Slouching Toward Babylon Part II

I think all of us recognize that we are we have been in the season of lights, right? That's one of the terms that is applied to this holiday festival season of Christmas and New Year's coming right as it does in the darkest part of winter.

And of course all the lights come out and they're bright and they're colored and they're beautiful and it all dates back to, you know, ancient times and the festivals of this time of period with people with light bonfires because it is in the least in the northern hemisphere the darkest time of the year.

Days are shortest, nights are longest, and more clouds, more gloom, and lights were lit to drive away the darkness. And so that's why we see what we see in part and why it's called the season of light. In talking about light, I think all of us recognize we are to be lights to the world. I'd like for you to turn over to the book of Daniel and I want to read to you something here.

Last time I was here I spoke to you out of the book of Daniel chapter 6. We're going back a chapter. We're going to go back to chapter 5 today and open today's sermon. And what is actually a rather dark scene. Daniel chapter 5 is the story of the fall of Babylon, Melchizedek's feast. The handwriting on the wall is one of the more dramatic stories of Scripture and it is very enlightening and it comes at a very dark time in the story of Babylon and the story here.

It is a festival. I think all of you know the basic story of Daniel 5 and this hand appears out of nowhere and writes on the wall a message. But it is, as we open it open up here, a time when the king, Belchazar, gave a great feast that says in verse 1, for a thousand of his nobles and he drank wine with them.

So it's a time of reveling, alright? Kind of like right now. A time of reveling, a season of the lights, and also a season of parties and reveling and people are still probably hung over from a couple of nights ago from the New Year's festivities. So kind of a connection here. Verse 2, while Belchazar was drinking the wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver cups that his predecessor, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken from the temple in Jerusalem. He wanted to drink with them.

I'm reading from the New Living translation. It's a little different, but same thought here. He wanted to drink from those vessels with his nobles, his wives, and his concubines. And they brought these cups taken from the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, and they all drank from them.

And while they drank, they praised their idols made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone. So again, it is a huge party. And if you know your story of Daniel, which Monica Call is here today, and Monica knows her story of Daniel because she sat through my class at ABC, and she knows it real well. So sorry to call you out, but she did quite well on that.

And it is a time of great peril. Why? Because this is the last night of Babylon, so to speak, in terms of power. The Persian Empire are literally at the gates of Babylon. And Babylon is to fall. By the time you get to the end of chapter 5, they fall. And the Persians come in, and Belshazzar, instead of defending his people, defending the gates and the walls of the ancient city, he throws this big party, throws all caution to the wind and says, let's party down.

And this is the setting for all of this, but it is a great time of peril. And it's a party at night. And suddenly, in verse 5, they saw the fingers of a human hand riding on the plaster wall of the king's palace near the lampstand. The king himself saw the hand as it wrote, and his face turned pale with fright. His knees knocked together in fear, and his legs gave way beneath him. This is very polite language for what really happened. Everything just kind of let loose with everybody here. It was that frightening. And it would be to see a hand appear and begin to write on the wall, in this case, a disembodied hand.

So again, keep the setting in time. People in this room know what's going on, how dire the moment is in the story of the nation. Babylon. Danger at the gates. And yet, they don't care. They just want to move on to the next round of festivities.

Sound familiar? Sound familiar? Suddenly, as I said, the fingers appear.

In verse 7, the king shouts for the enchanters, sorcerers, and fortune tellers to come in.

These wise men of Babylon calls in. He wants to know what this handwriting on the wall means. He promises that whoever can read this writing and tell me what it means will be dressed in purple robes of royal honor and will have a gold chain placed around his neck. And he will become the third one. So again, let's not worry about anything else. You know, we'll throw a few bobbles your way. We'll give you a title. It doesn't matter that the nation is about to fall. And that title won't mean anything. But give me an answer to this handwriting. They came in in verse 8, and none of them could tell what the writing on the wall meant. And so in verse 9, the king grew even more alarmed when his face turned pale and his nobles, too, were shaken.

