Romans 1:18-32
Romans 12:1-2
Erwin Lutzer “No Reason to Hide”
WILL YOU BE COMPLICIT, COMPLACENT, OR COURAGEOUS?
“Revolutionaries cannot amass power within a country that is at peace with itself; they must have chaos. The great pillars of civilization must be upended. Radicals want to disrupt America’s history, its culture, and the very building blocks that made this nation possible. How better to do that than to destroy the nuclear family and bring about the dissolution of decency and reason? And, what could be more appealing than to have the sovereignty of the individual usurp the sovereignty of God?”
Erwin Lutzer “We Will Not Be Silenced”
“Parents – and I include most Christian parents – no longer raise their children. Rather, culture does – most significantly, through the Internet. Like one mother said to me, ‘I didn’t know that when I gave my thirteen-year-old daughter a cell-phone, I might as well have given her the first shot of heroin.’
As a nation, we have submitted our minds to electronic devices that now shape our thinking and provide endless entertainment.
In 2004, Pew Research polls showed that 60 percent of Americans were opposed to same-sex marriage. Today those numbers have flipped, with only 40 percent of Americans opposed. Why the change? Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed that Apple’s iPhone was released in 2004. And that’s not all. Social media apps Facebook and Twitter were rolled out. Google bought YouTube and launched their Android operating system. Amazon released their Kindle e-reader. And there were now more than one billion people accessing the Internet. Thus, technology facilitated cultural change more quickly than anyone could have imagined. The cellphone in a teenager’s hand is doing more to shape their worldview than one hour of Sunday school or the admonitions of parents. We are failing to pass our faith on to the next generation because they are captives to the culture, social media, their peers, and the indoctrination by the public schools. Parents clothe their children, feed them, and send them to school, but the hearts of their kids are being stolen and molded by a world that many of us don’t understand. Perhaps nowhere do we see the work of Satan in America as clearly as we do in the sexualization of children – destroying their identity, confusing their gender, and creating unresolved guilt and self-hatred.”
Peter Hitchens in his book “The Rage Against God” writes that
‘the youth movements of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were startlingly similar. Any ideological or revolutionary state must always alienate the young from their pre-revolutionary parents if it hopes to survive into future generations.”
Adolf Hitler gave a speech in 1935 at the Reichsparteitag
“HE ALONE, WHO OWNS THE YOUTH, GAINS THE FUTURE”
Erwin Lutzer “We Will Not Be Silenced”
“Through laws and coercion, the education of America’s youth is being taken out of the hands of parents and placed in the hands of secular educators. As MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said, “We have to break through our private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” And in order for children to belong to ‘whole communities’ it’s necessary that they be indoctrinated with certain core beliefs about the world in general and sexuality in particular. Using education to change the worldview of children has always been the goal of cultural Marxism. American Communist party leader William Z. Foster, in his book TOWARD SOVIET AMERICA, lays out socialism’s agenda. He speaks confidently about the coming “American Soviet government”. Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education…..
Note carefully: The National Department of Education, not the parents, will set the agenda and determine what is being taught. Through the clever use of curricula, it will cleanse our schools of religious and patriotic influence. And the beast way to do that is through sex-education classes. The sensitive issue of sexuality and gender can be the gateway to the glories of the ’equality’ of all who reside in the state. As we said before, it will be sold under the banner of a noble cause. Without consent of the parents, the Comprehensive Sexuality Education curriculum was created by Planned Parenthood and the Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS), which was founded by a devout follower of Alfred Kinsey (a pedophile who believed that children can be sexual from birth).
The Reformer Martin Luther saw this day coming:
“I am much afraid that the universities will prove to be the great gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth.”
In 2019 Southern Baptist Convention President, JD Greear, called on Christians to be the first ones to stand up for LGBTQ rights.
“You will begin to treat them first and foremost like people who deserve compassion, not scorn, or judgment, or a political voting bloc we need to marginalize. When you understand that, then what that means is you will become a person who will, for example, stand up and be among the fiercest advocates for the preservation of the dignity and the rights of LGBTQ people. Because we recognize that gay and lesbian people are just like us.”
But it does not stop there.
Erwin Lutzer “We Will Not Be Silenced”
“In an article titled “Christian Higher Ed Can’t Win” David P Gushee, who at one time held to the traditional view of sexuality, argues that evangelicals cannot withstand the LGBTQ debate on their Christian campuses. They must adapt culture’s view of sexuality and accommodate the spirit of the times.
