The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Kevin Swanson with the following message entitled, How worldview affects music and worship. One of the things I wanted to say before I get started is that I have a vision for seeing that Christians begin to engage more in caring for the elderly. I think this is where God is taking his people especially as we see 80 million baby boomers retiring over the next 30 years or so. Right now 75% of 75ers and older are living alone or they are institutionalized. The problem is only going to get worse.

And for those who still believe that Jesus would care for the lonely And for those who are the most needy in society, and that would be any Christian in America, I think we need to reach out to the elderly and families need to re-relationalize the area of elderly care. So I'm inviting everybody to my house. On November 16th, I have my wife's permission to do this. On November 16th, and we are going to start the first organization in America, as far as we know, relational home-based Christian care for the elderly, whether it be children caring for their own parents or reaching out as a family economy and a family ministry to do exactly what Jesus would want us to do over the next 20 years, and that is to care for the elderly. So it's free.

We will serve you lunch. But please RSVP. My daughters need to know how many to prepare for. It's all on my website. Just go to my blog.

I just wanted to mention that because Scott Brown did say that part of Caring for the needy and the elderly is reaching out to those who are lonely who are being institutionalized and probably Euthanized in the years to come I do not trust the human estate Okay, that's not my topic tonight but I wanted to say that modern worship modern worship is a problem as Scott said it's not just a problem for everybody out there, it's a problem for us too. The modern worshipper is not keen on some of the messages they've heard this weekend because If they tremble in the worship service, they might spill their cappuccino. And that's a concern to the modern worshiper. When the modern worshiper enters the worship service with the No Fear t-shirt and approaches the throne room of Almighty God, the judge of heaven and earth, the one who will cast the wicked into hellfire forever and ever, what is Jesus going to say? What's with the t-shirt?

No fear. What's with the t-shirt? What about the pastor who takes God's name in vain while he's giving us the pep talk? It's not exactly the message, but the pep talk. And we have heard this.

We've been to churches where in the midst of the sermon The pastor is taking the name of God in vain In fact, I would submit to you one of the Most important measurements as to whether anybody fears God, which is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge, not just in the worship service but everywhere else, is whether or not we honor the name of God. I was taught to honor God's name by my parents who were careful even with words like gosh or darn or heck my father said you say gosh darn it all to heck you're effectively saying god damn it all to hell So my father was very careful as he trained us to honor God's names, titles, attributes, ordinances, word and work. And yet the fear of God is hardly in the worship service anymore. The girl leading the worship team is in a miniskirt I don't even want to preach on head coverings she's not even covering her navel you see I'm I'm not just making this up, brothers and sisters. There's something really wrong with us.

This is where we need to be is where Josiah was when he opened the lost book of the law and somehow the word of God penetrated him and he could see that They were a million miles away from what God wanted. And immediately, he organized the most sweeping reformation that Judah ever had. And it was, of course, at the very, very cusp of the destruction of the state of Judah and the Babylonian captivity, but God gave that man mercy in the midst of his repentance. This, I think, is where we are today. The problem with us is we offer to God autonomous, misdirected worship, what the Bible calls will worship.

We give God what we want to give him, not what he wants. God is not getting the glory He should out of us. And again it's it's right here it's with us right here. I believe that God is waking us up to a reality that we are more self-oriented, we are more man-oriented than God-oriented. And this is the fundamental issue.

And again, this is not just all those other people out there we ourselves right here right now are self-oriented we're star system oriented we give man more glory than we give to God and I'm so convicted of this brothers and sisters I'm going to ask that for the rest of my message tonight all the way to the end that you not clap for me but you say Amen you say praise God or you say hallelujah, you give God glory, you don't give me anything. For the rest of this message I ask that you would do this for several reasons. One is God's not getting enough glory. We need to give him all of it. And secondly, this is a conference about worship.

This is not a conference about worshiping man. It is a conference about worshiping God. And if you have come all this distance to a conference on the worship of God, as I pointed out at the beginning yesterday, this conference is specifically not about you. It is not about me, it is about God, and let us give Him the glory tonight for this. Now my topic tonight is worldview and worship.

It's effectively setting again the antithesis against the thesis as best as I can please understand in summarizing the real-world view battle that's going on and has been raging in the West for nine to five hundred years really back to Aquinas eight hundred years ago as I have summarized in my book apostate trying to explain the massive apostasy going on in the West the largest apostasy numbers wise in the history of the Christian Church as far as I'm concerned I find the difference between a humanist worldview and a Christian worldview that of who is in center. Is God in center or is man in center? And there is no better way to see how this works itself out than in a worship service in American Church. Are we keeping God in center or have we brought man in center? God is the center according to Paul in Romans 11 36 when he summarizes it all in his wonderful verse that at 13 years of age I remember looking at this verse and saying that's the verse of my life That's the most important verse for me and it goes this way, of Him and through Him and to Him are all things to whom be glory forever, Amen.

