Now, those are two major issues. This is the environment in which we have our civic liberties. But if we have our civic liberties and are slaves to our own corrupt sinful nature, and in addition to that, we are dominated by a fundamentally corrupt world around us, guess what? We are slaves to corruption, and we will find ourselves constantly enticed. We will find ourselves enticed by what is without; we will find ourselves drawn away by what is within. When you accumulate the sheer enticing power of what is without, and you marry it to that enticing response that comes from within, guess what? You will find a very high probability that you have found somebody who lives in the land of the free, and the home of the brave in bondage to their own sinful nature and bound by the error and the enticing dynamic of a fundamentally corrupt world. It's a scary proposition!

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But that is what Peter talks about. He says in the old days we had to worry about false prophets, in our contemporary days we have to worry about false teachers, and today what we have to worry about is this simple fact: That we may have some people who will come and listen to a preacher for an hour a week, but unfortunately, there are twenty-three more hours in Sunday, and there are twenty-four hours, six days of the week, and in all of those hours, what are they listening to? What are they exposed to? What are the philosophies? What are the mentalities? What are the theories? What are the skilled communication pieces that are coming their way? What are they bombarded with?

The answer is: They are being bombarded with philosophies that are fundamentally contrary to the God from whom we come, and to whom we're accountable. To make things worse, we have within us something that is fundamentally corrupt that responds to them, and we find ourselves with civic freedoms living in spiritual bondage. Here's an interesting thing, the more civic freedoms we have, the more opportunities for bondage are presented to us.

What about economic freedom? Isn't that something we appreciate? All the opportunities that we have, this is certainly the land of opportunity! There are people who are limited in the opportunities; there are people who traditionally and historically have lived in an underclass, and we must never, never forget how extremely difficult it is for them to break out of it. But for many, many people, America is the Land of Opportunity! There is great economic liberty. There are resources; there's opportunity, if you go for it. For many people the sky is the limit, and we enjoy our economic freedom.

Have you ever noticed however, the more economic freedom we have, the more in bondage to greed we become? With a continual desire for more and for bigger, and for better? And what has sexual freedom brought us? Bondage to lust! With the resultant and concomitant disaster in the breakdown of marriages and families. Isn't it interesting, all this enticing stuff about freedom, all the wonderful opportunities that are fundamentally in error, that are utterly empty, desperately enticing, and finish up totally ensnaring. There's so much one could say about this.