Psalm 124 tells us, Praise ye the Lord. Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, that delighteth greatly in His commandments. His seed shall be mighty upon the earth. The generation of the upright shall be blessed. Wealth and riches shall be in his house." God promises great blessing for those who delight greatly in the laws of God.

And I know sometimes when we talk about the law of God, People are overwhelmed with it. People think that somehow you're developing a legalistic relationship with God. In fact, somebody at this conference mentioned to me that a pastor had preached a message on Jesus, and he said that Jesus is about relationships, not rules. How many of you have heard that before? Jesus is about relationships, not rules.

Well, you know, I think there is a tension in the minds of a lot of people between relationships and rules. Certainly, if you're a parent, that is the case, is it not? You know that You cannot disciple children with nothing but relationships. It is important to have some rule, some structure in the home. So there's this balance between relationships and rules.

And I guess one of the things we struggle with is how to achieve the balance, how to understand that faith and works has a distinct but not separate relationship, while at the same time you want to maintain your justification by faith alone. So how can you have a unity of faith and works as the body and soul has a unity, while at the same time retaining a justification by faith alone? These things are mysteries. These things are mysteries. In fact, personally I think where most heresy begins in the Church of Christ is the inability for the human being to account for paradox, to accept paradox.

And the reason why people have a hard time receiving paradox is because they are proud. It's just that simple. Pride is the root of all heresies. And that's why we have problems in doctrine. That's why we have problems in the church.

But I think one illustration may be helpful to you. I think this is helpful because it brings rules together with relationships. Now from time to time we will split wood in the dead of winter. My son is 16 years old, he's the oldest in the household. He is a strapping young man, he has far more strength now than his father.

And one winter morning, Dad is down in the back of the woods chopping wood. Now, where we split the wood, we have a direct sight line to the kitchen window. There in the kitchen window is the frame of my son sipping hot chocolates. While dear old dad is in the back chopping wood. Now what am I saying?

Now I have a back issue, okay? I've got serious back trouble. He knows that dear old dad really shouldn't be splitting all the wood. Now I holler up at him, son, come on down here and work with dear old dad as we chop wood. My son comes down and says, Dad, why do I have to chop wood?

Why must I earn your sonship? I say, son, you're not earning my sonship. This is what sons do. Sons don't sip hot chocolate while dear old dad chops all the wood. That simply doesn't happen.

Well my son begins to chop the wood after a while. He says, Dad, How many logs do I have to split before I have earned your sonship? I say, son, you still don't get it. Fathers don't count logs. Are you with me here?

Yes, there are rules. There are rules, there are structures, there are expectations that God the Father has for us legislated in his holy law. And if we are sons, Shouldn't we act like sons? Rules and relationships. We know all about them as parents.

And personally I think as we begin to understand what it is to parent children and families, we're going to have a better understanding of how the theological systems work that bring rules and relationships together and typically we call this Covenant Theology. The covenant involves rules and structure and vows and relationships. Both. Both. Alright, I want to bring out the issues of principle and pragmatism today, beginning with Matthew chapter 15.

Please turn to Matthew chapter 15. And let's look first at the biblical system of principle. We call it the law of God. And Jesus in this text emphasizes the absolute authority of God in heaven to establish His commandments and his law. Please follow along with me as I read Matthew 15.

Then came Jesus to Jesus, scribes and Pharisees which were of Jerusalem, saying, Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they washed not their hands when they ate bread, but he answered and said unto them, Why do you also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and mother, and he that curses father and mother, let him die the death. But you say, Whosoever shall say to his father and his mother, It is a gift, but whatsoever thou mightst be profited of me, and on her not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have you made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.

You hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and on earth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." Jesus here in this text emphasizes the absolute authority of Almighty God. And his beef with the Pharisees is that they so emphasize the washing of cups and hands, and they emphasize their little core band tradition of giving a gift to the temple and then no longer having financial responsibility to mother and father, sort of like an old-fashioned social security program. Only you gave the money to the church instead of the state. Okay, Jesus said, by your traditions you have squeezed out, you have made up none effect the law of God.

Jesus' beef with the Pharisees is they did not respect the Old Testament law. Now people have come to me and said, no, no, no, the problem with the Pharisees is they were legalistic. They had too much emphasis on the law of God. No, Jesus had not enough emphasis on the law of God. They did not reverence, respect, and honor the law giver such that they would not have allowed the traditions of men to squeeze out the law of God.

This is what happened in Matthew chapter fifteen. Jesus is not a civil judge. He did not come to be a civil judge. In one place he said, who made me a judge over you to determine whether somebody gets this part of the inheritance or that part of inheritance. Jesus didn't come for as a civil judge to put anybody to death.

He didn't come as a civil judge to legislate against people who steal and kill. That wasn't his purpose. However, you do note in this passage that he emphasizes the absolute authority of the law of God legislated in the Old Testament. And the law that he chose to emphasize was the law to honor father and mother such that if someone did curse father or mother, He ought to be put to death. Jesus emphasizes civil law.

Okay? Now, personally, I don't like the artificial division of Old Testament law as the moral law, the civil law, and the ceremonial law. That is a man-made construct. A better construct would be to note the spheres of jurisdiction that God himself has established. Much better it would have been if the Westminster Divines or anybody else who brought out the divisions of law would have said there are some laws that apply distinctively to family, some to the ecclesiastical, the church, and some to the civil magistrate.

Much better if we had divided it up that way. Of course we are not to apply the civil law relating to murder or the cursing of mother and father or the robbing of banks to a family or to a church magistrate. You ought not to do that. No elder, no pastor has a responsibility to legislate against rape. It just shouldn't happen.

We're not to go out and start hanging rapists as elders or fathers. We're to do it as civil judges. This is the sphere of jurisdiction for the civil magistrate. And Jesus here emphasizes that particular law that belongs to the civil magistrate. The real principle though behind this particular passage is the idea of squeezing out the relevance of the law of God.