At that point in the story, in comes the queen mother. This is actually the grandmother of the present king here, Bel Shazar. We'll go into all the details of it. But she's probably the wife of Nebuchadnezzar. She's been up in years. She heard what was happening. News traveled fast through the palace about this party, but also the disturbance now with this handwriting. And she comes in and she addresses the king, long live the king. Don't be frightened, she says. In verse 11, she says, There is a man in your kingdom who has within him the spirit of the holy gods.

During Nebuchadnezzar's reign, this man was found to have insight, understanding, and wisdom like that of the gods. And your predecessor, Nebuchadnezzar, made him chief over all the magicians, and the astrologers, and the fortune tellers. This man Daniel, whom the king named Bel Shazar, has exceptional ability and is filled with divine knowledge and understanding, and he can interpret dreams, riddles, and difficult problems he can solve. Call for Daniel, and he will tell you what the writing means. And so, what this tells you is a number of things. Daniel's been forgotten. He's no longer on the A-list of the invitees, or he's not right next to the corner office anymore. The king has to be reminded that this man once existed.

And the queen says, bring him in. Now, I've read from the New Living, the New King James translation says that she describes Daniel as a man of light, wisdom, and understanding. I like that. I do like that a little bit better. Light, wisdom, and understanding, she says, this man has. All right? Dark night. It's dark today, isn't it? Cloudy. Darkest time of the year.

We like to have lights. And I like to flood my backyard with my flood lights at certain times, just to light up the backyard and also kind of drive away the darkness. We all know what light does.

It draws us. We are to be of the lights of the world. Daniel is described as a man of conviction and courage and character, a man of God. We all know that. But he's described this way by a queen mother who's, you know, a pagan queen. She's not a worshipper, a God-ferer. She doesn't know Daniel's God. And yet she knew something was unique about this man because she had been around him and seen him work and knew to be a person of character and of integrity. And that's why she says, call him in. He has light. He gives understanding. And he'll interpret this for you.

And this is kind of the opening of what we are seeing here in this story. Now, as I've said, it's the fall of Babylon. And instead of preparing for it or trying to protect the realm and the people, the king throws this party. Today, I think, as I look at this story, it is kind of one that I see as a centerpiece of the entire book of Daniel in many ways.

As a setting for us all to understand the bigger message of not just Daniel, but of God's prophetic teaching and story out of Scripture. And also how we are to be as disciples. How we are to live our lives. We all have our favorites, don't we, when it comes to biblical characters. Daniel is one of my favorites because of a lot of reasons I won't go into, but I find his story to be very compelling. And I get to take young students through the story every year as I teach the book of Daniel. So I've kind of lived with it for the choral in the last seven or eight years, and it's been a fabulous ride for me just to be able to go back through it every year in detail. And I always learned something different, and I always explain it just a little bit differently, but hopefully better, with each year of passing. But it is a very compelling story, and I find that it has a lot to teach us about God's plan and purpose, and but more importantly, how you and I are to be as disciples. Because Daniel was a disciple.

No question about it. You know, we tend to think of the 12 that Christ called as the disciples.

You know, Matthew, John, Peter, and the others, and they were. But we are to be disciples, too.

Christ said to the church, go and make disciples. Teach them all that I've commanded you. Daniel was a disciple. He was a learner, and that's something that is drawn out from the story that is very plain. But as I look at this episode here, and as I look at our world today, I think all of us recognize that we are in a moment. We are in a moment. Is it a moment of turning? As some have described it. I saw the headline in one article this week. A hinge of history is how it was described. This moment in time. A hinge. In other words, as a door turns on a hinge, that the world is turning into a different period, into a different time. We're at a hinge of history. Is that correct? Is that true? As I mentioned in our beginning, you know, even Newsmax television, people got disillusioned, discouraged, fed up, whatever, with Fox News, at the time of the election, which has been a very dramatic period, and time of change, a lot of emotions flowing on all sides in our country, and issues. And, you know, we see these things, you know, that creates consequences. People take action, good or bad. Things happen.

