Turn with me to the book of Nehemiah, and I’d like to look at Nehemiah chapter 10 this morning, and possibly get into some of the things in chapter 11. Nehemiah was written by Nehemiah at the time that Ezra and Nehemiah came back in to Israel after the nation of Israel had been taken away into captivity, and they’d returned to the land, and Ezra had returned before Nehemiah to rebuild the temple, and Nehemiah had come at the order of the king of Persia to be able to rebuild the walls of the city of Jerusalem. We’ve been looking at how that has been going.
Throughout the building of the walls, Nehemiah has constantly met with opposition. Satan always is there to oppose those of God’s people who are seeking to accomplish God’s will, and he had three particular men, Samballot, Tobiah, and Geshem, that stood against Nehemiah and tried to discourage him from within the camp of the Israelites by trying to tempt Nehemiah himself to try and get them to stop building the walls. But the walls have been completed.
But there’s still a problem. The problem is the hearts of the people. At the completion of the walls, as we saw last week and the week before, Nehemiah gathered the priests, and specifically he called upon Ezra to read the word of God, and then he called on the Levites to teach the word of God, that the people could know what God’s commands were to them and why they had actually been dispatched and removed from the land for 70 years.
It was because of their lack of belief and obedience to God’s will and word. They were supposed to honor the Lord every seventh year with a year of rest. During this year of rest, the people were supposed to be forgiving the debts of their fellow countrymen.
If someone had become an indentured servant to another Israelite during that time, they were to set them free. They were to do a lot of things. One of the specific things they were to do was let the land rest.
This was not only God allowing the land to rest for his purposes, but it was also to show a trust on the people’s part that they believed that God could provide for them even though they weren’t working the land that year. It had a lot to do with faith and trust. Well, they hadn’t done that for 490 years.
They had not let the land rest as God had told them. And so he had taken them away into captivity for 70 years. When they came back, there was still the problem of the heart.
I want to tell you that one of the things that we have in America today is we see that things are changing in many areas. And people are encouraged. But I just want to tell you that there is still a heart issue in America.
And people need to understand that the issues of the heart begin with God’s people, that they need to have a repentant heart and a desire to seek and serve the Lord and do His will above all else. And that from there it can reach out and those that are not God’s people can see the difference in the hearts of God’s people and can be drawn to the power of God to transform the heart and the life of a man or a woman. I want you to know the greatest miracle that you’ll probably ever see is not the healing of a body, the taking away of a disease.
It’s not the transformation of a land where all of a sudden a land as we saw that was under great oppression now has a degree of freedom that we hadn’t experienced for a few years. But the greatest miracle of all is the transformation of the human heart from one that is rebellious against God into one that not only worships Him but loves Him and serves Him out of the free will of His heart. I mentioned before, our concept of heart has been tainted by Hollywood.
Hollywood makes the heart just a seat of emotions and it’s all a bunch of feelings. Sadly to say today in the church, the church has adopted much of that view of heart and they’ve been influenced by the world and not understanding the biblical view of what the heart is. Jews didn’t say and deal with the heart, they dealt with the bowels.
And you’ll see in scripture it says the bowels and it’s referring to a transformation in a character and they don’t deal with the heart. In America, the church’s view of the heart has become one of feelings and emotions and much of our current Christianity is based on feelings and emotions. You see the people, a number of years ago we were listening, my wife and I were just at a conference in 1987, just saw one of the messages that was given at that conference by Dave Hunt and as Mr. Hunt gave that message, he was talking about the impact of ungodliness on the church.
And he was calling for a new reformation to occur in the church where people would reform their thinking and turn back to God and abandon all the influences that had tainted our perspective of who God is. One of the things that he brought out was psychology at the time, brought a number of different examples from psychology, but psychology had influenced the church because people believed that they could only get answers from man instead of God’s word. One of the things he mentioned was how the pastors didn’t feel they could any longer have anything to say to the people that they were working with because they just had the Bible, they needed to go back to school and be trained by Freud and Jung and Rogers and all of the man-centered thinking of psychology.
And many, many pastors have done that. But out of that came a whole movement that turned people away from repentance and turning to Christ and looking to within their hearts and seeking direction from within their own lives instead of turning to God and His word. As Nehemiah was coming to rebuild the walls, the people were downtrodden, they’d been discouraged by all of the things that Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem had been telling them.