And we, as a movement, are emphasizing this over and over again. I speak to tens of thousands of home schoolers across America with this Matthew 15 passage every year, emphasizing the absolute importance of God's law in setting out how we educate our children. We go back to the Industrial Revolution and find that since the Industrial Revolution, the family has been increasingly disintegrated. It's been difficult for us to accomplish the Deuteronomy 6-7 mandate. Because, you know, father left the home and went off to the corporation, then mother left the home and went off to the corporation.

And all the children go off to age-segregated classrooms, and then we're segregated into classrooms in Sunday school, and then we have non-interactive forms of entertainment, right? Like video games and television sets, and everybody has their own little box and their own little experience, and we have a very individualistic society and education, economics, business, etc. That's the way our world was constructed. And then there were some like Josiah who went back to the Word of God. They cracked it about a third of the way through, found Deuteronomy 6, 7, and we began to say, hey, God's Word said you're supposed to teach your children God's Word as you walk by the way, as you rise up, as you lie down, as if, well, it appears that the family is integrated.

It appears that there ought to be opportunities whereby families ought to be connected with each other such that they could do a Deuteronomy 6-7 sort of a situation. And then families said, hey, why don't we forget all of this disintegration activity and let's go back to the laws of God and apply it. You see what happened was It wasn't as if the entire industrial revolution is at fault. Certainly the hearts of men contributed to what happened over the last 200 years. It was the hearts of men.

It was the hearts of Rousseau who abandoned his children on the steps of an orphanage and wrote the book on how to educate children. It started with the hearts and then it played out economically. You follow me here? It was the hearts of men that went astray. We went away from God's law, God's way of living, God's way of doing things.

We began to live our lives our own way. But then we come back to God's Word and we say it's apparent to us that there have been traditions, lots of traditions, the Industrial Revolution, Mom and Dad splitting up, the professional form of education that has no interest in relationships and discipleship, etc., etc. We look at this package and say, forget this. We're going to go back to the laws of God. We're going to find an application whereby we can begin to incorporate the Deuteronomy 6-7 Ephesians 6-4 mandate.

We've got to figure out a way to do this. And families are trying to reconstruct the way they live their lives, according to passages like Deuteronomy 6-7. And see, again, we are bringing back the laws of God. People have asked me before, in my denomination, they've asked me, is age segregation of the devil? Are Sunday schools malamens say, which means, is it inherently evil to the point where if you ever had a Sunday school, you are in sin?

Or if you ever segregate people at all, you are in sin. Is that what you're trying to tell us? Well, my answer is no. That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to apply God's Word in that way.

My problem is that I believe nobody really cares about what God wants. This is the real hard issue that we are dealing with in America today. Nobody cares what God wants. Nobody has taken the time to go into God's Word and find out what God wants. They've just come out and done their own things willy-nilly.

And they've come up with Sunday schools and youth groups that say, I'm not saying it's wrong to say, all you 10 year olds come over here and pick up the chairs. We do that sometimes in our church. We age segregate for just a second. Or to say, we're going to have all the 12 to 18 year old boys come down and paint Widow Jones' home on Saturday afternoon. Now we've got gender segregation going on.

Now is that malamand say? Is there some evil with that? No, that's the last thing I'm trying to say. That's why one reason we've got to be careful when we say it's, you know, we're against age segregation or gender segregation or slotted life. What we're saying is we want to replicate what God wants in His Word.

And what we're finding is in all of this segregation, we have begun to undermine the body of the church, the body of the home that is an integrated unit that God wants us to respect as a body, as a unit, as a covenant blob. We've lost the blobbiness. That's the way I put it. We've lost the blobbiness. So maybe what we need to do, Scott, is call this the reintegration of blobbiness movement.

What has happened? And Scott pointed this out in one of his presentations. What has happened is When you begin to incorporate these delegated systems, when you establish, and our denomination has done this, and I think just about every denomination out there has done this, they've established a Christian Education Committee. Now When you ask your, what is a Christian education committee? What you find out is it's Sunday school.

Now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You go into God's Word and you find out what God has to say about educating Christian education. Number one, you never, never, never, never separate the academics from character and the fear of God. That's number one. And they missed it totally.

So they think somehow you can get a little Christian education happening for two hours on Sunday, and whatever happens the rest of the week, who cares? Because academics will always be separated in the minds of these people from the fear of God and from the nurture of faith and character, which by the way is the essence, the essence of education in God's Word. But secondly, they believe that Christian education is completely and utterly delegated. That's the way it's defined. I mean, I sat down and talked to the guy who runs the Christian Education Committee two weeks ago in our denomination.

I brought out my family worship stuff I've been doing and he found this novel. He says, wow, I've never seen anything like this before in all my life. Okay, now there it is. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Exactly what I'm talking about!

In all his life, he's never seen anything quite like this! Well, as it turns out, it's what God was talking about throughout his whole book. Somebody called me from George Bonner Research and said, what's your church doing in terms of trying to get the kids saved? And this happened like two years ago. I couldn't believe they called me on a Saturday morning, wanted to know what I thought.

And they went down the list. Youth groups, you guys got any youth groups? No, we don't have any youth groups. You guys got any Sunday? No, we don't do any of that at all.

And by the end of the interview, that was it. They said, OK, aren't you interested in getting kids saved? What's wrong with you? I said, well, apparently something's not on your list. We actually are really, really excited about what the Bible has to say about getting kids saved.

We believe that it's really important to do everything that we're going to do to Deuteronomy 6, Ephesians 6, 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, the entire book of Proverbs. This is what we're doing, and we're doing everything we possibly can to empower, equip, etc. At the fathers to make this thing happen. The guy said, you know, oh that's really novel, that's not on my list. What's going on?

What's going on? People are hating the law of God. That's what's going on. Are my words too severe? Am I being too severe?

