In this series, my goal is to help you know God by exposing fake Christianity. This misled group of people call themselves “woke” because they have discovered that the Bible is out of touch with the modern church.
Yet, how can you even call it Christianity if the Bible isn’t the ultimate guidebook?
The reality is, you’re only a Christian if you believe in and follow Jesus Christ. And the Bible refers to Jesus as the Word of God.
So, when it comes down to it, you really can’t call yourself a follower of Jesus if you don’t follow the Bible.
Woke christianity isn’t Christianity at all. It’s a fake version of Christianity that denies or misuses the Word of God in favor of making sure no one gets their feelings hurt.
I’ll give them this though: they’re clever. They say a lot of things that sound really good and seem right. But almost all of it leads to destruction.
Not on my watch. I’m going to keep exposing wokeness for the evil that it is because I don’t want people to go to hell.
I’m here to help you follow Jesus so that we can spend eternity together in heaven and bring a lot of people with us.
This message is my God-given assignment in this season: Jesus Ain’t Woke. And I will do whatever it takes to get it out to everyone who needs it.
I’ll even dress up like Jesus for a photoshoot. (show image)
In the first week of this series, I explained how Satan is after our kids. We were made in God’s image, Satan hates God, therefore he also hates us. Yet God gave us this amazing ability to multiply.
Speaking of, I’d like to let you know that all of this talk about multiplication has produced fruit. I have a testimony to share with you guys: Beth and I are expecting our fifth child.
So, here we are. We keep filling the earth with more and more humans and Satan is doing whatever he can to stop the multiplication.
He has lots of strategies for this, just none of them work in the Young house. But you still need to know about them.
Here’s one: Create a culture where children are a nuisance so people don’t want to have kids and push aside the ones they do have.
Satan also works to make society numb to killing babies through abortion. He takes it a step further by normalizing food and drugs that ruin the reproductive system.
Oh, and the one he’s most proud of. It’s even called the Pride Movement. Satan is a pro at promoting homosexuality so reproduction is impossible.
I hope you are able to see what’s going on. Almost all of the challenges we’re up against right now all lead to one thing: the destruction of children.
This past Friday, all but one House Democrat voted in favor of any kind of abortion, at any time, for any reason. Killing babies is a top priority for Speaker Pelosi and her posse.
And when you tolerate abortion instead of standing against it, you are advancing Satan’s agenda. When you advocate for the LGBTQ+ movement, you are advancing the plan of the enemy.
The church has been quiet on these issues for a long time. But it’s time to issue a counterattack on evil.
Satan is working hard to destroy people with normalized sin. So we, as the body of Christ, must work hard to expose the dangers of sin so people are drawn to Jesus and receive salvation and freedom.
That’s what we talked about last week. Jesus didn’t just give you forgiveness of sin; He gave you freedom from sin. He came to take your sin away.
Yet, there are people who call themselves Christians everywhere that choose to live a life of sin. They think they can keep on sinning even when they say they belong to God. But look at this:
1 John 3:8 NLT - But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning.
The church has done a good job ignoring this truth so it doesn’t get in the way of filling the seats on Sunday morning. But this truth is necessary for people to receive true salvation.
If no one tells you that Jesus came to take away your sin, you’ll believe the lie that all you have to do is say a little prayer to receive salvation.
We might as well just slap Jesus in the face if we are going to weaken salvation to a point where we say a quick prayer on Sunday morning and nothing changes.
When you truly receive salvation by believing in Jesus Christ, the power of God changes your life. Immediately you are forgiven of everything you’ve done wrong.
Not only that, but Jesus reaches in and He takes that sin out of your life. You don’t even like it anymore. You don’t want it anymore. It’s like Jesus has made you a new person, and He has.
It’s not that you’ll never sin again. You will, as we all can attest to in this room. But you no longer keep on sinning. You now live a life of repentance. When sin is revealed, you turn the other way.
Because, when you believe in Jesus, you follow Jesus. And He leads you down this glorious path to complete freedom from sin.
Are you getting this? You must understand that the church cannot tolerate sin. If we do, the power of God cannot be made manifest in our services. And without the power of God, what do we have?
