Hello, this is Ashley Chase 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 real faith.com, where you'll find study guides to go along with each sermon series as he

preaches verse by verse through books of the Bible, daily devotions, free

e-books and more. Now grab your Bibles and get ready for today's sermon.

All right 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 gonna 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 in general in 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 gonna you're probably gonna 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 gonna 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.

Now the more progressive or liberal or non-Christian view is that we're basically good.

...