In the Last Days – Self-Love Is The Modern Epidemic

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

I’m going to give you a short phrase and see if you can complete it. In the last days, right, perilous times shall come. It’s in our collective consciousness. You may have paused because there are several places in the Bible, probably in the King James Version there must be at least seven places where the phrase, in the last days, is to be found. But that’s the one somehow that has gone into the collective consciousness of Christians everywhere. In the last days, perilous times shall come. Now, it’s surprising to me how often different translations miss important nuances, important to me at least, in the original Greek. I have this blessing of being able to have a Bible software program that I do all my sermon preparation with that enables me to see several translations immediately, to also take a look at the original Greek and Hebrew words immediately. to get a feeling for what the Scripture is trying to say. And I got a surprise this morning when I looked at this particular Scripture. The word peros, in this particular case, the Greek word for it is kaliphos, from a root that has the sense of weakening. In actual fact, what the verb is saying is, in the last days, debilitating times shall come. Weakening times shall come. Now, who do you think is at risk of being weakened in these last days. I’m looking at them. Because Paul wrote to Timothy, and he’s warning Timothy and the disciples, in the last days, debilitating times are going to come. They will be weakening. They will weaken you personally. They will weaken the church. They will weaken the faith. They are weakened in times. Now, you can call them dangerous times. You can call them difficult times. You can call them perilous times. They are all that. But I think it says something to us that we need to know when we know that this know also in the last days debilitating times shall come. For men will be lovers of their own selves. And then really, was one of the defining characteristics of the age we’re living in today. And that is this of an overwhelming preoccupation with one’s self. A love of one’s self. Now, I’ve long since talked about what Rollo May said, that when men lose the power to love, they substitute power over. And I have seen this from time to time. I think also a defining characteristic of our age is the substitution of sex for love. There is so much conflict now among the people who are talking about the schools, teaching sex in schools, teaching birth control in schools, teaching the kids all about different kinds of sex in schools. And so that sex is a very strong topic in the school system. I don’t ever hear, maybe it’s there and I just don’t hear about it. It’s not news. It’s not interesting to the news media. I don’t hear them talking about love. I don’t hear them talking about the importance of two people falling in love, having this growing passion for one another, this growing love for one another, this willingness to sacrifice the self for the other. I don’t hear that. Now, is it out there, and I’m just not hearing it? If it is, I hope that you will tell me, because I would take great encouragement from that. Now, I remember… When some of the biggest medical advertisements for medications of one kind or another on television were Alka-Seltzer and aspirin. You know, I remember them vividly. I shouldn’t have eaten the whole thing. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. And, of course, aspirin for your headache. And I think Excedrin came along a little later, but there was another one. Anacin, it was. I think it was great for headaches. These were the big advertisements because there were problems in the society at large. Now, what are they? Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra. And judging from television ads alone, a visitor from another planet watching our ads would say, hmm, they have a terrible epidemic of impotence in this country and in this world. Now, Paul went on to say, men will be covetous, proud, boasters, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Another clear defining characteristic of our age is covetousness. Jesus made it very clear. A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses, but you would never know that living in this world at this time where there’s almost a competition to see how much we can own, how much we can possess. You know, the guy who wins the game is the guy who dies with the most toys. It seems to be what some people think. And also notice this. Men… who are disobedient to parents. How many of your parents are still alive? You adult people. Is obedience to your parents a major factor in your life? Well, not really. Your parents, once you’re out of their home, have no right to direct your life. It no longer is a question of obedience to parents. listening to their advice, yes, heeding your parents, yes, but disobedient, no. I really think what he’s talking about here would be young men who are still of an age, still in their father’s home, perhaps teenagers, perhaps early 20s, perhaps going to college and living at home, which is a great boon for some young men, who then have an obligation to their parents and who are disobedient to those parents. Now, there’s a reason why I think we need to take note to that. He goes on to say that men will be without natural affection. They will be truce breakers. You cannot depend on people to keep their word at all for anything. They’ll be false accusers. They’ll think nothing in the world of lying, nothing in the world of slander, of libeling another person. And, of course, we live in the age of spin in politics. And spin is just another word for a clever lie. I mean, it’s just