You know, as I look at this, as I look at this story, and as I look at our world, and especially where America is right now, and what we are anticipating, wondering what's going to happen next, but where does all this fit in God's grand purpose for mankind? I will say this.

I think that today that we are, we should understand that in a sense, we are always, we are always at this night in Babylon, in this room. We are always at this moment in the palace on that night. And there is always a handwriting on the wall, whether it's in our own personal lives, or whether it is in the life of this nation or any other people. We're always here in a spiritual sense, because we live in a world of spiritual darkness, magnified and highlighted at this time of year more than any other time of the year, no doubt, as the world builds up toward their holiday season of lights, and the spending, the talk, the action, the movement, the celebrations, and all, and we kind of hold our breath, usually as disciples in the church, to get through this time. And our, you know, oh, I'm glad it's over. And of course, everybody else is saying the same thing, too, even though they've kept it, right? Your co-workers will tell you on Monday morning, boy, I'm glad it's all over with. I'm worn out, you know, because I used to have a barber, a lady cut my hair for 20, more than 20 years when I lived in Indianapolis, and when she found out that I didn't keep Christmas, as you know, they inevitably do, and you get into these conversations while they've got scissors and knives all around your head. And she says, she said, you don't keep Christmas. I said, well, yes, that's true. They were a brief explanation. She says, well, I get tired of it, too. And then every year after that, I would hear her lament about the money she had to spend, the ungrateful nieces and nephews and everybody else, and I just kept my mouth shut, because I'm thinking, well, you put yourself through that, and everybody's glad it's over, but then they go through it, but it's nothing. It's a reveling with idols of stone and silver and gold, like Belshazzar's feast is, and we truly understand that. And that's why I say that this world is drunk, spiritually drunk, just like in Revelation 17, where you have that image of what is the final rise of Babylon. In Revelation 17, it is a scarlet woman writing a beast, and what's in her hand?

It's a cup of wine, and with that she has made the nations drunk with the wine of her fornication. It's a spiritual drunkenness that was described there, a false teaching, a false doctrine, and false ways that has infected all parts of the world and world communities, and is embodied in the system of this final Babylon there in Revelation 17. And it flows right from this story in chapter 5 of the king and the Babylon and his nobles and his leaders, all feasting with wine and goblets, in the midst of the actual Babylon of the time, and the hand of God's judgment appears in the midst of it and begins to write. That's why I think that all of us could understand that we're always at this moment, we're always in this room, and we should understand that.

And more so, perhaps, as we turn the calendar to 2021, than at any time in my short memory and yours as well, the time we have spent on this earth and understood what God has allowed us to understand of this planet. The world right now at this moment is slowly and inevitably slouching toward Babylon.

The world is slouching toward Babylon.

The rise of an age-ending system. The Bible describes will be used to put over one last time of deception upon the word of the world. And all the world will worship that system.

That's what we're told in Revelation chapter 13, beginning in verse 1, where this beast system rises there in John's vision, and it says, all the world worshiped the beast. And that beast, that figure, is the leader of this final rise of Babylon. The world is slouching toward Babylon.

Kind of, I think I've coined that phrase. The reason I'm giving the sermon at this point is because I've got to write an article on this, and I'm thinking that's the title. And that article, I hope, will be the final chapter of the booklet that we're writing, finally putting together in final form about Babylon. And I have finally delivered my part of it, and I want to write the final chapter. If it passes our editors, the final chapter will be slouching toward Babylon. I kind of adapted that. I didn't invent it completely because it comes actually from a poem, that phrase slouching, not toward Babylon, but there was a poem written back in, I think, 1919, called The Second Coming. Anybody familiar with that poem? The Second Coming. It's written by an Irish poet, W.B. Yates, and it's called The Second Coming, and it actually talks about the time in the earth and the world being in a time of chaos. It was written right after the end of World War I, and it was written actually during the pandemic of the Spanish flu at that period, and Yates's wife had the flu and was very, very ill with it. I think she survived, but she at the moment was very sick with it, and he wrote this poem called The Second Coming. It's rather dark, and when you read it, he talks about Christ being born in Bethlehem, and the world being at a time of crisis, and this beast rises up. The imagery is right out of Revelation, and then, but the last line is this beast is slouching toward Bethlehem.

