Pastor Max Lucado has cemented himself as a voice of calm in the terror all around us. He has been widely described as America s pastor. He s written 40 books, 145 million in print, and his sermons and writings have saved lives. He played a fundamental role in the He Gets Us campaign, which strives to share the love of Jesus with all, right or left. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media was quick to label it corrupt, divisive, political, and a number of snotty accusations.
00:00:00.000The world grows more chaotic, more scary every day.
00:00:04.420And it goes way beyond rising prices or political tension.
00:00:07.980We are now finding ourselves in a place where we could be actually surrounded by countries with leaders that are thinking about going to world war.
00:10:07.360It's as if we are having a funeral dirge for a world that we cherished and we're seeing it pass down the street and the hearse just drives by and that deep, deep sadness.
00:12:52.400Nobody, I'm sympathetic with some student of prophecy from 200 years ago who says, well, this is never going to happen.
00:13:00.400How in the world could the Jews ever repopulate the nation of Israel?
00:13:05.120I mean, it's just the greatest miracle.
00:13:06.860And so that miracle, that sign, it seems to me, Glenn, announced that we're in the final days because so many things, Israel has to be a nation for many of the prophecies to be fulfilled, namely the reconstruction of the temple.
00:13:26.200And so there has to be a national Israel in order for many of these things to happen.
00:13:30.700Well, now it wasn't there 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 400 years ago, but it's there right now.
00:13:38.600And so I think the discussion of what we're seeing on the world stage is a discussion that we need to have both politically, but even more important, spiritually.
00:13:49.660Because something is happening here that has never happened in any generation in history.
00:13:55.300I don't know when Christ is returning.
00:13:58.320But we are told to look for the signs.
00:14:01.920In fact, Jesus was critical of those religious leaders.
00:14:05.860He said, you see Red Sky at morning, you know it's dawn, but here I've given you sign after sign and you have not watched.
00:14:11.980And so there's an expectation that in addition to viewing what's happening geopolitically, we have to interpret it spiritually.
00:14:20.600I will tell you that I've said so many times here recently, you know, when the Bible was being put together, it's not like, it's not like God said, you know, the Jesus part, we went all soft.
00:14:36.920Let's go out with a bang, you know, let's freak everybody out in the last book of the Bible.
00:15:07.360Jesus said the night before his crucifixion.
00:15:08.960crucifixion and then in the Olivet discourse or the sermon about end times, Jesus said in Luke 21, lift up your eyes.
00:15:16.600Your redemption draws near when you see these things coming.
00:15:19.880So rather than panic, which nobody faults anybody for their anxiety these days, but knowing what's next prepares us to face what's now.
00:15:31.400And if we can know what's next, if we can begin to get a semblance of what's about to happen, then I believe that it allows us to land at a spot that says, OK, God said something like this was going to happen.
00:15:46.980I'm going to make sure my relationship with him is solid and I'm going to pray.
00:15:51.480I'm going to pray and I'm going to lean heavily into God's word for help.
00:15:55.300It may just be me, Max, but I don't know why everything that's good for me, I don't like and everything that is not good for me, I do like, you know, chocolate milk, not good for me, ice cream, not good for me.
00:16:17.500Help me out on prayer and scripture study and it takes such discipline to do it.
00:16:31.440And then I've been in periods of my life, long periods, where I've just been, you know, just voracious appetite for it.
00:16:41.900And then other times, and it seems to go in the times when I need it the most.
00:17:20.580And Satan has never told a word of truth ever.
00:17:24.140And whenever he sees a person like you or any person, uh, try to deal with the anxieties of life by turning to faith or turning to God, he's going to step in.
00:17:38.040And so one doubt after another or interrupt one with one interruption after another.
00:17:44.480We can just expect him to do that because the last thing he wants us to do as people right now is turn to God in faith.
00:17:52.160He wants us to turn on each other in anger.
00:18:00.280Uh, he, he is, he's the, the source of all, uh, wherever there's a, a, a division between two human beings, that's the footprints of Satan or the fingerprints of Satan.
00:18:10.180Uh, that's why when he sees you opening your Bible, he's going to interrupt it, or he's going to bring some type of ethereal thought in and say, well, this can't be true.
00:18:19.880Or he's going to cause doubt, or he's going to cause you to think I'm too bad to deserve.
00:18:25.020He's got a million and one tools, but everything is settled on keeping you from drawing close to God.
00:18:31.200Because where you are at peace with God, then you can be at peace with others.
00:18:35.780But when we're not at peace with God, then we see what the world sees right now.
00:21:06.680I think taking – what if there was just this collective desire to get down on our knees and say, Lord, we're crying out to you in desperation?
00:29:55.220Their end times philosophy is when, you know, when their leadership says, oh, Allah, give us a strength to hasten the return of the promised one.
00:30:10.340Their promised one is the 12th, the mom.
