Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - How Your Faith Will Influence the Future of Our Nation

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

The Gospel of Luke provides a powerful reminder that each generation has a choice: Will we accept or reject God and His Truth? On this podcast, Pastor Allen Jackson discusses the current condition of our nation and how the challenges we face reflect our spiritual condition. Will we seek to align our lives with a higher authority—one that transcends illnesses, natural elements, demonic forces, governments, and even death? In a world overcome by chaos and uncertainty, we must ask ourselves what values we want to govern us, and then be diligent to uphold them. After all, our engagement and response will either invite God's blessings upon our nation—or His judgment.__ It’s up to us to bring God’s truth back into our culture. It may feel like an impossible assignment, but there’s much we can do. Join Pastor Allen Jackson as he discusses today’s issues from a biblical perspective. Find thought-provoking insight from Pastor Allen and his guests, equipping you to lead with your faith in your home, your school, your community, and wherever God takes you. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3JsyO6ysUVGOIV70xAjtcm?si=6805fe488cf64a6d Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/culture-christianity-the-allen-jackson-podcast/id1729435597

I want to take what I want to share with you really out of the Gospel of Luke. If you've been following us through our services lately, you know, we've been doing several sessions from the Gospel of Luke. And I've been encouraging the congregation and anybody else that really follows the ministry to read Luke with me. It's just 24 chapters. You know, in our mind, that sounds like a whole lot. It's a whole book.

But it's not a book in the sense that you and I read a book. Most of the chapters in Luke's gospel are a page or two pages at the most. So we're talking about reading 40 pages. You can do that in a single sitting. It takes less time than it does to watch a ballgame or even a movie. And if you'll read that repetitively for a few weeks, it will completely change, I think, what you hear and see in the gospel. And I know I've been doing that for several weeks,

and it has been so profound to me. I want to start with it. I want to talk to you about some things that are happening in our world. I've had the opportunity in just the last two or three days to spend some time with the leadership of Samaritan's purse and all the disaster relief they're providing for people with the hurricanes and the storms that have been such a problem in the south and the southeast. I was with a senior congressman from a southeastern state, U.S. congressman that I have known for many years. And I want to talk a bit about that, but I want to do it in the context of what, at least the Lord's been ministering to me from the gospel of Luke. And we have four gospels at the beginning of the New Testament. They give us these perspectives on Jesus' life and ministry.

And I've been a pastor a long, long time. And when I think of the gospels, you know, I usually start to cut to the chase, the circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth, and then the circumstances surrounding his death. It's where we get our holidays, you know, Christmas and then Easter. But there's a narrative that the gospel writers are presenting. They're telling us a story, not fabricating something. It's not fiction, but they're making a point. And Luke's narrative has become so significant to me lately. His gospel gives us this story, certainly about Jesus' arrival and his redemptive work,

his death, burial, and resurrection. But it also records something else. It reflects an opportunity for a group of people whom Jesus walked in their midst. I mean, that's very much a part of the Gospel of Luke. There's this whole group of people from across the nation of Israel in Galilee in the north, Jerusalem, in the south, various walks of life, prostitutes, thieves, religious leaders, fishermen. It's a very diverse group of people. Jesus walked amongst them. And Luke is telling us this timeless story in an account of what happens.

if we either accept God's message or if we reject it. And I think that's where I want to start. The people to whom Jesus spoke were confronted with a choice. And the overwhelming majority of them did not choose Jesus. And so Jesus began to warn them of what the implications of that would be. And I'm going to tag them with you. And purposely, it's not religious language. They could choose God's provision.

They could yield to God's provision. They could yield to God's revelation of himself, or they could face the consequences. And I know that sounds a bit harsh, but that's really the narrative that Luke gives us. Jesus said that the patterns of their life would be interrupted. All of us have a pattern. We have a daily routine, a weekly routine,

we have monthly routines, we have annual routines. We look forward to spring break, or fall break or we look forward to certain, you know, this Saturday in Tennessee is the Tennessee Alabama game. I mean, that's a fixture if you're a UT fan or I suppose an Alabama fan. We have life patterns, and Jesus said your life patterns are never going to be the same again. If you don't get this decision right, your life patterns are going to be ruptured. He said that their annual plans would be removed.