Could you say it any better than that? Amen. It's beautiful. Of God, through God, and to God are all things to whom be glory forever. Amen.

This means that God is the source. God is the center. God is the source of all reality. God is the source of all truth and all of ethics, anything that constitutes man's existence, man's knowledge, man's action, anything relating to man, any reality around man, anything that man knows and anything that man ought to do or ought not to do is ultimately sourced in God Himself. This is the fundamental of a biblical worldview.

The problem with modern Christianity is they retain the notion of God or Jesus Christ they just gut him of what it takes to be God. The Godness of God. That is in order for God to be God, He must be the source of all reality. He must be sovereign. He must be in control of everything that happens in creation, providence, and, yes, redemption too.

If God is not sovereign over reality if God is not the source of law and God is not the source of truth but man will construct his own reality man will set his own direction man will determine whether or not he will go to heaven or hell in the ultimate sense. Man is the source of his own truth. Man will decide whether or not he has value. Man will decide whether or not it's appropriate for women to lead in the church. Man will decide whether this form of sexuality or that form of sexuality is all right.

Man will determine how he will do his politics, his economics, his economics, etc. Etc. When you begin to gut God of being the source of all of these things, God dies the death of 10, 000 qualifications and at the end of all of this you may be in some kind of a church giving some credence to a god of some sort but you have no God man himself has displaced God and become God in the minds of these people We live in a world without the recognition of this God, without the idea of this God's very presence, relevance, connection with with ourselves. It's happened over a series of generations as we we've just sat and marinated in a humanist worldview whether it be in our churches or in our college classrooms to the point where if there is a Christian left in a college classroom today one single Christian imagine a a Christian in a college classroom what an amazing idea but there he is he's sitting there in his freshman year, hearing in his biology classroom about the magnificence of the human cell. That here is a cell that is 10, 000 times more complicated than anything that a Hewlett Packard or Microsoft could ever do.

It has more activity than a Boeing 747 plant up in Seattle, Washington. There's three trillion of these cells floating around in your body at any given point in time. There's a replacement of 500, 000 of these cells in any given hour. So here's this incredible construction of Almighty God. And this student is hearing this lecture.

And he steps up and he gets up on his chair in the middle of the lecture and he says, praise be to the God who made this! And everybody looks at him And he's broken through for just a second. A hundred years of indoctrination. Where people can hardly see the reality of a creator God who is all wise and all powerful, who can do things a hundred billion times more complex than Bill Gates even. And then, he worships.

He falls on his face and worships the true and living God in that biology classroom. That hardly ever happens. And the reason of course is because God is very distant from the modern conception of reality God is hardly part of our lives we have hardly have any connection with him see I don't think Tetzel would have much of a business if he set up a shop outside of Walmart today selling indulgences. Why not? Nobody cares.

For a lot of reasons. Apparently atheists make it to heaven too, According to what I just heard from the Pope himself But whatever There is no fear of God, there's no sense of judgment nobody feels the flames of hellfire nobody has this concept of God the postmodern is slowly losing his concept of any reality whatsoever he's taken the 10, 000 escape ramps off the highway of reality through the internet and through his virtual worlds and of course the most popular games today are selling a billion dollars every weekend. He's disconnected. He doesn't understand that there is something such as life and it is real And if he does sort of wander into some kind of a modern worship service where there is a man one man left in the city Who still has a conception of God and hell fire and he begins to hear this man preaching about the reality of God about? About his judgment about sin about how we've broken the laws of God and about how God has already in history come and brought a tremendous flood that wiped off all flesh from off the earth and he and he this man can feel the fire it's himself he's close enough to it that it seems like he's he really understands the reality of it but the postmodern is sitting in the front seat and he's hearing this message and he says this is good this is good this is more horrific this is this is more horrible than Friday the 13th part 17 somebody get me more popcorn.

He doesn't see it. He doesn't see it. He's out of touch with any kind of reality. And God help us but that man may wake up someday and he most certainly will wake up someday And if he does wake up someday It may be at the judgment seat of God where the most real thing that McMahon ever experiences is Nothing for 68 years out of his life while he's playing games and escaping the highway of reality but he wakes up on that day and Jesus says depart from me you cursed you workers of iniquity to everlasting fire and according to Deuteronomy chapter 7 God says to the man who hates me, to the man who avoids me, to the man who does everything he can to despise me and rejects my word, I will punish him to his face. And the most real thing that that man will experience will be that message on Judgment Day when Jesus Christ himself looks that man in the eye and says depart from me.