When you read it, and you read it from the viewpoint of the Bible, you see that it's a satanic effort to destroy who was born in Bethlehem, Jesus, which we know from the Gospels, Herod tried to do. So it's filled with biblical imagery, and it's been used by people down through the years in many different ways. Joni Mitchell had a song or two about it.

There was a book written back in the 80s called Slouching Toward Gomorrah. Anybody ever know or hear about that book, or ever did? It was written by Judge Robert Bork, who was a failed Supreme Court Nominate at the time, the first one in my memory. Well, not the first one, but he was nominated, but they didn't approve him. And he wrote this book describing American culture as slouching toward Gomorrah. So when I say slouching toward Babylon, I'm just adapting it in a long line of others who've adapted that line out of that particular poem. But I think it fits, as we look at the world right now and where it is as we turn the corner into 2021. I think it was mentioned during the sermon that we're kind of looking for a better time and a better experience in 2021. But as any of us that get into current events, cultural trends, and what's happening in our world, it's hard to stay away from it today. And I'll be blunt, those that know me, I'm a news junkie, I'm a political junkie, history junkie, prophecy junkie, and the Bible junkie too. I mean, I call the Bible, but I focus on that, always have. But at times, I have to just back away from it. And more recently, I've kind of just said, I'm going to take a half a sabbatical in certain ways. And finally, we cut the cable cord this week in our home. We still have the internet, and we still watch the things that stream things, but we finally cut that because I left Fox News too on November 3rd. I said, that's it. You know what I realized? I realized that Fox and friends are not my friends. And they're not your friends either. So don't think that they are.

They're not your friends. They have their biases, they have their prejudices, and no matter what side of the political spectrum they seem to fall on, they're not your friends. They're not mine either.

And so I realized, I just like to step back from this again and look at this and sort through. And you know, people disappoint you. You finally realize certain motives, biases, etc. You always have to come back to what the Word of God tells us, a reset. So what are we facing? What's going on in today's world and society today as we look at this? I just mentioned the term reset. That's a term that is being used right now among world leaders and those that are leading this new administration that will come into the United States here in a few days, called the Time for Reset, the Great Reset. It is a reset in the transnational global world that we are in that has had four years of a bit of a hiccup. If part and probably at the heart of the biggest resistance toward President Trump was, he in a sense put a halt to the global involvement of America in the global community and the march toward a transnational global world. There's a lot of people that didn't like that. We're going to reset toward that, probably.

That's some of the discussion. The issues of the climate crisis, gender issues will come back full force into the front and center. Issues of social justice and all that surrounds that.

The efforts to increase this transnational organizations like the World Health Organization and the United Nations and other world bodies, the European Unity, are going to once again take a priority and we will look at their movements to increase their power and to use the COVID crisis as an opportunity to reset the world in largely capitalist terms to a different situation.

This is beyond politics and it should be understood as that. Frankly, what we will see and have been as we've watched this through the decades, it's the essence of what began at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. When mankind was wanting to be of one, one language, and let us band together, let us build a tower to heaven, which was a symbol for a structure of community, government, and society, that was one. And God came down and said, if this continues, they'll be like us. Which is a way of saying that that system was wanting to assume divine-like power over mankind. So he scattered them by confusing the languages. But we're at that moment.

