God, did You write the Bible & is it true?

Once again, we’re so glad that you’re here. We hope you can stick around after the service.

If you’re here in person in our West Lobby, we have coffee and refreshments, and if you’re, especially if this is your first time, just come up and say hi. I’d love to shake your hand and just thank you for being with us. We also are grateful for those that are streaming in online or watching later on demand, including all our friends in Algonac this morning, as we start a brand new sermon series that’s going to carry us through the next couple of months called Questioning God.

And isn’t it interesting that once again, as we’ve gathered here on Sunday and we rewind just the last seven days, how many questions we have in our hearts and our minds. Amen. As you know, as a congregation, we so often will stop our services or our worship services and pray for the devastation that’s taking place in our country or around the world.

And as you heard, we’re going to be doing that toward the end of our service today. But let’s just be real. Many of us came in today with some real, honest, raw feelings.

And we’re still trying to make sense and we’re still trying to understand why things keep happening around us and so close to us that just break our hearts. Why is it that human life seems to keep getting devalued more and more? And yet, as a society, it seems like we never are evolving. And when you think of a sermon series like Questioning God, I mean, the first kind of question that pops into your mind is, are we even allowed to question God? Or is he so sovereign that we just don’t ever speak to him and we don’t ever second guess anything that’s happened and we just kind of remain silent and say, well, God, you’re sovereign and whatever you’re going to do, you’re going to do and we’ll just have to deal with it.

What’s fascinating when you go to the scriptures and you see people, God’s people, people that love God questioning God. This guy’s got one of the coolest names in the Old Testament. He’s called Habakkuk.

And he asked this at the very beginning of his book. How long, Lord, must I call for help? But you did not listen, which I don’t know if it’s a good idea to be calling out God. But here’s the saving grace is that what he wrote was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

And so God is the one that’s actually inspired him to write these words. And if you read through his book, you kind of understand why he started this way. Or another Old Testament character named David, who we have lots of material about and you get to read about his life from a shepherd boy all the way up to becoming king and all of the victories that experience, but also all the hardships that he experienced.

He’s one of the one of the biggest writers of Psalms. And he said this. How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? And let’s be honest, how many of us have had that prayer where you get a diagnosis or a family member is going through a circumstance or a hardship comes into your life and you and you give it to the Lord and then you go into the waiting period and you get frustrated because you’re like, God, I came to you.

You’re my God. My heart belongs to you. I have faith in you.

Why are you still silent? Why don’t I see you? Why can’t I feel you? Why does it seem that you aren’t interested in what’s going on in my life? Here’s what you need to know today is that not only can you question God, you can cry out to God. You can wrestle with God. You can lament before God.

You can bring your doubts to God. You can even struggle to pray or not even want to pray and utter a single word to God. And you find this all throughout scriptures.

You find this all throughout those that have put their faith in Jesus. I mean, you can’t even get past the Easter message without seeing those that were closest to Jesus wrestle with doubt and wrestle with questions. So I’m here to tell you today that your faith can coexist when you have questions or you have doubt or even in the midst of pain and suffering.

God knows we’re fallen, sinful human beings. He knows the struggles that we face. He knows that this is a constant daily battle of trying to figure out how to navigate our life in view of who he is while we’re on this earth.

Here’s some other good news. One of the most well-known disciples of Jesus, his name is Peter, when he was penning his letter said this, is that you and I are to cast all our anxieties on Jesus. And the reason we’re to do that is because he actually cares for us.

He sees us, he hears us, and he knows us. Any prayer request that you have, any burden that you have on your heart, questions like, God, why is it that people keep going into schools and killing each other? Why are we living in a day and age when kids are killing kids? God, why would a woman that was in Ukraine, terrible, awful place, all of a sudden make it to America and she’s one stop short of getting off of a train and she’s brutally murdered in front of all of our eyes for all of us to see? God, why go through those lengths? Why was she, even in that situation, why didn’t you protect her? And why did nobody around her do anything about it? God, why this week did we have to watch a 31 year old dad who loves college kids, who loves you and loves telling people about the hope they can have in you be tragically taken from this earth? Two little kids. How do we wrap our minds around these circumstances? God, you have to help us.

It doesn’t make sense. I can’t figure it out. I need you to give me direction and guidance.

