We're going to be in Numbers chapter 22, Numbers chapter 25, and in Revelation chapter 3 today. But to start with Numbers 22, verse 22, if you're using the Bible and the rack in front of you in the pew is page 178, numbers chapter 22. Starting in verse 22, we're going to read this, I'm going to explain it, a little bit of what's going on and what's been going on, what's about to happen, how. And then we're going to read a little bit later, so follow along with us here. In Numbers 22, God, it says this.

Then God's anger was kindled because he, this guy named Balaam, went and the angel of the Lord stood in the road to oppose him. Now he was riding on his donkey and his two servants were with him. And the donkey, listen to this. The donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with his sword drawn in his hand. By the way, if you ever had the opportunity to see beyond the veil of this earthly existence, to see the angel of the Lord, which we believe in scripture in the Old Testament is the pre incarnate Jesus Christ.

Last week we were in Daniel 10 and Daniel saw a vision of the pre incarnate Jesus Christ. Jesus has always existed. He has existed forever, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit. And he showed up in human history from time to time. Now, in this case, he shows up as the angel of the Lord with his sword drawn.

The donkey sees this and Balaam doesn't, so he says, it says this. The donkey sees the angel of the Lord with his sword drawn in the road. So the donkey turns aside from the road, goes into the field, and Balaam beat the donkey. That's not cool. But that's what he did, right?

So he tried to make her turn back to the road. The angel of the Lord stood in a path among the vineyards where there was a wall on either side. And then the donkey saw the angel, the Lord. She pressed herself into the wall and crushed Balaam's foot against the wall. So naturally he beat her again.

He doesn't sound like a nice guy, Right? He really isn't. Then the angel of the Lord went farther and stood in a narrow place where there was no way to turn either to the right or to the left. When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord, she crouched down under Balaam. Then Balaam was angry, or some versions might say his anger was kindled.

Balaam's anger was kindled and he beat his Donkey with a staff. Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey and she said to Balaam, and now this. I forgot I was going to start with a joke and I didn't make it, but there's this great joke that my uncle used to tell and he said there was this engineer and he picks up this frog because the frog starts talking to him and says, hey, if you know, you kiss me, I'll turn into a princess. And he's like, eh. And he tucks the frog in his pocket of his lab coat, you know, or whatever.

He goes on and the frog's like, hey, I promise if you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess and I'll stay with you and everything will be great. And he says, okay, puts the frog in his pocket. He goes a while later and the frog says, hey, if you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess. I'll stay with you. I'll even like cook and clean and do all this stuff.

And he says, tucks the frog in his pocket. Finally the frog says, hey, what's going on? I offered you all this stuff, I'll turn into a beautiful princess, stay with you, take care of everything. Why haven't you kissed me? He says, I'm an engineer and I'm busy and I don't have time for all that stuff.

But a talking frog is pretty cool, you know. Balaam doesn't seem to have that response to the donkey. He doesn't say like, oh my goodness, a talking donkey. That's, I think, what I would say. Balaam just kind of takes it in stride and he's like, okay, so my donkey's talking to me now.

Don't know if I, you know, there was something in the air that I sniffed and I'm a little high, I don't know what's going on. But he says, he says to the donkey, he's. The donkey says, hey, why have you beaten me these three times? That's a good question, right? Balaam said to the donkey, you made me look like a fool.

I wish there was a sword in my hand. He wishes for a sword. And what he doesn't see is that the angel of the Lord has a sword drawn against him. He says, I wish I had a sword in my hand and I would kill you right now. That's pretty angry to kill.

That'd be like saying I'm mad at my car and then pulling out a shotgun and shooting the engine block, you know, like it's just a bad plan. But he says, I Wish I had a sword, I'd kill you right now. The donkey said to Balaam, am I not your donkey? Listen to how eloquent this donkey is. Am I not your donkey that you have ridden ever since I was yours, until this day?

Have I ever attempted to treat you this way? He said, no. Then the Lord opened Balaam's eyes. He saw the angel, the Lord standing in the way with his sword drawn in his hand. So he bowed his head and threw himself down with his face to the ground.

