Well, good morning. It's great to be back in the Phoenix area. I was here for the homeschool conference several months ago. It's great to be back with you again. And I have to say that the passion of my life is reformation.

That's my family. We have five children. We live out in the plains of eastern Colorado. That's my beautiful wife, Brenda, and five children. Rebecca Joy is with us today, and we've got three other daughters.

My son, Daniel, is sort of a Kevin Jr. But we're hoping for reformation. This is the desire of our hearts. This is the desire of my heart. This is my desire for the church as well.

In fact, seven years ago we laid out the plans for the church that we planted in Castle Rock, Colorado. We decided to name that church Reformation Church. Because from the bottom of my heart, I want to see reformation. And I know that was the desire of my father. We homeschool our children out in Colorado, and part of the reason we do that is because my father in 1969 decided he did not want to raise his children in the American culture.

That's what he told us. And so he just took us out of the American culture and moved to an island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called Kyushu. It was the southern island of Japan. And he raised us out there. My father was a radical.

When I say radical, I mean he was the kind of guy who would get down to the root of things. That's what the word radical means. So if anybody ever accuses you of being radical, that's okay to be radical. Because a radical is looking at the root. My father saw there were some root problems in 1969.

And I'll tell you what, folks, there weren't many people home schooling in 1969. You follow me? The modern movement didn't get started until the 80s. And my father had tremendous courage, faith, and I think foresight. My father was a reformer.

In fact, he protected us from American culture. Some of you children, my guess, have been homeschooled. How many of you children have been homeschooled? You want to just raise your hand? Okay, looks like a lot of you.

And that's the way it was with us. My father wanted to protect us from the culture. I remember we watched one movie in Japanese television when we were out there in the 1970s. It was Sound of Music. And you know what?

We did not even make it through the end of that thing. It was right about halfway through where it got a little semi-romantic. I don't think they even kissed. But it was just, it wasn't quite right, you know? And my father said, OK, that's it.

The television is off. You're off to bed. My father let us watch half of Sound of Music. But he let us read Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther. He let us read Calvin's Institutes, Augustine's Confessions.

He let us read all of the Puritans. And I'll tell you, I'm bringing this out guys, because I want you to understand how unusual, how weird we were. We were a peculiar people. And you know what was funny is that we knew it. I mean we were past the denial stage.

By the time I was 12 years old I knew we were strange. We didn't have any other missionary families that we knew in Japan who were quite like us. You see my father was concerned not just about the culture and part of the reason he got out of the public school system, he was a teacher in the public schools, was because he saw what evolution was doing in the public schools. He knew that within 20-30 years there would be something like Columbine happening because these kids were being taught that they were cosmic dust. Not creator of the image of God, but random pieces of cosmic dust that by pure chance, not by providential sovereign control or anything like that, by pure chance, they were evolving into something in the universe that was apart from the living God.

My father knew it would be a real problem, and So he took us out of that system, but he also understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Church of Christ in the 21st century, in the 20th century. He knew there was something wrong. And I wonder why sometimes my father gained this understanding that there's something wrong with the church. And I think it had a lot to do with the fact that my father began to read the church fathers. My father was able, by God's grace, to get out of the evangelical morass that he found himself in, and he began to read other people who had written John Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon, Martin Luther, John Calvin, the Puritans like Richard Baxter.

These were the sorts of men that filled our bookshelves. And as he read these things, he began to see there was something flimsy about the faith in the 20th century. My father engaged a great reformation. And you know what? You think that this audience today is rather small.

This would have been 20 times the size of any audience my father ever spoke to in the 1970s. The kind of message I'm going to give you today would have been extremely unpopular in the 1970s. Oh, it was almost impossible to find anybody who believed God was central in metaphysics, ethics, and truth. You wouldn't find them. People didn't care.

They knew man was central. They knew man was ultimate. They'd been taught that in their churches for a hundred years. So my father understood that these things were unpopular. He wrote a book called Kama-Sama no Rippo, a book called God's Law where he just went through the Ten Commandments.

Highly unpopular in the 1970s. Very many people wanted to hear anything that God had to say about law. Didn't want any of that. My father wrote a book called Seisho Togendai Kagaku. This means the Bible in modern science.

And my father's life was transformed largely by reading Henry Morris's and John C. Whitcomb's book, The Genesis Flood. It was published in 1960. A man by the name of R.J. Rushdoney talked to PNR Publishing back in 1959 and solidified that publishing of that book in 1960, which was a significant book.

I'll tell you why. What happened was they were beginning to make an epistemological shift in the minds of, as it turns out, not clergy but laymen. Men like Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb, these men were scientists. Understand for 200 years people had worshiped at the altar of science, but for the first time, what happened?

For the first time, men were saying, let's interpret rock layers by the Bible instead of interpreting the Bible by rock layers. This became a fundamental epistemological shift in the minds of many men. And they again began to subscribe to God the glory and the authority that is due Him rather than to kowtow to the idols of the empiricism. And this began a tremendous reformation in the mind of my father. I believe the modern day reformation began in 1960 with the publishing of that book.

Well where are we today? I'll tell you what. Where we are today is we're crying out for reformation. Amen. May God do something right now.

I believe we may be seeing the end of evangelicalism. Remember, evangelicalism came out of the split between liberalism and the more conservative reformed element in the 1920s and 1930s. It was Christianity today that refused to move on with J. Gresham Machen. They said, we don't want to go all the way, we'll go halfway.

And the end result was the capturing of a major element of Christianity at the time. But over time they did not, they were not able to solidify a significant enough worldview God-centered worldview to establish a strong enough church that would stand the test of time So what happens is evangelicalism now is falling apart. It's happening right now. Evangelicalism is almost dead. Do you know that 50 percent of evangelical pastors have been divorced?

There is no difference. This came out in Newsweek just a few weeks ago. There is no difference between the divorce rate among evangelical pastors and that divorce rate that exists among the wider populace in America. In fact, in our state just last year, a significant thing happened. Two of the megachurches, the largest megachurches, one in Colorado Springs and one in Denver, and these were fairly conservative, evangelical megachurches, one of them much bigger than the other and you know what I'm talking about, two pastors came out of the closet admitting to a lifestyle of homosexuality.

Now I'll tell you ladies and gentlemen, this did not happen in the 1850s. You didn't have a pastor admitting to homosexuality in the 1850s. Didn't happen in the 1950s. Didn't happen in the 1960s. Didn't happen in the 1970s.