A comfortable, woke church might draw a large crowd, but without the power of God, it’s worthless.
We can’t lead people to salvation without the power of God present. We can’t heal people without the power of God present. We can’t operate in spiritual gifts without the power of God present.
For the sake of everyone out there who is headed to hell because they have yet to receive salvation, stop tolerating sin in your life. Let Jesus take it away so we can operate in the power of God.
Let me show it to you in scripture. In 1 Peter chapter 1, Peter is talking to the church and reminding them how wonderful it is that they were born again.
Then he reminded them how they received salvation. Take a look:
1 Peter 1:12 NLT - This Good News has been announced to you by those who preached in the power of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven.
These people received salvation only because somebody told them the Good News in the power of the Holy Spirit.
We’ve been taught that all you have to do to lead someone to salvation is tell them about Jesus. But you have to do more than just tell them. You have to show up with the power of God.
How do we walk in this power? By being filled with the Holy Spirit.
What is a prerequisite to being filled? Obedience to God. Here’s how Jesus explains it:
John 14:15-17 NKJV - Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—the Spirit of truth.”
If you want the power of God to manifest in your life, just like it did through Jesus, obedience to God is required.
When we choose to tolerate sin in the name of love, we dismiss the power of God because the power of God cannot exist alongside disobedience.
But you will always struggle with obedience if it is coming from the wrong place. We’ve talked about this.
By default, obedience is a performance. We perform for God by doing our best to live like He wants us to.
We think God’s impressed when we get it right. We think He yells at us when we get it wrong. But it turns out, God doesn’t want us to perform.
You’ve probably already figured this out, but we aren’t capable of a flawless performance. We just keep messing it up. But the good news is, there’s another way to walk in obedience.
Obedience to God comes one of two ways. Either you are performing, or it is an overflow of your identity in Jesus Christ.
Obedience comes easy when we know who we are to God. And the only way to know who you are to God is to know His Word. Look at this:
Romans 5:17 NLT - For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one man, Jesus Christ.
This is who you are to God. You are triumphant over sin. You come face-to-face with sin and you win every time.
But the only reason you are able to do this is because you’ve received God’s gift of righteousness through Jesus Christ.
Righteousness is a gift. You receive it and you walk in it.
Let me put it to you this way:
Romans 6:11 NLT - Consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus.
Once again, this is your true identity in Christ. You are dead to the power of sin and alive to God. How do we walk in this?
Romans 8:13 NLT - ...through the power of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature.
How do we walk free from sin? Through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is so good. Let’s tie it all together.
Obedience comes easy when I know who I am in Christ. Walking in this obedience enables me to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And when I’m filled with the Holy Spirit, sin is dead to me.
I’m a step-by-step kind of guy. So let me put it to you this way:
Take a moment to figure out where you are in this process.
If you are on step one, there is no shame. But don’t just sit back and wait for me to spoon feed this to you. Get in the Bible every single day and find out who you are in Christ.
Let me give you a hint. Your wrong thinking is not overcome by reading a scripture once. Find your scriptures about who you are in Christ and speak them out loud over and over and over.
Write them on your bathroom mirror. Write them in your journal. Underline them in your Bible. Read them out loud every day, multiple times a day until you get it.
You’ll no when you get it because you no longer doubt it.
At first, when you say you are dead to sin, it might feel like a lie. But put in the work to repeat that scripture over and over and over and one day, it hits you. I really am dead to sin!
Maybe you are on step two. Your identity in Christ is secure and you are walking in obedience because of it. But, you’ve yet to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
If you’ve made it through step one and you’re struggling with step two, I get it. I’m a practical guy. I don’t like to make decisions without seeing the data first.
So, being filled with the Holy Spirit is still kind of strange to me. He tells me to do stuff all the time without an explanation. There’s no data to back it up. It usually doesn’t make sense.
This past Tuesday, I had a lot of work to do. Actually, I have a lot of work to do every Tuesday because Monday is my Sabbath where I take the entire day off and rest every week.
I know, it’s kind of weird to choose Monday for Sabbath, but when you lead a church, weekends aren’t very restful. But, since nobody else is taking off on Monday, Tuesday greets me with lots of emails and things to do.
