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Sept. 5, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

27:15

Sermon #039 - Philippians - Being SELFISH and greedy is the default human condition...

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	Welcome to today's sermon from Abundance.Church.
	I'm Mike Adams. Thank you for joining me today.
	And have you ever noticed how it's easy for people, all the people out there in the world around you, it's very easy for them to be evil.
	But it takes discipline and focus and dedication to be good people.
	Why is that? And what did the Bible have to say about that?
	I would say that starting off, it's very easy for most people to be evil because they don't have to really try.
	All they have to do is just follow their urges, follow their greed, you know, accept a lot of short-term thinking rather than considering the long-term ramifications or the betterment of society as a whole.
	In other words, being evil or doing evil is kind of the default way that human neurology is wired.
	It's like people think, oh, it's all about them, and all they have to do is worry about themselves.
	And from that comes selfishness and greed and also sometimes jealousy and tyranny.
	But to think about the betterment of others in society, to be a citizen who is moral, to have compassion, to have kindness, to have forgiveness, to be generous.
	These require a much higher level, much more mature thinking that takes effort.
	And you could argue it takes training.
	It takes learning these things.
	It's not just automatic.
	You don't just... We're good to go.
	This is, well, you could think of it as a burden, as Paul did.
	In fact, we're going to be covering another letter from Paul, this time to the citizens of Philippi.
	Of course, I'm referring to Philippians, the book of Philippians in the New Testament.
	This is another letter from Paul to the congregation of the church there.
	And this letter was written from prison.
	And in prison, Paul had kind of a thought experiment to go through.
	He thought on one hand, I could be executed, and then I would join Christ.
	You know, I would join with the Lord in heaven, and that would be something to rejoice.
	That would be very easy.
	All I have to do is just, you know, endure the execution and then I will be saved.
	I'll be joining the Lord in heaven.
	But he also realized that probably the far more important thing for him and the more burdensome thing is to be spared and to be ultimately released from prison to where he could go on and teach the word of Christ in this earthly realm, which would involve a lot more effort, frankly.
	Anyway, it's work to travel around, especially at his elderly age, travel around and teach the word of Christ and also frequently being arrested or threatened with arrest and always being persecuted or spat upon and so on, mostly by the religious leaders of the Jews. travel around and teach the word of Christ and also And he was once one of them, you know, and Paul used to run around persecuting Christians.
	So that's why he understands the importance of speaking out against that.
	So Paul himself writes about this in verse 19 of chapter one of Philippians.
	Quote, for I know that this will turn out for my deliverance through your prayer and the supply of the spirit of Jesus Christ, according to my earnest expectation and hope that in nothing I shall be ashamed.
	But with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death.
	by death.
	So he's saying that he is living close to Christ or Christ is living through him, whether he lives or dies, he's going to serve Christ either way.
	And then his experience of persecution and possible execution actually mirrors much of the experience of Christ himself.
	And so this creates closeness that Paul is essentially giving his life to Christ and whatever happens to his life is also walking with Christ either way.
	He goes on in verse 21,"...for to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
	But if I live on in the flesh, this will mean fruit from my labor." Yet what I shall choose I cannot tell.
	He's saying, fruit from his labor, he's saying that there will be gains for Christianity by Paul continuing to evangelize, to teach Christianity, bring more people to the Christian church, bring more followers to Christ.
	That's the fruit from his labor in the earthly realm.
	Verse 23, he continues, And remember,
	he's writing to the congregation of the churches of Philippi, right?
	So they wrote him a letter.
	He read that letter in prison, and then he's responding, also still in prison, he's responding to the congregation, the actual Philippians, and saying to them that this is the choice, and either way, he's with Christ, but probably he's going to have a lot more work he's with Christ, but probably he's going to have a lot more So this is a good example of what I'm talking about, where being good and doing good in the world takes effort.
	It's not the easier choice.
	This is exactly what Paul's talking about.
	It would have been easier to just be executed and then join with God in heaven.
	So nevertheless, ultimately, in chapter 4 of Philippians, he talks about how our citizenship is in heaven.
	So in the long run, even though it's important that we fulfill our mission here on earth, and that we do good on earth, and we teach goodness, and we help bring people to this knowledge, this enlightenment, or at least understanding of what is morality, you know, what's the greater good for humanity— But ultimately, we are citizens of heaven.
