166. Secular Morality vs. Biblical Morality

I found my freedom in you I found a joy I can't lose And thank God it's true You wrapped your arms around me And heaven broke through From the moment you found me I found my freedom in you Welcome to the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now, here are your hosts, James Safer. Welcome back to the For Freedom Podcast. It is a wonderful day. Brett, we are in spring season. All of our allergies are going crazy. North Carolina has been on fire for the last couple of days. And my son just, I mean, he just sounds like someone ran over his throat with his cough. And it happens every year. He's got allergies like I do. But man, I love the spring season. I love this, that feeling of new life coming back, getting out in the mower and mowing and just enjoying being outside with the kids. And spring also brings Easter, right? Our resurrection season where we get to worship the resurrected Jesus, which we do every week. We should resurrect. We should celebrate the resurrected Jesus every week. But it brings a special emphasis for the community, for people that haven't been to church in a while, to try to get them plugged into a service. And then hopefully that can continue on as traditional coming to church and growing together and doing some of those things. But man, it's been a great time. We saw this horrible natural disaster that happened in Bangkok and over in Myanmar and Thailand. And man, just tragic. Hundreds of thousands of people. I think they said last I saw was 200,000 people are missing and 20,000 or 30,000 people are already presumed dead. Just a horrible, horrible tragedy. Oftentimes when it happens across the sea, across the way, it doesn't affect us. But man, watching some of those videos and seeing those skyscrapers fall, man, it touched my heart. But it also challenged me to be praying for those missionaries that are over there that are going to be serving and picking up the pieces and loving on the people and the gospel to be spread in those areas. And so just a couple things on my heart. Man, how are you doing? How was your Sunday this last week? And how are things going in your area? Man, things are going real good. This is, like you said, this time of year, springtime. It's a good time. I like it. We're getting back out. Wet winter's going away. But, you know, it's 80 degrees one day. And so then the next day you put on the shorts and then you go outside and it's 40 degrees. Right, right. So it just can't make up its mind about, you know, what if it wants to get rid of the cold yet. But the pollen is just everywhere. It's just a never-ending battle. No point in washing the truck. It's going to be getting, you know, pollen on it 15 minutes after you wash the truck. It's going to be covered again. And so, and they say that the yellow pollen that you can see is not the pollen that causes the allergies. The allergies is caused by the pollen that you, that's so small you can't see. I don't know how true that is, but that is just something that they say. But we are getting ready for Easter season. We got Easter coming up. We're doing everything we can do to promote. We've got tracks. We got door hangers. We've got, we're here pretty soon. We're going to go out in the community to our local Dollar Gentral. And we're going to give out hamburgers one Saturday. We've got some servant evangelism. We've got coming in, coming up, some different things we thought of. Try to get in the community. And, you know, we want to hit evangelism in three different tiers, personal, servant, and mass evangelism. And so we're just trying to get out the name of Jesus, trying to get out the gospel, trying to reach our community and our world for Christ. And, you know, I'll tell you, when you think about the numbers of those people over there that you said are missing, 200,000, that's almost an unfathomable number. You think about. And it's really, you got to understand that each one of those numbers is a soul. You know, I don't want to make light of the situation, but I heard Jeff Foxworthy tell a joke the other day that, you know, we're just so desensitized to tragedy because of the news and different things like that, that he said the other day, he heard a story about a bus going over a cliff and it killed 200 people. And his first instinct was, how do you get 200 people on a bus? Not that it went off the cliff, you know, and he was just making a point that we're so desensitized to stuff like that. But we can't, we can't let society and news, we can't let that desensitize us to the fact that each one of those numbers is a human soul that will spend eternity somewhere. We have to stay soul conscious, not just as pastors, but as Christians, as church members. So, you know, it's something to think about, really something to think about. But we are thankful that spring is here. Time to change the oil in the mower and get out and start cutting the grass again. Got to do that this week. My boys are cutting the church grass this year. And so we got to get the oil change in the mower and just look forward to what we got coming up here pretty soon in our church. Yeah, we, I've got the oil change, the blades changed a couple weeks ago. Got my first cut in of the year. And yeah, it's been good, man. I'm excited about what the Lord's going to bring in this new season, this new season of ministry, the season of pastoring and loving people. And it's just been a blessing. We haven't, we've had several families come the last couple of weeks, just new families