Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - The Destruction and Looting of America

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

As our nation shifts—culturally, economically, and morally—we're experiencing a systematic and spiritual “looting” of our moral foundation. "We're being looted. We will witness an increase in the unbridled pursuit of pleasure and hedonism because if you don't want people to notice that you're plundering the world around them, you give them greater license to behave in the most self-absorbed, narcissistic ways possible. We see that happening all around us," Pastor Allen asserts in this podcast. He discusses several areas where we see looting taking place right now. Our current trends place our nation in crisis as we struggle to maintain our identity and values. Yet, there is still hope. Watch this podcast to discover how you can be a force for change and invite God to bring healing to our nation.__ 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

Welcome to culture and Christianity. This is a really remarkable time of the year. It's Christmas season, and I love this time of the year. It's a lot of work for me. Christmas time and church world is crazy busy, with all the special programming for everybody. So it isn't because there's a lot of freedom and flexibility in it. I love a season when the whole culture stops to at least allow us to celebrate Jesus' Lord.

I know everybody doesn't participate. People still say happy holidays to me. I think that's a total lack of situational awareness, but they say it. But I love the Christmas season because of the significance of the opportunity that is before us. And I just want to encourage you not to let Christmas come and go without using your voice and whatever influence God has given you. You know, that varies a lot. There was a businessman led one of the largest corporations, actually one of the largest

manufacturing initiatives in our nation. And it was owned by a company from another nation that doesn't have a Christian worldview. By giving you enough clues. And they called me to do a Christmas video. And he said, you can say whatever you want to. You can talk about Jesus any way you want to. And for several years, I did a Christmas video for their entire manufacturing plant, thousands and thousands of people.

You may not have that influence, but you've got influence. you may write a Christmas card. You may write a half a dozen and share them with people you work with. It can look like a lot of things, but don't let Christmas come and go. And I understand life's not perfect. Many of you know I lost my mom this year, so it's my first Christmas without my mom and helping my dad walk through that. And I mean, it isn't because everything's perfect and everything goes your way.

It's a little cliche-ish to say that when you lose things, everything becomes more valuable. That's not usually true. I think it's more discouraging and more depressing. and we have to choose not to put those days. We have to take off the spirit of despair and put on a garment of praise. I have to choose that. One of my most memorable Christmases, I lived in Jerusalem. And I love Israel.

I love the city of Jerusalem. I love the Jewish people. But it's not a friendly place for Jesus at Christmastime. I was at Hebrew University, and they had classes on Christmas Day. I didn't go. And so a handful of us that were Christians got together, and we celebrated Christmas, and it was the most modest. I was on a really limited budget.

I mean, it was a very, very modest day, but it was one of the most meaningful Christmases I've ever had. And so don't let your Christmas be about everything being perfect. The year's been amazing. Everybody that needs to love you is giving you expressions of that love and affirmation in the way that you want it. You know, very seldom is life that ideal. But in the midst of that,

we have the freedom and the privilege of honoring the birth, the arrival of Jesus. And that's one of the greatest gifts we will ever have. So I want to wish you a Merry Christmas. I'm going to say it again before we're done, but it's an amazing time of the year. And don't let all of the Scroooges in your world rob you of that. And if you're completely alone, you're not alone because God said he would never leave you or forsake you, that he's close to the brokenhearted.

And that gives us something to celebrate. So Merry Christmas. What I want to talk to you about today is a little different, but in some ways I think it's on point. I did a message a few weeks ago, a part of a series I've been doing, and I talk to the congregation here and beyond about the looting of America. And I want to come back after the holiday, after the beginning of the new year, and work on that in a bit more of an intentional way.

