God's Way Works

Good afternoon to all of you. It's a delight to follow such a beautiful piece of special music. I was commenting to my wife and my son. I said it was fascinating to see how much rich sound a small male section produced. Beautifully balanced, numerically. I enjoy music enough that I always watch such things and beautifully balanced, very nicely performed.

I have a question of curiosity. I was watching Mr. Stiver go through the seniority count last night with fascination, but I have a similar but a very different question. I'm curious how many in the room were at the Feast of Tabernacles in Regina 20 years ago? Exactly 20 years ago.

Now, if you don't remember what exactly 20 years ago was, it was the year that we shared the stage with the Phantom of the Opera. So how many were there the year we and Phantom were there together? Okay, about five of us. Excluding my wife, the two of us, and about five or six of you.

It wasn't the last time I was in Canada as a speaker, but it was the last time—well, that may be fudging, too—it was the last time I've been as close to here in Canada for a feast. Following the feast in Regina 20 years ago, my wife and I came over to Lake Louise. Our anniversary usually falls during the Feast of Tabernacles, and we flew into Calgary and then drove up to Lake Louise and then back down to Calgary and flew home to Seattle, which was home at the time. Still have some very vivid memories of that trip. Being assigned as a festival speaker that year, when you come in, you have no way of knowing what your accommodations are going to be, what your transportation will be, what your lodging will be. You simply arrange to fly in, and then when you get there, you find out. I was quite surprised when I flew in at the generosity of the Canadian staff who had done the selection of things, because at the airport I was met with a brand-new white Cadillac as my transportation.

My mother and father came up from the United States, kept the Feast with us, and we went downtown Regina to the old Hudson Bay Department Store. Went inside to look around, came back out, and as we were getting in the car, one of us tripped the arm system. Lights flashing, horn blaring, sitting there in the street.

I was in a panic. Some of my family were enjoying my panic. There was no instruction manual in the block box, so there was absolutely no instruction on how to turn it off. I still don't know how we got it off. We got in the car, well, I turned on the ignition. We pulled out into traffic. I don't think we got half a block before somebody triggered that alarm again.

Now we're driving down the street, lights flashing, brand new, luxury car, horn blaring. I made a right turn, and I've inquired of a couple of members from Regina, but nobody can give me an exact answer. All I remember is we did a right turn and went by a very impressive—get my initials right—RCMP.

I have to think of the full name, which I know to get the initials right. We went by a very impressive—RCMP building to our right. Lights flashing, horn blaring. The only way I could make any lemonade out of my lemon was to say, Well, at least I know if I want to steal a luxury car, where to go to do it?

Go to Regina, try it in front of the Mounties. Nobody even gave me a second look.

The other delight was—and I Googled because I—you know how you fixate on a particular name, and yet you're not sure whether you're right? I had to Google Regina just before we left here, and sure enough, my name was wrong.

One of the recommended places to eat was a restaurant called The Diplomat Steakhouse, and we ate there on the evening of the last great day. As we walked in, and there were a group of about six of us, there was a long banquet table that had to hold at least 20. It took up the whole middle of the restaurant, and it obviously caught your attention as you walked in. So we sat down, and we were sitting at an angle where we could watch it. And I saw the first two or three people come and sit down, and I nudged my wife, and I said, you see those two people? Those were cast members for phantom. More came in, and since many of us in the church had the opportunity to see the play also, we began naming the parts that they played, and they filled that whole table. And then the wheels began to turn. They had closed at the same time the feast was closing. And so this was their closing dinner before they moved on to whatever the next city would be that they would be performing. And I watched the Mater D bring an elderly lady up to the table and introduce her around, and she was just beaming at the privilege to meet the cast members.

And then I heard the most common piece of music and the most beautiful rendition I've ever heard in my life, and I understood what was going on. The cast of phantom all broke out in four-part harmony and sang happy birthday to this elderly lady. And I have never heard happy birthday sung that majestically in my life, nor do I ever expect to again.

So we left Regina with some interesting memories. I noticed also, as Mr. Stiver was asking for hands, there were hands in the room that were 50-plus years. I'm curious, how many of you in the room attended the Feast of Tabernacles when the only festival site in the North American continent was Big Sandy, Texas? Okay. I can tell by the hands that were up that there were those among you that had the seniority.

