Michael Youssef - Our God Always Wins - Part 2
I know that whenever any of us individually, and I can speak for myself, goes through crushing circumstances, we feel that our minds really play havoc on us. Our imagination runs wild, and our hearts sometimes get unglued, for there’s no doubt that we can doubt in the dark. And the truth is whenever we get locked in, in that straight jacket of doubt, then we allow Satan to defeat us. Hear me right, please. Satan cannot, cannot, cannot steal our salvation from us, amen. But he can render us ineffective. No matter how small you feel your effectiveness is, and no matter how big you feel your effectiveness, no matter how sometimes you feel that your impact or your service is so insignificant, listen carefully.
From God’s eyes, there is no service and ministry that is insignificant. From God’s eyes, who have given you a spiritual gift, expect every one of us to use our spiritual gift, and he is the one who will reward us for that. Now, the same thing happens when it comes to global and prophetic times and prophetic events. We can look at these events and we can look at these global things that are going on around us, as you’ve just heard, and we see them as insurmountable problems. «What can little old me do? I can’t do anything about this. This is too big for me. I can’t do anything about it». And so we withdraw into our safe zones. In our safe zones, we do nothing, we say nothing, we accomplish nothing, and Satan loves it.
If you studied the Epistles of Paul, the letters of Paul, very closely, the Corinthians, the Thessalonians, or the Ephesians, whatever those letters are, there’s some general theme in all of these letters. Whether those churches facing individual problems or facing global problems, whatever it is, you always see the apostle Paul seeking to uplift the recipients of his letter. You always see him endeavoring to remind them that God is sovereign. So when the Thessalonian believers, they were going through a crushing circumstance at the time, and it was a combination of severe persecution that they were facing and the consequence of listening to false teachers and false teaching.
That combination got them really discombobuled, as we say. Here you see them in this particular Epistle, and in every Epistle, what the apostle Paul does, he fights lies with the truth. Beloved, that’s the only way. You fight lies with the truth. What happened? Some false teachers came after Paul founded the church of Thessaloniki, and they came and they said to them, «The return of the Lord already happened, and you are left behind». Well, just think about how devastating that is. I mean, they’re suffering in the name of Jesus. They are experiencing crushing times, and then they felt devastated with this false teaching because they said, «We missed out».
And Paul assures them, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, verses 1 to 5. If you have that passage in front of you, keep it open. I’m going to come back to it. 2 Thessalonians, or as they say in England, 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2, verses 1 to 5. Here’s what he said. I’m going to read it later. He said, that day, the return of the Lord, will not take place until the man of lawlessness is revealed. Fighting lies with the truth. But the Bible says that after the Antichrist comes, the Lord Jesus is going to return and he’s going to smite him and destroy him and his master Satan forever. Also, we saw the rise of Baal and Baal worship. Baal basically gets people to focus on materialism and prosperity.
Now remember, God is the one who prospers. God loves to prosper his faithful children. But they said, take your eyes off the one who prosper you, focus on the prosperity itself as an end in itself. Once Baal came in and opened the door to that kind of thinking, the second God or goddess of that evil trinity that we read about in the Old Testament over and over and over again was ushered in. I’m talking about the goddess, the queen of heaven, they called her, who is associated with the moonlight.
In Western world, it was known as Venus because that’s the last of its appearance in the Roman culture. She is the goddess of sexuality. This goddess of the ancient world was renowned for her emotional demands and fierce carnality. She is given to raging romance, full of unbridled passion and insatiable sexual desire. If offended or shunned, she would become vengeful and violent. This goddess was known as the transgressor of standards and of conventions. The ancient mythology, she literally scammed and stole what belongs to other gods when they’re not watching. This is the pagan goddess whom the Bible called Ishtar, or Ashtaroth in plural.
In Canaanite mythology, she was connected to Baal as his consort or his lover. To the Greek, she became Aphrodite. And don’t ever forget, don’t ever forget, don’t ever forget, whatever names these gods are called, they’re the same ones. They’re the same storefront for Satan and demonic forces. They’re storefront. There’s no such thing as these gods and goddesses. Satan set them up. I’m going to show you why he did this. Because from the very beginning, Satan wanted to be worshiped instead of God. From the very beginning. That’s why he got kicked out of heaven. And when he failed, he shifted and sought the worship of these pagan individuals and cultures, through these so-called gods.
Listen to me. We’re all designed, scheme designed by Satan, in order to keep people living in terror and fear. That’s how he does it, under the control. Those of us who have been set free from the clutches of Satan and sin, we have no fear of him. Did you get that? Those of us who know the Lord Jesus Christ washed by his blood, we have no fear. To us, he is a defeated foe. He’s a toothless lion. He is no match to the Lion of Judah. And therefore, my beloved friends, our preaching, our witness, our testimonies, our prayers, should be fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit to do what? To set the captives free, to proclaim the power of the cross, to declare that Jesus and only Jesus saves.
And my beloved friends, we must let the world know that no one can sin beyond the reaches of the grace of Jesus Christ. No one. You’re watching around the world or here in this beautiful sanctuary. Know this. This is the Bible from cover to cover. No one can sin beyond the reaches of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. No one. In these last days where the world is gripped by so many evil powers, the faithful remnant cannot, cannot, cannot, say it with me, cannot, cannot sit on their blessed assurance and do nothing. More than ever before, our prayer, our giving, our serving, doing whatever God calls us to do, and every one of us is called of God to do something. It is all to reach the lost that the lost can be found and so that the blind can see and that the dumb can speak and the deaf can hear in the power of Jesus’s name.