You cursed, you workers of iniquity. God have mercy on those who are sitting right here tonight. That He would wake you up to the reality of God. Life is real, You are real. Sin is real.

The sin you committed last night was real. The God whose law you broke is real. And His judgment is real. God have mercy. Send your spirit upon us.

Save us tonight we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. This year was an interesting year in Colorado. It was the year in which we had the most serious fire that took down more property than any other fire in the history of our state second to last year. Last year was second, this year was first.

And we had the worst flood in all of Colorado history in its destructive effect on human property. And we had the worst legislature ever as measured by God's word or God's law. We had some of the most egregious things happen ever that anybody has ever seen in our state. We had our legislators, the leader of our House of Representatives in Colorado performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post last May. And then we had the worst fire ever and then we had the worst flood ever and I said there might be a connection and I was scoffed I was mocked People could not believe that somebody said it.

There is a God who causes fires and floods and holds men to his holy law. And Christians were embarrassed of me. There was a man who was on his honeymoon for a while. Came back and he reported to everybody at work what happened. He talked about the wonderful time he had.

Talked about everything he ate, everything he drank, beautiful scenery, the things he did, cruises he went on, but he forgot to mention his wife, which we all thought was a little odd. So we asked, Was your wife there with you on your honeymoon? And he said, I'm not sure. I don't remember. So we all concluded that the man was insane.

Friends, we walk out into God's world and we miss Him. Him. The fundamental reality. And let me tell you this, if God's not real, Nothing is real. You're not real.

God is the ultimate reality. And can you Picture now for a moment the cosmic treachery of one who will discover God's universe. Look around and see all of these people made in the image of God with his handprints all over them and miss the God who created them God have mercy on us Friends I miss God Can anybody agree with me on that? I miss God. My heart cries out to know Him.

To seek Him. To see Him. To know Him. Now we're going to talk about worship for a moment. Worship is our response when we have come face to face with God Himself through His Word and by His work.

There is no such thing as a worship service per se if there is no worship. Can we agree on that? Now, what we would call a worship service is where we set up a context in which worship might occur or It may not Worship is a response What you'll find in scripture is worship is a response to answered prayer. Worship is always a response. Look up the word worship in the verb form, those who worship or worship in the word of God.

You're going to find examples like Job who received a visitation of Almighty God in his life. And it came like this. The first messenger came in and said, Job, you just lost all of your beloved servants the next messenger came in and said you just left missed all of your family members except your wife all of your children gone and the Word of God said Joe tore his clothes fell on his face and worshiped God because he knew that he had just been visited by Almighty God. God had touched his life. God had reached into his life and touched him.

And yes, it was a painful touch, but he knew that God did it because he said the Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Worship is to know that God has just worked in your life. Now it can happen by way of negative experience or positive experiences. God works in our lives all the time.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we were on the way to church, and I'm doing the last touch-up to my sermon. It's not where it used to be, and typically what happens is I'm a crammer. So it's right there, my daughter's driving, my wife's in the backseat reading the Bible to the children. And I am, just then and there I get a verse that I have to have. Without it I can't make the biblical case.

And so I begin to pray, Lord, help me to find this verse. I turn to my wife and I say honey I need the verse that sounds like this here's the word you have a concordance he says no I don't I said well that's too bad She went back to reading to the children and the next verse she read was the one I needed. There is a God. And he answers prayer. And I worshiped.

This is very much like Abraham's servant. Same deal. Where is worship? Mentioned in scripture. We talk about worship so much.

But who's worshiping? Abraham's servant. Same kind of prayer. Lord, if this is the right woman, may she come, may she give the water to myself, to all my camels and all 647 gallons, etc., etc. May that be what she does.

He gets up off his knees and she said, sure, I'll get 647 gallons for you and all the camels and Where we read he fell on his face, and he worshiped God right there because he knew he'd been touched by Almighty God He had been visited by Almighty God. He knew that he knew that God was real and that God was real in his own life Same kind of thing Happened to us coming back from vacation a number of years ago We were out in Steamboat and about halfway home. I get out to tie something up keep on driving 150 miles later. I reach for my wallet. It's not there and I knew that it fell out Halfway from Steamboat Denver and so I was fit to be tied I said honey cancel the credit cards is the disaster and my my son in the backseat says under his breath, dad why don't you pray about it.