You know, in the Jewish community three times a year, they're directed to go to Jerusalem to the temple for feasts and festivals and celebrations. And it was a big, big, big deal. And Jesus said those annual plans are going to be completely different. He said your generational progress will be stopped. You know, most of us carry the dream that our children's lives will in many ways be improved on the lives that we've led, that they'll have opportunities that exceed our lives or our grandchildren will have those things.

And Jesus said that generational progress stops. You shouldn't imagine that the generation who follows, you will have better opportunities. He said that if we neglect God's invitations, that chaotic forces of disruption and diminishment will beset our lives. Jesus said this stuff. I mean, in the midst of all the verses we quote and the miracles we talk about, he's saying to the people, if you neglect me, chaos will be more part of your future than stability. In fact, he told them they would forfeit security, that the things that they thought would protect their lives would evaporate, that lawlessness would increase, the deception would multiply.

He said there will be tremendous financial loss, devastating financial loss, that they would even be displaced. I mean, the list goes on, but those are all included. I could take you to verse after verse where Jesus is describing those things in the gospel of Luke. And we tend to read past them and not pay too much attention. Well, I'm going to come back and see if I can identify some passages and some places where I think it helps us understand what's happening today. But I'll tell you this as a bit of a teaser, I suppose. I believe we're every bit as much at a crossroads right now, this moment in time, is that audience that Jesus ministered to for three years.

And I don't think we have a three-year window. I think the decisions that surround us over these next weeks and months, I mean, we might push you. it to three years, but I think our future will be set on a course that will dictate the balance of our lives based on what we do in a period of time, certainly not larger than what's presented in Jesus' ministry in Luke's gospel. I think a little history will help with that, so you don't think I'm just speculating or having a bad day. For more than a thousand years, the Jewish people lived in the land that God promised to Abraham. More than a thousand years. Our nation's about 250 years old. So four times as long as the United States has been a nation, the Jewish people,

actually more than that, but they lived in the land of Israel with Jerusalem as their capital. There was one brief interruption of that for about a 70-year period of time when God sent them out of the country. He said their hearts had become so corrupt, their behavior so ungodly. I mean, they still had temples, they still offered sacrifices, they still did religious things, but their hearts were far from God. I trust you understand. We can be engaged in all kinds of religious activity, but our hearts still be a long way away from God.

Well, because of that, they lost their place in the land. The temple was destroyed. The Babylonians did that. Nebuchadnezzar is the king that you know about in the Bible. If you can spell Nebuchadnezzar, you get bonus points. They're gone about 70 years, and then they come back, and they reestablish themselves. You know those books in your Bible.

It's Ezra and Nehemiah. Daniel is an exile in Babylon and then in Persia. Esther is a Persian queen. All of that happens in that period of time during the exile. But they return. They're established. The second temple is built. And the New Testament opens with Jesus' arrival.

And Jesus is really a rescue mission. The covenant people of God had arrived in a place that is so desperate, they're going to lose their place in the land again. They're going to be sent out of the land. unless there's a tremendous change of heart. I mean, yes, Jesus came with a redemptive plan for all humanity, but he came for a redemptive plan for a first century audience in the land of Israel every bit as much. And I think it's important to let that settle into your heart. They needed a Messiah.

They needed a Savior. You know, most of us in the Christian community are looking forward to Jesus' return. But I trust you understand that when he returns, it will be because we need a Savior. He's not coming back to interrupt our picnic. He's not coming back to intrude on our summer break. When Jesus returns, it will be because circumstances are so desperate that the pressure is so intense that only the arrival of our Savior can ensure the outcome that we need.

And that's much the place that we find the world when Jesus is born in Bethlehem, and certainly then when he begins his public ministry some 30 years later. and his audience, his peer group, Peter and James and John and the people that were their peers, they've imagined a political solution. By this point in the history of Israel, the Romans have occupied the land. They have captured the whole region. So the Jewish people in Israel pay taxes to the Romans. There are Roman soldiers billeted in their communities.

