In this sermon, the speaker begins by referencing 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, which talks about running a race and receiving a prize. He emphasizes the importance of conducting oneself temperately and restricting oneself in all things, just like athletes do in training. The speaker then expresses gratitude for the opportunity to seek God's face and repent of sins with a group of men. He encourages the audience to make changes in their lives, specifically in the area of self-control and temperance, in order to feel like true Christians again. The sermon concludes with a call to repentance and a reminder that indulging in excess can make one sluggish and lethargic.

Hello, this is Brother Denny. Welcome to Charity Ministries. Our desire is that your life would be blessed and changed by this message. This message is not copyrighted and is not to be bought or sold. You are welcome to make copies for your friends and neighbors. If you would like additional messages, please go to our website for a complete listing at www.charityministries.org. If you would like a catalog of other sermons, please call 1-800-227-7902 or write to Charity Ministries, 400 West Main Street, Suite 1, EFRA PA 17522. These messages are offered to all without charge by the freewill offerings of God's people. A special thank you to all who support this ministry. Well, it's been good. I just thank God. You know, we always just tremble at the beginning of a serious five messages to preach, three of us here and all of us tremble and still trembling, but I couldn't believe what happened in two days. Thank God. We are not worthy to see these things that we see and to experience them that we experience. We are never, never worthy. Shall we just bow our heads for prayer? Father in heaven, thank you, Lord. Thank you deeply from the bottom of our hearts, Father, that a group of men could get together and behave themselves in such a way as this, to seek the face of God, to repent of their sins, to confess them, to edify one another, encourage one another, bless and just be open and transparent. God, it is so wonderful and I want to thank and bless you. Now, I do pray, God, that you would again break the word of blight and help us to apply it in a practical way in this message after the tremendous truths that were given this morning. God, I do pray, help us to know how to put it into practice in a very literal and practical manner. Thank you, dear God, for your spirit. I pray that you only give me utterance, Father, for the things that you would want to be said here. And as I seek not my own or my own message, Lord, but only to break that which is true and right according to the Scriptures. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Brother Daniel hit the nail on the head here when he talked about fighting against and warring against the flesh, sin and the devil. Well, we all know that the flesh is an enemy, a great enemy, and that is the reason that I would like to speak the next two sessions or this one and tomorrow, the Lord willing, on undisciplined lifestyles. I've noticed for a long time that people have tried to put right theology in an undisciplined lifestyle and it doesn't come out right. You know, they seem to have... Sometimes we think that we only go about halfway. You know, we say we believe it, we love the Lord, we believe His Word, but we're not willing to carry it on out to where it has a direct effect upon how we live. And then, of course, there is a blockage there. Jesus says, and I often view it with great compassion and concern, He says, why do you call me Lord and don't do the things which I say? Why do you do that? If you call me Lord, you should do the things which I say. And that's very true to be able to say the word Lord and mean it. If He's the Lord Jesus Christ, then He's the Lord. He's in charge. He's in control. And we should seek to do the things that He would say. Well, let us turn to Ezekiel chapter 16 for our beginning verses, three verses we'd like to read here. Ezekiel 16, 48 through 50. As I live, say of the Lord God, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done thou and thy daughters. Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom. Pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters. Neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty and committed abomination before me. Therefore, I took them away as I saw good. I suppose before I would have read that scripture, if I would have asked the question, what was the sin of Sodom? I could pretty well guess what most of the answers would be. But I would like to at least suggest that if you go ahead of the abominable things that were committed there in Sodom, which we normally talk about homosexuality or sodomy, what we really look at here according to this, which we don't have much of that detail given to us in Genesis, but here the prophet Ezekiel seems to have a revelation of God of the greater difficulty or problem in Sodom's life, or in the people of Sodom. And what it really is, as you look at this, is an undisciplined lifestyle. And the problem, and we probably often do not make the connection, but you know there is a connection. There is a connection between an undisciplined lifestyle ending up where Sodom ended up. It is because you have this mentality, you just let go, let her drive, you do whatever you want to do. If it feels good, that's fine. You just help yourself. There are no laws or limits. And that is the way America and the way many people, even in Christendom, are beginning to sound those kind of statements and words. And it is totally scary. Totally scary when people talk about that. And they just say, no laws, no legalism. Now that sounds like legalism to me. And as soon as you start talking about restricting, and you talk about the temperance of the flesh, and you talk about bringing your body under, and you talk about submitting yourself under the rule of Christ, then everybody gets very upset and nervous and all that. And because we