Hello, this is Ashley Schates welcoming you to the Mark Driscoll Podcast.

For more content from my dad, Pastor Mark, senior pastor here at the Trinity Church in

Scottsdale, Arizona, visit realthafed.com where you'll find study guides to go along with

each sermon series as he preaches verse by verse 3 books of the Bible, daily devotions,

free e-books, and more.

Now grab your Bibles and get ready for today's sermon.

Alright, we have just a few weeks left in our study of a great book of the Bible called

Nehemiah. It's in the Old Testament and we're in chapter 11 today and what we're going to do,

oftentimes we spend a lot of our energy just looking at our life, our family, our finances,

our faith, our relationships.

We're going to do today, we're going to get a bigger picture, we're going to look down

on culture and general and our lives in particular from the perspective of God.

So let me set up Nehemiah chapter 11 and this is going to be a little bit of a mind melt.

You're probably going to hear some things that maybe you've never thought about and if

you read Nehemiah 11 this week, you have no idea where this is going to go because it's

not going where you're expecting.

But let me just jump right in.

There are kind of two views.

When you look at culture and the world and where society is trending, there is the Christian

view and that is that we are sinners by nature and choice, that the world is cursed and

if you just let everybody do whatever they feel and think and want, it's going to get

better or worse, worse, way worse.

...