Dr. David Jeremiah – A Biographical Prophecy of End Times

God puts dreams in our hearts bigger than what we can accomplish on our own. This is where faith kicks in. You have to pray bold prayers and believe for uncommon resources, out of the ordinary increase, so you can accomplish what God put in your heart.

It’s not our talkativeness that impresses God when we pray nor the speed of our prayers. It’s the faith behind them, the certain confidence that He will respond to our prayers. When we sincerely bring our needs and burdens to Him and pray with perseverance, He will always answer in the wisest possible way. His answer may not always be what we envision, but that’s where faith comes in. First, we trust God to answer; second, we trust His answer to be what is best in the situation.

Sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison.
And shortly thereafter, he was on a prison plane Handcuff shackled, heading to a federal penitentiary, he was only twenty three years old, and his life was growing worse and worse.
By the day. Now if you stay with me, I’ll tell you what happened to him at the end of my message.
But his story raises questions for all of us. Why do people go the wrong way?
Or in a broader sense, why do good people do bad things?
For 1000 years, people have been debating those sociologists and lay people expend huge amounts of air and ink trying to determine if human beings are basically good or fundamentally evil.
According to Scripture, sin is the fundamental problem of every person.
Romans 310 says, no one is righteous, not even one. No one is truly wise.
No one is seeking god all have turned away. All have become useless.
No one does good, not a single one. That’s from the new living translation.
Our problem then isn’t just that we live in a sinful world, which we do, but that we live in a world full of sinful people.
Because our sin affects everything in our lives.
The Bible makes it clear that we are all corrupted by sin.
Every one of us that corruption entered our bloodstream through Adam and Eve, who rebelled against god in his garden, and the blood disease of sin has descended through the generations, and it affects all of us today, the Bible says, therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin and thus death spread to all men because all sin.
Because we have been stained by sin in this way, every one of us.
The Bible says, there is none righteous, no, not one. We cannot produce anything good on our own.
Collectively, individually, without me, you can do nothing, Jesus said.
So the blood of Christ and the spirit of god must unleash their power in our lives god can come into a prison cell.
He can take the life of a person who’s going the wrong way and totally changing but only god can do that.
There’s no other program that you can go to.
God is the only one who can offset the impact of original sin, sin that started in the garden.
So what that means is you and I live in this war zone. We call planet Earth.
We’re pushed and pulled between goodness and evil between love and hate between creation and destruction.
You and I are Christ followers in a fallen world.
That has been true for god’s people throughout all the centuries. But can you feel it?
Can you sense it? Something is changing. The bad is getting worse.
Godlessness is overtaking every institution every platform, every square inch of our culture, because something in us is broken, We live in a world of sinful people.
Better said we live in a world of broken people.
And the brokenness is becoming everywhere more evident to us as time goes by.
What does this mean?
Well, I wanna show you a prediction about the last days that will put all of this into prophetic context I want to quote from a letter written by another prisoner, this one on death row, and he wasn’t there for robbing banks.
He was there for preaching the gospel.
The apostle Paul wrote his final letter to Timothy from a Roman cell, near the end of his letter he drew a surprisingly detailed picture of how people will behave just prior to the lord’s return and the beginning of the tribulation period.
So I’m gonna read that letter and see if you don’t resonate with what he said.
2nd Timothy 3, 1 through 5, But know this, that in the last days, perilous times will come for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, crowd, blast fevers, disobedient to parents, ful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slandererers, without self control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of god having a form of godliness, but denying its power.
And then if you jump down in this passage to the 13th verse, here’s what it says, evil men and impostors, will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.
So we’re not just imagining this, What’s happening right now isn’t just something that, oh, I, I, I haven’t known many evil people before, so maybe I’m just meeting more right now.
No, the Bible says, that there will be a trajectory toward the coming of Christ when sinful people will be more sinful, evil people will be more evil and difficulty in relationships and all the rest will be more profound.
Worse and worse, the scripture says, With those three short words, Paul predicted people will descend into a rampant and accelerating godlessness as we approach the tribulation.
Please note the apostle’s focus is not on bad times, but on bad people.
As John Calvin wrote, many, many years ago, The hardness or danger of this time is in Paul’s view to be not war, not famine or diseases, nor any of the calamities or Ils that befall the body, but the wicked and depraved ways of man.
You know, it’s an interesting thing.
