Chosen For Abundance

Title: Chosen For Abundance (An Introduction to 1 Peter)
Text: 1 Peter 1:1-2

OPEN:
“I, Peter, am an apostle on assignment by Jesus, the Messiah, writing to exiles, scattered to the four winds. Not one is missing, not one forgotten. God the Father has his eye on each of you, and has determined by the work of the Spirit to keep you obedient through the sacrifice of Jesus. May everything good from God be yours!” (The Message)

What’s gone wrong with the American dream? I guess the general idea of “the dream” hasn’t changed much through the years, only the particulars:
• Own a home> own a home larger than you can ever fully use.
• Own a car> own several vehicles, including an SUV, recreational vehicle, etc.
• Pay bills>’Who wants to be a millionaire?’

Does Scripture have anything relevant to say to us about our definitions of prosperity, success, and abundance? It does, actually. And nowhere does it speak more clearly to our present predicament than Peter’s First Letter.
[READ TEXT]
Immediately, when reading the statement in verse 2 (“may everything good from God be yours”/”grace and peace be yours in abundance”) I have a serious problem. The problem is produced by knowing the context of this letter:
• This is a letter written by Peter, one of Jesus’ original 12 apostles. He was the one named Simon that Jesus renamed “Rocky” on the basis of his confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
• As Eugene Peterson writes by way of introduction to Peter’s letters, Peter exerted enormous influence in the early church due to his relationship with Jesus and forceful, if not erratic, personality.
• Peter knew persecution firsthand. Beaten and jailed, Peter had been threatened often and had seen fellow believers jailed and die and the church scattered.
• This letter was written by Peter while he was in Rome not long before his death at the hands of Nero in 64 AD.
• Persecution of the early Christians began in Jerusalem at the hand of Jewish leaders, then spread to the rest of the world and climaxed when Rome wanted to rid the Empire of those who refused to bow to Caesar as god.
• The early Christians were persecuted for basically four reasons:
1) They refused to worship the emperor as God—so they were labeled ‘atheists.’
2) They refused to worship at pagan temples—business fell off from lack of idol sales.
3) They were accused of being cannibals—eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus.
4) They were accused of being immoral—“agape or love feasts”—like the mystery cults.
• Nero blamed all the problems of the decaying Roman Empire on the Christians—used them as human candles to light his gardens. Blamed the burning of Rome on the Christians.
• Peter wrote to the church scattered and suffering for their faith, giving comfort and hope, and urging continued loyalty to Christ.

So, how can Peter speak of abundant living to this persecuted audience? Seems like he is adding insult to injury. The key to understanding this is your point of reference.
• If the American Dream is your point of reference for prosperity, success, and abundance, what Peter writes (and the rest of the Bible, for that matter) will make no sense to you.
• If, however, Jesus Christ is your point of reference, Peter’s instruction will make perfect sense and will form a roadmap for navigating difficult waters.

Now I can say that according to Peter, believers are actually chosen by and set apart for God so that we may experience God’s fullness and abundance.
Illus:
Irenaeus, 3rd Century Bishop of Lyons said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” In other words, God’s glory is most clearly seen in you and I living lives of abundance.

Jesus himself declares, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and live it to the full.” (John 10:10)

So, what is this abundance we are supposed to have?

I. BELIEVERS HAVE SPIRITUAL ABUNDANCE (v. 2)
“Grace… be yours in abundance”
To understand this aspect of our abundance, look back to verse 1.
1. Should read “elect strangers”—no comma.
• Parepidemoi=persons belonging to some other land and people, who are temporarily residing with a people to whom they do not belong. There are for the time being aliens, foreigners, not natives. Aliens are often held in contempt by the natives among whom they dwell. Yet, despite this estimate of the natives, Peter exalts his readers far above the natives among whom they live.
2. Election is explained in verse 2.
“Chosen according to the foreknowledge of God… for obedience.”
• There is obviously something incredibly special about being chosen.
Illus:
Growing up always knowing I was adopted. My parents always told me, “You’re special because we chose you.”
Rom 8:33, “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?”
Col 3:12, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved…”
Eph 1:4, “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy
and blameless in his sight.”
• “Foreknowledge” is prognosin, from which we get our word “prognosis.” It is a compound word in Greek made up of pro—before; gnosis—to know intimately.
1) This knowledge is negative with regard to the wicked:
Mt 7:23, “I never knew you…”
Jn 10:14, “I know my sheep, and am known of mine.”
2 Tim 2:19, “The Lord knows those who are his…”
2) This is making one the object of loving care. God literally loves us to himself.
• Jesus died for us while we were still alienated from God (Rom 5:6-10).
• He also set us apart for himself as his own unique possession. This is the sanctifying work Peter speaks of in 1:2 (“through the sanctifying work of the Spirit”).
Read Colossians 2:13-15
3) Here’s what grace us—God knew all about us and chose us anyway, forgave us and declared us righteous in Christ before we ever knew him.
• This is not based on anything in us; it is all by the mercy and love of God—Amazing Grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. (Written by John Newton, who had captained a slaver ship. Later was saved and became a Baptist pastor in England)
Read Ephesians 2:8-10
4) This is abundant life—all our sins forgiven—an infinite number of new beginnings/fresh starts.