And I thought, no kidding, I thought to myself, to myself now, a lot of good that'll do the wallet is gone it's gone but because I'm a father and a pastor and all of this sort of thing I I said sure let's pray so I said Lord how about to find the stupid wallet that I lost back there somewhere. You know, it was one of the faithless prayers of my life. Turn to my wife afterwards, cancel the credit card, son. Let's go. We get home.

We get home. I drive into the parking lot of my house. Kids go downstairs. First thing they do is go downstairs. They hit the answering machine.

And I hear all the way from downstairs, I hear, hello, whoever you are, I was driving about 68 miles an hour through Steamboat Springs happen to see something black on the side of the freeway and I found your wallet it was like two minutes after we prayed this guy found the wallet I called him he sent it to me He said I have a gift for finding wallets on the sides of highways. What are the odds? What are the odds of a guy who has a gift? For years we kept that little message on that answer machine remember that Emily and you guys would play that and you look at me and go there is a God and he is real And He manifests Himself to us all the time. But may I say this evening that where God really manifests Himself to us is in the preaching of the Word of God.

And yes, we see Him in providence. We see His actions, His works. And we ought to be giving Him the glory. We need to say that's God. He acted again.

Whether it be in the floods and fires in Colorado or lost wallets in Steamboat Springs, we need to give Him the glory all the time. But we need to seek Him in the worship service. One of the most important contrasts between the wicked and the righteous is right here in the worship service of God when we come into the worship service of God according to Psalm 10 and verse 4 in the pride of his face the wicked does not seek God He doesn't come to church to see God. He isn't sitting on the front of the chair, leaning forward, saying, give it to me, pastor. Preach the word of God to me.

I want to hear it from the word. I want to hear the verses. I need the Spirit of God to act upon me that I might see him this is precisely a spirit of Psalm 63 1 oh God you are my God earnestly I will seek thee I have looked upon thy power and thy glory in the sanctuary it is in the sanctuary It is through the preaching of the word of God that we receive a vision of the power and the glory of God, and our response then must be worshiped. Now let's talk about worship music because That's the second part of my message tonight. Apostasy is very strong, as I said.

As man seeks to worship himself, as man seeks to give himself the glory, and as man ignores the laws of God in the music, in the worship service itself. Now music is not the fundamental element of worship. I believe preaching is because without a face-to-face confrontation with a true and living God you will not respond in worship whether it be in praise and song or prayer So let's talk about culture and music. This is a very important subject. It's more important in world view in some ways because culture is the emanation or the incarnation of what we really believe.

So if you want to know what someone believes look at their culture. I'm writing a book, a sequel to Apostate Soon to Come Out tentatively called The Tattooed Jesus. The false Christs of Culture. Because I believe right now the Christian Church is apostatizing from the faith to a pretty significant extent And we're seeing it in the way they express themselves in their music, in their culture. An important question I have asked in this book that I'm writing is this, would Jesus tattoo Leviticus 19, 29 on his left thigh?

Now, even as I say that, the Christian church is torn on this issue. There is part of the Christian church that says that sounds pretty cool. There's another part of the Christian church that finds even the question to be blasphemous. Now, let me ask you this. Do you think it's an important question to ask modern Christianity?

Would Jesus tattoo Leviticus 19.29 on his left thigh? It also drives the point hard as to whether or not Jesus would pay any attention to the Old Testament law. For any of you who don't know what Leviticus 19.29 says, it basically says, don't tattoo anything on your left thigh. What I'm saying is, these are important questions. They will determine whether or not people are Christians or are not Christians in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

That's why it's so important. It's important because culture is not neutral. Christians must address culture or be consumed by it. That's why it's important for us to write books like Apostate and the other books I plan to write on culture. The last section of my book is on culture.

I talk about the great philosophical Nephilim in this book who effectively set the worldview direction for the modern world, the literary nephilim that set the direction for the universities and the academy and the liberal arts universities and the Christian liberal arts curriculum for the last 150 years and then I move on to the humanist cultural nephilim that are now dominating in the cultural realm and taking hoards of people. I would, I think it'd be safe to say billions of people around the globe to hell with them by way of these philosophical ideas that have been beautifully incarnated and cultural means like music and motion pictures. The time is apostasy. And that's one thing you need to know before we get into the issue of music. You need to understand the times.

