← River Valley Church
Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
A
All right, church on this July 4th weekend. We have a special guest with us today. He, 10 years ago, was sitting at our crosstown campus and had a successful career in sales thought, all right, that's my future. That's where I'm going. And God tapped him on the shoulder and said, ben, I want you to minister to the military. You were in the army. You served in Iraq. You did that, and you understand that you've dealt with all these things. You've been mentored through this you time. Now I want you to minister to the military. So he stepped out of faith. I remember we came in, he's like, I'm gonna do this. And we prayed over him. We launched him. We said, we pray that we don't know what your ministry is gonna turn into. But I can tell you this now. Since that day, he is now has a ministry on 10 military bases across America with a goal to be on 54 of them. In the last three years, he's led seven soldiers to Jesus Christ. Is that not amazing? So from a tap on the shoulder of, ben, you need to do this now. He's traveling the world, going in the Pentagon, going around the world to all these military bases, dealing with special forces. And he's one of our own from River Valley. So I said, ben, come on back on the July 4th weekend, preach the word to us. Give us an update. Tell us how we can be involved. Can you welcome Ben Peterson as he brings the messages today, one of our own from River Valley. Thanks, brother.
- [01:31]
B
Thanks, man.
- [01:31]
A
God bless.
- [01:32]
B
Yeah. All right. Good morning. Awesome. No, you can go a little longer. I'm just kidding. Well, they informed me about five minutes before I got up that this is gonna be live streamed to all the campuses. And I said, ben, you've been in a combat zone. You can do this.
- [01:51]
A
Right?
- [01:53]
B
So grateful to be at River Valley this morning. I have to say that what you're about to see in this video of soldiers coming to Christ in a move of God that's happening in the military would not be possible without River Valley Church and Rob Kettering. It was Rob Kettering who believed in me, who launched an event right here at River Valley where we led veterans to Christ. And sitting in that audience was the daughter of a general who then opened a door to the active duty military where we've been ever since. And it wouldn't have been through this church without the faith of Pastor Rob in me and in God. So I want to say thank you, River Valley. Thank you for believing in this. Thank you, Tim. Thank you for all the amazing people at River Valley that made this ministry possible. So I would just love for you to get a glimpse of what God is doing in your defenders of freedom. My name is Ben Peterson. I'm the founder and CEO of Engage youe Destiny, where we have a vision for a world without military suicide. And the way that we are completing that vision is by advancing the Great Commission on Military bases. Ginger Destiny has shown me how to be a better man of God and a better follower of Christ and how to lead. First things first is made me a better man of God. I have so many different ways and different days. I can go and practice my faith with other believers. I've really seen myself grow since I've joined Engage your Destiny. It's been around four months that I started attending Engage your Destiny. This has made a complete transformation on my whole faith journey. Engage your Destiny has made me feel like I have a purpose and I belong. Sam. Praise God. So at the end of the service, you're going to learn about how you can make a difference in the lives of one of our defenders of freedom. But on this Fourth of July holiday, can we celebrate for a second? Hey, we made it to 250, huh? Hey, we made it. Now, it hasn't been through hard times, right? A lot of sacrifice for this country to have the freedoms that we enjoy. There's been a lot of battles, and I mean, Minnesota has been in a battle. We've been at a war for the soul of this state. Am I right? And, you know, I have wrestled with a lot of the things that have happened in our state. And there's just some specific things that I've really struggled with, one in particular. And I'm going to make a statement this morning that I think many of you are going to disagree with. But it's something that I need to say because I need to draw a line in the sand about this state so that we can move forward today. And that's that the Vikings are a bad football team, okay? They're a bad football team, and I'm going to tell you why. So when I was 13 years old, it was 1997, and Brett Favre was playing in the Super Bowl. And I remember I didn't grow up in a sports family. And so I decided I was going to watch the super bowl. And I made it Totino's Pizza. And we're talking about, like, where the pepperonis would cup up and you've got this little saucer of grease. Can I get an amen? Where's the millennials in the room, right? We grew up on this stuff. And I made this pizza and I went and I sat down and what unveiled before my eyes was the greatest war of sport I had ever seen. And I fell in love. And so I said, okay, I