The Cursed Causeless Shall Not Come

Well, as I said, this is a two-part sermon. Go into this. A two-part sermon. The title today is, A Curse, Cause, Lest Shall Not Come, from Proverbs 26 and verse 2 from the Old King James. This nation, America, is under a curse in more ways than one. Thirty-five point nine percent of adults, twenty years and older, are obese. That means they're over fifty pounds overweight. Forty point seven six percent, according to the Center for Disease Control from the United States Government Statistics, forty point seven six percent of men and women today will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

That's almost one half of all the people born are going to get cancer. But the curse, causeless, shall not come. One in every four deaths are heart disease related. And six hundred thousand people in America die of heart disease. When I went to the CDC website under prevention, the very first thing, the very first point they made about how to live a healthy life was, number one, not surprising, eat healthy, eat healthy.

And yet, fast food places start up every day. And processed foods are being more processed. And we're becoming less healthy by the day. Our prayer list gets longer and longer. We spent last year, some time this past year, on the study from God's Word on prayer. We actually had four or five sermons on prayer because it is very important. And we understand that prayer works. Prayer helps. But can we do more? I know last year at this time we had a lot of sick people.

We still have people afflicted with different things, but it's not as bad as it was last year by any means. And I like to give God that credit, but I would like for us to be more healthy. I would like him to perform more healings, more miracles in this congregation. And to do that, we must be doing our best to obey him, strive to do our best in what he's laid out for us. Can we do more? Does God expect more? We must ask ourselves that. This book, the Bible, calls our bodies the temple of God. Do we treat them as such?

I can say I haven't always done that and need to do a better job. Even my friend in the back said he doesn't either. He's raising his hand. We all can do a better job, and I think it pleases God when we do. We're going to dive in next week into our bodies being the temple of God. But today I wanted to look at something different, look more at the physical aspect.

We'll get into the spiritual aspect next week. God tells his people in his book how to live and how to eat. He tells his people, spiritual Israel, how to live and how to eat. We are spiritual Israel. Are we listening? Do we care? Simply put, God calls food either clean or unclean. He does that in Deuteronomy 14.

And along with the food laws of Deuteronomy 14, with all the laws God has given his people, and we are his people, he says quite a few times, and I quote from Deuteronomy 4, Deuteronomy 5, Deuteronomy 11, all these different chapters, he says the same thing.

That he gives all these things to us, and I quote that ye, and I give this from the Old King James, since I like the way it's put, that ye may live and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days. Most of us would like to prolong our days. I want to see Nathaniel's days prolonged. I want to see the young people in here's days prolonged. I want to see the older people in here prolonged so we can have more time together.

Do we cherish the knowledge that God has given to us enough? Do we cherish the words that come from his Scripture? God tells us in Proverbs 4 and verse 22. Proverbs 4 and verse 22, he says, For my words they are life unto those who find them. Are we looking? Are we looking to find them? I hope so. And it says, And health to all their flesh, and to health to all their flesh. We need a healthy congregation. Do you agree?

Yes? Good. And are we going to do what it takes to be a healthy congregation? I hope so. Most parents typically do not just let their children eat anything they want. If my parents had done that, I'd never made it to 18.

God does not want us eating what's not healthy for us, because he realizes that our body is a temple, and he's going to put his spirit in us. Mary and I feel a closeness to this congregation. That's the way it should be. We've had meals together. We'll continue to have meals together. We'll visit. We'll have counseling. There will be prayers. There's quite a few prayers for this congregation that go up from Unit 209, 400 North Federal Highway in Deerfield Beach. Every day, prayers go up for this congregation. Not only myself, but my wife.

We care about you. We're vested. You are a church family. I was hired to look after this church family, but I don't just do it for the money. I do it because I care about you. I was told to take care of the needs of the Fort Lauderdale church.

Pastor actually means the word shepherd to look after, to care for. Also, the word bishop means an overseer. I have to make sure things try to go right. But you see, Christ is the head shepherd. He owns you. He owns you. If you take Passover and you claim the gift of His Holy Spirit, and you dedicated your life to Him, He owns you. I don't own you. I'm just here to be the under shepherd to try to help you. My number one job as a pastor is what? Any of you guess what my number one job as a pastor here is? To serve? Teach? Help? Yes. My number one priority as pastor is one thing and one thing alone. To help you make it into the kingdom of God. Whatever that takes, I'm willing to do. That is the greatest gift a pastor could ever do for his sheep, for his flock, for the people that he loves and cares for. To help you, as we experienced this week at the Feast of Tabernacles, is to see you in the kingdom of God. The greatest gift you can give to your children, to your husband, to your family, is to help them make it in the kingdom of God. My number one job with Mary is to help her anyway I can't make it into the kingdom of God. Priority one, I must feed you spiritual food.

