Good afternoon. It's good to be with you brothers. Just a few things to share with you this afternoon. First of which is our ministry generations has worked for the last five years to put together a Christian curriculum for high school students. And this was planted in my heart, in my mind, early on when my parents were homeschooling me in the 1970s.

My mother was not happy with the forms of curriculum that was available through even Christian suppliers in that we were more educated in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and William Shakespeare than we were in John Bunyan, John Calvin, and Augustine. And that was a severe lapse. And so for the last five years or closer to eight years, I have been working with this curriculum and we have completed grades eight through 12, largely focusing on literature and history. For world history, for 10th grade world history, we put together a curriculum in which we told just a little bit about Napoleon and the great empires of the world. We would give Napoleon two pages and we would give the great missionaries that God used to bring the gospel to the nation's 25 pages.

So it's effectively, when I was done writing the curriculum for master's books, I found that I had done a history of Christian missions over 2, 000 years instead of focusing on the great empires that rose and fell, I focused on the kingdom of Jesus Christ that continues to rise and to rise and to rise and to rise. So it was a most inspiring study in my life as I saw what Jesus had done. Much more impressive than Napoleon and Caesar, amen? Way more impressive. So be sure your children know the history of the kingdom of God.

Make sure they've read Eusebius, Philip Schaff, and the history of the Reformation. Make sure they've read the history of what was really going on in history. Forget about Napoleon for a second. They can read a little bit of that, but please be sure that they get Church history and what Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, has done. I'd like to draw just briefly from 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 10 and 11.

Paul says here, "...for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord we persuade men but we are made manifest unto God and I trust also are made manifest in your consciences." Brothers what occurs to me is that we need so much more a sense of the terror of the Lord, the fear of God, a sense of sobriety, seriousness. The fear of God is essential for a faith. It's basic for a faith because the fear of God takes God seriously. As we take God's judgment seriously, we take his redemption seriously, we then begin to embrace these truths in a sober sense and in faith and we preach it that way as well.

It seems to me that we need more of an urgency in our preaching, More of a watchfulness, more of a holy prophetic burden, and a call to repentance. This conference is a conference on repentance, but until until we gain by His word first a sense of the need, our need, the need of the church, the need of the hour, then we're not prepared for prayer, we're not prepared for preaching. The thing that matters first is the burden. The prophets in the Old Testament would receive the burden and it became heavy upon them and I think that that happens in our preaching. And when preaching is brought appropriately on a Sunday, the Spirit of God lays something on you.

And I'm sure, brothers, those of you who preach know what that is. That sometimes it takes an hour or two or maybe a day or two, maybe four or five, six days. It might be Saturday afternoon before the burden is there. There's a need to preach this. There's a need to pray over this word and to bring it to God's people.

And so this is the thing that we need. Before we even enter into a conference on repentance, we need to know what we're to repent of. Repentance is a change of mind concerning God, concerning sin, concerning Christ, concerning righteousness. And I think back to my Al Martin days of studying repentance. Remember the series on repentance?

My father had me type the sermons word for word with my little typewriter when I was 12 years of age so he could translate these sermons into Japanese. That's a sideline. But brothers, we need a sense of burden. We need to call our people to repentance, call the church to repentance. America is still one of the most religious nations in the world, but it's a bad religion.

The religion's been terribly perverted. I've never seen an apple so red and so shiny and so good but so rotten at the center of it. That's the best analogy I can think for for America right now. We have a lot of firsts in this generation. Just to give you a sense for the urgency of the hour, if we're to look at the macro for a moment, this is the first age in history in which most of the developed nations in the world, the Western nations, the Christian nations, have approved of the neurotic agenda.

And many, if not most of the mainline denominations, have at least to some extent embraced the neurotic agenda where Nero was the namesake for this abomination called same-sex marriage. But understand this is the hour, this has happened. Five or six years ago, if there's ever a time in history where nations are calling out for the judgment of God as the judgment brought upon Sodom and Gomorrah or upon Pompeii years ago. These nations, I'm not talking about city-states, I'm talking entire nations today are crying out for God's judgment. This is the first age in the history of the world in which 410 million prescriptions were issued last year for psychotropic drugs here in America, up 2, 500% since 1992.

The nation is going insane. There's insanity all around us. People are addressing their psychological needs, their deep need for God, their guilt issues by means of psychotropic drugs, more so some 25 times more frequently than they were in 1992. This is the first age in history as well where third graders, first graders are demanding transgendered restrooms. It's just insanity.

Just understand where we are, where we've gone in the last five to six years and as far as I know this is the first era in the history of the Christian Church in which we have Christian comedians who make that their full-time work. Now as I put these things together, do you see there's something wrong, there's something desperately wrong with American religion? There's something, there's there's a lack of a sense of urgency in the church. There isn't the preaching, there isn't the call to repentance that we would love to see. So the burden, brothers, is that the fear of God would return to the churches.

