1. Election Day is on November 4.
2. Some newspaper and television reporters are saying it will be a conservative landslide (excluding NY of course). They say voters across the country are fed up with the bad economy, terrorism, Ebola, and many other problems.
3. I read an interesting article recently entitled, "Why the real battle for America is over culture, not elections" (Mark Steyn, New York Post).
4. Mark Steyn said, "You can’t have conservative government in a liberal culture... Culture trumps politics."
5. There is no question about it -- Over the past few decades, America has moved from a Christian culture to an anti-Christian culture.
6. In 1798, our second president, John Adams, said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
7. Sadly, most Americans are no longer moral and religious people.
8. Two thousand, seven hundred years ago the prophet Isaiah said, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil."
9. That sounds America today! For example, today, homosexuality is called good, and those who oppose homosexuality are called bad.
10. Two Christian ministers who own an Idaho wedding chapel were recently told they had to either perform homosexual weddings or face jail time and up to a $1,000 fine.
11. Houston, Texas passed a law in May that allows “gender confused” people to use public facilities designated for the opposite sex.
12. Now the Houston City Attorney and Houston's lesbian mayor have subpoenaed five Houston pastors for any sermons or church communications critical of homosexuality.
13. There is a vicious attack on traditional Christianity in America, and much of this attack is coming from the homosexuals and their liberal allies. In many ways they are more dangerous than the Muslim terrorists.
14. Just the other day a Muslim maniac attacked a policemen with a hatchet on Jamaica Avenue near 160th Street. He fractured the policeman's skull.
15. Our leaders are afraid of offending Muslims, but they have no qualms about offending Christians. The homosexuals shake their fists at us and say, "We're queer and we're here! Get used to it!" I will never get used to it. God says it is an abomination.
16. In Mark Steyn's article, he mentions how in 1986, in a concurrence to a majority opinion, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger declared that “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.”
17. In his decision, Chief Justice Burger referred to William Blackstone’s statement that homosexuality was an “infamous crime against nature."
18. Steyn notes that today, 28 years later, the Supreme Court has now discovered a "fundamental right" to so-called "homosexual marriage."
19. Steyn correctly noted that "to say today what the chief justice of the United States said 28 years ago would be to render oneself unfit for public office — not merely as Chief Justice but as CEO of a private company, or host of a cable home-remodeling show, or dog-catcher in Dead Moose Junction."
20. Why? "Because the culture — from school guidance counselors to sitcom characters to Oscar hosts — moved on, and so even America’s Regency of Jurists was obliged to get with the beat."
21. How did this happen? Through the media, popular television shows, Hollywood movies, the public schools and colleges, and corrupt politicians, the multitudes have been brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is good, and those who oppose it are evil! (Isa. 5:20).
22. Most of us have heard the acronym, LGBT. It stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Mark Steyn says that Facebook now offers people the opportunity to select their preference from 56 options! People can use up to 10 of them on their profile.
23. In addition to male and female, “gender selections” now include “androgynous,” “bi-gender,” “intersex,” and “gender fluid,” etc.
24. The devil is turning men into women, and women into men, and our nation straight into hell!

I. BIBLICAL ILLITERACY

1. Today most people do not read the Bible. Isaiah 5:13 says, "Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge."
2. Hosea 4:6 says, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
3. People accept homosexuality and abortion, and all sorts of wicked things because they do not read the Bible.
4. Psalm 34:11 says, "Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the LORD." We learn the fear of the LORD from reading the Bible.
5. Proverbs 8:13 says, "The fear of the LORD is to hate evil." If you fear the LORD, you hate evil -- homosexuality, adultery, fornication, pornography, abortion, drunkenness, etc.
6. Proverbs 16:6 says, "By the fear of the LORD men depart from evil."
7. A few years ago, a professor of computer science at Yale University named David Gelernter (he was critically injured by a letter-bomb sent from the crazy “Unabomber” back in 1993), said: “Wherever you stand on the spectrum from devout to atheist, you must acknowledge that the Bible has been a creative force without parallel in history...Evidently young Americans don’t know much about the Bible (or anything else, come to think of it; that’s another story)."
8. Dr. Gelernter quotes Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who said, "The King James Bible has influenced our literature more deeply than any other book -- more deeply even than all the writings of Shakespeare -- far more deeply."
9. Dr. Gelernter refers to President Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address -- "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right..." and says, "Lincoln's speech reads like a supplement to the Bible...with its fourteen references to God, four direct quotations from Genesis, Psalms, and Matthew, and other allusions to scriptural teaching. 'The best gift God has given to man,' Lincoln called the Bible. 'But for it we could not know right from wrong.'"
10. Think about that statement! Abraham Lincoln said the Bible is "the best gift God has given to man. But for it we could not know right from wrong." Today most Americans do not know right from wrong.
11. "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil" (Isaiah 5:20).

