For more than a century, American Christians have shown little interest in repenting of a very clever form of idolatry. Evangelicalism has created ingenious religious reasons to avoid doing the right thing. Instead, we do the selfish, convenient, popular or affluent thing that gives us a carnal sort of security.  James knew this would be a temptation to believers, and in perhaps the first written message to the early churches, James addresses this with grim warnings, and he outlines the path to the righteous alternative expected of a true follower of Jesus Christ.  We must not be spiritually satisfied with the kind of Christian playground we have created.  

The doctrine of repentance cannot be fully understood without taking an honest look at the scriptures Scott Brown has identified for this conference. And I'm really thankful to Scott for letting me speak to James 4.17. Let's pray together and begin. Our Father in heaven, there are many things we know intellectually about who you are and how we should respond to you and your love and your holiness. And we confess today it's easier to hide from you than to draw near to you because of ongoing sin issues that we simply will not mortify in our lives.

For thus says the Lord God in Isaiah 30, the Holy One of Israel. In repentance and rest you will be saved. In quietness and trust is your strength. But you were not willing. And our Father, we say and we pray this morning, where we are unwilling, we ask you to be patient with us as you inspire us to be more willing.

Use these scriptures, we pray, we study now to change us through and through. In Jesus' name, amen. On 9-11, 2001, I was in New Zealand when the Twin Towers and the other buildings came down in New York City. The first news said that Americans understood it to be a jihad launched by Osama bin Laden. Muslims worldwide understood that too and rejoiced.

The immediate response of many Americans was to shudder and to admit that God was doing something by way of judgment to get our attention because of our great national sin. And I heard news that there were calls for national repentance going out on September 11th, going out on September 12th, But by September 13th, and this is the stories we were getting down in New Zealand, those requests, those calls, those reports had been replaced with another explanation. America wasn't actually at fault. It's what was being interpreted now. America wasn't at fault.

It wasn't at fault after all. It was our enemies who simply hated us because we were righteous. And the solution to this act, this act of terrorism, was not there for repentance, but the puffing out of proud American breasts along with some tough military retaliation. Now my message today to American Christians is that American Christians as a corporate entity and listen to me very carefully here, we're strangers to biblical repentance that have been for two centuries. Real, true biblical repentance, and I'm talking about American Christians as a corporate entity in this nation.

We have been largely unwilling to respond to God in repentance and in trust, in faith, in rest, in broken spiritedness, and yet we want God to be pleased with us. Now here's the theological challenge that we must address and I intend to here in the next hour. True biblical repentance is completely impossible if sin cannot be defined and identified and hated the way God hates it and the way God identifies it and the way God terms it. And then we have to study the fact that true biblical obedience is impossible if the will of God is ignored or cleverly disdained by large sections of professing Christians. And so we Americans have maintained, and this is the point I'm making, for one century going on two centuries, Americans have maintained a self-righteous, comfortable version of Christianity that we created in America, that we developed, and which by our clever definition doesn't even require true biblical repentance because of how we see ourselves.

Now my first experience with this sin, and it is a sin, was in 1975. I was a new convert to Christianity in that year. And I was trying to figure out Christianity not only from Scripture but how Bible-believing Christians who were born again in my country were living out their faith, practically being filled with the Holy Spirit, following after Christ, clinging to him, walking with him. What did that really look like? Well, I had my scriptures, but I wanted to see it lived out in reality, and so I circulated among the Christian community eager to find out what it would be like.

And in that year, 1975, it was the eve of America's 200th Independence Day celebration. American evangelicals were getting ready to commemorate 1776 and the bravery of the men who declared independence, our Christian forefathers. Now one theme for the commemoration, it was probably the main theme in the main verse that I heard, was from 2 Chronicles 7.14. If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and heal their land." Now, I was really impressed that Christians were bringing this up, And I was even more impressed to see that they were praying it, they were talking about it, and all over the country, there was a common understanding that this is a verse that needed to be thematic. But Then I learned what this verse meant to these American Christians.

I traveled a lot in the celebration year, that next year, 1976. And the interpretation of that verse was strangely uniform from Washington, D.C. To the Republican National Convention that was held that summer in Kansas City, I went there, and the Democratic Convention in New York City. And here's how the interpretation went. America is God's chosen country.

America is God's country, Christian America. But then I was told that the problem here is that there are hippies, there are commies, there are swingers, there are pornographers like Hugh Hefner living in America, and They're the ones who need to repent, because it is they who are bringing a sickness to our country. And then I was told the Christians actually have no need of repentance. That's how they were interpreting this passage of scripture. And they said the Christians are doing fine.

They're perfectly conformed to the Christian way of just doing everything in America, Christian way of doing church, of doing nationhood, of doing politics, of doing missions, worship, revivals, Christian radio, Christian television, Christian education, and Christian commemorations. And this was the popular and acceptable form of self-righteousness in 1976. And this was a sin that I had been reading about in Scripture. And so the nagging question in my mind was, have God's people become corrupt and dishonest like the Jews had in the time of Jeremiah? Jeremiah 2.21, read it with me here.

