Turning Point

Guest (Male): At a time when God’s word is more accessible to more people than ever before, the world is spiritually starving. What does that mean in these last days? Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah considers the consequences of spiritual starvation on a world desperately in need of God. From where do we go from here, listen as David introduces his message, "Spiritual Famine: A Spiritual Prophecy."

Dr. David Jeremiah: Thank you for joining us today for the Friday edition of Turning Point. Today we’re going to talk about something that catches us off guard when we read it for the first time. It’s the word of the prophet Amos in the Old Testament who said there’s coming a time when there will be a famine, not of meat and bread and potatoes and all the other things that we eat, but a spiritual famine, a famine of the word of God.

If you look around today, you have to admit we may be certainly at the beginning of that. Places that once taught the Scripture no longer do. Places where the Bible was prominent, it no longer is. Opportunities for the Bible to be on display in courthouses and schoolhouses, it's gone. The word of God is being marginalized by so many people and it’s one of the signs of the end times according to the word of God.

We’ll get to it in just a moment, but first, let me remind you that during the month of March, we are making available to those of you who will send a gift to help with the expense of this ministry this book called "Understanding Biblical Prophecy." It’s a 30-day Bible study that answers critical questions about prophecy in the Bible and God’s promises for the future.

Questions at the end of each chapter for personal group study will help you understand how prophecy appears in the Bible and how you should take it into your own heart and into your own life. It's a very helpful booklet, and I hope you'll get it. You can do that by just sending us a gift of any size this month and asking for it. We have them all ready to ship and we’ll ship one to you as soon as we hear from you.

We’re very grateful for your attendance to the word of God each day. It’s my wonderful privilege to be with you and encourage you and open the Scripture and teach you. Today we begin again with this subject of spiritual famine: a spiritual prophecy.

When actor Benedict Cumberbatch took on the role of Greville Wynne in the movie "The Courier," he faced some scenes that required him to endure severe weight loss. The movie was inspired by real events and Wynne was an English businessman recruited by MI6 and the CIA to spy against Russia during the Cold War. When Wynne was captured by the Soviets, he spent a few years in lockup and his near-starvation diet reduced him to skin and bone.

For about four scenes in this movie, Cumberbatch had to replicate the look of a man nearly starved to death. The movie’s crew took a break from filming while he went on a harsh diet to make him look emaciated for this portion of the movie. It was a brutal experience. "You get very disoriented," he said. "You feel dehydrated, you feel hungry all the time, you feel emotionally and physically vulnerable. It’s horrible." He said, "I felt mentally unstable."

Have you ever wondered why our world seems so hungry all the time? Why we are perpetually thirsty, why so many people are emotionally and physically vulnerable, why they feel horrible, why they seem mentally unstable? The answer is that our generation is on a diet. It’s a generation that is famished.

We have been starved for truth. We’re hungry for hope and thirsty for the God-given message of the Scripture. What we’re experiencing right now, which we’ll get into in a little bit, is something that the Bible teaches would happen. The Bible says there will be a famine of truth in the last days. Did you know that was in the Bible?

The most vivid biblical prediction about this comes from the rugged prophet Amos. He wasn’t a trained priest or an educated theologian. He was a herdsman who spent most of his time trying to figure out where his sheep were. He also was a fruit picker—Amos the fruit picker.

He churned with courage and he spoke with conviction because he knew his God. His home-spun message was so direct. Amos 4:12 says, "Prepare to meet your God, O Israel." When I read that, I was reminded of the many trips my family and I took across this country when I was growing up, and you would see that up on billboards: "Prepare to meet your God." It was not just a few times; it was all over the country. I recall seeing this painted on rocks and signposts along the highway when I was growing up. Now, of course, they’ve almost disappeared from our consciousness and people take offense at that and probably would go to jail if they put it up there where people could see it.

They didn’t like it in Amos' day either. We often think we’re different than history. When Amos said this, he didn’t win any awards, I promise you. In fact, in the New Living Translation of Amos 7:12-13, here’s what we read: "Get out of here, you prophet," they said. "Go on back to the land of Judah and earn your living by prophesying back there. Don't bother us with your prophecies here in Bethel. This is the King's sanctuary and the national place of worship."