have bought into the lie again from the devil, in this whole matter that grace is freedom to do what we want to do, and God will somehow just overlook all that is going on and bless us. And I will tell you, this nation is filled with that theology. Literally filled. A loose and condoning attitude concerning sin and ungodliness that are clearly spoken of in the written Word of God. And we say that grace of God overshadows it, covers it all, takes care of it all, we don't have to worry. And this big thing that is out today, which maybe Brother Denny, I just got a little bit again of his message, which might have spoken up before, is the fact that all future sins are all taken care of too. Not only the past, but everything we are ever going to do is already atoned for and taken care of and forgiven. In other words, there is just nothing we can do that would ever jeopardize our eternal salvation. A lot of that around. Oh my, so many things. I just would like to read a little bit from A.W. Tozer concerning the dangers of too much liberty. Because it will reflect both of these messages, I would just like to read a little article here, or just a portion of an article. Freedom is priceless. Where it is present, almost any kind of life is enjoyable. When it is absent, life can never be enjoyed. It can only be endured. Though millions have died in freedom's defense and through her praise, though her praise is in everyone's mouth, yet she has been tragically misunderstood by her advocates and sorely wounded in the house of her friends. I think the difficulty lies with our failure to distinguish freedom from liberty, which are indeed sisters, but not identical twins. Freedom is liberty within bounds. Liberty to keep the commandments of Christ. Liberty to serve mankind. Liberty to develop to the full in all the latent possibilities within our redeemed nature. True Christian liberty never sets us free to indulge our lusts or to follow our fallen impulses. The desire for unqualified freedom caused the fall of Lucifer and wrought the destruction of the angels at sin, as we have in Jude and 2 Peter 2. These sought freedom to do as they willed, and to get it, they threw away the beautiful liberty that meant freedom to do the will of God. And the human race followed them in the tragic and moral blunder. To anyone who bothers to think a bit, it should be evident that there is in the universe no such thing as absolute freedom. Only God is free. It is inherent in creaturehood that its freedom must be limited by the will of the Creator and the nature of the thing created. May I add my own words, or it will destroy itself. The glory of heaven lies in the character of the freedom enjoyed by those who dwell therein, that innumerable company of angels, the General Assembly, the Church of the Firstborn, and the spirits of just men made perfect are at liberty to fulfill all the broad purposes of God, and this liberty secures for them an infinitely greater degree of happiness than unqualified freedom could ever do. Unqualified freedom in any area of human life is deadly. In government, it's anarchy. In domestic life, free love, it's called free love. And in religion, it's called antinomianism. The freest cells of the body are cancer cells, but they kill the organism where they grow. A healthy society requires that its members accept the limited freedom. Each must curtail his own liberty that all may be free. And this law runs throughout all the created universe, including the kingdom of God. End of article there. Well, when we talk about lifestyle, you know we could talk on this for all week, but again, I would like to zero in, as I did yesterday, to what I believe is the most untouched or unspoken subject on the matter. And I don't mean to be too hard on you. I recognize that there are many variables when we look at lifestyles that affect people in different ways. One person can live a certain way and get by and live to be 82 years old, and you can point to all kinds of relatives that did that and got by. But there are all kinds that don't get by, and they're dying in their 50s, and they're dying in their 40s. I recently met a nurse from the Lancaster General Hospital here who worked in the intensive care or cardiac unit. She got so frustrated that she quit her job and began to teach nutrition because of the people coming in with massive heart attacks in their 30s and 40s. And she finally recognized that something is way out of whack. Well, I'm going to speak predominantly today on that sin of Sodom called fullness of bread. Now, this is not only... When we think of fullness of bread, we might think, well, that means that there was an abundance of bread. Well, there's an abundance of bread in America without a doubt. In fact, we just throw away about 10,000 tractor-trailer loads every day that we waste. This is something in the neighborhood of 200,000 tons. A child takes two bites of food and says, Mommy, I don't like it, and the rest gets thrown away. At the end of the fast food restaurants and all the other, everything that happens to be left over is going into the dumpster and into the landfills. And I tremble to think of the judgment of God and what could happen with that type of a lifestyle. Fullness of bread. One writer gives it this way, It's the American way to die. It's the American way to die. In parentheses, following that, I say, in short, gluttony. Gluttony, the American way to die. High blood pressure, or rather called hypertension, is the single most common risk factor for heart, blood vessels, and kidney disease in the United States. There are approximately 50 million people in the United States that have some form of high blood pressure. Consequently, they go to the doctor, the doctor says very little, most of the time, about lifestyle. Rather, he'll give them a prescription, and that causes side effects, which causes a later visit for another prescription, and most times a third in order to balance out the first one that he gave in order to combat this disease. Heart bypasses