But I wanted to take a few minutes with you because I really felt like the Lord, he at least gave me the awareness to understand some of what was happening in a way that it felt like it was important to talk to you about it. So I want to start with a bit of a biblical perspective, which perhaps in a bit more intentional way than I typically do on these podcasts. But at the end of the day, I'm a pastor. And so the authority from which I typically speak comes from Scripture. And the point I would make without just walking you back through all the chapters and verses

is that throughout the scripture, God's incremental judgment is evident in the lives of his people. It starts in many places, and it's a consistent part of the story. Much of the history that we have in our Bibles of the nation of Israel and the Jewish people is when they are a vassal state, they're subjugated to other peoples, The Book of Judges is predominantly focused on that cycle of the Israelites being subjugated to other people.

In Samson's Day, it was the Philistines. In Gideon's day, it was the Midianites. The people changed, but it was really God handing His covenant people over to their enemies. Not to be completely annihilated, but as an expression of his judgment because they had wandered away from the truth. they'd wandered off the path into the weeds. They're still the covenant people of God, but they have violated those initial commandments where you can have no other God before me,

and they've turned their hearts to other things, and in doing so, they forfeit liberties and freedoms. They didn't lose their complete freedom, but they lost segments of that. Maybe the most elaborate presentation of that is what in biblical studies we talk about as the exile, when the Babylonians ultimately subjugate the Jewish people and the nation of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, which ends in the destruction of the city and the destruction of the temple.

But it didn't happen all at once. It happened in phases over a period of more than a decade. First, they looted the temple. They took the gold and the silver out of the temple. And they took a few exiles with them. You know, ultimately, after more than 14 years, the whole city is destroyed, but it happened incrementally. The people could have changed at any number of points and escaped the judgment of God.

When I shared the message with the congregation and beyond, I got some emails and people said to me, Pastor, that's an Old Testament concept. You're taking the notions of God of the Old Testament and bringing them into the New Testament. Well, thank you, Obi-Wan, for that very clever observance. Let me invite you into the New Testament when we meet Jesus in the Gospel. the Romans are the authority in Jerusalem and over the land of Israel. And Israel is being looted by the Romans. They're paying taxes to the Romans.

They're having to bill it Roman troops. They're under Roman authority. Jerusalem has a Roman governor. It is very much the scenario of what we see in other places in Scripture. And Jesus is very well aware of that authority. In fact, in Luke's gospel, he prophesies. And he says to the covenant people of God, because you didn't recognize the day of God's coming.

They're going to build an embankment against you. They'll encircle you on every side. He's describing siege warfare. And he said every stone on this city will be torn down. They'll dash the heads of the babies of this city against the rocks. And within 40 years of Jesus' death, the Romans did exactly what he said they would do. If you visit Jerusalem today, they have the archaeologists have excavated. You can see where they toppled the stones from the temple now under the Romans.

roads below it, they literally tore it apart, stone at a time. That incremental judgment of God, the New Testament closes with that in the Book of Revelation. You know, the Book of Revelation is a story of this conflict between the Lamb and the beast, this conflict at the end of the age, where God is going to visit his judgment upon the nations. And it's done incrementally. It isn't done in one fell swoop. Remember you've read the book of Revelation? I'm sure most of you have, and it talks about seven bowls of judgment and different expressions of judgment. All of those things are done incrementally, the four horsemen that ride out through the earth. It's not in one fell swoop.

It's not Noah-esque with the flood that destroys everyone. And so when we see this happening, when we see this incremental forfeiture of the blessing of God, it should capture our attention. It is a very significant biblical principle. from the beginning of the story all the way through the end of the story. And in my opinion, we are living through one of those seasons of the incremental judgment of God. And the outcome is going to be determined not by politicians and elections. The outcome will be determined by the attitudes of the hearts of God's people.

The Babylonians didn't conquer Jerusalem because they had superior military technology. They did, but that's not the reason they won. over the city of Jerusalem. God handed the people over to the Babylonians. The Midianites didn't overrun Israel in Gideon's days because they had superior military numbers. They did, but the scripture very clearly says that God handed his people over to the Midianites.

