Lord, I want to thank you for your
body, your bride, the church.
We're all conscious of its many imperfections because
it's a body of which we are part.
But we thank you for the great promises
the gates of hell will not prevail.
And as we live in a world of
tremendous tension, and in a church with tremendous
tensions, we pray that you'll give us all
vision for the future, confidence in you and
wisdom.
So help John as he speaks to us
now.
May he feel immediately at home with us,
even though it's only a flying visit.
And may we all benefit from what we
hear, and by your grace put into practice.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Please give a warm welcome to John Stott.
Thank you very much.
Well, hello everybody, and thank you very much
for your kind welcome.
I'm grateful to my old friend, Philip Hacking,
for his generous words of introduction.
Now the topic on which I'm going to
speak tonight, slightly different from the wording on
your program, is Contemporary Challenges to the Church.
Or if you would like a subtitle, The
Call to Radical Nonconformity.
All Christians know that the church has a
double calling.
On the one hand, to live and serve
in the world.
And on the other, not to be contaminated
by the world.
The first might be called, A Call to
Worldliness.
Using the word as the opposite of other
worldliness.
The worldliness that means that we involve ourselves
in the life of the world.
But the second could be called, A Call
to Holiness.
Refusing to assimilate the standards of the world
around us.
So we have no liberty either to preserve
our holiness by escaping from the world, or
to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the
world.
Escapism, on the one hand, and conformism, on
the other, are both equally forbidden to Christian
people.
Instead we are to combine both callings, involvement
in the world, and separation from the world.
We are to develop what Dr. Alec Vidler
called, A Holy Worldliness.
Now in our day, the common of the
two temptations is not escapism, I think, it
is conformism.
The danger of accommodating ourselves to the standards
and the values and the ideals of the
secular world around us.
We are exposed on every side, through print
and radio and television, to cultural pressures which
are incompatible with the Lordship of Jesus Christ,
which nevertheless demand our capitulation, and which if
we do capitulate, will compromise our integrity, blunt
our testimony, and suffocate our spiritual life.
Now I wonder if we realize that this
is one of the major themes of the
whole Bible.
That God is calling out a people for
himself, and that he summons his people to
be different from the world around them.
Be holy, he says, because I am holy.
As a community you are different from the
community around you.
Now this fundamental theme recurs in all four
of the major segments of the Bible.
In the law, in the prophets, in the
teaching of Jesus, and in the apostles, in
the letters of the apostles.
Let me give you just a single example
from each.
Take the law.
If you come across Leviticus 18, verses 1
and 2, God says to his people through
Moses, you must not do as they do
in the land of Egypt where you used
to live.
And you must not do as they do
in the land of Canaan, into which I
am bringing you.
Do not follow their practices.
You must obey my laws and follow my
decrees.
You see the call to be different from
the surrounding culture.
Well let's move on from the law to
the prophets.
I give you one example, God's complaint through
Ezekiel.
You have not followed my decrees or kept
my laws.
But you have conformed to the standards of
the nations around you.
Well here is the teaching of Jesus in
the Sermon on the Mount.
Do not be like them.
Five monosyllables.
There are the Pharisees, the hypocrites, there are
the pagans around you.
Do not be like them.
The call to a radical non-conformity to
the surrounding culture.
And then fourthly in the epistles we take
the Apostle Paul's great letter to the Romans,
chapter 12 and verse 1.
No longer conform yourselves to the fashions of
the world around you, but be transformed, be
changed.
So here is a call to radical non
-conformity.
If you like it is a call to
develop a Christian counter culture which is different
from the culture around.
Well with that introduction I want to ask
and try to answer the question, what are
the major contemporary trends at the end of
the 20th century which threaten to engulf and
envelop the church and which the church must
resist if it is to be true to
its own vocation.
I selected four.
I think and hope we may have time
to look at them.
The first will take us the longest time.
It's the challenge of pluralism.
Now today at the end of the 20th
century the intellectual triumphalism of the European enlightenment
has gone.
And you will know I'm sure that what
we now call post-modernism is a self
-conscious reaction against the rationalism of the European
enlightenment.
And the only confidence of post-modernity is
that it lacks all confidence.
It asserts that there is no such thing
as objective truth or universal truth.
