James MacDonald - What are We Supposed to Do
Summary:
In this 2015 message responding to cultural upheavals like the Caitlyn Jenner transition, the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling, and Planned Parenthood controversies, the preacher asks «What are we supposed to do?» amid rapid moral decline, using Psalm 11 where David refuses to flee despite threats, affirming that «if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?» He argues that crises reveal long-building erosion, and Christians disagree widely on responses—from fighting to fleeing—but the biblical answer is neither: instead, take refuge in the sovereign Lord who remains on His throne, testing the righteous while hating wickedness. The key call is to strengthen personal foundations in God through unwavering trust, rather than panic or judgmentalism toward others navigating these hard times.
A Changing World
I don’t know if you remember what was going on in June, but there was a lot to think about when that whole thing was big in the news with Bruce Jenner, and then when he won an ESPY award for courage. The Supreme Court approved the same-sex marriage issue, creating much to ponder, and I’m sure you were thinking about how many people were contemplating the same things—wondering what is happening exactly.
For myself, my wife, my family, my grown children, and their children, it is a different world to follow Jesus Christ than it was in 1988. It wasn’t awesome then, and it wasn’t easy, and it is staggering when I think about what I faced then, what my kids face now, and what my grandkids will encounter growing up in this culture. I also think about my family and then about all the people I’m blessed to interact with.
I wrote a blog post about this Bruce Jenner situation, and I couldn’t even calculate how many people read it—over 200,000 people shared it and passed it on to others. People were thinking about these things, talking about them, wrestling with them, and around the same time, all those Planned Parenthood videos were coming out. You see the depths to which the culture is sinking and their disregard for the sanctity of life.
Crises Reveal Long Trends
People always ask, «What is happening exactly, and how can all this be happening?» Something I learned a long time ago is that the crises of life reveal something that’s been going on for a long time. All of a sudden, something hits the news, hits your street, or hits your house, and you’re like, «What on Earth? Where did this come from?» But that crisis reveals something that has actually been happening slowly and incrementally over time. While the headline might grab your attention, the reality is that these things have been occurring gradually for a very long time.
What Are We Supposed to Do?
So what are we supposed to do? That’s the title of this message: What are we supposed to do? Let me just say that in the family of God and in the family of Christ followers, there is not a lot of agreement about what we are supposed to do. In fact, I would say that the response of Christians to the decline of our culture is as different as black and white and as wide as A to Z. There is no consensus among Christians about how they are supposed to respond to a time of cultural decline.
So where should we find the answer? I’m glad that wasn’t a hard question for you; of course, we should turn to God’s word at times like this for answers. When we see these very public falls from grace, we realize that it has been happening for a long time, and God surely must answer in His Word the question: What are we supposed to do?
Finding the Key Verse
I hope you have your Bible. Jesus promised the disciples that He would bring all things to our remembrance that He had taught. Sometimes, the Spirit of God will bring to mind what I call «a little shrapnel of Scripture.» You know what I mean by little shrapnel—you think, «Is that in the Bible? I think that’s in the Bible! Where did that phrase come from?» One of my sons said to me today, «What did you do before you had Google?» There was life before that; I existed and walked the Earth before the Internet. I really did!
Before Google, I had software on my computer. I also had a book on the shelf. The outside was hard, and then inside, there were pages. I would look it up in a concordance. Do you even know what a concordance is, in the back of your Bible? Because it’s pretty worthless now that we have Google. I had this piece of shrapnel in my mind, and it was, «What can we do? What are we supposed to do?» Then it evolved into «What can the righteous do in praying?» Somewhere along the line, the scripture came to mind. If everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, what can the righteous do? Now that’s the way the message translates it, but the actual translation is, «If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?»
I was thinking about that for several days, praying about it, before I actually opened my Bible, which I hope you’ll do now—to Psalm 11.