And if we lose our freedom and our liberty and the abundance that God has blessed us with, it won't be because the Chinese outsmarted our Congress or our elected leaders. it will be because the people of faith abandoned our faithfulness to God, and he handed us over to our adversaries. And to imagine that the redemptive work of Jesus eliminates God's judgment in history is to ignore the message that Jesus brought

and the unfolding of the gospel being preached throughout the New Testament. So I think that's an incomplete understanding. So I want to take it just a minute with you and give you a little wind. into current events that I'm going to label the looting of America. You know, when I shared with this with the church, I showed a little short video clip that was taken out of the news. They may lay that in here, I don't know, of the looting that's been taking place for some time now in some of our major cities, smash and grab. We've got a whole new language around it. I mean, laws have been changed where they don't prosecute shoplifting

for amounts less than $1,000 in some states. Because they simply, you know, it's just not worth bothering with it. We've come up with a whole ideas, whole sets of language and conversations in culture about why people are entitled to that. So we see drugstores, CVS, and other stores closing in major American cities because the legal system and law enforcement won't protect them from looting. People walking in, carrying out the produce, not paying. Well, I'm going to submit to you that we're watching our nation be looted on a much grander level. If you'll start to pay attention, you'll see it happen week in and week out. Over the weekend, I heard the reports that the components that had been purchased under President Trump in his first time in office to build the wall on our southern border.

There was a lot of steel that had been purchased. A lot of the components necessary for that wall, billions of dollars' worth are being sold like in a fire sale right now by the current administration for pennies on the dollar. They don't want any of those components for the wall to be present when President Trump returns to the White House in January. When they're taking billions of dollars of taxpayer money and getting rid of it for pennies on the dollar, I think looting is a good word for that. The ideologically, you may have different opinions on whether it's appropriate or not, but they're taking our money and they're basically just putting it in the shredder. the looting of America. There are a lot of components. And this is by no means intended to be an inclusive list,

but I want to try to walk you towards it. And then I trust the Lord to help you begin to see it. And again, this isn't a political issue. It's not just an economic issue or a moral issue or an academic issue. It's a spiritual issue. If God's people, maybe we start this with the churches. The churches are being looted. They're carrying away our orthodoxy.

It was unimaginable not too long ago, a couple decades ago, maybe a little longer than that, to talk about being a legitimate expression of the Christian church in our nation without imagining, you were also under the authority of Scripture. That is, at the end of the day, a significant component of the definition of a church, a group of people gathered together under the lordship of Jesus of Nazareth and under the authority of the Word of God. Well, tragically, that's not the case for major sections of main, line American evangelicalism. We've stepped out from under the authority of Scripture. You can't do that and imagine you're still Christ followers. We don't get to make up the rules.

We can't choose commandment one, three, and five, and imagine we're good with God. It's the looting of the American church. And in that, there is a tremendously diminished authority. You know, how did we arrive at the place where men and women are competing in athletic competitions together? that they're boxing together at the Olympics. It's pretty obvious that there's fundamental physical differences between biological males and biological females. And at the Olympics, where we imagine that physical skills have been honed to their highest degree, we put in a boxing ring, a biological male, and a biological female,

and we're surprised when the female says, I've never been hit that hard in my whole life. Duh. Well, how do we arrive at a point of such obvious, confusion. Well, I would submit to you it's the looting of the church. How long has it been since we've had the courage in the American church to talk about gender roles? We don't want to have anything to do with that topic. It's not culturally popular. Never mind what the scripture says. We don't want to deal with it. We just set it aside. And so we stopped being salt and we stopped

being light. And we began saying to our children, you can do anything you want to do. It doesn't matter. You can be whatever you want to be. And we ignored the counsel and the wisdom from the word of God. And so now we arrive at a cultural point where we can't even figure out a logical reason to discuss why men and women competing against one another in physical competitions might put someone at risk. The looting of America. A globalism, I think is a very clear expression of the looting of America, a move towards a global economy, a global currency,