Am I being too hard? I just think over time our hearts have been misdirected. We are not guided by God, by His law anymore. God is supposed to be our Father. He was supposed to tell us what to do.

Jesus was supposed to be our Lord and our King, and you know what lords and kings do? Does anybody know what lords and kings do? They tell you what to do. Yeah, they rule. They give you rules.

They say, oh, that's novel. I can give you so many other areas. Rebellion. Rebellion of men happens right here. And this, by the way, is the original sin.

You shall be as gods, determining good and evil for yourself. Numbers 39, God tells the children of Israel, don't seek after your own heart and your own eyes. Do my commandments. You know, I have read Christian books written by mainstream evangelicals that tell you to follow your heart. Follow your heart.

That's what a real man of God does in the 21st century. He follows his own heart. And these guys hate the commandments of God, they'll tell you that! They say, I don't want to hear any directive ethical commands from God, I am the source of ethics! Well this is precisely, precisely what humanism is.

And Our culture is characterized by a radical, blatant, open, rebellious autonomy. Law to one's own self is what that means. My introductory philosophy class included a text that defined humanism in these words, any law that people are counseled to obey that is none of their own making enslaves them and robs them of their dignity. That's humanism. And that's what has corrupted the church.

See, man set out some two, three hundred years ago, and this is the humanist movement. The humanist movement was sick and tired of man being degraded. And so they said, we're going to gain some dignity here. And the way we're going to gain dignity is to make man his own God. We're going to cut off the covenantal legal relationship between man and God, and man himself is going to be his own God and establish his own law, and by that means establish his own dignity.

The problem with that is the minute you cut off your own existence from the existence of an eternal absolute, you have reduced yourself to nothing but cosmic dust floating around in a universe of pure chance. You are nothing. Now you're nothing because you have no relationship with an absolute. So humanism has degraded man in the attempt to dignify man. Do you realize that most pastors in Arizona send their kids to public schools?

You know why they do that? I struggle with this. Why do they do this? And I've been bringing resolutions to my denominations. It's a very small denomination, but I'm working on them too.

And I'm finding that a lot of these guys will send their children to public schools by default because they never really asked the question, how does this comport with Proverbs 1-7, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, Ephesians 6-4, Deuteronomy 6-7, etc. They've never asked that question. They've never sat down and said, how does what I do comport with what God says in His Word? They've never actually asked the question. Now let me ask you, why have they never asked the question?

It's because the law of God has not been preached. It's because of what I said yesterday, is that line that is drawn between law and grace, Old Testament, New Testament, faith and works, they draw the line, they say one is incompatible with the other. I told you they come together at the cross, didn't I? They come together beautifully at the cross. In the beautiful picture of the sinner woman who's washing Jesus' feet with her hair.

It's amazing what we see there in that example. And yet, for some reason, the law of God cannot be preached in the churches. We've got deep theological problems. Deep theological problems. They play themselves out in the liturgy of the church.

The way that the church sings. In fact, you know what? From time to time we like to sing about the law of God. In the Trinity hymnal that we use, I can only find two to three hymns in the entire hymn book that have to do with the law of God. By the way, the Psalms bring them out more.

So that's one of the reasons we started singing more songs. Because the Psalms have them everywhere. Blessed is the... I just read the Psalm. Blessed is the man that fears the Lord and loves His commandments.

His seed shall be mighty in the earth. We sing these songs Because we want to bring a biblical concept of law and grace to bear in our hymnody something that for the last 200 years we've had a hard time replaying. Now I'm not saying we don't sing the songs of grace and the love of Christ, etc., etc., but where is the law, where is the balance here between law and grace, faith and works? About the only song I can find that have somewhat of a unity between faith and works is Trust and Obey. Trust and Obey, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey a beautiful hymn.

But it's about the only one I can find that have a really neat little unity. Because much of the hymnody written in the 1800s and into the 1900s has ignored the absolute essential unity of faith and works, faith and repentance, grace and law that we find in the Word of God. By the way, it's really hard to find a law Baptist church. You ever notice that? Or how about a repentance Presbyterian church?

Just, you know, a repentance Presbyterian church. TBL has said, You guys have a weird name, Reformation Church. I say, yeah, Reformation means transformation, repentance. We like the idea of repentance, changing, transforming ourselves according to the laws of God. We actually like this kind of thing.

They say, well, that's really weird. Why don't you just go with faith and grace? That's what everybody else does. And there's nothing wrong with faith and grace. I'm just looking for a law Baptist Church, that's all.

How about a law and grace Baptist Church? That'd be good. Or a faith and repentance Presbyterian Church? There, that sounds good. It's just that people have lost the balance.

And by the way, Paul in Acts chapter 20, what does he preach? People say you've got to preach a Christ-centered view of things. That's not what Acts chapter 20 says. Acts chapter 20 says, I preach faith towards Christ, faith that's centered on Christ, and repentance towards God. And any time you say ours is more balanced towards faith, ours is more balanced towards Christ, rather than God you're denying the Trinity, the one and the many.

God and Jesus. So you're losing a Trinitarian balance as well at the same time. And just, these are a few sidelines, but folks, we have lost the balance. This theological balance is critical. We've got to bring it back.

If we're going to have a healthy gospel, this is what Jesus preached. This is what Paul preached. Faith and repentance towards God. Both absolutely are both are important. We don't focus on one or the other.

We focus on both at the same time. If you have a hard time focusing on two things at the same time, you're going to have a hard time being a Trinitarian. Well the law of God has not been preached. From the 1880s to the 1920s, conservative churches supported things like prohibition. They would have put Jesus in prison for making wine at Cana.

And it was very good wine, by the way. They supported Sunday schools, child labor laws, the abolition of the gold standard. I'm talking about conservative Christians, the very best Christians in the 1910s and 1920s were supporting policies that really ran contrary to the laws of God. Why is this? Because for the previous 100 years, there wasn't enough preaching of the law of God as the moral standard in the civil magistrates as well as with the family and the church.