Nourish you spiritually. Yes, and I enjoy the physical things we do and the relationships we develop and hearing about you and that's why we've either had you over to our house or you've had us over or we've went out to eat or we've done so many things with almost everyone here in the congregation. We wanted to know you. We wanted to know about your family, where you came from, what you're all about. Because the goal is to spend eternity together. That's my goal. It's God's goal for us. And some have even brought out, not here, but at other times, why would I waste a sermon talking about clean and unclean foods? Can't they read our booklet? There's an unclean and unclean booklet back there on the table. Again, they read their Bibles.

See, I want to get you to eat these words. That's why I want to feed you the words here. And I want you to not only eat them, but to swallow them, digest them, and let them live in you so you never forget. Not only the letter of the law is, but what is the spirit of the law? The spirit of the law, when God wrote these words, what was he thinking? What was it all about? It was all about you. It was all about me. And how we could have life, and we could live it more abundantly. And that's what it should be about. That's what it is about. Matthew 4, 4, as you know. Jesus Christ gave an example to Satan. He said, Man, you're not lived by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Do we do that?

We need a balanced spiritual diet. Not everyone is balanced spiritually. Fan that out at the feast.

We always had the opportunity with only 70 or so people. That's why I like small feasts. Everybody gets to know everybody. We eat together, we share time together, and we talk and we worship together. So you get to know. And some people are just obsessed with certain things. We had a man there that was kind of obsessed with Revelation. And every time we'd talk scripture, which happened a lot, he would bring up the same thing about prophecy.

The same coming. We need to be balanced. We need to eat all the words that come out of here, not just a few. And that's why we went through five sermons just before the feast on prophecy. And we will not go back there until probably the fall of next year. And we will dig even deeper. Once we built on the foundation that was built here, we will build upon that foundation next year as we go deeper into it. When it comes to the Word of God, I'd like you to think of a pyramid. I know some people say that's evil. But I'd like you to think of a pyramid because you can see it.

I'd like you to break it into boxes, if you will. And at the bottom of the box, the widest part of the pyramid, are the issues that God gives us in His Word. The ways to live. How to live. How to act. How to be one of His. And they are very important. And as you go up this pyramid, you find other issues in the Bible that are not as important as the foundational issues. And that's where we need to spend our time, like a pyramid, on the important issues.

When you get to the very top, it's a very small point, those are the issues that are not salvation issues. They are important because they're in God's Word, but they should not be something we spend the majority of our time on. I saw a program many years ago about a man that wanted to find out if he ate at McDonald's every day for 30 days, every single meal. Does anybody remember when that program came out?

As a matter of fact, it became a documentary or something. If you haven't, you can probably find it on YouTube, I didn't check, but it's probably there. You can find out what happens when a man doesn't look after his health and decides to eat it. McDonald's every day for every meal for 30 days. It even goes through the doctors checking him out, finding out just how bad he was at the end of 30 days.

With us not eating God's Word every day, we can be spiritually malnourished. And that's important. That's one of the most important things. So what I'm talking about today is it more important than God's Word? No, it actually comes from God's Word, but it's an admonition that we want to make sure we take care of our physical bodies as much as our spiritual bodies.

Caring for sheep is a shepherd's number one job. Caring for sheep, you check them physically. You make sure that they're physically okay. Because for the sheep to grow, they need to be healthy. And things can happen to sheep, and they're not very healthy, and they won't live long. If they do, they won't prosper. God's spiritual sheep need good health, too. Besides teaching and praying and answering emails and phone calls and anointings and all the other things that ministers do, it's important that we look after the care of the brethren.

And if we can help, we do. It's important that we set the example. And I was asked not long ago, when I brought this up about seven, eight, nine months ago, about bringing up health issues in the church and eating what we should and should not be doing. I asked somebody at the home office why we have not really stressed that as we used to. Because in church of God, I don't know when you came in, when I came in, it was health was stressed a lot.

And they said, well, there's your fellow ministers. Look out and see how many are overweight, how many don't take care of their bodies, how are they going to say this? So they'd just be hypocrites if they did and not take care of themselves. Well, over a year ago, we were admonished by the heads of the church to start being more physically fit, being a better example.

I want to talk about us today because last summer, as a matter of fact, in July, I don't usually, I'm not usually sick. Usually, if I get sick, it's about once every two years. When I do, I really get sick. But typically, I've not had a problem with being sick. Thankfully, most of it is due to my wife, who keeps me on the straight and narrow, as Vitamins, points out when I shouldn't eat this, when I want to, and points out to me that I shouldn't have eaten this when I did, when I wouldn't listen to her.