The 1980s. The 1990s. But it just happened just last year in Colorado. This indicates to me that evangelicalism is almost dead. Get your RIP signs ready to go and put the rest on NP signs on evangelicalism.

It's just about dead. 70% to 80% of churches in America have plateaued or in decline in membership and yet there are a few mega churches that are still surviving. This is only the beginning of the end. Therefore, I think it's critical that we establish a Reformation agenda. This my friends is for the survival of the Church of Christ.

Now granted, He is sovereign. I'm not saying He's not sovereign. God is totally sovereign in what is happening, yet He holds the people in this room personally responsible for what happens. So I want to impose that responsibility on us. It is absolutely critical that God's remnant come out from among them and be separate, sayeth the Lord.

It's important that we understand what the issues are. And part of the problem I'm seeing is that within our ranks, we have a hard time identifying the Reformation agenda. Some people have not correctly estimated the enemy, the antithesis that is before us. They don't understand how significant it is. They've come out against mosquitoes with some cans of raid.

They don't understand these are dragons that are destroying our cultures, our families, and our churches. They don't understand. They haven't painted a proper picture of what this enemy consists of. And unless we can do that, unless we can identify it properly, brothers and sisters, we're going after the wrong thing. Our Reformations will not be significant enough.

Well, what has happened in America, and by the way, this is a brief outline of what I'm presenting today. What has happened in America, brothers and sisters, is we have become a post-Christian nation. You know when this nation was founded in the 1600s, that we were a Christian nation. We were the product of the First Reformation, period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The Puritans, the Pilgrims, the Scottish Presbyterians, they looked to their spiritual forefathers of John Calvin and John Knox as the original visionaries that gave birth to this nation. In fact, John Knox and John Calvin are the men. Far more than anybody else. These men influenced the nation we have today. These men influenced the educational system that was provided to this early nation.

In the first 100 years, 200 years of this nation, you know the first book that was provided for little tiny tykes, the first little preschool book began with A, in Adam's fall we sinned all. Now you know that book is not being used very much in American public schools today. Now it was two or four hundred years ago, and it continued to be used for the next two hundred years or three hundred years. But at the turn of the twentieth century, things changed. What happened over those hundred years?

How did we lose the vision? How did we transfer from a primarily a Christian nation to a secular nation? I suggest to you it was the theology of the churches. We turned away from God-centered thinking, God-centered perspectives on truth, on ethics and metaphysics, and over time we moved into a modern secularized nation. And that, my friends, is the world that we live in today.

The problems we deal with is that the church is unable to make an appreciable impact on the culture. Obviously if we didn't make an impact We would see that Heather has two daddies would not be the new primary school textbook we're arguing about in New York City school districts out in New York. Obviously the church is unable to make an appreciable impact on the culture. We can't even win our own children. We talk about this all the time, don't we?

We can't even win our own children. We lose 80% of our children to the world. Why is that? That's because the world has made an impact upon the church. Not only can the church fail to make any appreciable impact on the way we do our education or economics or politics, our life in the 21st century, but the world has impact upon the church!

The world is corrupting the church! Now let me give you a couple of examples where this sort of thing happens. About two years ago, the Denver Rocky Mountain News came out with a 12 page article came out in the Sunday newspaper about a little boy named Dylan who had problems, he had birth problems, he wasn't able to speak, he wasn't able to eat, he was fed by a tube And his parents, by the time this little boy was five years old, his parents were sick of it. And they decided to pull the plug on this boy. And this 12-page article was a macabre step-by-step detail of this little child's starving to death.

An amazing story that pulled in our heartstrings, ours especially, because you know what was ironic about this story is six years ago about the very same time that Dylan was born, Another little boy was born named Simon to our congregation. In fact, Simon was born at the very beginning of our congregation. Our congregation is seven years old today, and Simon is seven years old too. We know how old our church is by just looking at Simon. And Simon had the exact same problems that this little boy had to every single detail.

He had the same surgeries. He had the same dysfunctions. He had the same inability to communicate with his parents in the church body. But here's another similarity. Both Simon and Dylan attended godly churches.

And the newspaper article was very, very clear. This woman attended a large evangelical community church in Arvada, Colorado. It was faith in Jesus that helped this mother kill her five-year-old boy by removing the feeding tube. The pastor told everybody in the newspaper how the Lord told the mother to kill the baby. This is synthesis.

This is synthesis. The world is synthesized into the church as infected the way that we think and the way that we live, effectively sucking life out of the Church of Jesus Christ in our present day. Another example, the Metropolitan Community Church of the Rockies is a church that meets about 20 miles up the freeway from us. They have three to four hundred members. They actually have three or four hundred other churches around the United States.

And it is a church of the lesbian and gay community. Quote, we are, this is on their website, we are a vibrant faith community based on a passionate belief in God's grace. Christ calls us to serve others, to grow closer to God, to build community. From Jesus, who is both human and divine, we learn how to love both God and our neighbors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. See now, What do we have here?

We have a church that is Orthodox. A church that effectively teaches the very same things that the vast majority of Evangelical churches teach across America. They sing the very same songs. They sing Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. They have the same liturgy and yet, would you suggest to me that there might be something wrong with this church?

You see, it is insufficient for us to rely entirely upon the original church councils and creeds to establish orthodoxy in the 21st century. God's people are going to have to come out and determine what the new standards of orthodoxy are. Why? Because the antithesis has changed form. You see, this is precisely what the church had to deal with when Arius came forward and said, I don't think Jesus is God.

It forced the church to unify, which I know you're going to say is impossible today. Yes, it is impossible. But for the grace of God. It forced the church to come forward with a new standard of orthodoxy and this has got to, got to, got to, got to happen in the next 100 years. It has to happen.

I understand we haven't had a Nicaea or a Chalcedon in 9 to 1600 years. I'm telling you it's got to happen again if the Church of Christ is going to survive. Now, here's one of the problems. As we set out to define our Reformation agenda, you're going to find people constantly disagreeing on minors. In fact, one of the reasons why we are unable to unify, one of the reasons why we are unable to establish any kind of a standard of orthodoxy, is because the church has been split a thousand times, ten thousand times, by disagreements on minor issues that have come up again and again and again and again.

You tell me why you have churches all over America, evangelical, fundamentalist churches all over America, that man, they've dialed in the right amount of water in the baptism, they've even put it in the name of their church, but they're sending their kids to hell wholesale by sending their kids to public schools where the fear of God is not taught as the beginning of wisdom and knowledge. The most basic principle in all of education is ignored. I'll tell you what happened. There were Pharisees over the last 200 years of church history that strained that gnats and swallowed camels and the judgment of God is upon us for that reason. Now I know this message is a tough message.