The end results were denominations that began prohibiting all alcohol. And by the way, the denominations that prohibit all alcohol and would just as soon see Jesus in jail for making wine, They have the absolute highest obesity rate in the entire world. They have a 30% obesity rate. They're killing themselves and everybody says America's killing themselves with obesity. Compare that to the Catholics and the Jews.

They have obesity rates of 1, 4, 5 percent. It's an incredible difference. When these denominations began establishing their fences that were not in accord with biblical law, guess what happens? What happens is they begin to sin in other areas. The Bible prohibits drunkenness and gluttony, both.

All right? Both. When you begin to focus on one and then build your nice, sweet little fences on one particular issue, guess what happens? The idolatry that you would have paid to the wine bottle is the exactly the same idolatry that's going to come up in gluttony as you worship the rest of the food on the table. Brothers and sisters, what we're talking about here is autonomy.

It's just another form of autonomy. And it's just as bad as the pagans that run out there and justify their homosexuality and everything else because they refuse to use the law of God as a standard. Let me give you a couple other examples of autonomy. Autonomy is not respecting the jurisdictions in applications. That is, when I as a pastor stand up and preach on modesty, and then I run down to Walmart with all of the ladies in the church and tell them what to buy.

Or if I present the standard on modesty and I preach that from my pulpit in such a way that the ladies call me from Walmart and they say, Pastor, I'm looking at this outfit. What do you think? We got a problem. What's the problem? The problem is many of these decisions belong in the jurisdiction of the individual and I'd say the family.

They need to ask their own husband or their father whether they're getting the right thing. That father better be engaged enough, And by the way, you've got to be preaching at fathers so they equipped and engaged doing to to understand the Word of God and apply It to their families. You know what the way I preach it is I preach modesty until my face turns blue And then I say You guys go out there and love God with all your mind, enough that you can figure out what I'm trying to say. You see, there's a reason God doesn't in His Word say, when I say modesty, I want to dress 7.4 inches from the knee, plus or minus point one. See, God doesn't do that, does He?

Why? Because He wants you to go to Walmart and love God with all your mind and figure it out for yourself. And when we violate these jurisdictions, brothers and sisters, we're becoming autonomous. I'll give you another example. When you refuse to respect the complexity of an application, you refuse to understand that the law of God is not a neat little recipe that's really hard to, that's really easy to apply.

The Word of God presents the law of God as something that requires the work of the Spirit of God upon your mind and heart in order to accomplish it, in order to apply it. You can't find a recipe that will tell you exactly what to do in every situation in life. The Bible gives you these broad principles and Jesus comes to the Pharisees and says, you guys didn't get it straight. If you had understood that God loves mercy more than sacrifice, you would have known that it's okay for David to eat the showbread, and you would have known that it's okay to heal on the Sabbath day. The problem is there's these really narrow people in life, and they are very wooden and square in their application of the law of God, they don't understand that God's law tends to round the corners here and there, as in David eating the showbread.

I love the discussion on women submitting to their husbands because there are some weird examples of that in the Bible. Sarai submits to her husband and is blessed for it, even in his harebrained little scheme, and some of you may disagree on whether it's harebrained or not, but of trying to pretend like his wife was his sister, which she sort of was, but She just went along with the whole thing, and God blessed her for her obedience to submission. Now I'm just taking the Word of God the way it's written. I'm saying, okay, God bless her for doing that. Some people say, she should never have done that!

That's ridiculous! You never go along with your husband in the gray area? Absolutely you do. Well then there's the other example is Abigail. Another beautiful example.

For Abigail circumvents her husband, I believe another example of submission to her husband. Now how can I say that? Because God's law presents it that way. David eats the showbread, Abigail circumvents her husband, goes to David, and David puts a blessing upon her as a prophet of God. Bless be you!

Bless be your seed woman! Thank you for coming and preventing bloodshed! You were a blessing! I love you! In a godly way and then later he married her figure that one out well the Word of God presents ethics such that there are no recipes, and mercy sometimes co-ops the letter of the law.

This is what Jesus said. Mercy sometimes just rounds that corner. So you're not going to counsel in a certain direction or do something. Also another way that we are autonomous, we narrow the application so tightly we displace the principle with our applications. And this applies to homeschooling.

People have asked me before, is homeschooling the only biblical way to educate your children? And I go, well, what does the concordance have? You know, you go into concordance, what do you got there? Homeschooling, where is it? H-O-M-E.

H-O-M-E. Oh, it's not there. Well, I guess it's not biblical. No, we go into God's Word and we find these principles. I got them in my book Upgrade because I want to know what God's Word had to say about education and you find all this kind of stuff on education.

It's all the way through the Word of God. It's amazing how much is in there on education. Principle of relationships, principle of individuality, principle of life integration. Character is absolutely preeminent in education. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

On and on and on and on. And then I say, okay, what are the best applications whereby you can bring relationships, one-on-one instruction, heart-to-heart kind of stuff, character development, character coming together in the curriculum. How can you bring this all to bear in an educational program? You show me how it can be done. And I say homeschooling is one of the best applications I can find.

And yet, there was a family one time that went from coast to coast, from Maine up to Alaska on bikes, took an entire year to do that, and they weren't homeschooling a single day that year. I'm going to sit back and say, okay, they were in sin. They weren't homeschooling, they were bike schooling. What am I going to say? Is bike schooling against the laws of God?

Not if they were bringing the principles of God's Word to bear in the education of their children on those bikes. That's it! That's all! All I'm saying is, let's be careful. We don't establish an application.