All we have is a plurality of subjective
culturally conditioned opinions with no criterion by which
to judge between them.
So you have your truth but then I
have my truth.
And he has his, she has hers, they
have theirs.
There are thousands of different truths on show
in the world today.
Well the correct name for this aspect of
post-modernity is pluralism.
Pluralism affirms not just the fact that there
is a multitude of ideologies or religions but
it affirms that all the claims of every
religion must be treated with equal respect.
Every ideology and every religion say the pluralist
has an independent validity of its own and
we must give up the naive and arrogant
notion that we are correct and everybody else
is mistaken and that we should try to
convert anybody let alone everybody to our own
opinion.
Now that's pluralism.
And to anybody who has embraced pluralism nothing
is more obnoxious than the Christian claim to
uniqueness and the Christian concept of world mission
and world evangelization.
It was well illustrated in my view in
a little anecdote I heard some time ago
about a social worker in Nigeria who was
visiting in the back streets of Lagos and
came to a student who was in trouble
and who had at his bedside a pile
of books.
There was the Bible, the Book of Common
Prayer, the Koran, three copies of Watchtower, the
magazine of Jehovah's Witnesses, a biography of Karl
Marx, a book of yoga exercises and what
I think the poor fellow needed most of
all a popular paperback entitled How to Stop
Worrying.
Now that's pluralism.
How should we respond to it?
Well with great humility I hope and with
no element of personal superiority or arrogance we
have to maintain that there is such a
thing as absolute objective truth because God has
revealed himself to us not only in the
ordered loveliness of the created universe but supremely
in Jesus Christ who claimed that he was
the truth and in the total biblical witness
to Christ.
We believe that Jesus is the son or
word of God who became a historical human
being, that he's the rock on which the
church is built and the church has no
liberty to tamper with its own foundations.
So the existence of truth revealed, objective, accessible
is fundamental to the Christian church.
The church is a community of truth whose
responsibility is to confess the truth, to guard
the truth and to communicate the truth.
Now let's be clear about the nature of
our Christian truth claim.
We do not claim finality and uniqueness to
Christianity in any of its traditional formulations, Catholic,
Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal.
We don't claim uniqueness for Christianity as a
system in any of its traditional formulations.
Nor do we claim finality for the church
in any of its cultural manifestations, African, Asian,
Latin American, Western and so on.
No, we claim uniqueness and finality for Jesus
Christ alone.
It is in him that the finality and
the uniqueness are to be found.
You know the name, don't you?
A Sadhu Sundar Singh, brought up in a
Sikh family in India, wonderfully converted to Christ
who became an itinerant Sadhu or Christian holy
man.
One day he visited a Hindu university when
a professor said to him, what have you
found in Christianity that you did not have
in your old religion of Sikhism?
I have found Christ, said Sadhu Sundar Singh.
Oh yes, I know, said the professor rather
impatiently, but what particular principle, what particular doctrine
have you found that you did not have
before?
Well, the particular doctrine and principle that I
found, said Sadhu Sundar Singh, is Christ.
So, wherein lies the uniqueness of Jesus Christ?
As briefly as possible, I want to suggest
that it is in three things, A, B,
C.
A, it is found in the incarnation.
This is the claim that Jesus of Nazareth
was and is the one and only God
-man, fully divine and fully human and nobody
else in history has been like him in
that.
There is nothing approaching this claim in any
other religion and the nearest is in Hinduism
with its claim to avatars.
The word avatar is a Sanskrit word for
a descent and it is the Hindu belief
that the God Vishnu has descended upon certain
human beings at different kinds in history and
then has left them again.
But the claim to the Hindu avatars is
quite different from the claim regarding the incarnation
of God in Jesus Christ.
For one thing, the historicity of these avatars
is extremely dubious.
They appear to be myths rather than historical
events.
Secondly, they are different in that the avatars
were plural.
Vishnu came several times to several different people
and then left them.
Not God in Jesus Christ.
In Jesus Christ, God took human nature to
himself once and for all and forever and
he has never laid it aside.
And having assumed our humanity, seated at the
right hand of God this afternoon is the
glorified God-man, Christ Jesus.
And then the third difference between them is
that avatars were only temporary because Vishnu descended
and then departed again whereas the incarnation, as
I've said, is forever.