And today, believe it or not, our very topic speaks to this. Because for week one, we are going to tackle this question. God, did you write the Bible and is it true? Do you really believe that? Because you may be here and you don’t know if you believe that.

And that’s why you’re here. You’re exploring this whole idea and you’ve heard some things about scripture and, you know, you’ve heard some rebuttals to scripture and some other people that have maybe influenced or professors or others that have studied the scriptures and say, no, really, that was just the church that did that. Or really, that was just this group of people that that put this collection of writings together to try to control people or to try to get everybody to to think the way that they do.

And so, again, the point of this sermon series is to go straight to God, to ask God, God, is this your book? Did you put this together for us? And are the writings actually true? Well, Paul, who is an apostle of Jesus, he came after the disciples. Radically saved, literally knocked off his horse. He spent the better part of the second part of his life influencing and raising up other leaders, and one of them just happened to be Timothy, who is this young pastor.

And so he’s teaching Timothy how to be a pastor, how to proclaim the gospel. And he says these words to him, hey, Timothy, all scripture is breathed out by God, that when you read the scriptures, just so you know, it links back to Genesis when God spoke creation into existence. But wait, my human mind can’t comprehend how anything could be spoken into existence.

And so there’s a tension there because we we can hear the scriptures and we can read the verses, but yet God’s the one that has to give us the ability to have faith that when God speaks something miraculous actually has the power to take place. Over in Hebrews, it tells us this about the Bible, that the word of God is living and active. And these words are very important because it’s basically saying the Bible is like no other book on this planet.

There is nothing that compares to God’s word. God’s word is living and it’s active. It’s the only thing that has the ability to penetrate our human hearts, to bring us to faith, to show us who God is so that we can be in a right relationship with him.

It literally can penetrate our thoughts and the deepest areas of our souls. Now, again, going back to Peter, one of the disciples, the leader of the pack, he wrote this, he said, no prophecy of scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. Just so you know, everything that you’re reading is not the result of man.

God used men and God spoke to men and they were carried along by the Holy Spirit to write what it is that we have today in scripture. So if you’re wondering what kind of church that we are and how often we’ll say that we’re a Bible-believing, Bible-teaching church, this is what it means. We believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God.

God inspired the men who wrote it, that it is absolutely infallible. It does not fail, nor can it mislead or guide you or me. And third, and this is really important, is that it’s actually inerrant, that the Bible from beginning to end, Genesis to Revelation, has absolutely zero errors in it.

Why is this important? Because there are churches and church bodies in our country, we’ll just stay here in the United States, that don’t believe this. There are church bodies that used to believe this and then gathered people together, had a national convention, and then said, we no longer believe these things to be true of God’s word. Now, some of you, you know that we are a Lutheran church.

Some of you are hearing this for the very first time, because when you think Lutheran, this is not what you think of. And so the reason that we don’t always, you know, start our worship services by saying, just so everyone knows we’re part of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and we don’t, you know, plaster that all over our social media and all of the external communications that we do to try to invite people here, because it goes back to our beginning when this church was first started. That this church wanted to reach people in the community that were far from Christ and didn’t know Christ, and they had this expression that they were willing to do anything short of sin to reach people.

Now, not including the word Lutheran is not a sin, just so you know. Because sometimes people will be like, what are you, ashamed to be Lutheran? We are not ashamed to be Lutheran. We just don’t want a barrier for anybody that might be coming and checking out who we are.

We want them to to experience us, but more importantly, experience the gospel and get to know who we are as a community of believers. The second reason, and don’t miss this, is because the largest Lutheran denomination in our country right now does not believe this list anymore. Many years ago, they are the ones that had a convention that decided that the word is not infallible and it’s not inherent.

In fact, it’s now open to cultural interpretation, and so every pastor, wherever they’re at in the community that they’re at, can interpret scriptures according to their own local church body. Which, listen to me, if that ever happens here, you ever hear me say that, run. Don’t ever come back to this church that does not have a Bible-believing, Bible-teaching church.

And that’s a struggle. It’s a struggle because we have friends that go to different denominations. We have friends that are in different churches, and we love them.