I remember with great excitement when the Feast opened in Big Sandy, there was a question that, as a teenager, I sat on the edge of my seat waiting for the question to be asked, and then looking around with all the multiple hundreds that were there, and that was when the question was asked, where are you from? And the roll call was called. And after a couple of years, you knew if you were an attentive watcher which areas were not represented.

And you'd listen as Mr. Armstrong would ask about either small population states, like Rhode Island, or areas remote, or Canadian provinces, all of which were lesser represented, and you'd look across the auditorium to see if you could see a hand from one of the provinces or from one of the far eastern New England states and rejoice at the fact that here were hands raised that represented areas that were previously not there. The other thing that was so common, that it became a byword, every single opening message was introduced with the question, why are you here?

In this room are people who have been here 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 plus years. And the question is, at this point in time, why are you still here? You know, at that time the church was so young and so fresh, that every year the turnover was in the ballpark of 50 percent. By turnover I mean each year there were half of the people in that room that had not been there before. Prior to having congregations and baptismal tours being the primary way in which people were brought into the church, there was also a high drop-off rate.

So we grew by 30 percent, but 50 percent of the people there were there for the first time. So you can do the math to realize that there was a significant attrition. People baptized on baptismal tours whose love for the way of God simply lasted for a short period of time. And like the parable of the seeds on the soil, some of them withered very quickly, passed on.

You demonstrated durability. You demonstrated staying power. But the question is, what has kept you here? If your answer is correctly focused, what has kept you here is the same thing that will prepare you to lead, guide, and teach when the meanings of these days are revealed to all mankind when God's kingdom comes. So you may not connect the two. It may not immediately at this time be something that automatically connects. But the things that have kept you here, if they are correctly focused, will also be the greatest qualifier so that you may be able to guide, lead, and teach those who are yet to come. There have been many reasons over the years why people are in the church and why they stay in the church. Many of these reasons are of temporary value. When I finished high school, I applied to attend Ambassador College. I had attended Imperial High School in Pasadena, California for four years while my father was a student at Ambassador College. I had learned enough to know that there was no other place to go. I realized that at that time I was too young to be making the kind of a commitment that was necessary for the rest of my life. So, in the autobiography section of the application to Ambassador College, I wanted to ask, who are you, why do you want to be here, give us your reason? I said very simply, I know at this time I'm not mature enough for baptism, but I also know that what I've studied and what I've learned is the truth. I quoted from John 6, 68, which was the place after Christ had said, you have to eat my flesh and drink my body and disciples by the droves left him. And he turned to Peter and he said, Peter, are you going to leave also? And I quoted Peter's answer because it was my position. He said, where would I go? You have the words of truth. I know what started me here. For many of us, it started you also. As the decades go by, there are those who are here because of family ties and family traditions. There have always been people in the Church of God who are here because the Church provides those who have no connections with hospitality in a home. This is a kind place to be. People who society can be rude to and can simply push aside can find warmth and a welcome. There are those, if I took a sidestep off of Mr. Hall's presentation, there are those who are here because of the fear of what lies ahead. I had a very dear friend whose mate, after being neighbors for nearly eight years, came to me and said, I am here because of the pressure my husband has put upon me. I don't fully understand this way. I am here because of him. As the time goes by, and as we build generationally, coming from Portland, Oregon as pastor, I'm in an area that is the oldest in the United States, from Eugene, Salem, Portland, and on up to Tacoma and Seattle. Those are the church areas where people have been in this church the longest, 60-plus years. And as a result, you have three, four, and in some cases, even the beginnings of a fifth generation. People can be here because they've never known anything else. None of these will carry us to the end. All of the ones I've named here will not carry you all the way. Some will carry you further. Some will carry you a shorter distance, but none of them will carry you to the end.

What will carry you to the end is an unwavering belief that God's way works, and that it is the only way that works. It isn't one of Hein's 57 varieties of ways. It isn't one of a dozen options. God's way is the way that works, and there is no other.