Which by the way, I think homeschooling is a beautiful application of what God says about the discipleship of children in His Word. It's one of the best I can find. And the life that we're seeing across this country, in the academic skills, in the character, in the faith, of millions of children, it's a beautiful thing, amen? But that moment that I take that application and raise it to the level of the principles in my mind and in my teaching, I have displaced the principles with my own cute little application and in the process become an autonomous. You see what I'm saying here?

There are so many ways to be an autonomous. We can go the same direction that all the pagans are going. There are many other forms of autonomy. Denying what God calls good, for example. By the way, ethics are broken up into what is good and what is right.

It is basic ethics 101. Get it in college, you can get it in high school if you're homeschooling. It's what is good and what is right. The Bible looks at certain things and says this is good and this is evil. For example, the Bible calls debt evil and children a blessing.

But guess what our world does? Our world says debt is a good and Children are a curse. And with this ethical construct, what you get is the size of American households dropping from 4.0 children to 1.9 children per family in the last 100 years, while the Square footage of homes have doubled in size. People have lived their lives by the values that have been defined by autonomous culture. And I'll tell you what, there are Christians out there that live their lives not according to the dictates of God's word and the definition of good that God places in his word.

They live it according to people like Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, the man behind the fractional reserve system, the debt system that we now enjoy today. And Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and all the other existentialists, feminists, egalitarians that will not acknowledge children as a blessing from God. Another form of autonomy is making the exception the norm. They and I see this all over the place. And by the way, the church did this for about a thousand years.

They went into 1 Corinthians chapter 7, they found a little verse. Paul says singleness is great! And they said, hey, celibacy is the way we're going to go. From here on out, celibacy is the quintessential example of how somebody exercises self-denial, etc., etc., etc. And yet They forgot to read that Paul said, for the present distress.

Singleness is a cool idea. They forgot to read that singleness is an exception. And in 1 Timothy 5, Paul says, I would that the single women be married, raise children, etc. They forgot to read Genesis 2, Titus 2, etc., etc. To find out what God said about the norm.

And how about the norm for eldership? Where is that? 1 Timothy 3. Boom, right there. That's the norm for eldership.

They made the exception, the norm, and by that means, actually served to destroy the church eventually. I'm not saying celibacy wasn't a cool thing when there was a lot of persecution going on early on in the Roman world. It was a good idea, but they made it the norm. And in so doing, they destroyed the church. Now let's talk about delegation.

I tell you, I'm in all these debates right now with the mainstream leaders in my denomination on the issue of whether you can delegate the education of your children. And I've gone through all the Word of God, I say, hey, we've got Deuteronomy 6-7, we've got Ephesians 6-4, 1 Thessalonians 2, we've got Proverbs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 31. We've got all these verses on education of a children. It appears the norm is this and they come back and say, yeah, but what about Samuel? Samuel!

Samuel is adopted into a house and he is educated and discipled by one man named Eli. Looks like adoption, and it sure seems like homeschooling to me. He's in the guy's home. He grows up with him. He is discipled by Him.

That sounds like what we're doing. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's an example where Jesus goes to the temple for three days. He's with other guys for three days. See, delegation is the norm.

We've got it. Delegation is the norm. The hearts of men are hating God and His Word! That's as simple as it is, guys! The hearts of men are turned away from God!

They take His exception, and they make it the norm. They take his norm, crinkle it up and throw it in the wastebasket. That's what they're doing. That, my friends, is autonomy it is rebellion against God am I being too hard? Let's talk about pragmatism.

Well how much time do we have? We got a little more time? Okay. You start throwing things at me, Scott, when it's done. Okay.

Just keep going. Please turn in your Bibles to 2 Samuel 6. I love this passage. 2 Samuel 6. And let's read the first 8 verses.

Now hear the Word of God. Again David gathered together all the chosen men of Israel. There were thirty thousand. David arose and went with all the people that were with him from Baal of Judah to bring up from thence the ark of God whose name is called by the name of the Lord of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubim." And they set the ark of God upon a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab that was in Gibeah and Uzzah in Ohio. The sons of Abinadab drave the new cart and they brought it out of the house of Abinadab which was at Gibeah accompanying the Ark of God and Ahio went before the Ark and David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood even on harps and on salt trees on timbrels on cornets and on cymbals When they had come to Nacon's threshing floor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it for the oxen shook it.

And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error. And there he died by the ark of God. And David was displeased because God had made a breach upon Uzzah and he called the name of the place Perez-Uzzah to this day and David was afraid of the Lord that day and said how shall the ark of the Lord come unto me? Super Uza saves the Ark. Super Uza saves the Ark.

Uza did a very little thing. A very little thing. Understand what happened guys. They're driving the ox and the oxen stumble. The thing jerks a little bit.

It could potentially fall on somebody or worse, fall down to the ground and break apart. And we are all equipped with instincts to catch something that's about to fall. Uzzah had the best of intentions. Uzzah was concerned with what was going to happen. And as we all are when something's about ready to fall off the table, we're concerned about the imminent consequence of what will happen if that little glass of water that's on the edge of the table just starts to tip and we jump in and we save the day and that's precisely what Uzzah did and God killed him for his efforts.

You see the problem was at the moment he was most concerned with what was going to happen, at the moment that he wanted to prevent something from happening, from happening, Uzzah neglected to remember the Word of God. That's the problem. The Word of God was clear to Uzzah in Numbers 4 and verse 15 when Aaron and his sons have made an end of covering the sanctuary as the camp is to set forward after that the sons of Kohath shall come to bear it, but they shall not touch any holy thing lest they die." That was God's law. That was God's Word. God's law was to direct the ethics of the man who saw.

But the man who saw is the ultimate in pragmatism. Why? Pragmatism is always concerned with what is going to happen. And man by nature usually reverts to utilitarianism or to pragmatism. Please understand the difference between utilitarianism and pragmatism.