But I got a bout, I had a bout with what they believe is E. coli, from water, either drinking it or ate some food that possibly was washed in it. And I was as sick as I'd been in years, decades. She was gone for a couple weeks, and it happened.

And I was so sick, I just couldn't even study, like I needed to study. I prayed because I was on my knees in front of the commode most of the time, and I did pray a lot. But it was a great lesson for me, that if I do not feel well, I do not study well.

I do not live well. So I think it's very important for us to live well, so that God can use us, so we can be an inspiration to other people. It took a couple weeks before I got past it. Hopefully I am, I'm still not 100%.

But in Mark 2 and verse 17, Mark 2 and verse 17, Christ healed many thousands of sick people, so we know they're sick. We know people were sick then, they're sick now. And he made the statement in Mark 2 and verse 17, that healthy people do not need a physician, but sick people do.

So there, Christ points out that healthy people don't need a doctor. For one thing, whenever I went in to visit a doctor, I sometimes feel sick just walking in the room, waiting room, when you see all the sick people there, when I visit people in the hospital. I am very thankful that I'm not sick. And I give God the glory.

As we continue to do that, we need to. We're blessed in this congregation to have three or four nurses. Back in the church 20 years ago, I was at the Murfreesboro Church, I had over 200 people, and we had two nurses. I was in a congregation in Nashville, Tennessee that had over 500 people, and we had four nurses. This congregation of 50 people has three or four nurses, and one that's married to a doctor. That's a blessing.

See, being a doctor or a nurse is a gift. Well, let me restate that. Being a good doctor and a good nurse is a gift because you care about people. And it's very important. A gift to help others. Our nurses have agreed to be here next week at our Bible study to help us, because as Jesus Christ healed on the Sabbath and gave people knowledge of what it takes to be healed physically and spiritually, we want to do the same thing next week. We want to eat healthy, we want to bring in healthy food for the potluck.

We'd also like to have an interactive Bible study. Bring your questions. We're going to talk about spiritual and physical well-being. And our nurses have agreed to answer so many questions. We'll not only save you money, but it may save you health, save you some poor health, as we want to do a better job at pleasing God. I want you to turn to Hosea 4 and verse 6 if you'd like. I'll read it. Hosea 4 and verse 6 says, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. This is true physically as well as spiritually.

It's the way it is. One of the best books I have ever read in my life on the subject of health with a biblical perspective is this book right here. It's God's Key to Health and Happiness by Elmer A. Josephson. Interesting part. It was written back in 1976.

Some things have changed. But Elmer A. Josephson is a Baptist minister who ate pork all of his life until he became so sick he was going to die. He ate anything because he was taught, as the world is taught, that everything was miraculously cleansed the day at Gogatha. Until he became so sick he was going to die and went to every doctor. They couldn't do anything about it until he laid himself out before God and knew he was going to die. He was actually between green and gray his entire body. And so at that time, God, I feel like, opened up his mind to have an understanding because he understands what our booklet back there teaches about cleaning unclean meats.

And he delved into his study and God miraculously healed him. And his job for the rest of his life was to go around trying to teach churches. Baptist churches, Methodist churches, all the churches in the world, that what God said back in Leviticus and Deuteronomy was true. And they would accept it from one of their own. And so he went to many, many churches, teaching them that we should not eat this stuff.

So I will quote some from his book because he brought out in his understanding. Excuse me. It says on page 25, God could keep you alive supernaturally without your eating food, but he doesn't do it. It is not his plan. God could keep you well supernaturally without your eating right. But he doesn't do that either. It is not his plan. Settle this truth, as it is not in God's plan to keep you alive without eating, so it is not God's plan to keep you well without eating right. If you do not eat food, you will die. If you do not eat good food, you will not have good health. If you eat bad food, you will have bad health.

No food, no life. Bad food, bad health. Good food, good health. It is as simple as that. God tells the readers of the book, the Bible, Deuteronomy, Leviticus 11, Deuteronomy 14, what to eat and what not to eat. And it is the same today as it was when it was written 4,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago. You know, a car engine runs on gas, and you get the instructions in the... You get a car, and most of us already know, and it tells you what kind of gas to put in. Maybe it is high test, maybe it is ready, but put in gas.

What is going to happen if you go and put diesel fuel in it? It is not going to run right. Why? The manufacturers didn't make it to run on diesel or water. Boy, it would be cheaper if we could just put water in that tank, wouldn't it? Save us a lot of money. But you are not going to get far down the road, and our lives, our bodies, are not going to get far down the road if we put what God says not to put in there.