We're not living in New Guinea where the gospel is coming for the first time to people in New Guinea we're not living in Rome where the gospel came for the first time to pagan Romans we're living in pagan America where the vast majority of Americans are ex-Christians or becoming ex-Christians as quickly as they possibly can. This is the zeitgeist. This is where we live. Know where we live. Now a lot of Christians are coming back and saying, but we need to contextualize.

We need to contextualize And as I'm watching end of the spear, any of you remember end of the spear, the story of Jim Elliot put to the motion picture, I'm horrified. Number one, because they chose a homosexual for the leading role, but number two was because when Jim Elliot and the other guys make it down to meet the Akkas, they're taking off their clothes as quickly as possible so they can relate to these natives in their skivvies. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't think John G. Paton did that. I don't think David Brainerd did that.

I can't remember Patrick taking his clothes off. This contextualization is craziness. And it's leading the American Christians to an ungodly expression of an ungodly worldview. And I'll explain to you some of the ways in which that happens in the remainder of my message. As we consider culture, the first thing you need to understand is the time we live in.

It's a time of apostasy. That's where American is in the 21st century. Secondly, when it comes to culture, there is a subjective element to it. Again, this is not the easiest thing in the world to express. Culture is ultimately wisdom.

Worldview is knowledge. But culture is the expression of worldview which ultimately is expressed by wisdom. And wisdom is hard to come by and it certainly is hard to describe, but I'm going to do the best I possibly can. There is what I would call in culture, direction not perfection. We work off of baseline, and we move a trajectory off a baseline.

We're interested in both things. In some ways, the baseline itself is the context in which you find yourself. The trajectory is the direction in which you're headed. And so here's my point. There is a difference between the inner city young man who is saved out of a gang, who happens to start out with a certain music form and a homeschooling kid who's been raised with much better forms much stronger forms that better represent the biblical worldview and moves towards the forms that are discovered by this little boy in the inner city.

Moreover, consider for a moment those moms and dads here who was saved out of the 70s and 80s and they burned their demon rock albums and their rape rap albums. 15 years later their kids pick up some Christian rap and some Christian heavy metal and then four years later they're bored of it and they're moving back to the death metal and rape rap albums that their parents burned 25 years earlier you see both are on trajectories there is the trajectory of the man who repents and there is the trajectory of that who is apostatizing or moving away from the faith that was given to them by their parents not saying that an apostasy a man loses his salvation what I what I'm saying is that in the generations you find men like John Paul Sartre who had seven generations of Protestant pastors in their heritage rebelled against it and became probably one of the most evil men who has ever lived. Apostates tend to be dangerous, really dangerous, that's why we call them the Nephilim so we work off a baseline and trajectory both are important to analyze as you look at music and culture thirdly third point here on music remember that symbols mean things.

Symbols mean things. If I was to drive into my church parking line on a Sunday morning with a big old three-foot playboy symbol in the window of my car. That might be offensive to some who attend our worship service. Now if a little boy in Africa is wearing a t-shirt with a bunny on it, that means lunch to him. You see, it has a different implication to him in his cultural setting imagine for a moment that some youth group leader decided to bring in some kind of a cultural form from out there.

And there is a cultural form in which the people who want to express the most evil forms of disrespect to their fellow men who are made in the image of God will lift one particular finger. I won't demonstrate it for you because I think you probably know about this. Those of you who do not live in America may not understand what I'm saying. But all of these fingers are good. They're made by God himself and they ought to be redeemed for good uses, okay?

But let's say this guy thinks it's really cool what everybody out there is doing in this expression of disrespect And so he brings it into his youth group praise and worship time where he gets everybody to lift that finger That is incredibly obnoxious not just in the sight of everybody there, but also in the sight of God, because everybody there knows what it means. Most of you are saying at this point, what an idiot. Now let me ask you this. Why would anybody want to bring a music form that is invented by angry young fatherless boys in the inner city who are incredibly angry, who are not redeemed, and are putting together a form of music that is known to the gangstas in the area. And somebody comes up with a brilliant idea to pull this form that is used to express disrespect, certainly a lack of fear of God, but more than that a disrespect for others in which they refer to the mother of female dogs and I can give you other ideas of what kind of message these people are trying to set forward by their music form.

What if somebody takes that music form and says, hey, I've got a great idea. Let's use this form in the worship service. Now is anybody saying, what idiot would do that? This is the problem of food offered to idols. Paul says, be very careful about food offered to idols because there is an association between the food that is offered to idols and the idolatry itself.

