End Times Warning: 2 Timothy 3 Explained | Why People Are Getting Worse (Bible Prophecy)

We live in a world full of sinful people because our sin affects everything in our lives. The Bible makes it clear that we are all corrupted by sin. Every one of us. That corruption entered our bloodstream through Adam and Eve who rebelled against God in his garden. And the blood disease of sin has descended through the generations and it affects all of us today.

The Bible says, "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because all sin." YouTube is one of the most powerful ways we share the gospel today. When you subscribe, you're helping us reach people who may never step foot in a church or turn on a Christian broadcast.

So don't just watch, take a moment to subscribe and join us in sharing Jesus with the world. Would you be surprised to know the decay of character is a precursor for Christ's return? We could see it. The bad is getting worse. Godlessness is overtaking every square inch of our culture.

Decency is crumbling. And the Bible predicts the rise of end times people. But just who are they? >> And now here is Dr. Jeremiah with his message, End Times People, a biographical prophecy. >> Sean Hoppwood grew up in a Christian home in rural Nebraska and he had parents who had started a local church.

He was the oldest of five children and he was bright and excelling on standardized tests. He also played basketball in high school and won a scholarship to Nebraska's Midland University. But in his teens, Hopwood grew disillusioned with his basketball skills. He stopped going to class and he dropped out of school.

Then he joined the United States Navy and ended up in the Persian Gulf guarding warships with shouldermounted Stinger missiles. But Hopwood developed acute pancreatitis, almost died in a Bahrain hospital, and he left the Navy with an honorable discharge. That's when lostness overtook this young man. His alcohol and drug use grew into raging addictions and he became depressed.

One day while drinking with a friend, they decided to rob a bank together while armed and eventually his life came crashing down in the lobby of a Double Tree hotel in Omaha, Nebraska when FBI agents tackled and arrested him. A year later, he stood terrified before a federal judge who sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison.

And shortly thereafter, he was on a prison plane, handcuffed, shackled, heading to a federal penitentiary. He was only 23 years old and his life was growing worse and worse by the day. Now, if you stay with me, I'll tell you what happened to him at the end of my message.

But his story raises questions for all of us. Why do people go the wrong way? Or in a broader sense, why do good people do bad things? According to scripture, sin is the fundamental problem of every person. The Bible makes it clear that we are all corrupted by sin.

Every one of us. That corruption entered our bloodstream through Adam and Eve who rebelled against God in his garden. And the blood disease of sin has descended through the generations. And the Bible says, "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sin, because we have been stained by sin in this way, every one of us."

The Bible says, "There is none righteous, know not one. We cannot produce anything good on our own. Without me, you can do nothing." Jesus said, "There's no other program that you can go to. God is the only one who can offset the impact of original sin. Sin that started in the garden.

So what that means is you and I live in this war zone we call planet earth. We're pushed and pulled between goodness and evil, between love and hate, between creation and destruction. You and I are Christ's followers in a fallen world. And that has been true for God's people throughout all the centuries.

But can you feel it? Can you sense it? Something is changing. The bad is getting worse. Godlessness is overtaking every institution, every platform, every square inch of our culture because something in us is broken. We live in a world of sinful people. Better said, we live in a world of broken people.

And the brokenness is becoming everywhere more evident to us as time goes by. The Apostle Paul wrote his final letter to Timothy from a Roman cell. Near the end of his letter, he drew a surprisingly detailed picture of how people will behave just prior to the Lord's return and the beginning of the tribulation period. 2 Timothy 3 1-5.

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, hotty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse deceiving and being deceived.

So, we're not just imagining this. What's happening right now isn't just something that, oh, I I I haven't known many evil people before, so maybe I'm just meeting them all right now. No. The Bible says that there will be a trajectory toward the coming of Christ when sinful people will be more sinful, evil people will be more evil, and difficulty in relationships and all the rest will be more profound.