II. BELIEVERS HAVE EXPERIENTIAL ABUNDANCE (v. 2).
“Peace be yours in abundance.”
• Eirene (peace)=harmony, balance, everything in its place.
1. God wants to help sort your life, put everything in its place with himself surrounding us. This peace is much more than the absence of conflict.
Jn 14:27, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
Phil 4:6-7, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the
peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your
hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
2. Picture this as a circle with a dot in the center. We are the dot and Christ is the sphere around us.
Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.”
• God is truly in control.
Hannah Whithall Smith: “The darkness of our doubts or our fears, of our sorrows, or our despair, or even of our sins, cannot hide us from him, although it may, and often does, hide him from us.”
• Joy comes from surrendering to his control. He is in control—that’s not up for debate or question. The secret is to surrender to that control.
Mt 5:5, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (in other words, ‘everything good from God will be theirs’).
• The meaning of ‘meek’ is that of the horse that is “broken”/trained, still with all the strength and fire but under control—not “sacking out” but ‘Join-Up.’
• This was Job’s difficult lesson (Job 38-41)

CLOSE:
When you have this kind of abundance, you have everything!
Believers are actually chosen by and set apart for God so that we may experience God’s fullness and abundance.
Lk 12:15, “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions…”
Mt 6:33, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things
will be given to you as well.”

1. God loves us to himself.
• Shepherd, not a cattle herder.
• He draws us to himself.
2. God’s grace is our spiritual abundance.
3. Surrendering to God’s control provides experiential abundance.

How would you describe your life?
• Miserable and miserly or abundant and flowing?
What do you need to do to move into abundance?
• Receive & relish God’s grace and live like the chosen, forgiven, holy person that you are in Christ,
• Surrender to God’s control—acknowledge on an ongoing basis his control and bow to his leadership.

Trembling

Trembling Before God
Text: Psalm 119:120

OPEN:
Though our modern sensibilities may resist it, trembling depicts an essential movement of the heart before God. In the Psalms, it describes the sinner’s response to powerful experiences of awe, wonder, and fear in the face of the overwhelming majesty of God. If we would understand their songs and nurture the inner life, we too, must learn to tremble before God. As important as it is, trembling, or the experience of awe, is largely absent from our ordinary living.
 We are so desensitized by our own living that we are numb to see the holy.
 Our pace of life can drown out even a thunderous divine voice.
 Movies, professional sports, and other entertainments add a numbing crescendo of contrived excitements that shields us from the holy.
 Our pop-cultural worldview also hinders experiencing awe. By this I mean joining the masses of popular culture who see at best a God who is distant and unlikely to be encountered in the “real world.”
 Many encounter a social barrier to a sense of awe because they are told it simply is not sophisticated to all religion to touch them very deeply or very visibly.

Physical trembling is not our main concern, of course, but I hesitate to put us at ease too quickly, for it seems odd that, while all creation shudders in dread before the power and purity of the Terrifying One, we should rest wholly untouched by his Presence. We should recall that trembling or other physical responses to the Presence of God have often occurred throughout the history of the faith.
 From Belshazzar’s knees clattering together, through Quaker and Puritan revivals, and on up to modern times, many have had a physical response to the reality of God. Not only is such experience common, but it is also widely varied.

To say that trembling before God has often been accompanied by such experiences is not the same, however, as preaching that everyone should respond in the same. Nonetheless, the mind, body, psyche, and spirit are woven together so inseparably that we should expect to be affected as whole persons when we encounter God.

In the Psalms, one of the words that most helpfully explains this experience to us is the word fear. The Hebrew words most often used for “fear” in the OT depict God as one who elicits ultimate respect. Individuals, nations, and nature are urged to fear God; and many, overwhelmed by God, are said to be filled with fear at God’s presence or action.
 To fear God in the Psalms, does not primarily mean quivering in anxiety and terror, but instead describes a profound sense of reverence or awe.

The heart of the experience of fear and trembling is to feel and acknowledge God over against us. God is the Wholly Other. To encounter this Holy One leaves us awestruck. We may respond with great waves of laughter and joy, rolling out of every corner of our beings. Or the awe may strike us silent (e.g. the words in the contemporary song, “I Can Only Imagine”). The Psalms are bursting with majestic, overwhelming images of God. These images can teach us and guide us to recover a lost sense of wonder so that we may awake and truly see God.

I. Creation Helps Us Recover a Sense of Awe of God.
1. One of the main witnesses to holy majesty in the Psalms is the created world itself.

Ps. 19:1-4, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where there voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world.”

 Theologians refer to creation’s witness to God as “general revelation,” but it seems to me that this is too dull a term to describe the grandeur of the experience.
illus:
I left just after my daughter Jordan was born to go preach a revival for Lakeview Baptist Church in Polson, Montana. Montana is profoundly beautiful country. The landscape swims with majestic mountains in western Montana. One particular night the heavens began to shout God’s glory and it stopped me in my tracks. The experience was a dazzling display of the aurora borealis. At the sudden appearance of these “northern lights” I craned my neck backward in wonder, but soon lay flat on my back to try to take in every nuance of light I possibly could. In ever-changing shades of blue, pink, and orange, the lights rolled and rippled, pulsing in waves, shimmering in jeweled arcs across the sky. They left me breathless, caught somewhere between a whispered “Wow!” and no words at all. And I worshipped God.

Another more recent experience took place early one morning outside my home in the country. Some distance from town, the night sky can be brilliant with stars and constellations. This particular morning we woke the children early, made hot chocolate, and sat outside to watch a meteor shower, something akin to colossal sparklers tracing across the sky. It was incredibly glorious and we spoke of the greatness of our creator God.

