0:00:00 - 0:00:35 It's about uh two am in the morning on a weekend. And I woke up at about midnight and for the last two hours have been praying to God and thinking about the state of the world. And uh it's been kind of overwhelming to think about. I had this flood of thoughts and feelings and I was going to write up 0:00:35 - 0:01:05 a blog post. But the Lord told me to make a video instead and to just speak my heart a couple of days ago, I was praying and has every morning I, I wake up and the Lord tells me things to study and he tells me things to write about. And uh that particular morning, I didn't have anything on my mind and 0:01:04 - 0:01:28 I prayed and I read and went through my morning that way and then went about my rest of the day with work and family and everything else. And the next day, the same thing happened and I prayed and I said, Lord, I'm setting aside this time for you and you've been gracious in teaching me all these things 0:01:28 - 0:01:58 during this time. But uh I don't really understand why I'm not being given anything in particular to look at or think about or learn about or teach about. And I'm grateful for this because, you know, it all comes from you and obviously, you know, better than I do. But this time I'm giving to you and 0:01:57 - 0:02:22 if you have anything for me to do, please tell me. And, uh, he rebuked me a little bit because he said there's no such thing as a normal day. And you have to realize that even with the little that you understand about what is coming, because there's always more to know your heart should be broken and 0:02:21 - 0:02:56 you should be crying and pleading for mercy for the people uh who are going to suffer through what's going to come. And I was humbled by that and I immediately started praying for those people. And um the next day I woke up and I didn't have anything to, to teach or, or, or learn about specifically given 0:02:56 - 0:03:38 to me. So I began to pray and I was crying and I was praying for these people. And all of a sudden, I had a vision of some things. I saw Children being bayoneted by soldiers and I saw elderly people overcome with terror. I saw parents eating their Children and I saw younger people working age people 0:03:37 - 0:04:22 overcome with, with fury and anger and acting like animals. And uh I was really overwhelmed by that and I prayed, Lord have mercy, have mercy on these people. And he said, what good would mercy do? Will they repent? Will they turn to me? And I knew they wouldn't. So I asked him, please send more laborers 0:04:21 - 0:04:57 into the field and help these people help these people have the opportunity to learn to believe, to have faith. And I asked him to honor the slightest effort that, that people make to turn to him. So there can be more people who've experienced him, It can testify of that and help people to have faith 0:04:57 - 0:05:28 in truth, not just a fairy tale, the fairy tale gospel, but substance and power and to know his love in a real way. Well, that was a couple of days ago this morning, I woke up and the Lord directed me to some statistics on child trafficking and it probably sounds pretty random, but he always takes me 0:05:28 - 0:05:57 in places I didn't intend to go. It shows me things that I didn't think about before and I was blown away. I was blown away at how much of an issue this is in the United States. And it's just the latest piece in a stack of wickedness that is sitting right under our noses. We have, we have a situation 0:05:56 - 0:06:30 where the vast majority of men are addicted to pornography. Growing numbers of women are as well. It's just sexual deviance left and right. We've got people who eat too much people who drink too much. People who use other drugs and unhealthy. Behaviors to hide the daily exposure, their daily exposure 0:06:29 - 0:06:55 to reality. You know, life is designed to show us the things that we lack. So we can turn to God and he can teach us those things and we can overcome step by step. Everything the world has to throw at us. And that's one dimension of the purpose of this life. But we've been blessed more than the previous 0:06:55 - 0:07:21 generation in the world with resources. And what do we use them for hiding from reality? That's the primary use of resources. We don't use them to better ourselves or to learn more than previous generations new or to be wiser than previous generations. Were we have more leisure time than any previous 0:07:20 - 0:07:52 generation on this planet? And we fritter it away or meaningless things. We work more than we need to just so that we can fuel our efforts to hide from reality. But reality persists we're surrounded by all types of people. Most of us have such a narrow awareness that we have no idea how evil people can 0:07:51 - 0:08:17 be and also how good people can be. We just kind of assume everyone is like we are and most of us are wicked, but we don't really know the depth of the depravity in our hearts till the Lord shows us. You know, life, life can slap you in the head 100 times a day on the same things. And I don't know how 0:08:17 - 0:08:42 but humans, we just have this almost supernatural ability to ignore cause and effect. And we can live our whole lives suffering needlessly on things that can be prevented if we just learn wisdom and learn to trust God so he could teach us cause and effect. It's not to say that all suffering is avoidable 0:08:41 - 0:09:06 . If you turn to the light, you'll actually, you'll suffer more. But it's, it's a much different suffering. Not all pain is bad because some types of pain come with equal and opposite joy. And that's, that's a good thing. Anyway, I was looking at the statistics on child trafficking and I was thinking 0:09:06 - 0:09:28 about how corrupt almost every politician, if not every politician is of the rich and powerful are just completely evil people by and large. They're doing such wicked things in secret, but it's becoming more and more open because they can get away with just about anything. So they're not even hiding 0:09:28 - 0:09:56 it anymore. And these sorts of behaviors are more present with your average person than most people want to believe. But more and more people are part of that. So it's getting harder and harder to hide it. But we just kind of stick our hands heads in the sand. It's getting to the point now where it's 0:09:56 - 0:10:26 very hard to ask the Lord to have mercy. Not because we don't love these people in spite of the evil in their hearts, but because we love the people, they hurt because there is nowhere you can go today to separate yourself from it. You know, you put your kid through school surrounded by people who have 0:10:25 - 0:10:56 this evil in their hearts and they're going to get not only exposed to it and indoctrinated into it, but they could be harmed by these people in very real ways. Then they graduate from school, get a job or go to college, their coworkers, their fellow students, their professors, their supervisors, they're 0:10:56 - 0:11:27 all drawn from the same pools of people have the same depths of depravity in their hearts. So it's an undercurrent of every aspect of life. A lot of people get hung up on the fact that God in the Old Testament commanded the Israelites to do some things that aren't readily recognized as merciful or loving 0:11:27 - 0:11:56 . But I can tell you that God really is love, that is his defining characteristic. We oversimplify what the word love means. Sometimes we completely modify it. But in its truest sense, God really is love and in a very rich and deep way, everything that he does can be explained by that attribute and we 0:11:55 - 0:12:18 can learn more about that attribute, by understanding better, by better understanding what he does and why. And these situations in the Old Testament are no um exception. A lot of times we stray away from things in the scriptures that we don't understand. We kind of gloss over them, but those are the 0:12:18 - 0:12:41 richest veins to mine because they reveal the lack, our lack of understanding, the limits of our understanding. And when we go to him and we ask him about these things and sincerity with an open mind. He can vastly expand our awareness and teach us the things that we don't yet perceive, which will cause 0:12:40 - 0:13:06 us to draw closer to him. Sometimes it's immediate, sometimes it takes time. I've had prayers that take 10 years to be answered, but it's always worth the effort anyway, in the Old Testament, when these things happen, when God commands for whole civilization to be wiped out or for a city to be killed 0:13:05 - 0:13:35 or very few, if any to be spared, including women and Children, people get a bit upset about that and they don't understand how God can be loving. If you trust him and you come to him, he will show you the depths of evil that exist in mankind. I should say that that can possibly exist in mankind because 0:13:35 - 0:14:06 it is possible for people to turn to God and become more like He is. But our default state is one of wickedness. And when mankind are exposed to greater light, their propensity is to turn to greater evil in response to it. There are situations and it's not as rare as I would hope. We're the most merciful 0:14:06 - 0:14:40 thing God can do is to cut people off. And what is coming is an outpouring of mercy. But it's, it's going to be absolutely terrible. My heart breaks for what people are gonna go through. I can't really describe my feelings about that. It's something though that I, I pray about every day and I mourn for 0:14:40 - 0:15:15 these people, but I also mourn for the innocent and what's happening to them right now. And I, I don't know of a greater testament to God's mercy than him withholding the natural consequences of how we as a people are living right now. It's hard to imagine it getting worse, but it will get worse. I'm 0:15:15 - 0:15:56 talking about the depths of evil and the plainness in which people live it in our society, it's going to get worse, ok? But if anybody's watching this, I want to invite you to fall on your face and plead before God. Things are very bad right now and they're going to get worse. And as his judgments