I preach it with conviction because we've got some repentance to do. I'm not talking to a bunch of homosexuals today in this audience, am I? We have our own repentance to do. God I believe has cursed this nation and cursed the church because we haven't properly loved His Word and loved each other. Those are the only two possible problems, brothers and sisters, in developing the formulations of our Reformation doctrine.

We don't love God enough. We don't love each other enough. And if we don't love each other enough, we're going to split each other down the middle again and again and again and again over every single minor issue that comes down the pike. In repentance before God over the last five years of our church's life, we have put the baptism issue aside. We're saying that issue is not going to dictate our church's basic Orthodox theme because we are repenting for 200 years of failing to note the camel.

Are you with me here? We are on our face before God. If we've been mistaken for 200 years and we miss something as important as giving our children a righteous Christian paideia, then God, We're not going to make any more mountains out of molehills for the time being. We're going to keep our eye on the ball. And not focus on the miners.

Brothers and sisters, I want to make an impact. Can you tell? Don't you? I have been part of the Christian Church for three, four generations. My father, My grandfather, sure we were involved in all the Children's Crusades and all the Youth for Christ programs.

And think of all the programs that the Christian church has come up with in the last 50 to 100 years. All those huge crusades where we wanted to see something accomplished. But we fast forwarded 20, 30 years. I still have my grandfather's biography that he wrote a year or two before he passed away. And he was a man of God.

Praise God I have a grandfather who was a godly man who had a heart for Jesus. And he was involved in every program. And he sent his kids off to boarding school so he could head up some kind of a big Youth for Christ program. And he lost his youngest boy to homosexuality. I have all the stories for you, but in his last words he said, the impact of my life was when I was able to connect with four to five people and disciple them for Jesus Christ in relationship.

You see, all of the programs that we have seen, I don't know how many of them have produced much gold, silver, and precious stones, but I'll tell you what, as the fire has burned, over the generations that we look back at all those people, and my relatives have told me these sorts of things, have gone back to the people that were on fire and youth for Christ, they're not anymore. The fire burned. And when the fire burned, all we had was wood, hay, and stubble. And I'll tell you what, I'm sick of it. I just am.

I guess it's because I only live one life of Christ. I mean, amen? Amen? Do you want to waste it? I think We want to look into the eyes of our children, the ones we're discipling for Jesus Christ, and know that there's gold, silver, and precious stones right there.

We want to know that What we're doing for God is going to produce something of substance and is going to yield fruit for generations to come. This is what we want. We don't want revivals. Don't give me another revival. We're sick of it.

We're burned out on revivals, right? We're tired of some guy coming into town and telling everybody he's going to get everybody saved, and everybody comes forward and does their little thing, and that's it. That's the end of it. Societies were never changed. Cultures weren't changed.

Education systems, economic systems weren't transformed according to the law word of Jesus Christ and we get a world where 37% of children now are born without fathers up from 6% and where half of marriage is in a divorce and you say that evangelicalism has made progress in the last hundred years. Nothing, I tell you, nothing. Nothing. Throw it away. Let's start over again.

Let's go back to the Word of God and establish a new agenda, a reformation agenda, that will make a difference. Now, let's ask the million dollar question. This is the tough question. What is this agenda going to consist of? This is not an easy question.

I have grappled with it for the last seven years out of my life. This particular question I have wrestled with it. I prayed over it. I've asked every godly man that wants to be reforming in some way or another what the agenda is. We've done interviews on it on a radio program.

And Here's the way to establish the Reformation agenda. It's right there on the screen. Identify the foundational issue and get a sufficient incarnation of it. Boom. That's it.

That's it. That's what you've got to do. You see, as Brother Scott told us this morning, you cannot come to a particular application like family integration and say that's the sum and substance of a 21st century reformation. Why is that? Because homosexuals can family integrate their churches that they want to.

It's not enough. There's not enough substance to it. And I know some people are sufficient with a couple of tweaked applications. If you've got some girls in long dresses, if you've got a little courtship happening, you've got integration in the church, man, you're there! Well you know what, there are some Mormons out there that'd be real happy with that agenda.

It's Not enough! My point here is that God isn't looking for superficial changes. He wants fundamental foundational heart changes happening in the very, very center of our souls. He wants the reformation extending from heart to hands. He doesn't want to confine it to the heart.

There are people out there saying, hey, we're as modest as the day is long in our heart. They'll send their daughters into church wearing bikinis, telling everybody they're modest. Well, there are those who dress modestly, but boy, they're still as proud as the day is long inside their hearts. So see, it works both directions. We need to find a foundational, substantial issue over which we have got to transform society and then sufficiently incarnate it into light.

This is essential for a modern day Reformation. How do I identify it? We choose the right issue. Now a lot of good men are grappling with this issue. I did a series of interviews on my radio program involving the Reformation of the church.

I stuck a mic in front of a couple of guys' faces and says, I'll give you five minutes. What's wrong with the church and what do we do about it? That was my question. I talked to D. James Kennedy's operation, a man I respect tremendously.

I was able to get into Gary Cass because D. James Kennedy was on his way out and God bless him. He did a great ministry, didn't he? And he left a great legacy. He did some very good things.

And we praise God for it. As I interviewed this man, Gary Cass, I discover that the heart of the ministry is indeed to preach the word of God and apply it to the area of politics. Apply it to the area of politics. It is only when God's people step forward and want to make a positive, righteous change in the political sphere where we've got reformation. That's Gary Cass.

Talk to Doug Wilson, another reformer from Moscow, Idaho. He said we need God-centered teaching, a solemn and joyful return to doctrinal preaching, liturgical worship and songs that honor God. The incarnation for Doug Wilson is all worship. It's all worship. That's what he talks about.

Again, you understand what people are doing? These are reforming guys. They desire reformation in the church, change in the church. They're sick of whatever we have And they're out there trying to establish something. And everybody has a different take on this, a different agenda, a different direction.

The emergent church. I interviewed a guy named Doug Padgett from the emergent church movement, which, by the way, has also involved somewhat in family-integrated home church operations. And the emergent church is very interested in the renewal of relationships. This is important to them. But they say the problem with the church is it has not adapted fast enough to the worldly culture out there.