 Creation declares the glory of God to us in many ways, and we each hear its voice differently.
o The voice may come through surging rivers or crashing seas
o Through the intricate beauty of a rose or the delicacy of
o Through the soaring majesty of an eagle or the scarlet flight of a cardinal.
o Through scowling gray-green thunderheads or through a flaming pink/purple/orange sunset.
2. In the Psalms the creation tells us of God in two ways: through its own response to God and through its witness to others.
 The creation witnesses to God’s inventiveness, wisdom, beauty, and tender care.
[READ Psalm 65:5-13]
 Though the Hebrew singers were moved by the witness of nature perhaps more readily than we are, we can learn to listen more deeply as a way of nurturing trembling in our own hearts:
1) Break down the wall between yourself and creation—it is hard for us to imagine creation responding to God in any way except as a machine. Handicapped by such a view, we can hardly imagine the trees clapping their hands and the hills skipping like lambs in response to God.
 We need to take seriously the clear biblical teaching that nature, like us, does respond to God.
2) Recover your sense of God as Creator.
 Tragically, in our time, even people of faith have had their sense of God as Creator diminished and even destroyed by a wrong response to science. Even those who have not enlisted on one side or the other of the Bible-versus-science war have often been robbed of the majestic images of God’s creative power.
 Fortunately, we can reclaim what has been taken or given away—“open your heart to the powerful word pictures that show speaking the world into being, becoming a sculptor and surgeon spreading out the heavens like a tent, measuring the seas in the palm of his hand, weighing the mountains in balance scales, and much more.” (H. Macy)
3) Pay more attention to nature and cherish its marvels.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

II. The Experience of Trembling Before God Is Evoked by Power, But Also by Overwhelming Love.
1. The images of power are potent and plentiful.
Ps 99, “The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake. Great is the Lord in Zion; he is exalted over all the nations.”
 The Lord is feared for his powerful acts of deliverance—the “terrible deeds” in Israel’s history, most notably the Exodus from Egypt.
Ps 66:1-3, “Shout with joy to God, all the earth! Sing the glory of His name; make his praise glorious! Say to God, ‘How awesome are your deeds! So great is your power that your enemies cringe before you. All the earth bows down to you; they sing praise to you, they sing praise to your name.”

2. Among these wonders of power, however, are also the wonders of love.
 Compelled by love, the Creator uses his power to protect and prosper his people.
 The foreboding holiness of God is anchored in love as the faithful are invited to be like God in holiness (Lev. 19:2) and as they experience forgiveness. “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”
 God’s forgiveness causes us to fear him.
Ps 130:3-4, “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.”

illus:
Steeped in the Psalms, hymn writer Isaac Watts captured how grace penetrates power when he wrote:
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And make the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love.

When we combine our visions of God’s majesty and of God’s love, we move even more directly toward awe and adoration. Thomas Merton describes this beautifully:
When one becomes conscious of who God really is, and when one realizes that He who is Almighty, and infinitely Holy, has “done great things for us,” the only possible reaction is the cry of half-articulate exultation that bursts from the depths of our being in amazement at the tremendous, inexplicable goodness of God to men.

III. We Are Best Moved to Tremble As We Gain a Vision of God’s Holiness.
This is what overwhelmed Isaiah, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

1. A vision of God’s holiness, along with an overwhelming sense of divine sovereignty, is at the heart of a right response toward God.
 The idea of holiness in the Old Testament points toward purity and perfection. It refers to what is set apart from the common and the polluted, for the holiness of God cannot tolerate sin—any type of sin.
 So Hebrew religious practices required that worshippers should observe purification rituals and that objects used in worship should be unblemished and pure, whether they be garments or sacrificial animals.
 Holiness can be seen as the very essence of the character of God.
2. Expressions of our trembling before God’s holiness.
1) Worship
illus:
Howard Macy:
“I see the holiness of God as an astonishingly pure, white light, one that we can hardly bear to see, but that is refracted to us through the prism of God’s words and deeds. So what we see as divine love, justice, wrath, faithfulness, patience, and wisdom are simply beautifully refracted rays of the holiness of God. To see this holiness, whether through the prism’s rainbow or directly in its dazzling purity, brings us to awe and worship.

Ps 96:9, “Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; tremble before him all the earth.”

2) Two-fold Repentance
Isaiah 6:5, “Woe is me….”
a. Sense of being overwhelmed by one’s own sin.
“My sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see. They are more than the hairs on my head, and my heart fails within me.” (Ps 40:12)

“I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.” (Ps 51:3)

“Do not bring your servant into judgment, for no one living is righteous before you.” (Ps 143:2)
 It is right that our understanding of God should bring us to this kind of self-understanding and repentance.
William Temple:
If a man should claim to have had a vision of God which did not bring him to penitence, I should feel very sure that he had had no real vision, or that it was not a vision of the real God.
b. Desire for a pure heart.
 Yearn to be set apart for God, living in the world, but not sharing its corruption.
 This is inviting God to keep on with the work of transformation, of creating within them the holiness they so much desire.
Ps 139: 23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.”
Ps 51:10, “Create in me a pure heart, O God,
And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

CLOSE:
I suggest you find a place outdoors (even if it requires some travel to arrive there) that brings you close up to God's reflection and refuse to move until you tremble with the awesomeness of His presence.

Created To Be Creative

Title: Created To Be Creative
Text: Genesis 1:27

OPEN:
You may not know it to look at me now, but I was a boyhood superhero. I mean it—secret identity, super powers, snazzy costume—the whole nine yards. You see, I spent all of my early years on this mortal planet inventing and drawing superheroes. My line-up of supercharged mutants made the Justice League of America blush, the Fantastic Four faint, and the X-men look like superhero wannabees. But I didn’t stop there—I became a superhero.
· Secret identity, costume in the closet (underwear over pajamas with towel held together by diaper pin).
· Superhero career ended on top of my roof. Was about to go “up, up and away” (more likely—down, down, way down) when my father found me and said, “Son, come down from there before you kill yourself. You can’t fly. You’re no superhero.”—death of imagination!
· Past 35 years have been on a quest to regain my lost imagination.

I’m not the only one who struggles with lost imagination/crippled creativity. No group is this more true of than the Christian Church of today:
“If one were to ask an unbiased observer to name that institution in our society which clearly espouses creativity, we can be sure that he would not name our 21st Century church. This is an indictment of how we Christians feel about the mandate God has given us for being creative… We do not embrace creativity as a way of life… We do not see it as having much to do with Biblical living.” (Calvin M. Johannson)

What about that? If it’s true, why is it? Is creativity incompatible with Christ following? Is imagination a gift or a curse/ good or evil?