the diminishment of our nation. You couldn't imagine leading an American corporation, or even tragically in recent years as an elected official of this nation, holding the idea around the uniqueness of our nation. American exceptionalism, we are told, is a

bad thing. That it shouldn't be championed. That we should be more aware of the failures of our nation. We should be more aware of the missteps of our nation than we should the contributions our nation has made to the larger global community. And therefore, we should be diminished. We should be weakened to level the playing field, whether it's our economic resources being diminished or our military resources being diminished. Whatever that means, we shouldn't assert ourselves as leaders in the world

because there's nothing exceptional about our nation. I think it's a lie from the pit of hell. Do you remember what Jesus said? It's John chapter 10 and verse 10. If you want a big picture perspective on this with a spiritual lens, Jesus said the thief comes only to steal, to kill, and destroy. But I'm come that you might have life and have it to the fullest. See, the more fully you cooperate with the Spirit of God, the more momentum he will bring to your life.

And the more you walk out from under the authority of the Spirit of God, the more it will bring this looting to you to steal, to kill, and destroy. That is the ultimate portrayal of looting. And the end goal of that, be absolutely clear on this, is destruction. It's not just diminishment. It's personal. If you and I decide to stop cooperating with the Spirit of God, we stop practicing obedience. We start walking more rebelliously before the Lord.

We begin to forfeit the things that come from the blessings of God. and if we leave that unchecked, if we're unrepentant, we will forfeit them all. It brings destruction. It's not a surprise. We're just watching it now on a national scale. You know, the whole diminishment of nationalism, the pride of our country, or the accomplishments of our nation. And there's so many ways that I have seen that, particularly in academia, the demonization of colonialism. You know, how awful colonialism was.

Well, it wasn't a uniquely American idea or something associated. with the colonies. The colonies were a reflection of that colonial ambition of Europe. But there's been ambition amongst people groups as long as we've had civilization. The Mongols raided towards the West, the Native American tribes, often competed with one another for territory and resources. That ambition within people groups to expand their influence has been a part of civilization for as long as we have recorded it. We've just demonized this one slice of it and then taught ourselves for generations how that was a reflection of evil. And we lumped into that the activity of the church that looked at other peoples and said they would benefit from an

expression of the gospel. We call that missions. And so missional activity's been lumped into. It's almost equated synonymous with colonialism. And it's bad. How dare us look at another group of people and say they would benefit with the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth. And to underscore it, often when it's being denigrated, they'll find the worst expressions of missional activity and say we were converting people to Western culture and Western behavior and Western clothing. We weren't really taking to them a gospel. And there's enough bad examples. You can find to illustrate that when you're teaching it. But I believe that we have a biblical assignment that's never been amended or rescinded. Jesus had gone into all the world

and preach this gospel to every creature. I don't give a hoot if it's politically correct or not. I intend to share the gospel wherever, however, and whenever the Lord gives me the opportunity. We broadcast what we do in our little congregation in Tennessee into multiple languages. One of the most recent initiatives is it's translated into Arabic, and by satellite it's broadcast over the Middle East in North Africa. AI makes all of those things much easier to do. I am proudly, gladly, and wholly committed to missional activity of the Church of Jesus Christ.

And I quite candidly don't care what they think about it at Harvard or Yale or any Ivy League school. Academia has for a long time now taught that Christian missions are a reflection of an antiquated view of people and culture. We shouldn't presume to have a message of salvation for the peoples of the world. All that really reflects to me is ignorance of scripture. and I'd prefer not to be ignorant of Scripture. Christian nationalism to me, having been denigrated, language is being manipulated so broadly, but Christian nationalism has been morphed

into a very derogatory term. You know, language, you have to pay attention. You know, I understand God's not an American. I know when I get to heaven, they're not going to play the Star-Spangled banner in the elevators, that when you walk through the pearly gates, the red, white, and blue is not going to be flapping in the breeze. But God caused me to be born in this nation, and I have an assignment, I believe, a biblical

assignment to be salt and light in my home, in my community, and in the nation where God planted me. I'm not limited to here. One of the unique contributions of Christianity is no matter what nations of the world we have resided, we wanted to bring our biblical worldview to bear in those nations because we believe that brings the blessings of the creator of heaven. and earth. So I'm happy to say that I believe God has blessed this nation, that he's called it into existence, that it is a most unique experiment in self-government. It isn't perfect.