And they do not acknowledge that God's law is an absolute standard, or that there is anything absolute about the law of God or the truth of God. But The truth of God must continually be twisted and made conformable to the culture as it changes. Now some of you know what the problems are with some of these theories. But now let me get to a couple of guys who I respect even more. R.C.

Sproul Sr., he says, the problem is the secularization of the church. Churches have become man-centered, and seminaries have weak professors who kowtow to the pseudo-intellectuals of the humanist temples. The church was gutted of the message, the doctrine of God, His character, His sovereignty, His holiness, His justice, His wrath. Every aspect of His being has been diminished. The Old Testament is deemed irrelevant.

How can you worship God that you don't know? Asked R.C. On my radio program, he says there's a lack of gravitas in the church, a lack of gravity, a lack of weightiness, a lack of the sense that God is big! God is sovereign! God is somebody who ought to be worshipped rather than high-fived here and there.

During the service, you see, this is what RC senior said and he said something I think is really critical. You may see new models in educating the clergy. We've got to get back more to the local churches. And I'm going to refer to that later because this is key. This is very, very key.

We're talking about a radical reformation of the church. And R.C. Senior is looking at the track record of dragging the secular university model into seminary education, which by the way was a fundamental problem with the founding of the Puritan school Harvard at the beginning. That's a fundamental problem. They actually dragged in the university model that came from the scholastics when they started the Greek model of education for higher education back in the 11th and 12th centuries.

We never rid ourselves of that wretched application. We need to bring education back into the context of discipleship. If it doesn't happen in the seminaries, my friends, you're talking about people, pastors, who are being educated in a sterile seminary apart from the concept of relationships, discipleship, faith and character, which ought to be central in education, in a biblical model, and you're establishing an area where knowledge is separated from life, knowledge is separated from charity, and it becomes a knowledge that puffs up, not a charity that edifies. And that, my friends, is a fundamental problem with the seminary system and it's corrupting the way we do pastors. Doug Phillips, I interviewed him, and Doug, as you know, says it's a matter of the Church abandoning the sufficiency of Scripture for faith and life.

Doug says we've got to bring faith and works together. He wants orthodoxy and orthoproxy and a renewal of fatherhood and family discipleship is an important incarnation to him as well as family discipleship and straightening out the jurisdictions. This is what Doug is about. Now, I'm just bringing these things out and I'm going to give you my take on it now. Turn with me, if you will, to 2 Timothy chapter 3.

2 Timothy chapter 3, And I'm going to read from the Word of God. Alright, here we go. This know also then the last days perilous time shall come, for men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce despisers of those that are good traitors heady high-minded lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof from such turn away. Now the the thing I want you to focus on is that very last verse. Paul says these guys are going to come in the last days.

I believe that applies to every point after which Paul spoke the word. I think it still applies today. There are times when these men come forward. They are teachers. They are leaders of the church.

And they present a message, but the message lacks a power to it. And I want to caution you as we move towards reformation, I want you to caution you that reformation can be watered down very quickly. And I think it will be within our midst. Remember the first reformation had many detractors. And this I would say would be around the time of the 16th century, from about 1520 to 1600.

You had, of course, the Catholics coming with their Counter-Reformation in the form of the Jesuits. But you also had Erasmus, who wanted to see Reformation in the church and did it his way with, I believe, a man-centered approach. If you read Erasmus, you know he was man-centered. And if you look at Erasmus and Luther being two different small branches that broke away from each other early on, you're going to find that the modern church in the modern world followed the humanism of Erasmus instead of following the God-centered metaphysic of Martin Luther. Eventually, in fact, within the Lutheran church, within a generation, Erasmus was winning out over Luther, at least in the debate on the bondage of the will.

And then you know what happened to the German church quickly. They moved quickly towards higher criticism and eventually to Adolf Hitler. And today the church hardly exists anymore at all in Germany. So you have these what I call counter-reformers. You also have the radical reformers, guys like Thomas Münster, who established his cultic approach to community and to redistribution of the wealth, and they redistributed wives as well.

They shared wives in common. Terrible things were happening in this radical reformation. In fact, Frederick Engels, who is the partner of Karl Marx, wrote a book called The Peasant War in Germany, and called Thomas Münzer's work the first communist revolution because they held everything in common, including wives. So you see, during times of reformation these are dangerous times. These are times when it is vitally important to establish number one some connection with the past.

We don't completely revolt from the past and number two we endorse God's Word from cover to cover, something that these men did not do. These men had a form of godliness. They had an external form of godliness. Whatever it was looked good. Maybe they dressed modestly.

Maybe they did worship slightly better than the Catholics did. Maybe they had some courtship going on. They had a very thin morphosis or form of godliness, but it lacked the power thereof because they had bought a car without an engine. Let's look at the last few verses of 2 Timothy 3. Evil men, starting with verse 13, and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived, But continue thou on the things which thou hast heard, and that that hast been assured of, knowing of whom you have learned them, and that from a child you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction and instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." What this text tells us is our solution to the problem is to go to the scriptures that we've been taught ever since we were a tiny little boy. And what were those scriptures? Everybody say it. The Old Testament. The Old Testament.

These were the scriptures. Paul says, go to the Old Testament. Go to the scriptures. You know you've been taught these things, Timothy, ever since you were tiny tyke. Go back to the Old Testament and teach the Old Testament because they are the power of God unto salvation.

They are able to make you wise unto salvation. You say, the Old Testament. Yes, I said the Old Testament. You say, doesn't that include the New Testament? Yes, it does.

Everybody breathe. Okay. Good. My point being that Paul is looking at the Old Testament as the Scriptures. And people who come to me and say, the Old Testament, that doesn't apply to us.

I say, yes it does. If you take the New Testament without the Old Testament, That's like buying a QuickBooks accounting package in the update form. Because it was cheap. Think about the El Cheapo who goes out to try to get a really cheap version of QuickBooks and finds that you can get the update for 20 bucks so he buys it. He sticks it in.

Is it going to work for him? No, why not? Because he doesn't have the package, the basic package. The Old Testament is the basic package. And folks, when you take a big pair of shears and you cut that thing out in your mind, you say that doesn't have any relevance to us in the area of history, law, economics, politics.

Well guess what? You've just cut out 99% of what the Bible has to say about ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. You've lost your worldview. This is why those who deny the Old Testament are those that lack a worldview. They're still teaching something about Jesus, but Jesus doesn't make sense if you don't have the Old Testament.