in the community that have been showing up and friends are telling friends. And it's a blessing when that happens and the Lord just begins to show favor and excited about that. Brett coming up here in just a couple of days, man, we're, believe it or not, today's April 1st when we're recording this. Two months from now, I'll be in Texas. I'm going out there the week before the convention and I'll be out there with my sister and her brother and her husband, my brother-in-law and kids. We're going to spend the first week there with them. And then the second week will be the convention. And so we are excited about bringing that together and us being out there, our house and just being able to enjoy some fellowship, some time to get together. It's almost like a little mini vacation that we get to go to, even though there's lots of business and lots of things going on. It is a good time just to get away, get our soul refreshed with the pastor's conference to be able to hear some of these great men that get to pour in some messages on us, but also just the fellowship of me and you together in the same room, our kids getting together, our wives getting together. It's always a great thing. And so I'm excited about Dallas coming up very quickly right around the corner. Exactly. I am looking forward to getting there and hanging out and seeing any of our listeners that's around there at the conference and having a meetup and hanging out with them. That is something that we're definitely looking forward to. Man, I'm looking forward to Israel. I want to push this. I'm going to push this every episode. We are going to Israel. Now is kind of the safest time to go. Our buddy Marcus Merritt was just over there for two solid weeks. Never had one issue. He sent us video after video after video. I showed a video. He sent me a video Saturday night, which was Sunday morning for him and telling us about how, you know, him and Pari were standing in front of the Western Wall, how everything was good. Israel opened for business. I showed that to our church this last Sunday morning. And there's a lot of interest buzzing around in my county about this trip. And listen, I want to reach out to our listeners. If you want to go to Israel, if you've never been, I guarantee you it's a life-changing trip. It will change the way you read your Bible. It will change the way you pray. Seeing these places, being where the patriarch stood, walking in the footsteps of Jesus, being on a road that he walked on, touching the floor of a synagogue that he preached in. It's something that will change you. It will affect you. It will have a profound effect. You'll never be sorry that you just took the time, spent the money to go. So it's definitely worth it. Our trip is January 30th through February 7th of 2026. Plenty of time to save up. If you want to register, registration is now open. We're going to hold registration open until June. We may or may not extend it, but our registration is open until June. And so we want you to get on there. Register. Registration is $450. Reserves your spot. Our website gives the payment schedule for the trip and tells you what to expect, how much it's going to cost, where we're going. So it's a go, Yael. And you'll be able to get all that on our website and our Facebook page. We've got links to take it right to the website. Want to promote this trip? Excited about it? Come to the Holy Land with the For Freedom podcast. Absolutely. It's going to be a wonderful time. And you are not going to regret it. I just had a buddy of mine that was with Marcus there. His name is Russ Billio. And man, he was sharing pictures and just got back and got to see all that. Brett, I've got an opportunity. My wife, sorry, my wife, my daughter's teacher, which also taught my son two years ago, had me come in and give a little presentation to the class about the Holy Land and the Garden of Gethsemane and Passion Week. And I got to come on the week right before Easter two years ago. And she ran into me. She was like, hey, will you come back? And so I got to pull up some of my pictures and my presentation and got to look through some of those things. And so I'm going back in two weeks, a week from Thursday, and I get to share with the class all that we got to go and see while we were there. And man, it's just going to be awesome. My heart was just excited looking through that. Last thing I want to mention, if you've held on to us for this long for our beginning banter is our Four Freedom Cigar Lines, Four Freedom Cigar Company. Man, we are doing great with that. We are excited to be able to have this opportunity for you to support our podcast. Many people ask, how can we can support you guys? How can we help you? We don't have a way for you to, you know, go on and give monthly support. This is a way where we can get some support, some opportunity for you to enjoy high quality premium cigars and support a great organization and some great things that will be coming up here at the end of the summer that we're going to be releasing. And so we're excited about that and hoping that you will go on there and be able to have a little bit of a way to support our podcast. Brett, anything else before we jump into our episode? I'm just excited about our subject today and I say let's go. All right, here we go. We cannot truly worship God while we stay silent on injustice in all kinds of areas. And I know as a white pastor, I have blind spots, so I am part of the problem. James, Paul, elected to unhitch the Christian faith from their