Well, I want to welcome you today.
Happy New Year. Who's in charge of our happiness?
Is anybody else in charge of our happiness except for ourselves?
We're in charge of our happiness, aren't we? That's right.
We can be happy, we can have joy in our hearts even when we're going through some bad things.
That's always something to look forward to.
Well, we've got a interesting little presentation to make, a little talk to make.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
Render to God the things that are God's.
What does April 15 mean to you?
That tax time? That tax time, okay.
Do we owe Caesar?
In other words, do we owe the government?
We do, don't we? We really do.
Do we owe God?
We owe Him our loyalty, we owe Him our heart.
Sometimes those two things come in conflicting situations.
So let's take a look this morning at some of these.
And I want to bring your attention to a text.
Let me get this little button out here so we can do that.
And it may be hard for you to read that.
And it says in Matthew 22, starting with 13, it says,
And the Pharisees went out to plot how they might entangle Him.
That's Jesus, of course, in His talk.
And they sent to Him their disciples with the Herodians.
That's interesting because the Pharisees did not like paying taxes,
didn't believe in paying taxes, okay, to the government.
The Herodians did. That's interesting.
But they came together. Why did they come together?
To trap Jesus. That's what they were doing.
And they said, Teacher, we know that you are true
and teaching the way that God in truth, nor do you care about anyone.
For you do not regard person of men.
Tell us, therefore, what do you think?
Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
What a trap. They set a trap.
But Jesus perceived their wickedness and said,
Why do you test me, you hypocrites?
Show me the tax money. So they brought him a denarius.
And he said to them, Whose image and inscription is this?
And they said to him, Caesar's.
And he said to them, Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's,
and to God the things that are God's.
When they had heard those words, they marveled and left him and went their way.
A trap. He saw through their trap, of course, didn't he?
That's right. Have you ever been trapped?
We get trapped sometimes, don't we?
We really do. That's interesting.
Now, what is the denarius?
Well, that was a tax.
That was a tax money.
After Jesus' disciples arrived in Capernaum,
the collectors of the two drachma temple tax came to Peter and they asked,
he says, Does your teacher pay the temple tax?
And Peter said, Yes, yes, he does. Yes, he does.
When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak.
And he says, What do you think, Simon? He asks,
From whom do the kings of earth collect duty and taxes?
From their own children or from others?
And Peter said, Well, from others.
Then the children are exempt. Jesus said to him,
But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and do what?
What did you tell him to do? He said, Go fish.
How many of you like to fish? I know Darren. Darren, you like to fish.
There you go. Like to fish.
And what did he say? Take the first fish you catch,
open its mouth and you will find a four drachma coin.
Take it and give it to them to pay the taxes for us.
That's interesting.
Well, have you ever caught a fish with a coin in his mouth?
That would be interesting, wouldn't it?
That indeed was a was a miracle.
That was a miracle.
That was a miracle. But Jesus did pay the tax.
He didn't need to, but he paid the tax.
That's very interesting.
Sometimes we don't think we need to pay taxes, but we do.
We actually do. We have some wonderful examples in the Bible of people
that rendered to God the things that are God's.
And these people are our heroes, which is interesting.
So I'd like to bring out some of these facts to you
and see if maybe could be an inspiration for us.
I think we need to be inspired.
First of all, when we look at Egypt, there's a lot of things about Egypt
that are interesting.
We had the Shepra and Porah. Who were they?
You remember those names in the Bible?
Who were they?
Well, they were the midwives.
Okay, they were the Egyptian midwives.
Historically, this is probably the earliest known example
of civil disobedience.
Interesting. In the face of a specific command
by a powerful regime to disobey the law of God.
Even today, it remains as a wonderful example of the power of faith
in very difficult circumstances.
The two courageous women did what they could to protect themselves,
yet their faith in God was ultimately their protection and blessing.
What were they supposed to do?
What did the Pharaoh tell them to do?
Commanded them to kill all the boys.
Kill all the boys at birth.
That's interesting. These are midwives.
So God was good to the midwives.
They spared the boys.
And of course, the girls, that was no problem.
They didn't have to worry about that.
But God actually had blessed both of Shepra and Porah
and gave them their own families, which is interesting.
Wow. That's interesting to me. Very interesting.
Then we have another example.
Moses' parents, did they disobey?
They actually disobeyed. That's right.
The parents of Moses, they disobeyed the Egyptian king's Edict,
and they hid Moses, saving him from death in the bulrushes.