There was a Roman soldier in Copernium where Jesus set up his ministry base, a man who happened to have great faith that Jesus commended. And the hope in the hearts of the Israelites was a political solution, a Messiah that would restore independence and autonomy, that would push the Romans out, and Jewish independence would flourish again. Back to the heydays of King David or King Solomon. That was the hope and the imagination.

They wanted the excessive taxes to be ended, the abusive treatment, the humiliation of the Romans, the indignities that their women were suffering. It wasn't an easy time. And Jesus' arrival is in fulfillment of what the prophetsists had said. He was born in the right place. He grew up in the right place. He met all the prophetic markers, and yet the people struggled to recognize him.

That's an important point, because he didn't fulfill their expectations with regard to Rome. What they wanted from a Messiah and what the prophets said about the Messiah were in conflict. And on that point, I think we can understand we might want things from God that are different than what God said he would do. Nevertheless, I want to stay in history. I'll come back and try to connect this to current events a little bit.

Jesus' message was directed at the behavior of the covenant people of God. What he had to say wasn't to the pagans. He didn't go talk to the Romans predominantly or to the non-Jewish people. He came to the Jewish people. He said, I came to the House of Israel. I have to go to those villages.

And he had a message for those people. He typically began his messaging in the synagogue in those local communities. The synagogues were the local places of worship. And Jesus would go into those little towns and little villages and go to their synagogues and talk to the people. He had a message for the covenant people of God. And what he told them was that their freedom from political oppression was going to be linked to their spiritual choices. That they couldn't be free of Rome until they had made the appropriate peace with God. and they weren't overly interested in that message.

In fact, they were often most frequently offended by it. In Nazareth, they tried to kill Jesus. In multiple places, they said he wasn't welcome. Jesus didn't avoid the reality of secular authority and power. He clearly understood and acknowledged that there was secular power, secular authority, but he equally said that it was secondary to the kingdom of God, that there was a greater power and a greater authority. Now again, I think we have lost much of that imagination.

Jesus very frequently and very publicly demonstrated the power of the kingdom of God over demons. He would meet people who were demonized, tormented by demons, and he would rebuke the demons, cast them out from the individuals or the individuals that were involved, and the people would understand peace and calm, whether it was the demonized man on the other side, the Gentile side of the lake, the Sea of Galilee, that lived amongst the tombs and had this crazy strength. He could break change. Jesus delivered him. The spirits went into a herd of pigs, and the pigs were destroyed. It was the man in the synagogue in Copernium, where the demon cried out when Jesus began to speak. We know who you are. Why did you come here to torture us? And Jesus commanded the demon to leave the man, and he stayed in the synagogue in peace.

Jesus demonstrated a power and authority over sicknesses. He healed many people of many diseases and many problems, blindness, all sorts of physical ailments. He even demonstrated an authority over death. He raised more than one person from the dead, sometimes with an invitation, sometimes simply because he was moved with compassion. Again, he's demonstrating something. He had a power that was greater than the wind and the waves. He could speak to the wind and the waves, and they would speak to the wind and the waves, and they would. obey him. It freaked out his disciples. He had a power which transcended financial matters. When it was time to pay the taxes, he told Peter to go fishing, and he would find the money he needed for the taxes in the mouth of a fish. I believe that he wanted the people to see and understand the magnitude of the invitation, which was before them, that there truly was a power and authority greater than Rome. And when Luke tells us the story, he goes out of his way to let us see this demonstration of the power of the kingdom of God. Now the conclusion of the gospel, it's not the end of the Jesus story, but it's the crescendo.

It's the big finish. It is the overarching message. Once we have established that there's a kingdom of God, that it's available to human beings, that it was offered first to the Jewish people, the crescendo of the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, which is also what Luke had to write,

is this redemptive work of Jesus, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Now what makes that such big news is it's going to enable not just the Jewish people, but people from every nation, race, language, and tribe to participate in this kingdom of God, to be a part of the covenant people of God. It's no longer a matter of dissent, of lineage, of having the right ancestry, the right genealogy, access to the eternal kingdom of God by the end of the Gospel of Luke, and certainly in the book of Acts, is freely available

to any person who will choose Jesus' Lord and repent of their sins. In the same way, Jesus' audience, through all the towns and villages of Galilee and then into Jerusalem and in between, had this invitation. By the time we get to the end of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, every person is invited into that narrative. Now, that is a remarkable, remarkable thing. But I would remind you that the majority of Jesus' audience, the majority of the people presented in the Gospel of Luke, took a pass. They spend far more time looking for reasons to criticize Jesus, looking for reasons to accuse him. Ultimately, they will band together in his arrest.

