Allen Jackson - A Price?!
I started a little series in our previous session and I want to continue it under this general notion of "One Nation, Under God". Well, I believe that's our best pathway forward that we recognize we're a nation under God's authority. I believe if we imagine ourselves to be a nation without God's authority, that we'll lose our liberties and freedoms. And I believe we can only make withdrawals from the sacrifices of previous generations for so long before we become bankrupt, morally, socially, in our faith, economically, in any way you want. Every generation has to make a choice for themselves. I celebrate that the World War II group was known as The Greatest Generation. I hesitate a bit at what our label will be.
I don't think it's been written yet. I pray we were a faithful generation or a godly generation or a righteous generation or a generation of awakening. There's a lot of labels, I don't know which one God will choose to enable, to label us, but I wanna work on that a little bit. There's a price to that and that's really what I wanna focus a bit on this session with you. It's summertime and that means many things to me. In Tennessee, it means growing season... I said this on television, I find that where I live in the world confounds people who don't, because somebody asked me what I thought. I said, well, summertime is growing season for me. And that means summer vegetables and we get green beans and new potatoes and fresh squash.
Which to me, I mean, that's exciting stuff, when they were looking at me like I had three heads and I'm like, but it's not enough for me that the vegetables grow and the trees grow and the flowers grow. I want to grow spiritually. Well, summertime also means to me a season when there are these multiple expressions of pride in our nation. I don't mean Pride Month, but pride in our nation. There's a difference. But I mean, the summer holidays to me are kind of wrapped up in all that. We start with Memorial Day and we move on to the Fourth of July and we celebrate our mothers and our fathers, which I never thought were exceptional things, but becoming more so.
We have national tournaments. They play golf and they have a US Open and they play tennis with the US Open. We acknowledge a championship in our nation. It's a celebration of who we are as a people. Not to denigrate other nations in the world. Not to say that we're greater and they're lesser, simply to recognize the uniqueness and the blessings of where we are. I would hope every person, every nation would have those celebrations. I understand it isn't fashionable these days. Someone, I heard a poll this week and I'm reluctant with that. Pollsters are wrong more frequently than the weather people. But the statistics they cited was only a third of Americans under 30 said they were proud of our nation.
And I didn't have any frustration towards that generation, but I had a tremendous amount of frustration towards academia and families that have allowed that nonsense to flourish. That's just an inadequate education or an inadequate concern at home to the education that our children and students are receiving. There's a tremendous reluctance today in many segments of our culture, unfortunately, even within the Christian community, to say something as simple as "God bless America," as if that were inappropriate. How else do we imagine we'll find a better future? I believe we live in a remarkable nation, a nation blessed by God. It's a unique experiment where people from many nations have been able to find opportunity.
There's never been anything quite like it. And at the moment, if you look across the horizon, there's no promise of anything remotely like it emerging. It's not a perfect record. We've had some failures, but we've had many more victories. And those who prefer to disdain, express disdain or disappointment in our nation, it seems to me hold one of two positions. They either have a disdainful attitude towards America because they have a lack of awareness of global reality or they're just willfully ignorant. Because the facts on the ground are not difficult to get to.
I took just a couple of moments with Rabbi Google. I wanted to share some perspective on the rest of the planet. We don't talk about that a lot. Whenever we talk about other civilizations, they're amazing and remarkable and wonderful. And that doesn't offend me, but they're not perfect. I took a couple of moments just chasing the idea of the toll of Marxism in our world in the last hundred years or so. If you're not much of a historian that would include leaders like Stalin or Lenin, Mao, but we're not limited there. You can roll in Castro. I mean, it's really quite a list.