Jewish scriptures. And my friends, we must as well. White people fear black men. That's not fair, but it's true. Jesus repents of his racism and extends healing to this woman's daughter. I love this story because it's a reminder that Jesus is human. He had prejudices and bias and when confronted with it, he was willing to do his work. I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling child of God. I believe in the rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity. I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the eighth quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder. I believe in the calling to each of us that love is love is love. So beloved, let us love. I believe, glorious God, help my unbelief. Amen. This woke self-loathing and we will never let the woke left take it away. It's because they're putting woke ideology to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is. In this season of the For Freedom Podcast, we want to bring to you some enlightening topics that deal with the wokeness of the church. We want to bring to light some issues that are often overlooked and we hope that it will be a blessing to you in your listening experience. Hey, hey, hey, man, right now. Everybody okay? Okay. Have you ever had one of those conversations that sticks with you for weeks? The kind that plays in your head where you think, man, I should have said this or I wonder if they even thought about that. A couple of months ago, I found myself sitting in a little coffee shop downtown. One of those little places where the baristas have a tattoo of Greek philosophers and they serve espresso and cups small enough to make you question why you've even paid five bucks for it. I was meeting up with an old friend, someone I hadn't seen in years to protect his privacy. I'm going to call his name Matt. Matt and I used to do ministry together back in college. We were in the same Bible study group. We went on mission trips in different locations. We even stayed up late debating theology in our dorm rooms and our dorm house. Somewhere along the way, Matt walked away from his faith. He didn't have some big crisis moment, no major tragedy that made him question everything. He just drifted. Starting reading philosophy, listening to podcasts that question the Bible. And over time, he decided that Christianity was too rigid and too outdated. Now he calls himself a secular humanist. He says that he doesn't need God to be moral. So here we are sitting in this coffee shop. We're catching up. He leans forward and he asks me this question. He said, James, I got to ask you something. Do you really think that people need religion to be good? I mean, look around us. I know atheists who are kind, who give to charity, who fight for justice. I know Christians who cheat on their taxes, who gossip, who live no different than anyone else. So tell me, why do you think morality has to come from God? That question hit me hard. Not because I didn't know how to answer or what to answer, but because I knew what he was really asking. He wasn't just asking, can non-Christians be good? And he was asking, is there something deeper than just being good? I took a sip of my coffee by burning my tongue in the process, brought myself a moment to think of what I was going to say. And I told him, Matt, let's say you're right. Let's say you don't need God to be a decent person. Let's say morality can be built on reason. And what makes society function best? How do you know what's right and wrong? He shrugged. Simple. You do what causes the least harm. What promotes human flourishing. I nodded. Okay, but who decides what human flourishing is? What happens when two different cultures disagree about what's best? What if one generation decides something is evil, but the next generation says it's good? What if society shifts and what if we call moral and what we call good today is condemned tomorrow? He smirked. Well, that's the beauty of progress. Morality evolves. We refine it as we learn. I leaned forward and I began to say, let's play this out for a moment. If morality is constantly changing, then by definition, it's not absolute. So how do we ever call something truly wrong? Like genocide, slavery, the Holocaust. If morality is just a human construct, then all we can say is that it was bad for them, but in their time, they saw it was right. Matt said, come on, James. You don't need religion to know that genocide is evil. And I began to ask him why. Why is it evil and not just unpopular? If there's no higher moral law, no standard above human opinion, then morality is just majority rule. And as history proves that majorities can be dead wrong. Matt stared at his cup. You're making this more complicated than it needs to be. Right and wrong come from empathy, from reason, and from what benefits society. All right, I said. If what society benefits at the, but what if society benefits at the expense of others? What if a majority decides that eliminating a certain group of people makes the world better? If morality is just about pragmatism, then we can justify anything. And his smirk began to fade. In this moment, he began to question a little bit. And I said, that's why secular morality falls apart. I told him that it's built on shifting sand. It changes with culture. It bends to social pressures. But biblical morality, God's morality, isn't based on any opinion here on this world. It's based on the unchanging character of Christ. And that's why we can say what certain things are right and things are wrong, no matter