So there are differences between the two.
Jesus is unique as the incarnation of God.
And then, B, he is unique in the
atonement.
The claim of the gospel is that God
took the initiative in and through Jesus Christ
to identify himself completely with us.
He not only took our human nature to
himself in his birth, he also took our
sin, our guilt, and our condemnation to himself
in his death.
He not only lived our life, he bore
our sin and he died our death.
So that on the cross, God satisfied both
his love and his justice.
He exacted the just penalty of our sins
by paying it himself.
And so he opened a way to welcome
us home to himself without either condoning our
sin or compromising his justice.
And there is nothing, nothing like the death,
the atoning death of Christ in any other
religion.
Let me quote from Bishop Stephen Neal, who
had a great knowledge of the religions of
the world.
He said, the good shepherd goes out into
the wilderness to seek the lost sheep.
That is to say, God in Christ takes
the initiative in going out to seek and
to save those who are lost with no
grudging calculation of the cost to himself.
And if in any other religion there is
anything in the least like the doctrines of
incarnation and atonement, I for one have yet
to find it.
Unique in his incarnation, unique in his atonement,
and see, unique in his resurrection.
And by affirming that Jesus rose from the
dead, we do not mean merely that his
personality survived death.
We do not mean simply that his influence
continues in the world today.
We are not referring to him as alive
when we say Jesus is alive.
We do not mean that in the same
way that Latin American Marxist students say Che
lives, referring to Che Guevara, their great hero.
Che lives, they chant.
When we say Jesus lives, we don't mean
that.
We don't mean simply that his inspiration continues.
We mean that his body was raised from
the dead and simultaneously transformed into an altogether
new vehicle for his personality.
In fact, we mean that death was defeated
because his resurrection body will never die.
Now there is nothing approaching this in any
other faith or religion which makes a comparable
claim.
Other religions look back to their founder and
celebrate his teaching as it lives on in
their own loyalty.
But Christians see Jesus as more than a
dead but inspiring teacher of the past.
No, he is our living, resurrected Lord.
So he is available to those who call
upon him.
And we claim to know him and to
love him.
And our desire is to live each day
in the power of his resurrection.
Besides his resurrection is the pledge of ours.
And it has these many implications if we
truly believe it.
So to sum this up, because in no
other person than Jesus of Nazareth did God
first become human in his birth and then
bear our sin in his death and then
triumph over death in his resurrection, he is
uniquely competent to save.
Nobody else begins to have his competence as
the savior of sinners.
So let's not be afraid of the challenge
of pluralism.
Let us stand up to it because we
believe and know that Jesus Christ is true,
particularly in his birth, death and resurrection.
Now secondly we move from the challenge of
pluralism to the challenge of materialism.
The western world to which probably most of
us belong is almost unbearably affluent in contrast
to the developing countries of the third world.
To visit a North American or European supermarket
is to be exposed to a choice of
goods so wide as to be positively embarrassing,
confusing and even obscene.
Such wealth of course is taken for granted
by us and it leads naturally into materialism.
Now materialism is not an affirmation of the
material order, the created order that God has
made.
If that were the meaning of materialism, every
Christian would be a materialist because God has
made the world and we receive it from
his hand with thanksgiving.
And to reject the material order that God
has created is asceticism which we should avoid.
No, materialism is not the affirmation of the
material order.
Materialism is a preoccupation with material things until
they suffocate our human spirit.
At now last the spirit of materialism is
seeping into the church and has corrupted many
of us Christian people.
And against this background of materialism you and
I need to listen again to the words
of Jesus.
Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth.
Again, beware of covetousness.
A human life does not consist in the
abundance of our possessions.
In other words there is more to life
than money and property.
And we need to hear the words of
the Apostle Paul as well who calls us
very plainly away from covetousness towards a lifestyle
of simplicity, generosity and contentment.
He wrote, I've learned in whatever state I
am therewith to be content.
Again, godliness with contentment is great gain.
For we brought nothing into this world and
it is certain that we shall carry nothing
out.
Which is a kind of reminiscence of the
words of Job in chapter 1 verse 21.
Naked I came from my mother's womb and
naked I shall depart.
I wonder friends if you've ever considered that
life on earth is a pilgrimage between two
moments of nakedness.