gotta figure out who the Minnesota team is. I'm gonna stick with my state. I find out it's the Vikings. And the next season, The Vikings go 15 1, they make it to the NFC championship, they had the best offense in the history of the NFL, and. And the guy who hadn't missed a kick all year misses the kick to get to the Super Bowl. And I made a vow that day that I was going to watch every Minnesota Vikings football game until they win a Super Bowl. And 26 years later, I am still waiting for them to win the last game of the season. I was in Iraq, getting up at one o' clock in the morning to watch this team. I've seen every game. And this last year, I had gotten so deep into podcasts and fantasy football and all of this stuff. I mean, I was putting like 15 to 20 hours a week into football into the Vikings, right? And I remember I was driving down the road and I'm listening to these nerds talk about endless stats and pointless information. And I had this moment, and it just hit me, like, what are you doing here? It was an Elijah moment where Elijah is this great warrior man of God, and after his greatest miracle, he gets scared away by a woman and he runs away, and God shows up to him and he says, what are you doing here, Elijah? You don't belong here. This isn't who you are. And I had that moment of like, dude, what am I? And what am I doing here? And how many of us end up in those situations right after looking at pornography or drinking too much or getting in a fight with our spouse and saying things that we totally regret, where we're just like, dude, this isn't who I am. What am I doing here? And God began to really speak to me about how I was wasting the gift of time and the time is short. And then I was reading, and it's a verse that we all know, but John 3, 30 and 31 says, he must increase, but I must, I must decrease. He who comes from above is above all. And he who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth, and he who comes from heaven is above all. And I don't know where you're at today, but I want to get to heaven and I want to Feel like I've already tasted a little bit of it. You know, I want to get to heaven and go, I've already brought some of this down to earth. And that's why when Jesus said, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, I want what's up there, down here. And that is the mission of every person who has decided that they're going to follow Jesus. And so I want to say to you this morning, church, that if we're going to see Jesus do what he's capable of doing and experience heaven around us, then we have to decrease. And we need him to increase. And in order for us to take seriously what it actually takes to decrease so that he can increase, we have to see the gravity of the moment that we are in right now in history and what's at stake. If you and I, both of us, we're in this together, if we don't decrease. There's this phrase that has repeated itself all throughout history and it says this, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. In my new book that's coming out this summer, I get really deep into this theory and what it's setting up in the hour that we're in. And this has been laid out for generations, this process of history and how a generation is about 80 to 90 years old, but then that 80 year time frame gets broken into two different mindsets of 40 year pieces. And you can see this throughout the Bible of because Israel rebelled against God, they were condemned to wander for 40 years. This allowed the faithless self reliant generation to die off so a new generation could inherit the land. Moses life was broken into 40 year segments. And so what happens to bring in a new generation? There's typically a major financial hardship. This is the hard times that create strong men. So we're gonna go back to 1929 and this of course was the crash of 1929, brought about by a lot of greed and the stock market crashes and unemployment goes up to 30%. Anything above 6 is bad, 10% is horrible, 30% is catastrophic. And so this hard time brings everyone together and this is what begins a we generation. Say we generation, okay? And this is very much us versus them. So everyone finds where they belong and they find their people in their tribe and then they locate their enemy and it's us versus them, okay? And it's at the height of a we generation that we will see the greatest evil and the greatest good. Collide and so at the height of the we generation, we have World War II, where the Axis of evil comes. And I'm telling you, like, we came in, like, this close to Hitler taking over the world. If it weren't for the winters in Russia and if it weren't for them running out of gas, it was that close. So the good prevails. And everyone that is in this we generation, they've come together, they defeat the evil, and they look at themselves and say, look at what we can do. And then they start to say, look at what I can do. And it starts to downshift. So we move into the 1950s, a time of prosperity and peace, and then we enter into a me generation. And there typically is a cultural event that brings us into a me generation. And this happened in 1967. It