In 2017, a Professor Kotkin wrote in "The Wall Street Journal" that communism killed at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017. That's a worldview, a worldview responsible for those deaths. Though communism has killed enormous numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of their attempts at social engineering, redistribution of wealth. People starve to death, when the government who has authority over you begins to steal. The most commonly cited figure is over 100 million deaths. Some on the extreme end report as many as 160 million deaths, the majority of whom from starvation. Not a story told frequently. We're told Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
A little tone deaf perhaps. China is celebrated as a tolerant place these days. And I have no doubt that many of the Chinese people are tolerant but the government has not been so. Mao is responsible for as many as 45 million deaths between 1958 and 1962: four years, more than 40 million of his own people. Our professional athletes, they like to criticize the US history, but they are very willing to embrace the marketing opportunities of China. Somebody should explain to them. Marxism embraces the centralization of power, the domination of the citizens by an authoritarian government. I take a minute because it's relevant in our culture, in our churches. We're in the midst of conversations about what kind of world we should live in.
Isn't it appropriate for Christians to talk about that? Does our faith impact the governments we have? In the simplest language, I think we're in the midst of a revolution. You don't have to have a great deal of discernment. Lawlessness is escalating on a daily basis. Our borders are open. We've never had anything like that in our history. Propaganda is flourishing. I know that because those with authority over us tell us our borders are secure. They either have to be woefully unaware or intentionally misrepresenting and they do that with the help of the messaging outlets. That is the definition of propaganda. We've been living with this notion of sanctuary cities for quite a while.
The epicenter of that for quite some time has been the San Francisco-Oakland area. Last week in Oakland, there was a gas station's, Quick Mart that had recently opened and it was completely devastated by a flash mob. Almost sounds like a choir was gonna gather. Totally devastated a new business. They spent 40 minutes doing it and no help arrived. I have a couple of questions: When will it have gone too far? When will we awake from our stupor and say, "Enough"? What will be the requirement, what's the threshold? When they come into our homes and take whatever they want? You know, one of the words that's getting great play these days is equity. It's not new. I actually found a little bit that I prepared on this, like, seven years ago, but it's grown incredibly since then.
Equity is the idea that everybody gets an equal outcome. Not an equal opportunity, that's equality. An equal outcome, that's equity. And I wanna be really clear, both biblically and ideologically, it's a false construct. It's not an idea that is supported by reality. Equal outcomes require stealing. Robin Hood, you know the old notion that you steal from the rich and you give to the poor? It didn't stop Robin Hood from being a thief. It just meant he was cute in tights. So they get winsome, charming, pretty people to play the character, and the people he's stealing from, they make ugly and ogre-like, but he's still stealing.
Equity is not a naturally occurring outcome. It requires manipulation and it bears some questions: Should we all do the same amount of work? Should we all have the same amount of education? Should we wear uniforms? Important questions. Just a little bit of a casual glance and an opening of your imagination, you realize that some of us are tall and some are short. Some thin, some thick. I used to be mad at people that were thinner than me. Oh, they got a better metabolism. Then I started listening to 'em, and they did weird things, like not eat dessert. I thought, "Wow, what's wrong with... no wonder. You're not healthy". Some are pretty.
You know, we're told that society defines what is pretty. So now we see everyone's beautiful. Well, folks, if everyone's beautiful, it's equally true that everyone's ugly. Yeah, you see, sameness diminishes us all. We're working to the absurd conclusion of that with this whole, you know, there's no difference between men and women. We've been listening to that my entire life. We're not, there's no different, we're the same. It's all about social engineering. "It's the toys you gave the little boys that made them more aggressive". We've been listening to that for decades, until now we've got the boys competing with the girls, and lo and behold, we're different. I'm pretty sure our grandparents knew that 60 years ago.
See, creation gives us another perspective entirely. Look around, please. We have mountains and valleys and deserts and swamps and marshes. We have trees which bloom and trees with fruit and trees with nuts. We have cats and some of them have long tails and some of them have no tails. We have dogs and some of them have thick fur. My dad was a veterinarian, I know. And some have almost no fur at all, very thin coats. There are birds with long legs that live near the ocean and birds designed to live in the desert. If the government was in charge, we would have a bird. It would be gray, it would be back-ordered.