	It doesn't mean that we have to try to rush to be there like, you know, some kind of suicide cult or anything, but rather that that's where we're going to ultimately end up, and that's where our actions really count.
	So in verse 17, again, this is in chapter 3, it says,"'Brethren, join in following my example, and note those who so walk, as you have us for a pattern.'" He's saying, you know, I'm demonstrating a more appropriate way to live with Christ.
	Verse 18, For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ.
	He's saying there's a lot of fake Christians.
	That's exactly what he's saying.
	A lot of fake Christians out there who claim to be followers of Jesus, but they don't really walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
	He continues, He's talking about the corruption of the church.
	Yet again, are you getting the idea that the church was totally corrupt?
	Then as now also, the churches are so corrupt.
	It's sickening how many people claim to be following Christ or teaching Christ, and yet then on their own they're just greedy for money and luxury items and indulging with way too much food or processed food, and they're actually destroying their communities.
	This is what Paul is talking about.
	Verse 20, for our citizenship is in heaven, he says, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that I believe he's referring to the body of the church, right? who will transform our lowly body that I believe he's I believe he's referring to the body of the church, right?
	The congregation, the elect.
	So in other words, we are going to undergo a transformation personally, but also as a group, as a congregation.
	And The church, the body of Christ, shall through effort, through work, through dedication, through obedience to God, shall move closer and closer to perfection, which is signified by Jesus Christ himself.
	And this will happen over time, and it will take work.
	And he even adds, by which he is able even to subdue all things to himself.
	So, the Lord has...
	Such incredible power that he can transform almost anything but it's going to take human effort in addition to that.
	This is what the scripture says about this.
	Now, I have to continue this sermon recording in a different environment, so you're going to hear some audio changes, but as we continue, we will get into hard work of being a good person versus the easy, seductive path of being evil or selfish.
	We'll talk about that much more.
	Now, to understand human nature, it's really useful to study human anthropology, as I have done.
	And when we look at human anthropology, we realize that humans are wired by default for selfishness because it's a survival mechanism.
	And without training in morality or religion or, you know, higher forms of functioning in society, a typical human being will just steal everything that they need for themselves.
	They will not think about other people except their close family members.
	And there's an anthropological reason for that because they share genes.
	They share genetic code.
	And a lot of human anthropology is focused on the genetic survival.
	Of an individual.
	And genetic survival means, very often, taking from others for yourself, taking more than you need, that is greed and also thievery.
	Exploiting your position of authority or power over others in order to gather more resources for yourself.
	So that's tyranny and authoritarianism.
	And then also, for males, engaging in highly promiscuous sexual activity in order to impregnate as many women as possible.
	So that could involve either consenting sexual relations or rape, both of which have occurred obviously all throughout human history.
	And for women, it typically involves choosing a mate who has higher quality genetic code, which typically means choosing someone who has more power, more money, more celebrity status, or who appears to be more handsome or more adventurous and so on.
	So that's part of the mating ritual between men and women.
	But both men and women, by default, they want to survive as individuals.
	And that means thinking selfishly by default.
	They do not automatically think about the benefit of other people, or the greater good in society, or teaching morality, teaching the rule of law.
	These are things that have to be learned, and then they have to be applied with effort.
	These are properties of a civilized society.
	And children must be taught these things in order to follow them.
	This is why homeschooling is so important.
	This is why Bible study for children is so important.
	You need to give them an understanding of what is morality.
	You don't just steal all the cookies for yourself.
	You don't just run around raping people because you want to.
	You don't just give in to these basic instincts that are wired into The human nervous system via these principles of anthropology that I'm talking about here.
	And if you don't educate people, if you just leave them to be savages, they will carry out all these things I'm talking about.
	And it's easy for them to act that way.
	In other words, selfishness is easy.
	It requires no effort.
	Greed is easy.
	It requires no effort.
	Stealing from others and justifying it to yourself, for many people, it's easy.
	It requires no real effort.
	What's hard, as Paul's talking about, is serving Christ and living a life in service, teaching others what In his case, traveling and working to influence people to be more faithful to the church and to the teachings of Christ.
	This requires effort, but it is from this effort that civilization becomes sustainable.