We enter the world naked, we die and
are buried naked.
Do you know the story of when the
wealthy lady in the community died and everybody
was very curious to know how much she'd
left, the size of her fortune.
And somebody was brash enough after the funeral
to go up to the minister and whisper
in his ear, how much did she leave?
To which he had the wisdom to reply,
she left everything.
We take nothing with us, we leave it
all behind.
So let's learn to travel light.
And as the Apostle Paul also wrote, if
we have food and clothing and shelter and
whatever else we can justify as reasonable necessities
in our situation, let us be with these
things content.
For covetous people fall into a trap and
the love of money is the root of
all kinds of evil.
But do we hear that message in the
contemporary church at the end of the 20th
century?
Where is the Christian protest against excessive materialism
and the Christian canvassing of a life of
simplicity and contentment and generosity?
Let's not be ashamed to lay hold of
this message of the New Testament.
Do you know the story of the young
American guy who once found a five dollar
bill in the street?
And who ever since that day never lifted
his eyes when walking.
And in the course of the years he
accumulated 29,516 buttons, 54
,172 pins, 12 cents, a bent back and
a miserly disposition.
And you think what he lost.
He couldn't see the smile on the face
of his friends.
He couldn't see the beauty of starlight and
moonlight at night or the blossom of spring.
He couldn't see any of these things because
his eyes were in the gutter.
That's materialism.
And we need to lift up our eyes
for the first glimmer of light behind the
clouds that tells us Christ is coming again.
And although we have our responsibilities on earth,
of course, as good citizens, good husbands, wives,
parents, whatever it is, students, yet we also
remember that we're pilgrims traveling home to an
eternal city.
So let us avoid materialism.
The challenge of pluralism, the challenge of materialism,
thirdly, there is the challenge of relativism, particularly
ethical relativism.
I don't need to tell you that all
around us today, moral standards are slipping, certainly
in the west, and increasingly elsewhere as television
throughout the world is creating a monoculture.
It used to be taken for granted that
there is such a thing as absolute truth
in opposition to error and that there is
such a thing as absolute goodness in opposition
to evil.
But today nobody seems sure any longer.
People are confused as to whether there are
any absolutes left.
Instead of truth, pluralism reigns, and instead of
righteousness, relativism reigns.
Moral relativism has permeated our culture and is
even seeping into the church.
Do you know this?
You can hardly call it a poem.
It's a bit of doggerel, really, but it
makes the point.
It all depends on where you are.
It all depends on who you are.
It all depends on what you feel, and
it all depends on how you feel.
It all depends on how you're raised.
It all depends on what is praised.
What's right today is wrong tomorrow.
Joy in France, in England sorrow.
It all depends on point of view.
Australia or Timbuktu.
In Rome, do as the Romans do.
If tastes just happen to agree, why then
you have morality.
But where there are conflicting trends, it all
depends.
It all depends.
And those are the swamps of ethical relativism
in which so many people are struggling today.
Well, the most obvious example is the revolution
in sexual ethics, which has taken place during
the last 50 years or less.
It used, of course, to be universally accepted,
at least in countries influenced by the Judeo
-Christian ethic, that marriage is a monogamous, heterosexual,
lifelong union and the only God-given context
for sexual intimacy and sexual intercourse.
But nowadays, even in the church, cohabitation before
marriage and even cohabitation without marriage is widely
accepted.
Homosexual partnerships are being proposed as a legitimate
alternative to heterosexual marriage.
And in the United States, now one marriage
in two ends in the divorce court.
Now, over against these trends, these politically correct
trends, as they are called, Jesus calls us
to obedience.
And obedience is a very unpopular word today
because people hate authority and the idea of
submission, obedience, submission to any authority.
But Jesus calls us to obedience.
He says, do you know this word of
his in John's Gospel, chapter 14, verse 21?
He who loves me, sorry, let me put
it the other way around as he did.
He who has my commandments and keeps them,
he it is who loves me.
And he who loves me shall be loved
by my Father, and I will love him,
and I will manifest myself to him.
So he who has my commandments, treasuring them
up in his mind and memory, and obeys
them, he it is who loves me.
We claim to love Christ.
You don't prove your love for Christ by
singing rather sentimental ditties, Jesus, I love you.