Equality, on the other hand, says we have an equal opportunity before the law. Now because laws are administered by human beings, that's never going to be perfect, but it's the ideal we strive for and it's very different than equity. It has been the objective that in all of our brokenness, we strive to treat one another with dignity, to find common ground and to build a bridge. I would strongly encourage you not to apologize for a biblical Judeo-Christian worldview, not to succumb to the manipulation of equity. It is destructive. It has a long track record. It is not new. They dress it up in fancy words, and people with lots of letters at the end of their names try to bully you into telling you it's true.
Since I've already wandered off script, I'll wander a step further. If your children or grandchildren or anyone you care about is in a classroom and some professor stands before them and says, "I'm going to deconstruct the faith that your parents or your church or your pastor has taught you," the moment you hear that, either remove the student from the classroom and do your best to remove the professor from that place. I've been students in those classrooms. They are not integrity infilled environments in general. There are exceptions and they're worth finding. One nation under God. There's a price for that.
But I'll start in Hebrews 11. I am back on your notes. There's hope. Says, I could go on, Hebrews 11 is the Hall of Fame in our Bible. It lists the most remarkable men and women of our faith, and the author is getting to the end of the chapter or at least to the end of this part of the presentation. And he realizes he's running out of time. I feel his pain. And he said, "I'm running out of time". So then he just throws in a bunch of names and a bunch of outcomes, he doesn't have time to explain. Said, "I could go on and on, but I've run out of time. There are so many more, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets. Through acts of faith, they toppled kingdoms, they made justice work, they took the promises for themselves".
I think it's worth noting that in the Bible, in the chapter where the Hall of Fame is presented, that the leaders that we emulate, the men and women of faith that are held up to us as examples, we are told, toppled kingdoms. They were engaged in the secular authorities over their lives. Many of our Hebrew, our heroes challenged authority, whether it was three Hebrew young men who wouldn't bow before an idol, or Daniel who wouldn't break his religious observation in spite of a law against it, like, the list goes on and on. "They toppled kingdoms, they made justice work".
Justice does not come from governments. Justice comes from God. He is a just God. There is nothing in the history of human civilization that would suggest to us human beings are just. Have you read "Animal Farm"? If you haven't, it would be a great summer project. It's a short book. And then it says, "They took the promises for themselves". Being a person of faith is not a passive response. It's unfortunate that our faith is presented and been presented in terms almost uniquely of a conversion experience. I believe in the new birth salvation, the necessity of it. The absolutely importance of it, that Jesus is the only way. He said, "I'm the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father, except by me".
I believe he's told us the truth. But having entered the kingdom of God, the assignment is to grow up. And the author of Hebrew says we'll have to take the promises for ourselves. It's an assertive response. We live too passively. "Well, if God wants me to have it, I guess he'll give it to me". Folks, you'll go to hell with that attitude. I don't mean that in an unkind way. But the Bible says in Romans that you have to confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord in order to be saved. God sent his Son, born of a virgin, born in a stable in Bethlehem. I believe that literally happened.
When he grew to adulthood, he was crucified by the Romans on a Roman cross outside the city of Jerusalem. I believe that literally happened. They buried him in a tomb and, three days later, God raised him to life again. I believe that literally happened. God has done everything he's going to do to make it possible for you or me or anyone else to be a participant in the kingdom of God. He's not gonna do something else. Our participation in the kingdom of God has to do with our willingness to decide that that narrative is true and not only acknowledge the uniqueness of Jesus, but then submit to him as Lord. That means he begins to establish the priorities, not the church, not the pastor, not the denomination. I'm not inviting you to keep the rules. I'm inviting you to get to know a person. His name is Jesus.
So when it says that we took those promises for ourselves, the first promise we could start with is salvation. But we don't stop there. One of the reasons we find ourselves in this mess we're in is we've stopped imagining the promises of God were necessary and we started accepting the promises of a government. That's not a good swap. Look at Ephesians 3:20, "God can do anything, you know, far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams"! That translation is from The Message. And I know that it is a paraphrase. So you don't need to send me a note. But sometimes I think it helps us get to the meaning of the scripture. "He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us".