are taking place like an assembly line in many of the major hospitals in America, including here in Lancaster, at about $35,000 to $45,000 a crack, only because of our lifestyle. There are about, and this is unbelievable, but there are about 100 million people in the United States who are having problems with constipation. Someone has called it the constipated nation, with 1,000 different products, listen to this, 1,000 different products to get and to keep things moving. America is drunk on food. America is drunk on food. There is too much feasting and not enough of fasting, and that is true in many, many Christians' lives. In fact, there is not a lot of difference. As you look at professed Christiandom, there is not hardly any difference. The whole concept of temperance is like the prophet says, truth is falling in the streets and equity cannot enter. We refuse to look at it. We refuse to face it. It has been a constant struggle in the last, I don't know how many years in my own life, and I battle it, but by God's grace, it is my firm conviction that for myself that I need to get a hold of this in a greater measure than I ever have up to this point. I'm 51 years of age and people are dropping over dead of heart attacks at that age, and I just had that rude awakening of the other day that a friend of mine was telling me that she sat in the living room with a friend of hers who was sitting there 52 years of age, huffing and puffing, and short of breath, overweight, smoked and drank, and she sat there and looked at him and turned to his wife and said, if you want that man around for any length of time, because the children are yet small, fairly small, you'd better go to the doctor pretty quick. Well, she heard her, but four days later she tried to crawl into bed with him and he wouldn't move, and he was gone at 52 years of age. And yet, if you look at a man like that, without a shadow of a doubt, if we have any common sense, we hear that and see that, we know of a certainty that he's committing partial suicide. You know, the Bible says that the rich man, in Luke chapter 16, verse 19, fared sumptuously every day in history, and I'm not going to preach vegetarianism here today, as you think I might or are afraid maybe I'm going to. I'm going to tell you right now that I believe that meat-eating is in the Bible all the way back to Abraham and beyond. Maybe not before the flood, but at least afterwards. But the problem is, there was an occasionally a calf was killed, a fatted calf was killed and man had a feast. The problem today is we're faring sumptuously every day and our bodies can't handle it and we're breaking down and it's killing us. And it's the American way to die. I looked at that scripture over in Luke chapter 16, verse 19. You know, it is one of those that I actually feel the way it is handled many times by preachers that it is preached upon and quickly run away from. Because it says there nothing to do, and I don't understand all this, but it has nothing to do with what this, because it kind of gives an Old Testament setting. There was a certain rich man and we know he had Moses and the prophets, so it's kind of an Old Testament picture and setting that is given there. But the Bible says that the rich man fared sumptuously every day and then the poor man, Lazarus, was laying at his gate full of sores and was, how does it say there, desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table. You go back to Ezekiel 16, you will notice that even though that Sodom had fullness of bread and abundance of pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness, neither did they care about the poor. You see, and so that was also part of the curse of the sin of Sodom. Well here, likewise, we have this rich man faring sumptuously every day, not caring about the poor, but then the Bible says that when he died, he went to hell. And in hell he lifted up his eyes and was in torment and he began to cry to Abraham and what was he told? He was told, Thou in thy lifetime receiveth the good and Lazarus the evil, but now he is comforted and thou art tormented. And I say, that's a scripture that makes me shudder sometimes. Thou in thy lifetime receiveth the good and Lazarus the evil, but now things are turned around and justice has come. And that causes me to tremble when I look at the American way. I'd like to look at a few more scriptures. And again, if I can refer to the Amplified, this, I'd like to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 9, verse 24 through 27 and read it in the Amplified. Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run your race that you may lay hold of the prize and make it yours. Now every athlete who goes into training conducts himself temperately and restricts himself in all things. They do it to win a wreath that will soon wither, but we do it to receive a crown of eternal blessedness that cannot wither. Therefore, I do not run uncertainty without definite aim. I do not box like one beating the air and striking without an adversary. But, like a boxer, I buffet my body, handle it roughly, discipline it by hardships, and subdue it for fear that after proclaiming to others the gospel of things pertaining to it, I myself should become unfit, nor stand the test, be unapproved and rejected as a counterfeit. Now, I've heard of people sitting in restaurants making a joke out of Paul's testimony, I buffet my body. You know, I sit at a buffet, I buffet my body, and laughing about it. It is an awesome thing. Gluttony. Ecclesiastes 10.17 Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles and thy princes eat in due season for strength and not for drunkenness. Solomon is speaking about princes eating and he's talking about drunkenness. Once again, we have that word. America and many of us have been drunk at times with food. I believe that if you will look through the Scriptures, drunkenness by strong drink and gluttony go hand in hand through the Scripture. However, if we as ministers of the Gospel would be staggering to the pulpit in drunkenness, we would be totally appalled. But when we do it drunk with food, we just wink our eye and look the other way or just laugh about it. Luke 21, excuse me, Luke 12, 19 to 21. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years. Take thine ease. Eat, drink, and be merry. I often say with that Scripture, you know, and you hear these statements. Have you ever heard them? Oh, come on. You deserved it. You hear those statements like, come on, take it a little easy. We've worked hard. We've deserved it. Let's live it up a little bit. You know, those kind of things are often spoken in our day. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. Then whose shall these things be which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. The awesome thing about that whole Scripture and the account there is how that you can tell it. I can. I can so easily tell that there's a spirit of the whole thing. It's just an attitude. It's a frame of mind. And many, many people have it today. And I just grieve many times when I go into a public eating place and I see exactly what the people are doing. Senior citizens sitting there, you know, who have nothing better to do with plates piled full of food. They're out of the hard work and the exercise category. And there they sit, stuffing themselves at smorgasbords and buffets where they can eat all they want to. And not only them, but many others likewise and many a working man who doesn't work that hard with a plate piled full of meat fried in oil and fat to a peak. I mean, it's piled to a peak on his plate. Luke 12, 45 to 46, But, and if that servant say in his heart, My Lord, delayeth his coming and shall begin to beat the men's servants and maidens and to eat and drink and to be drunken, the Lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him and in an hour when he is not aware and he will cut him in thunder and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. Now, we can look at a scripture like that and we can certainly pick out the part that seems to click well with us that he shall begin to beat the men's servants and the maidens. You know, but when it says that and to eat and drink and be drunken, you know, then we're not so sure it seems like, what he's trying to say there. But the Lord Jesus is putting it all on a package to delay, say, Well, the Lord's not going to come. You see the spirit again. You see the attitude. God isn't coming yet. We're living in prosperity. Let's enjoy life a little. Everything's going to be all right. Eat and drink and be merry. But it says, and this is why I call it drunkenness, it says that that man will be unattended. That man will be dull spiritually. And the day of the Lord is going to come in an hour or in a day, it says, when he looketh not for Him. And in an hour when he is not aware. And that's not because he beat the men's servants and the maid's servants. That's because his whole lifestyle and whole demeanor has dulled his senses concerning the spiritual time factor in which he's living in. And he doesn't understand that the Lord is coming soon. And I wish I could speak on the subject along with this as to why I believe the Lord is coming soon. And go into Daniel and some of the prophets to explain that. But I see that we are in the midst of a very, very dangerous time to live because we have such prosperity, which is prophesied in the book of Daniel, that should come in the end and is causing people to relax and to be drunk and to live lifestyles that further dull their senses concerning Christ's coming. Luke 21, 34-35 Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness and cares of this life, so that that day should come upon you for, and here's the prophecy, for as a snare shall it come upon all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. That's probably talking about the coming of the Lord and the people will be unprepared. But that word surfeiting, however you pronounce it there, in the Greek, is taken from drunkenness or a debauch or actually a glut is what it means. Romans 13, 13 Let us walk honestly in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, which is what I was speaking about yesterday. Chambering and wantonness, I believe, has to do with fornication and adultery and sexual immorality. Not in strife and envying, which is also a major matter of lifestyle. Not living in peace, and we'll speak more of that tomorrow. Perhaps not in strife and envying. 1 Peter 4, 3 and 4 For the time past of our life may suffice us to have brought the will of the Gentiles when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revelings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries, wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speak evil of you. But today, the church doesn't have any problem anymore with being spoken of, evil of, because they don't run with them the same excess because they do the same thing. And they have their parties all together, sinners and saints alike, many times. And there are reunions and there are feasts and suppers and what have you. And there's hardly any difference. But here in Philippians, you know, or in Peter, they thought it strange that the individual said, I cannot and I won't do it. And then they stormed and carried on and said, oh, who do you think you are, you know, that you won't even come to us and do this and drink this or eat that. Philippians 3.19, which is somewhat the crux of the matter again in the New Testament, where he says, whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and who glory in their shame, who mind earthly things. Now, for myself, in my Bible, I wrote down this, food, sex, and materialism. Whose God is their belly, who glory in their shame, the things that they should be ashamed of, and who mind earthly things. And if I have any understanding at all of the Word of God concerning that verse, that is what we're talking about. Undisciplined lifestyles that affect us so greatly today. Whose end is destruction. Let's look at it a little bit. That