America’s Turning: From Truth to Immorality
May 24, 2024
Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Guest: Dr. George Barna
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program originally aired on 5/24/24. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning this dialogue.
Sam Rohrer: Well hello and welcome to this Friday edition of Stand In the Gap Today, and it’s also our monthly culture and values update focused program, which we do generally once a month with our special friend and guest, Dr. George Barna, who is now professor at Arizona Christian University, where he’s also the director of research at the Cultural Research Center there at Arizona Christian University. Now the title I’ve chosen to frame our discussion today between Dr. Barna and Dr. Isaac Crockett and myself regarding the latest research conducted by him released to the cultural research center is this. And here’s the title, America’s Turning From Truth to Immorality. Now, for all of you listening are watching me right now, I would say we all know that the America of today, our America of today is not even remotely like it was in so many ways, even 10 years ago or let alone 40 years ago.
Sam Rohrer: And as the Bible indicates and records so clearly for our learning and admonition today, the nation of Israel is a comparison for all nations of all time, particularly I think for America. That nation, as we know, experienced the blessings of God in a unique way, but they walked away from God into the face of God’s judgment and really affords to us, I think a direct comparison, a good comparison, A reminder to the America of our day, to Israel. The nation had been the recipient of a covenant promise from God and an assurance from him of his amazing blessings attached with a warning not to forget God when the blessings would actually come. But we know from history within 40 years, a generation or so forgot God and lost their blessings while America’s founders made a covenant with God and we have been blessed, but we’re now being judged America like Israel was a nation who thought that they had experienced well.
Sam Rohrer: They knew that they had experienced remarkable delivery from the hands of their enemies. They had seen it over and over again. They’d been given a land flowing with milk and honey. They had a promise that if they formally embraced and obeyed God’s moral laws, that they could be guaranteed of God’s blessings such as security from the enemy and health and international respect and so much more. That is called out there in many places in the Old Testament. But we know that within a generation again or so, they would throw it all away. And in America we would remove that moral law, those 10 commandments literally ripping them off of our classroom walls and removing them from the hearts and the minds of our people and as a roadmap for our national leaders. So it’s with this look back and parallel consideration that I frame today’s program. And with that, George, I’d like to welcome you back to the program. Great to have you back.
George Barna: Well, Isaac and Sam, great to be with both of you. Thank you,
Sam Rohrer: George. In your latest worldview inventory research and it’s marked release three, and I’m looking at it here now, you’ve entitled, explaining America’s 40 year drop in the biblical worldview, and then you go on to how to reverse that decline. That’s all part of that title, but you’ve included a whole lot more information than we can cover comprehensively today on this program, but it does raise some questions and implications, a few of which I’d like to walk through if we could. Overall, just to frame it from a 10,000 foot level, can you provide for a brief overview of this release and if you could, how it fits along with release number one and number two?
George Barna: Sure. Release number one really had to do with the fact that if you look at what’s going on in our nation, you study the worldview of people, which is so critical because that’s what determines the choices that everybody makes every moment of every day. We filter all those opportunities through our worldview and we make our choices accordingly. Well, as we’ve been studying that this year’s American Worldview inventory really drove home the point to me that as I read the news and listen to news and whatnot, we’re so focused on politics, so focused on governments and public policy thinking that that’s what’s going to restore unity and a sense of peace for our population. But the fact of the matter is that’s not going to do it at all. What we really need is a consensual moral center that will bring us together as a nation.
George Barna: Right now we’re so divided and you can see that in terms of our worldview choices that we’re making, 92% of Americans are tists. And as we did the research, what we found is as you put together a synchronistic worldview, meaning that you’re drawing from many different worldviews, what we see is that ultimately people are drawing from an average of about nine different worldviews. And often the worldviews that we’re drawing from not only compete with each other, but they conflict with each other. And so you look at a biblical worldview, only 4% of Americans are there. What are we drawing from? There are four theistic worldviews that we found people were drawing from biblical worldview, Judaism, Islam, moralistic, therapeutic deism, as well as four atheistic worldviews, nihilism, Marxism, secular humanism, satanism, as well as for polytheistic worldviews, eastern mysticism, Mormonism, wca, animism. And then we throw in an agnostic worldview, postmodernism.