Leviticus 11, I'd like you to turn there. Leviticus 11, most of you know this, you are going to say, well, what are you going through this? I know all this already. Leviticus 11, verse 2, so speak to the children of Israel, saying, These are the animals which you may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth. Among the beasts whatever divides the hoof, having cloven hooves and chewing the cut.

That you may eat, nevertheless, these you shall not eat among those that chew the cut, or those who have cloven hooves. The camel. Don't eat camel. Because it chews the cut, but does not have cloven hooves. It is what? Unclean to you. Filthy. Unclean. Not fit to eat. Verse 5, the beaver, unto the badger. Who wants to eat a badger? In Alaska, they call it the cockatoo, as it is a dreaded animal.

Because it chews the cut, but does not have cloven hooves. It is unclean to you. The rabbit, because it chews the cut, but does not have cloven hooves. It is unclean to you. And the swine, though it divides the hooves, having cloven hooves, yet does not chew the cut as unclean to you. Their flesh, this swine, this pig, this hog, their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcass you shall not touch.

They are unclean to you. And then it goes down to tell you about the fish, which I had to ask for at the feast every day. They had all kinds of fish, but what kind of fish was it? Was it clean or unclean? So I had to, and they found out since we were the majority of the people in the hotel, that when they served unclean fish, they had a lot of fish left over. And they thought, obviously, that they could serve it for lunch the next day, and we might eat it there, too.

But they finally started serving more unclean fish, even though I told them about that.

But in verse 13, he said, And these you shall regard as an abomination among the birds. They shall not be eaten. They are an abomination, the eagle, the vulture, the buzzard, the kite, the falcon. Every raven after its kind, the ostrich, the short-eared owl, the seagull, the hawk after its kind, the little owl, the fisher owl, the screech owl, the white owl.

And then he tells the flying insects that you should eat and not eat. And he goes through all these various animals, all through Leviticus 11, telling us what to eat and what not to eat. And God said, don't eat this, but yet so much of the world eats these things.

Swine, hog, pig, whatever you want to call it, is the number one meat eaten for breakfast in America.

Drive by any of these places that serve breakfast, like IHOP, Cracker Peril, any of these places in the morning, and you will be able to smell the bacon, right? We all know what bacon smells like.

God said, don't eat it. He said, don't even touch it.

Why would he say that? Don't even touch it.

I read from his book, what I just put on my pages here. I want to give you one of the reasons. God never gave this reason, but science can give you the reason.

This book is actually so good, it goes into every type of research, laboratory, to science, to medical, to everything you can think of to prove God was right in what he said all the way back there in the food laws. We can prove it now without a shadow of doubt how bad these foods are for you. There's even a poison list of food that has these poisons in them. It's poison to your system. You can find it on the Internet, and you look at the unclean, it's off the chart on the poisons.

But it says, observe the cow, which we eat. I love beef.

It says, because of the sac-ulated condition of the alimatary canals and secondary-cut receptacles, the cow has practically three stomachs as refining agencies and cleansing laboratories for purifying their food.

It takes clean vegetable food over 24 hours in that cow's stomach to turn it into flesh.

Observe the swine, the pig.

It's food, not vegetable in matter.

Usually, any putrid thing it can find, but as it's raised on houses today where they raise hogs on cement and they feed them corn, or various other things, said the swine has but one poorly constructed stomach arrangement and very limited excretory organs.

In four hours after a pig has eaten his polluted food, man may eat the same second-handed off the ribs of that pig.

Not much processing goes there, does it?

See, the swine was created to be a walking garbage disposal. It's a scavenger. It will eat anything before it. Any of you have spent time raising swine, pigs, hogs.

And yet, people eat it like no tomorrow. They don't think anything about it. But yet, if you said, well, tomorrow morning I'm going to serve you a buzzard stew, everybody would go, what? But yet, God says it's as nasty and disgusting as any buzzard or vulture that's out there. Same as shrimp.

The God-given Mosaic Law condemns any scavenger meat as food for humans because they are scavengers. That's why He made them. They clean up the world. And if you've ever seen a lot of dead things along the side of the road, you may be thankful for the buzzards who clean it up.

The meat manufactured out of the filthiest and most abominable matter is unclean, and its very nature is poisonous, diseased, and deadly.

That science will tell you that.

I read from page 48 of his book, as he, Josephson, he not only interviewed many people, he traveled out through the Midwest, where they raised a lot of hogs, swine.

And Mr. John Johnson of Williams, Iowa, a farmer, speaks on the subject of swine, because I'm just covering one small aspect today.

I want you to understand, each of these animals, he said not to clean, if you study them, it is atrocious.

