been twenty-two years since he saw Joseph. Joseph was alive, and indeed he was ruler of all the land of Egypt, but he was stunned for he did not believe them. When they told him all the words of Joseph that he had spoken to them and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob was alive, and he said it is enough, my son Joseph is still alive. I will go and see him before I die. So Israel said I was all they had and came to bear silver and offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac. And God spoke to Israel in visions of the night and said Jacob, Jacob, here I am Lord, I am God, the God of your father, do not be afraid to go down to Egypt. So I will make you a great nation there. I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up again. And Joseph will close your eyes, that Jacob arose from bear silver and the sons of Israel carried their father Jacob and their little ones, and their wives and the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him. Go to verse 29. Now Joseph prepared his chariot and went up to Goshen to meet his father Israel as soon as he appeared before him. He fell on his neck and wrapped on his neck a long time and Israel said to Joseph, now let me die since I have seen your face that you have still alive. Joseph fed those brothers and his father's household. I will go up until Pharaoh will say to him, my brothers and my father's household who are in the land of Canaan have come to me and the men are shepherds for they have been keepers of livestock and they have brought their flocks and their herds and all that they have. And it shall come about when Pharaoh calls you and says, what is your occupation that you shall say? Your servants have been keepers of livestock from our youth even until now, but we and our fathers that you may live in the land of Goshen, for every shepherd is a loathsome to the Egyptian. Now this is what they did and we come to verse 5 of chapter 47 and Pharaoh sent to Joseph, your father and your brothers have come. The land of Egypt is at your disposal. Settle your father and your brothers in the best of the land with them live in the land of Goshen. And if you know any capable man among them that put them in charge of my livestock, then Joseph brought his father Jacob and presented him to Pharaoh and Jacob blessed Pharaoh, the end of the chapter of verse 28. And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt 17 years so that the length of Jacob's life was 147 years. And when the time for Israel to die drew near, he called his son Joseph and said to him, please if I have found favor in your sight, place now your hand under my thigh and deal with me in kindness and faithfulness, do not bury me in Egypt. When I lie down with my father, you shall carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial place. And Joseph said, I will do if you have sinned. He said swear to me so he swore to him an Israel bowed in worship at the head of the bed. And then they God bless this reading of his holy and infallible word. The glass withers in the flower fades, but not the word of God. No, the word of God stands forever. You may be seated. It's been some time now, but a couple of years ago I was at the Disney and I went in this attraction called the Alien encounter or something. There was some beast inside. Some laboratory was the idea and he had been captured or created or something, although there was some grotesque hideous beast slaughtered with some useless like gelatinous material and foul looking. And of course everybody was safe in the audience because there was this glass enclosure around the beast. When suddenly the power went out in the glass broke and you heard the screams of the scientist that was there in charge of this beast and you felt this hot air on the back of your neck and the soil of wind and the idea was the alien, the beast, the alien is loose in the room and then actually sprayed like dirt on you. So the idea of this alien was in the room. How could anyone survive? Well that's Genesis 45 to 47. Only God's people are the alien. Now that the Bible says the weird alien, try out the first verse of the book of Peter, which is addressed to aliens. Where are the aliens? Do you ever feel that way? Do you ever feel that you're an alien in a culture that's left you or you left it or but you just don't fit? I was taking my son to a movie at the mall a couple weeks ago and kissed a river and as we were walking in there was a group of young males walking in next to us teenagers and out came a group of females and the males walked up and began to do what I would say, well how do I say this? Rather foul things and the girls responded with a taunt of the self but I couldn't tell whether they liked what the guys were doing or whether they did. I didn't know whether that was like part of the game or I couldn't tell. All I knew was I walked past, I thought to myself, is this a jungle? What did I just witness? How common is this? Is this what happened in culture? Is this where we live? Yeah, you have that feeling ever. If you watch TV, you're reading newspapers, you encounter the media, is there what? How did we live in the midst of this? Well this is a common question because for a thousand years the Anglo-European culture was dominated by Christianity. We called the influence of Christianity on culture. We called this Christendom. The sense that Christianity ruled and reigned. Now I didn't mean that people were truly converted. I didn't mean that people were regenerated. The church did set sort of the moral climate and people who violated it lived outside