"'Yet I had planted you a noble vine, ' the Lord says to the Jews, a seed of highest quality. How then have you turned before me into the degenerate plant of an alien vine?" And as I read that and thought about it and thought about the ways that God miraculously had planted America in the colonies back in the 1600s and the 1700s, It began to appear to me that we had degenerated and become alien in very similar ways. So what I was seeing in 1976 was highly sophisticated sin. There was a wide consensus of self-righteous, self-delusion, Christians sinning against God and against each other, doing something very dangerous to themselves and bringing active judgment on themselves by a faithful God. Now let me give you an analogy in nature and science that might help you understand where I'm going with this.

Let's talk about microorganisms, dangerous ones. They're germs, they're little. They're small little germs which are typically weak and vulnerable to being stopped by our immune systems or disinfectants or antibiotics or soap and water, but they can become superbugs if they band together and stick together by manufacturing this slimy extracellular matrix, and the scientists call this a biofilm. So get the picture now. These tiny little organisms, fellowship together, come together, and they start creating a greasy web of complex polymers, they're sugars really, and this is, it sticks together, it blocks out anything that threatens this fellowship of germs.

God's people periodically act like dangerous germs instead of saints. When we do not want the authority of God challenging or altering our unhealthy man-made cultural environments, we find peers or false teachers or comfortable pop communities. We build a large protective web of lies and excuses which explain to us why we don't need to do what God tells us to do. Or in the homeschooling community, the home education community, we're really good at this. We create this web of rules about why we must not handle, we must not taste, must not touch, why we should never wear this or go here or do that or don't do that.

And if we can look like a righteous Christian on our terms, we have achieved the identity of the righteous Christian, we think. Now this is self-imposed false religion. Paul tells the Colossians in chapter 2, verse 23. This is not Christianity. Now God's chosen people, the Jews, did these very same things and they rejected the corrective healing words of the prophets.

They rejected the law. They rejected the commandments of God. And when the prophets came to them, like Jeremiah, let's look at 18 verse 11, God says to Jeremiah, Now therefore speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you. Return now, every one, from his evil way.'" So the Lord spells out his definitions of sin and evil and doesn't hesitate to point it out and give it to the prophet to say, return now everyone from his evil way and make your ways and your doings good." They knew what the ways were that would be good, the old paths, the obedience to the Scriptures and the law that had been given to them lovingly through Moses. Verse 12, And They said, the men of Judah said, that is hopeless.

Or in paraphrase, Jeremiah, you're wasting your time. We will walk according to our own plans and we will everyone obey the dictates of his evil heart. Now in Zephaniah chapter 1, do you see the danger of this? Do you see what people are doing to say, we will reject that. We will not do what we know is right and good to do.

We'll do what we want to do, but we've constructed the idolatries and the disobedience of our own evil hearts. In Zephaniah 1, God is so clear. He announces his plan to, quote, punish the men, plural, who are settled in complacency, who are settled in complacency, who've kicked back. They're not interested in seeking the Lord, obeying the Lord. They've created these walls around them or a web above them to protect them from the potency of God's word getting in, to change them.

And they're complacent. And when we get to this point of rebellion, this moral rebellion in our lives, what can move us from this self-righteous, religious identity that we have staked out for ourselves? Because The men of Judah were saying, we're fine, Jeremiah, leave us alone, we're doing just fine. We're doing the things that we're supposed to be doing in the way of sacrificing and being detail-oriented. You're just pushing a little bit too close on this morality and ethical things.

Now, A.W. Tozer said this in talking about Jacob and Esau. The worst thing that can be said about Esau, said Tozer, was that he was spiritually satisfied. And that damned him. Are you still with me?

Let's go now to James 4 and dig into this. God is defining very serious sin and He's trying to make sure that we know it is sin. James 4.17, Therefore, to the one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. To him this is sin. Now here's a paraphrase of verse 17.

To him who knows the will and commandments of Christ, but who figures out a clever way to excuse himself from being a doer of the will of God." This is a very dangerous sin. And defining this in scriptural terms, which we must, this kind of rebellion is at root a form of idolatry that deliberately honors self more than God. And it is scripturally speaking, as we look through Scripture and see where the same sin is repeated and then described. It's turning back from following God. And James was very blunt about this.

It's also rejecting the word of God. It's also having hatred for the Lord. And James points out to these sinning believers their evil motivations. And that's what he calls to find a group of people who hate God in the same way that they do so that they can pretend to share a respectable enough identity in Christ. We have a weakness to do this.

He's warning us. The book of James has such a carefully worded five-chapter warning to us on these weaknesses that we will be tempted to stumble into. And he tells us how to avoid it. Now the Scottish Puritan, Thomas Boston, observed this weakness in us, and he put it this way, he described it in this way in the 1600s, quote, Most men are so far from making God their chief end in their natural and civil actions, that in these matters God is not in all their thoughts. They seek God indeed, but not for Himself, but for themselves.

They seek Him not at all but for their own welfare. So their whole life is woven into one web of practical blasphemy. Are you with me? What does he say here? These Christians are making this kind of biofilm, this web, and he calls it a web of practical blasphemy.

Making God the means, he says, and self their end. God is the mean and self is their end. Yes, their chief end, Thomas Boston. Now he's describing this idolatry as a tightly woven web of self-righteous Christian works, activities that we dream up, that we define as the righteous way to live and walk, and it's not scriptural. What's happening?