One need not travel very far in Scripture to encounter the creative. Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created…”
Genesis 1:27
I do not intend to exegete this text but instead take a brief panoramic view of the creative in the Bible to see if we may indeed apply that action to human beings, then suggest 5 traits of those who are actively creative.
Other than offering unconditional love, Creativity is the most divine act of humanity

I. May We Ascribe Creativity to Human Beings?
Creativity—So much more than artistic expression, though the artist composer, actor, author have powerful tools at their disposal for presenting fresh perspectives. These are, quite simply, tools of human imagination.
· Everyone is born with imagination—your creative spirit—though few pursue and develop it beyond early childhood.
“The few who keep their imaginations active become theme-park designers, write multi-volume end-times bestsellers, or—if they can’t make a living that way—become youth ministers.”
(Disney Imagineer, C. McNair Wilson)

So, just what is creativity?

1. Creativity (verb)
a. to make the new, or rearrange the old to appear new.
b. action taken as a result of imagination.

· In the Bible “create” is reserved for extraordinarily exalted activity. The Hebrew and Greek words respectively bara and kitzo, are very similar in meaning and are employed sparingly to denote the pinnacles of God’s achievements—creating the heavens and the earth, man, righteousness/justice, the nation Israel, the Church, reconciling Israel and the Church, creating the New Jerusalem, and to regeneration and worship.
· The Biblical concept embraces a much broader canvas than merely the physical creation in Genesis One.
2. Two main dimensions characteristic of Biblical creativity:
a. The constructing dimension (as in the making of the universe).
b. The performing dimension (as in the doing of miracles).
· By way of human analogy, to make something in the construction dimension is to take material and shape or reshape it (into a book, essay, sculpture, etc.)
· To do something in the performance dimension is to perform on the piano, dance, deliver a speech. An action results, not a new form.
Both are expressions of biblical creativity
Exodus 35:30-36:2

Not every Christian leader has looked favorably on human creativity:
“the more the artist attains to the ideal of free, untrammeled creativity, the more likely he is to be disobedient to God… Human creation thus is seen not as Stewardship, but as a competition with divine Creation.” (Refomer)
· Reformed theologians viewed the idea of man as a creator as dangerous (Kuyper, Seerveld, Wolterstorff).

c. Gen 1:28 can be seen as a command, a charge to subdue not only all living creatures, but to discover and use the potential in all materials, including their macro and micro structural dimensions.
· To subdue means to tame, master, humanize, impose order, develop technique—to place our imprint on creation in a positive way.
· In other words, man is charged with working to extend God’s creation. In that sense, “creation” is uncompleted, unfinished.
J. R. R. Tolkien—man is “sub-creator”
Dorothy L. Sayer—mankind is viewed as small “c” creator.
“We are all aware that man cannot create in the absolute sense. We use the word “create to convey an extension and amplification of something we do know.”

II. Five Traits of Those Who are Actively Creative.
C. McNair Wilson: “As children, not a one of us had to be encouraged to paint, sing, draw, dance, make-up stories. Playfulness is a naturally occurring human activity. Good news: we can reignite these early flames of creativity any time we want by calling on the long-dormant curiosities of youth. They’re in there, way in the back, behind the mimeograph.”

We can all recapture our God-given creative spirit by practicing five traits we have in common with the most actively creative people in history. Enthusiastically and relentlessly applied, our creativity can change lives and reinvigorate the Church.

1. Take Risks—proceeding without control over outcome.
· Creativity only happens in the context of risk.
· Beware the ‘nay-sayers.’ Nothing destroys creativity faster than negativity.
Illus: Robert Fulton and his negative wife.
· Negativity destroys creativity!

2. Challenge Assumptions—ignore unwritten rules.
· Pay no attention to those who protest by saying, “We’ve never done it that way before.”
· See things differently. Jesus did this—he was radical. But he was different with a purpose; not different simply to be different.
· Creativity needs a purpose.
3. Learn to Play Again—don’t be afraid of imagination.
· It is a sad thing how the Church has become afraid of imagination to the point of condemning it.
Illus: My own sermon when returning to the US in 2000: “What’s wrong with Harry Potter?” Now I wonder: “What’s been wrong with Dane Fowlkes?”
· We actually learn more by playing than we do from listening to a lecture.
4. Pursue Curiosity—Ask ‘What if?”
· Questions are more important than their answers & problems are what matter most in life, not their solutions.
5. View Life as Art.
Malcolm Muggeridge: “All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message.”
· I am convinced that what happens in death is that we get a different body, but that what makes you “you” in this life continues to be “you” after death. That concept totally changes the way we view life here and now. Sickness and problems take on a whole new significance when you see them as opportunities to grow and that our response to them affects the person that we will be forever.
· The highest art form is the art of living creatively.

CLOSE:
Creativity is the most divine act of humanity. Creativity is at the very heart of being human. It’s not too late to regain imagination and release creativity in your life.