what society says. Matt didn't have a quick response for that. He sat there and stirred his coffee thinking. And finally, he said, I don't know, man. I still think people can be good without God. And I smiled and I said, maybe. But without God, you can't define what good is. And if you don't have a standard, eventually morality just becomes whatever people want it to be. We sat in silence for a moment. Both of us letting that seek in. The barista called out someone's name. The sound of espresso seems winding in the background. And finally, Matt looked up. All right. I'll give you this. That's something to think about. That conversation sticks with me because Matt isn't alone in the way he's thinking. We live in a world that wants morality without God. That wants justice without an ultimate judge. That wants truth, but only if it's convenient for them. And my dear friends, this is why we're having this conversation today. Because if morality is just a human invention, then it's nothing more than a popularity contest. But if morality comes from God, then it's unchanging, eternal, and binding on every person, whether they believe him or not. So let's jump into this topic today and let's begin to talk about what happens when morality is untethered from its foundation. Can secular ethics provide a meaningful alternative? Or is biblical morality the only true anchor for right and wrong? Let's dive in. Welcome back to the For Freedom Podcast. I'm James. And as always, I'm joined here with the delightful Brett Martin. Brett, how are we doing? We're doing good. Doing good. Excited to jump into today's discussion. discussion. We're talking about a topic that's become a huge debate in modern culture. And that's secular morality versus biblical morality. You know, can we have a functioning moral system apart from God? Or the question is, does morality collapse when you remove its foundation in divine truth? Yeah, you know, this is an issue that I believe, Brett, affects everything. I believe it affects politics. It affects education, law, personal decision making. And at its core, it's whether morality is absolute or if it's shifting with culture. And today we're going to break this down from a biblical perspective because oftentimes we'll say certain things are absolute. And then we'll say, well, something else isn't because of preference, right? In our IFB background, preference was often absolute, right? Women must wear skirts because this is not a, this is a question of morality. Men must not have long hair or beards or always have to dress a certain way because this is the standard to make sure you are holy. And we begin to read scripture and scripture tells us that we have this liberty, this law of liberty that allows us to do certain things. There is still an absolute law, but we're giving grace in that law as well. And so today we're going to talk through that. Exactly. So we're going to start out by defining secular morality. So secular morality is an attempt to construct an ethical system without reference to God or any religious framework. Instead of looking to divine revelation, secular ethics relies on reason, science, and societal norms or personal preference. Yeah. And, you know, it sounds nice on the surface, you know, almost like this. So we can be just good people without God. But when you dig deeper, Brett, you begin to start seeing the cracks in the foundation. If morality is purely a human construct, then who decides what is right and what is wrong? Exactly. So what's moral in one culture might not be moral in another. And over time, values start to shift. All right. Think about how dramatically Western morality has changed in just a few decades. Things that were once considered wrong are now celebrated and vice versa. Things that were once celebrated are now condemned. And so we have to look at it as this people look at morality, biblical morality as, oh, well, Jesus, we just need to Jesus taught us how to be a good person. OK, we he just just taught us how to live. Well, the Bible is more than that. It's more than just a set of rules to teach us how to live. Even Paul said if Jesus didn't die on the cross, then we're wasting our time. You know, it's the Bible is more than just although it is a moral code. It's it's more than that. Yeah. You know, when you think about that, how time shift and things change with time, you know, this past Monday was the transgender visibility day of awareness or whatever they call it. And one of the news articles, I think it was the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or someone had put out an article and they gave like half a page of talking about the transgender day of awareness. And and they the earliest they could cite was like 2011, 2012 was was this transgender person that began to go through there. And you go back to 2000, you go back to 1989, 88 when I was born. You go back just a couple of years. And this is an issue that no one even knows about. This is an issue that no one's even talking about. But all of a sudden, secular morality has come in and said that this is right. This is wrong. And that's where this problem begins to come in at. Without a transcendent standard, morality becomes subjective to whoever decides it. Right. It's like they're trying to build a house on shifting sand. This is nothing new. Jesus says this in the New Testament where Jesus says that there's a man that builds his house on a rock and there's a man that builds his house on the sand. And when the storm comes in, the house on the sand gets