that moral code, felt ostracized and felt social pressure to conform or always keep their behavior under wraps, right? We know that. Now that's again, don't consider this to be a real golden age. It wasn't particularly a golden age for African. It wasn't particularly a golden age for women. It wasn't particularly a golden age for children or the poor because you have to take biblical morality but it's not infused with a gospel transformed heart and what you end up with is cruelty and hypocrisy which we had a great deal of for a thousand years. But nevertheless, there was a sense that that Christianity was ascendant in the co-wall. That's what, that's over. That's over. If you were to go to India from America a hundred years ago, you would expect that the Indian culture would not have all been Christian, right? You would have known that you would expect that. You would know that when you went to live there, you wouldn't like complain because the government didn't support Christianity or reflect Christianity. You would understand before you went that that was the situation there. You would know that you were a missionary. You were an alien. You went to a different culture and now you had to have to live in it as the one who was just what we're having a hard time making that adjustment in the way of understanding that culture is completely transformed and we are aliens in the myth. We know that there's churches of different things to try to conceptualize. How would we keep, how would we be in a in an unbelieving culture and not completely affected by it? We know that there's a church that said, here's what we'll do. We'll take our clergy and we will demand that the clergy be set apart. They'd be celibate. They'd be unmarried. They have no families. They have no money. They'd be poor. They actually take vows to do that. It would be required. We'll set them apart. They'll even wear dark clothing, indiscriminate clothing. They'll live in monasteries or at the church. And that way we'll stay pure. I didn't work. Did it? That doesn't work. How do we live in the culture and not have the culture live in art? Wow. The question for us today, particularly if you have kids that you're responsible for. How do we raise our kids? How do we pass them under our kids? How do we get at ourselves so that our kids get from us would be distinct? This is a very question that Jacob's family faced as they stood on the brink of the most powerful culture of the day as they stood on the border of entering Egypt. How do we live in Egypt and still be the people of God? Take your salmon out line. Let us ask God to instruct us in his word. The first thing we have to say if we're going to live in an alien culture and thrive is that we must not be intimidated by it. We cannot be afraid. We must not be intimidated. What are we doing? There's many of them in few of us. I mean, that's pretty frightening. What if the darkness seems to be everywhere and all pervasive? How are we not intimidated? Joseph's brothers go home to Canaan and they get their father and they say, Joseph is alive and Jacob takes his whole family and they set out for Egypt but they come to a grinding stop where? Right on the border. You're on the Bible. If you read the Bible, you're used to the phrase, the land of Israel stretched from Dan in the north to Bersheva in the south because right past there, there's nothing but desert and then there's Egypt. So Jacob marches his family right to the edge, right to the border and then he stops. Why do you think he stops? He stops because he's afraid. He's afraid. He's hesitant. He's not sure. He's uncertain. Why do you think he's afraid? 130 years old. We don't like change when we're not 20s. He's 130 years old. Change, uprooting everything, moving to a different land, a different culture. Imagine how dramatic that would be. Who wouldn't branch in the face of that? So there's a fear of change. Consider that there's the fear of danger in Egypt. Consider that as a wonder, is this God's will? Would God actually want us to do this? Because you can go back to Genesis 26. I think it is when there's great famine in the land of Canaan and Isaac takes his family and heads for once they're headed for Egypt and God says, don't go to Egypt, whatever you do, you may not go to Egypt. That's what God said to Jacob's father. Now Jacob's going to go to Egypt from their famine. How could God be against the dead and before it now? He doesn't know what God's will is. He's not certain. He doesn't feel that way. God, I'll do what you want me to do. I just don't know what it is you want me to do. Is he not fearful of paganism? The religions, the religious community, and Egypt, Egypt is a cauldron of polytheism. They've got God forever. Egypt, they have the God of the Ibus. They have the God of the crocodile. No God of the Seminole, apparently, by the way. They have the God of Nile and the God of grain and the God of the stars and the God of the frogs, they've got for everything. All under the authority of the preeminent God, the God of the Sun. His name was great. I don't know if you need to know how to pronounce that better. So Jacob stops there and he seeks the face of God and what does the Bible say in the dark of the night? God comes and calls his name. In the Bible, there's only certain times that we hear this. It's pretty powerful when we do Abraham, Abraham. What? Don't kill your son. Samuel, Samuel, Moses. Moses, the burning bush. Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? God calling out the name of his servant, calling the name twice, which is a Hebrew way of reflecting intimacy, calling the name twice. And here we see God comes in the dark of the night and says, Jacob, Jacob, don't be afraid. I will make you a great nation in Egypt. I will go down there with you and I will take you down and I will bring you back and I will never leave you. Do not be afraid. Brothers and sisters, this is the word of God to His people of old. This is the word of God to His people in this day. Do not fear the darkness. Do not be afraid. Yes, evil is pervasive. Yes, evil is strong. Yes, the evil one is a roaring lion who seeks seeking whom he made a valor. Yes, we are weak. Yes, we are fickle. Yes, we are faithful. But God will keep his children. God will not allow us to be torn away from his care. And again and again, we come back to this, is that the faithfulness of God, the character of God, is that what we put our hope in so that if we look at living in the darkness, we say we must not be afraid. We are the children of the living God. We are the ambassadors of God. We belong to God. Our name is written on the palm of his hand. Nothing will ever take us away from him. We will not be afraid. So I am saying to the people of God, do not be afraid in full awareness that every single day we struggle with what? We are timid. We are afraid every day. So every day we have to revisit the character of God. Every day we have to gather up before the Lord and hear him say what? Hear him call out your name. Hear him say to you into your spirit. You are my child. But you belong to me. Don't be afraid. A couple years ago, I packed my son up and sent him off to college. That is a little unnerving for parents, isn't it? What will become of him there? Now, is my confidence that he would do well spiritually? Is that confidence rested in his discernment in his maturity and his wisdom? Hardly. Is my confidence resting the parenting he received? In the stellar example, in the robust faith of his household that he had the privilege of growing up in, is my confidence in his church, background? What is my confidence in? What is the only place to root that confidence in the character and promises of God? The God loves me. I will be a God to you and to your children after you. If a God cares about him and that God knows him and that God is watching over him and that he may be foolish and he may be idiotic and his parents may have left him the sorryest example, but God is for him and God is after his heart and God is after his soul. That is the confidence that keeps us from being captured by fear. When spoke he called me up this last year and he said, Dad, would you come up and speak at a men's retreat at the church I'm going to in Tallahassee? I said, Are you going to be there? He said, I guess that has to be the deal, huh? So that's the deal. If you go, then I'll do it. So we went up there. It was about 60 guys went to this retreat and about six college students and one of them, of course, was my son and I noticed as I was with him that weekend there was one particular guy hung out with a lot and seemed to interact with a lot. I was kind of curious who this guy was and I didn't really know until he stood out. His name was Brian and he stood up there and gave his testimony at the retreat. He said in the last year he'd become a Christian. I said, Call my son hanging out with a Christian. In the last year he'd become a Christian. He said that he wasn't a student however. He was a professor at FSU. He was a PhD at about 28 years old at his PhD in professor in child psychology and a physician in town had told him about Jesus and he come to personal faith in Jesus Christ. In a testimony he stopped as he was telling me and he spoke to six college students there and he said, you don't worry about you guys because you've got a college and you don't have a clue how dark it is and you don't have a clue how little your professors know about the truth. He said, I live in their world and he said as I become a Christian I realize I have to re-learn everything I've ever studied and I just sat there and I'm now so open and I said, is God faithful to my son? God said, my son's in this guy's class. God's gone before my son and he's converting his professors. By the way, to finish that story, there's a young lady who thinks God's faithful to because weep the heirs from our church is marrying this guy. This summer.
We'll not be afraid because God is active and it works in ways that I don't even know. He's faithful. He loves his own. He cares for them. I think of Lady Alani Akiyama, 14-year-old young woman in Seattle who's a judo champion and she's caused a real tempest because in these international judo competitions it's required that when you approach the tatami, you bow. She won't bow because she understands that that bowing is a shinto ritual and she won't do it. You know it's convicting. She won't do it because she's a Buddhist. Christians do it all the time. She understands. We face our culture and we say I will not be afraid because I will understand but my heart and my devotion is to Jesus and Jesus alone. I don't know that Lady Alani knows that all throughout Korea, Christians died by the thousands because they refused to bow to the emperor. Symbols matter, bowing before you go on the matter. She understands the religious nature of all of life and she wouldn't do it. What an example for us the way they lived. We're not afraid whether it's the college campus, whether it's I think of my friends who are starting churches in Cambridge and reaching Harvard and MIT students. I think of friends who are in San Francisco and in Seattle and in New York and in