There's no such thing as perfect. But we continue as we lean towards the Lord to make improvements. There is no greater expression of liberty and freedom amongst civilized human beings. And we've seen from our own nation in the last 250 years, as imperfect as it may be, that's true. I'll give you another expression of looting while we're kind of in this same bucket. Christian Zionism, Christians who believe God has given the land of Israel to the Jewish people. I happen to believe that's biblical all the way back to the book of Genesis. I don't believe that Jesus suffering, his crucifixion, eliminated the Jewish people. The New Testament in Roman, the book of Romans, chapters 9, 10, and 11, God says, Paul says,

did God reject the Jewish people? and then he uses the strongest possible language available in Greek. He says, God forbid, absolutely not. May it never be. God didn't reject the Jewish people. Did they forfeit some things? Because that generation missed the opportunity in front of them? They certainly did.

But God hasn't rejected them. When you walk into the New Jerusalem, you'll walk through a gate that has the name of a Hebrew man inscribed above it. And at the center of the city, you will find a throne with an observant Hebrew rabbi sitting on the throne. He hadn't rejected the Jewish people. I am gladly identified as a Christian Zionist. In fact, in the last few weeks, the Jerusalem Post, the primary paper in Jerusalem,

published a list of 10 leading Christian Zionists, and we were honored to be included in the list. So in the midst of the looting, you can still make choices to stand with the purposes of God and the earth. I would strongly encourage you to do so. I think another expression of the looting of our nation is the intentional marginalization of a biblical worldview. It's just not welcome any longer in the public square. It's not welcome in the corporate setting. It's not welcomed in much of academia any longer. In fact, we've been coached for quite a while that if you're in a public setting, an academic setting, and you say a prayer and one person is offended,

that you should have the wisdom not to pray, not to take your opinion and force it on another person if it makes them uncomfortable. then that opinion should be withdrawn from that setting. And under that general thought, Christianity has been pushed out of corporate settings. It's not welcome in the corporate boardroom. It's not welcome in most of academia. It's not welcomed in the public square because one person saying I'm offended. And yet we find ourselves today where there is very much a worldview being advocated, promoted by corporate America, by our government in most cases, by academia in

most cases, we see it Bud Light with their promotional campaign that so famously went wrong. They took a worldview and decided that they would force it quite literally into the faces of all the people who wanted their product. And there was quite a reaction. But corporate America doesn't shy away from ideologies and worldviews. We were played and we watched our nation be looted of the fact that. of a worldview that has held us together. With that biblical worldview came things like the value of telling the truth, of integrity, of not lying.

I mean, simple things that have held us together. And now we see those things being dramatically diminished. It's been the looting of our nation, the incremental judgment of God. And as much as we want to see political change, we're going to have to make spiritual changes. The movement of manufacturing away from America has been. a part of the looting of our country. Well, I know it was sold to us as profit. But corporations profiting while they take jobs away from Americans

and take money out of the pockets of the cities and the towns and the heartland of America so that they can turn in better profits to their boards and their shareholders. They are looting our nation. You know why we've been silent, I trust. It's because if they would give us a little bit of the loot, we would be quiet to the larger looting that was taking place around us. us. We have to change. It's about the 70s when manufacturing began in a wholesale way, moving

overseas. We called it offshoring. There is some movement back to manufacturing here again, but we've lost most of our will to work. We would rather the government hand us something, loot the money from someone else. Don't we hear that all the time? Take the money from the wealthy and redistribute it. You know the word for that. It's looting. Robin Hood at the end of the day was a thief. I know he stole from the rich and gave to the poor. That's the myth that's been established. He was still a thief.