The article says that schools will have an ‘eruption’ of LGBTQ policies and find themselves in the national headlines. LGBTQ students are ‘unwilling to accept some straight guy declaring to them that they can’t be both Christian and gay; they won’t tolerate second-class status on campus.’ Gushee says that students – even Christian students – arrive on campus having been exposed to tolerance, inclusion, and full acceptance of LGBTQ students. No matter what the school’s doctrinal and lifestyle statement says, the argument is that LGBTQ rights are a core value in our culture and the schools cannot (or will not) withstand the pressure. The bottom line; Christian colleges and seminaries are going to have to compromise the historic Christian understanding of sexuality and gender or be hopelessly left behind. They will lose their voice and credibility. They will be on ‘the wrong side of history.’
There is already a call for legislation to deny funding to all schools that receive financial loans if they don’t accept the full spectrum of LGBTQ rights. As a result, many Christian colleges are bowing to the pressure by allowing campus support groups for LGBTQ students and communicating to students that the school is a safe place for them to wrestle with their sexuality. The next logical step is for school to hire sympathetic staff who want to stand up for the rights of the same-sex and transgender students. But this will not be enough. Once a school’s administration has started down this road, there is no stopping until the full spectrum of the LGBTQ agenda is dutifully embraced.
The same kind of pressure is brought to bear on Christian ministries, Christian businesses, and even churches. There is no place to hide. Will our families, churches, and schools remain faithful? Or will we, as did the church in ancient Sardis (Revelation 3:1-6), comfortably embrace pagan sexuality?”
LTC Robert Maginnis “Progressive Evil” (2019)
“Thanks to progressives and in part due to Christian’s abandonment of their calling to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16), America today is on a rapid downward spiral. God is mostly absent from our public square, and His judgment is certain, which is why God’s people must redouble their efforts by seeking spiritual revival in our land, if it’s not already too late.
That call to action means we must appreciate not only these dangerous times but also our enemy, both the political and spiritual adversaries.
Earlier we considered the psychological profile of our human enemy, the progressives, especially their view of Christians. They genuinely hate us. Here is the bottom line regarding these people; Many progressives display symptoms of a mental illness, and they are associated with evil, although they think they are good. Further, unless they are stopped, they will become Satan’s right-hand men, welcoming the Antichrist and inevitably ushering in the end times. It’s that serious!”
Dr. Lyle Rossiter “The Liberal Mind – The Psychological Causes of Political Madness”(2011)
“The radical left’s efforts to regulate the people from cradle to grave. To rescue us from our troubled lives, the liberal agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship, through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. Radical liberalism thus assaults the foundation of civilized freedom.
Given its irrational goals, coercive methods and historical failures, and given its perverse effects on character development, there can be no question of the radical agenda’s madness. Only an irrational agenda would advocate a systematic destruction of the foundations on which ordered liberty depends. Only an irrational man would want to state to run his life for him rather than create secure conditions in which he can run his own life. Only an irrational agenda would deliberately undermine the citizen’s growth to competence by having the state adopt him. Only an irrational thinking would trade individual liberty for government coercion, sacrificing the pride of self-reliance for welfare dependency. Only a madman would look at a community of free people cooperating by choice and see a society of victims exploited by villains.”
Hannah Arendt – “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”
Arendt explained what she meant by the “Banality of Evil”.
“Only good has any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet and this is its horror! It can spread like fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it FINDS NOTHING THERE. That is the Banality of Evil.”
Erwin Lutzer in his book “No Reason To Hide”
“Let me ask the question this ways: When a man with a healthy arm decides the arm isn’t a rightful part of his body and wants it surgically removed, does he have a body problem or a mind problem? When a man who is 52 identifies as a six-year-old girl, does he have a body problem or a mind problem? Does a woman who has anorexia and starves herself to death have a body problem or a mind problem? Likewise, when someone argues they are transgender and, therefore, contemplating irreversible gender reassignment surgery, we must lovingly help them to understand that they are grappling not with a body problem, but a mind problem. Let be said again: It is better to be accused of being harsh than it is to tell lies with hushed tones of compassion, love, care, and thought-fulness. Or, to put it differently, the best way to love someone is to graciously tell them the truth.
Christians who struggle with gender dysphoria must seek help in reordering their mind.