I remember as a freshman in Ambassador College, Dr. Meredith was the instructor for First Year Bible, and it included going through the four Gospels in the Book of Acts. And as he entered the Book of Acts, he made a point that was relevant to the day and the time because there was a very famous radio preacher, known nationwide, frankly known throughout the Christian world, that had made the point, for what reason I've forgotten over the years, that one thing that Christianity wasn't was a way of life. And Mr. Armstrong had taken great exception to that, both in print and on the radio. And Dr. Meredith picked up the baton, and as a part of our instruction, he walked through every single Scripture in the Book of Acts that described this faith that sprung from Jesus Christ as a way of life. And there were numerous. Acts 9-2, Acts 16-17, 18-25, 19-9, 19-23, 23-4, 24-14, 24-22. Obviously, I didn't give them slow enough for you to pick them up, but I'm a believer in personal Bible study. Every one of those describes the fact that the faith to which we were called is a way. It isn't an avocation. It isn't a hobby. It isn't a part-time job. It isn't a weekend change. It is THE way of life. We incorporated for a while that particular phrase into our culture. In 1992, in our former affiliation, enough years had passed with our youth program that it was time to take a full review, a full examination, and ask the question of how could the job that was being done be done better. It was an opportunity to look at 15 years or so of youth work and to realize that with all the programs that were in place, that ranged from lessons and instruction, correspondence style, teen Bible studies, but a high emphasis on competitions, in sports, talent, the arts, and then our summer camp program, that we weren't producing the effect that we really wanted. So a group of men were assigned to sit down as a think tank and to try to identify the core position, belief, attitude, or philosophy that we wanted our teenagers to adopt. And generally, one of the great problems in life, especially when you're a part of a group that is supposed to crystallize thinking, is that fluffy thinking is very easy. Sharp focus is more difficult. A famous Frenchman, Pascal, back in the early 1600s, a mathematician, a physicist, and a theologian, once wrote in a letter to a friend, a comment, that became a part of understanding human communication. He wrote to his friend, I would have written a shorter letter, but he didn't have the time. And anyone, as I said, that gets into the business of fully focusing understands that it's really easy to be fuzzy and vague. But when those things are challenged and you have to get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, it's amazing how much time it takes to come down to the most elementary core principle. And as that group did it, they said, you know, the one thing that we want to instill into the thinking, into the actions, and into the lives of our children is not just a belief, but a complete passion for saying, the only way that works is God's way. We wanted them to look at life and say, God's way works, and no other way does, because no other way does work. Our society, Mr. Hall's sermonette, Mr. Saloma's offertory, you know what they were? They were both commentaries on the screaming commercial that man's way does not work. It is broken beyond repair and has to be replaced. We're here to celebrate that. We're here to look forward to it. We're here in training to be part of it.

Several years ago, I was introduced to an author through his first great book, and I'll leave the author's name out until we get to the end of all of this. You will all know his name. I've enjoyed critical reading for many, many, many, many years. I've enjoyed the critical analysis of books. And you'll learn when you critically analyze a book, that one of the things you do as the superficial look at a book is you look at a book's braids.

For those of you not familiar with the term, the braids, the braids are all those little comments on the back of the book or on the inside cover of the book or on the dust jacket of the book saying, wow, this is a fantastic book. You ought to buy it. You can tell when a person writes a book, and the braids are from his wife and his children, and his barber and his dentist, and a mechanic down the street, that the book is probably pretty shallow. I looked at this particular book before I ever opened it, before I ever looked at what was in it. I simply looked at the backside of it and I said, in all my life, I have never seen a book with braids of this caliber.

This is the most high-powered series of braids I've ever seen in my life. And not only is it the most high-powered series of braids I've ever seen, but the breadth of the braids, the most impressive I've seen. They were from educators, from scientists, from those people in the health industries, those who were CEOs of some of not Fortune 500, but from the top ten companies in the world.

Here were astronauts. Here were people who were the movers and the shakers at the top of a whole range. And all saying, this is one of the most phenomenal books I've ever read. I thought, you know what? On the merit of the raves alone, this is worth looking into. I got into the book, and the gentleman left a lasting impression on me because what he did in the book was to take the principles of God's way and to put them in the language that men of science, men of industry, men of finance, and men of education could wrap their heads around.