was called the Summer of Love, where over 100,000 young people descended on the Haight Ashbury district of California. I'm going to drop out. I'm going to tune in to drugs, sex, rock and roll, and it's all about me, baby. And it's defined the next generation. And so we get to the height of the me generation, and you can see it where we have the wolf of Wall street making tons of money. There's tons of financial prosperity. You have motivational speakers, Tony Robbins. If you can dream it, you can do it. We have prosperity preachers saying, if you bring forward a check, I will heal you. Are you with me? All focused on self. And then as it hits its culmination, we move into the 1990s, where we have the dream teams and the All Stars and the pop stars. Total idolatry of people. But during these me generations, there's never. It's never a historically changing time. Greatness never comes out of these seasons. It always happens in a we generation. And so you have all this financial prosperity again. And then comes the greed. And so it gets so Greedy that exactly 80 years after 1929, we have the crash of 2009. All these subprime mortgages get put together. They take advantage of it. On Wall street, it's a house of cards. Everything collapses. Unemployment goes up to 10%, and it shifts again, and we go into a we generation. Now, what's fascinating is that in this we generation, we have 2020 and 2020. You may think, wow, that was a really crazy hard time. But 2020, much like after we go back 80 years after the crash in 1929, it was during that time there was political unrest, there was distrust of governments, distrust of elections. There was major protests. Sound familiar? This cycle has repeated itself every 80 years, which we are in the culmination of between 2026 to 2028. And if we go back 80 years, we have World War II. You go back 80 years to that, you have the Civil War. 80 years before that, you have the Revolutionary War. Do you see what I'm saying? And this has repeated itself. You can go and study this in the book pendulum or the fourth turning. This has repeated itself for the last 6,000 years. We have to see the moment that we are in where we are going to see the greatest evil and the greatest good collide. This was the moment you were born into, and it's the moment you were born for. I put forth that the greatest evil that we are going to see in our generation is going to come forth from artificial intelligence. And I'm going to tell you why. This is less about what AI is capable of, and it's more about AI being used by the enemy and by its creators, the men who are leading the most powerful companies in the world. So let's look at context. I want to take you to Genesis, chapter 11. And it says, now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and they settled there. They said to each other, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. And the Lord said, listen to this. If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan will be impossible for them. I have been speaking for 15 minutes and 28 seconds and I'm getting to the very point of my message. In this amount of time, AI computers who have no language are able to communicate trillions of times. Are you with me? That's what's going to make this technology move so fast. And since this technology has one common language where it can communicate with everyone at the same time through the smartphone, we are witnessing the recreation of the Tower of Babel. And what we have seen with AI so far is just the beginning. We've gotten into the point in the last few weeks where Google has said that the AI systems are now leading them, making suggestions, making self improvements. Now, the enemy is not artificial intelligence. I want to hone in on its creators, the designers, the guides of it. AI is a conduit for its creator. I'm going to say that again. AI is a conduit for its creator. Now, the leaders of the most powerful tech firms in the world, Tesla, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, none of them follow Jesus. None of them. And Matthew 12:30 says, Whoever is not with me is against me. They're my enemy, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And so I want us to, like, grasp this this morning. The most powerful technology in the history of the world with exponential reach that is in every single one of our devices that we pay more attention to than Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit is ran by a group of men who don't follow Jesus. They actually ascribe to moral relativism, humanism, and they believe in survival of the fittest evolutionary thinking, which means whoever has the most offspring wins. So let me ask you a question, Church. Who's their offspring and what are they trying to build? The tech elites are casting a vision for a utopia. They're saying AI can create a world for us in a utopia. It can solve all the world's problems. We're just going to have to go through some suffering to get there. You know, who were the last people to say, we have to go through some suffering to get to a utopia? Their names were Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. And