The angel of the Lord said to him, why have you beaten your donkey these three times? And Balam's like, I'm tired of this question already, you know, he says, why have you beaten your donkey these three times? Not like, hey, why are you on this road? Or any of these things. Just why did you beat the donkey three times?

God does care about animals too. He says, if she, the donkey, had not turned away from me, I would have killed you, but saved her alive. I love that. God's like, you know, right now her life's more important than yours. You think she's just a pack animal.

Right now she has more value to her life than you do, Balaam. So you need to get straight right now. Balaam said to the angel, the Lord, I have sinned, for I did not know that you stood against me in the road. Now if it is evil in your sight, I will go back home. But the angel of the Lord said to Balaam, go with these men that you are with, but you may only speak the word that I will speak to you.

So Balaam went with the princes of Balak. Now, I called this sermon today Prophets for profit. And like the, the words like, it'll be up on the screen like prophets for profit spelled two different ways. And prophets like the prophet of God, somebody that speaks the word of God, but this one is doing it for monetary gain. So if you don't know the story of Balaam and Balak, by the way, their two names mean Devastator and Devourer.

That's not a good combination of guys to hang out with. So the. So Balak is this guy who is a king over Moab and the Israelites at this time in their journey, they've left Egypt. God has brought them out with the plagues. His mighty arm brings them through the Red Sea with the wall of water on either side.

They get through there and they're in the wilderness and they disobeyed God and they stayed there for 40 years because they didn't have the faith to go into the promised land that God was taking them into. They didn't think they could fight against the giants and the strongholds of the land. And so they spend 40 years in the wilderness. It's not just wandering, it's God keeping them there, leading them there. But as he's doing that, the older and faithless generation dies off.

Their children are adults, and it is now time for God to lead them into the promised Land before he takes them over the Jordan River. And if you read scripture very much, it's good for you to have a basic understanding of geography, of the layout of the land of Israel, the promised Land. And one of its natural borders is a sea on one side and a river on the other. The Jordan River. And the Jordan river is something that they would have to cross over to enter into the land that God has promised to them from Abraham on down.

And so there's a few nations that are on the eastern side of the Jordan river. And the Israelites, like over a million people strong, are camped there. And they're spread out through quite a big region. And as they are living there in their different tribal kind of lands where they've kind of broken up their camp into these tribal areas, as they are living over there, they begin, God begins using them to overthrow one of the nation areas. And don't think of like full size countries, but these areas that they overthrow.

A guy named Og, who's the king of Bashan, is one of them. And so they go in and they overtake these areas. And so they have their first military victories before going into the promised land. And there will be a lot of military battles to do that. And so as they're on the eastern side of the Jordan river, they start these battles.

And there's this land that they're camped next to where it's the Moabites. Now the Moabites are the descendants of a guy named Lot, who is Abraham's nephew. So these are like their cousins, but way down the line, you know, like very distant relatives. But they're relatives nonetheless. And God had actually told the Israelites not to harm them.

Like this is your family, don't hurt them. That's kind of a basic rule, right? Like, don't fight against your family. We do that a lot anyway, don't we? But that was their rule.

And so there they are, they're supposed to not fight against their relatives or family. And they're intent on that. But the King of Moab is very scared for his people. And in fact, his fear bled into the hearts of all of the people. So it says that all of Moab feared for the Israelites living there.

So they're scared of the Israelites, even though they have no reason to be. God has told them to leave the Moabites alone. So, but there they are, they're scared of them. And so what Balak, the king of the Moabites, does is he finds this guy that lives a couple hundred miles north of there, and he finds this guy named Balaam. Now, Balaam is a prophet for profit.

He's like 1-800- call a curse or something. Like, they just, they're like, hey, can we call up somebody that'll come here and pronounce a curse over Israel so that it will weaken Israel so that we can overtake them? That's what Balak's plan is. Now, one of the things to understand that's just, like, foundational for their worldview, their thinking, is they all believed, everybody believed that a God, a deity, was localized to a region. So they're thinking, all right, you know, we can just get this guy who can tap into the spiritual realm.

