think of that just hard shut down. We're not allowing anybody to come into the sanctuary anymore. We're not going to have church service.

Finally, after a bunch of months go by, almost a whole year or maybe a little bit longer than a year, oh, we'll open up the church now. But the reason why we'll only let you in the church is if you want to come and get a vaccine because we're a vaccine center. Why? Because the government was paying them money. Because the Spirit of God wasn't there. They weren't moving.

In the time where the people were suffering the most, in the time where suicidal ideation was growing at an extreme rate, at a time where there was this immense peer pressure to conform to the way of the world, to the thinking and the mindset of the world, the church gave in. The church pretty much faltered, and so much of the church decided to go down the way of the world.

Quite frankly, I don't care if people get upset by me making this statement. I think all of what happened over the last several years may have been the best thing that ever happened to the church because the reality is God separated the wheat from the chaff. God literally showed us what the true church looked like versus what the fake church look like.

But here's the thing that's come as a result of it. People have been forced to make a decision as into what fork in the road they're going to face. Are you going to serve the Lord here or are you going to deny him here? At that point, there was no compromise. There was no in-between. You're either going to go against the grain of the world and serve God and trust that God can do something spectacular, or you're going to go with the flow of the world.

A lot of people went with the flow of the world. Now we're in a new place. Now we're in a very interesting place in that there's a group of guys that chose not to go with the flow of the world, and God honored them on a lot of levels. Ministries grew as a result of lots of people who took a bold stand. Big changes were made, and God was faithful to show himself strong on their behalf.

But a new temptation is now erecting, and that temptation is a greater temptation than any other temptation I've ever seen before in my history of being in ministry. That's this: the technology we have in this world, the tools that are available for people to watch you, the things that are out there, has the ability to make whatever everybody would call superstars, to make celebrities out of people taking a stand and kicking against the goads.

But here's the problem. As the crowd grows, and as the fans, as people would call it in some cases, come out and bring their admiration, and as the popularity begins to increase, there's a pressure that comes from the world in the context of groupthink that wants you to conform to the way everybody else thinks. They want you to fit in a specific mold. They might not be so comfortable with who you are once they get you.

I can say this with sincerity. I don't want to burn bridges. I don't want to put people down. I don't want to say things in a harsh way. I'm just telling you what a passage like this means to me. Over the years, God blessed us. Make no mistake, God has blessed us over the years. We've grown in ways I never thought possible. I never thought that I would have the kind of reach that I have where even the radio ministry that we have is dwarfed in comparison to what we're doing online.

I never thought in a million years we could do the kind of things that we're doing right now and reach the kind of people that we reach. Hundreds and thousands and yes, millions of people every single month are being reached out to in ways I never thought possible. But here's what I'm facing, and here's the situation that I'm being confronted with.

For a little while, it was working out nicely because the message that I was bringing to a lot of people was very refreshing. It opened up their eyes to see things that they had not seen before, and they started learning and they grew as a result of it. But when the popularity grows, and when I began to be more listened to, I'm not going to say embraced or liked online, then as I began to make contacts with lots of people who were in the same area as I, popular people, people who were liked, they began to very quickly seek to get me to comply.

They wanted me to be like they are so that as we grow together, we can grow collectively and not seem to push against each other. "Oh, Pastor James, we love you. We love you. We love you. You're great!" only from a distance. "Don't come and sit down at one of our meetings," or, "Don't come and do this," or, "Don't come and do that because you just don't really have your tact down just yet," or, "You just really need to kind of fit into this category a little bit more."

People don't come to me outright and say things like that to me, but I can read it a mile away. Sometimes you'll open up the comments online and they'll say, "You're too loud! You scream!" Those are the lightweight things. Those are the things that who cares? I am who I am. Don't ask me to be someone that I'm not. But the temptation that comes up is real, and that temptation is: as you grow and you get to the next stage of wherever God wants you in your life, will you conform to the world because you think you have to in order to gain a notoriety that you think you want?

Or will you say, "God, I'm going to be like John the Baptist, and no matter what the cost may be, I will use the platform you've given me to affect change in the lives of the people that I touch"? What are you going to do? For John, it cost him his life. He literally died a terrible death because he chose to take a stand in an issue that many people could have argued he didn't have to bring up.

But I guarantee you, he brought it up because God told him to. I guarantee you he was led by the Lord in the assertion that he made. The question that I want to ask each and every single one of you, because it's an important question: you're at a crossroads. All of you are. You don't have to be what you consider superstardom to be confronted with that crossroads. Each of you are in a new crossroads in your life.

Some of you are about to walk into the most difficult times of your life and you know it. You're being put in a position where you have to think about how you're going to approach those moments. Some of you are in a cruise control moment in your life where you just feel like everything is great and so, as a result, the temptation is, "Make sure you don't mess with anything. Leave it on cruise control. Let it be nice. Let it be comfortable."