And of course, we continue to have relationship with them. I’m telling you what it is that the church has historically always believed for the last 2,000 years. And when you take these factors out of scripture, it becomes a slippery slope, and all sorts of new doctrines and all sorts of new things begin to penetrate that congregation.

Not only do we believe this, but we believe the Bible is authoritative, that it’s sufficient, and that it’s Christ-centered. The Bible is your final authority on life. What scripture says is how you are to live your life.

I don’t get to the privilege of going to scripture and then deciding what I like and don’t like about scripture. Did you know that? You don’t either. We go to the Word of God, and we allow God, because He’s the creator, He’s the one that wrote scripture, to dictate how we live our lives.

And it actually contains everything that we need for life here on earth. Of course there’s questions, of course there’s doubts, of course there’s things that we don’t understand, and especially questions that we will never have the answers to this side of eternity. But God reminds us in His grace and His mercy, we have everything that we need if we would just open our Bibles and read them, everything that you and I need to be husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and grandparents and go down the line is all found within the pages of scripture.

And this is so important, because there was a movement not long ago where there was churches and pastors that wanted to unhinge the Old Testament from the New Testament. They wanted to separate the two main parts of the Bible, because they said it was kind of offensive, some of the stuff in the Old Testament, or it was churning people away from God. And here’s why you will never hear us say that at Shepherds Gate, because we believe all scripture ultimately points to the person and work of Jesus Christ, even the difficult passages.

Which is why we’re crazy enough to go through books of the Bible here at Shepherds Gate, word by word and verse by verse. In fact, every single week you get some semblance of what is called an expository sermon, where we dig into a passage of scripture, because we believe that’s how God speaks to you. And that’s what you actually need to be fed to help you get through the week.

Does that make sense? In fact, Ben showed me this incredible chart this week. Some of you may have seen this. Has anyone seen this chart? Isn’t it beautiful? This is a chart of scripture quoting scripture.

So you can see the line in the middle. The left is the Old Testament. The right is the New Testament.

This is how many times in scripture, other scriptures are quoted. And so I’ll give you a moment to go ahead and count them. Any guesses on how many times you think scripture quotes scripture in our Bible? Go ahead.

Don’t be shy. 10,000, 17. Who said 60,000? Were you at the first service? You were at the first service 60,000 times.

Again, you can’t even get through the Christmas account or the Easter account without someone quoting the Old Testament. Why would you ever unhinge the Old Testament from the New Testament? That’s preposterous. It doesn’t make any sense.

But underneath all of that, you have to understand why, why is scripture so valuable to us? Why is it so important? And John’s the one that told us everything is written so that you would believe all of these scriptures being inspired by all these men. It’s so that you know who Jesus is, that, you know, he’s the one that was born, that he lived a sinless life, that he eventually went to the cross, that he stretched out his arms, that your sins and my sins and the sins of the world were placed upon him. So he could be the sacrifice.

So he could die a painful, horrible death because he was reconciling us to God, the father. And he also is the one that took that first bold step out of that empty tomb. And he declared victory over sin, death, and the devil for you and for me.

So we could have life and life to the full, not only here, but all eternity with Jesus. That is the gospel message for you and for me. That’s why we open our Bible.

That’s why it’s so joy filled to come to church. And I know so many of you so often after service in the lobby, you’ll say, wow, you really spoke to me today, pastor. Wow.

Were you peeking in my windows at my house this week? Wow. How did you know I was struggling with this? And the reason that those things happen is because I’m just the guy or Ben’s just the guy or Eric’s about to be the guy that is the vessel that God is using to speak to you. He knows all your hearts.

He knows all of your circumstances. And he is the one that speaks to you through his word as it’s proclaimed here on Sunday morning. Does that make sense? Now, those that question the Bible will say, God, did you really actually say those things? Does the Bible actually say what I’ve heard growing up and, you know, my pastor growing up or my Sunday school teacher, or even the parents that I have now, it’s popular for everyone to kind of quote the church fathers were just the guys that were around for the first 300 years of the church.

And so everyone’s debating what they said and how they said it and who believed which doctrines of the church. And what’s happened with this one in particular is now it is unprecedented what you have access to and all the different opinions, millions and millions and millions of different opinions about scripture. And why is it that you have so much access to all that? It’s one thing.