We're going to find this guy who can use divination and different sorcery and different things at his disposal, things that we might call the occult today, and he can use the occult to tap into that localized God and get that God to turn against Israel. Now, Balaam, as much as he is a man of idolatry, as much as he's a man that doesn't have respect for Yahweh, our God, the God of Israel, he, he. He does have this understanding that if that God won't let him pronounce a curse on those people, he can't do it. He recognizes the limits of his authority as a human being, but he's still willing to try to manipulate what he believes is the local God of that area to hopefully do what he's paid to do. So King Balak sends some envoys to him.

They go up to him and they're like, hey, could you come with us on a journey that'll take a few days and go down here and look at these people and pronounce a curse on them? He's like, no, thanks, not interested. Like, I don't know if he had just gotten a big paycheck recently and he just was flush with cash and it didn't matter, or if he didn't like traveling that far, or maybe he just didn't like the way the guys were dressed, I don't know. So he says, no thanks. So they go back, report to their king.

King Balak sends more important people back. Like maybe he'll like the prestige of the, the high officials that I sent him instead of these like low level envoys. So like, he sends in the big guns and Balak finally is like, stay with me overnight, let me talk to, talk to God and see what he says I can do. And God's like, don't do this. He's like, okay, but maybe, what if I just do it anyway?

And God's like, you're going to do what you're going to do. Now I have an eight year old, I understand this very well. There will be times where she's like, daddy, I want to fill in the blank, watch this show, eat this thing, do this, whatever it is. No, Emma, don't do that. Or sometimes I'll say, I would like for you not to do that.

She takes that to mean, okay, I can do it anyway. I guess you'd like for me not to, but I still can. You didn't directly say no. And that's kind of what God says to Balaam here. He says, you really ought not to, this isn't a good plan.

He's like, I mean, I guess you didn't say a direct no this time, so I guess I'm going. So as he's going with them, that's where we read the story of the angel, the Lord meeting him, and his, his donkey sees what he cannot see. Balaam, the guy that's supposed to be this prophet for a prophet, this sorcerer for hire, he sees the donkey, sees the thing that he cannot see. Now I also want to point out here that I believe what he's trying to do is he's trying to use illicit, evil, sinful methods to get at the will of God, to get at the heart of God. And hear me on this.

Last week I gave a little disclaimer on part of my message that said I'm not 100% sure on this part, and this is one of those today I'm not 100% sure. However, I believe that there are times where people can use, let's call it divination, sorcery, they can use what they might call white witchcraft, wicca, things like that. And they can try to think that they're tapping into a part or a side of God using those methods. And here's why I think that's possible. For one thing, you've got a time where there was King Saul who, who was trying to get ahold of Samuel the prophet who had died, he finds a sorcerer, a witch, and he goes to her and he says, I need to talk to someone and call up Samuel.

And sure enough, she calls up the spirit of Samuel and Saul talks with him. I don't know how that works. I don't want to know how that works. God forbids that. Expressly saying, don't try to contact the dead.

Like that's beyond what you're supposed to do. If you're joining us online, but you have never attended in person, let us know that you're watching by leaving a comment. And please give us a thumbs up on the video. If there's any way we can pray for you or if you would like to know a little bit more about this church or relationship with Jesus, text us at 833-339-7926. And be sure to check out our website at cdfnfamily.org we were on our trip that we took recently.

We were in Oklahoma City and we went to the memorial for where they had the Murrah Building that had been bombed in the 90s. And there was. There was this guy. I wish I had showed you the picture of this. It was.

Is only something a picture can display, but. But he had like this lantern, it was like purple. He had a cane. He was dressed kind of funny. And I figured out, I'm like, I think I know what this guy's up to.

And sure enough, I got close to him. And the one person that was in his tour that he was taking and he was doing ghost tours, of course, thinking this is a place where a tragedy happened, a lot of people died. He's going to get some people that believe like that they can contact the souls of the dead there and they can get some kind of insight or inspiration into what they went through or what the afterlife is like or something. I don't know what their goal was. He's making money doing it.

This lady that was with him, she believes that, you know, there's something to it and she thinks she's fulfilled somehow by this. It made me sad. They're both chasing something that God said, don't do that. It's dangerous. They might think, oh, it's harmless, it's not going to do anything to me.