Nobody knows how good a person can be, and nobody knows how bad a person can be.
Paul gave us 19 specific character descriptions of what people will be like.
In other words, here in 2nd Timothy 3, the lord gives us 19 expressions to depict the nature of godlessness in the last days.
The things we should expect and not be surprised by I can’t bore in all the 19 words, and I’m not going to do a 19 word, word study.
But I can show you a pattern in Paul’s words that move from selfish people to splintered families to shattered societies.
1st of all, selfish people.
Right front, the lord tells us that the last days will be populated by people who are lovers of themselves, narcissistic people.
People who see themselves in the mirror and applaud.
According to Paul, the days before the tribulation will be perilous because people will love only themselves.
They will, according to the scripture, be boasters and proud and blasphemers.
These people love to talk about themselves and to build themselves up.
Such people want everyone else to love them as much as they love themselves. They write their own press reports.
They pad their own resumes. When you finally meet the person in question, you hardly recognize them.
These are proud or haughty people, which means they’re stainful toward other people looking down on others comes as naturally to them as it does to a pigeon on top of a statue.
Perhaps nothing represents this attitude better than social media.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram allow us to constantly crow about our own success while simultaneously slashing away at the achievements of other people.
Often through anonymous comments and online bullying, social media is a stronghold for selfish people.
Unfortunately, selfish people rarely keep to themselves.
You watch what’s going on right now, in our culture and how we are treating one another.
I saw, on television, the story of a restaurant, and they closed the restaurant and said on the restaurant closed, And down at the bottom, it said, for kindness day.
And, and the story was that people came into that restaurant and treated the people that were working there so badly yelled at them, hollered at them, sometimes physically wanted to abuse them, that the owner said, no, you’re not doing that to my people.
And even though he’s trying to come back from COVID and get his feet back on the ground, actually.
He shut the restaurant down as a protest against the ugliness of the people who were coming into a store.
Well, selfish people end up being a part of splintered families.
People will focus less on their loved ones their time, energy and passion will be tied up in themselves.
And the result was in the days prior to the tribulation will be strewn. With broken homes.
And he uses 5 descriptions.
These 5 descriptions highlight the damage that broken people perpetuate on their own families in the last days.
It says they are disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, and unforgiving.
Those are the five things that are in the text.
And I want you to know that when ancient Greek writers wanted to say something negative, they took a positive word and put a letter in front of it called the alpha primitive.
The alpha negated the positive word.
You see the principle in English when we say something is distasteful.
We take the word tasteful, and we put a prefix in front of it, and that prefix negates the word.
All five of Paul’s terms about the family included in the paragraph are alpha primitives.
All five describe a positive attitude that has vanished from most families during the last days.
Children will be disobedient willfully.
They will do what they want to do, casting off oversight and authority they will ignore the instruction of scripture that says, children obey your parents in the lord for this is right, They will be ungrateful.
Gone will be a thankful spirit between children and their parents, and that lack of gratitude will extend to other relationships.
The third word is unholy. In this context, that implies lack of respect.
There will be no respect within the structure of the framework of the family.
The pictures of someone who throws off the oversight at all levels of authority and harbors a growing sense of rebellion and independence.
Next we come to the word unloving.
Normal human relationships will be destroyed and broken. And affected and wither away.
The word here is translated elsewhere in the new testament as heartless.
Homes will become hard places ruined by harsh hearts, and it’ll spill over into the whole society.
And the final word is unforgiving, which could also mean truth breaker.
This refers to people whose rebellion becomes stubborn and hard, harded.
The root of bitterness within them grows into an emotional forest of poisonous trees bearing toxic fruit.
And the lack of capacity to forgive others means they live as though they themselves could never be forgiven for all the harm they’ve done.
By now, you may be wondering, is this going to keep getting worse and worse?
Is this going to be a whole negative sermon? No. Let’s take a breath of fresh air.
Let’s take a moment and turn this around.
If the ungodly world is characterized by these negatives, how should god’s people live in the midst of it all?
It’s very simple. Our grammar has to change we should leave off the alpha primitive.
In Christ, it’s not appropriate to negate a virtue.
Our homes should be filled with obedience between children and parents.
Families should be filled with gratitude and defined by respect they should exude a natural love and affection, and we should be able to trust each other.
We have to work hard to avoid the alpha primitive lifestyle.