This is a fundamental area of reformation that's got to happen, I think, in the modern churches. Let's bring the whole Word of God to bear that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Okay, what sort of reformation are we looking for? What is the agenda we're after here? Number one, and you know what, I've struggled very hard because I wanted to boil this down to a single point, and that is this point that you see up here on the screen, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge.

That I think is the very beginning of a Reformation. Why is that? Because it is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge. Because we have gone for hundreds of years in American public schools, in a lot of American private schools, Where we have not been taught that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. This I think is the most significant reformation issue.

If we can't begin here, brothers and sisters, we've done our worship wrong, we've done our gospel wrong, and we've done our education systems wrong. Imagine a school where over generations like Harvard they have not taught the fear of God as the beginning of science in those classrooms. They don't talk about the intricacies of this universe. They don't talk about the depth of it, the creativity of it, the vastness of it, the creativity of it. All these things relating to our universe and then teach it in the fear of God.

They don't have their class stop for a moment and just stand in awe of the God who did these things. They don't get down on their knees and worship Him. Brothers and sisters, this is corrupting us. It is corrupting our pastors because they've been to those schools. They have been carefully trained for 16 years out of their life.

They walk into intellectual endeavor and they will be proud because they did not stand in the fear of God. This is basic. This is really basic. This has hurt us. Unless we fear God, we don't belong in God's church worshiping Him.

And we don't belong before God's people standing up and conveying to them the gospel of Jesus Christ. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge in the Gospel preaching as well. If a man has never learned to fear God, I don't care how much grace he hears, he will never turn to God in fear and love. Faith and love are rooted in the fear of God. This is the very beginning of wisdom and knowledge.

Throw away all of your gospel tracts if we don't begin here at the Fear of God. And I think the way that we construct the Gospel message must include a message on the fear of God. The Gospel is a combination of fear and love. Law and grace are a unity at the cross of Christ. Faith and works are unity.

Don't you remember the sinner woman that came to Jesus on her knees washing His feet with her tears and wiping His feet with her hair? You remember that story in Pharisees and what's with the woman? And Jesus said, I guess she loves Me. I've been here for the last two hours and I haven't seen anybody else come and wash my feet with their tears. Why does she love me?

Because she's been forgiven much. She's been forgiven much and so now she loves much. And brothers and sisters, people haven't been forgiven very much. That's the problem. The reason we haven't embraced the cross with tears in our eyes, with gratefulness to God, and we haven't left that cross with a brimming love of God that would keep His commandments is because we haven't ever seen our sin.

We have never been forgiven very much because we never feared the God who sent His Son to the cross to take the nails for our sin. We never really got the message of the cross because we never saw that law meets grace at the cross. Don't you ever, ever, ever, ever separate in your mind law and grace, faith and works. It's never separated in the Word of God. It's like the body and soul.

James says it's the body and soul distinct but not separate. The message that is preached from all of the pulpits across America need to bring the unity of the law and grace together at the cross of Christ. If it doesn't, you've got cheap grace. And it's not enough to convert souls in America. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge.

May God help us to bring this back. Oh, do you see how important He is? We have not been impressed very much with Christ. Amen? He's passé.

He's not very impressive. Why? Because you haven't seen your sin as you ought to. And if your preacher takes you to that cross and shows you your wretched sin that you have fallen short again and again, you go back to that cross and you embrace it again and wipe His feet with your tears one more time. And then you walk away from that cross loving Jesus with everything.

And those that have been forgiven much will love much. And those who have loved much will keep His commandments much. Because if you love me, Jesus said, you will keep my commands. Law and grace unified at the cross of Jesus Christ. This also involves the centrality of God in truth, ethics, and metaphysics.

And this is where we come face to face with the enemy. Brothers and sisters, the enemy has come up against the cross of Christ. It opposes Jesus and His Word with everything it has. And the last 200 years has been a systematic stripping back of a biblical worldview or a God-centered worldview, a God-centered view of truth, ethics, and metaphysics, and replacing it with a humanistic perspective of truth, ethics, and metaphysics. The Humanist manifestos 1 and 2 perfectly describe what the humanist agenda is about and you will recognize it because you have heard it before in many an evangelical preacher.

Man must be the determinant of his own destiny. That's what they say. That's it. Man must be the source of his ethics. Man must determine what is true.

And man must determine His own destiny. Man's choices are ultimate. And there is no God who can control everything such that man's choices will give God His glory because they are subject to the almighty sovereign choices of a sovereign God. That's what the humanists hate. They hate the idea that God is the source of our truth.

God is the source of our ethics. And God is the source of our reality. They hate that. They want to replace man with it so that man becomes God and God loses His very godness. I know there are people who come back and say, no, no, no, I'm sharing Jesus and I believe in God.

I just don't believe He's sovereign over reality, or this part of reality, or that part of reality. Salvation. The birds. The bees. I don't care.

The kings of the earth. Who gets elected president? I don't think He's sovereign here. I don't think God is the source of ethics. I don't think God is the source of truth.

And God eventually loses His Godness. He dies the death of a thousand qualifications. When that happens, we lose the thrust of the message itself. We've effectively stripped God of His godness. In this new Reformation, We must return God to the center in our truth.

God is the sufficient source for truth and His Word is sufficient for life and for faith. And let me go deeper and say God is authoritative in truth. God is the absolute authority. Isaiah 8, 19-21, I love this passage. I preached on it once.

Listen to these words. When they shall say to you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, unto the wizards that peep and that mutter, should none of people seek unto their God for the living of the dead? To the law and to the testimony! If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them! So when the wizards come out of their scientific laboratories with the white coats on, and they say, I found a rock.

It's 4 billion years old. We say, to the light and to the testimony. When they come out and they say, we've done this study on child discipline, we found that spanking a child over a period of the 200 year study, We have found that a child's ego is damaged and the economy and the character of the child will collapse, etc. Etc. We say to the law and to the testimony, enough of these wizards.

When they say, hey, we found a perfectly formed, half-developed human being, halfway between an ape and a man, what do we say? We say, to the law and to the testimony, it looks to me like God did to those scientists what He did to Ahab when He sent a lying spirit. God probably planted that thing for him. He's just testaments. To the Law and to the Testaments.

First and foremost. See, these sorts of things are hard on people who have learned to trust the empiricists. Because at every point, people want to undermine the authority and the sufficiency of Scripture. Let me give you some examples. First of all, there's the pitiful biblical illiteracy among Christians.

