A Nation Abandoned

A friend recently loaned us a CD of a sermon by John MacArthur. The title of the sermon is "A Nation Abandoned by God". You can click here to read the transcript. It was one of the most thought provoking sermons I have listened to in a long time.

The basic concept is this: God has abandoned America. We can see this because a description of an abandoned nation is given in Romans chapter 1. I won't go into all of the connections he makes. You should really read the transcript.

I do want to post a quote of the next to the last paragraph which is Mr. MacArthur's advice on what we should be doing about it.

God only wants one thing out of a nation. Listen and believe this book. I really get grieved even when I hear evangelical people in the media and the public eye kind of equivocating about the clarity of the gospel. It's all we've got. Or about the clarity of what Scripture says. Your prayer and mine has to be that God would raise up faithful preachers and people who would proclaim His Word across this land. Pray for this generation of young men that God will call and shape and send, pray for pastors everywhere. Pray for lay people, for Christians to be bold. There's only one solution and that's the truth...the truth by which God saves, by which God sanctifies, and if this nation will respond and listen to His truth, God will open the flood gates. We might be the greatest recovery story in history. But there's no other way than that people listen to Me and walk in My ways. It's not going to happen if there's a famine of the hearing of the Word of God. Pray that the Word, as Paul said, would have free course and that it would run with all its power across this land. With all its beauty and magnificence, all its power and grace, that people would hear and believe and be saved and be obedient, all that to the glory of God. I don't know what God's plan is, I just see here what His heart is. "O, that My people would listen to Me," that's the heart of God.

After listening to it this sermon, my husband and I were discussing the pattern in Judges: discipline, repentance, heroic civil magistrate (Gideon, Samson, etc.). Then I started thinking, "God raised up the excellent civil magistrate to rescue the people from their own demise not because the people found and voted on him/her but because they repented. Hearts across the nation of Israel turned to God. They changed their ways. They asked for His intervention. Then He raised up a leader."

Food for thought.