Regaining Lost Ground

Shane Idleman: He was renowned, he was known for being righteous, and still the Master commanded him, "You must be born again." He had a reputation for being alive, but he was dead inside. He was dead inside! How many of our congregations have dead preachers preaching to them? How can dead men beget living children? Oh my goodness, that's preaching! Guys, that's Holy Ghost, spirit-inspired preaching. That's the truth that will wreck a prideful heart and bring us to our knees.

Announcer (Male): Thank you for joining us here at Westside Christian Fellowship, located in Leona Valley, California, one hour north of Los Angeles. Today on Regaining Lost Ground, we hear the third and final part of this theologically sound message titled Building a God, Summoning a Demon.

Revival, as George Whitfield once said: "The great and important duty which is incumbent on Christians is to guard against all appearance of evil, to watch against the first risings in the heart to evil, and to have a guard upon our actions that they may not be sinful or so much as to seem to be."

Listen now to the strong, powerful message as Pastor Shane brings the important truth that every soul must hear. Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life. Listen now. You can hear the whole message at Pastor Shane's YouTube and Rumble channels. Make sure to subscribe today.

For more information, visit us online at westsidechristianfellowship.org. We also invite you to hear more truth from Pastor Shane with the Idleman Unplugged weekly podcast. And now from Westside Christian Fellowship in Leona Valley, California, here is Pastor Shane Idleman.

Shane Idleman: Truth is unyielding. Who is Jesus Christ? Isn't that funny that they're all divided over that? Oh no, he was the Archangel. You deviate from the scriptural course that Jesus was God. He died for the sins of the world. You have to repent and believe; it's pretty simple. No wonder the enemy wants to complicate it. False worship appears genuine, doesn't it? False worship appears genuine. They had a temple for worship and they sacrificed for atonement. It seemed genuine.

So let's remind all of us: don't have the heart of Herod or the arrogance of Pharaoh or the pride of Assyria. All of them challenged God. All of them believed in false gods. There are no other gods. Remember that. There's no other God. That's why it's lowercase 'g'. There is no other God. It's either God—that's it—or demons, the demonic realm, Satan.

So are we building a god and by so we're summoning a demon? Let me give you a fact from history: the Romans primarily sacrificed to Zeus, whom they equated with and called Jupiter, to maintain the peace of the gods. And in so it was a reciprocal agreement and offerings were made in exchange for divine favor. Sound familiar? That's what every single religion on planet earth does, except for Christianity. "I do this, you do this. I give so that you might give." Sacrificing was a way to guarantee the gods' support for military campaigns, agricultural, and civic life. But God says, "I gave so you don't have to give anything." Big difference. I gave my Son. You don't have to give anything. What we do though is we repent, we believe, and the Bible actually says to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Isn't that incredible? You can sacrifice to God. Did you know that? Not for salvation, but for intimacy.

I'm a lover of His presence. What are the sacrifices of God? It's a broken and contrite heart. The Bible says you can give God a broken and contrite heart. And Paul says present your bodies as living sacrifices. Lay it on the altar and say, "Lord, whatever You want to do with me." Okay, they're getting ready to sacrifice and a very important moment is coming up. Here we go. Acts 14. "But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this"—okay, here's the key turning point. This could go really bad or really good. What about if they said, "This sounds great. Bring on the wine and women. Let's be worshiped. Who's Yahweh? Let's be gods here." There's a turning point, isn't there? What do you do with praise?

What do you do with promotion? Are you always trying to jockey for position or is it about you and elevation? Be careful; that's an important turning point. A choice needed to be made here and now. The choice had to be made right now. And this decision will forever seal their fate and it will dictate their future. They're about ready to make a decision that will seal their fate. And so here's the right response: what do they do? Well, I'm not going to say anything until you answer. They tore their clothes and ran in among the multitude, crying out and saying, "Men, why are you doing these things?"

The reason this is pretty incredible is because it shows the magnitude and depth and seriousness of what's happening. Because they're not trying to be like, "Nah, guys, no. Thank you, but no." It's like—OMG. Okay, can I say that? Every time I say "OMG", I get emails from elderly people and I get it. I'm working on it. But "oh my God" in a good way. Oh my God! Their heart is breaking. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no!" And that was a sign. It wasn't just, "What does that mean?" They ripped, like the Pharisee you saw in the Passion of the Christ. It was like, "Blasphemy! Just blasphemy! No! No! No!"

And they would run and they tried to tell the people, "No, no, no, don't go this direction. Do not do—" You see the seriousness and the magnitude of false worship. You see how desperate they were for genuine and true worship. "No, men, we are just like you. Please stop." There was a passion, there was a fear, there was a reverence, there's a respect for the living God. We should come into the house of the living God with the same respect and the same fear and say, "God, get this sin out of me. I know what I saw last week. I know what I did last night. But God, I want to come into this place in fear and trembling before You."