Well, that system that began there at Babel, which was the beginning of Babylon, is continuing to move and we should understand that. And these issues are, they're frankly beyond politics. Sometimes we get ourselves into discussions in the church, on ourselves, people thinking, well, we're too political. This article is too political. This statement is too political. And while we do not take sides, we do sometimes sound a bit more political to someone that may not be. Or like we're, you know, supporting a certain ideology, or network, or politician. I get that. But the reality is, when you peel it all back, and what we all should understand is that issues that are front and center today that get political, they're political because of the way that they are applied at the end user point.

The origins are in sin, and that's spiritual.

Right? You take every major political issue today, and social issue, and whatever it is, and whatever tag is put on it, trace it back to its origins, and what's really the issue there, and it comes back to a matter of sin or righteousness. And when you're dealing with that, you're dealing with a godly matter, and the Church of God should speak out on it, without being charged with being political. All right? And we get ourselves kind of in the knickers in a snip, as they say, among ourselves. When we don't fully understand ramifications of what's taking place in our world today. So I talked about the reset.

There's another issue that at least we should note today, and that is what is a very large erosion of freedom going on at many different levels. And perhaps the most important for us is that of religion.

Attacks upon the freedom of religion. We take that for granted in America. We have that. I can stand and speak my mind to you here, not fear any repercussions yet. And yet, I see the trailing edges of that beginning to impact us, and will it wonder when that will, in some of our video content on Google or on YouTube, will be brought down or taken off because it's considered hate speech. Because we teach the word of God, the law of God. We haven't come to that point yet. And we haven't come to a point of direct persecution. But you know, there's other religions throughout the world that have. We don't tend to pay attention to them. Does the term Boko Haram ring a bell with any of you? Boko Haram is a Muslim terrorist group in Nigeria. They go around kidnapping Christian children. Well, that's Muslim. That's Nigeria. That's the world away, right? And it's a different religion from us. We tend not to worry about that or pay any attention to it. China incarcerates people who profess a Christian belief and have for decades.

And the world turns a blind eye to it. Nike continues to employ slave labor to build their finishes. We buy them. And Apple does the same thing, and so do a lot of other corporations.

And yet there's religious persecution there. The Middle East, Christians are being driven out. And you know what we do in the church? We don't tend to pay attention to that because we may not identify with their form of Christianity. Right. They don't keep the Sabbath. They don't keep the Holy Ghost. But they're persecuted for their belief. It just hasn't come to us, though.

And we tend to ignore that and not think about it. But it will come to our door. It will come to our door. America and the world is being overtaken by an anti-God militancy. And increasing governments are involved. Multinational corporations, academia, media, big tech are involved in it.

And this is being revealed right in front of our eyes. And we have to understand that. And slowly the world accepts that. And you know the story of the frog in the water, don't you?

How the frog just sat there until the water got warm and very comfortable. They got they tolerated that and they got a little bit warmer. And the frog tolerated that. And then all of a sudden it started to boil. The frog was in it and got boiled. We tend to be like that in terms of culture and society. And we don't see what's happening. And it is there. We need to understand those things. Gender identity, I don't even have the time to go into all of that.

I think the LGBTQ alphabet was mentioned in the sermonette. When you strip everything down and lay it out on a table of all these issues, especially gender matters, it all comes back to, and it's not politics, it comes back to a matter of God's law.

And what is taking place is we have to accommodate and go through training and make sure we do not offend and we address by certain pronouns, individuals, and not create unsafe spaces for everybody. Workplaces and academia and all this is being done.

We are seeing the temperature being turned up in our society and acceptance of lifestyles and attitudes and behavior that is sin. And I see that even impacting us in the church where certain things are seemingly tolerated a little bit more than perhaps they used to be.

It all comes back to, again, this matter of Babylon. Satan's goal is to break the family.

And when you trace everything down, you could draw a circle in the middle and just put family.