those men are responsible for over 100 million deaths. And so my question to you is, what happens when China has full capabilities of these AI systems? We have to get our heads around right now that this is happening between 2026-28, and that is where we're going to see the greatest evil and the greatest good in the history of the world. So, Church, we cannot fall asleep. Amen. Jesus said in Luke 21:36, Be always on the watch and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man. Now, here is the good news. In the 1770s, when we were at the height of a we generation and America was going against the greatest superpower in the world, God brought about the Great awakening. Over 50,000 people came to Christ in the New England era, which would be equal to 50 million people in America today. Can you imagine if 50 million people came to Christ in our country? I'd give up football for the rest of my life. I think the wives would too. Amen. Moving into the 1860s, the next we generation in the 1860s there were 4 million people enslaved in America. 4 million and over a million people died over that conflict, making it the deadliest U.S. conflict in in history. But the result is the greatest freedom and destruction of the slave system in the history of the world. That is a God sized win. Amen. The next we generation. Most people don't know this Post World War II is the greatest missions movement in the history of the world. At the end of World War II, there were 10,700 missionaries around the world from America. Over the next five years, that number exploded four times to almost 40,000 missionaries where veterans came back from the war, were commissioned by God and they said, I'm gonna go share the Gospel. The result of that is 660 million people in Africa alone that have come to Christ through that missions movement. So what I want you to see is that yes, we are headed to the time of the greatest evil and the greatest good. But to the degree of the challenge or the evil that we're going to experience is the degree of the anointing that God is going to pour out on his church. He's gonna pour that out on his people. And it's the people that are gonna choose to die to themselves and decrease so that Christ can increase in their life. This is how we have to cleanse our lens, see the pattern and step into the destiny that God has for our lives. Are you with me? So what is it going to take for us to decrease? What needs to die in you? What needs to die in me? I want to give you three practical things that you can do. Three steps of how you can decrease so he can increase in your life. I love that pad and paper. Ma', am, you just write this down. Okay? Number one, Start. Start your day with God. It's so easy to flip open Instagram and flip open news and sports. That is self gratifying dopamine. That is never gonna satisfy. It's gonna set your loops for what you're focused on for your day. His mercies are new every morning. Do you wanna waste his new mercies on gratifying yourself with information? Stop it. Open up your Bible and seek God. If you could have a five minute meeting with the most powerful trillionaire in the world, would you take that meeting? If you could have a five minute meeting with the wisest, most powerful, most influential, most resourceful person in the history of the world, would you take that meeting? You have the opportunity for it every morning. Amen. Seek first his kingdom and all else will be added to You. Number two, ask. Ask yourself this honest question. What is keeping me from loving God more? What's keeping me from loving him more? What affections am I putting towards that are keeping me from loving him more? And number three, assess. Assess your identity. Are you driven to prove that you're enough at work in your life, in your kids, in your parenting? Or are you working from the finished work of the cross? Your identity has been bought and paid for 2,000 years ago. It is no longer you who live, but it's Christ who lives in you. And this life you live in the flesh. You live through faith in the Son of God who died and gave his life for you. But there's so many things that happen in our lives that get us to think that we're not enough. So then we need to go prove it to the world and be enough to the world so that they'll love us and they'll tell us that we're enough. And that is not the freedom that Christ died to give us. So every day we have to start our day with God. We have to ask ourselves what's keeping us from loving him more? And we need to assess, assess our identity because it's under assault every waking moment. Do you know that the most affected by technology and artificial intelligence is our gen Z, ages 18 to 26. Right now, 40% of gen Z believes that talking to an AI chatbot is like talking to a pastor that came out from Barna about a month ago. And 18 to 26 is the very age of 70% of our U.S. military. When you walk into the Pentagon, there's a picture of Pete Hegseth saying, I want you to use AI every day. Every soldier that joins the military is assigned a chatbot and they are expected to use it every day. Day in our active military. Our world