You have no idea what kind of doors that opens to the evil spiritual realm and what the demons want to do when they get a hold of you because you've opened yourself up to things that God expressly said, keep that door closed. And you open that door anyway. See, this was the original sin when Adam and Eve were confronted by an option that the serpent gave them in the Garden of Eden. And, and they're confronted with this option. And Satan says to Eve, the serpent, he says, you know, if you eat this fruit, you will become like God yourself, able to choose for yourself between good and evil.

What that really means is not like, oh, you have two decisions and you can choose the right thing or the wrong thing. No, what that means is you're able to look at it and say, well, God said it's bad, but I'm going to put it in the good category. I'm going to take what God said is evil, but I'm going to say it's okay. And that's what Balaam is doing here. He's following along in those footsteps and he's saying, well, God said I shouldn't do this.

He said I ought not to. He said, don't do it, but I'm going to try to do it in a way where it's good. And I'll just say, well, I'll only say what God allows me to say there. I'm doing right. Except his heart was in the wrong place.

See, Balaam was willing to go up against the people of God and try to connive away to, to curse them so that he could get a paycheck out of it. And he was going to find some kind of wiggle room, some kind of, of, of clause in the contract where he could say, oh, here I found a little bit where I can just say something bad and, and then I can get a paycheck from this guy. So he goes there, he goes with them and, and he goes and, and, and you can read, this is like a three chapter long story in numbers here. But what he does is he shows up at, after meeting the angel on the road with the donkey and all that stuff, he shows up and King Balak says, okay, what do you want to do? Let me take you to this place.

And he takes him where he can see all of the encampment of all of the Israelites. There's over a million of them. And he says, look, here, here they all are. Now what do you want to do now? Balaam says, let's build seven altars.

I don't know how big they are, but seven altars that you can put seven, seven bulls on them. So like he's sacrificing seven. Actually, I think there was two animals on each one, so there's 14 that he's sacrificing they're decent size altars. And so they do all this work, I don't know how long it took. And they do all this work.

And he's like, sacrifice these. Now you stay there, I'm going to go over here. Do, do, do, do. I'm going to talk to God. He goes over to talk to God, and you know what?

God gives him a message, a blessing over Israel. So he pronounces a blessing over Israel. Now there's something that God had told Abraham when God had told him that he would make him a great nation. He says, whoever blesses you, I will bless. Whoever curses you, I will curse.

And so God is fulfilling that and he gives Balaam a blessing to pronounce over Israel. And sure enough, he comes back and they call it an oracle. He pronounces this oracle, this blessing over Israel. Balaam the guy, or Balak the guy writing the check, is a little bit ticked. His anger is now kindling.

Remember, Balaam's anger at his donkey was kindled. Now Balak's anger is kindling. But he's like, okay, all right, just keep it together, B. All right, you're, you're the guy, you're the destruction guy, you know, like, you're the guy. Like, what is your name, B?

Your name is Devastator. His name is Devourer. Okay, Devastator, focus. What if we go over here, he comes, he's like, maybe if we go over here, maybe there'll be like a different influence. Remember regional gods?

Maybe there'll be a different influence over here. And if we go over here and you just see just a little portion of them, maybe it was like, you know, the ones that lived in like the rundown RVs that like everybody, like, they weren't able to travel anymore, so somebody just backed them into the woods down by the river somewhere, you know what I'm saying? Like that part of town, there's a lot of tarps, a lot of old metal, you know, that people found, and they're building shacks, kind of homeless, like. And maybe we just find them and you'll be like, I don't like those people. I can curse them.

I'm not trying to talk bad about folks living in that situation. I'm saying we look the same way at people sometimes. Like, I could do without those folks. Yeah, I could curse them. Sure, let's do it.

And so he goes over there, he does the same thing. Seven more altars, 14 more animals, offers them, goes over, talks with God, God sends him back with another blessing. Oh, man. Now Balak is really getting ticked. He's angry, but he's like, you know what?

Let's go farther away so you can just barely see him. And they go geographically pretty far away, but up a mountain, just seven more altars, 14 more animals. Finally, he pronounces one more blessing on them, and Balik's it. Like, that's it. I'm done, and I'm not paying you.

