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

Turn, if you would, to Matthew chapter 26, so the Fairweather Christian. We have a few examples of this, and I probably won't be preaching too late this evening. It's a very simple subject, but we want to make sure that this never becomes us. It's easier to become, you know, to be the Fairweather Christian early on in your Christian life. It's easier to just kind of have that attitude and just kind of get out, but it literally can happen almost at any time. You don't want to be so puffed up into thinking, oh, that could never happen to me. You know, well, what's it going to take? How many years of not winning the World Series is it going to take before you jump onto a bandwagon and follow some other team or something, right? How long is it going to take before you just say, okay, I'm sick of church or whatever, right? Or things just not going well enough for you, and you say, you know what, forget all this. You're in Matthew 26, I'm just going to read this for you, Luke 7, 23. Jesus said, and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. Because what we read about in the parable of the sower is when affliction or persecution arises for the word's sake, so because of the word of God, because of the Bible, immediately they're offended. Well, Jesus said, hey, blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. When someone's going to bring up some verse in the Bible, oh, the Old Testament or whatever, and you're going to hear this passage, and you're not offended. Because the world's going to try to throw scripture in your face to make you be ashamed or feel guilt or like, oh, wow, I didn't know that was there. And look, this is all the more reason too, especially for newer Christians and people who haven't matured enough and people who don't have their root going down in the scripture, in the word of God, in the house of God, yet it's important that the preacher's preaching on these things so that they don't get offended later on. You could hear from the preacher, hear the word of God and say, no, look, this is what we believe because that's going to help strengthen the faith and not just allow it to be portrayed in some bad light or whatever and just let the world and let the God haters spin the word of God into looking like it's some horrible thing, because it's not, but to show and to give the reason and help people to understand, yes, the Bible does say that and it is righteous and usually, not usually, there's always good reasons for everything in scripture, but you hear the common complaints of people saying, oh, well, you know, oh, Christian, well, Lot tried to give his daughters over to these guys to, you know, to have their way with her. How's it like? Well, that was wrong. It's that simple. Well, the Bible teaches, no, the Bible tells what happened and it's like, oh, yeah, you want to bring up Lot? Because who were the people that were trying to defile and do vile things with what they thought were the men that showed up, if you want to bring that up and go down that rabbit trail, but that's why the Bible teaches about those things, but people need to hear, people need to hear why the Bible teaches, oh, if a son or a daughter smites their parent, right, that they deserve the death penalty according to scripture. Well, we're not talking about a four-year-old who's throwing a tantrum and is, you know, doing one of these and like hits mom or dad in the face or something, like clearly that's not what the Bible's talking about when it's given a death penalty. It's talking about like adult, like grown people who are so disrespectful and so rebellious that they'd be willing to throw a punch like that and hey, God says that that's, you know, that's what's righteous, that's what the law is and, you know, if we have things backwards, then that's our problem, not God's and, you know, don't let the world just water everything down so much, but no, people need to hear the teaching on this and just at least hear the, hey, this is what the Bible says and we're not going to be ashamed, you know, and teaching to people who are saved, obviously, because these people, the watered-down Christians or the fair-weather Christians are those that, they are saved, they are born again and you need to hear, hey, are you going to be ashamed of the word of God or are you going to be ashamed of Jesus who is the word, the one that saved you from your sin? Are you really going to now become ashamed and become offended at his word when he's the one who saved you?