The world is bent and warped. Happy New Year anyway. Let's talk about it. I'm Kee Life. Hello, this is Marie Kee Life. And that was Steve Brown. Life using the dress rehearsal. And that's why this program, Kee Life, is around. Honest, practical and street smart Bible teaching for the business of living. Thanks, Mike. And I do wish you a Happy New Year. And because God is your God, it will be. But that doesn't mean that the things I'm going to teach you on this broadcast today and the rest of this week and probably in the next week are going to be happy, nice, fun things. I said yesterday, and if you were listening, you know this. And if you weren't, I know your name. I said yesterday that you can't hear the good news until you're first here at the bad news. Now, I want you to keep something in mind as we talk about the problem of pain and suffering and evil. God is sovereign, He's good, and He's good all the time, and He knows what He's doing. That's the good news. And you kind of try to remember that as we talk about the bad news because I've got to spend some time on the bad news. A lot of you guys and me too, to a degree, have been surprised at the evil that we have seen in our world of late. Maybe we've been surprised at the evil and sin that we see in ourselves. Maybe we've gone through a really, really tough time. If you're a believer you should not have been surprised because you will have heard the good news. Now, if you were listening yesterday, we talked about the fall. Adam and Eve, two people who did bad stuff and were all suffering from it. Now, we're not bad, and we don't do evil just because Adam and Eve did bad and did evil. We do it because they infected us, but we do it because we want to do it, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Yesterday, as we began to talk about the bad news, I suggested that the first thing you need to know is that in a fallen world, the world is really warped. It really is bent. In the New Testament, Paul wrote about the repercussions of a bent world. The result of the fall for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope. For we know that the whole creation, that's the cosmos. That's everything you see. The groans and labours with birth pangs until now. That's Romans 820 through 22. A number of years ago, I was going to speak at a family conference in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I find myself under some pretty heavy pressure when I went there. I had heard that a hurricane was approaching where I then lived, and that was in Miami, Florida. Before I left, I, and he was a friend of mine, I called one of our local weather forecasters, and I asked him the odds of the hurricane reaching South Florida. He said, well, Steve, nobody can be sure hurricanes are controlled by God, not by us, but all of the models that we have done suggest that it's not going to get the southern tip of Florida. It's going to go into the Gulf, and you're probably going to be okay. Well, if he ain't quite comforted about his advice, I went to Pennsylvania to speak for the Bible conference. As soon as I got to the conference ground, I turned on the radio to find out that my sources had made a serious mistake. The hurricane was headed right for Miami, not only that, the hurricane was headed right for my house. The airports were closed, and I couldn't get back home. I don't know about you, but I verbalized my anxiety. I mean, if I'm scared you're going to know it. Now, I'm a loner. If I'm in pain, I'm going to tell you, but I'm a loner. I mean, I want you to feel sorry for me. I want you to be upset for me. I want you to share my anxiety. I want you to worry about me. Then I want you to leave me alone. I want to go off in a corner somewhere, and why? Well, that's what I did in Pennsylvania. Every time I got up to speak, I said something about being worried about my family. Also, each time I spoke, I noticed in the back of this large conference hall, a small group of people huddled together. I sometimes wondered what they were doing, but it was a rather free group of people at the conference. And they didn't seem too weird, and I was doing okay, so I just let it go. Between sessions, I phoned my wife and daughters and told them to batten down the hatches of our home and drive immediately to Orlando where we live now to stay with some friends who live there. After they finally arrived in Orlando, now that's in the middle of the state for those of you who are not familiar with Florida, I felt relieved that they were out of danger. You know what happened? That hurricane missed Miami all together. In fact, it came right up the coast, and then for some strange reason, turn left. Right into Orlando. Now, I had just announced a good news to the people at conference. I said, that thing has missed Miami. I want to thank you for that. Well, after I finished speaking, a young man came up to me and said, Mr. Brown, did you notice that whenever you were speaking group of us were gathered in the back of the auditorium? I allowed that I noticed. He said, do you know what we were doing? And I said no. He said, we were praying that that hurricane would turn north away from Miami. It turned north because we asked