Go home before I decide to do something bad to you. He's like, all right, I'm Audi 5000, by the way. I love that. That means I'm out of here. There was a car called the Audi 5000 where the gas pedals used to stick.

So that means I'm out of here and I'm going fast and I can't stop. That's what Audi 5000 means. If anybody ever says that to you, you guys don't care. All right, I love that one. It's better than deuces or Peace out to me.

I'm Audi 5000. Means I'm getting out of here quickly. So I don't know what the Toyota one was from, like, eight years ago when their gas pedals were stuck to their floorboards, too. I don't think they got a moniker for that one, but, oh, well, anyway, like, I'm Camry doesn't really have the same ring to it, you know, as an Audi 5. Seriously, you guys, it's funny.

Like, oh, dear.

Balaam still wants that paycheck. He still wants to find a way to fulfill his contractual obligation that he got himself into. So there's a verse in Revelation that talks about this, and I just want to turn there real quick. You don't have to if you don't want to. You can take my word for it.

Jesus talking to the church in pergamum. He says this. Revelation 2:14. I have a few things against you. You have some people there who follow the teaching of Balaam, who instructed Balak to put a stumbling block before the people of Israel, so they would eat food, sacrificed to idols, and commit sexual immorality.

Now, I want to flip back to numbers 25, and we're going to see what happened there, because it's like if the people. By the time of the New Testament church, after Jesus had died, risen again, ascended into heaven, and the churches that were formed are still talking about Balaam. In fact, references to him show up in Jude in Second Peter. I think it's two or three. They mentioned him there.

He was talked about for centuries. Later, millennia later, and we're talking about him here today. There's a reason that the Holy Spirit has preserved the mention or the story of Balaam for us today so that we can learn something from it. And. And we're going to look at that right here in.

In numbers, chapter 25, just a couple chapters after where we started earlier. I'm going to read you, like, 13 verses. This happened shortly after Balaam had left. When Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to commit sexual immorality with the daughters of Moab. That was their enemy, wasn't it?

That was the ones that wanted to curse them. These women invited the people to make sacrifices to their own gods. And then the people ate and bowed down to their gods. When Israel joined themselves to BAAL Peor, which is a regional version of the God baal, or the false God baal, the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel. Remember, we had anger that Balaam had kindled towards his donkey.

We had anger of Balak towards Balaam. Now God's anger is kindled towards Israel. The Lord said to Moses, this sounds harsh, but check this out. Arrest all of the leaders of the people and hang them up before the Lord in broad daylight so that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel. Now, hold on a second.

Why was that okay for them, but we can't do that stuff today? Like, when all our leaders lead us astray, why can't we. I'm not saying, like, you know, kill him, but I'm just saying, like, why can't we just kind of, like, do the old school thing where you put them in the stock, you know, in the public square, and they got to, like, get tomatoes thrown at their faces and stuff. I don't know, why isn't that okay? When they start trying to do all this evil, wicked stuff that they're doing constantly.

Why can't we do that? And be like, you might still be in office, but you're not, like, above this, you know? Well, anyway, God says, moses, arrest them all. Hang them up before the Lord in broad daylight. That means, like, you kill them and then you hang their bodies up as an example.

Sounds pretty brutal, but that was kind of regular for that day. So Moses said to the judges of Israel, each of you must execute those of his brethren who were joined to BAAL of Peor. Wow. Can you imagine that? Men, rise up, take your sword, kill your brethren.

Maybe not your blood brother, but I mean, your countrymen. Just then, one of the Israelites came and brought to his brothers, a Midianite woman in the plain view of Moses and the whole community of the Israelites while they were weeping at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. Now, here's what's going on. There's a plague that has started as God's anger is kindled. We'll see that in a moment.

24,000 people in Israel died from the sickness of this plague that God brought on them. God was serious about holiness then, and he's still serious about holiness now. But God was so serious about the holiness of Israel because their identity was wrapped up in him that he said, listen, you guys are not to do this. You're not to take on foreign wives. You're not to give your sons to their wives as daughters or give your daughters to their sons as wives.

