(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

especially those who you're either ignorant of a lot of facts or are maybe newer in the faith because Satan has a lot of tactics. Satan has a lot of devices on causing division, on trying to get God's work to cease, on just causing problems and disrupting things, and there's lots of ways that Satan will use tools that Satan will use to make that happen. Satan is devils and children of the devil and, you know, there's always going to be things and there's always going to be people who are going to be out there trying to cause confusion into a situation. And one of the ways they do that is by playing the victim card, right? And you see this happen in many groups, not just even in churches, but like sometimes it seems like everyone wants to play the victim card, right? Everyone's the victim. And one of the most recent things that I saw was just kind of blew my mind was, you know, with the bombing of First Works Baptist Church in LA, right, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out who the victim is. The place where the bomb went off, right, that blew out the windows and the damage was done, you know, they were the victims. They did not, nobody in the church was committing any type of evil against anyone else. Nobody was doing, you know, had gone out and injured anybody or done anything physically to hurt anybody, yet they were the ones that had a bomb blow up in their church building. But then if you start reading certain news, news, I call them quotes, news sources, they want to plant the sodomites as being the victims. It's crazy, like doublespeak, trying to make you think that, well, no, no, they're really the victims. Yeah, even though we're not going to talk too much about that bomb that was used, but they're threatened and they want to go out and they want to kill these people and they'll use all these slanders and all these lies, but the tactic is being used so that people who aren't familiar with that church can just have that church be demonized and have it legitimize the violence that was done ultimately against the church. Now thankfully no one got injured, no one got hurt, right, I mean praise God for that, right, that God protected the people there and that it was just some property that got damaged. But the fact that people would come out and even try to claim, well, you know, who the true real victims are is not the church, is insanity. Now that should be extremely obvious to us, who's right and who's not, right. So the church can say we're being persecuted, we're being harassed, we're victims here because someone blew up our church building, whereas the people who are responsible, again I don't know any individuals, but it's obvious that either some sodomite or some sodomite sympathizer that's just some extremely wicked person is responsible for doing that act because those are the people who had the problems with them leading up to that, those are the people trying to run them out of town, those are the people protesting them and want to get them shut down and, you know, and lo and hold there's a bomb coming up. It's pretty easy to see who's the real victim, right. But in other situations it may not always be as easy to determine, right, and especially when it comes with churches or preachers and things like that because you'll also have people turning to scripture, right, and you have multiple people turning to scripture going this or that, you know, and trying to prove the point. So this isn't necessarily the easiest sermon to preach through for me because I want to be clear on how to understand this. How do we determine what's right and what's wrong? Because obviously you need the Word of God to shine the light on the truth, right, and just to know the truth. But each situation is slightly different and you kind of need to know facts in order to also make the right judgment call. And we need to know when to be able to spot the facts or the truth and also be able to know when you can just have to say, well, I don't really know. And then you just have to refrain from judgment as well. But we start in Matthew chapter 5 there. I want to look at verse number 10. The Bible says, Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is a kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad for great is your reward in heaven for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Now that obviously is all true. Amen and amen. And the Bible is teaching us here that, you know, when when you're being reviled and persecuted for the name for the name of Christ, for the cause of Christ, for for doing things that are righteous and godly, that great is your reward in heaven. And you don't need to be upset about that. You could rejoice. You'd be happy about that because that's the way that all the prophets have been treated. But the confusing part comes in is when you've got two pastors or two preachers or two, you know, two people from different churches saying over the same event, I'm being persecuted and I'm, you know, and all this stuff is happening to me because I'm the one that's being persecuted. I'm going to these rewards, right? So many people are going to claim persecution, even the opposing sides of a fight. They're going to claim to be the ones being persecuted, right? But how do we know what's right? And so the goal of this sermon is to try to help think about these things rationally and scripturally to be able to get to the bottom of what is right and what's not right.