Because the definitions of who's rich and poor are manipulated by the people in charge so that they can keep their power. I don't observe them giving up any of their authority or their resources while they help loot our nation. Let me give you a list of products. When I read this, it surprised me. Converse Shoes, Gerber baby food, Schwinn bicycles, craftsman tools,

Under Armour, and York peppermint patties. Which ones of those do you think are manufactured in the United States? In the context of this discussion, I'm sure you're ahead of me. None of them are. None of them are. Not Gerber baby food? Not craftsman tools. None of them.

The manufacturing in our nation has been diminished so greatly. It has crippled us. We don't make it. anything anymore. We have been looted. The refusal to use American energy sources is another expression of the looting of America. We're a nation dependent upon energy, largely petroleum energy. We will buy it from other nations in the world. We will spend our dollars to enrich other people, other places, while we deny American jobs and American opportunities under some silly notion that it's better

for the economy if we buy our petroleum from someplace else. They are looting our nation. We have the largest energy reserves of any people on the planet and we have largely not used them. Terrorism has been a looting

of America. Targeting civilians in acts of violence and war, bringing fear and terror and destruction and murder to civilian populations, Now, I understand the degree to which academia has weighed in on this and said, we've done this for decades and generations and for centuries. One of the ways of understanding history is the rules of warfare.

World War I was trench warfare. They dug these big ditches and they shot from their ditch over you and your ditch. World War II was fought differently. Vietnam was about jungle warfare. Dense vegetation and enormous rain. What we've watched in the desert for the last. The last 25 years has been a completely different kind of warfare in the deserts with wide open expanses. Well, terrorism has been a change in how violence is visited upon civilization.

We have combatants that don't wear uniforms that don't identify with nations that target civilian populations to instill great fear and cause nations that are far more powerful than the attacking force to be brought to their knees. The most celebrated example of that, I suppose, in our nation in recent years, was 9-11. They took our airplanes and flew them into some of the highest profile buildings in our nation, taking the lives of thousands of people. We have spent trillions of dollars to protect ourselves from terrorists. It's looting. Dollars that could have been spent elsewhere

with a different perspective, with a different worldview, they are looting us. I'm old enough to remember going to the airport and walking in to the gate where I was going to depart from without having to go through security. There was a time when airplanes were not seen as weapons to hijack, to be used as tools of destruction.

Now all terrorists are not Muslims and they shouldn't be seen that way. I don't believe that. But the majority, I'm sorry, all Muslims are not terrorist and they shouldn't be understood that way. I have a lot of friends that live in Muslim nations. But the preponderance of people who are terrorists for the last several decades have been adherence of some form of Islam. And we don't have the courage to say it. Again, I'm not trashing a group of people. I'm trying to acknowledge the reality of what we're struggling.

We've been taught we have to understand what caused them to respond to the world in that way, more than we have to acknowledge the cost of addressing the challenges that it brings. Illegal immigration is a very, very intentional looting of America. And the key word is illegal. We're a nation of immigrants. We've come from the nations of the world. We're not bound together by the way we look. the color of our skin, the accent with which we speak,

we've been bound together by a set of values that held us together. And while those values have been being looted, so of our economic resources. Multiply millions of immigrants, I saw a report this last week, that the illegal immigrants that have come in that have been identified, which is not by any means a complete accounting for those who have come into our nation, exceed any point in American history, the rate of immigration. It exceeds the busiest days at Ellis Islands. So we've had more people coming into our nation illegally than have ever come into our nation under any circumstance in our history.

And they've been given access to our educational systems, to our health care systems, to our social services, to our housing. It is the looting of America. We don't have the resources to take all the people of the world, and see if we can elevate their standard of living. It not only will bankrupt us, it has bankrupted us. It isn't an expression of compassion. It may be compassionate towards the person that's coming across the border illegally, but it's not compassionate to the people who are here.

