Absolute Truth

Cleaned from YouTube auto-captions — lightly edited for punctuation, paragraphing, and obvious caption errors; wording is Bro. Leland's own. Scripture is quoted as spoken.

38:08

Amen. I can certainly relate to that song, as many of us can, I'm sure. Now, I found out in the first service, this is Paul's last Sunday with us. Paul is engaged now. His fiancée's here this morning. Can you believe he'd rather go to church with her than with us? I don't get that. I absolutely get it. And we're excited for him and for her as well. So, thank you, Paul. God bless you.

You know, Jesus was brought before Pilate when He was being tried. And Pilate, of course, couldn't find anything wrong. He couldn't find that He was guilty of anything. And he tried everything he could. And they were having a philosophical conversation at one point about Jesus being the King. And Pilate, at the end of that conversation, asks a very simple question, but one that, if you stop and think about it, is pretty profound really. As a matter of fact, we've got folks that just can't figure it out even to this day, and our society hasn't been able to really figure it out to this day either. He asked this question: What is truth? What is truth? That's what he said. Just three very simple words.

And in the day we live in now, philosophers and scientists would call it the postmodern age, whatever all that means. But in our culture today, we're questioning whether there even is such a thing as truth. I mean, does it even exist anywhere at all? That's what our culture says. You see, they say today in our culture that truth lies in our experience. And so if we experience that, then it's the truth. Your truth can't be different from your, quote, experience, because we go today by how you feel about things. And so it's all about feelings. If I feel this way or I feel that way, then it must be okay and it must be all right. No matter what God says, what the Bible says, it's okay, because that's the way I feel.

40:11

Josh McDowell's a Christian apologist. He wrote many books back in the '70s and '80s, traveled all over the country and the world, going to college campuses and speaking to college students about God. Some of his books, like Evidence That Demands a Verdict, are great books as far as giving evidence for the resurrection and a lot of the other things about Jesus. And he talks about a young girl named Amber that was 16 years old at the church he went to. And he said he went to Amber one day and he just asked her this question. He says, "Is it wrong to have premarital sex?" And she looked at him and said, "Well, I believe it's wrong for me." And he says, "Yeah, but do you believe the Bible teaches that premarital sex is wrong for everyone, no matter who it is?" And she kind of stopped for a minute and weighed her answer a little bit. And then finally she said, "Well, I know it's wrong for me, and I've chosen not to have sex until I'm married, but I don't think I can judge what other people do."

So here's what his conclusion was. Let me read it to you. He said, "Amber has been conditioned to believe that truth is not true for them unless they choose to believe it." Truth is not true in our world unless you choose to believe it. Here, I want you to know something. There is a truth that's the truth whether you believe it or not. It's just the truth. And we've got to come to grips with that, because we live in a world and in a society that does not believe that at all.

41:43

J. Warner Wallace wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. And in that book, he says this: "Those who claim that truth is a matter of perception and opinion are proclaiming this as more than a matter of perspective and opinion. They would like us to believe that this definition is objectively true, even as they deny the existence of objective truth."

So here's what you've got to get. We live in a society that 60 years ago began to say there is no such thing as absolute truth. It's all subjective. It's subjective to my feelings. It's subjective to my experience. It's subject to whatever I want it to be, the lifestyle that I choose to live, all my truth. And so that's where people have come up with "I have my truth, you have your truth." And I hate to tell you this, I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, but you don't have any business and any right to have your own truth. That's not a real thing. There is a truth. There is an absolute truth.

And because we got rid of that a long time ago — you know, it's amazing — in our colleges and in our universities, in our government, we decided years and years ago, decades ago, that we didn't want God in our government. We didn't want God in our schools. We didn't want God in the public square. We didn't want any of that. The church people need to keep God in the church. But then the public square begins to come into the church. And they said, "Yeah, but we're going to come into the church and tell you that it's okay for a man to choose to be a woman and go into a woman's locker room and compete in women's sports. It's okay. We're going to tell you that morally that's all right. We're going to tell you it's morally okay to change the definition of marriage" — a man and a woman for a lifetime — "we're going to tell you it's morally okay to do that. We're going to tell you that it is okay to end the life of your unborn child in the mother's womb. It's okay," they're going to tell you. So they don't want us out there, but they want to come in here and tell us what we should and shouldn't believe. These are moral issues. And it is not just something we need to talk about. It's something we have a responsibility to talk about, so that you know the truth, the real truth, because you're not going to get it from the world that we live in today.