Reading Psalm 11
Let me read this to you. Psalm 11 says, «To the choir master, of David, » so this is a psalm of David. He wrote it for the person who would put it to music. David was the lyricist apparently, and maybe someone else was going to put the music to it or lead the choir. Some Psalms of David are known for the circumstances behind them, and we say, «Oh, that was when this happened.» In this instance, there is no clear sense given; he was obviously in a crisis. He begins this way: «In the Lord, I take refuge. How can you say to my soul, ‘Flee like a bird to your mountain’? For behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?»
«The Lord is in His holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; His eyes see; His eyelids test the children of men. The Lord tests the righteous, but His soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. Let Him rain coals on the wicked; fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. For the Lord is righteous; He loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold His face.»
The Main Principle
Now, there’s the answer to the question: with everything happening as it is, what are we supposed to do? I just have one main point, and you can keep some notes as we go through the verses if you like to do that. Here’s the main thing I’ve taken from my thoughts, which has led to this message and the question: What are we supposed to do? The answer is in Psalm 11:3: «If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?» The principle that I’m going to try to teach from this passage is this: In times of moral decline, strengthen your foundation in the Lord.
Are We in Moral Decline?
So let’s start with what I fear will be patently obvious. Are we in times of moral decline? In no particular order, just a few examples. First of all, examples of moral decline: already in this millennium, our country—listen to me—is immensely more immoral than it was in the year 2000. The moral standard has declined so far; we’ve been standing in sewage up to our waist for so long that we’ve hardly noticed it’s up to our armpits already. It smells the same and doesn’t feel all that much different, and we’re losing track of how fast things are falling.
Ashley Madison is a Canadian-based online dating service, a social networking site that markets to people who are married. Its slogan is «Life is short; have an affair.» It’s the 18th most popular adult site; over 124 million people a month are visiting this site seeking opportunities to break their marriage vows. What does God say about that? «Better not to vow than not to pay.» God takes no pleasure in fools. Adultery destroys marriage; it shatters it. How often, Pastor Rick, have we had to stand there with the tattered pieces in our hands? We can’t even put any of this back together. Sometimes, if the duration was short, if the season was minor, grace can prevail, but it is a shattered relationship.
Back in July, someone hacked into this website. Now they have millions of names—I can’t remember the number exactly—but I do remember they said that 13,000 people with government email addresses were on the site. Doubt it? Just wait—it’s all going to come out in the next few weeks: this person, this person, this person. Prepare yourself; this pastor, this one. It’ll happen, and it grieves the heart.
In addition to that, I could put your name on there and plug in your email address, and then what is that person going to do? Well, it’s not my credit card, and they don’t have my credit; you’re going to have to try to prove—that the capacity of the internet to absolutely shred people’s lives is immense.
Of course, the recent legalization of same-sex marriage rose from 11% in 1988 to 50% in 2012—it’s beyond that now. Norway recently proposed a law to extend transgender rights to children as young as seven. People as young as 16 would be able to decide for themselves whether they’re male or female, regardless of their anatomy. The growth of online pornography is staggering—over $3 billion a year. The book «Fifty Shades of Grey» is now one of the top ten bestselling books of all time. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world, and 79% of human trafficking is for sexual exploitation. Just seven months ago, do you remember the 200 Nigerian girls who were kidnapped by Islamic extremists and distributed for someone’s personal slave fantasy? It hardly gets our attention anymore; it’s just replaced every day by something worse.
Some of you wish I would stop, and I want to, because it’s so grievous that it’s hard not to just shut it off, but it does beg the question: What are we supposed to do? I didn’t make this happen, but God in His sovereignty had us born here. God didn’t want you born 500 years ago. One of my friends says to me all the time, «God wanted you, James, born in the 1500s, but He had to wait 500 more years to engineer a woman capable of being your wife.» My family’s in the front row, and they were all nodding and saying, «Amen, » softly. So this is when God had us born—you’re not here at the wrong time. But what are we supposed to do?
Adding to the moral decline, friends of ours returned from a vacation in New York City. Good people in our church, leaders in our church, told Kathy and me how many times—every time we would go preach for Jim Cymbala at Brooklyn Tabernacle, we would always try to go to Times Square. It’s just exciting!
