In a World of Lawlessness, BE KIND

Message Description:
Chaos and violence are exploding in a world that holds the law in contempt. How did this all start, and where is it heading? Dr. David Jeremiah shares answers that might just surprise you.

“Is Jesus truly preeminent in your life? Is He number one? If He’s “a good two or three,” there will be nothing victorious about your experience. In this careening culture and in these perilous days, we must say as never before: “All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give.”
― Dr. David Jeremiah, Where Do We Go from Here?: How Tomorrow’s Prophecies Foreshadow Today’s Problems

God’s love is not about warm thoughts and well wishes. It’s expressed through action to actually being kind.
It’s expressing God’s love through our daily attitudes and actions. We keep it fervent.
We keep it hard for the devil to blow his cold breath over our heart by doing the works that God caused us to do.
That’s the spirit. I’m recommending those of us who know God have embraced his love and we have to resist the urge to just become complacent and to say, oh, this world is going to hell in a handbasket.
There’s nothing I can do. Get me some food for this week, close the door and lock it.
I’m gonna just be my, you know what the Bible teaches us that these things that are happening are happening, not to make us feel better, but to make us be better.
And I don’t know about you. I have a passion in my heart. I want to be better.
I want to be better for God. I want to know Him better.
So embrace God’s kindness in your heart, expresses kindness and then embody it.
Are we living in the world of the end?
If So what does the Bible tell us about this time these days?
Of war, devastation, unrest, strife, deception and lawlessness.
Jesus has given us a prophecy to prepare us for what’s to come prophecies that should shape our priorities, define our character and help us thrive instead of just survive in these days of uncertainty.
He didn’t give us this information so that we would be afraid of what’s to come or be overwhelmed by the world of the end.
But Jesus gave us this message so we can face it with confidence and hope though the circumstances around us may seem dire and our future dim, they should make us stronger and better equipped to be a light in the world around us.

The world of the end in the past couple of decades, it has felt to many of us that our culture has been sliding down a slippery slope or perhaps even running headlong off a cliff.
There are days when it feels like the whole world is upside down, even lawless.
And it’s tempting to respond with anger and despair, apathy as we struggle to comprehend what we can and cannot do to stem the tide.
But God calls us to something greater. Hello, I’m David Jeremiah.
And in today’s message entitled In a World of Lawlessness Be kind, we’ll study Jesus countercultural instructions to his followers will discover how into this cold and cynical world.
We can carry the flame of truth and the fire of God’s relentless love and grace.
That kind of radical love is possible and it changes everything.
So please join me as we study together on today’s edition of turning point, just when people needed hope, God would send a baby, a king to offer a foretaste of a better future.
But why, why was a virgin chosen to be the mother of Jesus?
Why would an earthly man be chosen to raise a baby sent from heaven?
Why choose the lowliest of men to be the first to see the newborn king?
Why did kings come from the East to worship the king of the Jews?
Why Bethlehem?
And perhaps the most important question, why should we care?
And what should the baby in Bethlehem? Mean to me, I’m David Jeremiah.
Won’t you journey back with me to a far away place and to a time that might otherwise be forgotten.
This Christmas travel back in time as we answer the mystery, the meaning and the question, why the nativity Zaki on worry was 17.
He was good looking and athletic and a rising star on Afghanistan’s national soccer team.
He spent hours practicing every day trying to emulate his hero, Argentinian footballer, Lionel Messi.
He couldn’t get enough said his older brother, all he ever talked about. It’s all he did.
He was born after September the 11th.
So he didn’t remember the brutal state of the Taliban or the early chaos of the war in Afghanistan.
He grew up in Kabul and relative peace and prosperity thanks to the presence of American forces there.
When President Joe Biden announced that he would withdraw US troops from Afghanistan in August of 2021, Zaki felt apprehensive.
He had heard reports of the Taliban heading toward Kabul and as the Afghan resistance collapsed, he feared for his family, he feared for his future.