is, they have no true religion. They must perish in the same manner as all sinners. And their profession is not going to save them. Unless these people are converted and become true friends of the cross, they cannot enter heaven. Whose God is their belly, who worship their own appetites, a people who worship eating, or worship their appetites, and who live not to adore and to honor God, but for self-indulgence and selfish gratification. Just recently, we read in a very common church newspaper about a youth group that put on a supper for their young people. They had a little extra equipment there for everybody, and then some missing. They gave them all gloves and aprons to put on, and no utensils, and served them spaghetti as a youth activity. They can be glad, I hope, that I wasn't there. I don't know how I could endure that. To see a bunch of young people sit at a table like pigs in the name of a youth activity. It's awesome. Absolutely awesome. And that's only the tip of the iceberg for all that stuff. And who glory in their shame. That is, they glory in the things which they ought to be ashamed of. They indulge in modes of living that they ought to be ashamed to even mention. And who mind earthly things. That is, whose heart is set on earthly things, or who live to obtain them. Their attention is directed to honor, gain, pleasure, chief anxiety, is that they may secure these objects. This is mentioned as one of the characteristics of enmity to the cross of Christ. And if this be so, my, what will God do with His church in our day? What will He do? On the local scene here, it is something, you know. The plain people in this area seem to be known more for their food preparation or their delicious meals that they serve than for about anything else. Of course, we have so much hypocrisy and so, you know, people are farming tobacco and known for all their sweets and sours and all the different food they make, but nobody virtually hears or learns of Jesus Christ when they come here as a tourist. But rather, they are competed with for being lured to the biggest smorgasbords and buffets, up to 80 items and all that that we have that try to get them in. And of course, many of the local people likewise. And I think in many of your cities you have the same things. We call them the food strips like we have over here on Route 30 where restaurants are nearly against each other for miles down the road. And everything is just prepared commercially but this is the problem, you know. And they just make the food because it tastes good and people eat it and never care. They never care the effect that it has on them. One of the major problems, I won't have time to speak about this too, is the fact that there is no fasting today. I talked to a minister of the gospel just a few weeks ago and in the course of my conversation I asked him, have you ever went on a three-day fast? He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and he shook his head, no. Never would have done such a thing. I said, I encourage you to do it and I think maybe God will open some things up to you that you haven't known before. And so not only are we faring sumptuously every day like the rich man, we never give the body and our organs any rest and therefore we are in trouble because of that many times. We overload our systems to the point and never give them any rest and they can't heal themselves or correct themselves and then we go to the doctor and sit under the knife to try to make the corrections but you know that that is only so much can be done. Total health care costs from one end to the other. America is costing America somewhere over 980 billion dollars a year which is virtually 1 trillion dollars. Not only, and a lot of it is set to correct this horrendous lifestyle that we are living. Abundance of idleness is another one that I could speak about. It's this faring sumptuously every day and then no exercise. Like I said, for the man who's a hardworking farmer or carpenter, many times he can eat this kind of a lifestyle and doesn't have much problem with it maybe. And he does okay with it. But for the most part, you eat like that and you sit in front of a computer all day, you are headed for trouble. Big time trouble. Well, I'm just going to continue to give you a few facts here. America is becoming increasingly aware that it is really unnatural to die from heart disease, cancers, strokes, diabetes, liver cirrhosis, and kidney disease. And yet these are the very diseases we find so abundantly in our western culture. These diseases are largely related to lifestyle choices. How we eat, how we drink, how we smoke, and how we relate to other people. Meaning the anxieties and the fears and the bitternesses and all that. Maybe we'll speak about it a little more tomorrow. For years we have believed that with the right amount of money, research, manpower, and time, scientists could find the right cure for anything. But we understand the limitations of the medical high-tech approach to be taking care of these western killer diseases. Instead, we have learned that they are the result of how we chose to live. They relate to lifestyle. They relate to the good life that we have. We don't really want the good life because it's killing us. Instead, we want the best life and the best life will happen to be found in a simpler life. What is the result of the good life? Seven out of ten deaths are now due to cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Imagine 70% of all the deaths are due to heart disease and stroke and to cancer. Though on the rise, these killer diseases are still rare in some 70% of the world's population. It has been interesting for scientists to try to study and try to figure out why that in Japan, a lot of these diseases never existed. Japanese men, there were no arteriosclerosis or arteriosclerotic plaque in their vein. That was until the fast food industry came into the major cities. And people, they tell me today, even in China, will spend a month's wages to take their son or