Now in our day, we have got to simply confess that this becomes a vicious feedback loop of blasphemy when we do it. And in this country, It's so easy because this feedback loop is supported by countless opportunities in Christian media, publishing, music, especially music, social media, blogs, concerts, church hopping, youth groups. We've created a vast evangelical subculture that tolerates this kind of idolatry and even in many cases encourages it. And it insulates us from God's imperative commands that many of us know. Well, I would not be surprised if every single person who's hearing this message from mine has heard the imperative commands that I'm about to go over.

Now you may be asking, okay, well what about all these really together homeschooling families who seem to have really worked out how to live, how to act, how to look, how to function, how to think, how to repent. Well, let me just say, we must confess our weaknesses that we really do have, Patterns of carelessness and negligence and even irreverence into little things in life, especially in the spiritual disciplines that we need to have at home. And James talked about this. How are you doing at home with your tongue in speaking to your little brother, your little sister and husband, speaking to your wives. We cannot be led because of these weaknesses into a permanent kind of mediocrity.

Now here's a quote by D.A. Carson. Some Christians, he said, want enough of Christ to be identified with him, but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced. Did you hear this? They want enough of Christ to be identified with him, with all their little stuff and their hats and their mugs and their bracelets and their tattoos and everything, but not enough of Christ to be seriously inconvenienced.

They genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy, but do not want to engage in serious Bible study. They value moral probity, all right, especially in public, he said. Like, hey, Mr. Eufter, you need to repent. You need to stop publishing that book.

You're doing the wrong thing. You're involved in the wrong industry. We value that, but we do not engage in war against inner corruptions. These Christians, says D.A. Carson, they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon, but they do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life.

Are you with me? Let's go back to James 4 now. James was alarmed by what he was seeing in the very early converts to Christianity. They did know better than to neglect and dodge the clear wishes of their Savior. And this is perhaps the earliest written message to the early church, and James is really direct in every chapter about his shock and his disappointment and what's going on and what he's seeing.

His letter is a strict warning to them and to us about giving into the temptation of living as friends of the world, creating their own cliques of favorites, who will join them in justifying crass devotion to mammon and profit as an acceptable way to live a life of faith in Christ. Okay? This book may be one of the most important books that we teach to our children, go over with our children, and young churches. And this activity was turning these Christians in the first century, these that James was writing to, into lying, hypocritical, adulterous murderers in the church. And he was pointing this out to them.

They were too self-righteous to admit that they actually hated God and they proved it by the treacherous way they were treating God's Word and God's people in the church with favoritism. James 4.17, therefore, To one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. And this is what James was pointing out. You know better than to be living the way that you're doing. Now I would say in America in this time, after having watched especially American evangelicalism since 1975, 1976, This may be one of the most scorned verses in Scripture today.

And the context of James may be one of the most ignored passages in the Bible. Now James warns us really clearly. We have not acted on his warnings to conquer the temptations of, and the big ones in this book are these, materialism. Is this us in the US? Vain glory, the dishonoring of brothers in Christ, and simply following the dictates of our own hearts.

He's really clear about this. James 4.17, therefore, to the one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. Now maybe you say American Christians, maybe they were just not up on the will of the Lord and the commands and knowing what the right thing to do is. They're so horrible in their biblical illiteracy, and yes, we are. We all are, not where we need to be.

But America was founded on such deep scriptural footings. It has been really hard to avoid many of Christ's direct commands. Even before I was a Christian, a kid in the public school system, I was surrounded by a legacy of scripture just in the culture that I lived in, Christmas carols, signs along the side of the road. Even though I was not going to church, reading the Bible, listening to any kind of Christian radio or anything, I was a pagan. I hated those things, but it was hard to escape them.

You know, there's an atheist in England right now who's reminding his countrymen in Britain. He said, look, we have to admit, we have to acknowledge the legacy that we've grown up in. He said, we are all actually Christians whether we want to admit it or not. And he didn't mean born again, regenerate people. I mean he knows the difference.

But he said, here's what he said. Douglas Murray is the name of this commentator, an atheist, a hardened atheist. He said, we think Christian thoughts and we dream Christian dreams. And he says, what Europe has got to realize is that we have departed so far from these Christian foundations. We have got to come home to Christianity or another worldview, a rival religion, will replace it with a rival law system." And he's referring to Islam, which has invaded his country and is about to take it over.

Now I can't get into that tonight, but you see, I wanted you to make the point. We know a lot more than we think we know. So how have we created such a passive kind of Christianity in the United States, gutting it of its militancy and its self-denial, its personal sacrifice, its hard labor, its serious discipline, its righteous ambition. We've ripped those things out by the way that we've lived and talked and taught others, taught our children. And it's primarily through compromised little systems of theology that we create, false teaching in many cases.

And so we the people will invent or find the theology that we really like the sound of, that's comfortable to us, that lets us really do the things that we want so that we can follow the dictates of our own hearts. Now is it possible, I'm putting this question to you, this is a very discouraging victor, I'm telling you we've been guilty of these sins of refusing to repent, refusing to do what we know is right for two centuries. That's a lot of bad habit that we've inherited from our great-great-great-grandfather, our parents, our grandparents. Is it possible that America could repent of such besetting national, local, church, and family sins. I mean, even if we are 200 years out of practice in repenting, and If we could see Ezekiel 36 23 with the eyes of faith, what would we see?

Let me read this one to you. I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations. If I could see this with faith happening in the United States, I would pray this. And as a matter of fact, I have prayed this. And I believe this could happen in my country, in your country.