44:01

G.K. Chesterton probably said this a hundred years ago, but listen to what he said: "We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be shouted down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green." You say, "Well, that's just nuts." Well, is it really? Is it more nuts than some of the stuff we see happening today? And if we disagree and say, "Well, look, that's not reality," we're told that we hate. We're called all kinds of names, all those kinds of things.

You know, we've got to realize we live in a culture that has abandoned truth. They don't know what truth is. They don't get it. They've got their own truth. All of them have their own truth. And yet they want to talk about objective truth out there. They want to say, "Well, there is an objective truth out there." And yet they deny the existence of objective truth. And so they don't even make sense in their own philosophy. And that's the way it's been for decades now. And nobody really calls them out on that.

You know, over in Jeremiah chapter 9, I want to read to you a verse out of that book. Jeremiah was the weeping prophet. And he's talking about Israel, his people. He's saying these people have left God behind. They've abandoned what they once believed in, the God who delivered them out of Egypt. He's no longer their number one love. They've left Him out of their public life and out of their political life and out of their personal lives. And here's what he says about them in Jeremiah 9:3. He says, "They bend their tongue like their bow; lies and not truth prevail in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know Me," declares the Lord. That kind of sounds familiar to me. Sounds like something going on today, as a matter of fact, in this very day.

And when we look over in Romans chapter 1 — Paul is writing this, and he's talking about how they didn't want to retain God in their memory. They didn't want that. And then he says in verse 24, because of that, "God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie." They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. I'm telling you, if I didn't know better, I would think that I was reading the newspaper this morning, what I just read to you, because it's exactly what we've seen happen in our world today. And so it's crazy that we are being told that we have to affirm people that have a mental illness or are disturbed in some way, and we can't tell them the truth because that will damage them in some way. But we've got to affirm the lie that they live in and the delusion that they live in. We see it all the time in our world.

47:16

Now, why talk about this today? Because we're about to have another election. We're about to have another election. And elections, as we've heard before, have consequences. Right now, I'm going to tell you something, and probably some of you are not going to like what I'm about to say, but I think it's important that it needs to be said. And I'm not a political person. I don't usually get this political, but this is more of a moral issue to me. I don't think there's ever been a clearer choice than there is today. I'm just going to announce this to you: the progressive left Democrats — everything that they are for, God is against. Everything they are for goes directly against this Bible right here. And they do it in the name of compassion. But it's not really about compassion.

So yes, we're about to have an election. And the platforms of these people that are being elected — I've told you before, you better be careful. We elect personalities, but we don't pay attention to what they stand for. We don't pay attention to the platform that's going to be going into effect once they get elected. But you better pay attention, because there are some moral issues that are going to hurt all of us if we give in, if we begin to not realize that elections have consequences.

As a matter of fact, if we lose absolute truth, if we lose the belief that there is an absolute truth out there, a standard which cannot be moved, then can I just tell you, we will lose our freedoms. You think that's not true, but already it's true on many of our college campuses, isn't it? How many times have you seen on the news where someone goes to a college campus and they're going to share a viewpoint that maybe some of those students don't like, and what do they do? There's violence on the campus and they shout them down, because there is no such thing on that campus as freedom of speech. We're losing our freedoms. And you and I better pay attention, because those kids are going to be running this country in a few years. Those kids who don't believe in freedom of speech, who don't want you to say your opinion or your viewpoint if it doesn't agree with theirs — they will be the ones deciding the policies of this nation in a few years. So we better pay attention. We better perk up. We better begin to realize.

Now, Jesus talks about truth. And that's where I want us to get today, in John chapter 8. So I want you to turn there. John chapter 8. In John chapter 8, Jesus has come to teach. All right? And He's there teaching. His disciples are there. He's got other Jewish people all around Him there, because they wanted to hear what He had to say. He taught in a different way than the religious teachers. He taught as somebody that had authority, and they weren't used to that. And guess who else was there? The religious leaders were there, too, because they had a lot invested in that. They were going to lose their special place at the banquets. Everybody looked up to them and came to them for religious and spiritual advice, and Jesus was undermining all that. That's what they thought. They didn't really get it.