What is it? What is it? Social media, where if you get on the right algorithm and you start seeing different things that are going through, you will find people that will deconstruct scripture and they will say, you learned this as a child, but guess what? Your pastor misrepresented scripture, or you learned this in Sunday school, but they didn’t tell you the whole story. And so I’m here to tell you the whole story. And so this is what scripture actually says.

And systematically what they do is they peel back the doctrines of the church. They peel back all the things that the church has always believed in for the last 2000 years. And folks, if you don’t know, we are living in unprecedented times when it comes to this, it’s unbelievable.

The movements that are out there that are trying specifically to win the hearts and the lives of the next generation, our young people, our Gen Z years, our college kids. And sometimes we look and we get angry and we get frustrated at all that is being played out right before our eyes. Again, watch what Paul does here in Corinthians.

He says this very simple gospel message. Christ died for our sins. By the way, that was prophesied in the old Testament.

He was buried and he was raised on the third day, by the way, that’s prophecy from the old Testament. And he also appeared to Peter and the other 12 disciples. We have eyewitness accounts.

These guys walked with Jesus. They heard Jesus. They are the ones that all of them, except for one ended up giving up their lives.

Think about this. They all ended up dead according to church tradition, because they were so convinced of who Jesus was and is, and that he was truly the Messiah. But see for us, it can get difficult because depending on what’s going on in our lives and the circumstances that we’re facing, when things don’t go the way that we want them to go, or even those that are around us in our families, in our places of work, what they’ll do is they begin to question God.

But the questioning of God begins to cross a line when it bleeds into these areas. When we tell the creator that he lied. Well, he can’t lie.

He’s the father of all truths. Or when we say to God, you don’t care what we time out, there’s no way he didn’t care. He’s the one that could have just destroyed us all.

But instead he sent his one and only son to this earth to do what we couldn’t do for ourselves. God, you’re evil. Which by the way, all of these things have been used on social media.

A group that was unbaptizing people. I don’t know if you saw that. They were having a rally and they were telling young people, well, if you’ve been baptized, you can come over here and we’ll unbaptize you.

Which by the way, makes absolutely no sense because if you don’t believe in God and you don’t believe in baptism, why would you need to be unbaptized? See how the devil works? Everything God creates, the devil counterfeits. Everything God says, the devil distorts. God, you made a mistake.

I came to you, I prayed, I told you what to do. You didn’t do it. Now, I don’t know if I want to follow you anymore.

And let’s be honest, we’ve all probably in some way, shape or form on one of these questions have felt this or thought this or even said it. God, you need to do my miracle now. God, you need to provide for me now.

God, you need to change my circumstance now. And if you don’t, I don’t know if I can keep walking this path with you. Here’s what we do know about the Bible.

I was written over 1500 years, 40 different authors composed in three different languages. And there’s an overwhelming evidence for the manuscript of the Bible. And I don’t have time to get into that today.

That’s another whole Bible study in three part sermon series. But it’s unbelievable the amount of evidence that God has left us to prove that these are his words. So let’s go back to our key verse for a moment, because it tells us that scripture is God breathed and this is what it does for us.

It is useful. What’s the first word? Teaching. How many of you like to be taught? Like it’s good to learn.

Some of you are like, I don’t know if I should raise my hand. You watch cooking shows, you read books. Some of you, you’re addicted to school, like you just love, you know, getting degrees and learning and growing.

Like we all, I mean, why do you go on social media? Why do you watch the news? You want to learn. And so that’s part of it as we go to scripture. Well, look at these next two words.

That as we go to the Bible, as we seek God’s word for our life, it tells us that it has the power to rebuke and correct us. And we all say, amen. Aren’t you glad that you have someone that loves you enough to tell you when you’re wrong? Aren’t you glad that when you read the pages of scripture, that you know what God’s boundaries are for your life? See, our society has convinced us that these are negative words, that no one should ever tell you what to do, or has the right to tell you what to do.

And certainly now, and it seems we’re moving into this as a society, that now all of a sudden we’re going to be told as pastors what we can say and not say, and what we can do and not do. Let me give you an example. Five years ago, I was at a conference, a pastor’s conference in Frankenmuth.