They'll shout for his crucifixion. They will manipulate the witnesses. They'll do whatever is necessary to silence the message. The overwhelming majority of the people do not want to participate. And Jesus says to his closest friends and followers, they've treated me this way. They're going to treat you that way. I think we should listen.

So I think most of us, when we imagine we're going to share our faith, when we're going to be a light in a dark world, we want people to be so excited that they'll respond with tears and joys and groups hugs. And that wasn't typically the response that Jesus got. And he said, you and I should expect a very similar reception. That we will share the good news. What we know of God. And we know it imperfectly.

And we know it incompletely. And we know it from our own broken perspective. but nevertheless it's what we have to share is our God's story. And not everyone who hears it's going to celebrate. I want to read you a verse of scripture. This isn't from Luke, but it highlights the point that I want to share with you about this fact that all of us are invited into the narrative. By the time we get to the end of the gospel, the good news is this isn't just for first century Jewish audiences. This is for any person, any man or woman, wherever we are across the span of time.

1 Peter chapter 2. It's verses 9 and 10. It says you're a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you're the people of God. Once you would not receive mercy, but now you have received mercy. Now that's from Peter, the fisherman that Jesus recruited on the shores of Galilee. He writes it near the end of his life. and he's writing it to the people scattered throughout the Roman Empire. And he said, you're a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God once you weren't a people, but now you're the people of God. It's almost the identical promise God made to the Hebrew people when he delivered them from Egyptian slavery.

Except now Peter is saying, through the precious blood of Jesus Christ, that every person can become a part of the chosen people of God. So here we find ourselves in the 21st century. And if we're in the United States, we have more freedom and more liberty and more affluence and more opportunity than any group of people that have ever walked on the planet. We have access to medicine and health care and opportunities. Our lives aren't perfect and there are challenges, but we have blessings that simply have no comparison throughout human history. And I want to submit to you that we are confronted with almost an identical set of, choices that Jesus' audience in the Gospel of Luke were confronted with. I want to take that same list and see if it seems familiar to us. I don't believe that we can continue on the pattern we're on

without facing the interruption of our life patterns. I think if we reject God and his purposes for ourselves and our families, that we will not be able to maintain the patterns that we have grown so accustomed to in the routine of our lives. Our days, our days, our lives. Our days, our weeks, our months, or our year. I believe we will see our annual plans removed. If you imagine that you're going to celebrate birthdays in some family traditional way, or there's ways that you celebrate holidays or places you go with your summer vacations, I honestly don't believe we can sustain those annual plans unless we have a change of response to God.

I believe the generational progress that we have come to depend upon, that our children's futures should be brighter than our own have been. I don't believe that's sustainable unless the people of God change. It's not just an opinion. When I look at the trajectory of what's happening around us, the debt of our nation, the moral condition of our nation, the rejection of truth in the public square, we're in an election season,

and I don't think anybody has tremendous confidence that we can even conduct elections any longer in a fair and upright manner. The things we're watching, if they continue, if they escalate the manipulation of the truth, censorship, the lack of free speech, a reluctance to engage in things that have defined our lives, if those things continue forward, I don't think there's any way we escape the judgment of God. I believe in the same way Jesus told his audience in the first century that there would be chaotic forces focused on disruption and diminishment.

I think our future will be defined by that. of the forfeiture of stability and security. We see it already. You know, I've been in 20 American cities in the last two years. And almost everywhere I've gone, the people that have been my host have warned me that the city wasn't safe. They had many stories to tell. Our cities are in a very, very difficult place. Our borders are open.