The Lord says, I will vindicate the holiness of My great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and my, have we ever profaned it. Which you have profaned in their midst, and then the nations will know that I am the Lord. When even the states, like Tennessee, will know I am the Lord. Declares the Lord God, when I prove myself holy among you in their sight. In their sight.

That's Ezekiel 36 23. Now I want to direct your attention to something that's amazingly encouraging. Amazingly encouraging. This is something that I was afraid I would never see in my lifetime, but now I have seen it with my own eyes. A nation confessing and turning from sin.

A nation being led into biblical and repentant way of thinking by the elected Christian officials of the nation. Okay? This is the story of modern Hungary, and it is one of the most remarkable you will see in my lifetime until other nations follow Hungary's example. And so to the generation of my children and my grandchildren, and to you and to your children and grandchildren, I want to say this. My generation has had very little fear of God, very little genuine contrition that they have modeled corporately.

And so please, I beg you take a lesson from both Hungary and America and repent accordingly. But now back to the story. Not that long ago, Hungary was suffering under God's chastisement as a slave state. The people were the slaves of the Soviet Empire, but they broke free of Soviet domination in 1989. Now, Not long afterward, a majority of Hungarians were ready to take the next step.

Now just breaking away from a tyranny like Soviet Marxism and welfarism is not a total solution because to break free of dependency on welfarism and socialism and to embrace responsibility and personal liberty is extraordinarily hard. It's very difficult. I talk to people in Russia and in former Soviet bloc nations all the time, And this is one of the main things they say, Mr. Botkin, please tell us how we can learn to think like free men. We don't know where to begin because we've been taught and discipled to think in a very different way.

So the majority of people in Hungary in the 1990s, in the early part of this century, were taking this big step. They wanted personal responsibility. They wanted to get away from the slave mentality. And seven years ago, this courageous majority elected Protestant Reformed Christian leaders to serve as the public servants in the national government, just seven years ago. And one of the first of that government's first acts was to legally replace the old communist Stalinist constitution with a self-consciously Christian constitution and document.

And then one of the next acts was to create what they called the Veritas Institute. It was a government entity that they appointed and funded. They selected Christian scholars and historians to be a part of it. And the purpose was to study the covenants of God and the mistakes that Hungary has made over its 1, 000-year-old Christian history. And so in short, the government of Hungary wants to know how to fear God and how to define sin the way God does.

And they're serious about it. And they assigned these scholars to look into it, going back a thousand years. Now, okay, follow with me. This summer I visited the Veritas Institute in Hungary's capital, Budapest, to interview these men to find out what they were looking at. Now, try to imagine this.

The leaders of the government said, we have been through so much. We are so grateful to have been a Christian country, but we were thrown into the confines of slavery and judgment. We're coming out of it now. We cannot make these mistakes again, these same mistakes. Would you men please find out where we went wrong so that we can confess our sins personally and publicly and corporately and nationally and never do those things ever again.

And this is the job these men have. And I went to their building, I interviewed the director and other scholars who were working on this. They gave me wonderful, lengthy interviews and tried to make sure that they could find the right English word to give me about the sins that they were finding about. And these mistakes that they made are not being called mistakes, but they're being identified as sin in Scripture, as defined by Scripture. And then these are being spoken of in public before Hungarians and before all the nations of Europe with an attitude of real contrition.

And the one who's leading the charge on this is the prime minister of the country, a reformed Protestant dad, who's willing to confess. He did this this summer. He confessed some of the sins that Hungary committed when they were under Nazi domination. He's confessed the sins of the six million babies who were aborted under the Soviet reign over their country. And the Hungarian government is serious about wanting God's holiness to be exalted in the truth, Even though there are so many places in Hungarian history which are really shameful, especially four, God had to intervene and stop Hungary from getting worse in those major judgments, and they were judgments of the sword.

Now I want to tell you very quickly what they were. Soviet communism was merely the last one. Here's a timeline. I'm going back in history from the 20th century. Soviet communism was a really deadly judgment.

It was extraordinarily painful. But before that, Hungary actually suffered the domination of Nazi Germany. And prior to that, Hungary suffered more than 400 years under occupation of Islamic invaders who destroyed the land, destroyed the cropland, exploited it, stole the wealth of the country, killed many of the men, raped their wives, and sold the surviving women and children into faraway slavery. And prior to that judgment, Mongols invaded and killed more than a quarter of the whole population of Hungary before they could be stopped, defeated, and run out of the country. Now, these judgments of the sword are properly called by the Hungarians scourges of God.

And They realized why God had to bring them. They had committed specific sins. Now I want you to observe this amazing discovery of the Veritas Institute. You would think that, let me just ask you, do you think the historians meeting together, digging into documents that they have, could determine the exact specific sins that brought God's specific chastisement on this nation. And as I sat in the office of the director, The repetitive sins of Hungary were bluntly outlined to me.

They have found out what they were. They've called them by their proper names. And here's what they are. They're the primary sins that James warns the early Christians about in his letter. Materialism, vainglory, and as I interviewed, they wanted to make sure that they had the correct English word.

They really struggled with this one, this species of pride, personal vanity and vainglory. The dishonoring of brothers in Christ as materialistic living disintegrates families and relationships. People just, it's every man for himself because he wants to get as much as he can. And then sophisticated negligence and doing God's will. Yes, they were guilty of this.