You're not allowed to take them as wives because they will lead you astray. See, God wasn't saying, oh, you should be xenophobic and hate anything of another race. He was saying, because of their religion, you must not do these things. And then they went and did it. And so here's what happens.

This guy, in defiance, while the people are. Some of them are repenting, they're weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. This is like their church. While they're weeping at the doorway of the church, they're not even allowing themselves to go into it. This man brings a Midianite woman in, in front of all of them.

I mean, he's having a little parade, him and his new girl that he's going to marry or sleep with. And he says it says he brought her into his tent. So verse, verse seven, when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest. So this is Moses, great nephew. When he saw what had happened, he got up from among the assembly, took a javelin in his hand, and went after the Israelite man into his tent and thrust him through the Israelite man and into the woman's abdomen.

So the plague was stopped from the Israelites. Those that died in the plague were 24,000. The Lord spoke to Moses, Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron. The priest has turned my anger away from the Israelites when he manifested such zeal for my sake among them, so that I did not consume the Israelites in my zeal, therefore announce I am going to give him my covenant of peace. So it will be to him and his descendants after him a covenant of permanent priesthood.

Because he has been zealous for his God and has made atonement for the Israelites.

This. This passage is. Is heavy. I love the parts of the Bible that tell, like, in brutal honesty, what was going on. But at the same time, it weighs heavy on my heart because I see this all around us.

I see this in churches today. See, what was happening was the people are weeping. God is telling Moses what needs to happen for the plague to stop. And Moses, he's. He's willing to do what it takes.

He tells his men, he says, those of you who are leaders among the men, stand up today and. And put a stop to this plague. And in the middle of saying this, this man decides, in direct defiance to God and everything Moses is doing, he says, well, I'm doing it anyway. He brings this woman in who has been planted as part of the solution to curse the Israelites, and he brings her in, he takes her into his tent. I don't have to graphically explain what's going on.

If you're able to stab two people with one spear, okay, they got right down to business. He had a plan, and he's going through with it. And Phineas says, not on my watch. I care about what God says. And he says, I know what God has commanded us.

So he goes, he's like, I got to get my javelin. He grabs his javelin, runs into that tent, and takes care of business. And God says, because he had zealousness for what I have said, this man is the protector of Israel. This man is the one who is responsible for stopping the plague against the Israelites. This man, it'll always be his family line that are the priests over Israel, because that story will be told to his son and to his grandson and his great grandson and on down the line, and they will know that the fear of the Lord and the zealousness for the holiness of God is what their family line is supposed to be about.

And they're going to walk in his ways. God celebrated what he did. Now, something that always happens always happens when the Israelites would vacate their holiness and they would walk in idolatry, worshiping foreign gods, false gods, something that always happened, it was almost always tied to somebody from a neighboring nation coming in and intermarrying with them and leading them astray. King Solomon did this. He married so many women, and the Bible says that they brought their worship with the foreign gods to him and that he even built palaces.

Not only built palaces for these wives, but built temples to their gods in the holy city of Jerusalem. And so what always happens when the people of Israel fall into Idolatry is they also would commit sexual immorality. When Moses had gone up the mountain to receive the tablets of the commandments from God, he's up there for 40 days. His servant Joshua is with him. But his brother Aaron, the priest is supposed to be leading them along these faithful ways of worshiping God.

Aaron, he bows down to the will of the people who said, moses has been gone a long time, several weeks. We don't know what's happened to him. Go ahead and just make some idols for us, Aaron. That's what everybody else does. We want to see a physical manifestation of God in our midst.

So if you could just make us something that we can look at and believe that there's some spiritual power behind it, then let's do that. So Aaron, rather than teaching the people and leading them, he says, well, if you have any gold jewelry, bring that to me and we'll craft an idol out of it. So he makes this golden calf, and he makes his golden calf. And he says, here, Israel, here is your God who has brought you out of Egypt. And it says the people got up and went down to it to indulge in revelry.

Revelry is a weird word. It's a word that we don't use too often anymore, but it simply means that it was drunken partying based on sexual immorality and bowing down to a false God. We think, well, nobody does that for real today, do they? Oh, right. We think all this sexual immorality that's going on in our country has nothing to do with idolatry.