The food is the symbol and it symbolizes what happens in the pagan services and unless you can pull these things apart in the consciousness of everybody in the area, you cannot use this food Symbols mean things Fourthly here's the fourth thing you need to know about music Music solidifies and confirms our Ultimate commitments now how our ultimate commitments set but by the preaching of the Word of God? Paul in Romans 10. How will somebody get saved unless they hear the Word of God preached? So the Word of God needs to be preached and the first mistake we make is to overemphasize music itself. The music wars in churches I think are manifestations of the fact that nobody cares about the preaching anymore and what they're really focused in on is is really the the singing and the songs because that is the quote unquote praise and worship.

It's not really the preaching of the word of God that's of essence to the modern Christian. Here's my problem though. Music is supposed to solidify and confirm our commitments, our ultimate commitments that are set by the preaching of the Word of God and the truths that are coming out of God's Word. But the problem with the Christians is they tend to not have a good worldview that as they borrow from the worldview of unbelievers, they synthesize their worldview. Their worldview is not well set, so not ready to culturalize yet.

They're not ready to enculturate the things that they've learned because they haven't learned anything. And What they know, the effective worldview they have, is still not really set by the metaphysics, the ethics, the epistemology, the teachings, the theology of the Word of God. And so they become synthesized on the one hand, or just plain old-fashioned, insipidized. That's a new word, insipidized. They just become insipid.

And much of Christian music I think is somewhat incipit. It doesn't really have any real gravitas to it. It doesn't really have much depth to it. And it could be, again, because Christians don't believe anything very deeply in the day in which we live. Now, I think that applies to all of us.

We need to believe something before we can express it or express it well and the problem with Noah and the ark and all the little pictures all the little picture books you get on it is the fact that it is it is very softened the story is softened we don't really get the thrust of the story when you have cute little pudgy Noah and the pudgy Noah wife and the pudgy little Noah kids and then pudgy little animals coming on the ark and everybody's waving you know as the ark is leaving this beautiful island and everything's really wonderful and they don't picture the dead bodies that are bloated and swimming around the ark and some trying to crawl on and their their fingernails are being that be torn to shreds as God is destroying all flesh from off the earth that little part of its gone so let me ask you this what's that story worth if we've lost the context in which the story happens? The same thing applies, I think, to quite a bit of the Christian faith. Unless we know why Jesus Christ, that bloody figure of Christ Himself, was hanging there on the cross, unless we know why, it means nothing to us.

We can't just speak of the love of God. It has to be rooted in the fear of God. It has to be. The fear of God is first base. Too many of our Christians are playing tee-ball like four-year-olds.

What do four-year-olds do in tee-ball? They hit the ball and they run to second base. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. Unless men and women in any given worship service understand the holiness of God, the justice of God, the law of God. Unless they've been taught that, unless there's been something of the fear of God in them, Why do we go to the cross?

Why do we go to the forgiveness of Christ? Why do we go to second base? Which is it was just faith and We assure our people the forgiveness of God The fear of God is what John Bunyan calls the bass in the orchestra. It's the bass. It kind of holds everything else up.

You have no bass. You have no fear. What do you have? This is too much of Christian music. I was listening to a CCM station for 48 hours about three years ago.

I sentenced myself to straight 48 hours. Listen to nothing but CCM music. And my goal was to identify the fear of God in 48 hours. Now, that may not be your station, it was my station out in Denver. I heard one song in 48 hours, Our God is an Awesome God, that seemed to smack a little bit of the fear of God.

One song in 48 hours. There's not much fear of God in modern Christian culture. Here, the next point is this. Method must support the message. Imagine a pastor come to his music pastor on a Sunday morning, a Saturday, and saying, I'm planning to preach on the fear of God, on the reverence of God on Sunday.

And I want you to bring a composition on the fear of the reverence of Almighty God on the Sunday morning. And the guy shows up that afternoon says I've got it past past I've got it this is the song that's gonna make it this is it this is the one we're gonna introduce Sunday morning fear of God reverence of God here it is and he starts working these guys guitar out he starts his hair going first you know His hair's kind of flying all over the place. You know, back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. And he starts to sing it. You got to reverent, reve, reve, reve, reve the old man in the sky.

Pastor looks at him and says, no, that's not quite the feel I was going for. Do you see how you could pick the wrong form of music to express the fear of God in that instance. The pastor says no actually I was preaching from Psalm 58 you know where we're gonna wash our feet in the blood of the wicked. So he comes back that afternoon and says I've got it, Pastor. Here it is.

Here's the song for Psalm 58. We will wash our feet. We will wash our feet in the blood of the wicked. We will wash our feet in the blood. Hallelujah.