wiped away. And we also understand that our house and our foundation for our life is built, should be built on a firm foundation, which is Christ and absolute truth. Exactly. And in contrast to that, biblical morality is rooted in the unchanging character of God. Right and wrong aren't based on human opinion, but on who God is. Because human opinion, like you said, it shifts with the wind. That's the reason why Paul warned about people being blown about with every wind of doctrine. They're going every which way, every new thing, every popular thing. And there are churches today that just want to just jump on that bandwagon of which way the wind is blowing. Now, I'm not saying that churches can't try something new. Of course, I'm not saying that at all. But, you know, this new way of looking at the Bible, new way of interpreting this word, new way of saying that something that used to be condemned is now okay. That's kind of what we're talking about here. Yeah, absolutely. Let's jump through a couple of scriptures here, Brett, to talk about the foundation of biblical morality. Psalms 119, 160 says that the sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever. You see, that's the key difference. God's moral law isn't up to debate. It isn't up to revision. It isn't up to man's own interpretation of the law. It is eternal. And what Christ has said is true. What God has said is true is true, and we can stake our flag on it. As the old preacher used to say, as my dad used to say, you can take that to the bank, right? It's a check that's going to cash. It's not going to bounce. It's not going to break. The banker's not going to run your card and say, oh, I've got insufficient funds here. The word of God is secure, and it is firm, and his rules will endure forever. In fact, when Jesus came, you read the Gospels. Jesus is trying to teach the Jews that morality is not just about rules. It's about a relationship. It's about your heart attitude. It's about your motive behind it. You can, what does the Old Testament say? That you can sacrifice thousands of lambs and pour out rivers of oil, but if your heart's not behind it, I don't want your sacrifice, okay? Morality is not just about rules. It's about a relationship. And in fact, Jesus summarized the moral law in Matthew 22, 37 through 39. He said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. So biblical morality isn't about just a set of cold, rigid laws. It actually flows from the love and justice of God. Absolutely. Another key point is that God has placed his law in the hearts of every single person. Romans 2, 15, listen to what it says. It says that those who don't even have a written law have a conscience that bears witness to moral truth. So even unbelievers have a sense of right and wrong, though apart from God, they have a conscience that is from God, that can be seared over time, but they know the truth because the truth of the Lord and the truth of what that conscience from the Spirit has been written in their heart. Exactly. That's why when people argue you don't need God to be a good person, they're actually borrowing from a biblical framework. They're borrowing from the Bible. The very concept of good and evil presupposes a standard which ultimately comes from God. So in order to argue that, they have to borrow from Christianity in order to say that. Yeah. So we've defined secular morality. We've given the biblical foundation for morality. Let's begin to look at some of the problems with secular morality. We're going to jump into this issue of secular morality. The first one, I believe, is one of the biggest and one of the hardest to get over. It's subjectivity and relativism. If morality is rooted in God, then God determines what's right and wrong. But when it's based on subjectivity and relativism, it's whatever I determine is right and wrong. If I hate the color duke blue, Brett's got a dark blue shirt on, and I say, you know what, that color's never going to be allowed. And if you wear that color, you're going to do wrong and you're going to face jail time. Well, there's no justice in that. There's no – it's all based on what I think and my relativism in my mind. And so that's when it begins to determine who is right and wrong because ultimately it should be rooted in God, not in what I think or what I feel. Exactly. Let me ask you a question, James. Was the Holocaust wrong? Yeah. Says who? Says God. Exactly. Because if you didn't appeal – couldn't appeal to God, you'd say, oh, well, it's just society or, you know, well, you know, Hitler thought it was right. Hitler convinced the people that they were going to be worse off if the Jews were still around. And so in their mind, they were convinced that it was the right thing to do in that time. The people that were living right there near it did not realize that it was as bad as it was. And that's why they made them walk through the concentration camps because Hitler had convinced them that it was the right thing to do. Right. And so if morality is just all relative to each person, then the Holocaust wasn't wrong because to them it seemed right. See, if morality is just based on society or if it's just based on individual feelings, then there's no real standard of truth. There's no objective standard. So what's moral becomes whatever the majority says at any given time. Okay. And that's dangerous because it means that morality can be twisted to justify anything. Okay. History proves this time and time again. We just talked about Nazi Germany. They legalized slavery. You