is changing and it's changing fast. When I was 22, I came home from a combat zone where I'd lost seven of my guys in warfare and had seen horrific things, things that I hope many of you and none of you ever have to see. And I was a mess. I walked away from God. I ran to alcohol, I ran to the bars, I ran to pornography, I ran to anything that could help me numb the pain. And I found nothing. And I remember one night I was out till bar close and I got home at 3 o' clock in the morning and in the best way I can say it in church is, dude, I. I was ready to end it. And I called a mentor of mine, picked up the phone at 3 o' clock in the morning. And all I could choke out as I was sitting there crying on the floor was, why? Why is this happening to me? And why did my guys die? And he said, ben, that's exactly how the disciples felt when they lost Jesus. They couldn't see that beneath his death and their loss was the greatest victory in the history of the world. Of him dying for their sins and for yours and mine. But that doesn't mean it wasn't there. And after three days of suffering and pain and questioning, they understood why they went through what they went through and they went and they changed the world. And Scott said, ben, if you trust God, he's going to take your why that your question? And he's going to use you. And now here I get to stand and tell you that story because he wants to do that for you too. Would you please stand? Would you just close your eyes and just have a moment with God? Father, your word says that you know every thought and intentions of our heart. And I ask you, Holy Spirit, at every campus, in every room of this beautiful church across Minnesota, you would come and you would speak to us. Show us what is getting in the way of loving you more. God, we're asking you to come. And now, Lord, give us the courage to decrease and to get these things out of our life so that you can increase in us. I speak to the heart and the mind of every man in this room that you are enough. And that you don't have to work to be enough anymore for anybody or anything men of God, you are enough. I speak to the heart and mind of every woman in this room that you are loved and that you're a daughter of a king. Your identity is in being his daughter, nothing more. And lastly, Lord, I pray that anyone who needs to give you their life would just surrender it right now and say, jesus, I invite you into my heart. Forgive me of my sins. I want to follow you in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Would you guys take a seat? I'd love to share with you a little more. Well, that was fun. Amen. By God's grace, over the last 10 years we've been able to build the first ever direct evangelism to discipleship model on an active duty base. And as Pastor Rob shared, We've seen over 7,000 military come to Christ and get discipled and we're launching leaders and it's expanding like crazy. I want to give you an opportunity to be a part of something really special. We have a new base down in Florida which Is where the 7th Special Forces Group is located. These are some of the most elite warriors in the world. They are coming back from missions to South America and Mexico. And you can imagine some of the things they've been working on. And in two weeks, we're going to have the opportunity to share the gospel with these men. And it'll be one of the first opportunities that a mass group of Special Forces operators are going to hear the testimony from another Special Forces operator that works for Engage youe Destiny. And they're going to hear the gospel. And so today I want to invite you to adopt one of these soldiers to become a guardian. And what that means is that for 20 bucks a month, you can directly adopt one of these soldiers. And you're going to go towards that money is going to go towards feeding, caffeinating and discipling these young men and women of God. We're asking for a year commitment. And if you want to keep going after that, we will continue to take your money. Okay. And we would love to ask you to sponsor one of these defenders of freedom today. It's been an honor to speak with you, church. We have our tables at the back of every campus where we have volunteers where you can go and scan a QR code. And then we have a dog tag that we want to give you today. And that dog tag has the name of the soldier that you're going to be sponsoring that you can carry with you and you can be praying over and help carry the burden. Amen. So I want to invite you into this fight for the young men and women that are laying it all down on the line for you. Will you do that for them? We want to. And we will be by God's grace, on every major base in the world in the next 10 years. We're at 10, we're 20% there. And if we can get every campus to sponsor 100 soldiers, we can fund this whole new base down in Florida with the most elite warriors in the world. So I want to ask you to be a part of this. I'll be in the back. I'd love to give you a hug and put a dog tag around your neck. Our volunteers will do that at all the campuses. Thank you, River Valley, for listening to my message today. God bless you.