And you'd think that a Christian nation like Hungary would learn from previous judgments and stop repeating this, don't you think? And you'd also think that an average Christian in America could learn from a simple letter from James, the Lord's brother, given to us in our own language that we would read and we'd listen to and we'd say, We hear what you're saying and we will not go down that road. We won't give in to those temptations of our own lusts. But we haven't learned. Now Hungary is trying nobly to get the lesson down, and the lesson is, if God says something you are doing is sin, You've got to stop it and turn around.

And Hungary is really serious about this. Their national anthem is a prayer of confession to God for national sin and a request to stay pure and single-minded going into the future, not to do those things again. Now the scholars, when they explained this to me and gave me the translation, they kind of laughed and they said, we're promising that we're never going to do it again, but history shows us that We are weak as Christians. We do stumble. We will commit these same things again if we are not careful to help each other, to confess.

And they are reminding themselves that in their 1, 000-year-old Christian nation, God means what he says about sin. God did not excuse their sin, but punished it very directly. Cities were destroyed. Millions of Hungarians died in these judgments, these scourges of God. Christian friends and family were bereaved.

They were scattered. They were sold into slavery. Hungarian children were forced to become jihadi assassins who later killed their own parents because that's what they were trained to do. Trained and then released to go back into their own villages and kill their own parents. And so Hungary understands this and now immediately enjoys God's blessings as the better alternative.

And I've seen this with my own eyes. They have broken out of the postmodern, multicultural, anti-Christian bubble that's all over Europe, this matrix of sugary matrix of make-believe, which has produced so much irreverence for God all over Western Europe. Hungary has broken out of it, the postmodernism, the political correctness. And now Hungary happens to be the only nation in all of Europe which is enjoying these things, let me list them for you. A dramatic revival of the church.

New churches are starting and being opened, even by the Prime Minister. He'll go and pray for these churches. They're getting a revival of learning and knowledge. They're getting a reformation of the two-parent family. They're getting more than 1.5 children per family.

They're getting sound economic foundations again. They're getting a growing comprehensive knowledge of their history, and they're getting long-term national security. The streets in Hungary are safe, the mosques are inactive, and the nation is free from jihadi cells. Now let me just say, in stark cold contrast, America and most of the West is under active judgment. I can't get into this right now, but there are more than 60 monetary judgments promised by God in Scripture that the United States of America is currently undergoing.

And even the New York Times is writing about national sin and national repentance. It's gotten so bad. You've seen the news about Hollywood and how men and women in Hollywood have been living. Even the New York Times is talking about the need for national repentance. And So what do we do by way of application?

We're at the point now we need to look at this. Confession and repentance, of course, are where we begin, right? Confession first, accurately, and then repentance. And these are not just academic theological concepts. God requires real confession and real repentance unto holiness on a daily basis.

And we're way behind. To the Christians in Laodicea, Jesus said, Revelation 3.19, As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent. Or he will come with chastening, Which he did to Laodicea.

And James said in talking about our sins that we stumble into, naming them specifically, that we would weep and howl for the misery of it. Of this chase. It hurts. And James said it's coming on you because of the way that you're living and treating one another, treating the Word of God, knowing the right thing to do, and not doing it. I was counseling a man about his sin the other day.

And the name James Bond came up in the conversation. And the man said this, he said, James Bond was my spiritual father as a boy. He taught me about life, about women, about guns, and about lust. Now James Bond got his fame first in the pornographic pages of Playboy magazine. I'm talking about the magazine that was so heavily criticized by self-righteous Christians back in 1975.

As I mentioned, Hugh Hefner was the great object of Christian indignation then. But when he died a few weeks ago, the New York Times pointed out That self-righteous Americans had become very Hefnerian during Hefner's lifetime. And we evangelicals, can we confess our sin? We have been disciples of Hugh Hefner. And the Times pointed this out.

That cultural affinity for Hefner reached deep into what they call the faith, family, and community camp, meaning us. And then they said this, now that death has taken him, direct quote, we should examine our own sins. Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Are you with me on this? That is precisely the starting point in application.

Now, however, I will not tell you how to examine, confess, and repent in this message because of the guilt which would rest on you if you did not respond. Now we all know how easy it is to come to conferences and even to be challenged. We all know how easy it is to go away with grand resolutions to do something and never do it. And I'll not add any more guilt to you today by showing you what you must do. If you are truly challenged and you want to do some turning around, you need to ask me for my application points.

I have a really short paper called How to Repent. You can get it if you write to service at western conservatory dot com. We do need to act on what challenges us. It's possible To be in that scriptural category of person who is always learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth, never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. It's also popular to come hear good speakers, to buy new books, fit out our libraries with deep material and never let it change us.

And I know families with impressive libraries containing good theology but whose lives are dry and disorderly and shallow and discouraged and unsatisfied and dispirited. They keep on trying to kind of level up another level to what they think is maturity. But they're not dealing with and turning from some of the most basic sins of speech in their own homes. These are the sins that James tells us about. Seeing this problem all around him, saying the ungoverned tongue is a sign that your Christianity is worthless.

This is what he was telling the people reading. To us, Control your tongues. Make repentance to one another in the home and watch what the Lord will do in the way of sanctification. Now, back to the New York Times, which is correct in saying that much of evangelicalism has been enjoying the sophisticated worldliness Hefner created, maybe not in the pages of Playboy, but in other media outlets that followed the trends that he started. He was quite a leader, and there were many followers in the Christian world, in Nashville, in Los Angeles, in New York.