We will wash our feet. Pastor says you're out of here See the problem is that the method is important but before that man really understands the method necessary the tune that needs to carry those lyrics he's got to understand the lyrics he's got to understand them he's got to feel them he's got to internalize the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge okay here's my next point the fifth commandment is important in preparing music for your church And the reason for that it is the first commandment with promise. Honor your father and your mother that it may be long will go well with you that you may live long upon the earth. This is the commandment that God gives us in the New Testament Ephesians six verses one and two and also back in the Old Testament as well. It's a critical, critical promise.

And friends, the reason why we have gone from Bach to Eminem's rape rap where he refers to his mother as a female dog is because you have successive generations that have disobeyed and dishonored their mother and father generation after generation after generation. You cannot improve on culture unless there are children who will honor their mother and father. In the book of Proverbs we find the father saying, oh my son take my law and tie it around your neck take your mother's commandments and tie it around your wrist so you see this in Scripture this is not a reference to God's commandments or God's laws but it's the mother's commandments the father's commandments which ultimately are an application of their mother's understanding concerning the commandments of God. You see, if a young man is told how to dress And how to make his bed and and how to say yes or no sir he comes back to his mother and says mother Jesus never said yes or no sir Jesus never tucked in his shirt, and I'm sure he never made his bed I can't find in Scripture anywhere. I've looked at the concordance.

It's just not there mother I don't know you're adding to God's Word these are laws these are commands that you're adding to God's Word you know mom stop being such a legalist what's mom saying but that a mother and a father present their best shot at the best form of application concerning manners, concerning dress, concerning culture, music, etc, etc, etc. This is what's happened in our society today where children refuse to honor their mother and father and thus create a revolution of culture from generation to generation generation that's why for the most part we have Gen X Gen Y Gen Z churches we get new services every 10-15 years where you have the youth service you have the nose ring service you know where everybody comes with a nose ring. And then you get the old fogey service where they sing the old hymns. And you get new services and new churches that come up again and again and again. This my friends is ultimately the death of the honor of mothers and fathers and the death of generational churches.

I have a vision, which by the way is probably the most challenging vision of all, that someday we have a church where great-grandparents and great-grandchildren worship in the same church and they relate to the same music. A typical old fundamentalist or reformed church in America is 50 gray hairs and two homeschooling families singing the old hymns and the old songs. Why is this? Because the pastor is still standing up and telling everybody, send your kids to the public schools everything's gonna be fine out there let your kids enjoy the pop culture and all the rest pick up their stuff from all of the peer groups and so forth and so on get their own culture he's undermining the church he will have no church 30 years from now If this cultural revolution continues from generation on to generation on to generation, the best thing that can happen is to see that the social revolution stops in order that the cultural revolution stops too. It will be the social revolutions that produce the cultural revolutions.

If music is not designed to fear God, or honor parents and grandparents in the same church, where everybody worships according to the same styles we do not have the worship of Christ because we are breaking the fifth commandment and the first commandment and Jesus Christ will have none of it There was a song that came out about 30 years ago by Nia Saldaca, it's probably 40 years ago now, Nia Saldaca came out with a song called Breaking Up is Hard to Do. You remember the song anybody? Just out of curiosity? Okay, breaking up is hard to do. Not a number one song in my home.

You know why? Because my kids don't know what that is. They have no idea what breaking up is. Breaking up, what's that dad? Oh, it has to do with dating.

What's that dad? Well, it's where little 13, 14 year old boys and girls hang out together and get in trouble and forget about it. Never mind. You see, we have a different social setting. The social setting produces a certain cultural form, which inevitably leads to the cultural forms we see today that eventually make their way into the church and affect the next generation and the next and the next.

This is why the reintegration of family, fatherhood, and culture will produce a different form of music and culture. And I think in the end, save culture. And perhaps even by God's grace, save the church. The final point I want to make is this. We need to get rid of the iPods.

Okay, except for those of you listening to Generations. One exception. But here's what I really mean. Here's what I mean. My son got me an iPod for my birthday a couple of years ago, And I went out with my wife.

We were on a plane somewhere and I was listening to some music and kind of bopping along. And then I looked at her and she was not enjoying the music with me. And I realized that I was entering into my own existentialistic, self-centered, narcissistic experience Where she was not involved in this I came back to my son said son this iPod this me pod It's all about me pods not going to work so he came back with a little splitter deal and now we have a we pod and We listen to it together, you know, so My point is this According to a scriptural way of looking at music and entertainment, ergo Deuteronomy 13 and 15 and 17 and so forth, where we are told to rejoice as a family in our entertainment experiences with our daughters and our sons and our wives and and our Levites and so forth and so on That's that's speaking of entertainment and music in the context of community not in a self-oriented narcissistic existentialistic lonely experience of the modern existentialist man we have to somehow wean ourselves from this and the best way I can tell you to do that is to pull out the earpods, put the iPods into a stereo system, and everybody listens to the same stuff.