But most of all, he grieved the loss of becoming a soccer star.
The Taliban banned most sports instead of rounding up young men for sports.
They force them to participate in the religious rituals and live under strict control.
It was on August 16 that Zacky went to the international airport with his older brother and a cousin who had worked for the American company to attempt to secure passage out of Afghanistan.
There had already been one suicide bombing in the city. People were beginning to feel panicked.
The Taliban forces were close, nearly surrounding the city.
The US backed government was showing more and more signs of imminent collapse.
The plan was for Zacky to watch the car while the older men negotiated. But Zacky couldn’t wait.
He jumped the fence and entered the airport And it’s not clear what happened next.
But at some point, he made his way onto the Tarmac as a US Air Force C17 prepared to take off.
He ran toward the plane, he raced alongside the aircraft, he was knocked off balance and fell under the wheel.
Among his final known words were pray for me. I’m going to America but he never made it.
He was killed in the accident.
And the question that comes to our mind when we hear a story like that, we’re not surprised because we watched it.
We saw it on TV. Why would anyone run alongside an airplane as it’s taking off?
Why would anybody do that? And the only reason they would do it is out of desperation, rising terror in the heart, lawlessness, violence, chaos, brutality.
Any of those words will do in all of them, describe our world today.
We see it most vividly in our failed states such as Yemen and Somalia and Syria and yes, Afghanistan where law and order have collapsed and extremists fill the void, fomenting hatred and exporting terror.
It’s difficult for you and me to understand the gruesome life that befalls people that don’t live in a place like we do.
Most of us in America in the west. We, we feel relatively safe.
We elect leaders who say they’re going to uphold the law.
We have law enforcement agencies and emergency response systems populated by millions of good and decent people.
But something is changing.
Our police officers have been so vilified by the media that they’re finding it hard to do their jobs.
Politicians curb law enforcement budgets and prosecutors release people who are arrested the next day with open borders.
It’s difficult to control human smugglers and sex traffickers and dangerous drugs.
Our Western nations have become so divided that we never know what’s gonna happen next.
What will provoke rioting in our streets and violence in our neighborhoods? What is happening to us?
The answer is just what Jesus said would happen in his discourse with his disciples.
Listen to his words in the 12 verse of Matthew 24 because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.
All you have to do is watch the news every single day.
There’s something on the news about lawlessness, about the law no longer being obeyed, about people no longer paying a penalty for their crimes.
Scenes of terrible things happening. Oh You say Pastor Jeremiah? There’s always been, yes, that’s true.
We’ve always had people that want to break the law, but we’ve always had people that stood behind the law and made sure if they did, they paid a penalty for it today.
The law means almost nothing in some places and that people are being more and more liberated to do whatever they want to do without penalty.
Jesus said that in the days before I return, lawlessness will abound and the love of many will grow cold.
Let’s talk for just a moment about this world of lawlessness.
If you remember the birth pangs principle where things start and then they get more intense and they get more close together.
That’s kind of what happens. Lawlessness starts and then it becomes more lawlessness and more lawlessness, closer together and more intense lawlessness.
So you ask yourself what’s going on in our world, what’s going on in our world is sin is just exploding everywhere.
And we have no answer to that.
Apart from the forgiveness of Almighty God, we have no way to curb that with our plans and our policies.
We curb it over here and it breaks out over here because the issue isn’t what people are doing.
The issue is why they’re doing it because we’re broken and we’re sinful and without the forgiveness of God to make us whole again, we do these things that we can explain.
Jesus knew that. Look again at Matthew 24 12, he said, lawlessness will abound and the love of many will grow cold and the Bible says, wickedness will increase.
When Jesus said that he was describing more than the absence of laws or law enforcement.
His words called to mind periods of human history that were defined by chaos and disorder like the dark ages, for example, or the bloody legacy of the first half of the 20th century or as I said earlier today, failed states and terrorist havens.
But the lawlessness that Jesus pointed to at the world of the end will be exponentially worse than anything we have ever witnessed before.