know, both were considered morality and acceptable. It was considered acceptable at the time. Okay. Just because that's how they felt. And if it's all relative, then that's okay then. Yeah, I agree 100%. Right. We were okay with slavery. We were okay with selling people and humanity. And we still have slavery today. We still have human sex trafficking, which is a form of slavery. And there's still other countries that still have slavery. And yet we know and we have abolished that. And yet we still have people that still see that the wrong way. It's a great point. The second issue that we want to talk about is a lack of moral compass. Without an absolute standard, people can justify almost any behavior they have. And as we see this today, things that were once universally recognized as wrong are now defended as personal choice or societal progress. And then there's evolving standards. Secular morality changes constantly. What was taboo a generation ago is now normalized. In another 20 years, who knows what will be considered moral. That kind of instability makes it impossible to have a lasting, objective moral code. Things that were on TV 50 years ago, 20 years ago, stuff like they would not allow then what we have today. Because things have shifted so much over time. I remember a pastor getting up and saying, what one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace. And so we change over time. Morality changes over time if it's based on us, if it's based on humans, if it's based on our society, if it's based on majority. It changes. And that's dangerous. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You know, that's part of this personal choice or societal progress with the abortion issue. And Kirk has been, Charlie Kirk has been asking a lot of people on this abortion issue and what they think about it. And I just watched an interview today about, Charlie Kirk asked a guy, would you have been okay if your mom aborted you? And the guy who was in his 20s in the college campus looked at him and said, it would have been her choice and I would have been okay with it. And everyone was like, I mean, even the people that were for abortion were like, dude, you wouldn't be here if that would have happened. But he justifies it through a personal choice. And then he began talking through some things and Charlie Kirk did a great job talking with him. But this is this personal choice. And my mind goes to the end of Judges, Judges chapter 21, verse 25. And Judges warns us and it says this, that everyone did right in their own eyes. And when we remove God, morality becomes a free for all. We begin to do whatever we see fit in our own eyes because we are not willing to submit and humble ourselves to the obedience of God's law. And so we're going to do whatever we decide to do. And what we decide to do is going to be right no matter the consequences. And God says when that happens, that's when the judges and that's when Israel went through some of the hardest times they ever had because everyone was doing right in their own eyes. Right. So let's contrast that with the biblical foundation for morality. What are the core principles that shape Christian ethics? Well, Brett, I'm glad you asked. The first one is the love for God and neighbor. You know, as we mentioned earlier, Jesus boiled all morality down to two commands. You know, they came to Jesus and they tried stumping him. What is the best law? What's the greatest law? What of Moses should we listen to and do? And he said, I'll tell you what. The first thing you should do is love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second thing you should do is love your neighbor as yourself. Love God and love others. Every moral decision should be filtered through those two lenses. Am I loving God in this decision? And am I loving humanity and other people in this decision? Exactly. Second is justice and fairness. The Bible is filled with commands about treating others with fairness, especially the poor and vulnerable. Micah 6.8 says, do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. God's justice is a reflection of his perfect character. We're not, you know, we had an episode a few weeks ago about, you know, talking about social justice. We're not against justice. We're for fairness and justice. We just have problems with, you know, societal issues taking precedent over precedent or priority over the gospel. But we are for justice and fairness because the Bible is. Jesus is for it. You know, how many times did he say, tell us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the sick and visit those in prison who are in prison? You know, this is a command he told us to do. Absolutely. The third one is integrity and honesty. Biblical morality teaches us that truth matters. As JC likes to say on the RFP, truth never fears a challenge because truth does matter. And we begin to see that Jesus said in John 8.32, you will know the truth and the truth will put you under bondage. It doesn't say that. It says the truth will set you free. Deception, fraud, and dishonesty are condemned because God is a God of truth. God is a God of justice and truth and love. And we understand this and we understand that being honest before God and before man brings us into this foundation that is going to make us so much more in tune with what God has for us. If we can just get to the truth of what God has for us. Right. Right. And that's a huge contrast with our culture today. It's such a different picture. In our culture today, truth is often seen as