It's pitiful. Have you seen this? You talk to a random hundred people about the Christian faith and you'll rarely find anybody who can defend the doctrine of the Trinity biblically or the two natures of Christ. Or they can go to the Word of God and right away give you the biblical position on abortion or explain the biblical doctrines of predestination, human responsibility, and where the apparent paradox seems to move into the fog. They don't even understand those words, let alone they've gone to the verses and really explored what God's Word has to say about these things.

There's a pitiful biblical illiteracy which means people aren't trusting the word of God. There's a disrespect for the word of God. It's betrayed by the theological systems which curtail its relevancy and application in life. And make no mistake about it, we got them everywhere. We got them my denomination.

My guess is the rebellion's been cross-denominational. That's my guess. You know, in 1485, the devil had a problem. You know what it was? It was Gutenberg.

Gutenberg was a problem. As was Tyndale and Wycliffe and everybody else who was translating the Word of God into the common tongue. He knew he had a problem and the devil had to do something because he knew that before long there would be five Bibles in every single evangelical home in America and everywhere else. So what would you do if you were the devil? What would you do?

Well, I would de-relevantize the Word of God. I would slip in theological systems into the way people think to give them the impression that somehow the Word of God is not relevant. It's not applicable to life. I would take away two-thirds of it. I would cut the sword down.

Here's another example. I would provide diversions, interesting things, like sermons filled with personal anecdotes, dreams, prophecies, revelations, and entertainment. I would make sure that people hear the least amount of the Word of God that they could possibly hear. And their interest peaks when they begin to hear another funny anecdote from the sermon, from the passage. And people have been carefully trained, again, not to ultimately respect the Word of God, to love the Word of God, to want to stick around and hear an hour or two or three hours of the Word of God exposited.

They would much rather hear the personal opinions, the personal feelings, the anecdotes, the dreams, the prophecies, the experiences of the guy who is speaking. Then there's pure evidentialism, I think provides a disrespect for the word of God. And again, I'm not saying evidentialism doesn't have its purpose. It's OK to bring out some of the evidences for the Christian faith. But if somebody is trained to say, I'm not going to believe your word, God, until I see somebody raised from the dead and you better have six witnesses no make it five hundred no make it a thousand you're not going to hear the word of the God who speaks out of the thunder, who literally cannot be questioned because you want to see his driver's license.

Well let me ask you this, Who issues a driver's license to God? Well I guess God does. So you see what I'm saying is, really when it comes down to an apologetics, and I recommend the books by Greg Bahnson on this particular subject, we've got some on our book table when it comes down to defending the faith we have got to understand that God's ultimate authority has got to be the basis and we argue on the basis of authority that's our worldview that's our perspective Now I think there are ways to do it in which we can challenge the unbeliever, but let's be careful. We don't kowtow to pure evidentialism. Higher criticism, we're outright questioning the truthfulness of the content of the Word of God and then weeding through it and deciding what was good and what had to go.

That came out of the 1700s and 1800s. Then today we have cultural kowtowing where politically incorrect teaching tends to be despised and people don't want to receive this idea that women can't lead in the church. So they're going to twist the cultural experience in order to modify it to their own standards. And then there's the mistrust of the Word of God. The idea that somehow God's Word is ineffective.

God's Word cannot be a good way to teach us how to do our economics, how to do our politics, how to resolve our psychological problems. By the way, I get this all the time. People don't want to come to a pastor for counseling. They'd much rather go to somebody who's been trained by Freud or some kind of a psychological system than go to a pastor who's going to come at it from the perspective of the Word of God. They'd much rather trust somebody like John Maynard Keynes for their economics, Karl Marx for their politics, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for their education theory, a man who abandoned five of his own children on the steps of an orphanage, and then went off and wrote the educational theory that now dominates the public school system in America.

They would much rather trust Rousseau, Marx, Keynes, and the psychopsychologists of the day than to go to the Word of God and trust what God's Word has to say about these things. God is absolutely and ultimately sovereignly in control of all things. I've already mentioned that God is the center in ethics. I'm going to share a little bit more on this tomorrow. But the authority of God in ethics as law givers almost completely undermined modern Christianity by neglecting to preach the requirements of God's righteous law in the pulpits of the land.

You just don't hear it. Run through seven or eight radio programs. Are they preaching the law of God? Do people understand Exodus and Deuteronomy and the book of Proverbs? Are these books being preached in America?

I don't hear them very much. I don't think people understand the laws of God very well. We just did a program on the air on tattooing and branding. 33% of Americans have been tattooed or branded. And Do you think that the church today is speaking authoritatively on this issue from Leviticus 19?

I don't think so. But we brought out the passage on tattoos on the radio program that airs today. Again the authority of God as lawgiver has been undermined by making two-thirds of the Bible irrelevant to life and culture, by implying that some of God's laws are unjust or wicked. I've actually run into pastors that look at some Old Testament law and say, oh that's horrible! Oh that's awful!

I don't want to have him do that! That's awful! That's the most unjust, wicked law I've ever heard! I left on the spot. I'm not standing anywhere near him.

You follow me here? You're going to accuse God of being unjust and wicked? Where's the ethical authority? Why is that man unable to stand face to face with the holy God and understand why he gave that law, says a child that better never ever ever ever cursed his parents or he ought to die to death? By the way, that was the only civil law that Jesus brought out in all of his ministry, and Jesus thought it was pretty cool.

Yet it's the one law that I hear again and again from pagans especially as the ultimate representative of an unjust God in the Bible. And Christians will do the same thing. Don't you ever, ever, I beg of you, even if you have no idea how to apply a law like that, you're going to say, I don't know how to apply a law like that. Fine, thank you, but don't you ever, ever, ever imply that the laws of God are unjust or wicked. Please don't do that.

That's a symbol of ultimate rebellion against God. People have set God's law against God's grace. I've mentioned that already. They've kowtowed to the culture and everything from our economic systems to our politics to our entertainment to how we educate our children to women taking office in the church etc etc etc. Okay we've got to bring God back.

We've got to bring Him back as central, active, involved in our lives, in creation and in providence every moment of the day. Your children have to get the idea that God is their environment. He's just swimming around it. He's always there. He's connected.

He is a cause. This causality works through every minute detail from the sparrow that falls to the number of hairs on their heads. You need to show that God has ethical concern, absolute ethical concern. All His principles can be brought to bear in every little situation in life in some way or another and it is ours to love the law of God and to apply it in our lives. God is ultimate in our truth, what we believe about reality, what we believe about everything.