He states that the swine in Iowa are principally fed on corn, but we'll eat anything we give them. If anything dies, we throw it to the hogs. I have actually seen hogs chewing at the cancer of other hogs, and these hogs are shipped to the market.

Many times, cattle are infected with an incurable disease of the hog, called the mad itch. It is transmitted by the hog's saliva left on the corn, which the cattle eat. The itching of the cattle becomes so intense, they run from stump to stump until they rub their skin from their mouths and soon die. When the saliva from the hog's mouth, when the saliva from the hog's mouth will poison cattle in its way, how can hogs be fit for anyone to eat? This man makes a statement. If swine are raised in a feedlot with other animals, such as the horse or the cow, they will eat and drink from the very refuse of these animals.

This is a common occurrence where animals are not separated. I know in Tennessee, when I was growing up, that's what people did. The hog was free. You raise cattle and you put some hogs in there and you never have to feed a hog. They will eat what comes out of the horse because corn has gone through them and they will just go to town on that.

The following story is on court record. The Silver Moon Mink Farm of New Holstein, Wisconsin, owned by the Lagenfelds, ordered a supply of beef livers for their mink for a meat packing plant. Instead, the packers shipped them pork livers unbeknownst to the Lagenfelds. Who fed them to the mink? What was the result? All the mink died. Yes, there was a lawsuit and the meat packers had to pay. Let the mink teach us a lesson. Didn't we be more discriminating about our diet than a glorified weasel? He says.

And said some contend that since many cities now require that garbage fed to stockyard hogs must be cooked, it minimizes the danger of trigonosis, which is a very dangerous worm that is in pork.

That it is supposed to kill the poisonous little treckney worms. We reiterate, who wants to kill the dead poisonous worms and keep it in the food? But that's what's being done. Others say that corn-fed hogs must be perfectly safe, but a farmer would have to police his hogs 24 hours a day to see they do not eat the dead rats or snakes or other maggot-infested matter found on the premises.

Trigonosis is very dangerous. I can...it's in the book here. I won't go into reading that for time, but you can look it up. Today, at one time, there was no actual cure for trigonosis. You had it. It always lived in your body. There's nothing you could do about it when this book was written. Now they actually have powerful enough drugs that can kill trigonosis, but it does a lot of damage to the human body to kill that. And now they have just passed laws in the last 10-15 years where they actually radiate pork coming out to the food markets because this deadly worm that was in the trigonosis worm that was in the pork was so deadly, it killed quite a few people or would make you so sick. And it actually shows it, and he tells in here, that if you want to do this and you have a microscope, you can teach your young kids this, you have a microscope, go and cut a piece of steak and go and cut a piece of pork and put each one out if it's fresh from what's killed at the stock market, at the stockyards after it's taken to be slaughtered. Before it's radiated, you can actually look at a beef, and when you look under a microscope, you can see the bit of muscle and the fat that's in that piece. If you look at a piece of pork that's just been killed under a microscope, you will actually see it moving. It actually moves, just like that, because of the bacteria, because of the worms, because of the stuff that's in it. That's what people like to eat. That's why God said, you shall not eat it. He said, don't do it. And it's interesting in Leviticus 11, in verse 44. God says, you shall be holy, for I am holy. Neither shall you defile yourself with any creeping thing that creeps on the earth. For I am the Lord your God, who brings you up out of the land of Egypt. You shall be holy, for I am holy. This is the law of the beasts and the birds, and every living creature that moves on the waters, and every creature that creeps on the earth, to distinguish between the clean and the unclean, and between the animal that may be eaten, and the animal that may not be eaten. God ties it into being holy. My father raised swine growing up for about nine years by the thousands. We usually kept anywhere between a thousand and five thousand swine or hogs on at the time. I've mentioned that before here, so I won't go into great detail, but I can tell you that we never, even when we were raising pigs, we didn't know anything about God's truth. After we started raising hogs, we never ate pig. You couldn't. You couldn't watch how they lived, what they ate, how they conducted themselves and eat it. You just could not do it. They would love to eat snakes. Any time we had our pens and we put them in concrete, each pen held fifty to a hundred different size hogs, we'd raise them at different stages so we could sell them at the market. We would buy them, little feeder pigs, about twenty, twenty-five pounds. We would raise them and we would have something going to the market every week by having these hundred or so in one pen. They would be at different stages along the way, so you would feed them. Living on the farm in Tennessee, we always had snakes. As a boy, I would chase the snakes towards the pens because they could get under there. You could just hear and see the pigs go crazy when a snake came in there. They just went crazy. You'd see them grab that snake and they'd throw it from here to there. They'd just try to eat it. Nothing of it.