the Lord to turn it north. Now, to this day, I'm not sure if the hurricane changed course because of their prayers or because of the weather front, which moved in from the west. Maybe it was a combination of both or maybe it was neither. However, the irony of the episode was that when it became clear that the hurricane was not going to hit Miami, my family began to drive back home to South Florida. That's when the hurricane turned left and went after them, catching my family in the middle of their truck back home. Now, everybody was okay, but it was a very difficult experience. I called my friends in Orlando thinking my family was there and I said, let me speak to my wife. And my friend Mo said, she's not here. And I said, what do you mean she's not there? And he said she started back to Miami. And I said, Mo, why did you letter? And Mo said, Steve, if you ever tried to stop in a brown from doing anything she wanted to do, well, the hurricane got them on their way back. But it turned out, well, what's the point and why am I telling you this? Just this, hurricanes are inevitable in a fallen world. Things are bent and wrong and the Bible says that they won't be put right until Jesus comes again. I'm not sure the people in Central Florida would have been very pleased with the folks who prayed the hurricane away from Miami and into their shores, perhaps if they had known how to pray better, they would have sent it to Georgia, or maybe to the Yankees in New York at any rate. Someone would have had to deal with that hurricane because hurricanes are a part of a fallen world. Now some of you know years after the incident, I just described to you, we went to Hurricane Andrew. We lost our house. A lot of neat stuff was destroyed in that hurricane. And I want you to know, I prayed God would remove it and he didn't. I prayed that we wouldn't lose our stuff and we did. I prayed for our contractor and he stole $60,000. I prayed that the contractors would be nice and they put $15,000 of leans on my car on my house. And then I prayed that God would protect us and somebody stole our car. And I could go on and on and on. Was that because I was particularly bad? Well maybe, but I don't think so. Was it because the people in South Florida were particularly bad? Well they are, but I don't think so. What was going on there? I tell you what was going on, exactly what the Bible says. That we live in a fallen world and the world suffers from that too. There's going to be pain and suffering that comes from natural disaster because that is the way it is. Now let me just introduce another part of this. Since we're talking about bad news and I'm trying to start your new year off on such a down note. Not only is the world bent and messed up, you are to sin is a part of a fallen world. Somebody has said that we sin because Adam and Eve sinned and that we sin as Adam and Eve sinned. But in this way for by one man's disobedience many were made sinners. Now there are two basic views with regard to human nature. The first is that man is basically good with an inclination toward evil. The second is that man is based and I use man in a generic sense. It's basically evil with an inclination toward good. Bible takes the second of those two options. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it. You got to face the fact that because of your sin nature you aren't perfectable and your lack of perfectability will cause you all kinds of trouble. Now let me apply that in a little wider way. The world and the people who live in the world are not perfectable. People are evil. The heart is deceitful above all things. We should have been hurt. We should have been devastated. We should have mourned over 9.11 but we should not have been surprised at what they did or at what we did because human beings are not by their very nature good people. There was a time in my life when I thought that if I tried hard enough and prayed long enough and studied deep enough I would reach the point of total commitment. Then I would be able to serve as a model to those who were less spiritual than I was. Every time I would get rid of one sin however the father would show me two more. It was almost as if someone had changed the rules in the middle of the game while they had not. And the Bible had been quite clear about who I was. I'm valuable but I'm not good and that's true of everybody else. They're valuable but they're not good. You can think about that. Hey, I've got a new booklet for you. It's called Does My Father Know I'm Aert? It's from my book on Broken Roads and from some of the teaching that we're doing right now on Key Life. Love descended to you absolutely free without charge obligation will pay the postage. Love descended to you as long as supplies last. You can get it by calling 1-800-Key Life 24 hours a day. Or writing Key Life post office box 5,000 Madeleine Florida 32794. Or Key Life Canada post office box 32150. Cambridge Ontario N3H5N3. Or you can email us with your regular mailing address to steveatkeylife.org and ask for Does My Father Know I'm Aert? Hey listen and it's free but if you can help us financially I sure would appreciate it. 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