If you watch carefully, what is happening today and it’s not just in Somalia and Afghanistan, what’s happening today in our own country.
There’s an awful lot of this inversion going on.
So we have to look at this world today in our own lives and try to find a point where we can put the stake down in the ground and say this is the truth and we won’t move from that.
And Jesus said is closer to the time when I come back, this is what it’s going to be like.
People will say good is evil and evil is good and they will glory in their shame.
Society is moving ever closer to the world of the end.
And we feel the currents of the tribulation blowing backward into our own cultures.
As never before, we need to be able to articulate biblical positions on moral issues without confusing or reversing right and wrong.
And it’s never before. We need to understand that the growing insanity in our world isn’t primarily a political or a military problem.
It’s a spiritual problem. The further our world strays from Christ, the closer it drifts toward cruelty and chaos and wickedness.
And Jesus said it will increase.
You put God out of the schools, you put prayer out of the schools and then you wonder why the schools have been shot up wherever you take God away, wherever you take Jesus away, wherever you push him to the perimeter, you leave a vacuum and that vacuum is always filled, not with good, but with evil.
And Jesus said, that’s what’s going to happen.
He’s not telling that to us because he wants it to happen because he knows it’s going to happen.
And then the Bible says when this wickedness increases love will grow cold. That’s an interesting thing.
The growing wickedness will cause the love of many to grow cold.
The N I V version of this particular versus it, this way, the love of most will grow cold.
And that phrase is a translation of the Greek word psycho, P S Y C H O.
The word from which we get our word psyche and psychology.
I want you to notice here in Matthew 24 12, the word is literally used in the sense of blowing air across something.
Think of your coffee when it’s too hot to drink. What do you do?
You blow on it, allowing the air to stir the top of the liquid, cooling it just a bit.
That’s the word Matthew used as the winds of lawlessness blow across our world.
It chills our love and the world becomes a colder place. That’s what’s happening.
If you need more evidence, think of the loneliness and lost nous of multitudes of people around us.
A recent study concluded that 36% of all Americans experience serious loneliness.
This includes a whopping 61% of young adults, 61% of our young adults are lonely.
Look at the rise of diseases of despair over recent decades, including addiction, anxiety, depression, suicide, and more.
All of these are skyrocketing in America and across the world.
In fact, the medical journal BMJ recently conducted a review of health insurance claims between 2009 and 2018 and they found a 68% increase in diseases of despair on a broad level during that time.
And that was before COVID and COVID has spiked them.
So this is what Jesus is telling us the world will be like.
And we know he was telling the truth because we live in that world and I may have pushed the limits a little bit today to get your attention.
But every one of you know, I’m telling the truth, this is the way it is.
And I try to make this as clear as I can.
So that what I’m about to tell you will mean the most that it can.
What do we do about people who are lawless and loveless?
Well, the first thing I want to say, don’t be that way, don’t be lawless and don’t be loveless.
That’s a pretty good start. It’s difficult to watch the world disconnect from God, isn’t it?
Humanity slide toward lawlessness and loveless. Nous is painful.
We feel a jolt when forces corrupt the institutions and customs we’ve cherished for so long.
The darkness seems to be deepening over our culture like the edge of night, but we are not powerless you.
We are Children of God were without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.
And in this generation, we shine as lights in the world holding fast the word of life.
One of the biggest ways we can make a difference is by bringing back a revolutionary concept called kindness, which in many ways is the anecdote to lawlessness.
We have limited ability to control the lawlessness and loveless nous in our society, but we can control how we respond to it.
Remember I told you at the beginning of this series that some people pray, Lord change the circumstances so I can feel better.
And the Lord says, no, I’m gonna use the circumstances to make you be better.
And I think that’s what’s happening to us.
Now, I know that as I see these things happening in the world and I see them as you do.
I don’t feel so much anger about it, but I feel Lord, how can I be the person I ought to be in the midst of this.