I guess one of the things that most gross you out is that pigs, they would get cancers on their jaws, usually on their back, haunches. It was just a growth that would come out. It would be kind of a pussy growth if it burst. But you didn't really put anything on them because you didn't have to because the other pigs would eat that growth off of their faces.

So many times in that growth, after they ate that off the side of its face, then you would see the maggots that were inside the face and they would then eat those maggots. There were maggots everywhere on our farm. Pigs would eat them. They would come out. They would eat them again. They would develop. It was a nasty, disgusting animal that we just could not eat. And see, I had to find this out. God knew this already. He knew it.

And I started to bring one. I said, No, I'm not going to do that this year because I've given this sermon in the past. I gave a sermon and other times I passed because we had a bunch of young people who had never been around pork since they were raised in the church.

I actually passed out pigs' ears, wrapped up in plastic very well, and pigs' feet. Many of you have seen pigs' feet. People eat pigs' feet. I couldn't find it when I walked in yesterday. I went to Publix. And they don't have pigs' feet. But if you go to one of these other markets, older markets, you'll find pigs' feet. And if you look at a pig being, we clean pigs because we showed some pigs and all this kind of stuff, so you would get to know the animal well. One thing, if you look at that pig's foot next time you have a chance, you'll see that right in the middle, right there, is a little tube.

Excuse me. A little round tube. And you'll wonder, wow, I never noticed that before. But when you, a pig has a little tube at the bottom of its foot, and what that tube is for is for the excess poisons when the fat, because the poison, even if snakes bite pigs or they get sick or whatever, there's so much fat on a pig that the fat usually absorbs the poisons. But when it gets so much poison that the fat can't absorb it, which the poisons come out through the sweat on a pig, and it's a good reason he says don't even touch it, because the poisons actually come out of that sweat.

If you've ever seen a pig sweat, I've seen many a pig sweat, used to lay down and clean our pigs and do this kind of stuff, so I knew them well. But at the bottom of its foot is this little round tube. You can see it. That is where, when so much poison, pus, this yellowish, greenish pus, would come out of that tube. Otherwise, the pig would die from being poisoned to death. So take a look at that tube, and I think of people who buy and eat that foot that has even the poison in it for people.

They would, our pigs would eat each other. Matter of fact, now, when we were raising pigs, we didn't have to, but at the time, now you have to actually cut a pig's tail off when they're very young, because we always had tail biters, as they called them, and they would just go around biting the other pig's tail off.

And eat them. Right? Mike? You've probably been around some. And you know. So now you have to cut their teeth out when they're real young and cut their tails off. But if a pig gets sick and dies, and I've seen many times, all they leave in the pen is a skeleton. They will eat that pig up. They will eat whatever is sick.

That pig is sick, you've got to get him out, because they will just eat him up. Many sows, when they gave pigs, and we raise sows also that raise little pigs, I would have to, you'd have to make sure. And they were very dangerous, some of those big sows. Whenever she had pigs that one didn't get around, you had to make sure they didn't walk up towards her mouth. Gosham! She'd just eat it.

She'd eat her own, and not think anything about it. Just second nature. See, God did not miraculously change the pig when Jesus Christ was on Golgotha, did he? That's why some people say, oh well, he's cleaned it, and we never have to do it. So they distort all kinds of scriptures. And I won't go through the scriptures they distort, and the stories. Maybe that will be left for another time. But church members will say, well, we don't eat the pig. We don't eat swine. To which I ask, oh really? You think you don't? You think you don't? There is so much of the swine that's processed.

And they process it down to use these enzymes. They process it down to use this for this and this for this and this for this. Do you think anything from a nasty stinking pig is clean? Do you think its enzymes are clean? Do you think even the smallest minute part of that pig is clean? Now, this is, in the past, it was a very controversial subject back in Tennessee, and a couple other states in which I gave this.

And this is not United Church of God doctrine. I'm not laying out doctrine. I'm giving you information. If you want to use it, fine. If you don't, it's fine too. But that's up to you. I just want you to be healthy. I just want the church to be healthy. If I took dog dung and put it on my grill, because I have a grill and I can cook it up to 700 degrees, to where it's mainly just dust, cooked everything out of it that there is, and I put that with a little hamburger meat, and just mix just a little bit, would you eat it?

Would you eat it? I wouldn't either. And yet, we eat a lot. We're a little processed, a little cooked, just a minute part of something is used, like gelatin, from enzymes of pigs. I'm going to give you some information that today might shock you or what you're eating.

I don't do this to shock you. I don't do this so that, well, what are we going to eat now? Because it's interesting that of all the corrupt things that we may eat, almost nothing has been tainted. You can't find anything if you eat non-processed foods. Now, none of us hardly can do that. We don't live on a farm.