We think it has nothing to do with trying to push God out of the way and support our own agendas. We think that there's nothing really behind it except, well, that's what somebody does in their own space. And I'm not saying necessarily you guys believe that. I'm saying, this is what is talked about in the world. They'll say, well, it's just whatever somebody does in their own private space.

It's just whatever happens in the bedroom is none of your business. Stay out of people's bedrooms. Oh, okay, sure, if you keep it out of church. We're good with that. Here's the problem.

Every push into sexual immorality in this country has been trying to make its way into every church in this country. See, everything that we do, we're faced on every side. There's publications like Christianity Today that has moved into this agenda of sexual immorality, trying to say, well, well, these lifestyles are okay, or the, you know, is really like, fornication is really okay if you're intent on staying with the person they tried to. And I'm not saying Christianity today specifically on all of these, but they have made a lot of these errors of going into the ways of Balaam. See, Balaam thought that he could make good on his contract.

Instead of cursing the people of Israel, he just enticed them to sin. He taught Balak how to send his women in. Hey, listen, if you get these women all dolled up, the Israelite men going to love it. If you get them all dolled up, you send them in there and you get some of the women that are just kind of willing to just kind of sleep around, the men will love that. They'll get involved in that.

They'll. They'll bring them into their homes, they'll marry some of them, they'll have kids with them later on. Like, by the time of Nehemiah, which we did a study on that a few months ago, by the time of Nehemiah, they were marrying all these women, and their kids didn't even speak the Hebrew language, which means you can't read the law of God. You can't understand the will of God if you don't read the language in which it's written. And so they've got all that going on.

And it always would lead the people astray in our land today, the push for all this freedom of sexual expression across. And it blends into confusion on genders, homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality. All these weird things that you fill in the blank. Like, if you just go to YouTube, you hear somebody say, like, oh, I'm a pansexual. You're like, I don't know what that means.

I just say, YouTube, Wikipedia. I would never tell you, go to Wikipedia. I hate that thing. But you go to Wikipedia and you go there and it has those little blue words that you can click on and it'll take you to another site. You say, what's a pansexual?

A teenager at church told me that they're pansexual. What's that mean? Oh, my. That's really weird and messed up. And then you see some other things.

You're like, I don't know what that word means. And you click on it and you read that article and you're like, oh, that's even more weird and messed up. Like, I had no idea. And then you click on another one that you find in there, and you're like, I just. I wish I hadn't asked, you know, like, there's so much going on.

And for me, that experience was like a decade ago. So it's gotten way crazier since then. And the more time goes on, the more we see that people are in the world. They're trying to say that. That all of this is so that people can feel whole, so that people can feel like.

Like that they've fully expressed themselves, their inner self, their deep. Who they are. And then the farther we go down that road, the more it's never quite enough. The more it has to intrude into all areas of life. Oh, it's not just in your TV programs.

It's not just in kids cartoons or kids movies. Disney has been known for doing this for the last several years, for sure. It's even in a language learning app that I'm using. I'm trying to learn some new language stuff. And in there, it's like something about she, blah, blah, blah, to her wife.

I don't even want to learn that sentence. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't want to learn that in this language, let alone in that language. You know, like, he has a boyfriend. And I'm like, stop.

Or then it says, well, my partner loves my grandfather. And it's like, why do I need to learn these phrases? I have a wife. I don't have a partner. I mean, we're partners in our marriage, but.

But, like, I don't think of her as my partner. That's my wife. I'm her husband. I look at all these things and it goes even into this simple language learning app on my phone. It cuts into all these things, and then they say, well, the last holdout is the church.

Now, we can either inspire the people of the church through all these media outlets in the world, but we have to get inside the church. And they try to get inside the church through their teachings. They try to influence the pastors. And I'm sorry to say that I've seen a lot of my colleagues fall prey to this. I've seen them fall victim to this, where they believe the lies of Satan.

And I think the angel of the Lord is standing there with a sword drawn saying, my anger is being kindled. The church is being destroyed by this. You're supposed to maintain holiness. You're supposed to be the ones that are going out leading a holy life and showing in a loving way the people of the world how God has called us to live. And in the end, all we end up doing is watering down what holiness means, watering down what faith In God looks like.