And so all these groups are there. Now, He's teaching His disciples and He's teaching the people that are there. And these religious leaders, these Pharisees and Sadducees, are trying to catch Him in some kind of mistake. They want to embarrass Him in front of everybody. And here's what He says in John chapter 8, verse 31: "So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed in Him, 'If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.' They answered Him, 'We are Abraham's descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, "You will become free"?'"

So that's the religious leaders. They're trying to catch Him. They say, "Well, wait a minute. We're Abraham's descendants. We've never been slaves to anyone." They're mistaken, aren't they? Either that or they're just lying, because they're forgetting they came out of Egypt as slaves. I mean, that's exactly what happened. And so a lot of times the culture we live in doesn't see its own mistake. They're blind to their own blindness, really. It's the blind leading the blind, and they don't see it, just like these men didn't see it, and they tried to argue with Jesus. But Jesus says some really important things here.

51:50

You know, Os Guinness has written a ton of books. He wrote a book called Time for Truth. And in that book he says this: "Truth matters supremely because in the end without truth there is no freedom. Truth, in fact, is not only essential to freedom; it is freedom. And the only way to a free life lies in becoming a person of truth and learning to live in truth. Living in truth is the secret of living free." Wow. He puts it pretty bluntly, but he's right. I don't think you and I realized, maybe until recent years, how close we are to not being free. We've already lost lots of freedoms, and eventually they'll be taken away one at a time.

Chuck Colson — you remember Chuck Colson of Watergate fame. He was very much involved in all of that. He went to prison. He got saved in prison. He started the Prison Fellowship ministry when he came out of there. He was a great apologist and a philosopher. He wrote a number of books. He's gone on to be with the Lord now. But in one of his books, he said this: "Without ultimate justice, people's sense of moral obligation dissolves. Social bonds are broken. People who have no fear of God soon have no fear of man, and no respect for human laws and authority." That could have been taken off the front page of our newspaper, couldn't it? That we're going to defund the police, that we're going to let everybody out of the prisons, that we have no respect for human law or authority, we're going to stand in front of the police and harass them in every way we can, and all these kinds of things. We see it today. Why? Because people have been taught all their lives that there is no such thing as an absolute truth.

53:45

And what about those people who say, "Well, let's just go along to get along. Let's just all join hands and sing 'Kumbaya' around the fire. That's what it's all about. It's all about unity, right?" But I love what Charles Spurgeon says, that old prince of preachers. He said, "To pursue union at the expense of truth is treason to the Lord Jesus Christ." If you think that we're going to be able to abandon the truth just to get along with everybody, he said, that's treason to the Lord Christ. Yeah. It's just not going to work like that.

So yes, the laws we have, the moral authority that's there, the freedoms we have — where do they come from? They come because there is a standard. It's a standard we didn't set. It's a standard that God set. And every human being realizes in their own conscience that there's a standard. Why is it that every civilization and every human being thinks that murder is wrong? Why is that? If the only reason we're here is because of a biological mistake, some chance thing, and we just developed and there was no God involved in any of that — if that's the real reason, why is it that everybody comes into this world having the same moral code? And what we've been doing in the last 60 years is everything we can to get rid of that moral code, to allow us to live any lifestyle we want to live, no matter what God says, because we don't care. But there is a standard. God's the one that sets the standard.

55:12

You know, Rachel, when she plays that piano — you probably won't believe this — every once in a while we've got to get it tuned. Rachel's good on that piano, and every once in a while we've got to get it tuned. But that guy doesn't just pick a note and tune it to that note. He doesn't just say, "Well, let me just tune it to whatever." He tunes it to a certain note, so that whenever those guys are playing those other instruments, they all go together, because they all have the same standard. It's a standard, and it's absolute. That's exactly what it's all about.

So the question is — and this is what Pilate's question was — what is truth? Well, Jesus said this in John 8. He was saying to those Jews who had believed in Him, "If you abide in My word, then you're My disciples." Those Jews, He said, who had believed in Him. You see, God and His Word are truth. Jesus is the truth. He even says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but by Me." Jesus is the truth. When you go to John chapter 1, verse 17, it says, "For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ." So yes, He is the truth. And by the way, over in John chapter 17, Jesus' prayer — He's praying before He goes to the cross, for all of us and for His disciples — He says to God the Father, "Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth."