Utilitarianism teaches that we do, one must do, what will bring about the most good for the most people in the long run. The ethical egoist is just a slight difference from that. He says he wants to produce that which will produce the most good for himself in the long run. Because what produces the good for himself is what will be the best thing for everybody or whatever will happen in the universe. Now pragmatism is less concerned with the ends.

See, the problem with utilitarianism, And this has always been the problem. I picked this up in my college philosophy class on ethics. They immediately, it doesn't take more than two seconds, where people say, okay, so if you want to produce that which will yield the most good in the long run, then How do you know what is good? Then the only other problem is, how do you know what will then produce the most good in the long run? Promise is impossible to know.

Utilitarianism and ethical-egoism are impossible ethical theories. Because you just simply cannot define as a mortal man what is good and what will produce the most good in the long run because you have no comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors of the universe and how all these factors interrelate and interact to produce anything in the long run. So what pragmatists do is they're more honest than utilitarians. They say, we don't know what will be good in the long run and what will produce good in the long run, so we're going to cut off in the long run. We're just going to do something that's going to produce the most good in the immediacy.

For me, pragmatists are honest utilitarians, but not as honest as relativists and total skeptics. You see, worldly philosophy always degrades to a total skepticism. Always! Because human minds are incapable of these things! We don't know what's going to produce the most good and long run!

So therefore it reverts to pragmatism. John Dewey was a pragmatist, and so was Uzzah. He sets out as utilitarian, claiming to know what the end of his actions will be and then he enthusiastically drives towards those ends. Let me give you an example. Some people say the Columbine murders were wrong.

Why? Why are they wrong? Well, the utilitarian says we've got to produce the most good. We say, what is the most good? Even if we allow the species to die out, would that be a bad thing?

Would it be a bad thing to wipe out everybody? If we legalize murder, maybe everybody wouldn't be wiped out. Maybe it's just a survival of the fittest. But should the fit really survive? Why should the fit really survive?

You see, it's impossible to establish good and right by utilitarian ethic, and yet This is the ethic used every day in every legislature in America. That's it. Just walk into those committees, I'll tell you, they're always talking about the results of their policies. They're always talking about, this study says this, this study says that, And by the way, the studies are a free-for-all. It's a complete battle of the studies.

It's the guy who can yell heretic the loudest that always wins. I think that was one of the worldly philosophers who said that. Wittgenstein, I think, said that. But some people bring their studies in, they say, teenagers with access to guns produce more bloodshed at schools. So we've got to outlaw guns.

Then you've got other people coming back saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, but communities with no gun restrictions produce less crime. The problem with the studies is it's impossible to block all the confounding factors. For example, at the same time that gun laws become looser, capital punishment came back in, or stricter laws against criminals might have come back in, so which factor produced the downturn in crime? Again, which factor was it? The problem is there are so many confounding factors in any kind of a study.

And by the way, it's difficult enough to establish an optimization of process and design in a very closed environment where me as an engineer was trying to optimize processes and designs for years and years. Very difficult in a closed laboratory. And we only established certainty at 5% for a beta risk or 95% on an alpha risk and we weren't sure how much improvement we would make. And with any study whatsoever, it's impossible to establish certainty, especially in the long run. You might be able to determine what would happen the next week, but it's almost impossible to know what's going to happen a year, five years, ten years, fifteen years down the line.

You want to see the ultimate utilitarian? Genesis 3 and verse 4 is a great example of this. The serpent is at the very beginning when the serpent comes to Eve. He says, you shall not surely die. Okay, God's lying.

For God knows that in the day that you eat thereof of this fruit that God has forbidden, your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as God's knowing good and evil. What he's saying is I know the result of you eating this fruit. I know what's going to happen and God knows the same thing, but God's not sharing this with you. If you eat of this tree, there's going to be effect. You will be as gods knowing good and evil.

And by the way, there is a certain amount of truth to that. They would know something about evil that they wouldn't know. But there are two problems here. The problem is that God is supposed to be the one who tells us what is the good effect. You see, what he's saying is, this is the effect.

You're going to be as God's knowing good and evil. And what the devil is saying is, I think it's going to be a good effect. But the problem here is that the devil doesn't have the right to determine what the good effect is. Remember what I said, God is the one who determines what is the good outcome, and God's law is the method by which we determine what will produce the good outcome. But the devil is saying, ah, God not only doesn't know what a good outcome is, God doesn't know what will produce a good outcome.

He told you not to eat of it, I'm telling you to eat of it. The devil is the pragmatist. The devil is utilitarian. And he's lying through his teeth. Pragmatism is the Mr.

Hyde of utilitarianism, abandoning certainty in the ends, acknowledging we don't really know or we don't really care what the ends are going to be in the long run. We could care less. Our ethical theory begins to ignore the validity of the ends. And because we are good scientists, we can figure out what approaches are beneficial for accomplishing some kind of an end that we don't even know is a good end. Let me describe a couple of examples where this sort of thing happens, especially in family life and church life.

We may want the gospel to reach thousands of people so that we can discover, okay that's what we want. That's the end. We want the gospel to reach thousands. So we discover that if we stop preaching against sin or a message of repentance, If we put signs up there in front of our church, come as you are. Stay as you are.

People will be impressed by that, and we will fill our churches with the people who feel accepted and come to church and claim Jesus as their Savior or as their whatever. In the end, people don't get saved because we watered down the message and also, by the way, we have watered down the message by way of the methodology. Because methodology always preaches message. There's no way to separate it. We may want our children saved, and just like the Barna study, we've come up with these great ideas.

But in the end, over hundreds of years, we begin to ignore the one thing God tells us to do. And the end result? Generational discontinuity. The end result? Constant covenant rebellion.

And by the way, brothers and sisters, covenant rebellion is far worse than pagans who've never received the truth. That's the principle we get in Isaiah Jeremiah. That's the principle we get from the Pharisees. The kind of judgment God brought in AD 70 upon that people was horrendous. Utterly horrendous.