And what has been the fruit of it? Did you know that Southern Baptist women in the bracket demographic 21 to 54, age 21 to 54, were the swing voter demographic who elected a playboy to be President of the United States in both 1992 and 1996. I saw the private polling data on this, which was done by the White House. I got a call in 92, they wanted me to take a look at it, and said, Botkin, you're a Christian, what in the world is going on? And what do we do?

I'm still trying to figure that out. What Playboy was doing these last 50 years was proselytizing the glamour of hedonism, the false virtues of greed and consumption, of clothes and travel and food and wine, and most importantly, self-identity. That's what they were selling in that magazine. And American media followed this irreverent leader, and much of American media and film and TV and later websites created niche media supplying content for these American appetites. And these were the lots that James warned us about.

Spectator sensuality and even spectator fornication as a basic American add-on. And this is the kind of media that I watched to develop over the last 15, 20 years. Read our niche magazine to find your self-identity and There you will find your personalized favorite community of friends who think like you do." Now Hefner was showing the way, making American sensuality and entertainment a kind of entitlement for all Americans. And now I want to say a word about family worship. Pastor Thomas Vincent lived through the great fire of London in the 17th century.

And someone asked him why God burned down the houses of London. Now, lives were not lost in that great fire, the great fire of London. It was the buildings that were just ravaged and destroyed. And they asked Thomas Vincent, why did God do this? And his answer was, why would God not burn down houses wherein the inhabitants refused to worship him.

And one of the most dangerous parts of the American cultural legacy in the home education culture is what I've seen as an entitlement mentality towards screen entertainment. How many families have replaced family worship with evenings of mindless entertainment and amusement? And here's what concerns me the most. What many families cling to the most tightly is the mindless component of watching fictional entertainment. Mindless.

They believe they have some kind of a right to turn the mind off, to turn discernment off, experience a theological culture that they find really comfortable. And They may explore for years to find out, what is it that I really find comfortable, that I really like seeing? And what I noticed in the 80s and 90s was church men's groups, they might gather over a weekend to watch what is really comfortable to them, like Sports Channel TV, or a James Bond movie marathon on cable, not quite remembering that it was Hugh Hefner who introduced Bond as pornography. That's where he got his start. And in the same way, Christian pastors long ago forgot that Hugh Hefner used prophets from Playboy back in the 1950s and 60s to fund the creation of the birth control pill and its legalization in all 50 states through lawsuits, Legal activism.

As early as 1968, Christianity today was following Playboy arguments about acceptable sorts of abortions. Now how many millions of evangelical women used Heffner's abortifacient, the pill, to follow the world into paths of convenience and entitlement, material pursuit, the self-identity of the woman with the perfect modern family, which is two women, one dog, one TV, in every room of the suburban home. Where is our guilt that needs to be confessed? Our collective guilt, our corporate guilt, can we do that? Why is the church so wayward?

Why is the church so cheerfully wayward? It's because we've figured out clever ways to support each other in not doing what we know is right. Back to James 4.17, please. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin." In the year 2014, George Barna conducted a poll of American pastors and concluded this, 90% of them, the pastors, know and believe that the Bible speaks to social and political issues of our time, but only 10% say they will speak to it. And so what are we seeing here?

These pastors know the right thing to do and they refuse to do it. And the reason they give is that the people do not want them to do what is right. Do not want them to preach what is demanded of God's people. It's we the people who can get together and make it very clear what we want and what we don't want. We want our ears tickled, and if we do want our ears tickled, we know exactly how to find the murmuring pastors who can do it.

Jeremiah 5.30. An astonishing and horrible thing has been committed in the land. Now when you see things in scripture like this, I mean, do you stop and think, this is what the Lord thinks. An astonishing and horrible thing has been, I want to know what it is so that I don't ever see that in my country. Verse 31, the prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule by their own power.

And my people love to have it so. The people of Judah just loved this. They were comfortable with it. This is what they wanted. This is why they would not listen to Jeremiah.

And so do you see the dangers of creating these little subculture, these subculture groups of friends who justify complacency and boast of their self-righteousness. Are you protecting your children as they fall into the same patterns of finding their own favorite friends with their own favorite custom theologies? Are you helping your children guard against the temptations that James warned so strongly about? There was a pastor who asked me to meet with a man who was losing his son. And so I did agree to meet with this man, and I sat down with him.

Let me see if I can recount the story. I asked him, I just asked him, tell me the story. How bad is it? You're losing your son." He said, well, it may be past tense, I may have lost my son. Well, how bad is it?

What's going on? Well, he's gone off to college. He'd been there only a couple of months and the son had, as the dad told me, Rejected the Lord, was railing against the Lord, had rejected everything his family had taught. Was hating the Lord and was acting like he hated his parents, denouncing his parents. Was concluding that he had, was born homosexual and was living that out and acting that out.

We talked further and the Father was finding out more and more things that were breaking His heart every day. And so He said, what do I do? And I said, well, what are you going to do? And he said, I don't know what I'm going to do. What do you tell me what to do?