And when Nehemiah came, he came with encouraging words that the Lord would be the one to rebuild the walls. They would be the instruments that God used. As the walls have been completed, he now wants to deal with their hearts.
And let’s turn to chapter 10. In the first portion of that chapter, the first 17 verses give the names of a number of individuals who are willing to sign a new covenant that they have just ratified this new covenant. This covenant has come out of the repentance of the people.
And I want us to look this morning at what the covenant dealt with, why it was significant, and what was significant in these men signing their names to this covenant. They were saying, we’re not just going to give it lip service, but we really mean what we say. Some of the things that the nation of Israel had been involved with, number one, desecration of the worship of the Lord in the temple.
They had brought in false gods and worshipped false gods. That had gone all the way back and began at the time of Solomon. It was intensified as Solomon gained more and more wives, and he introduced this false worship into the land.
After the time of Solomon, you had the dividing of the kingdom, the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah, Jeroboam I, when he became the first leader of the northern kingdom, the first thing he did was establish false centers of worship, false priests, false means of worship, false sacrifice, and encouraged the northern kingdom to be involved with it and to never go to Jerusalem again. After that, the kings only got worse and worse until they manifested themselves in the time of Ahab. And Ahab was probably the worst king of the northern kings, although they were all bad, because Ahab married Jezebel, who was the daughter of a Sidonian, and she worshipped Baal and really was a Baal priestess, and introduced false worship, the sacrifice of children, and human sacrifice into Israel, and it became awful.
God took them away into Assyria. Judah, the southern kingdom, observed it all. And yet, what did they do? They listened to what Solomon had done, and they established false centers of worship.
And even though they had a number of good kings who sought to bring revival to the land and reform to the nation, as we studied the last few weeks, we saw that even during all of that reform that was brought under Josiah, the last good king of Israel, or the southern kingdom of Judah, the people still had idols in their homes and worshipped false gods while giving lip service to God. As the nation now has the walls surrounding Jerusalem, the houses are in shambles that need to be repopulated, but it will never happen if the people’s hearts aren’t turned to God.
Nehemiah 10:28-39
And the rest of the people and the priests and the Levites and the porters and the singers and the Nephilims, and all they that had separated themselves from the people of the lands unto the law of God, their wives, their sons, and their daughters, everyone having knowledge and having understanding, they claimed to their brethren, their nobles, and entered into the curse and into an oath to walk in God’s law, which was given by Moses, the servant of God, and to observe and do all the commandments of the Lord, our Lord, and his judgments and his statutes. And that we would not give our daughters unto the people of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons. And if the people of the land bring any ware or victuals on the Sabbath way to sell, that we will not buy it of them on the Sabbath or on the holy day, that we would leave the seventh year and the extraction of every debt, also we made ordinances for us to charge ourselves yearly with the third part of the shekel for the service of the house of our God, for the showbread and for the continual meat offering and for the continual burnt offering of the Sabbaths, of the new moons and of the feasts, for the holy things and for the sin offerings to make an atonement for Israel and for all the work of the house of our God. And we cast the lots among the priests and the Levites and the people for the wood offering to bring it into the house of our God over the houses of our fathers at times appointed year by year to burn upon the altar of the Lord our God as it is written in the law. And to bring first fruits from our ground and the first fruits from all the fruit of all the trees year by year unto the house of the Lord. Also the first born of our sons and our cattle as it is written in the law and the first things of our herds and of the flocks and to bring it to the house of our God unto the priests and the ministers of the house of our God.
And that we should bring the first fruits of our dough and our offerings and the fruit of all manner of trees, of wine and of oil unto the priests and the chambers of the house of our God and the tithes of our ground unto the Levites that the same Levites might have tithes in all the cities of our village. And the priest, the son of Aaron, shall be with the Levites when the Levites take tithes and the Levites will bring up the tithe of the tithes into the house of our God to the chambers into the treasure of the house. For the children of Israel and the children of Levi shall bring the offering of corn and the new wine and oil unto the chambers where they are the vessels of the sanctuary and the priests that minister and the porters and the singers and we shall not forsake the house of our God.