daughter to McDonald's on their birthday because it all at once becomes the world thing to do. Now, Japanese sons are dying before their fathers. And if you bring the Japanese men to the United States, they have the same cardiovascular problems that the United States does. Doesn't matter the culture, doesn't matter the birth, doesn't matter where they come from, it only is because they have come into the American way to die. What we need is not more bypass surgery. After all, 15 to 30% of those grafted vessels will close up again within about 12 months after the surgery with fat-filled, cholesterol-laden arteriosclerotic plaques. And that is the plaque that closes off the arteries and forms on the inside of the blood vessels of which we are now needing to assembly line these heart transplants where a person goes in and cuts open his leg, takes out some veins, cuts open the heart, puts in these veins to surround the arteries that are clogged there by this plaque. And some of them totally shut off, others at 90-95% closed off and again get blood to the heart. The only problem is that if the lifestyle isn't changed, pretty soon the new veins that you just put in will have the exact same problem and they will clog too in a year or two or five. But we just go to the doctor and lay down our $35,000 or $40,000 or have hospitalization that will cover it and keep on going. The magic formula for weight loss is to eat more food, but of course the right kind. Refined foods pack in the calories. Natural foods, as grown, dilute the caloric density. You can actually eat more food with fewer calories and you can lose excess weight even without trying just by the lifestyle that you live. Let me give you some, well, for instance, in some of these problems that we're facing with processed foods versus what God has given us. Did you know that it takes 14 years of corn to yield one tablespoon of corn oil? Did you know that it takes 7 pounds of sugar beets to extract one pound of sugar? Adding these extracted and concentrated calories to the food we prepare or to the processed foods we eat greatly increases the caloric density of our diet. For example, a simple potato has about 100 calories. It's been a nutritious staple for many years in America. It saved Russia from mass starvation in the 30s and again in the 40s when they had such a great famine most of people who stayed alive stayed alive by the lowly potato. About 100 calories to it. Put it in a can of Pringles, that same potato is now a thousand calories. Take the humble nutritious apple, about 75 calories, and convert that thing into a out-of-this-world piece of pie a la mode and the 75 calories have skyrocketed to over 500. Take the 100 calorie banana, add fudge, nuts, ice cream and some gooey topping and all of a sudden we have a 1,000 calorie disaster. Nutritional disaster. Take a large candy bar, has about 500 calories, can be eaten in 2 minutes flat. You take the same calories in fresh fruits and you'll have to eat a banana an orange, an apple, a pear, a bunch of grapes, an apricot and half a papaya. We're ashamed to name it for what it is but it's called obesity. Blasphemy in America. Yet, we have just yielded to that and again, if it would be an occasional treat, an occasional stuffed duck, it would be fine but we fare sumptuously every day. And that's what does us in. I'm completely shocked when I find out that professing Christian people in the amount of sodas they drink. I spoke to this to the Bible school students a little over a year ago on this issue and made a study of it somewhat but there are somewhere between 8 and 13, depending on what kind you drink, teaspoons of sugar in one 12 ounce can. However, you'll find people stopping in at McDonald's or somewhere at a convenience store walking out with a hamburger or a cheeseburger, maybe a double burger that is up around 600 calories, a bag of potato chips and about a, oh, maybe 24 or even sometimes a 30 ounce can of soda to wash it all down. Some people go to work in construction jobs with six packs of sodas in order to hold them throughout the day. And one just cannot comprehend the impact that that has on the body. There's no way to describe it. When you're young and energetic, you get by with that for a while. But a good friend of mine in the state of Washington recently, I found out that he's having kidney problems. So bad that they thought that he had to go on a dialysis machine for the rest of his life. He's a young married man. Well, I shouldn't say maybe young married. The oldest child might have been 11 or 12 years old. I guess I can call him young married man. Would have been maybe in his low 30s. Only to find out that he was gorging himself with Mountain Dew on a regular basis for years and had almost destroyed his kidneys. He somehow, before he took the operation or went on the dialysis machine, somebody figured that out, which is rarely done in the medical world today, it seems like. And he quit it and his kidneys bounced back and it looks like he's going to do all right. He's doing fine. Just saved by a thread. Can you imagine being on a dialysis machine for the rest of his life to clean his blood only because of gluttony or drunkenness on soft drinks? Let's look a little bit at blood pressure. I have two books with me. You're welcome to come up and to look at them or get addresses from them, but the one I recommend very, very highly and since there's 50 million out there that have problems and are on medicine, it's called High Blood Pressure Lowered Naturally. And I have experienced this myself some time ago. I would recommend and another one is Reversing Heart Disease. I'll put these books out here and you can take a look at them. But I would recommend them for anybody over 40 years of age who even doesn't know at this point that they have any problem. But what happens is, again, due to the fault of the American problem, doctors love to write prescriptions and doctors love to do corrective surgery, but doctors do not love to tell you how to fix the