report 0:15:56 - 0:16:36 out, that'll be worse in its own way as well. But it will be a bittersweet season for those that trust God because they will be redeemed from all of this. There will be freed from the oppression of the captors and this evil will be put away from our faces because the wicked will be taken. I also want 0:16:36 - 0:17:16 to plead with you if you're watching this to not take lightly the opportunity that we have right now in terms of time resources, technology, to really feast on the word of God, to not take it lightly. The lords revealed a lot more to me than I talk about. And I would like to do the work required to polish 0:17:15 - 0:17:48 these things and fill in the blanks by obtaining more and inquiring of the Lord. But it's very hard to muster the strength required to do that. When people take things so lightly, we live in a culture and I'm talking about we as in people who do study the Gospel, who do pray. You do profess to believe 0:17:48 - 0:18:21 in God. We live in a culture that is more trivia oriented, then light and truth oriented and everybody wants everybody has itchy ears and they want to be titillated by some new thing. Meanwhile, God has revealed plainly to them right before their faces, what they have to change in their lives to reconcile 0:18:21 - 0:19:02 their selves to him. But very few seem to want to do that. Very few seem to be aware of how delicious truth is and how valuable it is. And we live in a time of a famine of the word of God and their puddles of water here and there. And we drunkenly stumble through the desert when we hit a puddle, we just 0:19:02 - 0:19:38 keep on stumbling as if it's not even there. There are very few people who appreciate the necessity of that water and who drop to their knees and drink it up as fast as they can and then go look for more that causes the Lord a great deal of sorrow. And I don't know what can be done about it. When things 0:19:38 - 0:20:05 get to the point that those who are called to intercede for the wicked, say, what's the point? Because they won't repent? And when those who are called to reveal things that have never been revealed from the foundation of the world, say, what's the point? No one will listen, no one will change. That 0:20:04 - 0:20:42 is a disastrous state because it means that progress can't be made and that things have gone as far as they can. I'm not saying that. Well, I'll just leave it at that. If you're listening to this, I invite you to be more aware of the situation that we find ourselves in. And I invite you to ask the Lord 0:20:42 - 0:21:13 to show you the state of affairs that we live in, to open your eyes to the corruption and the wickedness. It's being lived all around us and to repent, to turn to him and reconcile yourself completely to Him. The time to do that is now it's getting very late and there will be a time when it's too late 0:21:12 - 0:21:42 . We really need to broaden the channel of our connection with God. There's so much that we don't know. There's so much that we don't know. It's urgent and it's important and now's the time we absolutely have to increase our connection with God and learn more from Him, interact more with Him and open 0:21:41 - 0:22:12 our mouths to others. I do not understand for the life of me why so few Christians one obtain and two share. Most Christians don't have anything to share because they haven't bothered to obtain anything yet. But those that know don't necessarily teach. And I don't understand why that is. It's as if people 0:22:11 - 0:22:36 think that they can somehow trust God internally while not trusting him externally. And of course, that's a lie. If you've been warned, you have the responsibility to warn your neighbor. If you don't want your neighbor, you don't love your neighbor. If you don't love your neighbor while you're breaking 0:22:35 - 0:23:03 the second great commandment. And in doing so, you're breaking the first great commandment because if you don't love your neighbor, you don't love God. So I invite you to repent of that as well. And to understand that perfect love casts out fear. And what does that mean? If you believe that God really 0:23:03 - 0:23:34 loves you and that everything He directs in your life is for your good to a degree beyond what you comprehend because He knows more than you do and he loves you more than you love yourself, then you also have to believe that following His word will lead you to a greater state of affairs than anything 0:23:33 - 0:23:59 you can design. And when you have that belief, you truly have that belief, you can't have fear because what could happen, that's outside of the bounds of what God controls and ordains, except if you're disobedient then it's on you. But if you're fully reconciled to God, you obey Him in all things that 0:23:59 - 0:24:26 absolutely everything in your life is designed by an all knowing, all loving God for your greatest happiness. So if you trust Him, you'll have no fear and you'll share these things with others because you believe it and you know that it will help them and you love them and you love God.