Because of the Alan Jackson Now program, I have interviewed multiple security experts, national security experts. national security experts, security experts in our major cities. And they all have the same message that it's a certainty that we have traumatic events before us, 9-11 type events. It's just a matter of when they happen. Deception is increasing. Lawlessness is increasing. Looting, flash mobs that steal. Tremendous financial loss.

Even displacement. I think all of those things that describe the first century audience of Jesus and were born out in history to be true, I think are in our future unless we make a significant change in how we interact with the Lord. The problems we face are not because of the pagans or the ungodly or the immoral or the politicians or the party we don't like or whomever we imagine the adversary to be.

I believe it has more to do with the hearts of, God's people. We are at a crossroads. And I wouldn't presume to know the outcome. I don't believe we have to have a majority. I don't think we need 51% in an election in order for God to intervene on our behalf and rewrite our future. Because there's an authority in the truth of God that doesn't demand a majority. But it will demand of God's people. A heart turns towards him. I know the character of God. And I promise you that, that things like humility and repentance are powerful factors in eliciting God's engagement. For far too long, we have winked at ungodliness. We've just kind of overlooked it. We've imagined it wasn't significant. We would tolerate it in our homes and in our families because we loved the people that were involved in it and we knew they'd gone to church a little bit and we thought, well, God was graceful and it'll all work out in the end.

So we have facilitated ungodliness. It's coming to all of our lives. You know, we are in the midst of an election season, and I think it's a very important time for our nation. Elections have consequences. If you're not planning to vote, change your plans and participate. It's a binary system. You've got two options.

You need to choose one of those two options. Neither of them are perfect. I will readily acknowledge that, but they represent two very distinct worldviews. And you need to decide which of those worldviews most fully aligns with the biblical worldview that you choose. To choose some third party right-in candidate is cowardice. You're avoiding the process.

We've got to prayerfully engage in what's happening. But when I look around, an election to me is helpful in the sense that I believe it is an evaluation of the spiritual condition of the nation. I believe we'll have a lot of clarity after November about the spiritual condition of our nation. for all the talk about revivals and renewals and awakening, we get to choose. We get to choose which set of values you want to govern our future.

You know, I went to undergraduate. When I started my undergraduate academic career, I was at O'Roberts University, and they had a very aggressive health program for the students. Every semester that I was there, I was required to do physical activity and keep a record of it. They kept computer records of all of that. And every semester, I was subjected to a stress test.

They wanted a baseline on our health, and they wanted to monitor us throughout our lives. They put us on a treadmill, hook us up to EKG with all the electrodes on our chest, monitoring our heart, and then monitor our oxygen intake. It was a regular part of our deal. Those stress tests, when they put me on that treadmill and hooked me up to an EKG, it didn't make me healthier. It didn't make my heart stronger. it didn't give me greater lung capacity. It just evaluated my physical condition. Well, I believe that's what an election does.

They don't make us healthier. If we choose somebody with a biblical worldview or an ungodly worldview, it certainly has impact for our future, but what it gives us is a picture, a snapshot of that moment in time and the choices we make as a people. And so I believe what we're doing right now is preparing ourselves for a spiritual evaluation. I think if in our pride and indifference and stubborn unbelief, we stand and continue to say we're good enough, we don't have to change.

You know, the equivalent in Luke's gospel is the people said, we're descendants of Abraham. Well, if we sit in the churches and say, we're born again, we've made a profession of faith, we've been baptized, we go to church with some regularity, and we ignore the fact that we're aborting almost 3,000 babies a day, that there's all sorts of, of immorality and ungodliness that is flourishing on our watch, much of it involved in our own family systems, in our own networks of friends. We're not being salt and light. We're light salt. And I think if we can acknowledge those things,

then we can begin in humility to say to the Lord, Lord, we need help. We need to be different. We want freedom from oppression. We want your blessings. We want the interest rates to come down. We want peace in the world and abundant food. We want what we want, but we don't want to change.

You see, I think we're facing unprecedented expressions of lawlessness. For more than a decade now, for two decades, we've had sanctuary cities. We've had cities across our nation that said they would not enforce federal law, but they demanded federal funding. That's absurd. If you're going to ignore federal law, you shouldn't receive federal funding in support. It's insanity. The lawlessness has reached such an absurd point.