This past Tuesday, it was time to get to work. I was ready to knock it out, but when I got to my office I sensed the urge to pray. As I was praying, I was led to pray over the land that Beth and I are believing for.
You may remember a few months ago when I encouraged everyone to embrace extravagant asking. I mean, since God has promised to give us what we ask for, we might as well learn to ask for things that will really make a difference.
That Sunday, I revealed that Beth and I are believing God for 300 acres in Skiatook. It’s listed for just over one million dollars and we are believing that it will be ours without debt.
As I was praying about the land, the Holy Spirit told me to go to the land and bind the plan of the enemy. My response was, “Can’t I just do that from here? I need to get to work!” Silence.
When the Holy Spirit tells you to do something, He will usually only say it once. Then it’s up to you.
So I went and got in my car, drove to the land. As I was approaching the land, I saw the for sale sign now had another sign attached to it that said, “Under contract.”
But you know what, it didn’t even bother me. Honestly, my first thought was, “The contract will either fall through, or the person who is buying the land will sell it to us when it’s time.”
You know why that was my response? Because for months now, Beth and I have been proclaiming Deuteronomy 28 where it says that God will bless us in the land that He gives us.
I drove onto the land and did what the Holy Spirit told me to do. I rebuked the plan of the enemy. I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish, but I put a hard stop to it.
I tell you this story to encourage all of you who struggle with the mystery of being filled with the Holy Spirit and doing what He asks you to do. I get it. I’m with you.
There was even a time when I would ignore the Holy Spirit because I couldn’t get out of my own head. I truly believed that my ability to think and reason was superior to simply obeying the Holy Spirit.
I’ve since learned that obeying the Holy Spirit is a whole lot easier. Otherwise you spend all this time thinking about it, researching, developing your own plan, just to find yourself failing and retreating back to exactly what the Holy Spirit said in the first place.
Y’all, I am saving so much time and energy by following the Holy Spirit immediately, whether it makes sense or not. I still don’t know the outcome of what He asked me to do Tuesday, but I will tell you when I find out.
If you’ve been hiding from the Holy Spirit, I hope this has encouraged you to come out of hiding. You need to be filled so you have power and boldness to accomplish God’s will on the earth.
Now, to step three: Enjoy freedom from sin. Y’all, life is so much better without sin. I don’t know why people even fall for the lie that living in sin is loads of fun. Here’s the truth:
Sin does not give you a good life; it destroys you with a slow, painful death.
This is why you should be diligent to follow the path to freedom from sin.
The last step, enjoying freedom from sin, is something that I like to call God Privilege. We don’t deserve freedom, yet God gave it to us anyways.
My next book is actually going to be titled, God Privilege. Before we end today, I want to explain to you what I mean by comparing it to the woke counterfeit called, White Privilege.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but I would definitely be categorized as white. Although, if you want to get technical, I am a mix of many different races. I even have enough Cherokee Indian blood to be considered part of the tribe.
That’s beside the point, though. As far as woke folks are concerned, I am a white male, and they aren’t very happy about it.
In my early twenties, I went to work for a church that had a predominantly black congregation. For the first time in my life, I was the minority in the room.
Growing up, I vividly remember my mom teaching me that we never treat people differently because of their skin color. As a kid, it made total sense. So I fully embraced this truth.
I’ve discovered that, by default, kids don’t care about skin color. My six-year-old daughter saw a black man with the same body type and beard length as me and said, “Daddy, he looks just like you!”
Even though skin color isn’t something I think about, I’ll admit that the first few days at the new job, it felt strange to be the minority. I was the only white guy in the office.
It only took a few days to get over the shock of a new environment before realizing what a gift it was to emerge in a culture other than my own.
Every time we had lunch at the church, the sweet ladies in the kitchen would bring food to my office. And let me tell ya, it was some good cookin’!
They were always worried that I was too skinny, so they would bring me more than one dessert and expect me to eat it all.
I only remember one negative race-related experience in the three years I worked there. A woman came into the main office, peeked into mine on the way to the secretary, and started yelling, “You mean to tell me we hired a WHITE BOY!?”