And then what happened?
Well, Pharaoh's daughter rescued baby Moses, didn't they?
She really did. Now that's interesting to me.
And she was disobeying her father's command, by the way.
I wonder how she got away with that.
God must have provided that for sure. Interesting.
And we have another example.
In Daniel, we find three Hebrews.
Okay, we find three Hebrews.
You know this...oh, and that's...
Anyways, my picture is a little bit off right here.
But what were the three Hebrews supposed to do?
Supposed to bow down to the image, right? The image.
The image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up, that golden image.
Did they bow down? No, they didn't.
If they weren't going to bow down, what was supposed to happen to them?
What's that?
They were going to be thrown in the fiery furnace.
Okay, I'll catch up with these slides here in a minute.
So, Daniel also had his problem.
Daniel was one of the officials in the government.
And the king required him to do his duty.
He was active in civil affairs, which is interesting.
And Daniel had some people that he was in charge of
that really didn't appreciate him very much.
They wanted to get rid of him.
So, how did they get rid of Daniel?
Well, they couldn't find any fault with him.
Wow, I wonder how many people could find fault with us
if they were trying to get rid of us.
Well, they probably could find a lot of fault, okay, in my particular case.
But the only way that they could find fault with Daniel was, in fact,
the only thing that he did that wasn't against any kind of law was,
well, they knew that he prayed, okay, he would pray three times a day,
which is interesting.
And so, they convinced the king to set up a law
that no one was supposed to worship or pray to anyone except for him.
Well, that probably made him feel pretty good, you know.
Wouldn't you feel pretty good about that?
Well, they found him praying.
He didn't change his activity at all.
He kept doing what he always did, okay.
He was rendering to God the things that are his gods, okay.
And so, they had him thrown into the lion's den.
I don't know if you've ever been in a lion's den.
Have you ever been in a lion's den?
Have you ever been in a cage with a lion?
Well, I've been in a cage with a cougar before,
and I thought I was going to get eaten up, okay.
This was supposed to have been not a very bad cougar,
but that cougar had gotten me by the neck right here, which is interesting.
His mouth was right around my neck, his feet were on my shoulders,
and I was scared to death, okay.
But he didn't bite me. He didn't eat me.
My shirt got a little bit torn.
That's very frightening, very frightening indeed.
So, the king had to have Daniel thrown into the lion's den, okay.
And the king didn't sleep all that night.
Didn't sleep all that night. Why?
Well, he loved Daniel. He really liked Daniel.
But he knew that he was trapped, and he had to do this.
Interesting.
So, what happened? Daniel was protected.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine?
I wonder if Daniel slept.
You know, maybe he did. I don't know.
Maybe he put his head on one of those lioness' mains and just slept.
But the angel shut the lion's mouth,
and that early morning the king got up very early,
and was hoping that Daniel's God would have saved him.
And did he?
Oh, yeah.
And Daniel's God did save him.
That was an amazing, amazing story.
But that was a very, very brave situation.
Let me go into Shadrach.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were very familiar, okay,
with these three worthies, okay.
And they were supposed to bow down to that image, okay, of gold.
But they refused.
Well, the king gave them kind of a second chance.
They still didn't bow down to that image, okay.
Said, if you don't bow down, I'm going to go,
we're going to fire up those furnaces seven times hotter than they should be.
And they threw them in.
They threw them in.
I wonder what those furnaces were.
They were probably kilns, right, for building, for building bricks
and things that had to have a tremendous amount of heat.
And as the king looked in there, looked into that fire,
he noticed that there was four.
There was four people and not three.
And the fourth one was what?
Had the, had the, like the son of God, it looked like the son of God.
How interesting is that?
Wow.
That is extremely interesting.
And then what do we have?
What do we have here?
I can almost see my pictures.
We have a picture of a young lady, okay.
This young lady was called Rahab.
You remember the story of Rahab?
What's interesting?
That is very interesting.
Rahab lived where?
Where did Rahab live?
Jericho.
She lived in Jericho.
And Jericho was going to what?
Jericho was going to fall.
And why was it going to fall?
Because God was going to ask the people to make it fall down, okay.
And they marched around the walls of Jericho.
And so Joshua was the person in charge at that particular time.
And he was the son of Nun.
And secretly he sent two spies from Shittim.
And he says, I want you to go over to the land and I especially want you to check out Jericho.
So they went and they entered the house of a prostitute.