George Barna: So it’s no wonder that we’re confused. It’s no wonder that we’re at odds with each other because we can’t even define a consistent moral truth for ourselves to follow much less the rest of the culture. And so what that’s produced is our differences in how all of us view things like truth and purpose and the success and the goodness of humanity, morality, judgment, eternity, the role of Jesus Christ, the significance of Christ. And then the second release builds on that, looking at all of these different worldviews, showing some of the major declines that we’ve been experiencing in terms of our beliefs related to absolute moral truth, the existence, the nature, the holiness of God, the sin, nature of humanity, what we believe about lying and abortion and stealing and more. And so the point of those was to be directing us toward the idea that don’t look to Washington DC to save the nation and certainly don’t look toward it to have policies that are going to save your soul. What we need is a spiritual awakening in America. And so that’s what led to this particular release, which specifically is looking at morality in America. What do we think is good? What do we think is bad? On what basis do we make those judgments? And what are some of those judgments that are leading us astray and placing a wedge between us and other Americans?
Sam Rohrer: George, that’s excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that intrigues you a little bit to stay with us for the balance of the program because we’re all looking for something better. Are we not? We’re in an election year. What are people looking towards? Are they hoping that somebody is going to be elected that’s going to change our circumstance without looking to what God says is necessary to change our circumstance? That’s to the heart of what we’re going today. When we come back, we’re going to move actually into this research and quantify the conditions, some of which George is talking to. Well, if you’re just joining us today, thanks for being a part of this Friday program. Dr. George Barna is our special guest today along with Dr. Isaac Crockett and myself. And our theme is America’s Turning from Truth to Immorality, and we’re unpack this a little bit more of what that actually means.
Sam Rohrer: It’s based on some of Georgia’s latest research report Number three, actually it is. And that website you can find all of that is cultural research center.com, cultural research center.com. And there is all of the research that we break on this program of which Dr. George Barna oversees there at the Cultural Research Center can be found at that site for more information. Now when it comes to cultural values and worldview indicators, which we’ve already talked about and we will further break out here today, every nation in every civilization since creation has embraced some sort of set of values arising from some identifiable worldview. And while worldview, which we talk about a lot, and George measures as a part of his research, those worldview and values measured in quantifiable terms such as we’ll talk about here today and we talk about regularly may not have been done in the past and at least we don’t have the official history of civilizations now gone and past civilizations.
Sam Rohrer: So we can though to some degree measure what they did by observing what they had written down relative to their laws and their public policies, maybe court decisions and that kind of thing. But from a biblical perspective, evaluating people, evaluating nations, God measures nations and people, as far as I can tell from scripture, he only has two different categories, classifications, they’re the same two categories that are ascribed to individuals and political leaders alike. Proverb 29 2 says this, for when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice. But when the evil bear rule, the people mourn now the righteous one category, they fear God and keep his commandments. We know that from scripture, the evil though rebel against God and they despise God’s moral law. Those evil ultimately become the majority they really do. That says in scripture as occurred before the day of Noah’s foot as an example, there were only eight people in Noah’s household that were righteous.
Sam Rohrer: The rest of the world was evil and they lost their lives. The Bible also says that in the days leading up to Christ’s second coming, which is the days just ahead of us, that it would be marked by a very similarity to the people of Noah’s time who just did what was right in their own eyes and they did it continuously. So with that in place, George, in your report, you state this quote, data from the American Worldview Inventory 2024 show a dramatic shift in morals. You then cite three broad areas and let’s just kind of walk through and consider them if we can at this point. Here’s the first one that you say. You said this, A majority of adults now except lying, abortion, consensual intercourse between unmarried adults, gay marriage, and the rejection of absolute moral truth as morally acceptable. So here’s my question, would you please share some more key information about who are these people? What did you find and what’s it actually mean to accept lying, abortion, consensual intercourse between married adults and so forth?