Why? Because they were a covenant people who engaged in covenant rebellion against God. Much better to have a pagan than to have a covenant child, a child raised in a Christian church, in a Christian family, rebel against the faith. That's horrific. I don't want to pre-preach the sermon I preached on this, but when you get that level of synthesis and that level of rebellion, you wind up with men like Nietzsche, the man behind Hitler who was the son of a Lutheran pastor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the grandson of a Calvinist pastor, and the son of a Christian man.

Darwin, another example. There's many examples of Christians rebelling. The end result, I think, are some of the worst bloody purges you can imagine. Stalin. Stalin, another example.

His mother wanted him to be a priest, an Orthodox priest. Horrific what happens. Horrific. When you get people raised in a Christian culture, in Christian churches, Christian homes, and rebel, may God deliver us from these curses. But, but see, when we ignore God's principles, these sorts of things happen.

Let me give you an example in the form of a story, and I think this is one of the best ways to communicate what pragmatism does to a culture, and in this case to a family. Listen to this. A Christian father had a choice of two schools for a six-year-old daughter. He visited both schools and asked a simple question. Do you teach the fear of the triune god at the school?

To which both answered with another question, are you kidding? But one school insisted that they had better hall monitoring and a much safer playground. Instantly the father knew that he must go with the better of two evils because the third choice was well unthinkable, unworkable, impractical. Unfortunately his daughter did not learn the fear of the Lord, which as it turned out was the beginning of wisdom. Throughout her raising this father had hundreds of opportunities where he could have turned off the television set, denied her certain books and clothing that encouraged the breaking of the seventh commandment.

But he wanted her to be happy. He wanted a relationship with her, to be accepted, and the obvious choice was always to give into her wishes. He wondered if her unsaved friends were corrupting good manners. But then he remembered that he had sent her to the school to be a missionary. One day a teacher presented a new kind of meditation to the class.

She turned down the lights and encouraged the students to close their eyes and mind and pick a favorite word. Now for a moment this daughter thought about protesting and not participating, but she really didn't want to turn off her friends and further alienate herself from them and remove herself as a relevant influence on them. So she went ahead and participated in the exercise. The word she repeated over and over again was, Jesus. When this father's little girl turned 15 years old, She asked her daddy if she could stay over with her boyfriend.

His father was convinced that this was not the best situation, but he knew he only had two choices. He could say no and risk her running away, or just say yes, or perhaps a compromise. If she ran away, then he would lose the relationship and the opportunity to teach her the fear of the Lord. So he chose the better of two evils. She became pregnant and her boyfriend insisted on an abortion.

At first she resisted, then she realized she had two choices. Kill the child or risk losing her boyfriend. If she lost her boyfriend, then she would lose the opportunity to evangelize him and teach him about the fear of the Lord. So she chose to abort. Brothers and sisters, this is the way down to Gomorrah.

This is the way. This is not a satire. This is a true story. This happens in the lives of millions upon millions upon millions of people who call themselves Christians in America. And they Outline their walk, their lives by thousands upon thousands of choices that represent compromise.

And they compromise because there is a rule that works in their own hearts, a rule called pragmatism, and it has nothing to do with theonomy. They are not driven by the laws of God because they do not love the law of God. They do not delight greatly in the law of God. They just don't. And therefore their seed will be cursed in the earth.

This is what happens again and again and again and again. There's the guy that said, I want my wife to submit to me. Now that's a beautiful end. And he says, I'm going to do anything to get it. I'll get angry with her.

I'll yell. I'll say mean things in order to get her to submit to me. Brothers and sisters, you think this sort of thing happens in our midst? Does it happen in our homes? Do we ever act like pragmatists?

Pragmatism says, whatever will achieve my end. It may be a good end, but if you never achieve a submissive wife, then you may still be in the will of God, because you see, your job is to walk every step in obedience to God. Or how about the woman I overheard in a counseling situation? If I submit to my husband, he'll just take advantage of that and do more bad things to me. And then he'll be sinning more.

And I don't want him to sin, so I won't submit. What did I say to her? I said, why don't you just trust God for five seconds and just go ahead and submit. But I don't want the ark to fall! Let it fall!

You just let it fall! It's not your responsibility to keep the ark from falling. See pragmatism always takes the shortcuts to avoid the perceived evil. But this is not what Jesus did. It's interesting, the devil's temptations to Jesus were all again based in pragmatism.

Jesus, I'll give you a shortcut. You want to rule the world? I'll just give it to you if you worship me right now. Shortcut, you won't have to die on the cross. I'll just give it all to you.

Jesus said Jesus was not a pragmatist, He was a theonomist. He went right to Deuteronomy. Devil, the Word of God says, the Law of God says, you shall worship the Lord our God and Him only shall you serve. Jesus is not a pragmatist. No shortcuts.

No shortcuts. Pragmatism ignores the law of God. And this applies in politics as well. You know Exodus 18 and 21 tells us exactly who God wants us to select for our civil rulers, our judges. Precisely.

It's right there. You choose able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness, place such over them to be rulers of thousands, etc., etc. In 2 Samuel 23, the God of Israel said, He that rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. The Word of God is very clear. We choose our candidates on their character.

Do they fear God? Do they hate covetousness? Are they men of truth? This is what we use. This is the standard that we use.

And yet, every election time, without an exception, I have seen Christians, good Christian people, conservative Christian people, come to me and say, we don't want to risk losing the Republican Pennsylvania Senate seat and I know there's a good guy running against Arlen Specter, one of the worst baby killers in American history. I know he's a bad baby killer but we still got to retain our Republican majority. We still got to hang on to it. And so all of the Republicans, the good Republicans, rush into Pennsylvania and they campaign for Alan Specter against the good conservative candidate and Alan Specter wins it by 1%. And everybody says, thank God he made it.