We now have a candidate for president of the United States of America who didn't receive a vote. They're one of the two parties candidates for the presidency. No one voted for them. We're not certain who selected them to be the candidate. It wasn't a part of some open process. It wasn't some transparent process. We know about some things that were whispered or things that may have been conducted in backroom. or, but no one declared the candidate that was selected, the candidate that received the votes.

No one said they were unfit for office. There was no medical evaluation. There was no presentation from a psychiatric panel or a medical panel that said this person's not fit. We simply had a candidate that was chosen by the vote of the people set aside and another candidate put forward. And we don't know how that happened. We don't know who made the choices. That is the definition of lawlessness.

And while they're doing all of those things, they're accusing everyone else of subverting democracy, of being an existential threat to our freedoms. If you don't want to have a conversation that's about the political process, we can look at other things that are clearly biblical issues, abortion on demand. At any point throughout a pregnancy, we're told is the defining issue of this election.

that there is a significant portion of political people in this nation that believe you can secure power over the United States of America by promising women the privilege of killing their child at any point during pregnancy. Now, if there is enough support for that, that it secures somebody power in this nation, I assure you that Church of Jesus Christ's voice is small. That's an abhorrent idea. It's clearly not scriptural. we have an assignment to defend the sanctity of human life and the weakest amongst us. The biblical view of marriage between a man and a woman. That's not a political idea. That's a biblical idea. And it's been set aside.

It's been mocked and made fun of and ridiculed. And that didn't start in the hearts of the immoral or the ungodly or the atheist or the agnostics. It started in the hearts of God's people. been a pastor a long time. We stopped doing the majority of weddings in churches long ago. Because we lost the idea that a wedding was a covenant between a man and a woman made in the sight of God. Weddings became events. Weddings morphed into princess for a day. We wanted our wedding to be more unique than anyone else's wedding. They became destinations. They became great celebrations with our friends. I'm not opposed to destinations, vacations, celebrations with our

friends. That's not what a wedding is. A wedding is a sacred covenant made between a man and a woman in the sight of God. Everything else about a wedding is secondary to that reality. And we lost that idea in the midst of God's people to a significant extent long before marriage was redefined in our culture more broadly. We have set aside the biblical view of male and female. In the opening chapters of the Bible that says God created us male and female, and it was good. It doesn't say it was confusing, that it was a point of debate, that it was a choice someone could make, that really hasn't changed. And yet now we find ourselves in this seemingly bizarre place where the healthcare industry identifies a profit opportunity in fomenting confusion amongst young people about their

biological sex. And the church is strangely quiet. At the very least, we should be crying out to God with grief for the young people whose lives are being permanently altered by being subjected to gender mutilating surgeries or hormone blockers. Their lives are going to be altered forever, and we are silent. The biblical view of borders and and boundaries has been set aside. The Bible talks about curses for people who move boundary stones, who try to blur the lines between properties. And we're watching the intentional dismantling of our nation's borders.

That's not a political issue. It's a biblical issue grounded in authority and order. And again, the church has lost our balance. our view of sexual morality has been set aside. We don't feel we have the courage or the moral boldness to talk about moral and immoral. And oftentimes it's because of the immorality in our own lives and our own family systems that we have tolerated. All of those things collectively, if we continue down that path, then I believe we're going to walk into the same kind of future that Jesus' audience did.

Within 40 years of Jesus' death, Jerusalem is destroyed. The temple, the most fabulous building in the whole nation of Israel, one of the wonders of the ancient world, Herod the Great's second temple, is destroyed. Jerusalem is in a shambles. The slave markets of Rome are filled with Jewish people. The historians record this. Well, I believe we're at one of those same pivot points. the freedom and the liberty and the abundance and the opportunity and all the things that have defined our lives for generations.