He didn't preach to them. He didn't use church to speak or Bible speak. But his book, from beginning to end, was filled with God's way and how it works. He made a comment at the beginning that precipitated how the book was formed. I'd like to read that to you. It's not a long, long read, but it's a long enough read. It's not just a paragraph. He's talking about how the book came into existence.

He said, I was deeply immersed in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States. You know, there are people who are doing research. They want to see how other people feel. Well, this gentleman didn't do things in a half-baked way. He said, I wanted to see what the nature of success literature was from 1776 onward. I was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as self-improvement, popular psychology, self-help.

At my fingertips was the sum and substance of what a free and democratic people considered to be the keys to successful living. As my study took me back through 200 years of writing about success, I noticed a startling pattern emerging in the content of the literature. Now, he had had some family problems and some family pains, and he put two and two together on how to solve it, and had come up with five.

And he didn't like the feeling that five gave him because it did damage. And he said, I want to know what two and two is and how it comes to four. So I said, because of our own pain, and because of similar pain I had seen in the lives and relationships of many people I had worked with through the years, and I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial.

It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques, quick fixes, social band-aids and aspirants that addressed acute problems, sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again. In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the character ethic as the foundation of success. Things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the golden rule.

It's almost humorous to me if I might make a break for a moment to say, and the golden rule, because everything I read before that was integral to the golden rule. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that literature. As a freshman, Mr. Armstrong required all of us as freshmen to read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. It was required reading. This gentleman said Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that literature. It is basically the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature. The character ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success, and enduring happiness, as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.

But shortly after World War I, the basic view of success shifted from the character ethic to what we might call the personality ethic. Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques that lubricate the processes of human interaction. This personality ethic essentially took two paths. One was human and public relations techniques, and the other was positive mental attitude, or PMA. Some of this philosophy was expressed in inspiring and sometimes valid maxim, such as, your attitude determines your altitude. Smiling wins more friends than frowning. And whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe in, it can achieve. Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get them to do what you want, or to use the powerful look, or to intimidate. Some of this literature acknowledged character as an ingredient of success, but tended to compartmentalize it rather than recognize it as foundational and catalytic. Reference to the character ethic became mostly lip service. The basic thrust was quick, fixed, influenced techniques, power, strategies, communication, skills, and a positive attitude.

That was the introduction to Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which is simply a modern educator and psychologist, even though that's not his title, but it is the area of the book to help people realize how to be effective.

And fundamentally, as he said, we as a nation have gotten into tactics, techniques, gimmicks. For the first 150 years in the United States, the emphasis was far different.

You have been privileged, we have all been privileged, to learn that God's way works. That privilege was by invitation. We refer to it in our jargon as calling. Same thing. You were extended in invitation, but it also required you to exercise a degree of faith that is uncommon in the world today. Because without invitation, you had to step out and provide a willingness to trust God's Word even when you may not have understood it.

You know, Paul said in Romans 1, verse 17, he said, The just shall live by faith.

There's not a one of you in this room upon your calling where God said, Let me map out for you and give you all of the conclusions and end results of everything that you are going to step into.

You stepped into it seeing certain maxims, if we can use that word, within the Bible, and you said, This is what it says, and this is what it says I'm supposed to do.

And therefore, I'm going to step out on faith and do it even though I can't necessarily see where it is going to go.

This is the antithesis of the real we live in.

One of our world's greatest stumbling blocks is that it demands the, quote, scientific approach, unquote.

Basically, prove it to me first, then I'll sit and ponder whether I want to do it. God doesn't live at that address.

If you think through it deeply enough, that approach makes God your servant, and God is not going to live at that address.

When you call the shots and you say to God, God, as long as you prove everything to me, give me all the whys, wherefores, hows, then I will consider it, and then I will determine whether I want to do it. Who's in the driver's seat?

In that relationship, it's not God.

God says, I will tell you what works.

You may not understand why, and you may not understand how, but you have to step out and do it because you believe that I know what I'm talking about.

That's the relationship we entered into. That's why you're here. That's why some of you said, I've been here 10 years. Others said, I've been here 20. Others said 30, 40, 50.