And I'm so careful and cautious and hesitant to do that. I want men to figure it out by looking at Scripture and have, I don't want to give him a formula, say, here's what you always do in these situations. And so I was not laying it out and he said, well, what would you do if this was your son? And I said, well, I can certainly tell you that. I would bring him home immediately.

Look what's happening. Every single day that goes by, It's deeper and it gets worse and worse. I'd bring him home and Then I said and I would spend time with him and I said what do you do for a living? Could he be with you all day long?" And the man said, well, no, he couldn't. I'm a medical doctor.

There's no way he could do that. And I said, think about it. Is there no way possible that he could work with you in your practice, doing something in your practice to be with you? He said, no, there's no way. I said, well then, if I were you and you're asking me what I would do, I would leave my practice to come be with my son, to build his life back up.

So are you paying for his university? Yeah, I'm paying for it. It was a very prestigious school. Total tuition for a basic degree would have been about half million dollars. So why don't you take some of that, work with your son, start a business that will be a profitable business for you and even your family.

Spend time with Him. What is important to you? Let me tell you what happened. He didn't bring his son home. He said, well, how will he ever get a degree so that he can get into a secure, mammon-oriented, I'm paraphrasing here, position, like I have?

And why would I quit my profession that I've worked so hard for? He couldn't see the importance of doing what needed to be done for his son and what this really meant. He loved his mammon and his position and his prestige more than he loved his son. And he wanted his son to have this validation of the worldly elite more than he wanted his son to have righteousness and safety and protection. The protection of the Lord, the protection of the family.

The love of mammon and carnal security is one of the deepest sin problems in the American heart today. And we're 200 years out of practice and having the discipline and the humility and the righteousness to hate our sin and to yearn for the knowledge of the glory of the Lord to cover the earth. Our legacy of enslavement to Mammon goes way back. I mean, the first place that I have read about it in the 1820s, the economy of the U.S. Was booming, there were zero taxes, the government was minuscule, our enemies were quiet.

Alexis de Tocqueville was visiting America from France, 1820s and in the 1830s. And he wrote about what he saw, and here's what he talked about. Our mammon hungry hearts and our wayward hearts. He said this, quote, "'A native of the United States "'clings to this world's goods "'as if he were certain never to die. And he is so hasty and grasping all within his reach that one would suppose that he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them.

He clutches everything, He holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grip to pursue fresh gratifications. And so you can see that you are surrounded, and I'm surrounded, and your children are surrounded by deep, long-standing legacies of worldliness. We're comfortable in our little microorganism colonies with a sugar bubble around us. That's what we've built for ourselves. We fellowship with other pathogens because we don't really, truly want to be clean.

Now, we need to confess. We're not isolating our sins to confess them and to put them under the blood of Christ, but rather to put them under the slimy umbrella of the biofilm in hopes that no light will ever expose them, no verses will get through to really cleanse our hearts. We double-minded. And even when we feel the pangs of conviction like the rich young ruler did, like this doctor did, Let's go to the rich young ruler in Matthew. This young man had a rather perfect identity from his youth up.

He was the good Jewish boy. He had kept all the commandments from his youth up. In Matthew 19 21, Jesus said, if you want to be perfect, go sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, He went away sorrowful, grieving, for he had great possessions. And the sorrow that he had and the sorrow that I saw in that medical doctor, it was not a godly sorrow.

He was grieving and sorrowing unto death, not to repentance but unto death. That poor man and his family, the doctor and his son, things are getting worse and worse and worse because there is no repentance, no deeds of repentance, no pursuit of repentance, No pursuit of biblical solution. This man, the rich young ruler, the young Jewish boy, he loved other things more than he loved Christ. And he lived like it. He was outwardly perfect but impoverished in being rich toward God.

He had no treasure. He had no treasure. Well, he had a lot of treasure. He had no treasure in heaven. And so I want to close with this story about King Saul, a man with a nature like mine and like yours.

He was a recipient of God's favor and grace. And I want to beg you in the same way that Paul begged the Corinthians. If you receive the grace of God, don't receive it in vain. Don't do something that would squander what God has given to you. And now I turn to 1 Samuel 15 1 to read.

And Samuel also said to Saul, The Lord sent me to anoint you king over the people over Israel. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the Lord." Do you see this? Heed the voice of the words of the Lord. Heed it. The words of the Lord have a voice in them.

Are you listening to that? You've heard me read that, but are you hearing? Do you have ears to hear what the Lord is really saying to you in the holy and powerful Scripture? Verse 2 thus says the Lord of hosts. I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel How he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt Now go and attack Amalek So here's Samuel giving a mission and orders, instruction from God to Saul, the king.

"'Go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have. Do not spare them. Kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, oxen, sheep, camel and donkey. And so Saul gathered the people together and numbered them in Tileum and 200, 000 foot soldiers and 10, 000 men of Judah. And Saul came up to the city of Amalek and lay in wait.

And he said to the Kenites, go depart, get down from among the Amalites, lest I destroy you with them. For you showed kindness to all the children of Israel." Now, Saul's showing here, he knows the history. He knows what Amalek did. He knows what the Kenites did in kindness, and he knows what in cruelty the Amalekites did. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites in verse 7, and Saul attacked the Amalekites from Havilah all the way to Shur, which is east of Egypt.

And he also took Agag, the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and were unwilling to utterly destroy them. Everything despised and worthless, that they did utterly destroy. Verse 10, Now the word of the Lord came to Samuel saying, I greatly regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned back from following me. Do you see how Scripture speaks of this kind of attitude?