So yes, Jesus is the truth. He says that He's the truth. He's the standard for truth. And He has made the standard. You and I have never met the standard. We've never lived up to the standard. We're all sinners, and we've all fallen short. But guess who did? Jesus lived up to the standard. And He says, "Anyone who is in Me, anyone who's come to Me, that standard becomes yours as well. You meet the standard." You say, "Well, yeah, but I didn't meet the standard." He says, "Yeah, but I did on your behalf. I met the standard and even exceeded it." Why could He meet the standard? Because He made the standard. He is the standard. Jesus is the truth.

57:57

You know, absolute truth is defined as inflexible reality. It's fixed, invariable, unalterable facts. For example — I'm going to read this to you, because I wrote it down; I don't want to get these words all mixed up — it is a fixed, invariable, unalterable fact that there are absolutely no square circles and there are absolutely no round squares. Think about that. If all truth is relative, that right there refutes it. The only thing that's absolute that these people in our culture believe in is the fact that there's nothing absolute. But even that is an absolute. If there is no such thing as absolute truth, then how can we say that all circles are round and all squares are not round? We can't say those things. Why? Because there is an absolute truth. Circles are round, squares are square. And we know that two plus two is four. It's always going to be that way. That's an absolute truth. And it flies in the face of our whole culture, that wants to teach us and our children and our grandchildren that there's no such thing as absolute truth. They want to teach them that all truth is relative to your feelings and your situation, so that you can live any lifestyle you choose, even if it flies in the face of God's Word. And that's why they do it. But you and I are going to lose our freedom over that. We're going to lose our freedom because we've lost the truth. And we don't even know. We live in a world today that doesn't know what the truth is.

59:18

You know, I love what Jonathan Edwards said about absolute truth. He said, "Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God." And Josh McDowell once again — let me quote him: "Truth is objective because God exists outside of ourselves. It is universal because God is above all. It is constant because God is eternal. Absolute truth is absolute because it originates from the Original." So yes, Jesus is the truth. And by the way, He's the only truth that exists in this world today. The only absolute truth that exists in this world is Jesus and the Word of God.

So where do you find it? Well, I just said it. And Jesus said it in John chapter 8. He said, "If you abide in My word." Over in Psalm 25, verse 5, it says, "Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation." And just a few chapters over, in Psalm 119, verse 160, it says, "The sum of Your word is truth." It's truth. So Jesus says this — to those who believed in Him, now, not just to everybody, but to those who believed — "If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine." If you abide. Not if you just read it every once in a while. Not if you pull it out whenever you have a problem. But if you live in this Word, and you live out this Word in the community that you live in, you let it live out through your lives — that's abiding in the Word of God, and that's abiding in the truth. It's important that you and I learn to abide in the truth. We find it in the Word of God. Jesus is the Word. So He is the truth. He is the final exegesis of all truth.

1:01:20

Major Ian Thomas was a British major in World War II. As a matter of fact, he's the guy that was there at the surrender of Monte Cassino in Italy, and he took the surrender flag from the German officer. And he was a great Christian guy, and he says this: "Jesus Christ Himself is the final exegesis of all truth. He is all that we need to know about God, and He is all that we need to know about man." Why? Because He's God and He's man. He's both. He's the God-man. He is one of us, but He's also God. He existed from eternity past through eternity future.

So yes, if we study the absolute truth found in God's Word, guess what's going to happen? It's just like we talked about a few weeks ago, about those bank tellers: they look at the real thing long enough, they know it when they see a fake. You study the truth long enough, you're going to recognize a lie when you hear it. You're not going to be as susceptible to fall for the lies if you study the truth, if you abide in His Word, if you're right there where this is the truth. God has set it down. Jesus is the truth. And He put it right here for us to be able to read and study every single day. And if you study and look at the truth long enough, you'll recognize a fake. You'll recognize the lie when it comes your way. And it will come your way, absolutely. And there are lots of lies out there.

1:03:05

Listen, I'm telling you, we live in a society and in a world that lies, because it's controlled by Satan. As a matter of fact, in this very chapter, in John chapter 8, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees now. He's getting after them, and He says this: "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

Satan is in control of this world. He's the prince of the power of the air, the Bible calls him. So right now, Satan's got free rein to kind of be in control of things. His day will come to an end. He's already defeated, but he's in control right now. So it should not surprise us that we are being lied to all the time. And the sad thing is, there are a lot of people that walk these streets that are being lied to by Satan, and they don't even realize it. That's why they need the voice of truth: God's people who abide in His Word, His disciples who walk out there and live out this Word in that community every single day, live the truth, and aren't afraid to stand up and say the truth. I didn't say we ought to be disagreeable or obnoxious or angry or any of those things, and certainly not hateful. But we've got to stand and say the truth. Whether people want to hear it or not doesn't really matter. It's the truth, and they need to hear it. They need to be given that opportunity to hear it. We don't want them to be like these Pharisees who said, "Well, we've never been enslaved." Yeah. You lose your freedoms.