That doesn't prove we love him at all.
Nor if we make loud protestations of love,
like Simon Peter, who went off immediately to
betray Jesus.
There is only one way to prove that
we love him, and that is by keeping
his commandments or obeying him.
And now we're talking about sexual ethics.
We need to remember that Jesus quoted and
endorsed the biblical definition of marriage.
And that is given us in Genesis 2,
verse 24, where we read, Therefore a man
shall leave his parents and cleave to his
wife.
You notice a man and his wife, singular,
heterosexual, monogamous.
A man will leave his parents and cleave
to his wife, and they shall become one
flesh.
Jesus quoted it.
It isn't just the authority of Genesis.
It is the authority of our Lord Christ,
who said, What God has joined together, let
nobody put asunder.
And what has God joined together?
Answer, a man and his wife in heterosexual,
monogamous commitment.
We cannot get away from that.
It's as plain as anything.
And the church at the end of the
20th century has to face this challenge of
relativism.
So now I think it's time for me
to come to the fourth challenge, and then
I will conclude.
And the fourth challenge is the challenge of
narcissism.
If you like, individualism, as exhibited in Narcissus.
In Greek mythology, you probably remember Narcissus was
a handsome young man, who once caught a
glimpse of his image in a pond, who
promptly fell in love with his own image
and toppled into the water and drowned.
Serve him right, you might say.
So narcissism is an inordinate love of myself.
Narcissism is an unbounded admiration for oneself.
Somebody's tried to put it in a limerick
and said there once was a nymph named
Narcissus who thought himself very delicious.
So he stared like a fool at himself
in a pool, and his folly today is
still with us.
Now in the 1970s, narcissism found expression in
what was called the human potential movement, which
still lingers today.
Eric Fromm, for example, taught that vice, if
you want to know what vice is, it's
indifference to yourself, while virtue is the assertion
of yourself.
That was Eric Fromm's idea.
Carl Rogers then came along and saw psychotherapy
as helping a client to develop what he
called an unconditional self-regard.
There are no limits, no conditions to my
regard for myself.
Then Abraham Maslow came along and laid his
emphasis on the need for self-actualization, and
the most important responsibility that any human being
has, he says, is to actualize yourself.
Now all these were and are secular movements.
Those three names I've quoted are not Christians,
they are unbelievers.
So it's not surprising that in the 1980s
and 90s, the New Age movement jumped on
the bandwagon of the human potential movement.
Now the high priestess of the New Age
movement is the American actress Shirley MacLaine, and
she is infatuated with herself.
I've read three of her books, I didn't
enjoy any of them, but the good news
according to Shirley MacLaine is as follows.
This is a straight quote from her.
I know that I exist, therefore I am.
I know that the God force exists, and
therefore it is.
And since I am part of that force,
I am that I am.
Is that not blasphemous?
Taking upon her lips the very name and
affirmation of Yahweh, the God of Israel and
the creator of the universe.
So the New Age movement calls us to
look inside ourselves, explore yourself.
The solution to your problems is within yourself.
You don't need a saviour to come from
heaven and save you, you can save yourself.
Look within, find your own resources.
And unfortunately this preoccupation with self is now
permeating the church.
Especially in the popular but mistaken view that
Jesus taught us not only to love God
and to love our neighbour, but to love
ourselves as well.
But you know friends, that really isn't so.
And I hope that you haven't bought into
that secular philosophy.
And there are three reasons why we have
to reject that teaching.
The first is that Jesus spoke of two
commandments, not three.
He said the first commandment is love God
with all your being.
The second is to love your neighbour as
in fact being fallen you do love yourself.
But he didn't say thirdly love yourself.
There are only two commandments.
Secondly the word for love is this well
-known word agape or agape.
And agape means to sacrifice oneself in the
service of another.
To give oneself in the worship of God,
to sacrifice oneself in the service of a
neighbour.
And if that is the meaning of agape,
it cannot in the nature of the case
be turned in on itself.
How can you sacrifice yourself in order to
serve yourself?
That is a nonsense.
Agape is always finding an object outside itself,
whether God in worship or the neighbour in
service.
And then thirdly self-love is exactly what
the Bible means by sin.