The Lord tells us that the last days will be populated by people who are lovers of themselves, narcissistic people, people who see themselves in the mirror and applaud. These are proud or hotty people, which means looking down on others comes as naturally to them as it does to a pigeon on top of a statue.

Perhaps nothing represents this attitude better than social media. Social media is a stronghold for selfish people. Unfortunately, selfish people rarely keep to themselves. Selfish people end up being a part of splintered families. People will focus less on their loved ones. Their time, energy, and passion will be tied up in themselves.

And the result was in the days prior to the tribulation will be strewn with broken homes. And he uses five descriptions. These five descriptions highlight the damage that broken people perpetuate on their own families in the last days. It says they are disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, and unforgiving.

Those are the five things that are in the text. Children will be disobedient willfully. They will do what they want to do, casting off oversight and authority. They will ignore the instruction of scripture that says, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right." They will be ungrateful.

Gone will be a thankful spirit between children and their parents. And that lack of gratitude will extend to other relationships. The third word is unholy. In this context, that implies lack of respect. There will be no respect within the structure of the framework of the family. The picture is of someone who throws off the oversight at all levels of authority and harbors a growing sense of rebellion and independence.

Next, we come to the word unloving. Normal human relationships will be destroyed and broken and affected and wither away. The word here is translated elsewhere in the New Testament as heartless. Homes will become hard places ruined by harsh hearts. It'll spill over into the whole society. And the final word is unforgiving, which could also mean truthbreaker.

This refers to people whose rebellion becomes stubborn and hardhearted. The root of bitterness within them grows into an emotional forest of poisonous trees bearing toxic fruit. And the lack of capacity to forgive others means they live as though they themselves could never be forgiven for all the harm they've done.

Don't be a family that negates all the virtues that you've been given by almighty God. Whatever has happened to you in the past, start where you are today and with God's help, make your home a place that's indwelled by the Lord Jesus Christ. Make it a Christian home.

So, are you getting this picture? When you have selfish people, they end up creating splintered families and splintered families create shattered societies. You know, we're always looking for some corporate answer to the problems, but the problems are ours. Our families are what we create them to be. Our counties are what we allow them to be.

Our cities are it's all about us. So unless we're willing to take insight on ourselves, we don't have much of a chance to get better, do we? So how do Christians live in such a place where selfishness reigns and immorality increases? How can we be different kind of end times people in a broken world?

Our example is often greater than our words and our admonitions. And that's what we need to learn. With that in mind, I want to lift you out of 2 Timothy and take you to Ephesians 5. And this is the passage that says, "For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord."

That sentence is short enough to memorize, but it's powerful enough to illumin the pathways around your life. First of all, you need to remember the grace that you received. How do we walk in the light when our society is defined by end times people? How do you be a Christian if you're surrounded by people who are doing the kinds of things we're watching right now?

Literally destroying the fabric of our country. You have to experience God's grace through an encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ. Metaphors involving light pervade scripture. And Ephesians 5'8 describes the difference that comes over us when we have grace with Christ. Before that moment, we live in darkness as deep as underground caverns.

We are spiritually, morally, personally, and eternally in pitch blackness. But the moment we come to Christ, he pushes down the lever that connects us to the throne of grace and he switches on a billion megawatts of light inside of our souls. That experience is so vivid that many Christians describe their moment of grace in bright terms.

We have to exude God's light. We have to convey it. We have to reflect it. We have to radiate it. That's what we read in Ephesians 5:8. Walk as children of light. For the fruit of the spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth, finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.

Men and women, I am concerned about the way this present darkness is casting the shadow over many churches and over many Christians. Too many people in our community of faith are trying to blend the light and the darkness so they can kind of come up with a greyness in their life.

It's a devilish lie to believe that we can be Christians without being different and distinct from the world. You can't. And you can't marry the world so that you be more acceptable to them. As followers of Jesus, we have left the kingdom of darkness and we are now children of light.

So now we must walk, we must live as children of light. The Ephesians passage goes on to tell us something else. Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret.