Father, I pray that you speak to us through your word this morning help us understand what Israel is doing. Lord, we're not Jewish and we're not under the law but we're to have a heart of worship and we're to have a heart to follow you. Speak to us through your word this morning, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen
There were three main areas that Israel had totally neglected and turned their back on. The first was they allowed mixed marriages.
God had said they were never to have mixed marriages and especially there were certain groups of people that they were never to be married to. Two of them were the Moabites and the Ammonites. Even though the Moabites and the Ammonites were distant cousins of the Israelites because they were descendants of Lot who was a nephew of Abram.
We see that God had specifically told them because of the way that the Ammonites and the Moabites had treated Israel when God was bringing them out of Egypt and into the promised land they had to pass by Moab and Ammon to get to the promised land. And they had sought to bring harm to Israel. They had sought to prevent them from gaining access to the promised land.
They sought to bring curses upon Israel. Remember Balaam the false prophet was hired by Balak the king of Moab to bring a curse on Israel but God would not allow him to curse Israel. Every time he tried to curse Israel he would bless it.
But at the end when he could not curse it and Balak was getting extremely angry with him he said, I will tell you this, this is how you destroy Israel. You cause your daughters to marry their sons and your sons to marry their daughters. And God will judge them because of it.
That’s exactly what Balak did. He encouraged mixed marriages with the nation of Israel and it brought about a group of people who didn’t know God and God judged them. So we see that the home was under constant attack by Satan and those countries that were under his dominion of religious systems that stood against God.
The second area that we see is that they quit giving to the support of the temple. They quit giving and what God, the whole temple worship system was based on the giving of the people. And it wasn’t to be a giving that was forced on them but really it was to be a giving from their hearts.
The first fruits were acknowledgement and a trust and a worship of God from the hearts of the people. That they believed that God was going to give them more than just the first. And they would give him the best trusting that he would meet their needs.
Only quit doing that. But not only that, we see that God had established a means by which the priests were to take care of the temple. They were to take care of leading the worship.
They were to do the sacrifices. And they were to be a sacrificial system that was all pointing to the cross of Christ. If you study and look at, go back and read how God established the sacrificial system under Moses and what the elements of it were and what the purpose of it was it number one showed man’s need of a savior.
It showed that man had a sin problem and there needed to be sacrifice offered for that sin. But the manner in which it was established at the temple was a continual sacrifice. It needed to be done all the time.
The same sacrifices done over and over and over. Yom Kippur comes every year. The day of atonement came every year.
But it was all pointing to the fact there had to be a better covenant. And God had told through the prophets that there was coming a new covenant. A new covenant where there would be one sacrifice once and for all.
Sunday mornings we’re studying, going through the book of Hebrews. We’re just about done with it in the adult Sunday school class. And the whole purpose of the book of Hebrews being written was written to the Hebrews.
Who are the Hebrews? The Jewish people. Why? When the book of Hebrews was being written the temple was still existing. The second temple that was built by Ezra and how it had been re-added onto and made much more attractive under Herod the Great.
That was still standing when the book of Hebrews was written. And the people were confused. There were Jews that were not Christians.
They were wondering who is this Jesus and we still have the temple. And then there were the Christians who needed to understand the finality of Jesus’ sacrifice. And the whole book of Hebrews is written and if you read that you will see that Jesus is greater than the law.
Jesus is greater than the high priest. Jesus is greater than the priest system. Jesus is greater than the sacrifices that the priests continually made.
And Jesus is the sacrifice that God had promised way back when man first entered the Garden of Eden that would come and that he would come to crush the serpent’s head and make atonement for man’s sin. When they started perverting the temple worship they were taking their eyes off of the ultimate goal of the temple worship pointing to the cross of Christ and they say we can do it our way the way we want to do it when we want to do it. So the people came and the second thing that they needed to reform was they needed to look and get the temple worship back in order.
They needed to get the offerings back in order. And the third thing they needed to do was get their view of God in order. And those are three things that God has to deal with in the hearts of men continually.
Number one, the destruction of the family. Number two, the destruction of proper worship. And number three, our proper perspective of God.
I want to tell you, they went back and looked at what the Word of God had said in all three of these areas. And these men who signed this letter agreeing to this covenant that they’re making with the Lord saw the importance of going back and doing it God’s way. What can they learn from this? Because this is the law, this is Israel, this is not us.
We can learn a lot. The church has the same problem that the nation of Israel did. We have, number one, significance of the family.