00:30:12.780And he climbs out of a well he's been hiding there for, I don't know, a thousand years, 1500 years.
00:30:17.140And he comes out and he gathers the strength of the Middle East and he destroys Israel.
00:30:27.460In their book, Jesus comes to back him up and says, you know, I'm here because this is the real Messiah.
00:30:37.700And we'll behead anybody who disagrees with it.
00:30:43.260But as you look at it, it's almost as if it was written to freak people out.
00:30:50.320You know, it's almost like, let's write this because I just read the Christian's ending.
00:30:54.620Let's write this exactly like theirs except the reverse.
00:30:58.380There are people that are working for the end times.
00:31:07.380How does one make sure that you're not duped by that?
00:31:24.760He rose from the dead, thereby authenticating everything he said and everything he would do.
00:31:31.800And so for that reason, when I was 20 years old, a friend of mine asked me, well, what happened to the body if he wasn't risen from the dead?
00:31:40.420And I couldn't come up with a good answer.
00:31:42.240And it still took another couple of years before me to solidify my faith.
00:32:58.960But I have such faith that, well, I know the Lord is a promise keeper.
00:33:05.500And so what he says will be, whether we're living in that time or not, but I also know that, you know, Bonhoeffer, I'm sure, thought he was a failure.
00:34:16.960I mean, there is deep pain and despair, you know.
00:34:23.220Every time in the Bible, God's people got to this point, God interrupted it with a miracle.
00:34:31.960Now, sometimes it seemed like 400 years before that miracle would come, right, for those people in Egyptian slavery.
00:34:37.620But you think about how God interrupted the enslaved Jews in Egypt, how God interrupted with Joshua being able to retake the promised land with the collapse of the Jericho walls.
00:34:53.740How God interrupted the exile of the Jews with Nehemiah being not only invited to return, but funded in his return to rebuild the city of Jerusalem.
00:35:05.140And then, of course, for the Christian, there's the resurrection of Christ, just when it seemed the darkest, when God on earth was going to be destroyed, killed.
00:36:40.800Well, in case somebody has never heard this conversation, what we're talking about is described in Revelation chapter 20.
00:36:49.460Six times there's a reference to the millennium, and it's a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth.
00:36:56.720And it fulfills many prophecies and keeps many promises.
00:37:01.340The reason it's really relevant to our discussion, and especially what you're emphasizing, is because the thousand-year reign of Christ announces that Christ will have his garden of Eden.
00:37:13.800What was established and announced in Genesis 1, 2, and 3, that God would reign in a paradise with his people.
00:37:56.500So the teaching on the millennium says God's going to keep that promise, and Revelation chapter 20 describes the day God does it, and it's after he returns, Revelation chapter 19, and then Revelation chapter 20, and then Revelation chapter 21 announces the new heaven and the new earth.
00:38:16.500And so for a thousand years in between this life and our eternal state, the new heaven and new earth, you and I will reign with Christ on earth, and we'll be in glorified bodies, that is to say, bodies that are made perfect, equipped for eternity, and then there will be people who are still on earth in mortal bodies, and I know this sounds fictional and fantastical, but it's part of the story, and I'm excited about it, but there will be people who become Christ followers even during that time of tribulation.
00:38:46.500And they will enter into that time of the thousand-year reign, so we will—it's just like when Christ, after he rose from the dead, was in a glorified body with mortal people, so it'll happen yet again.
00:39:00.540I love the fact that, at least the way that I read this, is that you still have a choice, even when he's here.
00:39:53.500So, you know, we've touched on depression and sadness and hopelessness.
00:40:04.460Let's talk about your book, God Never Gives Up On You, because I think there's a lot of people that feel like he has, or he's not answered, or he's not been around.
00:40:14.700What do you mean by God Never Gives Up On You?
00:40:20.360Well, we interpret the presence of pain as the absence of God.
00:40:25.120That's the default human reaction to pain.
00:40:28.240If God was here, I wouldn't be hurting.
00:40:30.240If God was here, I wouldn't be battling with this particular struggle.
00:40:33.480So, the declaration from God throughout Scripture is, no, I never give up on my people.
00:43:57.980And when you suck the goodness out of life, you're left with the bitterness and the sadness that we see in so many.
00:44:06.400So even someone like Jacob, who, for crying out loud, as far as we know, the one, let's see, one of the two times he prayed, he was negotiating with God.
00:44:33.040And in the end, he was still following God.
00:44:36.040He died worshiping, the scripture says.
00:44:39.500So when you get, you know, this is one of the things that brings me back to how I, how difficult it is to live at this time when there's so much wrong and evil.
00:44:58.020And I think that's because I know God's not given up on him.
00:45:15.440Well, God is up to the task, even though we're not.
00:45:19.180You know, Glenn, I love to tell this story.
00:45:21.500I told it last night at a church where I preached.