Christian Worldview

OPENING:
About 20 years ago I decided to take up the sport of raquetball. It didn’t take much time to get me hooked. I started playing occasionally, then was playing regularly. After a while I was playing frequently, 3 or 4 times a week. In those days court time was cheap ($4 an hour), so I’d invite a friend to play and split the cost. He’d pay $3 and I’d pay $1.
In only a matter of months I was winning almost every game I played. Of course, I was screening my opponents carefully – playing mostly the elderly, the infirmed. So, being slightly competitive and driven by nature, I was pleased to find a sport I could play really well. One day, I noticed a poster where I played that said there was going to be a tournament at the club later that month. I was new to all this, so I read the poster carefully. It said the way the tournament was set up was that there would be 3 skill levels: C-level for recreational novices; B-level for serious raquetball players; and an A-level for the guys who slept with their rackets.
I remember standing there, looking at the poster and asking myself, “If I enter this thing, this being my very first tournament, what would be the appropriate skill level for me?” And because I was a Christian and a pastor, and knew all of what the Bible says about humility, I said to myself, “Let’s face it Dane. You’ve only been playing a few months. There’s probably no way you’re going to win the A-level.”
So I stood there and debated with myself whether or not I should play it safe and enter the B-level, or throw caution to the wind and enter the A-level and try to pull off an upset victory. One thing was certain, I had no interest in the C-level whatsoever – I was way past this recreational novice business. As I was finalizing my decision to jump right into the A-level, an older gentleman walked up to me and asked, “Are you going to enter the tournament this month?” I replied, “Well, I’m thinking about it.”
I could tell he was checking me over and sizing me up, wondering how good I was and what level I’d enter. And I was doing the same thing, wondering what level he’d be in. He was a short, pot-bellied guy. In different sports you look for different things – there were these little short arms on this guy. Then he said, “I entered last month’s tournament.” I asked, “What league?” And he said, “C-level.” I thought, “Figures.” And then he said, “And I came in 10th.” And it was like he was proud of it. I thought to myself, “If I came in 10th in the C-level, recreational novice league, I wouldn’t tell a soul. It would be embarrassing.” Then out of the blue the guy said, “I’ve already played a couple of games today but if you want, I’d be happy to play you.” I agreed, thinking this would be a kind of benchmark game for me – I could see the level of play of a C-guy, then judge the appropriate level for me (A or B, probably A).
To make a long story short, this short-armed pot-bellied bald guy beat me 21-0 in about 7 minutes! I’d never seen a raquetball hit that hard, go that fast, or hit that low. I felt like I needed a spatula rather than a racket. He annihilated me! We chatted after the game back in the locker room. He didn’t even have to shower. I asked him if I could ask a few questions before he left. I said, “You placed 10th in the C-league?” (”Yeah, I had a good tournament).
“If you were to have played the guy who won the C-level, what do you think the score would have been?” “21-5. I’d like to think I could get 5 points on him.” Then I asked, “What would happen if the average B-level guy played the winner of the C-league?” He said, “it would be ugly, murder, slice-and-dice, 21-0.” (I’m feeling weaker all the time). Finally, “What would happen if an A-league guy played the B-level winner?” “Same thing. It’d be over in a matter of minutes. By the way, you ought to see what a pro does to an A-level guy.”

Then he said, “I’m running late. Gotta go. Enjoyed the game.” I thought, “Bet you did.” So, I sat there all alone in the locker room thinking how deceived can a person be? 20 minutes ago I though I was almost an A-level player, I might even win it. I was certainly a B-level player and in the hunt. I didn’t even want to mess with the C-level. Then I got clobbered by a guy who placed 10th in the recreational novice league. How deceived can a person be?

Unfortunately, many of us have been deceived into accepting a popular version of reality without ever really thinking about it. It seems we have accepted by default an inaccurate, incomplete, and totally impotent understanding of reality (or ‘worldview’).
· And believe it or not, ideas matter. The ideas one really believes largely determine the kind of person he or she becomes.
· Everyone has a philosophy of life (worldview). That is not optional. What is optional, and, therefore, of ultimate importance is the adequacy of one’s philosophy of life. Are one’s views rational or irrational, true or false, carefully formed and precise or conveniently formed and fuzzy? Are they conducive to flourishing as a human being or do they cater to one’s fallen nature? Are they honoring or dishonoring to the triune God?

Fortunately for us, the Lord Jesus Christ did not leave us to ourselves when it comes to understanding reality. I want us to read his own statement concerning reality in John 14:6.
[John 14:1-7]

The Gospel of John frequently uses the language of truth, much more so than the other gospel writers, and with John the concept of truth undergoes significant theological development. John uses truth vocabulary in its conventional sense of genuineness/veracity/opposite of falsehood, but he also develops his own particular meaning where truth refers to the reality of God. In John 14:6, Jesus declares boldly and clearly that he is the revelation of the reality of God.
· The word used in 14:6 is aletheia. To understand Jesus’ usage we need to look back at the beginning of John’s gospel where he states: “For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”(1:17). Exodus 34:6 is clearly the relevant O.T. background because of the context which compares the incarnation of the Word with God’s revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
· What’s the point of John’s connection with Exodus 34? Revelation of Reality. The incarnation of God in Christ is presented as the supreme disclosure of the reality of God, who had revealed himself to Moses in the giving of the Law at Sinai.
· As the Law framed reality for the Jews, so now in an even fuller and complete way Jesus Christ frames reality for us. As ultimate reality, Christ is the standard by which all truth or falsehood is measured in this world.
Therefore, every believer must engage personally and intellectually the worldview Jesus revealed and from which he taught and lived .

But we have a serious problem today: Many Christians have been converted spiritually but not intellectually.

Let me explain what I mean:
illustration:
On a clear autumn day in 1980, 25 miles west of Chicago in Wheaton, Illinois, Charles Malik, a distinguished academic and statesman, rose to the podium to deliver the inaugural address at the dedication of the new Billy Graham Center on the campus of Wheaton College. His announced topic was “The Two Tasks of Evangelism.” What he said must have shocked his audience.

We face two tasks in our evangelism, he told them, “saving the soul and saving the mind” and the church, he warned, is lagging dangerously behind with respect to this second task. We would do well to consider Malik’s words:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting
American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-
intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches
is not cared for enough…. People who are in a hurry to get out
of the university and start earning money or serving the church
or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of
spending years of leisure conversing with the great minds and
souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their
powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative
thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among
evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on
their own terms of scholarship?…. For the sake of the greater
effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their
own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the
periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

· These words strike like a sledge hammer. The average Christian does not even realize that there is an intellectual struggle going on in the West and that Enlightenment naturalism and postmodern anti-realism are arrayed in an unholy alliance against a broadly theistic and specifically Christian worldview. Christians cannot afford to be indifferent to the outcome of this struggle, yet our churches are overpopulated with people, whose minds, as Christians, are going to waste.
· They may be spiritually regenerate but their minds have not been converted—they still think like unbelievers. Despite their Christian commitment, they remain largely empty selves. What is an empty self? An empty self is a person who is passive, flaccid, busy and hurried, incapable of developing an interior life.
· Imagine now a church filled with such people. What will be the theological understanding, the evangelistic courage, the cultural penetration of such a church? If the interior life does not really matter all that much, a person will simply not exert the effort to read, preferring to be entertained.
He or she….
Will consider magazines filled with pictures and visual media in general more important than mere words on a page or abstract thoughts.