Number two, a proper understanding of worship. And number three, a proper perspective of God. The church today has got the same problems.
One of the things that you see happening in our culture today, and rightfully, you’re seeing a lot of things happening that are good, but they’re also creating a lot of confusion in the minds of many people about what is truth. I remember reading Francis Schaeffer who wrote a book way back in the late 70s, early 80s. And at that time, he was becoming very involved with the pro-life movement, a very important movement because God values life.
Every man, woman, and child in this world is created in the image of God. Life is sacred. That’s what is happening in the Middle East is so disgusting and diabolical.
When you look at ISIS and Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, they have no value on life. They’re demonic. And the thing is, Francis Schaeffer was seeing the church, the evangelical church, really not taking much of a stand on life.
And at the heart of the pro-life movement is family. But one of the warnings he gave was he said, you can take a stand on the right issue, but you have to realize you may be identifying with the wrong people. And he called them co-belligerents.
And what he meant is people who had the right perspective on an issue, but they didn’t have a right perspective on everything. And really, when it came apart from that issue, they may be your enemies over here. The evangelical Bible-believing church today needs to understand what Francis Schaeffer was saying.
They need to have a proper perspective of God, they need to have a proper perspective of worship, and they need to have a proper perspective of the family. I like to listen to a young man, young compared to me. He’s got a daily radio show in town here, and he interviews a lot of people, stands for a lot of right issues, but I’m very concerned with one of the things I’ve been hearing him say.
He has proclaimed to be a Bible-believing evangelical Christian who’s given his heart to the Lord when he was a young man, a teenager. God has used him tremendously to do and speak about the issues that are happening in our nation today. But one of the things that’s been happening is he’s been beginning to be confused, in my perspective, in the things he’s saying, in that today he says he enjoys going to a Roman Catholic church because of the beauty that’s there.
He enjoys going and seeing what’s happening. We’ve got a little booklet out there that talks, written by a man who understood the difference between Roman Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity believes the Bible, they believe Jesus is the only and final sacrifice that is ever given, and it’s once and for all. Evangelical Christians believe the word of God when it says that Jesus came and he is the only mediator between God and man.
We believe what the Bible says, when it says that corruption would not touch him. And when he was placed in the grave, he rose again from the dead, his body did not rot. The little booklet back there talks about the difference between the Catholic Mass and the Lord’s Supper.
I want you to know, Roman Catholicism has not changed its view on the Catholic Mass since they were putting Christians to death in Europe for not taking it. The Roman Catholic Church has not changed their view on indulgences, it’s just that they do it different ways today than they did when they were introduced to line the pockets of the popes, cardinals and priests and church leaders in Europe at the expense of people, and saying that they were somehow imparting graces onto them if the people would buy them. The Roman Catholic Church hasn’t changed its doctrine, it’s just built on it and it made it worse.
Back at the time of Luther, they weren’t worshipping and adoring Mary, that came later. Today, they worship her, she is called the Redemptress with Jesus. My Bible says she is a woman that was a sinner that needed to be saved and she cried out and said, My Savior and my Lord, she is not the mother of God.
And the body and blood does not call down from heaven of Jesus Christ and manifest itself in the wafer and wine in the Catholic Mass. But yet today, Evangelicals, just listen, there are more Roman Catholics that are taking right stands on moral issues. And I’m glad they’re taking the stands, but they need to get their lives straight with God.
They need to be saved too. And it doesn’t help when you’ve got people that are strong voices for conservatism and proclaim to be Bible-believing Christians that say, I identify with Roman Catholicism, I think it’s cool. Tell that to all the martyrs that lost their life.
I was listening, there was a young mother during the Middle Ages, and she was brought up before the church because she would not take the Mass. She said, This, my Bible tells me Jesus’ body never suffered corruption. You take that wafer and you set it on that table and leave it there for three days and the worms will come and the mold will come and it will be corrupt.
That is not the body of Christ. I will not take it. And no priest can call Jesus down from heaven and change him into the body and blood of Christ.
And she was put to death for her conviction. But today, there’s nothing seen much different because there’s a stand on the right issues today. But you also had a Pope that wanted to be a one-worlder.
He wanted a one-world government. And I can guarantee you the Pope that we’ve got now is going to be just the same or worse because he was placed by the previous Pope because that Pope put into place the majority of the cardinals that elected this Pope. Their doctrine hasn’t changed.