	Now, think about it. Think about a farmer who's growing food.
	Now, the successful production of that food will require something like, typically, 120 days for the crops to grow, and then they have to be harvested.
	And then processed typically in some way and sent to market, what have you.
	But if you live in a society where there are no rules of private property, for example, then anybody can come along and just steal the crops when they're close to harvest time and the farmer can't do anything about it.
	Or if there's just no rule of law in society, if it's just chaos and violence and mass theft, you can't successfully grow food because you need a stable environment for at least 120 days.
	Actually, much more than that, you need a stable marketplace to purchase seeds and to sell finished goods and to buy farming equipment and to maintain farming equipment.
	You need a supply chain of parts and fuel and all these other things.
	And for this system to work, you have to have a civilization rooted in some forms of basic civility and morality.
	That is, the rule of law, the recognition of private property.
	Which is absolutely critical for human society.
	Oh, and by the way, that's something that is not recognized by the Marxists and the communists.
	They don't believe in private property.
	And that's why their people usually starve in horrible famines.
	And anybody that comes along and tells you that the government should set the food prices or the government should control food distribution, they are communists.
	And that will lead to mass starvation, typically by design, such as the Holodomor, That affected Ukraine where the Stalinists were trying to punish Ukrainian separatists.
	And so they starved millions of them with an engineered famine.
	So the pillars of morality that Paul was teaching through Christ's teachings, these are not just the pillars of the church.
	These are the pillars of sustainable civilization.
	One way or another, across the world, any society that has had any success whatsoever in feeding its people and engaging in productivity, producing things, has one way or another, even if they haven't accepted Christianity, they have accepted Christianity.
	Many of the basic principles of morality, which is the right to engage in a contract, the right to have private property, the right for investors to own factories or to build factories in order to produce things.
	And sometimes these are called tenets of capitalism, but mostly capitalism is just rooted in fundamental human rights, individual rights.
	Which are tied to morality that was taught by Paul and by Christ himself.
	Remember, Christ wanted people to be free.
	To be free to produce what they wanted.
	To be free to speak how they wish to speak.
	To be free to even consume what they wanted.
	To be free to keep the money that they earned.
	Remember when he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple.
	What was he protesting against?
	Not against trade.
	He was protesting against the money changers cheating people.
	Taking too much money from them out of a sense of unfairness.
	But Christ himself, the things that he taught and the things that his disciples taught...
	What are the basic principles of free market capitalism rooted in individual property rights, individual ownership of land so that a farmer can produce food and he can have an expectation that he will have the right to sell that food?
	Or, again, an investor can invest in a factory, let's say, and he can have some reasonable expectation that he'll be able to sell the goods out of that factory and ultimately one day maybe repay the cost of building the factory.
	So these are actually biblical principles, but they take real work to achieve.
	And so one of the costs of having a lack of good education in the Western world today is that people are not taught these things.
	And with so many people not teaching any kind of spirituality or religion or faith or morality to their children, those children end up Just pursuing their basic instinct neurology, which is rooted in selfishness and greed and thievery and authoritarianism and tyranny over others and so on.
	And that's why so many people who get into government...
	That's why they become tyrants and Satanists, because they seek positions of power in order to rule over others, in order to function as parasites, to take money out of society, effectively stealing from others, while dominating power over others and restricting others from being able to speak.
	For example, government-sponsored censorship.
	Or to prevent people from being able to run a business.
	Overzealous weaponized government regulation targeting small businesses in particular.
	These are the kinds of things that resonate with the more, you could say, the reptilian brain stems of human beings.
	The neurology of survival, which is not sophisticated.
	It takes no effort to invoke the neurology of survival.
	You're born with it. And sadly, most people just stay there their entire lives.
	They're just rooted in greed and sexual escapades and domination over others and stealing from as many people as possible in order to enrich themselves.
	And these people can end up running governments.
	They can run churches.
	They can run universities. They can certainly run corporations, as we have all seen.
	And there are many other examples like that.
	They can run schools.
	They can run entire nations.
	And they do. There are, in effect, then evil people all over the world, and maybe they didn't start out to become evil, but since they never made any effort to be good, then the evil just was a natural expression of them evil.
	Basically answering their basic human neurology, their animalistic instincts of greed and survival and genetic replication and so on.