a way of life. If you watch the news media very much, you will be exposed to lie after lie after lie after lie. It’s really a pretty good laboratory for tuning up your baloney detector, for being able to tune up your lie detector, to be able to detect when people are lying to you. And of course, the old saying is, how do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving, and that just gets too close to the truth for comfort. So, this is the kind of world we’re living in. Without natural affection, truce breakers, false… Without self-control. No discipline, a personal discipline that you would hope to see in grown men and also in young men who have been brought up right. You would like to see this. When I look around and I see these young guys taking these gorgeous young ladies out on prom dates in the spring of every year, I think, why in the world are these girls looking at those guys twice? I’ve got a boy living in my house, and he’s going to pick up some girl to take her to the prom looking like that? No. No, he will have to change clothes when he gets away from the house. He will not leave my home that way. But then I would not have brought him up to be that way. Well, this is the sort of thing that we’re looking for. Men are going to be without self-control, brutal, despisers of those that are good, and the brutality that we are seeing displayed for ourselves now, day after day after day, is just heartbreaking in the way that people are being treated. And I didn’t get to watch it this morning. I saw it briefly going by on television. They caught the guy that forced this girl into her car in a parking lot, carried her off somewhere and killed her. And, you know… How do people come to the place in their life to where they are like that? And he’s a relatively young man, not an old, dirty old man. When natural affection is gone, men look for other things to replace it. Unnatural affection, violence, brutality. And we get the brutality in our entertainment. You know, we take joy in it. And it’s just everywhere. It’s in video games. It’s in movies. And I still, to this day, have a hard time understanding some people, especially young people’s fascination with horror movies. Why do they want to see things like that? Why do they involve themselves? There’s a curiosity factor I will grant, but it’s unnatural. In the last days, men will be traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. And this one is stunning. Having a form… of religion, but denying the power thereof from such turn away. Now, what this suggests to me is that, excuse me, about to sneeze, that we’re not talking about overtly religious people when we read this long list of what men are going to be like in the last days. That people who have an overt religion They may claim to be this religion or that religion or this kind of Christian or the other kind of Christian. They have a form of godliness, but they deny any power, any authority of this. He says, from such, turn away. Just get away from people whose religion is skin deep. And you can spot it. It’s not that hard to find. The last I said is shocking. These are people with all the outward trappings of religion. And he says this of them. Of this sort are they which creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with diverse lusts. Now, I don’t know what you think when you read that. Are you thinking about Desperate Housewives? You know, something like that? I have never watched that program. I’ve seen it advertised, advertised, and talked about it. I’ve never seen it. But I don’t think so. I mean, it may be involved in there somewhere. But remember what I said about… men who were still disobedient to parents, which implies you’ve got a young man who’s living at home under his parents’ authority. In Paul’s world, women were frequently married in their early teens. One source I read speculated Mary could have been as young as 14 years old when she was impregnated with Jesus, when Jesus was begotten. Women were, when they were teenagers, being married off. So when he’s talking about women, silly women, He may just as easily be talking about teenagers, 20-year-olds. And the image that comes to my mind, and I see it, there’s another one that’s turned up just recently compared to Natalie Holloway. Here’s a girl who has now graduated from high school. She’s ready to move out of her parents’ home and go off to college. And now she is just really ready for the world. You know, you would really think, somewhere along the line we could impress upon young people’s minds, no, you’re just not ready for the world. And I know that’s been on television. Everybody has seen it. Everybody knows the name. Everybody knows basically what happened. May not know precisely who did whatever it was that was done to this girl. But here’s a girl. She is so big, so grown up, that she can… leave her friends, leave the chaperones, leave the adults who are with her on this trip, leave those people who are there for her protection, and even leave the other girls she’s hanging out with and go off in a car with guys she just met in a bar that evening. Now, I don’t want to slander the dead, but that is a silly woman. Stupid. Stupid. And I just wonder sometimes what it is, I will speak to the young ones among us now, that makes you think you know so much, that makes you think that you are immortal, that you are impenetrable, that nothing bad can ever happen to you. Hello? It can. It is a terribly dangerous world out there, and there is stuff in it that you cannot handle. There’s stuff out there, folks, I can’t handle. And, you know, of course, at my age, there’s a whole lot of stuff I can’t handle. But nevertheless, let’s take you guys that are in middle age and your peak of your life and