But somehow, simply because we stand on the right issues together on abortion, on child abuse, but yet they have that in their own church. But the thing is, we’ve got an improper view of doctrine which impacts our view of worship. And it impacts our view of God.
The whole concept of the family, the importance of the family. People say the Catholic Church is very important. It supports the family.
In some ways they do. In some ways more than the Evangelical Church has because the Evangelical Church bought into the lies of the world. Many churches bought into the lies of the world and said you should only have one or two children if you have any at all because we’ve got a global crisis of not enough food and not enough… No trust in God and no belief in his word.
The word of God says that a righteous man’s quiver is full of arrows and the arrows are his children. And children are a blessing from God. And yet the church will believe the green earth people and their deals about climate change and all this other stuff.
And many churches do. Way back when my wife and I were a lot younger than we are today, there was a group that was called Sojourners that had come out and they were promoting all of the really anti-God philosophies in the name of Christ. And many churches were influenced by it.
They were the socialist communists that were influencing the Christian church under the name of Christianity. There were some of them that were affiliated and brought the same message. There was a man by the name of Anthony Campalo who was a funny speaker.
He was very entertaining when he preached. But he was very anti-God when you looked at his doctrine. He claimed to be a Baptist and he taught at a Baptist school out on the east coast.
But he was bringing a message to undermine and destroy the truth of God’s word in God’s people’s hearts. We need to understand the nation of Israel had the same thing happen to them. They had people come and say, well, just believe this.
It’s a lot like what you believe, but look it. God is so harsh. No, God is true.
Now, as you look at this, how does this impact worship? And how does it impact our view of God? And why do we need to be in agreement to change our perspective and I trust you have a right perspective now. But why does the church as a whole need to change its perspective of worship and its view of God? As I was listening, re-listening to Dave Hunt’s message from 1987, it brought back a lot of memories on how he pointed out how the church was being undermined and destroyed. Francis Schaeffer did the same thing.
He wrote the last book he wrote was called The Great Evangelical Disaster. The cover of the book spoke very well of the situation. The cover of the book, the artwork on the cover of the book had a beautiful little church sitting with a well-manicured lawn, nice little trees, picket fence.
And they’re sitting on this lawn, but underneath the ground had been taken away and it was sitting on this small spindle of earth just waiting to topple over and just be destroyed. They thought they were something they weren’t. They looked at the outside and they didn’t examine what was going on inside.
Same problem that Jesus found when he came to earth with the Pharisees. On the outside, they did everything according to the law, but they had never examined their hearts. They’d never gone and examined their wills, their minds, their emotions.
Had they been given to the Lord and were they following God’s will? Were they doing God’s purposes? Or were they simply trying to put on airs? He said the great evangelical disaster is our desire to be conformed and not rocked a bowl. Christians today, are you willing to rock the boat when it comes to truth? Are you willing to share the gospel with someone because they need to hear it and there’s no way they’re going to get to heaven unless they hear the gospel, unless they give their heart to the Lord. They’re not going to get to heaven on their own good works.
And they’re not going to get to heaven because they cried at a movie that made them feel emotionally all strung out. They’re only going to get to heaven through the blood of Jesus. They’re only going to get to heaven through a proper perspective of worship and doctrine and belief, which results in a proper relationship, which turns into a proper life.
But what happened is the church became concerned with numbers and influence. And instead of trusting God and calling on the name of God, they looked at the world on how do you build a church? How do you influence a culture? A number of years ago, I read about two little old women who lived on some islands off the coast of England. And there was a well-known evangelical preacher in England.
And they were praying that this man would come to their little island and bring revival messages. And they prayed and prayed. And they wrote letters saying, God has laid in our burden that you’re supposed to come.
It always worked out he could never come. But they kept praying. Of course, they knew nobody else on the islands were praying that God would bring a man that could bring a message that would turn the hearts of the people back to him.
But one day, this man just felt convicted that he had to go and he went. And revival broke out on these little islands. It wasn’t because the church had formed a committee.
And it wasn’t because they had all this planning. But it was because two old women trusted God and believed that he answered their prayers. And God had laid it on their hearts to be concerned for their neighbors, their family, and those around them.