What you found out, what you found out as you stepped into these areas is that God's way does work, even though you didn't see it coming, even though you didn't grasp it coming.

You and I live in a society that has surrounded us with so many examples that we become numb by virtue of volume.

When something is so huge, we simply shut down because there's so much we can't process it.

Our world, every single solitary direction that you turn, is giving you a flashing Times Square, New York City billboard saying, here is the evidence, no way but God's way works.

That's the commercial you're getting. You're not going to get a commercial from society where God's way works. You're going to get the commercial that says, we're going to show you every other way fails.

Let's understand something about God's way.

Start out with something easy to wrap your mind around, and then it would be easy to make the simple steps sideways to the other.

There's another saying that says, always say the truth. That way you don't have to remember what you said last time.

You see, what it's saying is that truth is singular. Truth is truth is truth. If you tell somebody the truth, the next thing to come back to you, you don't have to say, well, what did I say to him? I can't remember exactly what I told you last time.

How many ways can you tell a lie? Truth only has one way of saying it.

You can lie in infinite number of ways.

It is the nature of life that truth is a singular path. Lying has paths that go in every direction.

Let's step sideways.

The effect of going God's way is singular.

It is a happy way.

It is a prosperous way.

It is a healthy way.

The wrong way of life can take you in a hundred different directions.

Truth is singular.

You can have a thousand variations of a lie.

God's way is the only way that produces constant, consistent, generationally progressive happiness.

Remember this fact.

Remember also that the myriad consequences of going the wrong way cannot be fully reasoned out in advance.

You know, when somebody takes a scientific method, what normally happens is they come back to you and give you their tale of law and say, Well, I went the wrong way. I learned what that does. I'm here to be a testimony to the fact that you don't want to go that way.

That's a hard way to learn. It's a hard way to learn because you can get a dozen people stand up and give you a dozen testimonies about all the various paths that fail.

God is not interested in you learning that way.

Let's look into some of the things that are part of the fabric of our society and just simply walk down the path.

I was listening to Mr. Saloma talk as he was preparing the offatory, and I thought to myself as I grinned, you just identified one of the major differences between the Canadian mind and the mind of your neighbor to the South and United States.

He was talking about financial woes and financial problems and so on and so forth, and he said that it took until July to pass the point where a Canadian was finished paying taxes.

I was reporting to my congregation in Portland within the last month that I had looked at Tax Freedom Day, which is a foundation that logs in the United States the day when U.S. citizens have passed the point where all their income went toward taxes and where they now began to own their money. And this last year was April the 17th.

The citizens of the United States are a group of people that are very frustrated by the taxes they pay.

They don't want to pay what they do pay, and they definitely aren't going to pay more. So when I heard him say what he said, I thought to myself, you are a gentler and more patient and more enduring people than we are.

If you had said to a U.S. audience, you're not going to get past that point until July, there would have been a national revolution if some sort take place.

But the fact of the matter is, whether you're an American citizen or a Canadian citizen, nobody likes to pay as much taxes as they do. We all like the benefits, but we don't like paying as much.

I mentioned that because I said to the congregation at the time that that tax date, which is true for Canadians and Americans, both people of the United States, does not represent just your annual income tax, but all the layers of tax.

And the hard part for any human being who lives in any society, no matter what it is, is to say, well, how much tax do I pay? Well, you honestly don't know.

Because the person who sold you a product added to it a sales tax, but he had to pay tax. And before that, the person that produced the raw material paid tax, and somebody else paid tax. And when you take the tax as it goes through the process, everybody's been paying tax on something all the way along, and by the time it gets to you, the price of the product and the tax percentage of it had become so totally fogged that you can't tell. This is true with the wrong way of life.

As you try to figure out the consequences, as you go back from the point where you're standing, you reach a point in time that the consequences simply disappear for either distance or lack of clarity. Your mind can tell you, I know there are consequences that go back even further, but they're either so far away I can't see them, or it's become so foggy and fuzzy I can't see through the haze to see what they are. God is interesting in His commands. Many of them are very simple. Many of them have no explanation. He will say, do this. And if He does an explanation, it may be because it'll make you happy.