George Barna: Well, yeah, we could get bogged down in a lot of data. I’ll try not to do that. I don’t want people’s eyes to cross here while they’re listening, but there are some patterns that became very clear because they were so consistent with all of these things that we were measuring whether people think that lying is morally acceptable, abortion, morally acceptable, consensual intercourse, et cetera, all these things. What we found is, let me just fix on four patterns in particular. One of those is that the younger a person is, and I looked at this primarily by generation, but the younger a generation is the more likely they are to reject biblical truth, biblical standards. So we found that generation Z, those who are under the age of 21 right now, 21 and under, they were the least likely to say that there’s a moral problem with any of these behaviors that were identifying.
George Barna: They were slightly worse off in their moral perceptions than millennials who were somewhat worse off than people from Gen X who were worse off than people from the boomer generation who were worse off than people from the elders generation. So it was a very clear and consistent pattern. We can switch gears and look at another way of looking at it. Who are these people? Why do they think this way? How do they get there? Well, we could look at people in terms of their religious connections, what kind of church they’re associated with, what types of churches they attend most frequently. There again, a very consistent pattern where we found that Catholics were least likely to embrace biblical morality on all of these behaviors that we were looking at. The next worst were mainline Protestants, very similar to Catholics, a few percentage points different on most of these indicators.
George Barna: And then there was a fairly sizable gap between Catholics and mainline Protestants versus evangelicals and charismatics. And so that’s another way of slicing the data. A third way of looking at it would be a person’s personal beliefs, religious beliefs. And here what we found, again, some pretty clear demarcations, the best of the lot, biblically speaking, were born again Christians far from perfect on every one of these indicators, but they were the best of the group that I’m going to allude to here. They were trailed by what we describe as notional Christians, people who call themselves Christians, but they’re not relying upon Jesus for their eternal salvation, more so they’re likely to say It’s because of my good behavior. I tried really hard or more of a universalistic perspective. God loves all the people he created. He’s not going to make us suffer eternally. Those are notional Christians.
George Barna: So morally speaking, they’re much more lax than born again Christians would be. And then the two groups that were by far least likely to embrace biblical morality would be Americans who are associated with non-Christian faith groups, whether that’s Judaism, Scientology, whatever it may be. And then the least likely of all are the group we call the don’ts. People who say they don’t know if God exists, they don’t believe that God exists or they don’t care if there’s a God that exists. Those are the people who are most likely to completely take morality into their own hands. One final group that I’ll identify integrated disciples, people who have a biblical worldview, humongous differences related to morality compared to people who do not have a biblical worldview. The issue here is that only 4% of American adults have a biblical worldview. 96% have other worldviews, and because of their inclination to follow those other worldviews, they’re not typically inclined to embrace biblical morality.
Isaac Crockett: So George, the second summary point building on this morality or lack thereof says less than half of all adults embrace the Bible as their primary guide to morality. And then kind of goes on in a very similar point. It says that a minority of these people that are embracing things and minority believe that every moral choice either honors or dishonor God. So again, are we talking about is this the same group of people that’s seeing this morality and what kind of impact does that have on our culture as a result of what you’re seeing?
George Barna: Yeah, I mean what we found is exactly the same patterns. The younger the person, the more likely they are to reject biblical morality. The less Bible centric of churches that you attend, the less likely you are to embrace biblical morality. Same thing with whether you’re born again or not, whether you’re an integrated disciple or not. And what difference does all of this make? Well, it has to do with redefining culture through our choices. Culture is nothing more than the accumulation of the choices of the people within it. And so if what we’ve got is a growing proportion of people who say, yeah, I know the Bible’s out there, but I’m not going to live according to it. I’m going to develop my own standards and I’m going to follow those, well, that’s going to change everything about our nation. And we can see that in terms of where we turn for guidance, how we measure how we’re doing, what kind of accountability exists.