You’ve probably never heard that word before, but here’s a new term. Don’t be an alpha primitive family.
Don’t be a family that negates all the virtues that you’ve been given by almighty god.
We must be doggedly committed to biblical marriages and kingdom families Whatever has happened to you in the past, start where you are today.
And with god’s help, make your home a place that’s indwelled by the lord Jesus Christ.
Make it a Christian home. So are you getting this picture?
When you have selfish people, they end up creating splintered families. And splintered families create shattered societies.
Now, I’m gonna do something right now that I I’ve fought with myself all week as to whether I should do this or not.
So I’m not really sure whether I should do it, but I’m gonna do it.
So One of my favorite preachers is Tony Evans. I love Tony Evans.
Believe it or not, when I was, when I graduated from seminary, I went back and I taught some postgraduate courses and Tony Evans was in my class.
My great, my great claim to fame was I was Tony Evans teacher for 1 semester.
And so everything good about him, he learned from somebody else. If he’s messing up, it’s my fault.
You know that, don’t you? Toni and his family have been friends of ours for so many years, and I love to hear this man preach because what an orator he is.
When he goes off on one of his orations, he just fell behind you.
And I heard one in one of his messages recently that totally illustrates what I’m talking about, and I can’t be tony Evans, so don’t get your expectations up.
But I’m gonna tell you what he said. Here’s what he said.
If you’re a messed up man and you have a family, you’re gonna help make a messed up family.
If you’re a messed up man contributing to a messed up family and your messed up family goes to church, then your messed up family is gonna make its contribution to a messed up church.
If you’re a messed up man contributing to a messed up family resulting in a messed up church causing a messed up neighborhood and your neighborhood’s part of a city Well, you messed up neighborhood’s gonna make its contribution to a messed up city.
If you’re a messed up man contributing to a messed up family resulting in a messed up church causing a messed up neighborhood that resides in a messed up city that’s part of a messed up county, and your county is part of the state well, your messed up county is gonna make its contribution to a messed up state.
If you’re a messed up man contributing to a messed up family resulting in a messed up causing a messed up neighborhood that resides in a messed up city that’s part of a messed up county contributed to a messed up state, and your state’s part of the country will guess what?
Your messed up state’s gonna make its contribution to your messed up nation.
And if you’re a messed up man contributing to a messed up family, resulting in a messed up church, causing a messed up neighborhood that resides in a messed up city that’s part of a messed up county that’s contributing to a messed up state.
Your messed up country is gonna make contribution to a messed up world. So do you get that?
I wish I could do it like him, but I can’t.
But I love the way he does it and love most of all his point.
It starts with individuals, doesn’t it? We look around and say, oh, this my church is a mess.
Well, You probably had something to do with that. Right?
If you’re looking for a perfect church, you can find it, don’t go there because you mess it up.
You know, we’re always looking for some corporate answer to the problems, but the problems are ours.
Our families are what we create them to be. Our counties or what we allow them to be.
Our cities are it’s all about us.
So unless we’re willing to take insight on ourselves, we don’t have much of a chance to get better, do we?
So we have selfish people. We have families.
That reflect on the selfishness of the people in them.
And then those families go into churches and cultures and societies, and the society becomes what the family is.
So what do we do with that?
I mean, in this message series, I’ve been trying to tell you here’s where we are, Here’s what that means.
And where do we go from here?
So how do Christians live in such a place where selfishness reigns and immorality increases, how can we be different kind of end times people in a broken world?
Let’s take a page from Benjamin Franklin.
In his autobiography, Franklin described the darkness that filled the streets of Philadelphia during his day.
It was pitch black at night and people were sleeping on the streets and they were stepping into mud puddles and stumbling over rough stones and even worse crime was growing.
Well, since it’s safe to be out after sunset.
So Franklin waged an intense campaign to persuade everyone delight the area around their own house, but he got nowhere.
Finally, he just did it himself. But only in front of his own house.
He planted a pole in front of his porch with a kerosene light on top of the pole.
That night in the city of Philadelphia, there was one house bathed in warm glow.
The lamp cast light on the street, giving passerby’s a feeling of well-being and safety.
But the next night, another house had a lamp, and then another, and pretty soon, almost the whole city was lighting the walkways in front of their houses at night.
Franklin learned something. He learned that our example is often greater than our words and our admonitions.
And that’s what we need to learn.