your strength and so forth. There’s all kinds of stuff you can’t handle either. And I don’t know why people do this kind of thing. But this is shocking. They creep into houses. They lead captive, silly women loaded with lusts, led away with diverse lusts. I think we have to understand that the people who can do this type of thing, the people who make the mistake and the people who hurt them, both can be church-going types of people or religious professing people or people who claim to be people of faith. So merely because some guy goes to church, merely because he seems to be religious, merely because he can claim to be Protestant or Catholic or Anglican or you name it, It means nothing, not in this generation, not in the times in which we live. Paul said, he said of these people, they are ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. And that also is kind of a shock to me, but I have seen it. I really have seen it and marvel at it. Many years ago, when we were part of another church organization which had a complete school system, Where the kids from the time they were born into that church until the time they graduated from high school were in the church’s educational system all the way to the college level and went on to the church’s college all the way through. They learned the whole thing. And they were never able to come to a knowledge and a commitment to the truth. And when they got in the ministry, when they got in positions of authority, they took the whole organization seriously. made a huge left turn and took it away completely from its roots, basically hijacked the church from its membership. Most of you here know who I’m talking about, but it could happen. The point I’m making is simply this. Just because you’ve been learning, just because you have education, isn’t going to feed the bulldog, to use the old saying. At some point in time, there are commitments that have to take place. And sometimes you have to consciously and deliberately enter covenant with Jesus Christ. And you can make that at a fairly young age. But you have to understand that you have to come to a knowledge of Christ. You have to come to know Him. You have to learn how to walk with Him. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy at all. It’s difficult. It’s challenging. And you just aren’t, none of you are, big enough to make that walk without some kind of support coming from somewhere. Just keep it in mind. And whenever that support is there where you can reach out and touch it, hang on to it. He says, as Janes and Jambres withstood Moses, so did these also resist the truth. Men of corrupt minds rejected as concerns the faith. Now, Paul’s brutal with his language. I mean, he just says these people have corrupt minds. How in the world did that happen? They weren’t born that way. They didn’t pop out of the womb and get smacked on the bottom and start crying at the top of their lungs that way. The mind was corrupted in the course of time. And God only knows how it happens or when it happens. But you would certainly think that somehow in our lifetime we would wake up and ask. I was surprised to learn that there is a very narrow window when you were a child. for the learning of language. And if you don’t hear a lot of spoken language in that window of time, you will always have trouble with language. It’s as though, and I read another thing which was interesting. It said when babies are born and they’re just beginning to develop, their brain is just going wild with making connections between all kinds of information that comes in. And those connections that are not used are pruned out of the mind entirely. which means you’ve got a baby in the household, a little kid in the household, you’d better be sure that they are getting used, that their minds, their brains, their eyes, their hands, their tongue are being used. The old saying, use it or lose it, applies perhaps more to a little child than to anybody else in the world and to their mind. That, to me, is one of the real shocking truths, and as a parent, you’ve got a huge responsibility. I think most of us have long sensed that Paul described a time very much like our own time, really. And I’ve heard sermons over the years just really comparing all this stuff to the way things are in this world. What I hadn’t grasped is, and I guess it was there for me, I just didn’t quite see it, is that all this pattern is debilitating to a culture. It weakens the whole culture. And in the process of weakening the culture, it weakens every person in it, which means that we live in an age which will take the strength from us, which will weaken us, will cut the heart out of us, will cause us, will lead us to make every kind of compromise that you can possibly imagine because we haven’t got the strength, the knowledge, the commitment that we have made somewhere down the line to hang in there and stay with it. There is some ambivalence in the Bible relative to the phrase in the last days. In some applications, it is seen as meaning in the days to come. And you get differences in the way the translations render it in different places and all that. But here’s how Peter uses this term in the last days. You’ll find it in 2 Peter 3. 