Toronto and Vancouver and the bastions of liberalism who are opening the Bible this very morning in rooms filled with people coming to faith in Jesus Christ because they are not afraid because they believe and understand and know that the gospel is unstoppable, that the darkness cannot overcome the light. How about us? Will we be the unafraid people of God? I think of Jack Miller on his way home from a prayer meeting when someone challenged him and said you preach about God transforming anybody but I don't I don't know if you believe it. So he went by that dairy bar where all the theme pumps him out and found the leader of a motorcycle gang gathered there a drug dealer, a kid to hide that very night as they talked and told him about Jesus. Just walked up to him asked him if he could tell him about Jesus told him about Jesus and of course he was spat at and mocked and felt threatened six months later that young man showed up leaping on his doorstep. Not only was he converted to faith in Jesus Christ but he married Jack Miller's daughter and he's a PCO pastor today, Angela Giuliani. The wife cannot be quenched and what do we have to do? We have to get together, timid people that we are and every life group and every discipleship group and every family dinner table meeting and every Sunday or Saturday night in church and remind ourselves what? We have the children of God, this is our identity, this is who we are. We may be aliens in this culture but we are not to be intimidated and we are not to be afraid. We belong to the living God, we are his. And you know in the quietness of your soul every single day you have to face your fear and you have to get along with God and you have to listen for what? If you listen for God to call your name, I know you. Baker T's is timid and I can say in all my fears and anxieties I wrestle with and I wrestle with great fear to even stand up here every service and get constantly I have to run to Jesus and hear him say to me why are you so timid with a smile? Raymond, Raymond if I am for you does it matter? There's against you? Second, if we're going to thrive in the darkness we must not be intimidated but we also must not be assimilated. We must not be assimilated, we must not just be absorbed. Here's a great challenge for us. I love what Joseph does for his family, he schools them. They're about to go into Egypt, they're about to meet with Pharaoh and Joseph actually tells them okay now Pharaoh's going to say this and you say this and Pharaoh said that and you say that actually has it all scripted out. Here's what I want you to do. Pharaoh's going to ask you well gee what kind of skills, what kind of trade do you bring to our culture? What I want you to do is tell him that you're shepherds because Egyptian hate shepherds. Now what do you think that if you were the needy people who needed jobs and needed sustenance and needed food and needed acceptance in a culture that you would want to tell Pharaoh something that would impress him. Something that would make Pharaoh like you because you need his good graces. Instead Joseph instructs them I want you to appear before Pharaoh tell him your shepherds because they love their love of shepherds. Joseph had a plan to keep his family separate from Egyptian culture didn't he? So that because they were all some Pharaoh immediately says it really wouldn't work for you to live here and here and here or what have you lived in Goshen. Settle your clan in Goshen. Look at all the way at the end of Jacob's life. As he's dying he says to his son Joseph, when I die do not what? Do not bury me in Egypt. Why? Because I've lived here 17 years but I am not what? I'm not an Egyptian. I do not belong to Egypt. I do not want my body buried in Egypt. Egypt is not my land. Egypt is not my home. Egypt is not in my heart. Here's the challenge for every one of us isn't it? We are not Egyptians. Look at Hebrews chapter 11 one of the great passages in all the Bible it says that Moses grows up in the house of Pharaoh. He has the opportunity to be the prince. He is the son of Pharaoh's daughter but Moses for stakes all of the splendor of that to identify himself with the hated children of God. He says no to the passing pleasures of wealth and authority and power all to bear the reproach of Christ is what it says in Hebrews chapter 11 because Moses knows in his heart he's not what? He is not an Egyptian and so what is your identity? What's the identity of your family? How distinct are you? How much are you an alien in this culture or have you become an immigrant and just taken on the language, taken on the customs, taken on the culture and so you are utterly indecidable. It's a melting pot and you've melted right in. Here's what I want to say brothers and sisters Joseph had a plan for prevention. If you don't you'll be absorbed and your children and your grandchildren. What if right now I would have said all right I'm not going to preach anymore. Here's your judgment. Take out a piece of paper and write your plan. The plan keeps yourself and your family from being absorbed into culture and being just like everyone else. Write out the plan and I'll stand at the door and when you give me a credible plan I'll let you go. Joseph had a plan. I want to know do you because if you don't you will be absorbed. Now I'm going to say that plan ought to include it's got to include just a couple thoughts on it and I really do urge you to do that. How is your family going to keep from being like every other family? They just swept away. Do you not think that the influence of culture is pervasive and powerful?