That's interesting.
What do we know?
What do we know about her?
She's actually in the line of Jesus, right?
In David's line as king.
That's interesting to me.
Wow.
Now God can use anyone.
And he used Rahab.
So what did Rahab do actually?
She hid the spies.
So that was against the law, okay.
And the people had seen those.
I got to figure out what this is right here.
Oh, there we go.
All right.
So the soldiers, okay, the officers came to her place and they said that people had said that,
you know, that the spies came into your house.
And she said, well, they're gone.
She lied, okay.
Is it ever okay to lie?
Well, we're not going to talk about that today.
But is it okay to lie to save somebody's life?
It's very interesting concept to think about, isn't it?
But she told them that they had gone.
They had gone just before they had shut the gates of the city and said, but you had better hurry up
because you might catch up with them.
And then she actually hid.
She hid the three spies or the two spies.
She hid them underneath some straw.
And then when the coast was clear, she let them down.
She let them down and a cord, okay, because she lived on the wall.
She absolutely lived on the wall.
It's interesting to me.
Wow. And so they escaped.
She said, you better go over here to the mountains, whatever, and stay three days before you actually go back.
And she, they, the spies had some very interesting information because they found out through Rahab
that the people were frightened of the Israelites.
They were frightened.
They had heard about how God had led them through the through the waters, how they had led them all of this time.
And they were afraid.
They were really, really afraid.
So that was a very good encouragement.
Okay.
For those people as well.
Well, how many of you are you?
This is kind of neat when we when we look at the stories of these heroes in the Bible.
But if you and I had been any one of these people that we just mentioned,
would we have done what they did?
Would we have done what they did?
Well, we know the end of the story.
Okay.
We know that it all turned out good.
All right.
But sometimes it doesn't turn out good.
But just like the Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they told the king, he says,
even if our God doesn't save us, we will not bow down and worship you.
That was interesting.
That was very, very interesting.
Now, I believe I don't know how many of you are active with civil things like our
government, our local government, okay, maybe even our national government.
I don't know how many of us have actually voted, okay, voted on local, local voting.
Because we vote for different, you know, people that have different positions in our
in our local government.
And then we also vote and national voting as well.
But I've talked to several people and I found out that some people have never voted.
Okay.
Now that's interesting.
You know, not voting is a vote.
Think about it.
If we don't vote, that is a vote.
That's a decision.
Okay.
That's a vote.
But I believe that if we look at the render to Caesar, the things that are Caesar's,
we need to render to Caesar our taxes, okay, our loyalty, okay?
Because we have benefit, don't we?
Benefit by roads.
We have benefit by government, okay, that keeps us safe, okay, and that protects us
in the court system.
Okay, we are a part of the government.
But if we don't vote, okay, on different matters, then who's going to vote?
And when we vote, we should vote our what?
Our conscience, shouldn't we?
We shouldn't vote, we should vote our conscience.
We should vote in the lines of what the Bible gives us as well.
And if we don't vote, then that is a vote.
Now what about local things that we have in our community?
Are there things that we can do in our local community to get involved with local things?
And one of those things that was brought to my attention is Religious Liberty,
the Religious Liberty Magazine.
And I got a little report from the Southern Union about religious liberty,
and they said that they don't have any record of anyone from this church getting the
Religious Liberty Magazine so that it could be sent out to our thought leaders, okay,
in our community.
And I thought, you know, that's pretty sad.
That's really sad.
Religious Liberty Magazine comes out in May-June, okay, the first issue is going to be May-June.
And we do have an obligation, I think, to make sure that our leaders, our local leaders,
okay, in our communities, get the Religious Liberty Magazine.
Now you might say, well, why?
Why should we do that?
Well, what does it do?
Well, here's some items that are mentioned here.
It defends religious liberty in the courts, advocate directly with lawmakers in Congress
and state capitals, support church members who face religious discrimination in the workplace,
send religious magazines to judges and elected officials across the nation.
Now that's a good thing, isn't it?
It is.
Now the campaign rate is $7 for a subscription to one of our thought leaders.
That's interesting.
That's really not a lot of money when you think about subscriptions to other magazines
that you may get.
The regular rate is like $10.
Now on January 14 is Religious Liberty Sabbath.
That's Religious Liberty Sabbath.
And we'll have something on the back in the foyer where you can actually sign up and you
can actually, if you know a thought leader, you can put their name and address down and
you can sponsor that for them.