So what is the truth? Jesus is the truth. It's unalterable. It's undeniable. It's eternal. It will not ever change. It is always going to be the truth. It is absolute. And where do we find it? In Jesus, once again, and in His Word. We abide in His Word.

And there's one other thing. So what does it matter? Why does it matter that we study the truth? Why does it matter that we know the real truth? What's the real deal about that? Jesus says this in John 8. He said, "The truth will make you free." Did you get that? The truth will make you free. You know, it's amazing to me, because we like to say, "Well, we're free. We can do whatever we want to. We've got all these freedoms." But when there's no restraint at all, no real truth involved, our freedoms lead us to our own form of slavery. We become slaves to our own sinful desires, and all of a sudden the things that we did, that we thought we could control, control us now. And we're miserable and we don't like it, but we can't get out of it. Ask anybody addicted to anything. Ask those people living on the streets because they've been addicted to some substance for years, and they don't want to be there, but they can't get out of it. They literally are controlled, and they've lost their freedom.

1:06:31

Jesus said you'll know the truth and you'll be free. The truth will set you free: the truth of who Jesus is, the truth of God, the truth that He's got a standard, the truth that we can't meet it, the truth that Jesus did it for us on a cross, the truth that it's available to us. If we'll just come in repentance to Him and give our lives to Him, we can know that truth and we can be free. I've read testimonies of people in Russian gulags who were Christians, and they write about how, even in the midst of the horrible conditions they lived in, they were free in their hearts. Prisoners — I've talked to prisoners in our own BPDC [Bossier Parish Detention Center] before, when I've gone out there to do programs with them and share with them and preach to them, who've gotten saved while they were in there, and they're in jail. You say, "Well, they're not free." But they are in their heart. They're free from the things that drove them. They're free from the things that got them there. They're free in their heart.

Jesus said, "You will know the truth if you abide in My word. You'll know the truth, and the truth will set you free." It doesn't say the truth will allow you to do anything you want to do, because that's not real freedom. Doing anything you want to do always leads down. But He said the truth will set you free, because that truth, if it's real truth, is in Him and leads you to Him. The truth will set you free. And it matters, if you're going to be a free person — free in your heart, free in your mind, free to grow, free to have purpose in your life, all those things. The truth will set you free.

1:08:07

Listen, the devil is a liar, and he's always telling lies, and we have to deal with that. And so many times he comes to you as a Christian. You've been saved. You know that Jesus has saved you. You have that standard. But what does Satan say to you? "Oh, you're a lousy excuse of a Christian. You will never really make it. Why do you even try? You just need to give up on all of that." That's how he talks to us. But we forget Jesus said he's a liar. And when he tells a lie, he's true to his nature, because that's all he can do, is lie. If you read His Word: "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." That's the truth. Satan says, "Oh, you're a sorry example of a Christian. Give up. Quit trying." That's the lie. And there are so many Christians who have chosen to believe the lie.

You say, "Well, why would Satan do that? Why does he want us to believe the lie?" Because if you don't have any confidence in your own salvation, you're certainly not going to share it with anybody else. You're not ever going to stand up and say to a lost world out there, "Hey, there is a real truth," because you aren't even certain about it. So yes, Satan wants to trap you into believing the lie instead of the truth. There is an absolute truth. There is an absolute standard out there.

1:09:31

You know, it's funny to me when we talk about how the truth will make you free. During World War I — you know I love history and have a history degree, and so I love to read history — there was a French soldier, Louis Delcourt. On one of his leaves he got to go home, and it was a terrible war. It was trench warfare. It was pretty rough conditions. Louis didn't want to go back. So he hid in his mother's attic. He said, "I'm just going to hide up here until the war is over, because I don't want to go back to that horrible place. So I'm just going to hide up here and I'll be free from that." So Louis hid up there. And the war was over. Well, then he was afraid to come out of the attic. He said, "You know, everybody's going to wonder where I've been, and they're going to find out, and they're going to put me in jail, because I was AWOL and I wasn't where I was supposed to be."