And then you could draw your lines out. I'd do this if I were in a classroom and I may do that for my class. But you draw your lines out of all the issues. BLM, LGBTQ, FYZ, H.I.W. whatever it might be. Draw that one out there. Critical theory, critical race theory, and that one down there. And all of that social injustice. And a shooting at a school by a single white guy with a gun who lives with his mother who was single. It all traces back to a breakdown in the family. And we're seeing that at every level and the effects of that. But it all comes back to the family. And ultimately, the ultimate goal is to destroy the family as God intended it.

And as God wants. I did a program that we aired about three weeks ago on gender.

And I said what I had to say about as plainly as I could say it without getting kicked off the air.

As Peter Eddington said to us at the council meeting, we said some things on that program that would normally get people kicked off of television. But I said it, I think I threaded the needle pretty well as we worked the script through, but show what God says without trying to blast everything out or just get us kicked off. But at some point, if somebody really wanted to focus on what I said, they would kick, you know, they could have a case against me beyond today.

I think God will give us that open door as long as he wants. But these are some of these are the issues that we are dealing with. And to go back to what I said of Daniel and what was said about him, a man of light and of wisdom and of understanding. Like that of the gods, as the queen put it, we would say, like God, the wisdom of God, the light that comes by God's Spirit working through us.

And if we're at that moment, always as I said it as well, in that palace room in Babylon, and the handwriting is on the wall, either for a nation or maybe even for us personally. Sometimes we have to take this story and say, what do I need to learn? Because when you break down what that handwriting did say, it was a period of judgment. It's God's judgment upon the world.

We're under judgment now in the house of God. And so we live soberly and righteously in this in this present age. What does that mean for us? What's it mean for you and I? What's the takeaway? How then should we live as we look at January 2nd, 2021? We've got a fresh new calendar, diary page, whatever. It will, you know, if you write a check, of course, nobody writes checks anymore.

And so I don't make as many mistakes writing the last year of my checks.

It's all taken care of digitally for me anymore. If I write a check, I've had the same checkbook for eight years now since I moved and opened up the account. I haven't had to order new ones because I've just basically gone to online payments on everything. So I don't write, rarely write a check anymore. So I don't have to, you know, cross out 2020 and write in 2021 there. But we're in a new calendar year and, you know, things reset for tax and other parts of our lives. So we pay attention to it, even though we know the year actually begins in God's calendar in the spring. But we tend to think about it anyway. How then should we live?

God's preparing a people. He is preparing the people who will survive this coming Babylon that the world is slouching for to receive that kingdom. That's what Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar when he interpreted the dream back to chapter 2 of Daniel in verse 44. When he described that stone cut without hands and struck the image on its feet and grew to fill the whole earth describing the kingdom. And it says the kingdom will not be left to other people. It's going to be left to the saints of God, the people who are prepared, the people who are like Daniel, who live in Babylon and are not impacted by and don't live like Babylon, who live in the spiritual darkness of Babylon but are people of light, which is what we should be. God's preparing that people to receive that kingdom. Let's turn over to the book of Titus chapter 2. Titus chapter 2.

I think this could be a good place for us to at least extract some understanding for now in this way. In Titus chapter 2, and I'll just go down to verse 11, where Paul writes this, For the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation to all people.

And we are instructed to turn from godless living. Get right in there. To turn from Babylon, to turn from sin, to turn from this world. We haven't been caught up in the season of lights, have we? We know the difference. We lived through it. We've endured it. We smiled when they said Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I usually say thank you. I take it as a wish for a good day. All right? Just move on. We come through this, but we're at a time, again, a new calendar year. As I said, if you keep a journal or a diary or whatever, you've got fresh pages to write on. All right? My favorite comic strip of all time was Calvin and Hobbes.

Anybody like Calvin and Hobbes here? Yeah. I have on my wall of my office the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from Sunday Paper. A copy that I cut out of Sunday Paper back in 1996. It was January 1996. It's Calvin and his imaginary friends Hobbes. They just come out with their sled and snow fell through the night. They got a white field full of snow. They basically say, the whole world is new. Let's go explore. They get on their sled and go off down the hill. That's the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. It spoke to me in 1990, January 1996, because there's all you can do.