problem yourself. And so we have 50 million people on blood pressure with blood pressure problems and the most of them are taking some kind of a drug to try to lower their blood pressure. It is my absolute firm persuasion that 95 plus percent of them wouldn't have to take a pill. Not a pill. And those drugs have side effects that you can't imagine. I wish I would have the time to read the list and it's in these books, read the list of side effects that happen from blood pressure medicine. But within three weeks you could probably throw all your pills away if you're on that simply by changing your lifestyle. Your lifestyle. And I say again, that doesn't mean you have to be an absolute vegetarian. But let's get some common sense. Once again, back into our way of living. If you'd go on a Central American diet of rice and beans and occasionally some meat, you could throw away your medicine, probably. I would encourage this for everyone. Don't go to the doctor and have your blood pressure checked. You buy a little machine. They have them now. You can put them on your wrist or on your finger. I like the one in the cuff. Buy one yourself. I don't care if it costs you $35. The best investment that you could make. And begin to monitor your own situation. And you will begin to see problems coming. And get it into order by diet. It's easy and simple to do it. You buy the cuff and the book and follow its directions. You can drop your blood pressure by 30 and 40 points in short order. The same way is pretty well true with constipation. You know, that is so simply remedied that it's unreal. Yet we flock to the drugstores and, like I said, buy over 1,000 different medications that are designed to get things moving when all you would have to do is change your lifestyle basically at morning, at breakfast time and the rest of the day everything would be fine. It is again diet and lifestyle related. And I can promise you one more thing in this whole matter. Something that I can't always promise in the spiritual realm. You will feel better. We don't like to dwell on feelings because feelings vary a lot. But if you get your lifestyle into order I can pretty well guarantee you you will feel better. You will feel better. Well, you say, brother, that's overwhelming. Many times we say, I know you're right. I know it's true. But I don't know what to do. I don't know how to get started. I have never disciplined myself. And many times we have had these lifestyles from our youth. Like brother John D. Martin says, just as sure as, you know, as every day would go by they would go to the refrigerator at 9 o'clock at night after the day's work is done even though they had eaten a good healthy dinner or supper whatever you call it around 5 or 6 o'clock they would go to the refrigerator again at 9 and load up again before they go to bed. He says that lifestyle is so into his system that his stomach begins to growl at 9 o'clock whether he goes or not. That's the lifestyle that we have adapted ourselves to it. Those habits are not easy to break. You need to see it first of all for what it is what it does to you and I'm not saying you can't eat at 9 o'clock but I know one thing that if you load up with food at 9 o'clock without any exercise it is that food that turns into fat and makes a major problem in your life. And I have found also it seems like sleep is sounder when the stomach is more at rest. Many, many more things like that to be said. Where do we begin? I do believe that we need to look at gluttony as sin and let me say don't you look across the room today and look at the person who is struggling with it in outward weight problems and that you're as skinny as a rail and eating twice as much food and you're not guilty. Just because you have a good metabolism and everything is working good to eliminate all this stuff and to work it off that you're eating does not mean you're not a glutton. So, you know, I have no desire to put anyone on a hard guilt trip in that sense by perhaps the way you look. I am still some overweight myself although God has helped me tremendously in the past year as I finally realized that this isn't right. I do believe we must, however, look at the issue in the sin category and understand that to go on living like this is a sin against God and against our bodies. Because just look at all these scriptures that I read. They're there, aren't they? They say what they say and I trust they mean what they say. So, it is my encouragement that this is one of the areas where we confess our faults one to another and pray one for another that we may be healed as a people. It is time once again that we come back to a temperance lifestyle and we recognize no, it's not my object at all to tell you to never eat a cone of ice cream or to never eat a steak and all that. But you can't go to California when they have a steak bowl and sit down like a football player does and eat seven steaks. He's sinning against God and he's sinning against his own body. He's a glutton. And many times when you sit down at our all-you-can-eat buffets and smorgasbords, I know many Christians tell me they feel like they have to make a confession when they come out of there. And I say if that's your case, you can't control yourself, then don't go in. Get practical about it. Don't go in there. Go somewhere where you order your portion and when it's done, it's done and the bill is high enough and you don't go for seconds. And it'll help you out a little to get started. The other thing is, study the subject. Read up on it. Train your wife and look at the issues. Teach her how that this is more nutritional than that and things like that. We have to finally take a look at it. But I do believe that for many of us, we have to repent. We have to repent. It's right for us to weep over it and say, we are causing ourselves to be sluggish, lethargic, our bodies are plugging up, we're hurting ourselves and we're cutting ten years off of our life some of us, just by continuing to live the American way to die and die sooner