Sin is transferring love from God to neighbour
to self.
So I hope that we can be rescued
from that false teaching.
What then is a proper attitude to ourselves?
Well let me simply put it like this.
Every one of us is a paradoxical creature.
Because what we are as human beings is
partly what is due to our creation in
the image and likeness of God.
Our rationality, our moral sense, our aesthetic artistry,
our social relationships, our capacity for love and
to worship.
These marvellous human things come from the creation.
But what we are is only partly due
to the creation and partly due to the
fall.
The twistedness, the self-centredness of our nature.
So we have to learn what is it
in our human experience that goes back to
the creation and is good.
And what is it in ourselves that goes
back to the fall and is evil.
When we can discern those things, we are
in a position to affirm what we are
by creation.
And to deny or repudiate what we are
by the fall.
That's the self-denial that Jesus called us
to.
Well, it's a great relief to turn from
this unhealthy preoccupation with self to the healthy
commandments of God united and reinforced by Jesus.
To love God with all our being and
to love our neighbour as in fact because
of our fallenness we do love ourselves.
Now everybody knows that love is the greatest
thing in the world.
And God intends his church to be a
community of love.
A worshipping and a serving community.
And we know why love is the greatest
thing in the world.
It is because God himself is love.
In his innermost being, God is love.
So when he made us in his own
image and likeness, he gave us a capacity
to love and to be loved.
Living is loving.
And without love, a personality disintegrates and dies.
That is why everybody is looking for the
authentic relationships of love.
And people ought to be pouring into our
churches if they are communities of love.
Whereas often the church is the one place
they don't bother even to look.
So convinced are they that they won't find
love there.
The church is a community of love.
Would that it were so.
Well, now let me recapitulate and conclude.
And we shall still have, I think, nearly
ten minutes for questions.
I've tried to bring before you some of
the major challenges to the church at the
end of the twentieth century and the end
of the millennium.
In the face of which the church is
called not to feeble-minded conformity, but to
radical non-conformity.
And over against the challenge of pluralism, we
are to be a community of truth.
Over against the challenge of materialism, we are
to be a community of simplicity and pilgrimage.
Over against the challenge of relativism, we are
to be a community of righteousness and obedience.
And over against narcissism, a community of love.
That is God's call to the church at
the end of the twentieth century.
To be different.
Radically different from the surrounding culture.
That is why Karl Barth called Christian ethics
the great disturbance.
Because it upsets our tranquil status quo.
That's why C.S. Lewis called Jesus a
transcendental interferer.
Who wants to come from heaven and interfere
in my private life.
No, but we are not to be like
reeds shaken with the wind, bowing down to
every gust of public opinion.
We are to be like rocks in a
mountain stream, unmoved and unmovable.
We are not to be like fish floating
with the stream.
Malcolm Muggeridge used to say that only dead
fish swim with the current.
We are to swim against the stream, against
the mainstream of what is politically correct today.
We are not to be like chameleons, those
lizards which change colour according to their surroundings.
No, we are to stand out visibly against
our surroundings.
So in conclusion, what are we to be
like?
If we are not to be reeds shaken
with the wind, or dead fish floating with
the stream, or chameleons changing our colour according
to our surroundings, what are we to be
like?
Is God's word entirely negative?
Don't be conformed to this world, don't, don't.
No it isn't, it's positive.
We are not to be like the world
around.
What are we to be like?
We are to be like Christ.
I want to suggest that we try to
remember to keep three texts together, which make
Christlikeness the ultimate objective of God for his
redeemed people.
Christlikeness is God's eternal purpose, Romans 8.29.
Where it says that we've been predestinated, eternally
predestinated, to be conformed to the image of
God's Son.
He wants to make us like Christ.
Then 2 Corinthians 3.18, it is also
his historical purpose.
We are being transformed into the image of
Christ, from one degree of glory to another.
Then thirdly, 1 John 3 verse 2, it
is also God's eschatological purpose.
For although we don't know what we shall
be in the next world, we do know
that when Christ comes, we shall be like
him.
Christlikeness, the predestinating, the eternal, the historical, the
eschatological purpose of God.
And nothing is more essential in our evangelism
than the Christlikeness of the evangelists.
I remember reading of a Hindu professor who
noticed in the middle of one of his
lectures that he had some Christians in his
audience.