And so Louis lived in his mother's attic for 21 years, until finally his mother died. You say, "Is this a real story?" Absolutely. Look it up. Louis Delcourt. Twenty-one years he lived in his mother's attic. And finally, when his mother died, he came out of the attic. He was haggard looking. He came out of the attic and he went to the nearest police station to turn himself in. And that's when the police told him they had granted amnesty to all those deserters. You see, the truth will make you free. But if you believe the lie, you're going to be trapped in a prison that Satan has designed for you, but you made it yourself. Twenty-one years living in his mother's attic. It's crazy.

But you know, there are a lot of people just like that. Even Christian people. He didn't realize he didn't have to be living in his mother's attic like that. He didn't realize he had already been forgiven. There are a lot of Christian people just like that. Satan's told you and convinced you that you're never going to make it. "You're never going to be a good Christian. Why even try?" So you just want to give up. But if you give up, you're sitting there not realizing that you've already been forgiven. You've already been forgiven. Jesus forgave you on a cross when He cried out, "It is finished." It was done, buddy. There was nothing left to do. And then He came out of the grave. God said, "I'll show you how powerful it was." And He rose from the dead. That's what we're talking about. That's truth. That's a truth that will never change. That's a truth you can absolutely anchor your life into. It will give you purpose. It will give you life. It will explain things in your life. It will get you through the difficult times in life. That's real truth. It's a standard.

1:12:19

Let me tell you about one other guy and I'll be through. W.H. Auden. In the 1930s, he didn't believe there was a God. He said, well, there's no God. And then we went through World War II, and after the war they had done a documentary on World War II and on Hitler and his invasion of Poland and all that kind of stuff, the death camps. And all of a sudden this guy, W.H. Auden, he knew two things. He said, one, Hitler is truly an evil human being. But then he said, two, he needed to know the source of absolute truth if he was going to judge somebody else as evil. In other words, he said, look, if you don't believe in absolute truth, then whoever has the biggest army decides what the truth is. Whoever has the biggest army makes the rules for everybody — unless there's a God who's bigger than all of us, who says, "No, I have a standard, and it's not yours."

See, Hitler had his own standard of truth. And he convinced a whole nation to go under that standard of truth. And his standard said, "Jewish people don't deserve to live, and we're going to get rid of all of them." And what you don't know about that is that was just the beginning, because he had made a chart. He wanted a pure Aryan line. The Jews were only the beginning, and after that he was going to go after other groups of people. We would have somewhere been in that group if we didn't have men and women brave enough, who believed in America enough and in truth enough and in God enough, to go over there and put a stop to this evil man. You can't believe that Hitler was evil unless you believe there's some standard of absolute truth. Otherwise you say, "Well, Hitler was perfectly fine in what he did, because he had the biggest army." If there's no God, whoever has the biggest army makes the rules. But if there is, then there's a standard of truth. And there has to be a standard. There has to be a standard. And God has set it for all of us.

And we're not going to go to heaven someday unless we meet the standard. And I can't meet the standard, and you can't meet the standard. But Jesus came, became one of us, and He met the standard. He said, "I fulfilled the Law, all of it. You come into Me, you become a part of Me, and you fulfill the Law."

1:15:02

Would you bow? Absolute truth. It's so important in our lives. And we live in a world that doesn't believe in it, doesn't want to believe in it. They want to live any lifestyle they want to live. But you and I know there is an absolute truth. There is accountability. There is a God who said, "This is right and this is wrong," and we trust that God and we trust His standard. If you're here today and you've never made Jesus your Lord and Savior, you've never come to Him and just said, "Lord, I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of You. I realize I don't meet the standard either, but You did. And You did it for me, and I want to be a part of that" — you come. There'll be pastors here to talk with you, pray for you. If you need a church home today and you've been visiting, and you say, "Hey, this is it," you come. If you need to pray with a pastor or you need to pray at this altar, you come today.

Father, we're so thankful that there is a real truth, in a world that's so crazy and mixed up. A world that can't figure out what the truth is. A world that just seems so upside down, where people have lost their freedoms and are losing them more and more every day. Lord, I pray people will begin to get hold of the truth, the absolute truth. Lord, be with us as we are about to enter into an election. We're all sick and tired of those political ads and all those kinds of things. But Lord, help us to be responsible, prayerful, realizing that You have standards, and we need to vote for Your standards. Father, let us speak out on these moral issues in a loving way. We thank You for Your love for us…