Everybody is looking for hope and we have the hope of Christ.
We need to turn our candles up higher and shine brighter.
We live in a dark world, but we are here on purpose.
God could have put us down in any generation. He wanted to.
But he plopped us down in this one in this particular generation that seems to be coming unglued and we are the light of the world.
Jesus is the light of the world. But before he went back to heaven.
He pointed to us and he said, you are the light of the world.
So before we can ever be purveyors of kindness, we have to embrace it ourselves.
So let me ask you this question. Do you embrace the kindness of God towards you?
God said, I’m going to love my Children. How shall I tell them? I know what I’ll do.
I’ll send him my only son to die for them so that they won’t misunderstand the depth of my love.
I know many people who listen to me today, who’ve been jolted by life and you’ve never had the human love.
You needed many in my generation growing up had that situation with our parents.
Wasn’t that they didn’t love us.
They just didn’t know how to say it or didn’t think it was right to say it.
And if you don’t have love from your parents, especially if it’s the father and the family, the father and the family is the He’s the metaphor for your heavenly father.
If my human father doesn’t express love to me, how do I know my heavenly Father loves me?
And that kind of works in your soul to all of you here today, God loves you.
Like you cannot imagine, maybe you wonder if somebody else loves you.
Maybe you wondered if God loves you, but I’m here to tell you on the authority of the bible.
God loves you. He always has. He always will He isn’t just about love.
He is love and that love extends to you.
So before you can ever express love to anybody else, on behalf of God, you have to accept that God loves you.
You cannot give to somebody what you don’t have on a practical level.
Men and women, our sense of God’s love deepens as we spend time with him.
And many of you know what I’m saying?
You’ve had moments when you’ve been reading the Bible or listening to a worship song or just praying and you can almost reach out and touch the Lord.
It feels like he’s right there. Now, let me ask you this question.
Does God get closer to us at one time than he is at another? No, he’s omnipresent.
It’s that we feel his love.
It’s the things that happen to us in our life that caused us to be sensitive to what’s already there.
God loves you. He actually loves you more than you can imagine. And maybe you don’t realize it.
But when you go through stress, if you’re a believer and you’re in the word of God, and you know, the Holy Spirit is in control of your life, the things you experience will make you aware of what’s already true.
You are loved by Almighty God. He loves you desperately.
And because that’s true because you are embracing God’s kindness. Now, you can express it.
Now, you can share that kindness with others when we embrace God’s love, it becomes natural to express it in many ways.
Kindness as God’s love expressed through action, nothing is more obvious in the Bible than God’s command to love the world in tangible ways such as providing a cup of cold water.
In jesus’ name to the thirsty.
The leaders of Bear Creek community church in Lodi California took on the task of expressing God’s kindness.
They felt a burden to help provide safe water to impoverished parts of the world.
The project wasn’t in the church’s budget and so many of the congregations, families were already under financial strain.
So who took up the challenge? The children’s ministry did.
There’s a strong recycling emphasis in California and the Children began collecting bottles and cans to bring with them to church.
Other congregations started to rally to the cause in which you believe it so far, they’ve raised almost $1 million dollars for clean water projects around the world.
And Michael Mantle described this wonderful news.
He said, Jesus turned water into wine, the kids at Bear Creek, turn garbage into water.
That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about us being channels of the love of God.
We aren’t supposed to just get loves from God and start we’re not a reservoir were a channel God loves us and he wants to love the world through us.
He wants his love to come through us and we become his hands and his feet and his eyes and his hugs to the people around us.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out everywhere you go in your neighborhood, among your friends.
If you just say, Lord today help me to see the needs of people that I might be able to help and he will show you and you will have a list, you will be able to keep up with.
The fact of the matter is over the years, we have trained ourselves to blind ourselves to the needs around us, to live in our own little world, to pull the mode up in our house when we go home at night and not to see what’s going on.
And today in our world, more than ever before, there are people who are just waiting for someone to share with them because you see, people don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care.
