00:12:44.660How does God turn his hand against a nation?
00:12:49.220How does the once faithful city experience God's hand of judgment?
00:12:56.020Well, it should be familiar to us because we've all lived through it.
00:13:00.720He shakes the nations with calamities.
00:13:04.620He shakes that nation with calamities.
00:13:08.440He places them under the rule of wicked rulers.
00:13:11.840He permits tragedies and famines and wars and immorality.
00:13:17.460he does this until the people feel the weight of their sin and the rod of his discipline and repent
00:13:27.160and i know i know it can seem as though we have had such a great reprieve
00:13:34.060in this recent presidential election maybe it is a turning and maybe it is
00:13:39.200but that does not mean that America does not still have a long way to go
00:13:49.320what sins have we committed to bring such a judgment upon us
00:13:55.320I think it's important to understand what got us here so that we might not repeat them
00:14:03.280and I think we could summarize them into four major categories
00:14:07.060i'm going to give them to you now number one we have ordained the wrong men
00:14:15.140we have ordained the wrong men to the pastorate congregations rarely rise above their pastors
00:14:22.580that's a fact on the one hand many pulpits have been filled with these excellent communicators
00:14:29.420the problem is that they traded courage for comfort they are people pleasing donor pleasing
00:14:36.720giving pleasing, controversy avoiding compromisers that are more concerned with financial security
00:14:42.640and popularity than they are with preaching the truth.
00:14:46.480Those people exist, and they exist not only in our nation, but also in our city.
00:14:54.260These men have diluted doctrine to accommodate the visitor.
00:15:00.040We have turned the church into a place of evangelism rather than the strengthening of the flock.
00:15:06.720They have feared women, and they have perverted compassion, and they have been painfully quiet in the face of a variety of cultural events.
00:15:20.720On the other hand, we have ordained intellectuals, PhDs, and master's degrees who love doctrine and scholastics, but they are out of touch with the pastoral reality, and they have no spine.
00:15:36.720They have confused a love of knowledge with a call to be a shepherd.