But all things that are exposed and are made manifest by the light. For whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore, he says, "Awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light." John 20:21 says, "For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deed should be exposed.

But he who does the truth comes to the light." You and I are children of light. We can't help being lights in the darkness wherever we go. And it's going to be different for you if you live for Christ. If you're not trying to be gray if you're not trying to mesmerize your own self by marrying the darkness with the light, which doesn't work and is not acceptable and will just lead you wrong.

If you're trying to really be the light, you just need to get excited about this. Someone isn't going to like you as much as they did before. Everybody in the world, whether they like to admit it or not, is looking for light. They're searching. They're trying to figure out why they are the way they are. why they do what they do.

They're looking for someone to help them. And if you compromise your witness, they won't come to you because they'll see the phoniness of who you are and what you're doing. That brings me back to Shawn Hopwood. As time went by, he got a job in the prison library and he began reading books about the law.

And as he learned about the law, he began taking on cases for fellow prisoners. Shawn also began corresponding with a friend named Annie, his secret crush through high school. Furthermore, his parents let him know. They continued to pray for him. And his mom, she kept sending him Christian books.

After Shawn was released from prison in 2009, he and Annie were engaged. And they asked Pastor Marty Barnhart to officiate the wedding. But Barnhart wanted to talk to them first. He asked them what they believed about Jesus. And he said they could be forgiven by the shed blood of Christ.

And the pastor's exact words were, "Yeah, even you, Sean. Here's what happened next." The next day, I couldn't accept the feeling, said Shawn, that God had been pursuing me for a long time, and that if I just abandoned my stubbornness and selfishness and hand everything over to him, I would find redemption.

What does it mean to be redeemed? And how do you redeem yourself after robbing five banks? Well, the answer is you don't. The answer is that you need some help. In Ephesians 1:7-8, Paul writes that in Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he elavished on us.

To put it differently, because of our sins, none of us, and surely no former prisoner like me, said Shawn, can be redeemed on our own. We need the gospel of grace which says that each of us matters and has worth because we're made in the image of God.

Grace says we are not defined by our failures and our faults but by a love without merit or condition. God's grace was enough to redeem me. He said Shawn and Annie asked Christ to come into their lives. They were married. They were baptized. They moved to Seattle so Shawn could attend the University of Washington Law School.

And believe it or not, today Shawn is a professor of law at the Georgetown University in Washington, where he is spreading the light every day. We're living in a messed up world. Let's face it, the Bible warns that in the last days, prayerless times will come. Society will go from bad to worse.

But remember, the city of Ephesus was also a place of darkness in Paul's day, the city to which his letter was written. Yet Paul viewed the Christians there as children of light. Their presence lit up the city streets with the glow of Jesus. So even in dark days, you can experience God's grace, exude his radiance, exhibit his holiness, and in a world increasingly dominated by the end times, God has empowered you to shine.

And how many of you know the darker the night, the brighter the light? And now with one last word for today's program, here is Dr. Jeremiah. It seems that modern societies are growing darker with every passing year. It's easy to think we can live surrounded by sin and not be influenced by it.

We need the protection of the Lord Jesus Christ in these dark days and to shine as lights for him. That protection begins when we accept him as Lord of our life and walk faithfully with him every day. To help, please allow me to send you two free gifts from Turning Point, a booklet called Your Greatest Turning Point and our monthly devotional magazine called Turning Points.

These resources will introduce you to Jesus Christ and help you know him personally. And we will gladly send both of these gifts to you free of charge if you will contact us here at Turning Point today. Next time on Turning Point. Jesus touched lepers who were untouchable according to the law.

He welcomed sinners who were despised. He expressed compassion for a woman taken in adultery. He cast demons out of people who were violent. And after his resurrection, he reassured a doubting disciple and reestablished the disciple who had denied him. Jesus had no place in his heart for the cancel culture.

Thank you for being with us today. Join Dr. Jeremiah next time for his message, Cancel Culture, a political prophecy here on Turning Point.