That would be interesting, wouldn't it?
I think so.
I think we ought to be active in our local affairs here in Gordon County.
Let's try Catoosa County.
We ought to be active.
How can we help?
How can we help in our local government?
How can we do that?
Should we be active in our local government?
Should we?
I think we should.
Now if we pay taxes, and I'm assuming most of us pay taxes, that means that we should
have some idea about what's going on locally.
What goes on in our school system?
You might say, I don't have any children in the school.
I have grandchildren in the school system.
But even if you don't have children in the school system, we pay taxes.
Part of those taxes go to support our school system.
But what are they teaching in our schools?
What are we doing?
Do we have any problems?
Do we have any obligation to make our will known?
And those are just some of the things that we can do.
What about if there's a Planned Parenthood?
If there's some places where we've been trying to be active with, what's that one over here?
What is it?
Yes, Christ Chapel.
And that's getting involved in our local affairs as well.
But if we're not active, then there is an obligation that we have.
Our obligation is to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to render to
God the things that are God's.
Sometimes those two come in conflict.
If the only time that we stand up because of the conflict, well, I would rather that
our local leaders know us because we are helping in local affairs.
We are active.
We are actively trying to help what is going on.
It's interesting to me.
And of course, during the time of the pandemic, there were some clashes, weren't there?
Clashes with some churches.
Some churches were closed.
In fact, some of them started out with, well, you could attend church, but you could only
have 250 members.
You couldn't have anybody else.
And then in just a few days, the mandate came down to you could only have 150.
Then it was 100.
Then it got down to about 25.
And it just fell apart from there.
And of course, where they banned church meetings, they actually put in prison some pastors.
One that I can think about was actually in Canada, put him in prison because they decided
that they still had to have church.
In some areas, even in the United States, some areas the churches were closed, but yet
the liquor stores were open, the bars were open.
It's kind of like, you know, I mean, this is rendered to Caesar the things that are
Caesar's.
But when they come in conflict with the things that are God's and worship, then maybe we
should take a stand.
Maybe like some of those people that we talked about, that we that were reflected with some
of these pictures on here, like Daniel and Rebecca and the three Worthys, okay, and the
Midwives.
And you can probably think of some others as well.
But I do believe that God will bless us, okay, as we don't neglect to render the things that
are God's.
And the government has sometimes they overreach.
Sometimes they overreach.
I wanted to share with you in the closing thoughts here, if I can find my notes.
There was an interview that I caught, and I wanted to read you some of this interview.
Here it is.
Okay.
There was an interview with Kirk Cameron, some of you may recognize that name, with
Dr. Ben Carson.
I think all of us know who Dr. Ben Carson is.
And Dr. Ben Carson said this.
This is interesting.
He says, there are a lot of policies in our government that keep people dependent rather
than try to boost them and to help them become self-sufficient.
And I thought that a lot of programs that I designed to get people out of poverty would
be very popular, but not so much on the Hill.
There are a lot of people there who want to keep people in poverty, who want to keep people
dependent.
And it was a struggle, and it continues to be a struggle now.
And we have to keep working on it, because resources in this country are adequate to
give everybody a reasonable lifestyle.
So you have these forces that want to control people, to control their vote, and to control
their psyche.
And it's a difficult thing.
And he goes on.
I also learned that the vast majority of people in this country actually think the right way,
and are quite reasonable people and logical people, but there is a certain lack of courage.
A lot of people will stand in the corner with their head down and just hope that no one
calls them a nasty name, and they're not willing to rally, to really stand up, to really stand
up strongly for what they believe in.
On the other hand, there are factions that don't like our country, and that want to fundamentally
change it into something else instead of a country that's by the people and for the people,
something that's up by and for the government.
And they seem to be much more forceful and willing to stand up for what they believe.
And it's going to take people of courage if we are going to be one nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
You have to be willing to stand up for that, and if you don't, you will lose it.
So we do have an obligation.
I do have an obligation to stand up for what we believe.
And if we believe in God and if we believe in the things that the Bible teaches us, I
think we have an obligation.
We have an obligation to vote.
That is our right.
We have a vote.
We should use that vote.
We should get active in local things, local government.
And I'm pointing to myself.
I'm not active in local government.
I vote, okay?
I vote local and I vote national and have for years, but I'm not involved in local things.
I want to get involved in some local things this year, this new year.
Maybe that would be a challenge for some of us, which would be probably a very interesting
thing for us to think about.