00:45:23.600So it's kind of on my mind, if you don't mind.
00:45:25.420When I, when my daughters were small, kindergarten and diaper age, I have three daughters, our bedtime routine involved the very last thing after songs, after bath, after songs, after stories, after jokes, after books, you know, the very last thing.
00:45:43.440They would say, flex your muscles, daddy.
00:46:01.920So they would all stand up and I would go pop those biceps and they'd put their hands on my muscles and they'd say, oh, you're strong, daddy.
00:46:10.280It's the last time I ever had women fall over my muscles.
00:46:14.460But, you know, I, I like to think that they slept better having just felt the strength of their father.
00:47:07.840Everything you buy, everything that you eat, every piece of clothing you wear, all of it came from somewhere.
00:47:14.660So if you're like me, when it comes to clothing, especially you want to take your hard earned cash and buy something that's made here in America, because American manufacturing matters.
00:47:31.100It is the backbone of our communities.
00:47:34.020And it puts food on the table for our fellow countrymen and women.
00:47:38.380That's one of the reasons why I love partnering with companies like grip six grip six.
00:47:43.760You're getting true American experience when you buy their socks, per se.
00:47:47.520You get the American experience because you're you're buying something that the American ranchers have raised specially bred sheep here in America that produce the modern world.
00:48:00.080The American manufacturers wash it, process it, weave it into socks that keep your feet warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
00:49:53.860And it always seems to center around the children that you will take this covenant and then you will plant it deep into the children so it continues on.
00:50:40.640He gave Abraham this land and he gave them soil.
00:50:45.260And then he said, through your seed, the world will be blessed.
00:50:49.220So it's a covenant of soil and a covenant of seed.
00:50:53.580And then God affirmed that in Genesis 15 with that mysterious moment in which there are there's a carcass and he passes between the carcass, the torn carcass of the animal.
00:51:05.820And there's a flaming pot and a burning flame, a flaming pot.
00:51:23.420Now, we can acknowledge the covenant or we can ignore the covenant.
00:51:26.600But the covenant is there and it's a governing principle in history.
00:51:32.440So I think really that if you want to understand what's about to happen in the future, you go back and you look at these covenants that God has made.
00:51:38.980You can tell that's where we're headed.
00:51:41.160You say that bearing the past is not always the best thing.
00:52:58.980And God saved me, not because of what I did, but because of what Christ did for me.
00:53:05.320And that liberates me from the fear of out sinning his grace.
00:53:10.100That liberates me from the fear of thinking I have to do more to get him to love me, because it wasn't what I did to get him to love me to begin with.
00:53:22.000It's that worldview question again, Glenn.
00:53:24.440So if my worldview has a God that loves me and has paid the price so I can spend forever with him in heaven, in the new millennium and then in heaven, then armed with that, I can face the challenges that we're going through right now.
00:53:39.140So God never gives up on you as a way to give hope and to show that even you weren't perfect.
00:53:51.420Go over the main thing that you think people need to know about that's in the book.
00:53:58.480Yeah, I think the big idea, Glenn, with the story of Jacob is here is a man who is a descendant, a grandson of Abraham, whom we call the father in the faith.
00:54:11.580And yet before he's even a chapter or two into the story, he's already swindled his brother and lied to his father.
00:54:20.640And he's on the run away from his own family.
00:54:24.320And he has to enter into modern day Turkey without a penny, without a servant, even though he comes from a family of affluence and wealth.
00:54:35.580Before we're even into a chapter or two, he's been deceitful, he's lied, he's on the lamb, he's a fugitive.
00:54:46.200And yet we still hear Jesus speak about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
00:54:51.780I would have thought that Jesus may have said Abraham and Isaac and that one guy who never did anything.
00:56:50.180And I believe in those people that you can just feel God jump off them.
00:56:54.440You know, there's something about, I don't know, I think there's something coming in the future that we're going to need to know just by looking to each other in their eyes.
00:58:21.200If you don't know who you are, you know, if you think we're just flotsam, we're just a coincidence of molecules, then for crying out loud, turn the party off.
00:59:10.440Anybody can trust God on a beautiful Sunday morning or Saturday Sabbath when everything is nice and we're out in the meadows looking at springtime.
00:59:20.820But when you see one report after another of atrocity and you see how evil and barbaric and bloodthirsty humanity can get, when we see yet again what man can do against man, can you trust in a good God then?
00:59:37.100I turn off into the story of Joseph in the Old Testament.
00:59:43.380Remember the son of Jacob who was sold into slavery, but then eventually became prime minister of Egypt.
00:59:50.540And then when he had that encounter with the brothers who did sell him into slavery, he did not retaliate because he said that part of the story.
00:59:58.900Yeah, Genesis 50, 20, what you intended for evil, God used for good.
01:00:06.080What you intended for evil, God used for good.
01:00:09.080So intended evil can result in ultimate good.