Will have little patience for theoretical knowledge and too short an attention span to stay with an idea while it is being developed.

What will that person read, if he or she reads at all? Books about Christian celebrities, Christian romance novels imitating the worst that the world has to offer, Christian self-help books with slogans, simplistic moralizing, lots of stories and pictures, and inadequate solutions for the problems facing the reader.

What will not be read are books that equip persons to develop a well-reasoned, theological understanding of the Christian faith and to assume their role in the broader work of the kingdom of God.

· Such a church will be impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to wash away Christian ideas in a flood of thoughtless pluralism and misguided scientism.

Such a church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers—numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, the church will become her own grave-digger—her short-term “success” will turn out in the long run to be the very thing that buries her.

What makes this envisioned scenario so disturbing is that we do not have to imagine such a church; rather, this is an apt description of the majority of American evangelical churches today.

It is no wonder then, that despite its resurgence, evangelical Christianity remains highly limited in its cultural impact.

illustration:
David Wells reflects on this current reality:

The vast growth in evangelically minded people… should by now have revolutionized American culture. With a third of American adults now claiming to have experienced spiritual rebirth, a powerful countercurrent of morality growing out of a powerful and alternative worldview should have been unleashed in factories, offices, and board rooms, in the media, universities, and professors, from one end of the country to the other. The results should by now be unmistakable. Secular values should be reeling, and those who are their proponents should be very troubled. But as it turns out, all of this swelling of the evangelical ranks has passed unnoticed in the culture…. The presence of evangelicals in American culture has barely caused a ripple. (David F. Wells, No Place for Truth)

Here is my best diagnosis of the problem: While evangelicals have for the most part correct Christian beliefs (orthodox religion), far too many of these beliefs lie largely at the periphery of their existence rather than at the center of their identity. At their core, they are hollow men, empty selves. And this trend within the church is combined with two unfortunate features of postmodern Western culture: the rampant pragmatism in society and the nonexistence of raising up a Christian worldview for our children, youth, and university students. The result is that serious intellectual reflection is virtually absent from most church fellowships. This, in turn, has contributed to intellectual shallowness and a lack of cultural discernment in the body of Christ.

Those who know me know that I am a passionate person. I aim toward living by a single God-exalting, soul-satisfying passion. And I do not shy away from the word or idea or outward display of “passion.” Passion is appropriate because God commands us to love Him with all our heart (Mt. 22:37) and Jesus reminds us that lukewarm lives make him hurl (Rev 3:16). But the same Jesus who tell us to love God with all our heart also tells us to love Him with all our mind.
· Yes, we need to feel and display a passionate love for God, but a revival of intellectual engagement is absolutely critical for restoring vibrant, life-transforming apprenticeship under the lordship of Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher.
· No apprentice will become like his or her teacher if he or she does not respect the authority of that teacher to direct the apprentice’s life and activities. However, today the general attitude even among many of Christ’s followers is that while Jesus Christ is holy, powerful, and so forth, the worldview he taught and from which he lived is no longer credible for thinking people. It seems we have accepted by default an inaccurate, incomplete, and totally impotent worldview.

CLOSING:

Why this Chapel theme: “… with all your mind?” Why this message on engaging the mind toward a Christian worldview?
· Frankly, it is because the single most important institution shaping Western culture is the university. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our teachers, our business executives, our lawyers, our artists, our vocational Christian ministers are being trained.
· It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers and leaders who will shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture.
· If the Christian worldview can be restored to a place of prominence, respect, and centrality at the university, it will have a leavening affect throughout society. And if we change the university, we change our culture through those who shape culture.
· May God help us engage personally and intellectually the worldview Jesus revealed and from which he taught and lived.

Relevance and Prophetic Voice

OPENING:
I have always loved the Church. It’s the churches that I’ve never really liked.
· For years I remained cynical about the local church, even while serving as a pastor. Not until I moved to Kenya, East Africa, did I witness on the back side of the Kaisuit Desert what church life could mean when expressed in way that was not only relevant to the culture but prophetic in its impact.
· I am no longer cynical about the church, but my burden for her has grown even larger since our return to the United States five years ago.
· I would like to read a New Testament text, and then apply it more than exegete for our purposes in this message.

Acts 17:16-34

Allow me to make a few introductory comments about this very familiar experience of the Apostle Paul. By the apostolic era, the city of Athens in Greece was no longer a world superpower, but it did have a legacy from its glories of the past and maintained a reputation as a center for intellectual activity, philosophy, and piety. Full of idols, as Acts 17 records, Athens was described by ancient authors as a model of “speaking well of the gods.” So religious were the people of Athens, that in the city altars were erected to “unknown gods.” Besides being an indication of religiousness, Athen’s idolatry was a safety precaution. The thinking was that if the gods were not properly venerated they would strike the city. So, lest they inadvertently invoke the wrath of some god in ignorance of him or her, the city erected these altars to unknown gods.
The Athenians appeared to have thought that Paul was referring to two gods in his preaching. “’He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection” (v.18). The terms Jesus and anastasis (Greek for “resurrection”) were mistaken for the names of a god and his wife/cohort. Paul effectively uses the altar to the Unknown God to defend himself against their charges and to quickly turn his defense into an attack. Paul models for us the proper approach for any church in a changing culture: cultural relevance & a prophetic voice. Christ himself, working on an interpersonal level, started with the needs of the needs of his listeners, adopting their frame of reference for his prophetic and challenging statements to them. He dealt with Nicodemus in terms of his religious background, the Samaritan woman in terms of her racial background, Zacchaeus in terms of his vocational background, etc. Jesus was not being inconsistent—he was very consistent in his principle of cultural identification and prophetic speech. Paul provides perhaps the clearest example of cultural relevance and prophetic speech.