God can do anything. I believe that. I'm evidence of that in so many, many, many ways. And so are you. If we could just open our heart the slightest bit, I think most of us could acknowledge the grace and the mercy of God, what he's done in us and through us and around us. We've been blessed. Not a life without pain, not a life without struggle, but the blessings of God. Why would we not want to walk towards him? What do you think you have that he needs? That makes me smile. You know, "All he wants is my money". No, folks, God does not need Allen's checkbook. Don't you know Gabriel's leaning for it?
"If Allen would just stroke a check". I don't think so. It's my greed that gets me in that place. God can do anything he wants. What I really wanna talk to you about is imagining a whole new generation of heroes, whole new generation of heroes, not maybe celebrities or sports figures. I spent a lot of time on planes lately and if you can't sleep, there's a screen in front of you. I spent more time trying to find something to watch than watching something. I'm sure that has something to do with my life season. But it seemed to me that an inordinate number of the movies were about heroes, superheroes, people not like us. And it got me thinking about that, and I would submit to you, we desperately need a whole new generation of heroes based more on character, on words like honor and duty and responsible.
So I made a list of heroisms. It's a made-up word, but since I wrote the outline, I get the privilege. I talked about it in more detail in the previous session. I'm not gonna recapitulate all of it, but I'll touch them. I said heroes have unique abilities that separate them from the rest of us. Things like they can fly, they have superhuman strength, they have x-ray vision. I mean, heroes are just not like us, we're normal and they're not. Heroes are never weighed down by the mundane problems of life. You never see Wonder Woman having trouble loading the dishwasher. It's hard to imagine her cleaning the bathroom. You just, it's hard to picture Wonder Woman in the grocery store, price-checking. I'm pretty sure Batman never took the Batmobile to have the tires rotated.
You know, those heroes, they don't do those mundane things that fill our lives. Somehow they don't have to do that. Three, heroes always have a clear sense of good and evil. They always know the right thing to do and when to do it. You know, after all, if the Joker presents himself, you don't need much discernment to know he does not have good in mind for Gotham City. If you get in a fistfight with John Wayne, most of us would agree, you just get what you got coming. Don't pick that fight, it's not gonna work out well. Heroes always want to do the right thing.
Can you imagine Superman saying, "I'm not gonna save that person until this ball game's over"? No, they always wanna run right into the middle of the fray. Heroes have heroic lives. Their kids, we know this, their kids are little super kids. They get their own comic strips, they get their spin-off shows and their own spin-off movies. Their bodies are perfect. They can wear Spandex. Most of us understand very well Spandex was not created with us in mind. We're content with that. May it stay far from us. Not heroes. Their marriages are outstanding. They always smile, they're always happy. They always say the right thing. Their homes are incredible.
Well, I have an announcement. I believe heroisms are false. It's just a lie. They're simply not the whole picture. If you'll allow me, I would submit to you that real heroes, they have pimples, cellulite, mortgages, rebellious kids. They have disagreements at home. Heroes, who knew? They have halitosis. They really do. I know it doesn't make it into the movies. They're perfect. People swoon. But in the real world, heroes look a lot like us.
Oftentimes for me, the most difficult part of following the Lord is making peace with God's timing. He just doesn't always pay attention to my agenda or my request or when I want something done. I bet you know what that feels like. Well, I wanna ask you if you got the courage to forgive God for messing up the timing. He didn't answer in the time and the place and in the way that perhaps you would have preferred him to. And we're left with the mess of that. Well, if we can make peace with God, it puts us in a place to receive what he has for us next. It's a better outcome. You willing to do that? Let's pray:
Heavenly Father, I thank you that you love us, that you have a plan for our good and not for our harm. Forgive us for being impatient, frustrated, angry, for stamping our feet. Lord, we want your best in our lives in your time, in Jesus's name, amen.