How are you going to do it? Well first I'd say you better fill your heart with Jesus. You ever try not to eat in this track's ice cream or some other directable thing that it is. It appears to you. I found that if you're really hungry you're not going to do very well but if you could fill yourself up with something else then you'll do much better saying no. You see you're not going to resist all that the world offers and the world will say unless you're filled with Jesus and unless you're filled with that which truly clenches your thirst and satisfies your hunger. Otherwise you're prey to everything and so you know how come people who like are into clothes can I mean somebody to buy clothes or to serve you or to follow them home you find out that they got tons of clothes and if you're in the house there are people that are re-referring their house but their house is already gorgeous. And how come people who are like driven are always driven? Not just in their work life and not just in their money and not just in but even when they're retired they like get driven about their yard or driven about their flowers or driven about their golf game or driven. You see the problem is if you're turning to anything but Jesus it won't satisfy you so you can't ever get what? You can't ever get enough. You have to keep trying you get hungry are actually. Your appetite increases for that which is destructive. The only way you're gonna the only way you're gonna be distinct is to say I have been to the buffet of Christ and I am satisfied at the depths of my soul. Now you're gonna remember that the next day? No you're gonna have to go again. You're gonna have to go again you're gonna have to go again because we're such a weak people. Why do Christians not by lottery tickets? Because they are because why would they want all their money? They have Christ
right? Right? You tell me if you don't have a plan you'll get sucked right down. You will spend a great deal of your time thinking about making your life better and more eased and you better fill your heart with Jesus. Secondly if you are gonna keep from being absorbed and keep your family from being absorbed you better fill your mind with Jesus. Jesus your affection, Jesus your thoughts, your mind. So you know in the old days when Christendom infused our hair culture there was lots of places that could probably teach you how to think properly. Where are you gonna learn how to think properly now? Where are you gonna learn how to think Christianly? You're gonna learn that from the government? Don't think so. You're gonna learn that from your parents? How did they know? Most of them don't know. We have parents converted all the time in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They weren't raised to know this. They don't know how to think. How you're gonna learn from your parents? You're gonna learn from the media. That's it. Get people magazine, you know. Get the Wall Street Journal, get the New York Times, always the old. Get the best the media has to offer. There's only one place you're really gonna learn to think in this day and age when you live in a missional environment like we do and that is the church. Fill our mind with truth. That's why the church started schools like Harvard. You know the mission statement of Harvard when it's founded went like this where every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed. Oh, I love that. Culture presses us into its mold, doesn't it? Here the founders of the church that founded Harvard said let every student be earnestly pressed to consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all found knowledge and learning. That's it. Way Christ in the bottom as the foundation to know God and Jesus Christ is the main end of all life and study. So the church must teach children needing the gospel into all of life so that all of the child's intellectual, emotional and imaginative activities are permeated with the truth of God's Word. If we do not educate our children distinctly, then they will be absorbed.
Fill your heart with Jesus, fill your mind with Jesus. And I already said you better get in a group where everybody else is trying not to be absorbed too. Call the church. Can't get to heaven. You can't not be absorbed standing alone. So, this is a battle and we are not up to it. We struggle. It's easier to preach about than it is to do, to invest in our families, to have a plan for prevention, to have hearts given to Jesus, to have minds given to Jesus so that all around us is this pervasive culture of it with its sirens beckoning us and yet in the midst of it we're distinct.
Let me tell you, only God can do that in our hearts and minds. A couple weeks ago I heard this story. It's a true story. A man was exercising jogging, walking through a park. It was late at night. It was very dark when he was disturbed to hear the muffled sounds of a woman being assaulted. He thought she was probably being assaulted, but in this damn age it was a sound of like she was in distress. And he thought it would be foolish for me to get in. I could run and get the help. I'll run and find a phone. I'll get the police. I'll find somebody else to check it out. And as he was considering all the sound, logical reasons that he shouldn't get involved, it appeared to him that the woman's cries were going weaker and weaker and there wasn't time for anyone else to come. And so he mustered up the courage and he left into the shrubs and he landed on top of the attacker who was so startled that he fled. But not only was the assailant startled, but the woman was startled too. She didn't know if there were others involved in this attack. And so she got up and she ran too and quickly the man cried out, don't be afraid. Don't run. Don't run. I'm here to help you. Don't be afraid. And then he heard these words from behind the tree where she'd taken refuge. Daddy, is that you? And inadvertently he saved his own daughter. It was his own daughter who was being assaulted. Daddy, is that you? Let me tell you something. We will never produce families that are distinct or hearts of our own that