That our churches would be filled with the solemnity of holy joy and holy love and a faith in God's redemption. And that the world would see that our churches are our churches that have been redeemed by the power of the Living Christ. That we are those who have just appeared on the far side shore of the Red Sea, and the dead bloated bodies of the largest enemy on earth are washing up on the shores and we have been delivered. We have been redeemed. Hallelujah!

We have experienced the solemn joy of God's amazing deliverance and as people hear us and as they watch us, they see our buildings rocking with shouts of acclamation and joy and praise for what God has done in his amazing redemption. May God bring this. May God bring a revival, a reformation of true redemption, salvation, and the joy that flows from it in our individual congregations. These are the burdens of the day. These are the things that we would like to see in our churches and that the church would seek after radical repentance by setting God's Word God's law against the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age and then know and really really know the power of the gospel and the redemption that really does set men free from their sins.

See this is the cry for the hour. So we come into a repentance conference. I wrote out on the way up here from South Carolina on my knee as I was driving the rent-a-car the things to repent of, stuff to repent of. If we are to call the church today to repentance, We must repent of the quiet detente with the world, its philosophies, and its godless systems. And that includes its institutions of education and the universities of the day that have been almost thoroughly contaminated by humanism.

We must repent and the church needs to cry out for God's mercy and God's repentance to the people in the congregations across this country on these things, the church's capitulation to statism, The welfare cartel, the redistribution of wealth in which the poor are corrupted. Brothers, it's a wholesale violation of the eighth commandment, and the church diaconate and the poor must both repent of it. There must be some new direction of repentance in the area of welfare and Social Security as well. As we progress there should be something of an urgency for this. That we as the Church of Christ should be the leaders in repenting of of this systemic violation of the eighth commandment or the church's failure to speak out loudly against the use of abortifacient contraceptive birth control.

I was doing a radio program on this with my co-host and we said okay let's make a list of the major leaders in America that have spoken out against abortifacient contraceptives. He said Randy Alcorn. I said okay we got that one down long pause did we mention Randy Alcorn yes we did another long pause did we mention Randy Alcorn yeah we got we got him brothers where are the voices where are the pastors Where are the national voices crying out for God's mercy upon a nation? I don't know how many hundreds of millions of children have been slaughtered because of the hazardous conditions obviously put in place in the birth canal by way of these abortifacient contraceptives drugs. It's a massive, massive failure in the church.

The gross self-centeredness that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of children must be repented of by the pastors, by the elders that teach in our churches. The pornography scourge, the hiding of sin, the refusal to walk in the light as he is in the light, the denominational The denominational splitting over endless inconsequential minor issues while congregations are filled with sexual sin, divorce, lovelessness, materialist idolatry, and parents that send their children to ungodly schools. This is a disaster. The state of the church – And I think we could just say that this problem of straining at gnats and swallowing camels has not just infected the mainline denominations. Brothers, it's everywhere.

It's our fundamentalist church. It's our Reformed churches. Presbyterian Baptist. We've all got these sins. How about the weak gospel incapable of cleansing a man or a woman of sin and incompetent to changing a sexual identity and orientation?

These brothers that are writing books somewhat connected to the gospel coalition and other groups calling out and saying the gay Christian still has a right to maintain his identity as a gay Christian. No, no, my Jesus saves us from these things. My Jesus replaces these old identities with new identities in Jesus. We must repent of these things as breaking down of the gospel as if somehow Christ wasn't quite able to save us from our sins. Oh, God, deliver us from these things.

We must repent of the man worship and the self-worship that has produced a deadening and a souring of worship of the true and living God in our churches. And that's in every week. That's in every Sunday battle I know in our churches. Also let's repent of a refusal to face the sin and to run to Christ and to see the beauty of His salvation. Let's repent of a lack of love for God such that Men would teach their children God's word as they sit in the house, as they walk by the way, as they rise up, as they lie down.

George Barna is telling us what some only 1% of American families do family worship on an occasional basis. Only 1% of American fathers and mothers love God with their heart, soul, mind and strength such that that would be the primary thing about their homes on a given day. That's the thing that matters even more than their work life. The thing that matters is that they are able to come together as a little family, a little church in the house and worship God on a Monday morning or Tuesday morning. May God bring forth a revival, a repentance in this land such that people's hearts will be turned back to God.

God files. Guys who love God with their heart, soul, mind, and strength such that they would do it. See we can't just be encouraging the discipleship or the family integration or the family worship without men who love God with their hearts, their souls, their minds. That's the need of the Day Brothers and if that's there we're gonna see a hundred thousand applications of God loving in all these different aspects of life. May God restore hearts that love Him with heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And then may God help us to repent of academic hubris that has been far too concerned with the skepticism of evolutionary scientism and higher criticism. And may God grant us repentance from the reliance on psychological methods, counseling, humanistic terminologies instead of preaching the word in season and out of season, rebuking, admonishing, and exhorting, which is the business of the church. May God deliver us from the humanistic systems and methodologies and bring back the simple preaching of the Word of God and the reliance upon the Spirit of God to transform lives. This is what burns in my soul today.