What are they saying? They're saying, if I hadn't voted for Alan Specter, what would have happened? Here's what I think would have happened. The Arc would have fallen. A Democrat would have beat this really good pro-life Republican competitor.

And therefore I think that in the long run we're going to see 18.4% more good decisions in the next six years under Alan Spector than under this Democrat that might have beaten this really good pro-life Republican. What are we saying? What are we saying? We're pretending that we're going to know the future. And we are determining our ethics by nothing but pragmatism.

We're not drawn, we're not driven by the law of God that says, you go and you find the man who fears God. Now we're not talking about perfect men here. We're just talking about men who you look at and you listen, and you can tell that they quake before Almighty God. There are millions of these conservatives, conscientious, caring Christian Americans who want to save the country. The problem is they're ignoring Exodus 18 and verse 21.

The Bible says you never vote for an evil man who doesn't fear God. Don't you ever, ever do it. And I praise God there are a few good men. Roy Moore, a great judge who would not give into pragmatism at all, would not budge, established God's law as the absolute standard for ethics, and put it out there in front of his law office. And the same thing for Phil Klein.

I don't know if any of you have heard of Phil Klein, Attorney General for Kansas a couple of years ago. He had four years, in his four years he did everything he could possibly do to shut down Planned Parenthood in that state. He fought against child rape with everything that he had, and then the child rapists and Planned Parenthood got together, they pulled together the largest war chest ever used by a factor of four times, ever used the state of Kansas to fight an attorney general race, and they wiped him out. And he was on my radio show, he said, I had four years. I knew I had four years, I didn't waste a minute of it.

I fought with everything I had for the law of God, and I knew every day I was risking my reelection, but I could care less about my reelection. Praise God these men exist, but I've only found two in major offices in American states. It's for the lack of these men that we perish. It's for the lack of these men that we perish. The temptations before us are intense.

You know what? We fear the consequences. What will happen if this guy gets elected? What will happen if I lose my re-election? Again, what's driving his decision?

Is it what the effect will be? Or God's Word? Choose you from among you men who fear God and hate covetousness. I'd say forget the effects. Focus on the law of God and in His delight, law, delight, day and night.

You know what? We might very well have more appointments or better appointments under Giuliani than we would under Thompson. I don't know. We might even have better Supreme Court appointments under Barack Obama. Because the rest of us went out and fought for some hardcore candidate and lost.

But God came around and decided he was going to save Barack Obama. Again, we didn't fight for Barack Obama. We fought for some minor candidate that barely got 4% of the vote, and Barack Obama walked away with the election. And then God came around and saved Barack Obama. How do you know what's going to happen?

You don't have a clue what's going to happen. You know what? The same issue came up in the life of Moses. God commanded Moses to go to Pharaoh with one of the more politically incorrect speeches you could ever give the most powerful man on earth. God says, you go in there and you tell him to repent before God and let my people go.

Moses said, you've got to be kidding me. You want me to go in there in the face of Pharaoh, the greatest empire on earth, and tell him to repent before Almighty God. Yeah, that's what I'm telling you to do. So he goes in there and He says, okay, let us go and worship our God. Pharaoh says, you've got to be kidding me.

He says, now, because you guys are so insolent, I'm going to make you go and get your own straw. And he made them work harder. Moses comes back to Moses, kind of in a whiny tone, God, why have You sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, He's done nothing but evil to Your people. Neither have You delivered Your people at all.

He's being the pragmatist. And things got very bad for the people of Israel. The Lord made it worse and worse and worse upon them. He ticked Pharaoh off more and more and more until finally he wiped out all the firstborn. And then they took off and there they were at the Red Sea and Pharaoh's army, as men as hornets, are coming over the mountain and God delivers His people right there.

I say forget pragmatism, amen? Who cares what happens in the future? Sometimes God has to do something that will make things worse before things are going to get better. And that's because God is in control and God always has a better plan. Let me point out to you the severity of God's judgment on Uzzah as we wrap up the message here.

The anger of the Lord, the Word of God says, was kindled against Uzzah. And God smote him there for his hour, and there he died by the ark of God. Did God overreact here? You know, David sure thought so, didn't he? You read the text right there.

David said, What are you doing, God? And Uzzah would have said, but I just wanted to save the ark. But God says I didn't ask you to save the ark. I asked you to keep your cotton-picking hands off of it. As all things are, this comes down to a heart issue, brothers and sisters.

Are you willing to trust your salvation in the hands of God? Are you willing to trust God enough to obey Him and leave the future in His hands? Moses did, Even when it looked like things were getting pretty bad. Uzzah didn't and Uzzah died for it. Our thoughts are not God's thoughts.

So humble yourself today before the mighty hand of God. You know the bottom line here is God is more interested in you, in what your heart is doing than he is in this country. And why is that? Because this country is made up of millions and millions of little hearts. Hearts that for the most part are unwilling to submit themselves to the hand of God, unwilling to acknowledge that God is ultimately sovereign over all things.

And brothers and sisters, people who reject God's sovereignty over the outcome will become pragmatists and violate God's law while trying to predestine the outcome. See, that's the problem. They not only have denied the law of God and the right of God to tell them what to do, but they have said, I am the one who by my actions will predestinate the outcome. This is why it is vitally important that we recover the sovereignty of God over metaphysics, reality, as well as ethics at the same time because God wants us to obey Him and risk the consequences because the consequences are in His hands. And God will not save this nation and God will not save this church in this country until his people are willing to sacrifice everything for his obedience.

Amen. Heavenly Father, we leave the future in your hands and We bow this day before You and acknowledge that God You are sovereign over us. You have the right to tell us what to do. We pray, O God, You would send Your Spirit upon these people. Help them to love You so much they will follow You and submit themselves to Your law and walk in Your ways.

Dear God, and always leave the outcome in Your hands. Give us the faith. Give us the courage to do this. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen. Amen.

Thank you very much. God bless you all. Thank you all.