And he stopped his lecture and addressed them
direct and said to them, if you Christians
lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at
your feet tomorrow.
I want to change it slightly and say
to you and to myself, if we Christians
lived like Jesus Christ, the world would be
at our feet today.
And so it is to this personal Christlike
authenticity that the world challenges us and Christ
calls us at the end of the 20th
century.
God give us grace to respond.
A moment of prayer before question time.
Our simple prayer, heavenly father, as we come
to the end of our session together, is
that you will fulfill your purposes regarding us
and make us more and more from one
degree of glory to another like your son,
Jesus Christ.
Forgive us for our many un-Christlikenesses and
make us like him, we pray.
For the glory of his great name.
Well, we now, I'm afraid, have only seven
minutes, but there is a roving mic, I'm
told.
If you put up your hand and want
to ask a question.
I can't myself see you in the darkness.
Gentleman there.
Is there a roving mic?
Oh, right.
Could you ask your question?
I will, thank you.
I'd like to first of all endorse what
Philip Hacking said at the beginning and thank
you for the personal help that you have
been, not only to me, but I'd like
to thank you that you have been in
no small measure a help to my son
as well in our Christian lives.
Thank you.
And what I would like to ask you
now is in view of the publicly stated
views of His Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales, of his pluralistic views, whether you think
there will now be a large exodus from
the established church into non-conformity in the
future years?
Well, I'm not a prophet or a son
of a prophet, and I can't tell you
what members of the so-called established or
national, I prefer the word the national church,
will be if and when Prince Charles ascends
to the throne and continues to say that
he's a defender of faith and not of
the faith.
I don't know.
But I would be very surprised indeed if
there was a large exodus from the national
church on that ground.
There might be an exodus on some other
grounds, but the personal opinions of somebody who
is purely the nominal head of the church
doesn't seem to me to be of very
great significance.
Right over there.
Can you throw it across there?
And then, is there one more down there?
We'll just have time.
Just another one down there afterwards.
Thank you.
That's it.
My sister is involved with the New Age
movement, and she believes in a force.
I'd like your advice on how I can
persuade her that perhaps God is out there.
Or he is out there.
Sorry, because your sister is a follower of
New Age, you'd like advice as to how
to persuade her.
She believes in a force, some sort of
force.
But that actually there is a personal God
and not just an impersonal force.
Is that it?
That's the one.
Thank you.
Well, obviously the most important thing we can
do for anybody we're trying to win for
Christ, whether New Age or not, is to
persuade them to read the New Testament, and
in particular to persuade them to read the
Gospels.
It never ceases to amaze me how many
otherwise honest, educated, and intelligent people have dismissed
Christianity without ever having investigated its credentials.
That is, they've never read the Gospels, at
least since they were kids at school, probably.
But now they're adults.
I want to challenge them, have you read
the Gospels as an adult?
Have you exposed yourself to the testimony of
the apostles of Jesus?
Have you asked yourself as you read the
Gospels the question, is it possible that this
man is true?
So that's where I would begin.
And while they're reading the Gospels, pray, pray,
that the Holy Spirit, who himself gave this
testimony of the apostles, let us pray that
he will illumine the mind of the reader
and bring conviction to his or her heart
and mind.
One final one over there.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for what you've said
about materialism.
I wonder if I could just press you
to go a bit further and distinguish a
little bit between materialism and consumerism, the mindset
of the consumer and how that is invading
the church.
Do you see anything there which really needs
to be addressed?
So you're asking really is there a difference
between materialism and consumerism?
First of all, yes.
Pardon?
Yeah.
Well, I don't really think there is.
I think materialists are all consumers and most
heavy consumers are materialists.
Consumerism means not just that you consume what
you need to remain healthy in mind and
body, but it means that you are infatuated
with consumerism.
And you know the great phrase everybody is
using today, Tesco ergo sum.
I shop and therefore I am.
Don't applaud me.
That's not an original.
I don't know who first said it, but
it's a good quip.
So I think they're the same.
Let's avoid them both.
Well, our gratitude again to John for that
tremendously helpful hour.
And that's it.
Wish you a good day for the rest
of the day.
Thank you, John.
Give John a big hand.
Thank you.