And the people don't see anything worthwhile in the church, so why should they bother coming today? I did a count we have. I wrote down a card that's in my pocket of everybody that's normally part of our church today that is not here today. And it's more missing than those present. Now, there's a story behind every one of those.

I'm not mad at anybody that's not here. Vacations, illnesses. Some go to more than one church and they're visiting different ones. That's fine, I got no issue with that. I'm just saying it's like, you look around and you're like, what happens?

What happens when church all of a sudden becomes like, I don't see the value in it. I don't see a reason to make it important. I don't see a reason why I should go there because we're here, that's not the problem. But you invite somebody to come and they're like, eh, no thanks. I mean, I've got a brother that's visiting in town for a while.

He won't come to church, doesn't see the value in it. He's been hurt and burned by different things. Some of it's his own thinking, some of it's things that happened in church before. He's a mile and a half from me right now, won't come be in church. It's that story over and over and over again because the church has followed the error of Balaam in saying, like, well, we can just kind of blend with the world just a little bit.

It'll be a little bit more attractive to others and. And then they'll say, well, look how, look how awake you guys are. Look how modern you guys are. Isn't that great? Meanwhile, people are leaving the Protestant church in droves, going to the Catholic Church because they say, well, at least that doesn't really change too much.

Like, there's some arguments there, but let's just leave that alone and say, okay, like, what are we doing here, folks? We need to be a place where the spirit of God meets us and says, this is what I've called you to do, and this is how I've called you to live. And the way I've called you to live is to set an example of what holiness looks like. And sure, part of the example was sexual immorality. Because that always, every time I find it in scripture, that is always what people are doing and engaging in when they walk away from God and begin worshiping idols and our country has an idolatry problem.

Problem. I have a speaking problem. Our country has an idolatry problem. And that's not going away quickly. It may never go away.

But when it starts getting into the church, we have to take stock of what's going on in our own lives and say, am I valuing a holy walk with Christ enough to say enough is enough. I'm going to stand for what is right, true and holy, because the word of God says so. I'm not going to be like Balaam, who said, well, can I just do it anyway? God? And he's like, you're going to do what you're going to do anyway.

That's what I tell my daughter sometimes. Say, you said you asked if I could do it. And I said, I prefer you didn't. She says, well, I think I want to. And I'm like, you're going to do what you're going to do anyway.

That is not permission. That is just me saying, I don't even know how to discipline you on this anymore. Like, you're just going to do it. So go ahead and do it, and I'll let you know what the consequences are later. And it's not going to be consequences that I bring on you.

The folly of your own ways is going to be the consequence in and of itself. Unfortunately, the church in America is seeing this today. The folly of some of our unfaithful ways to following the holiness that the Bible lays out for us has led to a crisis of where we're at. The good news is there's a generation that's growing up right now that's hungry for real things. They're seeing the.

The unreality that the world has been offering for 20, 30 years, 50 years, and they're saying, I don't want that. I want something that's real. And the good news is they're ready to turn back to church. And I love that. Even though we don't see the kids here right now, a bunch of them are upstairs and they're up there because they want to be here.

And they're saying, okay, God, like. Like, I'm here because I want to learn about you. I was in daycare chapel this week as Gail was leading it, and we had kids asking real questions about their life, things that are going on in their life, in their homes. And they said, I need help. And we told them, God loves you.

God is here to help you. I can't necessarily come into your house. Some of them don't even want their kids to be in church because they're literal pagans, but they're here in daycare, and by God's help, we're ministering to them while we've got them over the summer. See, God can reach people anywhere. The church has to be willing to step out, to step up, to live a life of holiness.

Maintain that call to holiness in a way that doesn't necessarily castigate or denigrate people, but says, here's what God has called us to do, and we're going to live that example out. And it calls them to live by that. Pastor Kendall, if you'll come up. I'm going to. I'm going to end with that.

Remember the example of Phineas? He did what God considered holy and righteous because he had a zeal for the things of God, and God considered that holiness.