I didn’t know if I should hide or run away. But the secretary, who is still a dear friend of mine, did a tremendous job handling the situation, and we moved on without bringing it up again.
Several years after I had moved on from this job, I reconnected with one of my coworkers there. It was the great year of 2020, so, of course, race was being exploited for political gain. She saw a Facebook post of mine that hit a nerve, so she wanted to talk about it.
We hopped on the phone, and she started the conversation with, “Kade, the time we spent working together made me realize that not all white people are racist. I was expecting you to slip up, and you never did. So, I know, without a doubt, you aren’t racist.”
This statement shocked me because she always did a great job hiding her suspicions. I never knew that I was under trial. But I am so thankful God used me to help her overcome these challenges.
Growing up, she had been taught to look out for white people, and for a good reason. The history between whites and blacks is very troubling. My compassion runs deep for those who have been hurt by the evil of racism.
But if we step back and take an honest look at the tension between blacks and whites, we’ll find that the enemy works to stir up the peaceful waters and turn the tables every time we are on the verge of resolve.
We’re deceived into elevating one race over the other. On the surface, it seems like a solid solution. But think a little deeper, and you’ll realize that equality can never exist when one is elevated over the other.
The woke church helps the enemy advance his agenda. They proudly wear their race-elevating gear to church and go home feeling really good about themselves.
This is a good place to pause and explain how to know if what you are doing is godly or not.
Do your actions elevate you, or do they elevate God? If you go home patting yourself on the back, you can be sure it had nothing to do with God.
A good example is the people who bow down to the god of racism by publicly apologizing for being white. Then they walk off with a smile on their face because they feel so good about what they just did.
Let me clear this up for you. That’s called worshiping an idol. The idol of racism. The woke church may be encouraging it, but Jesus’ church stays far from it.
This idol expresses itself in many ways, one of which being Critical Race Theory (CRT). Notice it’s a theory, which means it is an idea.
Legal scholars developed the idea to examine racism in the legal system. That’s a worthy cause. If racism is built into our legal structures, I think we all agree that it needs to be found and dealt with.
But CRT has been hijacked by the enemy. It is now being used as a racial weapon in our public schools.
Teachers who bow to the god of racism “teach” Critical Race Theory thinking they are doing a service, but all they accomplish is turning students against each other.
White kids leave class feeling ashamed of their race. Everyone else leaves upset with their “privileged” white friends.
This reveals the next expression of the racism idol: white privilege. Yet another theory, or idea, that white people have the upper hand in life simply because they are white.
Go ahead and prove that idea to all the white people struggling to get by. I’ll wait.
Have you ever noticed how people look for ways to put down those who are more successful?
“It’s because they have rich parents.”
“It’s because they don’t pay their employees enough.”
“It’s because they are white.”
The reality is, there will always be someone who was dealt a better hand in life than you. They have more resources. They are more talented. They have better connections.
But the only person you are responsible for is you. When you get to heaven, God is not going to ask you how someone else used their talents. He’s going to ask how you used yours.
God is not impressed by those who have the most. He’s impressed with those who multiply what they have. Read the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
White privilege is not a part of the solution. It’s a distraction. So, what is the solution?
In the book of Romans, you’ll find the Apostle Paul working hard to disarm racial tensions between the Jews and the Gentiles. Interestingly, he addresses the issue of the Jews being privileged and the Gentiles not.
Instead of trying to make the Jews feel bad about their privileged status, he invites the Gentiles to become part of it. Take a look:
Romans 5:2 NLT - Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege where we now stand.
This is what I like to call “God Privilege,” and it’s available to all who believe in Jesus Christ—no matter their race.
The woke church doesn’t want anyone to be privileged. But Jesus’ church seeks to walk in God Privilege and help others do the same.
This is the answer to racism. Instead of teaching others about Critical Race Theory and White Privilege, we must focus on leading people to Jesus and making it known that God Privilege is available to all who believe.
God Privilege is available to me, and it’s available to you. So are you going to keep griping about how life isn’t fair? Or are you going to step into the promises of God and show others how to do the same?
If you are ready to enjoy freedom from sin and walk in God Privilege, stand on your feet and raise both hands. This is a sign of surrender letting God know you are elevating Him over yourself and everything else.
