Every battle that we face is an opportunity for us to prove that we can
keep God's commandments. That we can, you know, hold to the Word of God, that we can
pray during a difficult time, that we can win these battles. Let me read to you
from Exodus 23. Exodus 23 verse 27 says this,
I will not drive them out from before thee in one year, lest the
land become desolate and the beasts of the field multiply against thee. By little
and little I will drive them out from before thee until thou be increased and
inherit the land. I love this verse. Actually I preached a sermon called
By Little and Little a couple years ago and it was that faithful word. I preached
that faithful word and the concept of it was this is that, you know, the Christian
life is a little here and a little there. So this should be an encouragement to us
when we feel discouraged like we're not growing enough. Like, man, I'm not where I
need to be. Yeah, but just little by little though. You know, you're not gonna
be a great Christian overnight. It happens by little and little, right? Hey,
how do you build some muscle, right? How do you, how do you deadlift a certain
amount of weight? Well, 2.5 pounds. 5 pounds, 10 pounds, right? That's how you do
it. How can you get stronger? By little and little. The problem with the children
of Israel, they're like, we want to be like the other nations. Well, what was the problem?
They were comparing themselves with other people. What they should be doing
is recognizing that God told them, hey, I can just drive them all out. I can just
cause you to deadlift 500 right off the bat if I wanted to, but then where's the
struggle in that? How are you gonna learn? Gotta learn how to struggle. Gotta
learn how to fight. Gotta learn how to discipline yourself. Gotta learn how to
be, to have tenacity. Gotta learn to have patience. Gotta learn to be disciplined.
And so, what he's telling them is, you know, I have work for you to do. You're
gonna war against these people, but it's not gonna happen in one year because no
one is a great Christian in one year. It takes years to learn the Bible, to learn
how to be a great husband, to learn to be a great wife, to learn how to raise
children, to be a great employee, to be a great church member. It takes a lifetime.
And we're constantly learning these things, okay? Not only that, look at verse
five of Judges chapter three. I've mentioned this already, but he says in
verse five, And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, and
the Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites. And they took their
daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served
their gods. And the children of Israel did evil on the side of the Lord, and
forget the Lord their God, and served Balaam and the grove. So what happened
here? Well, the concept is basically, it's simple. Fight the flesh or the flesh will
reign over you, right? So instead of fighting the Canaanites, they made an
affinity with them through their daughters, okay? And they begin to
intermingle. Obviously, one of the principles that we can learn from here
is that God does not want us as his people getting married to unsaved
people. Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, the Bible says. And look,
this is not a command of the Lord, this is just my opinion. I think you should
marry a Baptist. I mean, what's wrong with that? If you're gonna get a
Christian, if you're gonna marry a Christian, you might as well get like the best
ones. I would even go a little further and say you should get yourself an
independent fundamental Baptist. I would even go a little further than that and
say you should get a new I of B Baptist. Or convert them to being an independent
fundamental Baptist. Convert them to be a new I of B Baptist. But what I'm saying
is this, is that, you know, obviously the Bible strictly condemns marrying an
unsaved person as a Christian, okay? It's forbidden. Why? Well, because what we see
here is that they begin to intermingle with the foreign nations and the
instead of the believers, the children of God, or the nation of God, influencing the
heathen to worship the true God, the reverse happened. The heathen caused them
to worship their false god Balaam, okay? And I've seen this, you know, in my
personal life with people that I know where, you know, they got involved in a
relationship with an unsaved person, they got married to them, and now they're like
visiting a Mormon Church and stuff. They're going to the Catholic Church,
they're going to whatever, you know, something that's not Christian at all.
And you think to yourself like, man, people would actually do that? Yeah, when
you're in marriage you're kind of kind of screwed, let's just be honest. You have a
covenant with that person and, you know, a lot of people just choose not to fight
that battle and be like, I'll just go to the stupid Catholic Church with them. And I
mean we see it over and over again in the Bible where this happens. This is why
God tells us, he tells his people not to be unequally yoked together with
unbelievers, because they'll drive your heart away. And I'm not saying that if
you marry like a Catholic you're just gonna become a Roman Catholic or
something like that, and if that's the case you just believed in vain. What I'm
saying is that you will compromise, and you might even step into a Roman Catholic
Church, you know, you go into a Roman Catholic Church and you'll
kneel down, but in your heart you'll be like, but I'm standing up in my heart though.