All the rest of it's not there. So you step into it as a younger person, and you don't know where the journey is going to take you anymore than God said, this is the way I told you to do it. And you look and you say, well, God, I think you are smarter, wiser, kinder, gentler, and more generous than any human being on this earth, therefore.

I'll do it. The older you get, you know, Mr. Stuyver was talking about the Wisdom Letter Attorney toward the end of his message. He moved into one of the personifications of wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, the admonition to seek it, to enjoy it, to benefit from it. If you follow God's way as the years progress, the wisdom grows, and the reflection of how beautiful that way is and the benefits of it only get larger with time. There are a disproportionate number of people in my congregation, and I would say also in the congregations to the south of me, that are in the field of education.

I enjoyed being in Calgary Sabbath and hearing the sermonette being provided by a high school math teacher, and I know what his life is like. My son is a high school teacher. My family has a number of teachers. My wife just stepped out of full-time classroom work this last June. And as she would come home at the end of the day, we've had, I can't count, the number of conversations about classroom life. So I understand the consequences of all the other ways at the most fundamental level. If you look at the school system, and you look at the problems of the school system, and you walk any problem that you want to look at in the system back far enough, you will eventually arrive at a point where a fundamental principle of God's way has been violated, and it has been produced in consequences.

As the system looks at learning, we are dumbing down. I have to speak as a citizen of the United States. I don't expect that most countries are any different, but I am speaking from a south of the border perspective. We are dumbing down education. We are dumbing down testing. We are dumbing down requirements. We're dumbing down those things because of the capacity of our students. I don't know what studies have been performed. I do know from grassroots-level life that the maintenance in elementary school, the maintenance of discipline, occupies in many cases as much time as education.

How much can a child learn who comes to school from, first of all, an emotionally healthy family, so they are not distracted? Teachers look and they say, I can't teach that child. They are distracted by whatever they brought from home. As those children volunteer, knowledge, you find out they have brought to school abusive relationships. They have brought to school the fear of a child as they watch mothers and fathers fighting. They bring to school hunger to where, unless the school feeds them breakfast, they don't have enough calm to pay attention. They find themselves the consequences of an entire range of emotional and mental deficits all the way from the more radical forms of birth defects from parents who had habitual use of powerful drugs.

And all of these play upon the system. Those ways are all broken. The children that sit in the schoolroom are broken. A teacher is there for the well-being of the student, who wants nothing more than to see them learn and thrive, and lives with one hand tied behind his or her back because people are practicing the ways that don't work.

If I go back to the law, Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy, that's what I mean by the law. If I go back to the law, I look at some of the comments that God made to Israel as fundamental principles. I take one as an illustration. God said in the male-female relationship, both of you remain pure until you find a mate, and when you find a mate, remain faithful to each other until death parts that relationship.

That's virtually how much explanation there is. If you look at how much God says about, now, let me explain this. Let me write 50 pages with footnotes and bibliographies. Forget it. God does not work that way. He says, I created you. This is how I created you. This is how you do it. Go forth and prosper. Horribly simple. But it's like the truth-ly analogy. Truth is very simple. Lying is really complicated. It is hard to keep up. What are the benefits? I'm going to spread a little bit beyond school. Obviously, these things dovetail. In fact, they dovetail so much that they spill over into all sorts of different areas. I look at the violation of that particular command, or those particular maxims.

First of all, violation of that exposes people to a range of horrible diseases. Some of them life-threatening, some of them disabling for the remainder of life, a range of them incurable. I know and you know that every penny I pay out of my pocket for medical care is a penny that I could have used for something that I actually wanted.

I don't want to pay a hospital bill. I do if I need it. But it isn't something that's on my wish list. I wish to spend 25% of my income on hospital bills. Anybody here at that address? No? I'd like to know that I don't have to spend any of it so that I could spend it on something that would actually build the family that I'm a part of.

Not a place to be.

50% statistic recently published in the United States. 50% of American children are born without two parents.

They are born into a home where they will not have both a mother and a father.

Being born in that particular situation provides a handicap. It's a handicap on the single parent. It's a handicap on the child. And almost always, it's an economic handicap. It has the ability to be an emotional handicap. It happens to be a situation that can provide also social consequences.