Anyone been to Frankenmuth? I don’t know why we always have to have our conferences in Frankenmuth, other than there’s a lot of Lutherans in Frankenmuth. It’s like the Lutheran Mecca, I guess. So people just feel like that’s where you should go.

And we’re at this conference, and I really didn’t fully comprehend what we were going to be learning. And they brought in this high-powered lawyer from Chicago. And he’s presenting in front of all of these pastors.

And he said, guys, you need to prepare yourselves because number one, elections have consequences. And number two, there most likely will come a day and age in your ministry where you will probably have to stop doing weddings because laws will get passed and you will not have the ability to determine if you can do a wedding or not do a wedding. And the whole room gasped.

We’re like, what are you talking about? He said, they’re already preparing the documents. They’re already trying to figure out how to legislate this stuff so that the government can tell pastors and tell churches what they can and cannot do. And most likely the easy path is just to start with marriage and the sanctity of marriage and our view of marriage.

And so your parishioners will probably just have to go to the courthouse and get married by a judge. Or if you want to do secret weddings, spiritual weddings in the woods, but don’t ever sign a document because you don’t want anything tied back to you because you could be held liable and you could end up getting dragged through the courts. Is that crazy? Five years ago.

And that just popped into my head this week. And here’s the thing, what has been presented from this pulpit when it comes to the, to the sacredness of marriage that we believe, because God words tells us that marriage is between a man and a woman. And even saying that is like offensive to people.

Even saying that gets people uncomfortable. Like you can’t say that. Why can’t I? I’m not the one saying it.

God’s the one that’s saying it. And we just went through this. When we went through Genesis, I’ll tell you this.

We also don’t believe anybody should be living together before they get married. We don’t believe people should be having sex before they get married. And so what I mean with a couple that’s engaged, because that’s when I usually get them or Ben gets them or Eric’s about to get them and they come in and they tell us that guess what the first thing we tell them to do.

Not because we don’t want them to have fun or enjoy the pleasures. It’s because this is God’s guidance. This is where this is what God says.

And we don’t kick them out. We say, Hey, were you raised in the church? Were you raised in the church? And so often couples that are, they realize that what they’re doing is wrong. They always know it’s wrong.

If they’ve been raised in the church. And when you look him in the eyes and you say, okay, if you believe that what you were doing is wrong, what’s the next step. You confess, you give it to God.

And what does God do? Every single sin. He takes it from you. He cleanses you from all unrighteousness.

All right, you’re cleansed. It’s been paid for on the cross. Now what move out or stop, wait for your wedding day.

And if you can’t wait, go to the courthouse. I’ll do your wedding. Because right now we’re still not in that time yet.

We can just do it right now. And then you can have your wedding celebration whenever you want to do it. Do the right thing before the eyes of God, not before me, not before anybody else.

You’re doing this because this is what God’s word says. That’s what we preach. All of these things that is for rebuking, that is for correcting, that is to train us in righteousness and training is living the right way.

According to what God has for us, because he knows us and he knows what’s best for us. So that the servant of God, and this is really important because you and I, when we come into faith and come into contact with God, we are now his servant, that we come under his authority and his guidelines for our life. Man, if we believe that he’s the one that created us, how would he not have the best plan for our lives? Now, many of you know this verse.

Many of you expected this verse to be read when it came to this topic. But let me ask you this morning, how many of you know second Timothy chapter three, verse one? Look around the room. Nobody has it memorized.

We all know this one. And again, this is what’s so easy is you can take this scripture, right? We can, we can look at it. We can dissect it.

We can understand it. Now, what I want to do is I want you to see this scripture in its entire context, because this is what Paul tells Timothy first. Get out a pen and paper, mark this down.

And you tell me if this is true about our world today, there will be terrible times in the last days. Do the times seem like they’re getting better? Okay. Some of you are getting quiet.

Let’s see if this helps. People will be lovers of themselves. Got to make sure this is intact.

Lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited. I mean, what is he missing? And the grand finale here, right? Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Anybody want to admit that we fall into this all the time? The ways of the world, how easy it is to stay out of the local church, how easy it is to sit under the teaching of a Bible-believing, Bible-teaching church.

I don’t need that. My life’s great. Got a great job.

My family’s healthy. I got a little money in the bank account. What do I need God for? And yet our world around us continues to crumble.