George Barna: And some of the consequences of that are things like, well, therefore we reject the idea of the rule of law. Why? Because we’re rejecting the idea of some kind of supernatural or greater authority than ourselves. We’re changing the way that we parent our children because of our shifts in morality. Our whole approach to relationships has been tainted by the fact that we reject what God said, morality, and I’m sorry. Yeah, morality should be because our connection with other people depends on who we believe is right or wrong. What we believe is right or wrong, what kind of lifestyle is right or wrong. So I mean these kind of moral shifts have dramatic implications for everything in our
Sam Rohrer: Nation, George. They sure do. And I’m sure all of you listening to me right now can understand what we’re talking about. And so much as not being said, but enough is being said, when you move away from God’s standard for morality, well then what do you have? Well, you have everyone does that which is right in their own eyes. The further away from absolute truth, the word of God, the more you have everybody his own truth. And I think that’s clear. As we see what’s being phrased here, stay with us. We’ll be back in just a moment, as with all knowledge, and that’s what we’re trying to impart today. But knowledge as it exists, and I’m going to put into that what we’re talking about today, research, honest research, because there’s a lot of dishonest research, but honest research that’s knowledge. But it’s only valuable if it is accurately and truthfully considered.
Sam Rohrer: Does that make sense? That’s what we’re trying to do today. But the Bible makes it clear that if a person decides to pursue the truth, if they want to know the truth, Bible says they will find it. Now, we know that specifically that speaks to matters of salvation, redemption through Jesus Christ, who is the way, the life and the truth. And that comes by true faith in Jesus Christ by believing what God says. Now, that pursuit of truth and that way will lead to the truth, the person of Jesus Christ, that specifically we know ultimately is the most important. But if a person wants to know the truth, even generally as compared to just lies generally, they will find it. And that knowledge will then inform that person, equip them to then to be able to act in accordance with knowledge, based on truth, knowledge, and then wisdom coming as a result to, well, it will always then be in alignment with biblical truth and the fear of God.
Sam Rohrer: So if a person fears God, choose to keep his commandments, he will pursue truth, he will find it. He will then have wisdom to act upon it, make right decisions. But the Bible also says that the fool, now there’s another category, not the wise person, the fool despises wisdom, shuns knowledge, and ultimately embraces eternal death. That is the outcome for the fool who rejects truth. And that’s the thing though in his life, the fool, that person who rejects the truth may believe for the moment, may even believe for many years in their lifetime that they are in fact experiencing the highest of pleasure when it comes to sin, rejection of truth, because we do know that there is pleasure in sin, but for a season short time because the God desser we know and the fool will find that his pleasure is very short-lived and it’s very costly.
Sam Rohrer: So George, in the last segment you shared more of the what of the findings that you talked about there that have dropped in a measurable form over 40 years and you cite that timeframe. But let’s talk now some causes and further implications if you could. How did we get to the point where, again, as you said, quote, a majority of adults now accept lying, abortion, consensual intercourse between unmarried adults, gay marriage, and the rejection of absolute moral truth as morally acceptable. Let’s go to cause how did we get to this point? And then the implications when we see this throughout our culture, you have so few people based on what you said, who understand what is the truth that a change can actually be made to where we are?
George Barna: Well, Sam, let me attack that question this way because I think there are two different ways of looking at that. One of those is you can understand this movement, this shift away from biblical morality generationally. And what I mean by that is we’ve known for a number of years now, 30 years ago I started talking about research I’d done where we discovered that a person’s worldview basically starts developing at 15 to 18 months of age and is generally completely formed by the age of 13. And so if that’s the case, and then add to that data we had from another study, we did a long-term longitudinal study where we tracked people over time and we realized most people die with the same worldview that they had at the age of 13. It’s pretty much intact. They may have changed a few things, they may have changed how they articulate it, refined it a bit, but it’s basically the same.