Sadly today, instead of Christians enjoying the battle, knowing that Jesus already won it, right? And therefore, do it with confidence. There are some churches have joined the enemy forces. Some have joined the enemy forces. Baal and Ashtaroth invaded so many cold churches. Baal prepares the way for Ashtaroth. And so, first he comes in, divert people’s attention from the blessed to the blessing, and once he bought into this in the last 50, 60 years or so, then he ushers in Ashtaroth, the goddess of sensuality. Once Baal opened the door for Ashtaroth to move in, she moves in with viciousness, with militant gesture, with sexual perversion.
That way, Ashtaroth comes into a fertile ground, already been prepared by Baal, to unbridled sexuality, unbridled licentiousness, unbridled decadence. And the so-called Baal ushers the goddess Ashtaroth, and she ushers Moloch. The god Moloch is the god who demands children sacrifice, children be sacrificed. I will tell you more about this.
Can you see the pattern here? Can you see it in America? Can you see it in the West? Beginning in the '60s, we slowly but surely began as a culture and as a nation to move away from the one true God, thus opening the door first to Baal, then Ashtaroth, the goddess of sexuality. First they said, «All we need is acceptance, all we need is equality with biblical sexuality». And no sooner than the gullible acquiesced to that demand than Ashtaroth revealed her true nature of altering biblical standards, altering biblical morality, and altering biblical ethics. There was another sexual revolution in history that took place some years ago.
Yes, it took place in the Roman Empire, in the Western world. It was the revolution by which biblical sexuality and biblical ethics and biblical morality invaded the pagan world and replaced all of these false gods and false demons. How? By the preaching of the gospel. By preaching of the gospel. Oh, God, may it happen again. May it happen again when we return to biblical morality and godly morality. It can happen again. One last thing I need to tell you about this goddess. According to ancient mythology, it had dual nature. Dual nature.
This is very important for us today. Please listen. On the one hand, she was a goddess of love, beauty, allurement, and female sexuality. On the other hand, she embodied fierce, aggressive, violent, and destructive character which often ascribed to masculinity. She was one entity that embodied both the feminine and the masculine traits. In fact, ancient Mesopotamia record, she’s quoted to have said, «I am a woman, I am a man». To turn men into women and women into men is the very essence of the goddess Ashtaroth who has invaded our society. It was Ashtaroth’s nature to cross the boundaries, break down conventions, and blur distinctions, and merge the opposites. Why? In order to create confusion, confusion, confusion.
And beloved, confusion is Satan’s tool to hasten the appearance of his puppet, the Antichrist. But our God always, what? Back to where I started with the apostle Paul. I hope you have that passage still open in front of you, of 2 Thessalonians, the Epistle, second Epistle to the Thessalonians. When the Thessalonians were confused, as already mentioned in the beginning, about the return of Christ, Paul taught them and he teaches us something that we need to take to heart, something we must remember, not just on occasion, not on Sunday, but always remember. Again, look at the passage. Here’s what he said: «The return of Christ will happen when the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction».
Beloved, God always what? In the original Greek what the NIV translated as the rebellion is also can be translated as apostasy or the falling away. The falling away. This, my beloved friends, is a reference to great global rejection of the truth of God, particularly for people who are in churches. When Paul writing this Epistle, he’s writing it to believers in Thessaloniki, and most of the people in the Thessalonian church, they were Jewish. They were Jewish converts to Christianity. In fact, read about it for yourself, so you don’t have to take my word for it, in Acts chapter 17, how that church was founded.
And so when he wrote to this primarily Jewish congregation who are Messianic believers now, when he was writing to them, they were all acquainted with the Old Testament regarding the man of lawlessness. They’re very familiar with it. He didn’t have to go and explain it to them because they’re already familiar with it. They all understood and comprehended from Daniel chapter 9, verses 20 to 27, which contained the original Gabriel’s prophecy of the Antichrist. This is the same person that you read about in Daniel, 400 or 500 years before Christ, in Daniel chapter 9.
Is the same person our Lord Jesus Christ himself talked about in what we know as the Olivet Discourse, that’s in Matthew 24 and 25. Yes, Jesus quoted the Old Testament. Jesus did not get unhitched from the Old Testament. Jesus believed the Old Testament. And so I go back, as I finish, to the beginning. Paul’s desire was to comfort the believers, not confuse them. He sought to encourage them, not unsettle them. He longed to correct the errors that the false teachers have inflicted on them and to restore the joy they’ve lost because of these false teachers.
That’s exactly what I long to do. You’ll hear things that are going to confuse you, you’re going to hear things that are going to disturb you. You come here and I want to lift you up to the very throne room of God. Why? Because false teaching leads to anxiety and fear. False teaching leads people into disobeying the truth of the scripture. False teaching causes discouragement and disheartenment.
So listen to me as I finish. Deception abounds. I don’t have to tell you that. Deception abounds. But you, stand for the truth. You, uphold the truth. You, speak the truth. You, proclaim the truth. Let me remind you of this as I close. The truth is not determined by emotions or even by the crushing circumstances or a persuasive, smooth-talking, great communicating preacher. The truth is determined only, only, only by the Word of God. Can I get an «amen»?