With that in mind, I want to lift you out of 2nd Timothy and take you to Ephesians 5, and this is the passage that says, for you were once darkness, but now you are light in the lord.
That sentence is short enough to memorize, but it’s powerful enough to illuminate the pathways around your life.
First of all, you need to remember the grace that you received.
How do we walk in the light when our society is defined by end times people?
How do you be a Christian if you’re surrounded by people who are doing the kinds of things we’re watching right now, literally destroying the fabric of our country.
Well, you have to experience god’s grace to an encounter with the lord Jesus Christ.
Metaphores involving light, pervades scripture, and Ephesians 58 describes the difference that comes over us when we have grace spiritually morally, personally, and eternally in pitch blackness.
But the moment we come to Christ, he pushes down the lever that connects us to the throne of grace, and he switches on a billion megawatts of light inside of our souls.
That experience is so vivid that many Christians describe their moment of grace in bright terms.
So first of all, remember your salvation. Remember the grace she received.
Remember that, but for the grace of god, you would be a part of this culture doing the things that right now are so hurtful to you without Jesus Christ in your life.
You are capable. I am capable of all those things that we watch.
That are just making us shake our heads.
Number 2, reflect the light that you have become.
That brings us to our next tactic for living in these dark times. We have to exude god’s light.
We have to convey it. We have to reflect it. We have to radiate it.
That’s what we read in Ephesians 58.
Walk as children of light for the fruit of the spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth finding out what is acceptable to the lord.
Men and women, I am concerned about the way this present darkness is casting the shadow over many churches and over many Christians.
Too many people in our community of faith are trying to blend the light and the darkness.
So they can kinda come up with a grayness in their life. And that doesn’t work.
It’s a devilish lie to believe that we can be Christians without being different and distinct from the world.
You can’t, and you can’t marry the world so that you’d be more acceptable to them.
A lot of my younger friends who are pastors are doing that now with many of the social issues that we’re facing in this country.
As followers of Jesus, we have left the kingdom of darkness, and we are now children of light.
So now we must walk. We must live as children of light.
We have this ceremony here on Christmas Eve that’s always so meaningful to me, and I know it’s more meaningful to me than anybody else because I get this done up here.
And watch all of you light your candles. It starts out just like it in Ben Franklin’s story.
It starts out with my grandson who’s been walking down that aisle now for over 12 years in bringing me the original candle.
And I take that original candle with that light and I light all of the server and little by little, they liked the rose in this building, and 2, and it’s all done.
You look up, and this room is full of life. The light has dispelled the darkness.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re only one candle each of us.
But the Bible says when you have a city on a hill, where all the candles are lit, no one can deny the truth.
So the most important thing we can do as Christians in the darkness of our time is to let our light so shine that men will see us, and they will give glory to the father.
Castlefield Church is in the center of Derby UK as a section on its website for its members to share how they found the light of Christ.
So here’s one that showed up on that website.
Amanda grew up without a Christian background, except for a great aunt who would talk about the lord and give out bibles.
And when Amanda was 25, She was studying at a university feeling very depressed and having trouble finding employment.
One night, she was walking home on a cold February evening. She heard someone singing behind her.
He was singing loudly. Amanda turned around and said, Why are you so happy?
He said, I’m praising the lord. He makes me so happy. Turns out the man was a Nigerian evangelist.
And over time, he answered Amanda’s questions, he gave her literature, pointed her to the passages of scripture, explained the gospel simply through his words so that she can understand it.
And one evening, she said, something supernatural happened. A light switched on.
And I believed Jesus had died on the cross for my sins, and it all became so personal.
I gave my life to Jesus that February night in 1998, and Jesus became my lord and savior.
Note that phrase. A light switched on. How many of you can say today?
I remember the day when the light switched on. Can you say men? Amen.
When I read that story, I could almost hear that Nigerian evangelist singing as he walked through the dark streets of Derby, His faith lit up the sidewalk, and he was living out the words of Christ, who says to us that we are the light of the world, and a city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.
Finally, remember the grace you receive reflect the light you’ve become and revealed the darkness that you see.
The ephesians passage goes on to tell us something else, have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them for it is shameful, even to speak of those things, which are done by them in secret.
But all things that are exposed and are made manifest by the light for whatever makes manifest is light.
Therefore, he says, awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.
If you turn over a brick on a bright day,