George Barna: So what that means is over the course of time, if you’re going to see change in worldview, apart from cataclysmic personal or cultural changes that cause us to review and rethink our worldview, you can see what happens based on where a particular generation’s worldview average is, if you will, by the age of 13. And so what we’ve been seeing for the last three or four generations is with each succeeding generation, we’ve had a decline in the number of people in those generations who had a biblical worldview who saw morality through a biblical lens. So we can say, well, it’s due to change in generations, but then I think there’s a second level that we have to look at by asking the question, but what’s causing each generation in succession to in greater numbers, reject God’s ways to reject the Bible? And here’s where we start to look at, okay, well what’s responsible for developing a person’s worldview?
George Barna: We could talk about parenting, we could talk about churches, we could talk about media, we could talk about government technology, all these things. The book I recently put out, raising Spiritual Champions, I go through all that research and talk about that. And we know from that research that parents have essentially outsourced the task of parenting. So they’re allowing other educators to come in, tutors, mentors, coaches, all of these kinds of people to take over the development of different aspects of their child’s life. We can look at churches and the research I’ve been doing on that for four decades now shows that essentially churches ignore children. They’re not so much interested in children as they are in adults. And so they’re not even giving those adults help with the parenting of their children for the most part. They’ll give them games they can play pithy, little sayings they can give them, but in terms of a strategic and intentional process for consistently developing the worldview of their children, very, very few churches based on my research are doing that.
George Barna: We could look at the arts and entertainment media and we know that they’re having the biggest impact of all on the development of our children’s worldview. Why? Because in the course of the short amount of time that they have to convey messages to their audience, particularly children, they can be very consistent. It’s much harder when you’re a parent 24 7, 365 days a year, you have to be consistent or the child rejects you and says they don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re not going to leave me where I need to go. But when they’re watching a movie in 90 minutes, yeah, you can be consistent with your message pretty easy. You’ve had years to develop that script and then to tape it and edit it together so that it all comes together very different than real life. Same thing with music, same thing with video games.
George Barna: Same thing with television programs. A 24 minute program, that’s what a 30 minute TV show is, 24 minutes of that program content. You can be very consistent. Look at government policies. They’re not based on righteousness, they’re not based on biblical truth. They’re based on what will get me the person developing the policy reelected. And so it’s basically a popularity contest with policies. How do I make people think that I’m going to take care of them as opposed to saying, I’m going to give them what God said he wants so that he can take care of them. Technology, it’s given us an abundance of information. We’re overwhelmed with it. The visual modeling that comes with that is very powerful, but it’s basically overwhelming us with information saying all this information is of equal moral value. There are no standards attached to it. So you make the choice on what basis do we make that what feels good and right to us as opposed to what God has said? So that’s how we got in this situation was this confluence of influencers responsible for developing our worldview who basically threw their hands up and said, nah, we’d rather be popular. We’d rather have a lot of people paying attention to us. We’d rather do things that are comfortable for us, easy for us, make us happy, make our audience happy, as opposed to what is truth. And no matter how difficult it is, how can we make sure that we’re obedient to it?
Isaac Crockett: That is very interesting. And I guess it shouldn’t surprise me having read your research and things. I know as a parent even I was teaching in public schools and through you in your research seeing that point about that the worldview is really from 18 months to 12 years old, my wife and I decided, you know what? We’re going to homeschool our children. We use the BJU press curriculum. We started using it when our son, who’s now in ninth grade was in K four. And we’re so glad we have, not only are there test scores off the charts compared to the other students here in New York state where they’re spending $30,000 a student, sometimes people say, oh, you’re missing out. We say, no, we’re not. Our kids’ test scores are better. But even more than that, they have a moral foundation. And I know at our church we’re replanting a little church.