It's hard to do that. But the majority of our food is non-processed because that's where they use all this stuff. From foul stuff is in the processing of foods. And I researched this, and there's a lot more I could give. If you'd like more information, I'll be happy to give that because there is a church called the Israel of God, I think it is, in Chicago that keeps the Holy Days, keeps the Sabbath, keeps the unclean meats, and they've kind of made it their job to interview and to call all these companies and find out what they use in their food.

It's something that they've taken the mantle on. And so they have 20 or 30 sheets of all the different foods. And I'll just quote some of those today because I won't go through them all, but if you're interested, if you do not have a computer, you cannot go there.

But they do it, and they call these companies and usually get a letter from them to state that food is not tainted or it has pork in it or it has L-cysteine or it has some of these other products in it.

Swine is one of the deadliest meats out there. And even the minute essence of a swine is being used.

You know, when I first came into the church, people ate whole wheat bread.

Sugars and honey. We marry. We have sugar at our place. It's not like that, but we... she sweetens most of our food with honey. We try to do everything we can, but you even have to look at honey and go to a source because now they're just taking the stuff out of honey and putting corn syrup.

And honey to sell it as natural honey.

So I believe it is important enough to talk about so that we can go to God with a clear conscience and say, yes, God, I'm trying to do. Because how many... I'm not the only one who has gotten sick and been sick for two or three days and ended up talking to God and saying, you know, I can do a better job of eating. And you get well, and you know, guess what? You start eating a little bit better, don't you? All of us experience that. All of us can do that. And so I want to make sure we do what we can. Because Porky the pig is still in. Okay? He's big and he's out there.

Gelatin is processed down. Anything that has gelatin in it is something you have to really look at. And that means Jell-O. Okay? We don't eat Jell-O. Because most... all Jell-O is made from pork derivatives. Okay? That's where it comes from. Now, there is some beef gelatin. There is some other gelatin from other sources. But most have pork. Marshmallows have... almost all have some type of pork derivative from marshmallows. That's why you won't see me if you bring... if you bring something with marshmallows, you won't find me eating it. Because I go back, and my mind doesn't have to go back to Scripture first. It goes back to seeing those pigs eating maggots.

It's not even appetizing. You may think about cheeses, because a lot of cheeses... the rennet is from pork. That's why we eat sargentos. They're not. You can see a lot of cheeses. Wine. You know that pork is even used in wine. Now, it's very rare. I don't know if any of you like Kendall Jackson wine. Kendall Jackson is one of the few manufacturers that still use pork as a finding agent. They actually run it down their barrels, put a piece of pork in, so that things collect to it. They use it as a finding agent. Almost all manufacturers of wine use clay. Every... all of the big guys use clay. But Kendall Jackson, that's why if you have... we have you over at our house, and you serve... and you bring Kendall Jackson, I won't be drinking it, because it's the only wine that I know of. And these are things that we can look out for. If you eat a cracker barrel and you eat their cornbread, you're going to be eating something made from pork. If you eat their hash brown casserole, you are going to be... and I ate hash brown casserole and loved it! Until I found out it was made, what it was made from. McCormick's chili sauce has pork in it. Did you know Guinness beer is really unclean? Ever drink Guinness beer? It doesn't have pork in it. But it contains a product taken from catfish in Guinness beer. Hmm. McDonald's sesame seed bun as L-Sistine. White Castle buns. Sistine. Dolly Madison cupcakes with pork. Snowballs. I used to eat those little pink snowballs that used to have... Manufactured with pork. Oda Spunkmeyer bear claws. Cinnamon Danish. Cinnamon rolls. Pepperidge Farms. All their cakes. Made with pork. Altoyed mints. Process with pork. Bugles, which I used to like eating. Pork. Kraft planter dry roasted peanuts. Pork gelatin. Nabisco. Planters cheese balls and cheese curls. Made with pork. Mentos. Those candies. Pork gelatin. Wrigley's extra polar ice gum. The only gum out there. No, I'm not telling you this so you start... Oh, why don't I look at labels? I'm just telling you these things. Because, okay, none of the other gums are processed with pork. Wouldn't you like to know the one that is? That's why I'm telling you this. No other beer has something unclean, processed in it, that they know of except for Guinness, which is a part from catfish.

I'm just telling you this so that we can have a clear conscience and do everything that we can in our power. Kraft singles. Pork. Velveeta. Cheese. Pork. Almost everything from Kraft. My father used to work for Kraft. I would have loved for him to just come up here and give you a Bible study sometime. He worked for Kraft for many years in a cheese processing plant. He made cheese. He was a cheese taster and a tester for years for Kraft.