are distinct on our own. Unless we believe with all our hearts that the Jesus came into our world to pursue us, to save us, to rescue us, to have us, that we're his precious children, he's after our hearts. And you know what? Until that happens, we'll never be after our children's hearts. That's that we would we would turn and say, Daddy, that's you isn't it? It's you who loves me. It's you who came into this world and died for me. Daddy, that's what'll set us apart ultimately. We're the beloved people of God. We cannot be afraid. We cannot be assimilated. And last and finally, you may not be isolated. And one of my favorite verses in all the Bible, Genesis 47-7, just picture this. We have Jacob 130 years old, unimpressive, traveled the wrong way on nomad, a creaky, frail old man, and he appears before the wealthiest man, the powerful man in the whole world. It said that Pharaoh may have had a thousand wives. He had to be wealthy. A lot of shoes, you know? And
glittering powers, opulent wealth, power, everybody bowing down to him. And here comes the meeting between Pharaoh and Jacob. And the Bible says that Jacob blesses Pharaoh. Who's the greater? Jacob. Jacob is the greater. Jacob has the power. Jacob understands that it's not Pharaoh saving him and his family. It's Jacob's family that saved Pharaoh in all of Egypt. It's out of Jacob, came Joseph who has saved Egypt. And Jacob has the power and the authority to bless Pharaoh. That's what the Bible says is to be our posture with culture. Is we are to move into culture? Not isolate ourselves from culture, but we have to be God's instruments of blessing in our culture. And yet that's not often the response of the church has it. The response of the church is to stand outside culture and want to denounce it, right? Those wicked sinners and to assail homosexuals and to assail the filth of our culture and just stay separate from it and scornful of it and the people who are in it and liberals and all of that, I want nothing to do with it. And I just, you know, I would be thrilled that God would come and just smoke all those people because I'm a member of the moral majority. Do you realize how arrogant that phrase is? I am in the moral majority. I'm looking folks, I don't see anybody moral. All there are is immoral people. Immoral people who have experienced a grace of God and immoral people who are still separate from it. That's all there is in moral people. And so the church denounces the wickedness and can stay separate and proud and arrogant. Well, then we have the church that believe that God is going to come and save them from those pagan people and pagan rulers. And so they revoke the left behind series which espouses the theology, that God is going to rescue his church out. And so what the church is supposed to do is just stay separate and untainted. Not with the Bible, sir. God says, I chose you to be a blessing. I want you to live in the culture. I want you to build homes and raise families. I'm not coming to suck you out. I put you there for a reason. Quit talking about leaving and begin. And that's what God's people have done. They've moved into the arts. They've moved into business. They've moved into leisure. They've moved into every area. That's what they've done for thousands of years. That's why in the middle ages when plague swept through European cities and everyone fled out to the country to get away from these communicable diseases, it was Christians who stayed to take care of the sick and to think through the issues of hygienic procedures that would prevent these plague from happening again. That's what God wants you to do. He doesn't want it to running out to the country. He wants us to stay put. And so when level a couple of years ago swept out of Rwanda into the Rulansori mountains in western Uganda, the world harvest missionaries and doctors and nurses and teachers stayed put. That's ridiculous. People are having their heads cut off. That will cost them their lives. Exactly. Exactly. The aim of life is not to find ease and comfort. The aim of life is the blessed culture at whatever cost. Somebody said to me recently, they said, your neighborhood where it was really going downhill. I just noticed it's a lot worse. People moving in, not caring for their property and families and kids wandering through the neighborhood. And it just has a rougher character and a rougher feeling. I really had to agree with them. But the more I thought about, you know what struck me? What's the response to that? For me and my house, I'd have to say the response would be, God, this is clearly where you want us. And not just to stay there, but to love the neighborhood, which is, you know, I'm pretty good at the saying. I'm never very good at the loving. I actually love my neighbor. Maybe I got to meet him first. But at the end of the
guy let me in prison and he said to me, he said prison is full of pigs. He said prison is full of selfish, lazy, unmotivated, unkempt people. And he said, for the first time in my life, I realized that God wants me to stop thinking of getting out of prison and to realize that God put me in prison or allowed me to come to prison to be a blessing for this place. I'm in prison for the glory of God. I'm in prison to give my life for the good of the other prisoner. Wow. Take my life and let it be consecrated largely. So that's it. You know, the people who are going to thrive in the darkness are the people who can say, I'm glad to be here. And I will love those around me. I will not, I will not be such a zest with leaving, but I will dig in it and I will serve because those who lose their life for Jesus sake are the ones who what. Do you know that? They're the ones who find it. They find it. And so we become the people of God. Look at the last verse in your sermon outline on the third point, Philippians chapter two, do all things without grumbling or disputing people of God, that you may prove yourself to be blameless and innocent children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. I'm not with whom you appear as wise, white in the world. Oh, may it be so. Amen.