And as you start to do that, I will guarantee you, you will start to skip songs you used to never skip. I've noticed this, I've just done this the last one or two years myself. I've gotten rid of the earphones That if anybody's gonna listen to it We're gonna listen together and we start playing the stuff that that we all used to play to ourselves We find out we're weeding out this and weeding out that we're gradually forming art forms that I think are better expressive of what we really believe and hopefully we'll see the renewal and the restoration of decent culture in our families in the years to come. God help us in this area. The present system is destroying itself friends.

I am so concerned for God's people on this issue. I have been crying out for my own family, my own children. I have concerns about CCM, I have concerns about this or that, different forms of culture. They're sleeping in underneath the carpets and coming into our house and I'm finding that the present system is very destructive. I have been following the top 40 charts since I was a disc jockey in California in the 1980s.

And friends, I will tell you that the recent top five hits in the world today are the worst I've ever seen. They have crossed over from decadence to nihilism, almost without exception. Back in the 1990s, when Kurt Cobain committed suicide, it was that 25% of modern culture was destructive. Now it's closer to 90 to 100 percent the top five numbers or almost without exception incredibly destructive in form and content the number one song in the nation and was number one in 20 nations around the world was a song approving of the sin of rape and describing it for billions of people around the globe, number one in 20 nations around the world. This world is destroying itself together with its lusts.

It's happening right now in this generation. I don't know where you go from here at the point where you are at almost total destruction on the macro level What happens will we see mass suicides in the years to come? I don't know. I'm very concerned Extremely concerned Miley Cyrus went from nice to naughty to nihilist in five years it was a record even people in Time magazines are saying this whole thing all this culture is becoming self-destructive Camille Pile-Paglia writes articles on this as a feminist as a as a modern liberal who sees that culture itself is self-destructing even as we're watching But here's the point I want to make. We are being affected by it.

The top five numbers in the nation affect the top 10. The top 10 affect the top 40. Top 40 affect the top 100. The top 100 as a pyramid tends to affect all of the CCM artists that are way, way down the pyramid because they're all tapped into the same monolithic form of culture. Friends, it is a dangerous time.

Culture is starting to destroy our families. It's destroying our communities. I think it's going to destroy our nations in the years to come. My challenge to all of you is this. In the midst of this unprecedented power, these centralized forces that have so much more control over the minds of billions of people around the globe, they didn't have this before but with the top 40 stations and with the Hollywood and Nashville machines that are cranking out the stars they control the minds of billions of people around the globe and it is cross national it is international now these Nephilim have tremendous power but we have the power of the Word of God.

We can challenge our people to fear God, keep his commandments. We can preach the Word of God and apply it to culture. My challenge to our people is don't apostatize, repent, renew by understanding a proper biblical worldview, proper biblical law as applied to culture, we can see our children saved if God has mercy upon them and if we're on our knees. We need to be praying to God that he will deliver our children. It's time to cry out for the mercy of God.

I mean cry out. It's time to lift up your voice and say, God, I see there's destruction everywhere. I see it everywhere. I see in the high schools, I see in the college, I see it in the destruction of social systems, economic systems, cultural systems. I do see it.

It's all over the front page of the of Time magazine. It's all over the millennial generation. It's Destruction everywhere God have mercy on our boys have mercy on our girls Cry out to God scream out to God for his mercy get desperate with him. I'm telling you. This is the real deal There's a hurricane rushing 500 miles per hour across the deck of this ship right now, unless we're bolted down according to the principles of the Word of God.

We're applying God's principles to the way we do music and motion pictures and all the other aspects of culture friends and lest we do this unless we repent we will all likewise perish listen to me the world is passing away I'm convinced of it it's the front page of Time magazine they're saying they're passing away The greatest stars right now are calling their own fans, some of the most despicable names. They're making fun of their own crowd. They're making fun of themselves. They're about ready to commit suicide themselves. They'll tell you that.

That's the way the world is going. They will destroy themselves. Decadence always turns into nihilism. The world always destroys itself together with a lust thereof, but he who does the will of the Father shall abide forever Teach your children the will of the Father abide forever Amen Amen. And the Church and the Family to the Word of God.

And for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website ncfic.org.