When Amos told them to prepare to meet their God, they didn't like it. They told him to get lost. They didn't know with whom they were dealing. This Southern farmer wouldn't be intimidated. Instead, he met their threats with this piercing prediction: Amos 8:11-12. "Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord God, that I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, and they shall not find it."

Amos was describing a particularly deadly type of famine—a problem of the ears, not the stomach. Our generation may be the early stages of a hearing famine as another layer of biblical prophecy unfurls. This isn't the only time that this is in the Bible. This isn't just Amos' word by himself. Listen to what the prophet Ezekiel said: "Disaster will come upon disaster and rumor will be upon rumor. Then they will seek a vision from a prophet, but the law will perish from the priest and counsel from the elders."

The prophet Micah answered with these words: "Therefore you shall have night without vision; you shall have darkness without divination; the sun shall go down on the prophets and the day shall be dark for them." Here are the prophets describing a time in the future almost as difficult to understand as the 400 silent years that transpired between the Old Testament and the New Testament. That was literally a period of time when God did not speak. He went from Micah to Luke 2, and for the first time, you heard about the Messiah.

As you look around today, if you’re vigilant, if you’re sensitive to what's happening in the religious world at all, it sort of feels like those days are beginning to come upon us. Everywhere you turn, people are running to and fro trying to find where significance might be, trying to find satisfaction. They’ve lost their appetite for the objective truth of God’s word and so it’s being replaced with positive mental attitude lessons and motivational lessons and all kinds of cute little things to try to get people to come and sit in the seats in the church.

But it’s not the absence of the word of God that’s troubling. Do you know that there are Bibles aplenty in most of the world? A virtual army of Bible translators are working night and day to get the Scripture into every tongue. We’ve made great strides across the universe. More than 1,500 languages now have access to the New Testament and Bible translation work is currently being done on the rest.

Missionary and translation societies are focusing now on the 1.5 billion people who do not have the entire Bible in their language, working feverishly to meet their need. If you ever go to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, you will see a room where they have cataloged all the languages of the world and where you can figure out by just walking in there what languages are yet to be translated with the Bible as its subject.

Of course, what that means is that about 6 billion of the Earth’s 7.6 billion people now have access to the whole Bible, both the Old and the New Testament. In other words, God’s word has never been more accessible, and in many places in the world, it’s only a smartphone or a laptop click away. You can get the Bible on your phone as easily as you go to any app that you have.

So what was Amos talking about when he said there’s going to be a famine of the hearing of the word of God? The prophet’s warnings concerned a loss of hunger for the truth. This is a self-inflicted famine. I’ll never forget the impact a little book had on my life some years ago. It was written by Sherwood Eliot Wirt. He wrote a little book called "A Thirst for God." I read it when I was just getting started in ministry, just getting going as a preacher. It’s basically a commentary on Psalm 142.

He said that one of the problems we have when we talk about spiritual hunger is that we think that spiritual hunger and physical hunger are exactly alike, but they are as diverse from each other as they could be. For instance, spiritual hunger works just exactly the opposite from physical hunger. When we are physically hungry, we eat and satisfy our appetites and cease to be hungry. But when we are spiritually undernourished and are then given a feast of good spiritual food, it makes us hungrier than ever. The more we learn about God’s love, the more we want to know; we can’t get enough.

The reverse is also true. When we are physically hungry and miss a meal, our appetite becomes ravenous. But in time, if we receive no spiritual food in that period of time, we lose our appetite. You get it? When you're hungry physically, you get more hungry. But if you don’t satisfy your spiritual hunger for a period of time, your hunger quotient goes down. You get less hungry.

That’s a real problem because let’s suppose you’ve lost your appetite for the word of God. Suppose you don’t really desire it. Suppose you get up in the morning, you see your Bible, and think, "I should read this, but I don't do that anymore. I used to do it a long time ago, but I just don't really desire it." But then one day you realize you're missing something and you need to fix the problem. So what do you do? How do you fix a problem of spiritual lack of hunger for the word of God? Here it is: it’s called force-feeding.

You know what that is? You go into your little closet, your little study, your little desk, and you sit down and you say to yourself, "Self, I'm going to read the Bible today. I don't care if I get anything out of it or not; I'm going to read it. In fact, I'm going to read it till I get something out of it." You have to rekindle your appetite so that your appetite will grow. If you just stop reading the Bible and don't do anything about it, you will never again have an appetite for the word of God and you will be a part of the spiritual famine that Amos was talking about.