Isaac Crockett: It’s hard sometimes because a lot of parents are looking, well, what does your church do with games and activities for the children? We’re like, well, we are wanting you as parents to invest in your, let’s walk beside you. And then that’s not attractive sometimes to some of the families. But I know when we went through reading through your book, raising Spiritual Champions, there was a lot in it that really, I was super glad for some of the choices I’ve made, and there was a lot in it that even convicted me that I thought I need to do more in this and more in that area. And so as we look at the implications, George, of what your studies are showing about the lack of morality, the lack of standing on the word of God, what does this mean? I mean, whether we’re talking to government leaders, church leaders, families, what are the implications or what are suggestions you have from these findings?
Sam Rohrer: And George, you’re going to have to hold that for the moment. We’re going into our break, and ladies and gentlemen, stay with us. We’ll come back and we will address that plus a little bit more as we try to wrap up this volume of information today. So practical. But again, America’s turning from truth to immorality, how we have moved and moved so far. Is there a way back? We’ll discuss some of that when we come back. Well, before we go into our final segment here, Isaac, I just want to thank you for sharing a bit of what you said in the other segment about the decision that you and your wife Jill have made regarding the raising of your children. Now, my children are already raised. I’ve got grandchildren that are coming along, but my wife and I made the same decision that you did years ago, which others, all those listening to us right now, you’re all in that same boat.
Sam Rohrer: This information we’re talking about here, this knowledge, this fact of how we’ve moved as a nation away from what God says to what we think. And then all this research that George has been talking about that is now, well, George, you’ve been doing it over 30 or 40 years, a long time. So we have a wealth of information goldmine more or less, but only if we do something about it. So Isaac, as you have done with your children, you’ve chosen to use, for instance, the BJU press curriculum because it integrates a biblical worldview as a methodology. But you’re choosing educate your children at home, which is what we did. A lot of sacrifice that requires, but it is worth it in my opinion. And you testified to that. And all these things are all a matter of what we do with knowledge. Now we’ve chosen to act upon what we knew then and would say both of us.
Sam Rohrer: I know because you and I have talked about it, Isaac, we’re very, very thankful for the choices that we’ve made. But ultimately, everybody’s got to make a choice. And Georgette brings me back to this fact here, and that is that in your research and what you said in the last segment was so powerful, ladies and gentlemen, I encourage you to go back to get this program of the last weeks or so, we have been adding automatically a transcript of all of these programs. So you can both hear in audio form in this case today. It’s also in a video form, but the written transcript of what we’re actually saying is also available on our website. So you can have many ways to take a look at it. But there was too much information in that last segment for me to recall it. I encourage you to go back and read it, but George, here it is.
Sam Rohrer: We know that in the big picture, biblical worldview, God laid out a pattern and a standard from the beginning, sin came and interrupted it. The Satan got involved, death came on the world, got a cursed creation. Now, ultimately, that’s going to be made new with a new heaven and new earth down the road here. After tribulation time, the millennial kingdom, we now it’s going to end up, but we’re in this middle time where we’re seeing the outworking of sin. And the Bible does tell us that time would come when right would be wrong and wrong would be called. Right. And up would be down and down would be up an inversion of God’s plan. And that’s been the Satanic attack from the beginning. Now you’re talking about the majority of people in the United States today. They embrace lying and abortion, killing of our babies. Basically, as I read over, it’s basically all of the 10 commandments.
Sam Rohrer: They’re saying, fine, some other God worship whatever we want, kill whoever we want, our babies, immorality, adultery, covetousness, basically all of it. So we’ve seen an inversion. But within that, George, you identified two groups. You already referred to one of them, the integrated disciples, and then you have another one that we’ve talked about before and you talked about in this one, sage cons. Now, here’s my question to you. Those two stand out as going against the culture. Are these two groups the same ones, differentiate, compare, contrast, and then the offering or the hope I would say that they offer in our culture in these days?