In this message, I intend to show how we can return to the glorious truth of this ancient text and prepare for future textures by reclaiming two things: cultural relevance & prophetic voice.

I. REGAINING CULTURAL RELEVANCE.
1. The Lost World
Many people summarize the problem of American churches today by simply saying that most churches are not growing. But it’s far worse than that. The real tragedy is not that churches are declining and closing their doors. It’s not that churches are dying but that churches have lost their reason to live.

Living within an all-Christian context, it becomes easy to divide according to theological distinctions. The difference between a Baptist and a Methodist actually used to matter to people. In many ways we seem to have too much time on our hands. Just look at how many kinds of Baptists there are—Southern, Northern, Conservative, American, Swedish, Cooperative, Free-Will, Regular, General, just to name a few.
· But while we were dividing among ourselves, we missed the growing divide that really mattered. We were losing the battle for the lives of people who were without Christ.
a. From within this context, the contemporary parachurch movement has emerged.
· The parachurch created a missiological rather than a theological environment. If you believed that the Bible held the solutions for man’s problems, knew that Jesus was the only hope for a lost and broken world, and were willing to do something about it, then you qualified to be on the team.
b. In many ways the emergence of the parachurch reflects the paralysis within the local church.
· When we stopped calling youth to the mission of Christ, Youth With A Mission emerged.
· When we ignored the opportunity to reach university students, Campus Crusade emerged.
· When we settled for church attendance and neglected discipleship, Navigators emerged.
· When we hesitated to call men to the role of spiritual leadership, Promise Keepers emerged.
>We’ve relinquished the kingdom to the parachurch. The tragedy is that it ever became necessary to circumvent the local church to do what Jesus claimed as his own mission (Luke 4:18-19).
c. Yet while the parachurch was rallying and mobilizing men and women whose hearts were longing to serve Christ, it was at the same time accelerating the spiritual anemia and decline of the church.
· The church became a fortress from the world rather than the hope of the world.
2. The Church Remains Its Own Worst Enemy.
a. This means that we have become disconnected from our present context.
· We tend to speak about the shift from a Christian worldview as if it were instigated and implemented by those who were outside of the church’s reach.
· The truth is that America’s best atheists are children of the church. It is rare to find a person who is a passionate enemy of the church who has never had contact with her.
· The diminishing influence of the American church on American society is not simply because fewer people are going to church, but fewer people are going to church because of the diminishing influence of Christ on the church itself.
b. We didn’t lose America; we gave her away!
· Along the way we lost the power to transform culture.
· The world changed and we didn’t. The world changed for the worse because we didn’t change at all. The world waits for church to once again become God’s agent of change.
· Even with the bombardment of materialism, rationalism, existentialism, and empiricism, our society continues an essentially spiritual quest. Today we are not moving towards a godless land but to a land with many gods. America may be the next great Hindu nation behind India.
*Here’s the biting indictment: this country is not rejecting spirituality but Christianity. People are rejecting Christ because of the church!
Once we were called Christians by an unbelieving world, and now we call ourselves Christians and the world calls us hypocrites. Isn’t it possible that it isn’t our nation that has become secular but the church? We have become neither relevant nor transcendent. We have become, in the worst of ways, religious.
illustration:
“We’re looking for a church that meets our needs.” It seems I’ve heard this a thousand times and I become nauseated each time. The phenomenon of church shoppers has profoundly shaped the contemporary church. The entire conversation today is not about cultural relevance but personal convenience.
· Our focal point has shifted from the world to ourselves. And in so doing we have lost our connection with a lost and broken world.
· Too many of our statements about the crisis in the American church center on the superficial arena of style and neglect to go to the core issue of self. At the core of so much of what we have become is self-centeredness. It is one thing to have a preference; it is another to demand that one’s preferences be honored above the needs of those without Christ.

3. A comfortable Substitute.
a. In the process of moving from contact and connectedness to convenience, we have moved even farther away from the center into comfort.
· Somewhere along the way we have forsaken the truth of the gospel and traded it for a comfortable substitute. We shifted from a church “on mission” and settled for being a church that supported missions.
· Perhaps you’ve heard the statement that the center of God’s will is the safest place on the face of the earth. The truth of the matter is that the center of God’s will is not a safe place but the most dangerous place in the world! To live outside of God’s will puts us in danger; to live in his will makes us dangerous.
b. How could we ever think the Christian faith would be safe when its central metaphor is an instrument of death?
· It is not a coincidence that baptism is a water grave depicting death and resurrection. It is significant that the ongoing ordinance of the Lord’s Supper is a reminder of sacrifice.
· How did we ever develop a safe theology from such a dangerous faith?

I have attempted to assess some of the fundamental causes for the decline of the church. Have you noticed that none of them deal with the outside environment? Certainly, cultural shifts are significant and need to be addressed. Yet, in the words of Erwin McManus, "The rapid and dramatic changes in culture are making for rough sailing but they are not sinking the boat. The problem is not with the seas but with the leak in the boat. The only storm that can sink a church is the one that rages within." In the end the crisis is always spiritual, not cultural. Radical changes outside the church demand an even more radical sacrifice within the church. Laying aside our traditions and cultural preferences are a reasonable expectation for a church committed to cultural relevance and a prophetic voice.