flexible. Okay. People talk about living your truth. I'm living my truth instead of acknowledging the actual truth. Yeah. And, you know, Brett, biblical morality gives us a firm foundation. A moral code that doesn't shift with cultural trends. How often do we hear of a pastor who has, and we're going to, in two weeks, we're going to talk about an issue, a pastor that once stood firm, once stood firm on biblical truth, but allowed what we've talked about over the last 10 or 12 weeks to influence his ideology. And ultimately what he stood on was shifting sand. And that's how we're going to talk about it here in just a couple weeks to sort of wrap up this series of wokeness in the church. Exactly. So, James, let me ask you this. Why does this matter? What's really at stake here? Well, Brett, there's a lot at stake. And really, if we abandon biblical truth, biblical morality, if we abandon that, we don't just lose some abstract idea. We lose the foundation for justice. We lose the foundation for human dignity. Brett, we even begin to lose the foundation for accountability. If morality is just a human construct, then we have to ask ourselves, why is murder wrong? Why is lying bad? And ultimately, why should we even care about justice at all? If we allow these things to not have any human construct to it and any type of consequences or moral code, then really anything that someone thinks is wrong, in my mind, I can just say it's okay. Exactly. Exactly. When we remove God from morality, we can see the effects of this. We've got moral confusion, lawlessness, the breakdown of the family. It is no coincidence that as secularism arises and gets more popular, also we see moral chaos along with that. You look at all the countries that have come up underneath biblical codes of conduct, and you see how they are today compared to countries that didn't come up under biblical foundations of truth. And you see the difference in that. You know, it's no coincidence that as secularism rises, morality, biblical morality goes out the window. Yeah, and I believe, Brett, that's why it's so important for us as Christians to stand firm on God's truth. This past week I preached on Acts chapter 6 where they're ordaining Stephen as a deacon, and the apostles got up, the disciples got up and said, we must not neglect our prayer and preaching of the word of God. That must be the first and foremost thing. And when we stand firm on God's truth, and we understand that we are called to be the salt and the light of the world, when we are here to uphold God's moral standard even when the world rejects it, when we understand that that is the vital understanding of our belief, when we must stand for righteousness when the world turns it away, and we must stand up and we must be the light in this dark world. Because if we're not the light, then how will anyone ever see the way of salvation? If we're not the ones that are making people thirsty with being the salt of the world, how are they going to ask for a drink of water? I'm thinking often of the woman at the well who Jesus was there talking with, and she was thirsty for physical water, and Jesus said, if you believe in me, you can have water that will never, you'll have a well that never runs dry. And still, even in that moment, she's thinking of a physical water, and Jesus said, no, no, it's something so much better than physical water. It is something that is going to quench the thirst for your soul. And that is what we're here to give out. We're here to give out biblical morality for the souls of all humankind. You know, I used to read that passage when I was a kid, and where the salt has lost its savor, or the salt has lost its saltiness. And I used to think because of that, that that means the salt sits around long enough, it loses its saltiness, but that's actually impossible. So you think about how is the only way for salt to lose its saltiness? Well, the only way it can do that is to mix it with something else. When you mix the salt with water or some other substance, then that's the only way you can dilute it. Same thing with light. Lights in the sky, but say clouds come in, or dust storm comes in, and that stuff mixes with the light, it dilutes the light. So when we take God's truth, and we mix in secular humanism, and we mix in what the majority thinks, and we mix in what the society likes, because we're trying to be cool and want to reach people, and we start mixing in the sin of the world into our truth, we dilute it, and we become ineffective. So secular morality, it might sound appealing, but ultimately it's unstable, it's inconsistent. Only biblical morality is rooted in God's unchanging character, and provides a firm foundation for life. Amen to that. If you're listening today, and you're struggling with these issues, we encourage you, dig into the light of God's Word. Dig into your Bible. Begin to seek God's truth. Don't let culture dictate your morality, and let God's Word define you, and let God's Word guide you. And so until next time, to God be the glory, great things He has done. Found my new name, found that good grace, found that healing, and the tears fell down my face, when I found my beginning, that has no ending. Found that second chance, found my best friend, found my forgiveness, found my happiness, I've been singing ever since, found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing our podcast, or whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom Podcast. For Freedom Podcast.

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