The seriousness of sin. Haven't we drifted from that? They tore their clothes and they said, "No, men, no." Sometimes I want to run into some churches or parades in LA. "Men, women, this is not right. This is not right." They understood the seriousness and the magnitude of bowing to a false god. Do you? Because a false god doesn't come and ring the doorbell. They wait for that opportune time. Wealth and materialism, social status and fame. Isn't social status funny? It's like, "Look at me, look where I live." To me, it makes me sick. I love being around the humble, don't you? Just nothing to give you. I don't care where they live.

Just sickening. It's just uppityness, just arrogance. It's a fame. And it's in the Christian circles—Christian influencers. You see them, you guys watch them, you follow many of them, as do I, just to see what's going on. And it's about building a brand. And you have to be careful because you might be building a god. There's nothing wrong with God opening the door. Praise God when He does that. But remember He opened it, not you. You realize He holds your very breath in the palm of His hands. Relentless ambition and career success and things I've already mentioned, just be careful. Remember what I talked about in Acts, it was number 51 in the series: no flesh should glory in His presence.

Remember what happened to King Herod? God took him out quickly. And that verse means no flesh should get credit for what God is doing. No flesh glory in My presence. Again, He must increase, but we decrease. And oh, here's where I remember to say it: stop saying that men are amazing. I keep hearing, "Oh, that person's amazing." No, God's amazing. God's amazing! Such and such is just a man, just a woman. If you saw their true character, you would not think they were so amazing many times.

And I may be biased. I try to be careful, but I've been in green rooms with people you would know and many times I come away saddened because it's about building their ministry or their brand or their name. They don't really care about the people. "We also are men with the same nature as you." So they stopped them and say, "We're no different than you. And we're preaching to you that you should turn, repent, from these useless things"—S's are tough for me—"to the living God." So that, guys, that's repentance.

That's repentance. That's the theme of my ministry that God has granted us with here at Westside. Should say His ministry, right? Repentance. To turn, to turn. And I know many of you in this room need to turn from that thing that has captured your heart. That idolatry that comes in so subtly. It's captured your heart. And it can actually be exercise. Hello? Idolatry. Idolatry. Anything. Oh my goodness. I don't struggle with this one, so I don't remember too much sometimes, but this whole craze of gaming. People will say, "Shane, I don't know what to do. My husband's on video games five hours a day." Five hours a day playing video games? What in God's green earth is going on?

Addiction. Gaming. Addiction. Anything. Anything. Now, if you want to sit down, have some fun with your kid, enjoy it, right? It's not about that. It's about, "What am I putting first? What am I putting first?" I used to go off on Grand Theft Auto, but I won't today. You can be intimate with a prostitute, take back the money, and set her on fire. That's what they do in video games, some of them. Yeah, I see mouths dropped, mine too. And I know Christians that do things that they shouldn't be—guys, how is that even a good thing? "Well, I'm not really doing it." Well, sometimes I just have to leave. I don't know what to say because we are good at—we love making excuses to keep our god on the throne.

I've heard so many excuses for people to keep their god on the throne when it's destroying their family and destroying their life. He said, "Turn from these things, turn from them, and do what? Look at the God who made heaven and earth." In bygone generations, He's allowed nations to walk in their own ways, but not now. Not now. He's calling everyone to repentance. But here's a reality check for us. I love Luke 17:10: "When you have done all those things which you are commanded, then just simply say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what was our duty to do.'"

Can you imagine if we could get that back in our hearts again and remove the god of self-promotion? And so Luke is actually writing Acts. He says, "Nevertheless, He did not leave Himself without witness." Okay, God gave us a witness in that He did good, He gave rain from heaven, fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. This is something called a certain type of grace that God has over all of humanity. Raining even on countries that reject Him or people that reject Him, you can see the rain and the harvest. And it's that grace of God that all experience in that way, but it's not the grace for salvation.

And so He's saying, "Listen, you see there is a God out there. You see that. Turn to Him." But with these sayings they could scarcely restrain the multitude from sacrificing to them. No matter what they said, they were still hell-bent on sacrificing to the false gods. Boy, do I see that sometimes. So do you, don't you? No matter what you say, it's in one ear and out the next. But here's a final thought. He said, "Nevertheless, God did not leave Himself without a witness." And I've talked about this before that people say, "Well, prove God." Well, guys, have you seen pictures of the universe? Have you seen the sun come up about 93 million miles away? I don't know.