Because if it was up to us, we would just kill each other. We need God. We need his divine grace and mercy in our lives.

And you can hear Paul’s heart in this as he’s inspired by the Holy Spirit to write this. You and personalize it to you. You, however, you know the teachings of Scripture.

You know the way of life that Paul lived and the way that he was converted and all that he went through. You know that his purpose and his faith and his patience and his love and his endurance, even the persecutions that we can read about is there was times that he would proclaim the gospel in the public square and they would pull him away and beat him to a pulp. The book of Acts tells us at one point his disciples, his followers, thought he was dead.

They beat him so severely, but never ever afraid to go back out and to share the love and the hope and the grace and the mercy because he knew who his God was and he knew that it was true. And he knew that that’s what changed hearts and lives. And then I got to this verse this week says, in fact, Timothy, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ, what does it say? And you know how easy this one is to skip over? Oh, yeah, persecution.

Yeah, that’s for them back then. Thanks for paving the way, guys. Thanks for being willing to take the hits.

Glad that we live in comfortable America now where we don’t have to worry about persecution. Until the events that keep happening in our society are played over and over again in our minds and the events of society are played right out in front of us on our TV screens and on our smartphones. And I know some of you, you came in here and you wondered, is he going to talk about Charlie Kirk this morning? And I am absolutely going to talk about Charlie Kirk this morning.

As I look at this verse, as I think about this man who loved Jesus with all of his heart. That felt his mission was to go and to share the gospel, specifically the college aged kids willing to enter into the debate. And he felt like that was a way to bridge the gap.

And you might be here and say, oh, well, some of his approach wasn’t, you know, the best. And some of his tactics weren’t the best. And sometimes he just came off really harsh and this and this and this and this.

Can I ask you for a moment? Can you rewind back to when you were 31 years old? If you knew 31 year old Tim Bollinger, I was very black and white, very black and white, a lot, a lot of things. And here is this vessel of God. That is primary reason for even going there was so that more and more people would come to the saving knowledge of Jesus.

And he’s brutally murdered for speaking the same things that we speak here on Sunday morning. Did you know that? In fact, let’s just go there for a moment. Let’s just put out all the hot topic, hot topic buttons that seem to really agitate people.

When I came back from sabbatical in 2022, I was back for two weeks and we were in the process. We were only a few weeks away from voting on prop three to make abortion a constitutional, a constitutional issue in our state. Do you guys remember that? And I was so upset and angry that I stood right here and I said, abortion is murder according to the word of God.

And I said, there’s no way that the church can stand still. We told you what to vote. We told you to vote no on prop three.

And people didn’t like that. Pastor shut up, pastor, stay out of politics. You shouldn’t be telling us what to do.

And I’m like, I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what God’s word says. Read Psalm 139.

You were formed in your mother’s womb. You were beautifully and wonderfully made. How in the world can we stand by and just be passive on that? I watched as five families left the church and wrote me these crazy letters and had all of these reasons about who I was and what I believed and how he drank the Kool-Aid and who my political party was.

I said, this has nothing to do with the political party. This has everything to do with standing up for the truth. How about this? When we went through and we said, guess what? There’s only two genders because God’s word says I created the male and female.

Here’s what society has done. They keep adding more and more. We don’t understand.

And we understand that there’s people caught in this lifestyle. And it’s not that we don’t love them. It’s not that we won’t hug them.

It’s not that we won’t serve them. It’s not that we won’t feed them. We just believe that God says there’s two genders.

We believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. Why Genesis? And then you have Jesus and Matthew that goes back and quotes Genesis and says, oh, by the way, marriage is between a man and a woman. And then he adds to the scripture and he can add to the scripture because he’s God.

And he says, let this union that’s existing right now, let no one separate this union except for me. We believe as a church that kids shouldn’t mutilate themselves if they think they were born the wrong gender, that our government shouldn’t be legislating things to give them permission to go around their parents’ backs. You want to do it as an adult.

We don’t want you to do that, but dear God, keep your hands off of our kids. All of these areas, controversial, all of these things that have been spoken over and over again, you can go back because here’s the reality. Everything that I’m saying to you right now is going into those cameras and anybody in the world could be live streaming right now.