What I find interesting in the world that we live in is that when abnormal becomes normal, and that's where we are in society, when abnormal becomes normal, then what is done is to show why one level of abnormality is superior to another level of abnormality. Rather than saying all of these are abnormal, and we as a people ought to aim for and strive for what is normal. When I use normal, I mean normal by God's command and definition. I'm just simply using normal as a one-word way of saying God's way.

And so we get into social rationalizing that says, well, one good parent is better than two parents with one bad. You know, it's better to be in a single parent home than to be in a home with two parents, and you've got a father that's constantly beating the children. I understand that. I understand that. But it dodges the issue.

What God was saying is, I want a loving husband, a loving wife, and happy children. And the fact that one lesser is better than another lesser misses the point. We live sadly in a world where young ladies by the millions are vulnerable to seeking love in the wrong place or the wrong type, because they don't have a father who lives by the way of God, models true, godly masculinity for a daughter as she grows up, and leaves her both with an understanding of what to desire and what to look for.

You see, some of these things you simply can't log on paper and say, well, here are the monetary consequences of ways that are broken. Boys are no better off. The consequences are just different. Boys who live without a godly role model, who can demonstrate how to truly be a loving husband, leave young men that don't know how to treat a young lady. You know, the old biblical statement that I will pass in the blessings and cursing chapters, that I will pass the sins of the fathers on to the third and fourth generation, can be looked at as God there pulling the switches, pushing the buttons, and going up and down.

And that's really not the case. It's really not the case at all. With God, he simply asks, all God has to do is sit back like this and let autopilot take place. As a pastor and a counselor, and every counselor in this room, whether he's pastoral or he's in social counseling, knows the same thing. One of our biggest problems in dealing with people that have problems is that they can only visualize what they've experienced. You can't visualize what you've never experienced.

If you don't know what a loving father looks like, you don't know what he looks like. Those who have lived in God's way can be horribly naïve, if they don't ponder and meditate, to the fact that you also work on autopilot, but it is a beautiful autopilot. When everything has been modeled correctly for you, you simply say, well, that's the way to do it. Why? Well, I don't know. My dad did it. My mom did it. I live with my mom and dad.

They're happy. I appreciate the home I live in. Why would I do it any different? These consequences ripple on and on and on and on like the rock that is thrown in the still lake. There is just no end to the ripples. I find it fascinating at times, and I get a little bit impatient, that science having to prove what common sense has been saying for so long that anyone with a head on their shoulders would know.

Just recently, just recently, U.S. science confirmed that living all day long on soft drinks that have ten teaspoons of sugar in it contribute to obesity. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. It probably took multiple doctoral degrees to come to that profound piece of understanding. You know what? The only thing God says to us about diet is, These are meats that you should eat.

These are meats you shouldn't eat and treat your body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. He leaves an awful lot of room for common sense. Awful lot of room. Both of our nations have suffered the consequences economically and have also experienced the fear, emotionally, of a disease that I've never heard about until the last ten, fifteen years, a disease called the Mad Cow Disease. How do you create Mad Cow Disease? You take an herbivore and you make him a carnivore. Very simple. God made an animal that ruminates, lives on foliage and fodder, and you start feeding him animal byproducts.

God said, I made this animal to work a certain way. Allow him to live that way, treat him that way. He'd be a great animal. It's fascinating to me. We see all the sports figures that are beaten about the head and shoulders for taking steroids, Lance Armstrong recently being the most high-profile.

God in the sacrificial system, when he had a bullock, he gave the prime piece to the priesthood, and in some cases to the person who gave the offering. You know what he gave? He gave the front shoulder. We came up through the backside of the Rockies from the panhandle of Idaho, went by a field, and there was just an absolutely massive, dark, reddish-brown bull in a field, and he was majestic. His shoulders were yay-wide, and his backside was yay-wide. I said, there's an animal that is still-built like God built him.