Some of you might be in a sunburst sort of a moment, like everything is just popping off. You've got this thing in your mind that says, "I've got to be different now so that I can keep the momentum going." It doesn't matter what stage in your life you're in, the question you have to ask yourself is: Am I being true to what God wants me to be true to?

This prophet engaged in what God called him to engage in, and it cost him dearly. The question that I would ask you today is what are you choosing to do? Because I'm going to make this one statement that I think is important for us to be able to meditate on, and it's a good statement to close on: the cost that you think you will incur by making the right decision will be far less than the cost you will incur by disobeying God.

It doesn't matter how bad you think it's going to be when you pay the price. The price that you pay for not walking according to the will of God will be far greater and far deeper and far more worse. So the question is, which one are you going to do? What path are you going to follow? What rule set are you going to go by?

The encouragement that I would give to you is this: walk according to God's will and plan. Now some of you might be looking at me and going, "James, I'm not really discerning any of this stuff. I mean, I'm just living a normal life that I just feel like has been good and God's been touching me and I'm walking with God and we have a great relationship." To that, I would say great.

But here's the exhortation that I would give you in this moment: give yourself to the Word of God more than you've ever given it before. Give yourself to communicating with God more than you've ever done before. Give yourself to the place of seeking God more than you've ever done before. Why? Because a time is coming where you're going to be confronted with the very lessons that you're learning right now.

If you are ill-equipped to face it when it comes time to actually have to face it, you won't be ready. But if you gear yourself up for the moment that you know is coming, then when you face it, I promise you, you will not only be equipped, but you will walk with a certain confidence and joy in knowing that God is with you all the way because you prepared yourself for that time when it would come.

More than ever, guys, it's that time. Keep your eyes on Jesus. We're going to find ourselves in a very, very interesting point because Jesus is going to again walk deeper into the world of the crowd that is pushing against him and wants more of him. There is so much that we're going to learn from what Jesus does in this moment because the next natural thing that's going to come for us and our way of thinking is we're not adequate. We don't have enough. There's no way we can do the things. We're not qualified.

That's the big one, right? God's going to say, "I just want you to meet me with what you have and give it all to me and let me do it." But you're not going to be able to meet God with what you have and let him do it and give him all that you have until you've bought hook, line, and sinker the mentality of John the Baptist. Are you willing to put it all on the line? Are you willing to do what God's asked you to do? I hope the answer to that is yes because God has great things in store for you.

Father, we just thank you, Lord, for your Word. We thank you for the opportunity that your Word brings to us to learn and understand and discern the things that you're telling us on a day-to-day basis. Father, we do ask for the filling and the anointing of your Spirit, that you would give us wisdom and discernment and understanding about the things that we face on a day-to-day basis. We love you, God. We thank you. We look to you, and we ask these things in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Guest (Male): This is Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis, and we're currently going through the Gospel of Mark. Listen to this study and more at lightonthehillradio.com. Pastor James's teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at oneplace.com. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts as well.

When you have a moment sometime today, send us an email. We'd love it. It's encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners' lives, and it's an opportunity to thank the Lord for what he's doing. There's a place to contact us at our website, lightonthehillradio.com.

We've been blessed by the feedback we've received thus far regarding Pastor James's new book, *The Last Book*. If you haven't ordered a copy yet, we'd encourage you to do so. This guide to Revelation covers the first half of the book, giving you what you need to know about the rapture and the end times in a clear and concise manner. Request your copy today at lightonthehillradio.com or through Amazon.

If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there's also a place to make a donation at lightonthehillradio.com. Pastor James is back with us now. Today we learned about a prophet who was engaged in the political arena and killed because of it. What are you hoping our listeners will walk away with from today's lesson and apply to their own lives?

James Kaddis: I think the message is simple. If you walk according to God's call and you follow the biblical precedent for what we do, you bring your biblical worldview into it. You will speak out, especially in the political arena. The lesson that we can learn is God honors those who walk courageously. John made a difference. He changed so many more people's lives than anybody could possibly imagine.

What our leaders need, what our great Republic needs, what our world needs, is for us to speak boldly, concisely, clearly, especially in the political arena, because that's where God calls us to be. As a matter of fact, John the Baptist was called the greatest prophet that ever lived by Jesus himself. I can't think of any prophet, with maybe the exception of Enoch, and even then it's probably because we don't know much about him, that ever did their ministry not interacting with world leaders. It was very political. So we've got to stand up for what's right. We do it especially in this arena because that's what God has called us to do.

Guest (Male): Amen. Thanks, Pastor James. More from the book of Mark coming up next time on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This listener-supported program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.