God is all in all to us. He is everything. He is central in our reality, our truth, and in our ethics. And believe me, there is nothing more you can say about man than the fact that he is, he knows, and he should be doing stuff. Okay, my third point on the agenda is a return to Trinitarian thought and life.

Now why is that up there? Because it's basic. See everything I have up here is basic. The sovereignty of God, the fear of God, the Trinity of God. Very basic stuff.

We got to get back to the Trinity. Why the Trinity? Because God in the Trinity is eternally relational. God has been in relationship from eternity and as people cease to teach the Trinity, as they cease to pray the Trinity, as they cease to acknowledge the Trinity in their liturgy, they inevitably will move to Unitarian life like Mormons, like Muslims, and like the Unitarians in America that founded the public school system. The public school system is anti-relationship.

They don't want relationship. It was founded by a man named Rousseau who abandoned his five children on the step of an orphanage and abandoned the parent-child relationship right there because he wouldn't have anything to do with it. We believe in covenant relationship. We believe in bringing back the one and the many in covenant relationship. The oneness in the body of the church and the oneness in the husband and wife who come together and they are no more two but one says Jesus.

The one and the many come together in a mysterious sense in relational covenant living and that's why any reformer that is worth his salt is going to be talking relationship. You listen for those that come forward and say, we've got to bring covenant unity back into the house. We've got to bring it back into the church, and we better not be constructing the church just like the pagans do, such that we eliminate relationships and we're consumed with the slotted programs. That should not be in the Church of Christ. We are relational, even as God is eternally relational.

There is very little body life left in family and church in the modern age. In fact, we talk about bringing truth and relationships back to a lost and lonely world. Truth and relationships. Truth and relationships. Both.

And brothers and sisters, these are both vitally important in your homes. I have known people that have emphasized the law of God, the sovereignty of God, the Christian worldview, the biblical worldview. They have sent their children to every biblical worldview workshop they could think of, et cetera, et cetera. But there was never a renewed relational discipling home. And because of that, they did lose their children.

They still lost their children. They had the best worldview I could ever find. They still lost their children Because they didn't bring relationships together with truth. And when relationships come together with truth, you've got discipleship, not education. And that's why in the homeschool movement, we are radically opposed to the idea of the slotted educational program.

We're replacing it with a concept of discipleship, where faith and character are married with truth and academics. We're not going to separate these things. We're going to bring them together in the discipleship of our children, in the discipleship of others within the church. Also we want to bring an end to the age of unaccountability. Now you've heard of the age of accountability, haven't you?

How many of you have heard of the age of unaccountability? You heard my show, I bring it out from time to time. The age of unaccountability is that age where you have lived with a family for 18 years. You leave the home. And a lot of people say, when you grow up and leave the home, when you're on your own, this is what's going to happen.

I'm sorry, but that's not biblical language. Nobody gets to be on their own in a biblical system, okay? And so we don't live in a family for 18 years, then we go out into the solitary wilderness of unaccountability from 18 to 25 until, By God's grace, we're married again and have to learn how to unlearn the selfish pig habits we learned during the age of unaccountability. We're not going to live our lives that way anymore. The age of unaccountability is gone.

Our sons, our daughters, They're not living alone. They're going to live in covenant. Now I'm not telling you how to do it, but we're getting rid of the age of unaccountability. We're bringing the blobbiness of the family and the church back into play. God calls the family a blobby thing.

There's a particularity about it, but there's also a blobbiness about it. Why do I say that? Because Romans chapter 16 speaks of the household of Narcissus, which is in Christ. A lot of us say, that's really weird. Yeah, that is weird.

But see, God understands something. There is an individual relationship that he has with individuals. There is a oneness in Christ. If any man as an individual is in Christ, he's a new creature. But there's also a sense in which households can be in Christ as a blob, as a household.

And there are local churches like the Church of Thessalonica which is in Christ. You say, now wait a minute, I thought the only relationship that anybody ever had with God was a one-on-one, as if we're solitary individuals on the top of mountains, and we have our own personal relationship with Christ. It's both. It's both. We have lost the idea that the church is a blob, called a body.

I call it a blob because I can see the blob. It's all sort of connected. There's a daddy head, there's a mommy head, there's little kitty heads, and God has a relationship with that blob. God loves that family. That family is in Christ.

Even as a church, a local church is in Christ. Let's not talk about some of the complications here. I'm just saying that's what the Word of God says. So let's acknowledge There is a blob-ness. There is a one-ness about us.

And because theologically we have been unable to grapple with the idea of one-ness in the family, we have individuated ourselves and become a lost and lonely people in the postmodern age. World-due, truth in relationships, let's bring them back. Well, let's talk about the Incarnation and then I'm going to wrap it up. I've only got a minute or two left. I'm going to run through this as quickly as possible.

But the Reformation has got to honor parents. It's got to honor parents. Why is that? Because verse 4 of 2 Timothy 3 tells us that these men were characterized by being disobedient to parents. This is what constitutes really bad teachers or reformers.

I knew a man who grew up in a Christian home. As a young man, he began to listen to music that his Christian parents found reputed, reprehensible, and adopted facial jewelry that his parents thought was embarrassing. This man became a Marxist revolutionary college professor who wrote a book on one-world government. He had a form of godliness. By the way, he still has a form of godliness, but he denies the power thereof.

Why? Because he wouldn't respect his father and his mother, at least in their culture. It's critical that as we maintain a changing agenda, a Reformation agenda, we've got to continue to honor our fathers. This is essential. The Bible says if it's going to go well with you in anything, you better honor your fathers, certainly in the Reformation agenda.

And by the way, the way the world breaks down is by perpetual dishonor of fathers. That's how you get from Bock all the way down to Eminem's rape rap Over a period of 300 years you ever wonder how that happens Well, how do you get Nat King Cole lazy hazy crazy days of summer on the top 40 down to rape rap? How do you do that in 50 years? I'll tell you how you do it. You get an era where this generation is one that curses their father and does not bless their mother.

They are pure in their own eyes and yet not washed from their filthiness. A generation whose teeth are swords and their jaw teeth as knives. These are dangerous people. And so on two levels. The first level, let's make sure that we always follow teachers that honor their own fathers.

If you ever hear a teacher he's not honoring his father, leave. Don't listen to his tapes. Just go away. But secondly, I think it's incredibly important that we honor our church fathers as well. Some of the scariest things I've ever seen in people that are trying to change the church is when these sects, these Christian sects, refused to honor church fathers.