II. SPEAKING WITH A PROPHETIC VOICE.
The church is God’s agent for redeeming the earth to himself and filling the earth with his glory. Matthew tells us that the kingdom of God is forcefully advancing and forceful men take hold of it. Jesus reminds us that the church will crash against the very gates of hell. Paul describes us through the imagery of soldiers of light, dispelling the kingdom of darkness.

For 2000 years the church has been called by God to encounter culture through his transforming power. I am convinced that many of the global trends that have brought fear, concern, and even paralysis to the contemporary church are the very act of God. Several global movements are having sweeping and dramatic impacts on the culture in which we serve. The church is positioned to be either antagonistic, ineffective, or transformational in the emerging global scenario. While there are many current books that describe the significant part of this phenomenon as postmodernism, I would like to approach these issues from the perspective of globalization. For if postmodernism is the best description of what is happening on the Western front, globalization is the panoramic view of this historic paradigm shift. My perspective as we look at these is that the very movement that’s create friction for the contemporary church are the same ones from which we can generate traction. Friction is what hinders, slows us down. Traction is what gets is out of our ruts and enables us to launch a movement.

The following categories were originally suggested by Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, California:
1. Radical Migration.
· In the past the world has been stationary. It was extraordinary for a person to ever leave home, meet foreign peoples, and settle elsewhere. Jesus never traveled more than a hundred miles from his hometown during his adult life.
· This was the real world of the past—the world from which the American church was formed. Churches were landmarks of stability and continuity. All over America, next to churches lie cemeteries with the same dozen last names on the tombstones. If you lived in a community for 20 years but weren’t born there, you were still an outsider.
· What has become known as the phenomenon of transitional communities is simply the local expression of radical migration. That means neighborhoods are constantly changing. So we find white churches in black neighborhoods, black congregations in Latino communities, and Latino congregations in Asian communities.
· But what creates friction for the church can also be traction. The nations are at our front door—we have an opportunity to love our neighbors as ourselves, and the practical application of reconciliation is right across the street.
> Racial reconciliation may be the largest issue facing churches in Harrison County. Doubtful that God will ever bless us until we become broken enough about this sin to do something about it.

2. Urbanization.
· Ralph Winter has proposed that the last great frontier for the gospel is the cities. It is impossible to talk about the future without mentioning cities. While human history began in a garden, it ends in the city. This is a planet of great cities.
· This phenomenon creates great friction for the contemporary church (and especially Southern Southern Baptists). The majority of our churches have been informed and formed by rural ethos. Even the suburban church is in many ways the natural development of the county-seat church, maintaining its focus on rural values.
· It is ironic that the word pagan finds its roots in a word meaning “country dweller.” Christians today tend to view the urban dweller as the true pagan.
· Here’s how it can create positive traction. Many times in the rural or suburban community, the real issues of human poverty are camouflaged and overlooked. That’s not possible in an urban world. Everything is accentuated in the city (e.g. Ahmedabad—Holiday Inn looking down on slum dwellers on the banks of the Sabarmati River).
· Instead of contracting urbanitis and fleeing the urban challenge, we need to gain urban eyes and see how God is bringing the nations of the world to the cities.
· Urbanization affects towns the size of Marshall in perhaps even more significantly than large cities such as Houston, simply because of the greater conflict between nostalgia and reality>the way we wish it still was will never be that way again.
3. Demographic Shifts.
· As recent as the 1970’s, middle-class families constituted only one-third of the population of our cities. That percentage would today be more like one-fourth if not less. Why is it then that most of our churches are focused exclusively on the middle-class.
· Not sure about the accuracy of my assessment? Try this: What do you think of when you think of the church and its ministries? The vast majority of answers will fall within a narrow range including preaching, Sunday School, choir, age-graded programs. Don’t anticipate answers such as street people, ex-convicts, prisoners, drug addicts, homosexuals, impoverished, apartment dwellers, unemployed, unchurched high school kids, members of the cults, etc. Ministries that do not fit neatly into the middle-class primarily anglo nuclear family have simply been ignored.
· As a result of our middle-class focus, we have become ministry-poor. As long as we keep thinking that ministry is church work, we’ll never change. That’s because church work happens inside a church building. Therefore, the church person needs a Sunday School class to teach, a choir to sing in, a committee to serve on. He/she is too ministry-impaired to see beyond these typical activities. I do not mean that these things are wrong, just that they are insufficient to reach a lost, dying and decaying community.
4. Technological Revolution.
· What is the appropriate relationship between the church and its technological world?
· Is the church just a big “how to”? Does the church find her legitimacy in simply knowing how to do things better? Does the church sell out to culture when she beings to utilize the inventions of contemporary society? Does the church lose authenticity when she picks up innovation?
· Many in the church reject technology and at the same time depend on it. Even the most culturally conservative churches have no problem turning the lights on, using the microphone to preach against technology, or enjoying running water and indoor plumbing. Ironically, we tend to accept technologies that bring us comfort and convenience, while rejecting technologies that can produce creativity and innovation.
· Actually, the best use of technology takes the focus off technology. It accentuates humanity in the same way that spotlights should—not getting people to look at the light but helping people to see the speaker more clearly.
5. A Multicultural, Pluralistic World.
· The gospel, as presented in our time, has been crafted in a way that would only win Christians to Christ. We often preach to convert sinners who already believe in the God of the Bible. Our most basic presentations of the good news of Christ have been filled with assumptions—denying the essence of what communication is. Evangelism for the most part has been focused on people who already accept our worldview.
· What we began to describe as a New Age movement was the first wave of multicultural influence. For the first time we had access to multiple systems of belief. It was easier to be certain you were right when you had never heard of an opposing position. Everything begins to change when the nations become your neighbors.
· Apart from critical thought, religious pluralism produces “Christian universalism.”

CLOSING:

While the church was never intended to accommodate culture, much of the friction we’ve been experiencing is due to the fact that we’ve forsaken cultural relevance, and in so doing lost the right to speak with a prophetic voice.