	I mean, that's what drives most of humanity.
	You look around today, most people are driven by these basic instincts.
	They're not driven by morality because it takes effort.
	Now, when you're a child, of course, you are expected to be more self-centered, actually.
	Because children are working to survive and children are competing with siblings for parental attention and resources from parents.
	I mean, this starts early on with children trying to breastfeed.
	The more a child can successfully breastfeed and get the attention of his mother, Then the more calories he can have and the faster he can grow, or he or she can physically become a larger child and compete more successfully with other siblings or even cousins or what have you.
	And that's all part of survival.
	But as you grow out of being a child and you become an adult and possibly you become...
	A person of some credibility in society, whether in a position of government or a corporate board member or what have you, you are supposed to become more mature and you are supposed to refocus your efforts away from your own greed and to think about other people instead.
	Sadly though, our politics today are dominated by people who are still stuck in that childish greed.
	Many people run for office because they want to be powerful.
	They want to have more resources for themselves.
	Why is it that members of Congress, they may get elected to Congress while they have no money whatsoever.
	They're funded by somebody else.
	And then a few years later, they end up being multimillionaires.
	How did that work?
	Well, it's because insider trading is legal if you're a member of Congress.
	And so they engage in insider trading, which is a form of greed and selfishness and taking money from others to bring it to yourself for your own selfish gain.
	And we've all seen this.
	We've witnessed this in politics over the years.
	You can see, you can tell right away who's doing it for just greed and power versus actually serving the people.
	Serving the people is hard for most human beings.
	It requires a dedicated effort to think about others and put others above yourself.
	It requires compassion and empathy.
	And neurologically speaking, there are things called mirror neurons that exist in the human brain that help a human being simulate what it must feel like to somebody else to endure what that other person is going through.
	So the fact that if you feel any sympathy, if you feel compassion for fellow human beings who may be suffering or may be hungry or may be in a war zone or what have you, that's because you have mirror neurons.
	There's a part of your brain that is that human part.
	It's part of your human expression, is to care about other human beings.
	And that's a good thing.
	It makes you closer to humanity.
	It makes you more of an actual humanitarian.
	But for people who lack those mirror neurons, they are incapable of feeling the pain in others.
	They are incapable of putting themselves in other people's shoes.
	So they are incapable of empathy.
	These people become sociopaths, or at least that's the label given to them.
	Some of them can become high-functioning sociopaths, and they can fool people into thinking that they are good people when they're not.
	And some of those people become governors or presidents or high-level politicians or senators or what have you.
	Some of them become corporate leaders.
	But behind the act, they're actually sociopaths who are incapable of feeling anything for fellow human beings.
	Now, low functioning sociopaths may become serial killers or violent criminals or rapists, and often they'll end up arrested and thrown in prison.
	So this is why the prison system is filled largely with sociopathic individuals.
	Not entirely, but that's largely the case.
	Sociopaths are capable of exerting violence against others without regard, again, for what other people may feel.
	And so there may be even physiological reasons for this, but there are typically behavioral reasons.
	Most of these people who become sociopaths, they were abused as children.
	Many of them were sexually abused.
	Some of them were beaten, but sexual abuse is probably the most common thing.
	And what happens is the neurons turn off in the brain as a protective mechanism so that that child no longer has to endure the suffering of the abuse as it's happening.
	But then they grow up and go through their lives without those mirror neurons and then they become sociopaths and then, you know, they're elected governor or what have you.
	So that's kind of a summary of how that happens.
	And this is why Paul's teachings and the teachings of Christ in the New Testament are so important, because we don't want to raise up a generation of sociopaths and psychopaths and mass murderers and greed-driven, power-hungry politicians.
	But sadly, if you look around society today, that's exactly who dominates pop culture, Hollywood, music, government, entertainment, many corporate entities, and so on.
	And that's what we're fighting against, is all this evil in the world.
	We want to bring people back to morality.
	Back to selflessness, not selfishness, and thinking about others instead of only thinking about yourself.
	And that's part of what Paul was teaching, and that's part of what Christ has been teaching.
	So, hope you enjoyed today's sermon, and thank you for listening.
	We've got a lot more at abundance.church.
	I'm Mike Adams. Thank you for listening.

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