That man out of a desire to make a little bit more of this now does that animal with shoulders like this and a backside like that. Crazy world we live in. It majors in how to find ways that don't work. I was reading—I was watching a television documentary on cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay in the United States. Major ports feed into it. They were showing all the work of recreating oyster beds, and they said the results were phenomenal, that just a handful of these creatures could filter a tremendous amount of waste out of the water and turn the water quality back into something that was environmentally sound for all the fish and the other life forms that would be there.

Common sense says you don't eat your bread of filter when you take it out of the water. But somehow it doesn't equate that you don't eat the creatures that God built as the bread of filters of the ocean or other waterways. Final illustration, as I said, you can go on and on and on and on.

Mr. Saloma mentioned finances. I'm currently reading through an investigative study on what created the housing market collapse in the United States. It's a heavy read because the spider webs go in several directions, but it all comes down to a simple principle. Greed. Greed on every level. There isn't anybody that comes out of it saying, I am the victim, and he is the perpetrator.

Because it started with the people reading the book who could go home and look in the mirror. It started with people who wanted to own a home who could not honestly afford a home. It was furthered by the lender that said, Wank, Wank, I know that you can't afford a home. Okay, we fixed that. You're going to have a home. And as those people piled up by the thousands, they took all of these loans of people who somebody had wank, wank, and they went to the investment community and said, here, let me sell you a bundle of these as a very fine, stable, income-producing bond. And yet it had more holds than it than Swiss cheese.

Add to this as a sidebar, as all of this created the rise in home values on paper to where people said, My home just continues to get worth more and more and more and more, and I've got all of these things I want to buy. Let me spend my home. Let me go out and get a home equity loan and spend $50,000 of my home for some of the toys that I want out of money that is really only on paper.

It brought down some of the largest financial companies in the United States of America. What was interesting was, as it was bringing the roof down on the houses of many great and old financial names in America, Europe was sitting across the ocean going, Shame, shame, shame, shame.

The only problem being that the same greed of, I want more than something will actually produce for me, was alive and well throughout the common market. And so we just simply sat and nursed different wounds, but still each badly wounded.

The United States, beaten by its housing market, European banking, still trying to figure out how we keep all of the community together, and how we keep the greases and the Portugals afloat, the Spain's afloat, and how we sit. We hold our breath and we say we hope that Italy doesn't join them, and that Belgium doesn't fall in behind, and we're all holding our breath. None of us got there by God's way, working. As Mr. Saloma said, the United States, I'll say it in different words, the United States is sitting right now, putting everything, it just says timeout. We have an event right now that allows us to put it all over on the shelf, because we want to elect a president.

Porpiti, the man that gets in the office because the timeout will be over, and then he has to try to figure out how to fix Mission Impossible. We're arriving at a tipping point where all that we make has to go to service of debt. The consequences of actually arriving there are beyond what any of us want to imagine.

It is the most loud, screaming testimonial that when you don't go God's way, it not only doesn't work, it doesn't work at a horrible level. So you and I sit in a world suffering every form of consequence, social, marital, financial, industrial. It doesn't matter what it is. And all of it, because of our willingness to simply open this book and say, What does God say I should do?

As I said at the beginning of the sermon, if you have internalized the truth of that statement, and it guides your walk, it guides your thinking, it guides your living, it is the greatest qualifier that you could possibly have to be a teacher, an instructor, and a guide to those in the world tomorrow. We don't need engineers and scientists. We don't need people in, you know, many fields you want. What we need are people who can step into the millennium and say, I can tell you from personal experience that God's way works, and I can show you how.

We can educate every technical field in industry and science, but we cannot produce through schools what you are able to contribute. Isaiah chapter 2, as a closing scripture, makes this statement.

Right now, except for the Stephen Coveys and a few like him, we're in a world that doesn't care about God's way. It cares progressively less and less about God's way, and it doesn't want to hear a lot about God's way working. But that will change. When the time comes that through the resurrection you have become now a certified teacher, and the experience of however many years you raise your hand to and how many more there are yet in the future prepare you to teach God's way, you're going to have a joy that none of the public school teachers have today. You're going to have this joy. The joy of Isaiah chapter 2, verse 1, The word that Isaiah, the son of Amos, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways. Brethren, the beauty of these days we're in is that they look forward to a time when the entire world will want to know how God's way works, and you will be there to help them.