And when you help them with their physical need, they will listen to you when you try to help them with their spiritual need.
The Bible teaches us that these things that are happening are happening, not to make us feel better, but to make us be better.
And I don’t know about you. I have a passion in my heart. I want to be better.
I want to be better for God. I want to know Him better.
So embrace God’s kindness in your heart, expresses kindness and then embody it.
How do we pour out kindness in a world that’s defined by lawlessness.
There’s no better solution than just to be known as a kind person.
A gracious person, a loving person.
What if you and I were to reflect God’s love to such a degree that the world around us said?
Oh, you know that guy? Oh, my goodness, you should meet him. He’s the kindest person I ever met.
Oh, you know her, I’ll tell you if you go near her and you whisper that you got something wrong in your life, she’ll be at your house with something to help you.
I mean, she’s just the kindest, most loving person you ever met. Don’t you just kind of in your heart?
Wish you could be like that. I mean, people are gonna talk about you anyway.
Why don’t you figure out how they can talk about you and talk about you in a good way, right?
Give them something good to talk about in the world frozen from lawlessness and the lack of love you.
And I have the opportunity to radiate spiritual warmth that comes with the gospel, the warmth of community, the warmth of kindness, the warmth of fellowship, the warmth of intimacy with our creator.
We may not be able to control what’s happening in our world.
We wish we could, but we can’t, I can’t do anything about the lawlessness that’s in our country right now.
I don’t have that kind of power, but I do have power over me by the spirit of God.
And I can use what I see around me.
That’s so wrong to ask God to make me so right to make me the kind of person that people will say.
He’s kind, he’s gracious, he cares, there’s something different about that person.
And then the Bible says that as we do that as a church, we become like a city on a hill.
We must never forget what God has called us to do.
When He sets before us an agenda, we must follow it.
We must do it with all of our hearts because God has called us in a world of darkness to be light.
Let me ask you this question. Is He the light of your life.
Jesus Christ comes and offers himself to us.
He wants to come and live within us and take the darkness away, become the light of our life.
If you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, if He’s not the light of your life, there’s no way for you to shine to anybody else.
You cannot give away what you don’t possess. So let me ask you this question.
Are you a Christian? Is Jesus Christ the light of your life?
And if He’s not, wouldn’t you like him to be Dr Jeremiah will return in a moment with one more inspirational word to close today’s program right after this, just when people needed hope, God would send a baby a king to offer a foretaste of a better future.
But why, why was a virgin chosen to be the mother of Jesus?
Why would an earthly man be chosen to raise a baby sent from heaven?
Why choose the lowliest of men to be the first to see the newborn king?
Why did kings come from the East to worship the king of the Jews?
Why Bethlehem?
And perhaps the most important question, why should we care?
And what should the baby in Bethlehem? Mean to me, I’m David Jeremiah.
Won’t you journey back with me to a far away place and to a time that might otherwise be forgotten.
This Christmas travel back in time as we answer the mystery, the meaning and the question, why the nativity?
And now with one last word for today’s program here is Dr Jeremiah.
When we think of infections, we think of bacteria and viruses, but societies can also be infected with lawlessness.
And Jesus said that evil will increase in the world of the end and as lawlessness increases, love will decrease, it is up to us to respond to that infection.
What is the antidote to lawlessness? Jesus called it the law of love.
We can only learn to love by receiving God’s unconditional love for us as found in Jesus Christ to love like Christ.
We have to know Christ and I would love to send you two free gifts from turning point that will introduce you to Jesus Christ and his love one is a booklet called Your Greatest Turning Point and the other is our monthly devotional magazine called Turning Points.
Will send them to you immediately free of charge if you will just contact us here at Turning Point. Today.
Next time on Turning Point, the gospel that you and I have in our lives, in our hearts, in our hands is the only message of hope for the world in which we live.
Thank you for being with us today. Join Dr Jeremiah.
Next time for his message in a world of bad news.
The good news here on turning point.