Take January, take July, take March, whenever you can. Always make a new beginning whenever you get ready to. You've got a white field of snow out there to do it over. You can erase the board and draw something different and correct our mistakes. We were to turn from godless living, Paul says here, in sinful pleasures. We should live, going on here, we should live in this evil world with wisdom, righteousness, and devotion to God. This mirrors what the Queen said about Daniel, back in Daniel 5. In your kingdom, she said, is a man of life, wisdom, and understanding, like that of God.

Paul's saying the same thing that we should be. This is, you want to be a disciple? A true disciple, a learner, a defeat of a teacher, ultimately Christ. Then live in this present world, but live with wisdom, righteousness, and devotion. We have to live through this time. We have to understand what's taking place so that we can interpret the handwriting on the wall that is on this world right now, and understand it and navigate it.

Going back here to Titus, he says, while we look forward with hope to that wonderful day, when the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, will be revealed, that's our hope. That is the time we look forward to. We haven't come to that yet. When I say we're slouching, the world is slouching toward Babylon. That's where this world is headed. History is speeding up.

You know, what did we learn from last year, from 2020? I know I've seen so many things, you know, we're glad to get 2020 out of the way. You know, wake up from a bad nightmare. It was, it's been a bad time, but I hope we've learned something, because we're in 2021, and guess what?

We're still wearing masks. And I don't know how long this will continue. You don't either.

I thought we'd be way beyond this point, by this point in time. Last March, and we're not.

But I think we have some things to learn, no matter how long it goes, and what happens. Frankly, all of this, brethren, it's been a dress rehearsal. It's been a dress rehearsal for something yet to come. And if we are alive when that happens, according to the prophecies, then we will hopefully have learned, and can deal with that. We look for that glory of our great God, and of our Savior, Jesus Christ, when it will be revealed. Verse 14, He gave His life to free us from every kind of sin. That's the freedom that we have. The freedom from sin. The freedom from the penalty of sin. The freedom from the bondage of sin. That is the ultimate freedom that comes through Christ's sacrifice in His life. It cleanses us. It makes us His very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds. Those good deeds translate into the light that people see within us. The light that we have to others. The wisdom that we show because we glean the teaching and the understanding of God, and we know how to live it and put it into our life and to make the right decisions.

Hopefully, 90 plus percent of the time, we're not perfect in every way, but we are growing in grace and in knowledge to that point. We are learning wisdom and increasing an understanding. This is a beautiful passage that I've just read to you. It could be kind of a marker for us to come back to as we go ahead into 2021 to look at. I hope that we will use this winter period. We don't keep Christmas and New Year's. We keep the Feast of Tabernacles and Days of Unleavened Bread and Hope God's Holy Days. We order our life upon God's calendar, ultimately. We have to manage as we go through. Like I say, we've got to reset on taxes now as of yesterday, and whatever other deductions off the pace that all resets to zero. So, we have to pay attention to all of this. What we should learn about wintertime. I've always wondered about that, but it is part of the seasons that God has designed. Use this time to prepare for the coming months. This week, my wife and I, actually a few days ago, we cut down two trees in our front yard. Silver maple was one of them. I hate silver makers. They grow quick. They provide quick shade, but then they just take over. They're shallow roots. The silver maple that the builder or the home I'm in, the original owner planted, which seemed like a good idea 23 years ago. It's a bad idea today because the roots are pushing up on my sidewalk, and it's just too big. I said, it's going. So, we cut it down, and then we had to have somebody come in with a grinder, stump grinder, to grind out all the stumps.