Now they came back and told us that in Times Square, there is an influx—a river of naked women covered in only body paint jockeying for tips, kind of doing a little jig because the police cannot intervene in any expression of public nudity in New York. It’s legal as long as there is some performance going on, so these totally naked painted women are walking the streets of New York, and the police can do nothing about it. Men and women are coming up with their children to take pictures with them. Are we in times of moral decline? Yes, and it’s accelerating.
Persecution and Hard Choices
Many examples could be given of Christians being attacked for their faith. I don’t have any examples of Muslims or Buddhists being attacked for their faith because they’re ultimately all on the same team. There is one true God, and His Son’s name is Jesus Christ, and He is the only way to eternal life. He only wrote one book—this is the truth; everything else is a lie. Christians are being persecuted. So what are we supposed to do?
Hobby Lobby—the family behind that, the Green family, who has given us a couple of our facilities including the Elgen campus and the Aurora campus and the cathedral—don’t want to pay for Obamacare for their thousands of employees because they don’t want to pay for this post-sexual encounter abortion pill. They don’t feel they should be forced to pay money to help end life after conception. It seems like they won their case in court, but what about the couple in Oregon who doesn’t want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding? I’ll say myself, I’m not sure if maybe they shouldn’t have made it.
I think we should be super careful about assuming that these decisions are obvious. We should really watch out for judging each other. These are hard times; we don’t need to be judging one another. You mean they don’t know what to do? You don’t know what to do? I don’t know what to do. The last thing we should be doing is coming down on one another as though somehow the answers are obvious. They are not.
What is obvious is the scripture says in Romans 14:5, «Let each be fully persuaded in his own mind.» Scripture also says, «Whatever is not of faith is sin.» I’ve taught here many times that if you can’t do it confidently, believing it’s right for you to do, then it’s wrong for you to do it—even if it’s not wrong. You have to be sure it’s right for you to do it. If you can’t do it in faith, if you can’t do it in confidence, don’t do it. Different people will come to different conclusions and different convictions, and it is a harsh world out there. We need to be better at loving each other. The church needs to be a sanctuary from that—not a rehearsal of the same harsh tone.
God help all of us. The constant portrayal of Christians in the media as bigoted, hateful, intolerant—we live in a world where anything goes except for the person who won’t say anything goes. Everyone is accepted except the guy who says, «Everything’s not in—it’s not okay.»
Think of the next two or three most horrific things down the moral chain rushing upon us. Pastors are imprisoned by foreign governments for sharing their Christian faith. Pastor Saeed Abedini is an American pastor who’s serving an 8-year sentence in one of Iran’s toughest prisons simply for sharing his Christian faith. Here’s a picture of him with his wife, and we’ve had the privilege of meeting her on multiple occasions as she travels around the country trying to get Christians to wake up and pray.
Prayer for the Persecuted
I’m going to stop right now and just pray for him and for others.
Father, we bow together now as a church family, and we are grieved in our hearts for brothers and sisters in Christ who are suffering around this nation economically and socially. But, Father, in most instances, our trials are small compared to brothers and sisters in Christ around the world who are suffering imprisonment right now. We pray for Pastor Saeed; we pray for others like him that You would move upon our government to be grieved for the religious persecution that they seem to tolerate for political interests. God, our minds are not their minds; they know much more than we know. But we pray, O God, that these injustices would weigh upon their hearts and that You would move upon them in power, Lord, to right these wrongs. We pray for those who are imprisoned, as You’ve told us to, and we pray for those who have given their lives, Father. How it breaks Your heart to see the evil in this world growing worse and worse and evil things being done. We pray for comfort for those who have lost loved ones simply for standing up for Jesus, and we pray for equal courage and strength. We pray, Father, that You would come quickly-send Your Son quickly. The world is dark and growing darker, and it is desperately in need of a Savior and of perfect justice. So we wait by faith and wrestle with these matters of strengthening our foundations. Help us, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.