It's not compassionate to the children who are in schools to have their classrooms populated with people who have not been a part of the system, who are here illegally. the message you were being given is not helpful. It's the looting of our nation. It's the incremental judgment of God than we had better change. The military is a social experiment. Is another expression of the looting of our country.

The assignment of the military is to defend our country and defeat our enemies. The military is not intended to be a social experiment. It's not the incubator for DEI. It's nonsense. They are weakening our nation incrementally, week over week, month over month, and we stand on the sidelines, somewhat addled, confused by the messaging. We don't want to be ostracized. We don't want to be called names. We don't want to be labeled. Well, the ultimate outcome of the looting, if it's left unchecked, I can give, I won't give you the

complete list, but I can tell you what will happen. First of all, there'll be an absence of leadership from churches. Churches will become cultural voices, but not advocates for a biblical worldview. We'll be little more than a civic club with some ecclesiastical architecture. And that's not the position we need to bring the engagement of Almighty God. I believe in the creator of heaven and earth. It's engaged in the unfolding story of humanity. And we want to live with His blessings upon our lives, not just to get what we want. We will lose the leadership of churches.

Another thing that will take place to degrees beyond which it already has is we'll be bankrupt. as a people. We're already more than $36 trillion in debt. That's an unimaginable number. The interest payments of our debt in 2024 are projected to exceed $890 billion. That's more than we spend on defense. The interest payments on our national debt are greater than the defense budget of our nation. Not the principal payments, the interest payments. And that's That's almost a third higher than the interest payments a year ago. Lawlessness will increase. We already have sanctuary cities, cities that refuse to enforce federal law, but they demand federal dollars.

That's absurd. If that's an acceptable premise, why don't you and I declare ourselves sanctuary persons? We want all the blessings of being a part of this nation, but we don't want to pay income taxes. You can't reject the law and then demand the blessings of the civilization. Violence will increase. We see it already, but it will grow if the looting continues because we're giving it permission. Children will suffer. They suffer disproportionately in the midst of these times of looting.

We already see it. They're being preyed upon by the medical community. They're being taught. They're being coached on being confused about their biological sex and their bodies. are being mutilated because it's profitable for the health care system. We need the people involved in the health care system to stand up and say it's wrong

and we won't be a part of it. I'm sorry the churches won't do it more frequently, but those people who have spent their lives following the science know the science is not only sloppy, it's been manipulated. In fact, our health care systems as we've known them will collapse if

the looting continues. If the government's made an enormous effort to take over the health care system, They want to loot the resources, the profitability. They want to separate doctors from the well-being of their patients. They want to make it institutional. They want to insert themselves into the diagnostic process and the treatment protocols. It is a formula for disaster.

We're watching it happen. We're being looted. We'll also witness the increase in the unbridled pursuit of pleasure and hedonism. Because if you don't want people to notice that you're plundering the world around them, You give them greater license to behave in the most self-absorbed narcissistic ways possible. And we see that happening all around us. Redefinitions of marriage, redefinitions of family, redefinitions of human sexuality and morality and immorality. We don't even longer have the moral courage to say we don't want grossly immoral, sexually immoral books being in the libraries with our young children.

We stand silently by like adult observers while our children are being groomed for the most perverse forms of immorality, the looting of our nation. But it begins because of the spiritual deterioration of the people of faith. Now here's the good news. The response has been the same in every generation.

We can repent. We can say to God, I've been walking on the wrong path. I've been thinking the wrong way. I want to change how I'm going to change how I think and I want to change my behavior, if we'll do that in humility and decide to walk before the Lord with clean hands and a clean heart, I'm absolutely confident that God will look upon us with mercy and compassion and bring healing to our nation. That's our desire. And that's more than a

political response, folks. That's a spiritual response we reflected in the political community. I promise you there's more reasons for hope than despair and it starts in the hearts of the people of faith. God bless you and as I said at the beginning, Merry Christmas. 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.