But he didn't eat it. He wouldn't eat Kraft. We wouldn't have Kraft in our home. Because he knew some of the things they'd done. He actually said that when they ran out of an enzyme, pork enzyme one time, and they had to make a government, because a government Kraft sent the cheese to their troops at that time, had to have some so they had to have a culture to help make it.

They actually used some culture from a horse. They said, oh, we'd have been shut down if anybody found out about it, but it was a common practice. You kept a little horse culture just in case you ran out of pork. The only truly clean that this group has found in hot dogs is Hebrew National. Everything about it is clean. Hershey's, all their candies with gelatin, is used pork. Trader Joe's, most of their sausages, even their beef and turkey sausages, have pork casings.

The casing, even though it says that. I bring some of these things out because we need to be more aware of what we're eating. You want to know more, I can give you more information. But I'm telling you this today. Because there's so much information out there. Are we willing to dive in and listen to it? Because our health, our bodies are worth it. That little girl right there, and that little boy right there, they're worth it.

To me, they're worth this entire sermon. Because their parents may find something they do not feed those children now. If you've ever prayed for a child with cancer, just look at how much cancer is eating us up today, and all the other diseases. The curse, causeless, shall not come, as the Scripture says. And we as a nation, we can do better.

We as a church, we can do better. We can become wiser, what we eat and how we eat. Jennifer Cohen, she works for Forbes Magazine in the Health Department, because in Forbes Magazine. And she found out, and she wrote this, and I give you this just for your additional information, that she gave the FDA guidelines for filth, because the FDA is supposed to keep our food clean.

That's the processed foods. They don't have a whole lot to do with the unprocessed foods. But they have guidelines for filth, and one of those is mushrooms. I asked Mary just this morning, yesterday, when I found this out, because she loves mushrooms, and we usually eat mushrooms on various things.

Like mushroom on a pizza. I said, do you use canned mushrooms? And she said, I have. Well, the guidelines for canned mushrooms. So the FDA allows, and this is by their own standard. On canned mushrooms, not fresh, canned, the FDA allows 19 maggots and 74 mites in every 3.5-ounce can of mushrooms. What's the FDA standards? And that vanilla ice cream, if you will look on the label the next time you have vanilla ice cream, are raspberry ice cream.

There's a product called Castorium. Anybody heard of Castorium before? Our nurses might have. Castorium is a product they use in vanilla and raspberry ice cream. Not many of the others, but you can see it's on the list. If it's in your ice cream, they put it in there. Castorium, which most people do not know. Castorium is the anal secretions and urine from a beaver that they actually put in this ice cream.

Yes. From the back end of a beaver, the secretions and the urine, it's allowed. It's part of the FDA. Bread, L-cysteine, which is a softening agent, can actually be taken, as it's put inside the product, from human hair, from duck feathers, or from any other animal that has a hair.

So many of them are unclean animals. They take this and they process it down. I do not do this to gross anybody out or to change the way you live. I give it to you because God wants us to live healthy lives. Some people will just reject this. It was controversial because I had a lot of people that got upset from me bringing stuff out.

I even went into greater degree than this sermon today. Trying to help people because I felt every time that I kneeled to pray with our prayer list in the United Church of God that it was too big. And what can we do about it? And that was the reason I wanted to give this message. So I want you to think about these things.

I want you to look at Isaiah 65 and Isaiah 66 this week. Because the amazing thing about Isaiah is people have compared it to a microcosm of the actual Bible itself being there 66 chapters and 66 books. But you can see at the first of Isaiah where in chapter 1 God is explaining Himself. And by the end of this in chapter 65 and 66, the Scriptures set up the time for Jesus Christ's return.

And it actually tells when Jesus Christ will return and what He's going to do. But just before He gets to those verses in chapter 65 and 66, it actually tells what so many of the people are doing. What they are eating and how they're conducting their lives. And it describes this country to a tee. And even though it says those who eat the swine and the pig and also the rat, we do not eat many rats. But we do eat pigs who do eat rats.

So let's do the best we can. Next week we're going to talk about our bodies being the temple. I'm going to go to Scripture and show that. Because there are outward signs. I'd like you to think of that this week. Because next week I'm going to give you seven outward signs.

And I think you should come up with them. The very first one is food. When you met someone and spent time with them, how could you tell they were an authentic Christian from the outside? There are seven ways. The very first one that I can tell is what they eat. Because an authentic Christian, a true Christian, will not eat the unclean food. They will eat clean.

Now I'll let you during this week think of the rest of the six. The outward signs. The curse causeless shall not come. I'll go into part two next week.