because of that. Like I say, hearing a little bit of Brother Denny's message, I have no idea what will happen to people if they are so intemperate and undisciplined when God will change the scene and God will change the scene. Promised in Revelation that there will be times of famine coming. And I don't know, I'm not here to say whether we'll be here or whether we're not here when that comes. There's an awful lot of people who are hoping there won't be. I know that. And that's because they have never disciplined themselves in any kind of scarcity. A man my age in America and I have to say for myself, never known scarcity. I hear my Russian and Romanian brethren talk about what they went through and I see those poor children in Africa with distended tummies because they eat a fermented corn and that's all about that they get and I, we cannot even relate. We cannot even relate. How will we fare when the trouble comes? But the whole thing is the principle that I want to instill in your mind. We are called upon by God to be tempered in all things. We are to be tempered when it comes to our lifestyle, our eating, our drinking, our sexuality, our materialism. God is calling us to be tempered in these things. It's not right to live in a mansion just because we happen to have the money or the clout at the bank to borrow it. It's not right to go to the smorgasbord and try all the items if they have 80 and try to get out there without sinning. It's impossible. God doesn't expect us to do that. Rather, we need to make temperance a godly conviction in our life and to repent of our gluttony because the Bible says it's sin and there's a drunkenness related to it equal to alcoholism and has, I believe, similar effects and brings death similarly early. Also, we need to see it for what it is. So, may God give us much grace as we try to look at this situation and open our hearts to it. I know I want to. That is my desire. That is my heart. I don't want to lay a legalistic rule or law upon anybody and put people on a major difficulty or guilt trip as far as just for who you are and because you have missed this subject and never taken a good look at it. It is so easy in America not to take a look at it and all that. But, I just say, just consider. Just pray about it. Ask God about it and look at it. And, like I say, read up a bit. Examine the situation. I believe that this matter of heart disease can be reversed. One fellow by the name of Gene, we'll call him. That's his name, I think, or that's how he's named in the book. It's in there that he was scheduled for a heart bypass surgery and he called another doctor. Oh, he got a cold and they didn't operate. That gave him a few days to think about it. In those days, he called another doctor and he said, you know, I'm made to feel just like I'm some kind of a... I forget whether it was this whole matter of just on the assembly line, you know, and they just want to... This is just like how did he relate to it? Just like pulling a tooth or, you know, something of that nature. That's how he said, these people are treating me and they've got me scheduled to go through with this thing. And he wondered if they're not possibly another way. He was a man in so bad shape that he couldn't walk across the kitchen floor without panting for his breath. He was in bad shape, somewhere around 52 or 54 years old. I'm not a little bit older than that. Well, he went to a natural clinic in California and he immediately put him on a strict diet and got him to walking. However, he couldn't walk out to the trail to walk. So, he walked just out toward the trail and back again. That's all he could take. But in a matter of 11 days, he had him walking four and a half miles a day and had him on a completely different lifestyle. And I think he cancelled the surgery. He never bothered going and they began to monitor him and he'd come back again in two months and his vital statistics had changed so drastically. That was absolutely phenomenal. And in that time, he had been on nitroglycerin tablets I think up to 11 a day that he was taking just to walk toward the trail and back. But he changed his lifestyle. He cancelled his surgery. He went off of his nitroglycerin. Eventually, after a couple of weeks or I forget how it was, the pain was gone. The shortness of breath was gone. And four years later, he was back working like a horse. Everything was fine. Basically speaking, he was fine and he averted the entire thing and was able to keep his $35,000 to $45,000. I believe that those things can be reversed. We can look at them and take serious measures and I know some of you could give clear testimony of that here today. I know God has touched your life in that same way as you have seen. This is wrong. I must change. So that's my encouragement to you. I just want to give you hope. I want to give you conviction. I want to give you something that you can sink your teeth in that will change your life in this area. And the end of it all, you'll feel like a Christian again. You get that thing into order and get that thing under the reins that God has designed for called temperance, you'll feel much, much better about yourself. You will not be under the guilt of that thing as you fare sumptuously every day. Shall we bow our heads for prayer? Father in Heaven, O God I pray, will you help us once more with this life of ours in this America in which we live. God I ask you to forgive us where we have just let her go and just went her own way and did that which tasted good and felt good to us and forgot the scriptures and the principles and the word of God concerning temperance, concerning keeping our body under, lest we ourselves would be a cast away. Oh Father I pray that many times we knew these verses were there but we just didn't look at them earnest enough and faithful enough. I do pray Father that you would touch us here this afternoon and help us to see what you would have us see and open our heart to it. I pray in Jesus name. Amen. Alright, you are dismissed. God bless you.