Well, my wife had some nice daffodils planted right there. She said, I want my daffodils. So, she got out before the stump grinder came, and she dug up her daffodils. So, they've been setting in the garage until this week after we got the stump ground. And so, this week, we went back out, and we put the daffodils, the bulbs, back in the ground. How many have we planted two bulbs or bulbs like that? You plant those in the fall or the winter, and then they come up in the spring, don't they? You know why? Because even though they're covered over in the dark cold of winter, those root systems are still alive, and they're growing, and they're building strength.

And that's what we should be doing during the winter of time. Building strength, growing, using. If we're not out in the yard doing whatever or other things, the days get shorter. If you're like me, you know, as soon as that sun goes down at five o'clock now, I'm ready for bed by six thirty. It's a function of age, I recognize, but I have to fight myself because I want to go to bed at six thirty seven o'clock, and I can't.

Because I'll be up at two, you know, wide awake. What am I going to do from that point forward?

Use this time, like those bulbs that are in the ground, to build spiritual strength.

Let's look at the last 10 months as a gift from God. All right? Let's just make it...can I say the word resolution right now without being branded a heretic? Let's just make a resolution to say, you know, I learned something during 2020. Here's what I learned, and whatever you learned, you can write it down and you can say, you know, God does say it. Count it all joy.

Doesn't it? When trials hit, what did you learn in 2020? What is it that God wanted us to know?

Did you learn courage or fear? Courage or fear? Commitment? Do you have a deeper commitment, or has it built in despair? What are we going to do? And I know, look, it's tough. The second wave comes, and then it gets a little bit closer. I mean, let's run through our congregation. That makes sense. I'm heading. I had to go...the last week of ABC, we had to go back to online classes to finish up to the grave. Monday, we'll be back in the classroom, but, you know, it's just run through. I mean, I meet people around, you know, people getting it, and the wards down here in London. This is what's been in the hospital there. So, you know, we're not through it yet, but we do need commitment. We need courage. We need that conviction.

Whatever you might do in your life, your personal life, to facilitate your growth towards it.

My wife was pulling out yesterday her journals. She has, for several years, she reads through the Bible every year, and she's bought over the years a lot of different journals that have a Bible reading program in them, and she's used them, and she's used some of them three or four times. She doesn't throw them all away, and she cycles back through them. She sees her notes from three or four years earlier that she made as she was going through this, and then she'll add to it. I kept the journal for long periods of time, and I go back through those journals. I did back those, kind of sorting everything through last week. I was going back over a few months ago to some of the things I wrote. I got an article idea, and I got a sermon idea out of things that I'd written down two months ago that I would normally have forgotten if I just think, oh, I'll remember that, that you don't do it. That's why it's write it down. One of the things I teach kids at ABC is, if you don't write it down, it never happened. Don't write it down, it never happened.

And usually, you never thought about it, because you just forget about it.

Jeremiah was told in chapter 30, verse 2, God said, write this in a book. And he wrote in the book. That's part of the Bible. But he had to write it down.

Write this in a book. Create your own book, a journal, little field notes, or whatever it might be.

All these things that we get given to us, if we stick them in a drawer someplace. Write it down.

Get a little bit more organized about that. Create a new habit.

You know, when you look at Daniel, Daniel stayed in Babylon. You know why he was there that night?

When danger was at the gates and he had not fled? Because he stayed.

He didn't run. And you know the rest of the story of Daniel. He was there for several more years through the Persian period. I think Daniel took a page out of the story of Jeremiah because he knew Jeremiah. He read the book of Jeremiah. You see the evidence of that in Daniel. And Jeremiah didn't leave Jerusalem. And it was besieged by the Babylonians. Jeremiah stayed until the very end. And then he was taken by the Babylonians. He could have cut and run.

He could have said, I'm going to warn you. I'm going to witness to you. And then I'm out of here.

He stayed. Daniel did the same thing. We're here too. We have to live in Babylon. The spiritual Babylon around us. Let's be like Daniel. Let's be a light.

And be the true light of the way of the Word of God in a season of false lights that doesn't really dispel the darkness. It's only the light of God that is true that does.