What if it was 90 million miles away? You'd be a biscuit cooked in the oven. What do you do with all that? Have you ever just go on and measure just go ask how delicate the oxygen balance and hydrogen balance is here on planet earth? Just go. Creator! Hello! What more proof do you want? He could write something in the sky and you'd say, "No, my eyes are betraying me. That was some alien thing." Oh yeah, I forgot now aliens are coming, right? I mean, oh my goodness. I do have a thought on that—whatever all this comes out could be demonic beings manifesting, revealing themselves, but we're not there yet. It doesn't fit the text, and I don't want to go into that realm of topic just yet. I'm sure we will.

But of course there could be things like that. Demonic beings. Exactly why I don't know why people are so surprised and concerned. You shouldn't be concerned. God is still on the throne. But that's the point here. He's clearly revealed Himself. Clearly revealed Himself. You get a cut, it repairs itself. How did that happen? How's my heart and blood and lymphatic system? Just all kind of happened one day. This little—what do they call those? Amoebas? Little single cell little tiny little thing was crawling on the ground and decided to just— So my question is, okay, did it form a man first? Come on, little buddy.

Oh, by the way, you have to form the liver, the kidney, the heart, everything all at once, by the way. You can't evolve. And then if it's a man, how did he know to go and make a woman? It's impossible. Absolutely impossible. You are deceived. You are living in deception. And people get so upset about this because you're challenging their god. And the irony is that there are no gods, lowercase 'g'. There are no gods. There are demons, but there are not gods. There are demons, but there are not gods. So I have to ask the question this morning. You ready for this? Are you following a deceiver? Are you believing a lie? Are you enslaved to a master? Are you bound to a death sentence? Are you summoning a demon?

We have to be real and honest with people, don't we? This is probably not the sermon I would have chosen because we have to speak the truth, especially now. You know what? I'm going to tell you guys something. There's people that were hoping that what was happening to me now was hoping it would shut me up. Go into hiding, get out of my face. And no, it just reignited a deeper passion to speak the truth. That's all it did! That's all it did! You think I was bold back then?

Listen to the two-minute clip on YouTube what I said at the men's breakfast. Holy smokes! I don't even know where that came from. But we have to start speaking the truth in love and being bold, being that voice of truth. And I believe God sustains as long as I'm honoring His word. Once you get into lazy fear mode and self-preservation, you've got to be willing to lay down your life to receive the power of the Spirit. The time to be bold—you see it: the quiet churches, silent pastors, woke agendas. It's everywhere. And it's destroying the young, the next generation. We've got to be that bold preacher again. And maybe not you preacher, but bold out in the workforce and love the Lord with all your heart and all your strength. We need to get back to that again.

We're celebrating 250 years, correct? Has the nation done bad things? Yes. Hello! But anytime people say that, they forget about the Christian influence that began to bring correction back to all those areas. And that's why I posted on Facebook my favorite clip I think of all time on any movie ever is what George Whitfield said in his first sermon. You guys got to watch the movie The Great Awakening. What he said in his very first sermon. They allowed him to preach at a church, and he was never allowed to preach again. Well, maybe I'll share a little bit with you. He basically said: "Actors speak of fantasy as if it were real. But you preachers speak of real things as if they're fantasy."

And he said, "I will not be a velvet-mouthed preacher. Do not be deceived. You may have a religious head, but a devil in your heart. Our Lord speaks the same words to you as He did Nicodemus: you must be born again." He was religious, he was respected, he was renowned, he was known for being righteous, and still the Master commanded him, "You must be born again." He had a reputation for being alive, but he was dead inside. He was dead inside! How many of our congregations have dead preachers preaching to them? How can dead men beget living children? Oh my goodness, that's preaching! Guys, that's Holy Ghost, spirit-inspired preaching. That's the truth that will wreck a prideful heart and bring us to our knees.

Therefore Christ said, "If you be lukewarm, I will spew you out of My mouth." Oh, if we could get back to real Holy Ghost preaching. God help us. God help us. God help us. Can we meet You? God, our families need You. They are falling apart. Men are walking away. Families are disintegrating. They are callous and cold and I can preach my heart out and it doesn't change the hardest of hearts. God, grip them this morning. Grip them! Draw them to this altar. Break their pride, their arrogance. God, do what only You can do. I've lit the match, Lord, but You've got to burn the fire. I'm a lover of Your presence, God. We love Your presence in this place. Convict us, draw us to You. In Jesus' name, amen.

Announcer (Male): You've been listening to Regaining Lost Ground with Pastor Shane Idleman. You can find more information at westsidechristianfellowship.org. That's westsidechristianfellowship.org. And for all the latest on what God is doing with His ministry here, please be sure to follow us on most social media platforms.

Westside Christian Fellowship is located 60 miles north of Los Angeles in Leona Valley, California. Thank you again for listening to today's message of Regaining Lost Ground, where we are reminded daily: times change, truth does not.