The reality is that our hearts are easily drawn away from God and His word. We know that. Human beings have a terrible habit of losing their appetite for the truth. D.A. Carson wrote these words: "Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord." It’s not natural to go there.

"We drift toward compromise and we call it tolerance. We drift toward disobedience and we call it freedom. We drift toward superstition and we call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and we call it relaxation. We slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking that we’ve just escaped legalism. We slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves that we have been liberated."

We play these games in our minds. We all know it; all of us do it. I have done it. The integrity of our own mind is at stake here if we’re going to maintain a spiritual appetite. So what does this mean? That’s where we are; what does it mean? I know there are some who are listening who will wonder about the inclusion of a chapter like this in a prophecy book. After all, most of the other topics that I talk about in this series are sort of cataclysmic or apocalyptic in nature: the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of socialism, economic danger poised to crush all resistance during the tribulation.

But what we see prophesied in the book of Amos and other passages of Scripture is nothing less than spiritual starvation. It’s a crisis affecting not only our bodies but our souls. To appreciate the serious nature of this coming spiritual famine, I want you to go with me and let’s dig a little deeper into its implications. What does it mean for the last days? What does it mean for our lives right now? Here are four things our culture is currently under threat from spiritual malnutrition.

First of all, our heritage is being lost. We’re losing our heritage. The Psalmist said, "You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name." Hear me now carefully. How many children in Sunday school and church know anything about the 2,000 years of Christian history? Where are the missionary stories? What’s happened to the heroes and martyrs and stalwarts of the past whose courage brought the Gospel to us? How many children grow up learning the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer? What has happened to our old hymns? Our spiritual heritage is, little by little, just slipping away. We all know that and it frustrates us.

Number two, our theology is being weakened. We must also guard our theology because it’s easy for churches to become malnourished in times of spiritual famine. George Barna and his researchers issued a 2020 report warning American Christians are undergoing a post-Christian reformation. The irony of the reshaping of the spiritual landscape in America is that it represents a post-Christian reformation driven by people seeking to retain a Christian identity. The most startling realization is how many people from evangelical churches are adopting unbiblical beliefs.

If you don't lay a foundation down of what true doctrine is and teach people what theology is all about, if we don't stand for something, we fall for anything and they fall for whatever comes down the road. It doesn't have anything to measure it by, so it sounds good and they buy it. The report went on to say that evangelicals have traditionally emphasized the importance of seeing the Bible as the infallible, inerrant word of God, but now today, 52% of evangelicals do not believe in objective moral truth. These aren’t the people on the outside of the church. These aren't the people that we think of as the pagans and we’re the evangelicals. No, that statistic is about people who go to churches like ours. Some of those people go to our church and to your church.

The researchers concluded that what used to be basic, universally known truth about Christianity are now unknown mysteries to a large and growing share of Americans, especially young adults. Let me tell you what that means to me as a preacher. I used to preach with an assumption of a certain basic knowledge of biblical truth. I can’t do that anymore. I have to go back and realize that when I preach, the assumption I have to have is that people don't know this. So I have to explain it and try to do it in a way that I don’t bore and frustrate the people who do know it. But the vast majority of people who come to church today, even if they grew up in a Christian home, do not know the books of the Bible. They don't know Genesis from Revelation.

They don’t know Psalms from palms. They don’t know anything. If you ask them, "Where's this book?" One of the things I love to do is say, "Okay everyone, open your Bibles and let’s turn to Jude." And they want to know what chapter, but there's only one chapter in Jude. Just the basic understanding of spiritual things that we used to have, that we assumed when you and I were growing up in the church—it was just part of our understanding, it was part of our knowledge. It’s not there anymore. It’s been replaced by a lot of secular humanism that’s come in to drive our kids and our children away.

As a pastor, I'm deeply concerned about the wayward theological patterns that are trending in churches everywhere. It’s not simply the liberal old Protestant mainstream denominations that are diminishing their doctrines. It’s evangelical churches who, in trying to reach a resistant audience, go too far in compromising biblical truth. For centuries, God’s word has been at the center of Christian preaching. Today, questioning scriptural authority is in vogue even in certain faith communities. Popular speakers advocate processing God’s word through cultural filters rather than the other way around.