Their idea of church history is the last three years of their local church. They think they are the beginning of the church on earth, you know? And I'll tell you, it scares me because I know within 10-20 years you're drinking Kool-Aid down in South America. When that happens, if you run into somebody who says, we're it, we are the beginning of the church, we are the pure church on earth, you've got a problem. We need to be connected geographically, most definitely historically.

We have to be connected historically. The first Reformation was formed solidly on the shoulders of the previous Reformation, or our Reformation should be built on the shoulders of the previous Reformation. Luther beat Eck in some of those debates because he knew church history far better than Eck did. And if you read Calvin's Institutes, it's filled with references to the church fathers. These guys understand that as you reform the church, you have to keep a hand on previous generations.

Otherwise, if you let go and you don't honor your church fathers, you're going to be adrift in a sea of revolution. And that's the difference between revolution and reformation. Revolution refuses to honor fathers. I think Doug Phillips talks about how revolution came to Africa. These guys are trained.

These sons of kings in Africa were trained to kill their own fathers first. It's the only way a Marxist revolution can survive. It's by killing the past and constantly revolting into the future. That, my friends, is not what we do. We're like Elijah when Elisha passed away.

He says, my father, my father. Remember that? My father. Elisha had a father and that father was Elijah. Moreover, in Hebrews 11, we learn about men who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouth of lions, turned to flight the armies of the aliens of whom the world is not worthy.

We are compassed about with so great a cloud of martyrs. The word is testifiers there. We are encompassed about with these testifiers and we're not going to listen to what they testified of? We're not going to listen to their testimonies? I'll tell you, you know when a Reformation has come.

People know their church history and they're rooted in it. So let me encourage an application here. Be sure you're teaching your children church history. We have a book called Sketches in Church History. There's Trials and Triumphs.

There's a book called 100 Best Events or Most Important Events in Christian History. You need to walk through these books. You need to understand them. You need to teach your children the history of the church. It's vitally important if we're going to carry on an important Reformation in the Church of Christ.

There's also a generational component. This is important. This is, I believe, a secret to Reformation. If our children stand on our shoulders, they will take the Reformation further. But if they've been trained to dishonor the fathers who've come before them, they've been trained to ignore what their fathers told them, then they'll never stand on our shoulders.

I think it's important for our children to stand on our shoulders, which means they won't repeat exactly what we did. But you know what? What's on this screen today is primarily what my father taught me. In fact, it's all what my father taught me. My father homeschooled me.

My father wrote a book on the law of God. My father wrote a book on God being central in salvation. My father wrote a book called The Bible and Modern Science saying the Bible is what you got to look for, Kevin. The Bible is what you got to look to. My father gave me this.

I stand on his shoulders. I think I've got a few more applications than my father had. But if it wasn't for my father, I wouldn't be standing before you today. It is generational leverage that will produce a mighty Reformation. We've got to have it.

We've got to have that generational testimony. The Reformation will also have an incarnation in preaching the Word. 2 Timothy 4.1. Remember right after saying the Word of God is sufficient for all these things, He says, I charge you therefore before God preach the Word. And again, preach the Old Testament.

Preach the Old Testament. Preach it. Preach the New Testament. Preach it all. Preach all 66 books.

You know churches that are not reforming. They will not preach the Old Testament. They will not preach the New Testament. In many cases, preach the Word. This is the core stuff.

A Reformation will be characterized by the preaching of the Word of God. We've got to replace seminaries with discipleship and put an end to the secular Greek form of university, especially in the seminary. Thirdly, let's produce life in the church. This will be true repentance in heart and life, and I think a radical reconstruction of family and church community. And then James 1.27 brings out what pure religion is all about.

I wouldn't leave incarnation of the truth of God's Word in this mighty Reformation without mentioning that James 1 29 says you've got to take care of, visit the widows in their affliction and keep yourself unspotted from the world. That will characterize our work. That means that we're not going to toss the widows into a socialist program. We're gonna visit them. The word visit means visit them.

And I know there's a lot of folks out there that are saying we've got a program for widows and they can take some money out of the state, etc., etc. No, I'm talking about churches doing what churches are called to do. And that is take care of those widows themselves. Visit those widows yourself. Connect with those widows.

And the way the church develops in reformation very much will be determined by what the widows will look like 30 years from now. In fact as we wrap up this message, folks, I want to point out to you what I think the Reformation is going to yield. If this is a reformation 30 years from now, when I'm 73 years old, okay, I'm an old man, we've gone 30 years through this, and Scott's even older than I am 30 years from now, Here's what I think we want to see. This is how you know if we've had a Reformation. Number one, 95% of our children are in our churches and they're still serving God.

95%! Amen? May it be 95%? I'm sick of losing 80%! Let's flip it on them.

Let's go 95%. 95% of our widows are being taken care of by the family and the church, not the state. 95% of our pastors didn't go to seminary. They were carefully discipled by a pastor locally without sacrificing an iota of academic rigor. There are 500 elders in Arizona that are actually shepherding people in 80 churches.

We have that, praise be to God, we've got a Reformation. You know we have a Reformation. No more mega churches, 500 pastor-shepherd elders slogging out into the muddy pen and working with sheep every day. If we see that kind of thing happening, we've got reformation. The Word of God is preached powerfully and people are really offended by the Word of God.

Especially when they find out that God is sovereign and man is not. Persecution finally breaks out because the church has hit the radar screen of the evil one. Because it's actually saying something worth persecuting. And finally, instead of just splitting churches, brothers begin to give their lives for brothers. That my friends, will be the sign of real reformation.

When brothers are giving their lives for other brothers. Grace be to all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity not just on the outside but on the inside and all the way out amen amen I went way over time I'm sorry brothers I'm sorry let's pray to God Heavenly Father Oh God we pray You'd bring reformation to our time. O God, we need it. Work in our hearts. Help us to fear You.

Help us to understand, dear God, that You are a relational God that wants to have a relationship with us and our families and our churches. We pray we would bring back relationship in this age. And help us, Lord, to see that you are central in reality, in truth and in ethics. Oh God, we pray that you would bring repentance to our lives, that these would incarnate themselves in real ways. The way we do everything, family, church, state, economics, education, all of life, Dear God, we're bringing it to the throne of Jesus Christ, acknowledging He is King of kings.

He is worthy, worthy to be praised, worthy to be worshipped, worthy to be served, worthy to be loved, worthy to be obeyed. Dear God, we give You all the glory this day. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in Jesus' name we pray, Amen. Amen.