II. PRIDE AND ARROGANCE (5:21)

1. I have talked to people about the Lord, and have had them say to me: “Oh, if I were simple-minded like you, I might believe the Bible – but I am too intelligent for that, I am too brilliant, I am an intellectual, blah blah, etc.”
2. Listen, getting college degrees is good, but you better make sure you have your BA – “Born Again.”
3. Education without God and the Bible is dangerous and devilish. Martin Luther said, "I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth."
4. God says: “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:21).
5. Someone said that conceit is the only disease known to man that makes everyone sick except the one who has it.
6. Romans 1:22 says: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
7. We are surrounded on every hand by conceited and arrogant fools! Sadly many of them are on television reporting the news with a very liberal and anti-Christian bias.
8. Sadly many of them are teachers, corrupting the minds of impressionable young people.
9. This world is full of people who think they know everything, and who cannot be told anything. They think they have all the answers.
10. James 3:15 says, "This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish."
11. God condemns this worldly way of thinking. Proverbs 3:7 says, “Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.”
12. Romans 12:16 says, "Be not wise in your own conceits."

III. LOVE OF SIN AND PLEASURE (5:22, cf. 5:11, 12)

1. Second Timothy 3:1 says, "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come." Then the apostle Paul gives us certain characteristics of these last days.
2. Verses 2-4 says, "For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God."
3. Drinking alcohol is such a wicked sin that two woes are pronounced upon it in Isaiah chapter 5 (Isaiah 5:11, 22).
4. In Isaiah's day, even the priests and the prophets were drunkards (Isaiah 28:7, 8).
5. Drinking is such a wicked sin that those who indulge in it are cast into hell (Isaiah 5:11, 14; cf. I Cor. 6:9, 10).
6. Some people are so enslaved to alcohol that they even “rise up early in the morning” to start drinking (5:11; cf. Prov. 23:29-35).
7. Then they proceed to drink all day, to “continue until night, till wine inflame them!” (5:11).
8. Note that word “inflame.” Wine inflames the drunkard, and burns away his brain cells, and burns away his good manners, and burns way his morals and his health and his decency and his ambition, till he is nothing but a burnt-out wreck.
9. Then after the devil has destroyed him physically and mentally, the poor drunkard stumbles off into hell (5:14). Then he is really "inflamed"!
10. In I Corinthians 6:9, 10, drunkards are listed with fornicators and idolaters and adulterers and homosexuals and thieves as people who shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven.
11. Some people do not like it when preachers preach hard against alcohol. They ought to consider the heart-broken mother who had her little child ran over and killed by a drunk driver!
12. They ought to consider the poor wife who has been beaten up by a drunken husband, a wicked fool who spends his paycheck on booze (Isa. 5:11).
13. All drinkers care about is fun and games, parties and revelry. They “regard not the work of the Lord” (Isa. 5:12). They are have no time for God. “The work of the LORD” means nothing to them.
14. Drunkards disregard the Lord's Day. They stay up late on Saturday drinking, and then when God's people attend Sunday School and church, the drunkards stay in bed.
15. Billy Sunday said it best -- "Whiskey and beer are all right in their place, but their place is in hell."
16. Total abstinence is the best policy. It is a bad testimony for a Christian to drink alcohol (Isaiah 5:22, 23; cf. Pro. 20:1; 23:29-35; Hab. 2:15, 16).
17. In Shakespeare's play Othello, Cassio says, “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil...O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!”

CONCLUSION:

1. America has plunged so deep into sin that only a major nationwide revival could turn things around.
2. And revival always begins with individual Christians.
3. Someone once asked Gypsy Smith, a British evangelist during the late 19th and early 20th century, how to have a revival.
4. He said the way to have revival is to get a piece of chalk, draw a circle around yourself, then get down on your knees and pray, “Lord send a revival and let it begin inside of this circle.”