You read about when God’s had great movements, part of the problem, part of the thing that’s happened when the movements come is that people get a burden for the Lord and they begin to pray. What happens when you get a burden from the Lord and you begin to pray? It shows that number one, you’re not trusting in yourself, but you’re trusting in God and his ability to move. The sad thing is, I think today there’s a whole lot of planning and not a lot of prayer.
And consequently, what you have is you have a lot of people that say, I’m a Christian. But when you ask them to verbalize what it means to be a Christian and what it means to live your Christian life and what it means to walk with the Lord, they struggle. And they say, well, I do all of these things.
I’m right on this issue. I’m right on this issue. I’m right on this issue.
But what about your daily walk with Jesus? People that Nehemiah brought, I came back to to rebuild the wall. He needed to restore their understanding of what it is to worship God. It’s not just to do the right things, but it’s to do the right things for the right purpose and with the right heart.
And then he had to change their view of who God is. Is God big enough today to still hear and answer prayers of Christians today? Or did somehow God change because it’s the 21st century and we’ve got AI and we’ve got computers and we’ve got cell phones and we’ve got all this other stuff. And so somehow God is different today.
God didn’t know about this stuff. If you look at the Bible, God knew all about it. Matter of fact, he knew more about how they were going to control our money supply at the last days and be able to cut off your ability to buy and sell.
And how could they ever do that when every country had their own currency and currency was based on gold and silver? How is he going to do that? Well, he can do it today with Bitcoin and electronic economics and electronic currency. God knew that. He knew it was going to happen.
He knew things were even being put in place today for it to happen. So do we wring our hands? No, we realize God is powerful in the same today as he was yesterday. And he can hear and answer my prayers today.
And so if I’ve got loved ones that aren’t safe, I need to get on my knees and start praying. And I need to understand that the Bible’s got answers for and solutions for the world’s problems and it’s got answers and solutions for my problems. And I need to ask God to help me to understand those solutions and not look to the world.
And so that’s what these men agreed to do. They agreed to number one, quit marrying so that they wouldn’t have these families. It would be have the whole perspective of God to be destroyed in the home, because the home is the strongest place that we are to have to teach our children and our grandchildren who God is and to live it out before them.
That’s exactly what Israel is to do. That’s what Christians are to do. Many Christians have lost sight of that.
Secondly, they came in and they begin to reestablish the temple worship properly, the sacrifices properly, the gifts properly, the offerings properly, because they realized that God had established it for a certain perspective and was all pointing to the coming Messiah, the Jesus, the Messiah, the promised one, and that they needed to do that. And so they began to change that. And then thirdly, they begin to change the perspective of God.
They realized that God had brought them back, called them out of captivity and brought them back exactly when he said he would bring them back. He said he was going to allow them to rebuild the temple. They were rebuilding the temple and had rebuilt the temple.
He was going to allow them to rebuild the walls. They had rebuilt the walls and they were completed, just as he said, and that was directly tied again to the coming Messiah, and you can read about it in Daniel. And all of these things they begin to see in the perspective of God begin to change.
God is who he says he is. He is the one that is worthy of our worship and praise. He is the one that is worthy of our sacrifice and giving of our lives to.
And I need to be, have holy and righteous fear of him and not fear of the world. Many Christians would rather appease the world than they’d appease God. The Israelites, when they signed this covenant, saying, no, we’re turning back to believing God.
God isn’t asking us to sign the second covenant, but he is asking us to change our heart and our world view and not be influenced by an ungodly world and actors all around us, even who come in the name of Christ. Jesus said in the last days, the greatest problem believers would have is the deception that would be all around them. He said, many will come in my name.
Many will stand before him and say, Lord, Lord, I’ve done this and this and this. And you say, I never knew you. Why? Because they never believed in the true and the living God.
They were doing what they thought was the right thing, but for the wrong motive and the wrong purpose. We are called to have the right motive, the right purpose, proper doctrine and a proper perspective of who God is and live our lives in a manner which will bring honor and glory to him. Let’s just close in prayer.
Lord, I pray that you would just help us to understand and to learn from the covenant that Israel made with you when they came back under Nehemiah to rebuild the walls and help us to see the importance that we walk, sold out to you and not to a world system that comes disguised as you. And Lord, that you would give us discerning hearts and spirits that we could tell the difference. This we’d ask in Jesus name.