George Barna: Okay, well, there’s a lot of overlap between these two groups. Integrated disciples are essentially the 4% of the adult population that has a biblical worldview. Sage cons are the roughly 9% of the adult population who are what we call spiritually active governance, engaged conservative Christians. That’s what SAGE stands for. Spiritually active governance, engaged. And then conservative Christians, they don’t all have a biblical worldview, but most of them are either close to having one or they do have one. And they realize that politics and government is just another dimension of life that the Lord has to be king of for them. They can’t separate it out and say, oh, it’s dirty, it’s evil, it’s corrupt. I don’t want to dirty my hands with that. They know that God has to oversee that as well, and that we as Christians are the ones who have to bring that toward righteousness.
George Barna: So yeah, there’s a lot of similarity between the two groups. But what does it all mean? I think that the big picture conclusion I’d probably draw from the conversation we’ve been having here today is that I bet a lot of people who are listening or watching today or who might read transcripts afterwards, they’re thinking, oh, it’s hopeless. We don’t have enough people. 4%, maybe even at 9% with sage, gods, that’s not enough. You can’t turn it around. You can. God never waited until he had a majority to change any culture that you see him changing in the pages of scripture. And so what does that say to us? A week ago or so, maybe two weeks now, I had the privilege of being the commencement speaker here at Arizona Christian University, and I took the time that I had to remind students that you know what your time here was to prepare you to go out into the world, to be what rich, famous, popular, comfortable, now to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
George Barna: And as a disciple of Jesus, you’re called to engage in the spiritual war every day. So what we’ve done here for the last four years is try to prepare you to be an effective spiritual warrior. And you’ve got to take that warrior mentality into life every day. People who sit back and say, oh, we don’t have enough people who can do this for the kingdom of God. It’s like wrong. God doesn’t need a huge number. He needs a few people who are willing to put it all on the line for him every moment of every day because they know that this life isn’t about them. God created them specifically for this moment, knowing this is the cultural context in which we would have to fight, and knowing that they would have what it takes, his Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, knowledge, experiences, relationships to get the job done.
George Barna: If we’re willing to make the commitment to be that spiritual warrior that God wants to put into the battle. And so that means we’ve got to be committed to Jesus Christ. It means we’ve got to know what’s in the Bible, which means we’ve got to study it, not just once a week, once a month, listen to sermons. That’s good enough for me. No, every single day we have to be not just reading it, but studying it, diving in, digging in, taking notes, praying about it, talking to people about it. We’ve got to apply those truth principles that we’re learning from the scriptures to the situations that God places us in because we’re not there by accident. He put us there on purpose. And so we need to be ready where the battle will be fought. We need to be connected to other disciples, that community that gives us strength and encouragement, knowledge and wisdom.
George Barna: We need to be thinking that as a spiritual warrior, what is my ultimate job? It’s to make more disciples. The only people that can make disciples are disciples. You reproduce who you are. You cannot reproduce something that you are not, which is one of the reasons why so many of our churches fail because we have people who aren’t really disciples of Jesus based on the criteria he gives us in scripture. And they’re kind of playing a spiritual game and saying, okay, well follow me and you’ll be fine. No, don’t follow you. Follow Jesus. And so this is the whole thing that we got to realize once we get in that battle, we’re going to be persecuted. Jesus promised us that we know that’s coming. So there’s no question about that. But ultimately, we’re not responsible for the outcomes, only the choices that we make that lead to those outcomes. We can do
Sam Rohrer: This. And George, wonderful summation, and Isaac, thank you for being a part of this today. George, thank you for all the work that you’ve done and that challenge at the end, ladies and gentlemen, again, knowledge the truth of God’s word is before us. What are we to do with it? Well, we are to do it and to live it out with courage. And when we do that, the results are up to God. But will he use our lives to influence those that he has prepared ahead of time? Yes, he will let us do that.
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