So our heritage is being lost, our theology is being weakened, and our Bibles are being overlooked. Mark Twain once defined a literary classic as a book which people praise but never read. Unfortunately, that describes the way many people in modern society approach the Bible. "Are you for the Bible?" "Oh, yes." "Do you ever read the Bible?" "Well, in all honesty, no."

It doesn’t help that cultures around the world are trying to minimize our Bible reading. China has just shut down Bible apps and Christian WeChat public accounts, and hard copies of the Bible are no longer available for sale online in China. In America and the West, the Gideons are running into problems getting their Bibles into many hotel rooms. One of the most encouraging things if you travel like I have is you go into a hotel room and in the stand next to your bed, you open the top door and there's a Gideon Bible in there. Not so. I’ve been in many hotels where that Bible is no longer present.

A recent survey showed the percentage of hotels willing to offer Bibles in their rooms has dropped from 90% to 48%. Hotels are finding younger travelers who are less devout than their parents or grandparents, and they don't want to offend atheists or those of other religions. One atheistic group created stickers for its members to attach to any Gideon Bible they did find in a hotel room. The sticker said, quote, "Warning: literal belief in this book may endanger your health and your life." They take those stickers with them on their trips and they put them on the Gideon Bibles in the hotels, or if they get into a Marriott, they put it on the Book of Mormon.

I’d call that spiritual famine. I’d call that people who disregard the Bible who someday may want a society that would be impacted by the Bible. If we take the Bible out of our culture, we may ultimately get what we want. A moral compass of Scripture will self-destruct from moral decay and decadence, and pretty soon, we will just be immoral, amoral perhaps, without any morality at all.

So what's happening in this famine is our heritage is being lost, our theology is being weakened, our Bibles are being overlooked, and our appetite is being ruined. That leads to my next thought. The reason we’re facing a spiritual famine is because our appetite for God’s truth is being ruined. A child that gorges on junk food and candy in the afternoon won't have much of an appetite for meat and potatoes at supper.

In these last days, it seems as if Satan has unleashed an invisible spiritual virus that robs people of their appetite for God’s word. But it’s worse than that because it’s not just a loss of appetite. It’s a total distaste for the Bible. People grab a handful of Scripture, take a bite, find it distasteful, and spew it out like a child spitting out carrots. As likely as not, they’ll dub it hate speech, and often we allow that to push us away and then we don't preach the truth.

Often God will respond to our lack of spiritual appetite with silence. He doesn't force His words into our ears. He may withdraw for a time if we lose our appreciation for the privilege of His voice. But God’s silence may be hardly noticed at first. You may still remember times when God spoke to you, but you gradually realize you haven’t heard from Him in a long time.

If you realize you are in a drought, immediately seek God and ask Him what adjustments you need to make in your life so that you can once again enjoy fellowship with Him. It may be you've disobeyed His last instructions to you. Maybe He's waiting on your obedience before giving you fresh direction. If there's unconfessed sin in your life or if you have a damaged relationship, get it right and do it now.

By grace, we can stay healthy even during a large-scale spiritual famine. Paul told us to be nourished in the words of faith and of good doctrine, and the Psalmist described Scripture as sweeter than honey, and the prophet Jeremiah said, "Your words were found and I ate them, and Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart." Everything about the Bible is special. It’s God’s gift to the human race. It’s bread for the soul and honey for the heart. It’s nourishment for your nerves and wisdom for your mind. This is an incredible book, this book we call the Bible. And this is your book as well as it is mine. Jesus said, "People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." Amen.

Well, it’s Friday and I’d like to take a moment on Friday and remind you of a couple of things. First of all, for those of you who are listening to us in Canada, I just always want to tell you that when you support us from Canada, your money stays in Canada because it helps to support the many stations we’re on throughout your great nation. We’re so very grateful for our Canadian friends, and we know that many of you are just deeply in love with the word of God and God Himself, and it’s our delight to serve you. We want you to know that we serve you and we serve your nation. We serve you as Canadian brothers and sisters, and what you give stays there to help us do that. We’re so very grateful for the opportunity.

For those of you who are listening here and across the border in our nation, and actually, this goes for either one: you need to get to church on Sunday. This is my Friday speech. Go to church. Don’t sit home and watch television or read a book; get to church and gather with God’s people. That’s what the word of God says and we want to encourage you to do it. We’ll see you right here on Monday.