Honoring yourself above God. Disobeying the strict, clear commands of God, not doing what you know to be right. He has turned back from following Me. He has not performed My commandments. Jesus said, He who has My commandments, He it is who loves Me.

And it grieved Samuel. Jesus said if you love Me, you will keep My commandments. Saul really showed where his affections and his love and his obedience were. It grieved Samuel, and he cried out to the Lord all night. How much have you cried out to the Lord for the condition of your nation and the ways that we have been refusing to follow after the Lord, turning from following him?

Verse 12, So when Samuel rose early in the morning to meet Saul, he was told, Samuel, saying, Saul went to Carmel, and indeed he set up a monument for himself and he's gone on around, passed by and gone down to Gilgal. And then Samuel went to Saul. And Saul said to him, Blessed are you of the Lord! I have performed the commandment of the Lord." So here's he seeing Samuel for the first time since he's given him the commandment, right? The instructions.

And he's boasting about what a great, perfect, obedient servant of the Lord that he is. And Samuel said, "'What then is this bleeding of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?' And Saul said, "'They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people Spared the best of the sheep and the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God and the rest we have utterly destroyed So immediately he's beginning to shift some blame again. Really look watch what he's doing To his peers the people. Oh the people they're the ones who started sparing the best of the sheep. And then Samuel said to Saul, be quiet and I will tell you what the Lord said to me last night and he said, Speak on.

And Samuel said, When you were little in your own eyes, were you not head of the drives of Israel? And did not the Lord anoint you king over Israel? And now the Lord sent you on a mission and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop down on the spoil to do evil in the sight of the Lord?

These kinds of questions. I have prayed for our country, for my family, for my church, for my countrymen, When their lives are over, that they would not be hearing questions like these from their Lord and Savior. Why did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you devote so much time to mammon and spoil and not to the things that I commanded you to do. Why did you do evil in the sight of the Lord?

I'm referring to the evil that's spoken about in James. Verse 20, and Saul said back to Samuel, but I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I've gone on a mission on which the Lord sent me, and I brought back Agag, king of Amalek. I have utterly destroyed the Amalekites." Well, what a contradiction right there. I brought this one guy back.

Well, he didn't utterly destroy them. And then he says, "...but the people took of the plunder, the sheep and ox and the best of things that should have been utterly destroyed. So he's again contradicting himself saying, I know what I was supposed to do. I actually obeyed, but no, I didn't obey the people. He sounds like a two-year-old making excuses.

And so Samuel said, Has the Lord has great a delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to Obey is better than sacrifice, than to heed than the fat of rams. To obey and to heed. Are you hearing and heeding? Do you have ears to hear?

Are you heeding the voice of the Lord? Or are you a heedless person? Is your country a heedless country? For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he also has rejected you from being king.

And then Saul said to Samuel, I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. Now is he finally being honest here? He wasn't before. He was all over the map with his excuses and self-justification, minimizing his sin, blaming it on others. But, you know, I have sinned in fearing people and obeying their voice, listening to my peers and sinning against God because they're taking all the pressure off of me.

He said, oh, don't be so worried and uptight about obeying this. Nobody does. None of us do. And here's what we've heard about why you don't have to. And perhaps this is really what he did when they came to him and said, hey, Saul, we've got this great idea.

Look how perfect some of these fattlings are and these sheep and these rams and these yoke of oxen. Look how strong they are. I mean, why should we slaughter them on this day? Can't we use them for the glory of God? How about that?

You know, how about if I go to Hollywood and be an actress for the glory of God? How about if I become a stand-up comedian for the glory of God? Why don't I call that my calling so that I can justify it to all my friends? And it sounds very spiritual. Verse 25, Now therefore, please pardon my sin and return with me that I may worship the Lord.

But Samuel said to Saul, I will not return with you, for you have rejected the word of the Lord and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. And Samuel turned around to go away and Saul seized the edge of his robe and it tore. And Samuel said to him, The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today, and has given it to a neighbor of yours who is better than you. And also the strength of Israel, meaning God, will not lie or relent, for he is not a man that he should relent. And then Saul said, I have sinned, yet honor me now, please, before the elders of my people and before Israel in return with me, that I may worship the Lord your God.

He's not even calling him my God. He's saying, Samuel, Look, I really need the approval and validation again of all these people around me. Would you just please come and we'll worship your God, the real God, your way, but just do it with me." He still lusts after the validation of the people. So Samuel turned back after Saul. We won't explore now why or how he did that.

And Saul worshiped the Lord. And then Samuel said, Bring Agag king of the Amalekites here to me. And so Agag came to him cautiously. And Agag said, Surely the bitterness of death is past. But Samuel said, As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.

And Samuel Hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. And then Samuel went to Ramah and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. And Samuel went no more to see Saul until the day of his death. Nevertheless, Samuel mourned for Saul. And the Lord..." Okay, listen to this.

Samuel loved Saul and he mourned for Saul and the kind of sin that's being committed and the tragedy that's happening with this kind of rebellion. And the Lord regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel. And so now as we close, may the Lord enlarge His grace to you that you may live a full and fruitful life with no regret on your part and no regret on the Lord's part, and no reserve on your part, and no retreat on your part, and no lack of repentance on your part. Amen.