The Jewish people had been there for a thousand years. There had been ebbs and flows to it. There had been cycles and ups and downs. But that had been their land. They were the covenant people of God with the temple. God had protected them from the Assyrians and all sorts of people. Then they ignored the invitation of Jesus. I believe that we have an invitation before us.

and I believe we could have a future that's defined by the goodness and the grace and the mercy of God if we will humble ourselves and repent and change. Or I believe we can stand in our stubborn determination to assert that we are right and point accusing fingers at other people. We can strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, as the scripture says, and we will face the judgment of God. I want to wrap this up with a passage from Luke chapter 19. I wish I could pick you up and take you to Jerusalem today without the judgment.

jet lag especially. The Mount of Olives is a hill just east of the city of Jerusalem. Between the Mount of Olives and the Temple is the Kidron Valley. And as you walk down the Mount of Olives today, it's littered with churches. There's churches, there's the church of the Lord's Prayer, Potter Nostra, there's churches of ascension. There's a Russian Orthodox church dedicated to Mary Magdalene. But my favorite church on the Mount of Olives is that it's called called Dominus Flevet. It's the place where Jesus wept. It's a very simple little chapel. There's a little garden there. There's a quiet place. The hill is often covered with pilgrims. But in the gardens of Dominus Flevet, when I studied at the university there,

my brother and I would often walk over there and sit sometimes in the afternoon and watch the sunset on Jerusalem. But as Jesus is coming into Jerusalem for the triumphal entry with all the crowd and the cheers and the accolades of the people. Jesus paused. And I want to read it to you. It's Luke 19. In verse 41, as he approached Jerusalem and he saw the city, he wept over it. And he said, if you had only known on this day what would bring you peace.

But now it's hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children with everyone. your walls. They'll not leave one stone on another because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you. It's one of the more sobering passages. This was Jesus. This is Jerusalem, the city of the king, the eternal city of the king. God chose that place for himself. And as Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, he begins to weep, not because of the suffering that's in front of him, but because of the

suffering that's in front of the city. He says, you didn't recognize the opportunity you had. And his heart is broken. He's overwhelmed with grief. Again, I said earlier, I don't know what the outcome is for us. I can't tell. I don't know. I don't know how many people are required. I know we don't have to have a majority, but I know it will take some percentage, some portion of the people turning our hearts to the Lord in humility and repentance and seeking God, no longer being tolerant of ungodliness and wickedness and immorality and saying, God, be merciful to us. I believe if we will do that, we will see the deliverance of God

and he will give us an extended season of freedom and opportunity from which everybody will benefit. I think if we don't do that and we reject the opportunity that God gives us, I think we will face a set of difficulties that are similar to what Jesus audience faced. That's not frightening to me. It's a great opportunity. We can choose the Lord and enjoy his blessings. Or we can assert our self-righteousness and face the consequences. Again, it didn't feel like a threat to me. It feels like a great gift. It's like we've gone to the doctor. And he said, listen, if you continue to behave this way, if you continue to eat this way, it'll wreck your health.

or you can change your habits and change your patterns and you can have a long, healthy life. I think our choices will determine the outcome, but it will take the power of God to bring about those outcomes. I would rather have his power at work on our behalf in us and through us than have his power at work through our enemies bringing the judgment of God to us.

So I don't know what's happening in your life these days. I don't know what's in your heart. I know it's easy to be agitated by political activity and politicians and parties that you don't like or translations of the Bible that you don't prefer to think that someone else is the problem. But I assure you that if we will humble ourselves and seek the Lord, God has a plan for our good. Or we can continue to assert our self-rightness with the same stubbornness of those folks we read in the Gospel of Luke. They were certain that they were doing it right. And Jesus wept over them and said, your future is not.

good. What I can tell you is we can't stay on the path we're on. We can't continue to behave as we're behaving and imagine we can continue in the blessings of God. We can't do it in the church, we can't do it in the halls of Washington, we can't do it with our habits, it's time for a change. Let's choose the Lord. Let's give him our very best. Let's begin to talk to him in a genuine way, in an honest way in a transparent way beyond anything we've ever done. And I believe we can see the deliverance of God in our lives in a way that will make a generational difference.

I want to be a part of a generation like that. And I believe many of you do as well. Hey, 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 to subscribe to Alan Jackson Ministries YouTube channel and follow the Culture and Christianity podcast. on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith and change our culture. I'll see you next time.