People that don’t agree with this, people that think I’m full of angry people that I think that I’m full of hatred, people that think that I don’t love them or accept them. As soon as the service is over, my entire sermon is manuscripted and put on the internet. Anybody at any time could go back and get all of the data from my sermons and Ben’s sermons and anyone that has stood here and boldly proclaimed the word of God.

And this is the problem. This is where it became a reality this week is when I picked up my son from school. He’s 14 freaking years old and I pick him up from school and he’s already seen the video over and over and over again of Charlie Kirk being murdered.

And he looks at me and he says, dad, what’s going on? What did Charlie do? That was so bad. What did he say? This is where it gets personal folks. And I’m not a martyr.

Trust me. I’ve dealt with enough emails and people that disagree, which is fine. You want to go to a different church? That’s fine.

I know all the pastors in the church in the, in the area, but I know who I am as a pastor. I know what my convictions are. I know what this church stands for, but you can’t help in your human mind to go.

What’s next? Who’s the next conservative that’s going to get taken out? Who’s the next pastor? Is that what it’s going to be? We don’t have a right to say what we actually want to say from the pulpits in America, because someone on the other end disagrees. And so, because we disagree, we don’t deserve to be alive. And the weight that not only we carry, but our families carry, our spouses carry in this, anybody think of this can walk in the doors of our church, the back of the walls, I mean, that far away.

What are you going to do? Get metal detectors? Is that what it is? Is that what we’re coming to as a society? And now personalize it to you because it’s not just me or Ben or someone that’s in the position to preach this truth and to hold and stand firm to the truth of God’s word. It’s also you. It’s you in your family.

It’s you in your place of work where, oh, now all of a sudden I got to use these pronouns or I got to do this or I got to do that. Oh, I don’t know if I really want to pray before I eat lunch because somebody else might see me and then they’re going to think this about me. Oh, I really can’t speak up because my company keeps closing in more and more and regulating what I can say and not say.

That’s what we need to be conscious of. That’s what we need to lean hard into God and say, God, is this where we’re headed? Is this the persecution? Is this what’s going to be the next wave of what you have for your church? And God help us give us the strength to be able to stand boldly and declare your word without compromise, no matter the cost. So I want you to see what he says right before he gets to second Timothy three 16.

He says, these words, Timothy, you, you continue in what you have learned. You know how the Holy spirit has worked in your life. You know who you’ve learned it from.

You’ve learned it from me. You’ve learned it from your relatives. You’ve learned it from your church community, from infancy, credible that we had an infant baptism today from intimate from infancy.

You have known the Holy scriptures. And that is what is able to make you wise for salvation. This is the gospel.

Once again, this is God pointing us to the person and work of Jesus that God only by your grace and your mercy, or any of us standing here today in view of who you are and what it is that you have done in our lives. So what are we going to do church? What are we going to do in the days and the weeks and the months and the years ahead? We’re going to continue to open God’s word, which by the way, if you didn’t know our services from September to may our 70 minute services. Okay.

Surprise. Some of you are looking at your watches and given the times that we live in, it might be a good idea to just leave your watch and your smartphone in your car and come in here and care less about the lions and more about God’s word. And if you really care about the lions and come to the nine o’clock service, amen.

And you have plenty of time to watch them do whatever they’re going to do, but that we continue to allow God to speak deeply into our hearts and into our lives. He gives us instruction that he gives us the lessons and the teachings that he has, and not just for us, but for our children and our teenagers and our grandchildren and all of those who come after us. Amen.

Will you bow your heads and close your eyes with me this morning? Gracious heavenly father, God, we come before you. God, many of us just thrown off from all that’s transpired this last week. God, but what we’ve just been reminded of through your word and through pastor Tim, God, is that your word endures forever.

God, we pray now for all the victims of this last week, even the school and train and Charlie’s family as well. God, that you send the comforter, your Holy spirit, wrap them with your loving arms. God, give them us the hope of the resurrection that while they no longer see him here and now, because he professed faith in you, they will be reunited with him again.

And he is now in your presence, seeing you face to face. God, let us all be so bold to profess our faith just as he did in our homes, in our places of work, in our places of worship. God, that we would cling to you tightly just as he did.

We pray this all in Jesus name. Amen.