2 Peter 3. This second epistle, beloved, I now write to you in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance. I love this, to stir up the mind. You know, stick that spoon down in there and stir it around. That you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior. Knowing this first, let’s get a starting point, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were right from the very beginning. The world that you see around you, these people say, is not different from any other world you have ever seen. These aren’t the last days, latter days. Time has passed, maybe, but we’re not nearing the end, these people say. They’re scoffers. They say they scoff at the idea that we might be living in the end times. But then he goes on to say this, this they are willingly ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water, whereby the world that then was being overflowed with water perished. Now, we know that that is true. He says there are people who are willingly ignorant of that. They could know it, but don’t. So there was a whole world, there was a time in the past when this whole good old world that we were in, this whole society, this whole wonderful culture, perished. Eight people survived that, and that’s all that did by that time. He said, the heavens and the earth, verse 7, which are now, by the same word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. Now, that is discomforting, to say the least. We look back and we say we understand fully that the world that was destroyed by a flood in the past takes some comfort in the fact that God told Noah, with the rainbow and the clouds, it’s not going to ever happen again by water. But now we are told that the world is reserved for the future at a time when it’s going to be destroyed by fire. Now that is a sobering thing to consider. He said, Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, a thousand years is as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some people might think he is. He is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish. but that all should come to repentance. Why the delay? Why does God extend things? Why does he allow it to go as far as it does? Because in the process of time, some may repent and find grace in God’s eyes, as Noah did, and be survived. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth also and all the works that are in it shall be burned up, So when Peter uses the term in the last days, it doesn’t sound to me like he’s just using a broad term about some general last time. He’s looking down toward the bitter end of everything. It would seem then that seeing all these things shall be shattered, what kind of persons ought you to be in all holy conduct and reverence? And see, right here lies the crux of all this. When I come before you and read from the prophets and declaim against the sins of our generation, when Paul comes and declaims against the sins of his generation or the sins of the last days, when Peter comes and declaims against all these bad people who have done all these bad things, we are not here to play a game of ain’t it awful. To just say, oh my, it’s just terrible. Go away clucking about the terrible times in which we live. These things are told to us because they are a warning for us. There’s no need to tell us this if we’re doing just fine and Christ is going to take care of us. The warning, I think, is for us in that we are being weakened by this culture. Notice, I didn’t say we may be. I said we are being weakened by the culture in which we live. It is slowly but surely draining the life out of us, and it is a fight, an ongoing fight, to keep it from happening. And the impression I get is that we’re not just fighting all that hard. Now, we need to come up short and consider where we are and just how much we’ve already lost. And as Christ said to one of the churches in Revelation, He said, Wake up now and strengthen… the things that remain. Hang on to what you’ve got, strengthen it, make it stronger, because the culture around you will continue to weaken you. He said, what kind of a person do I need to be when I know what lies ahead? Peter said, looking for and hasting to the coming of the day of God, where in the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness. You know, I used to know a song leader in a church. He had a favorite quotation. He said, Only one life will soon be passed. Only what’s done for Christ will last. The fact of the matter is that everything you have will be burned. Gone. And when you consider all of the work you do, all of the sacrifices you make to acquire, to possess, it’s all for the fire. And consequently, what you do for Christ, the character that you build, the kind of person that you are, that is the only thing that God intends to bring through the times ahead. So Peter said, Wherefore, beloved, seeing that you look for such things, be diligent that you may be found of him without spot and blameless. It calls for action. Later in verse 17, he said, Beloved, seeing you know these things, beware lest you also being led away with the error of the wicked fall from your own steadfastness. But grow in grace and knowledge, in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, to him be glory forever and ever. Okay, we grow in two ways. One is behavior. I’m sorry, in knowledge, which we all understand. We know we’re supposed to grow in knowledge. The other is behavior. Because graciousness, the way we treat one another, is an area that has lots and lots of room for growth. This is the admonition here. that Peter had for everybody as we look down to the last days. Now, there is rather more, but I’m running a little bit short on time, so I won’t go down the line to the remainder of the things I might say on this. My point today was simply to call everyone’s attention to the fact that we live in times in a culture in which it seems everything around us is designed to weaken us, to get us to blend in, to get us to become a part of the thing. to get us to meld with the mindset, the worldview, the approach to life of the generation in which we’re living, which will leave us so weak that when the tough times really come, we won’t have anything to survive on. So give some thought to the kind of person that you want to survive the fire.