Good morning everyone.
It's nice to be here today.
I've been in this building a number of
times because when they were doing some reconstruction
work at Forest Hill, we used to have
our OM prayer meetings here on a Tuesday
and I often used to come and look
around and wonder what it was like on
a Sunday and now I know.
So it's great to be here.
My name is Gareth Bolton.
My wife Malu from the Philippines.
We're with Operation Mobilization.
We're part of the International Coordinating Team and
I have a sort of a speaking ministry.
So we're more out of the country than
we're in the country and we've just been
to France.
That wasn't with OM, that was with a
group called Oak Hall Expeditions and I don't
know how many of you've been on Oak
Hall.
We had an excellent time.
Very, very hot in the south of France
and then two weeks today I'll be in,
we'll both be in Colombo in Sri Lanka
and I'll be speaking in a church there.
I don't know quite how with it I
will be because the airplane arrives at 20
past 3 in the morning having come all
the way from England and I'm preaching I
think at a 10 o'clock service.
So just imagine what I'm like, know what
I'm like this morning and then sort of
multiply it by 10 times of badness and
you'll get some idea of what it is.
Yes of course we have books with OM.
I've been in full-time with OM eight
years.
I was a school teacher for 22 years.
I only ever taught at one school.
I couldn't get into any other school.
It was the primary school that I used
to go to so in a sense I
never left primary school.
Just this one school, it was in the
road where I lived, it was 50 yards
from my front door, went with junior school
in Dartford.
It's one claim to fame apart from the
fact that I taught there as well as
being a pupil was that two other pupils
who were there before me, one was called
Mick Jagger and the other was called Keith
Richards.
It's the school where the Rolling Stones, Keith
and Mick actually met in the sandpit of
the infant school which is now hallowed ground
of course.
Well what books have we got here today?
Calvary Road, an absolute classic.
Don't hear much of this book these days.
It used to be required reading for those
who joined Operation Mobilisation but it's an excellent
book on the meaning of the cross and
the way of brokenness in the Christian life.
Then of course Mr Verwer himself has got
his own George Verwer collection.
Three books in one so this is a
real bargain.
Revolution of Love, No Turning Back and Hunger
for Reality.
One of these books, Have I gone?
Oh I'm here.
Oh I think the coat covers the microphone.
One of those books, No Turning Back, a
friend of mine went to the bookstore and
started reading it and she got as far
as chapter three and at the end of
chapter three she recommitted her life.
So if you haven't got any money this
morning and you're a quick reader and you
need the touch of God just go straight
to the bookstore afterwards.
Probably be there long enough for you to
get to the end of chapter three.
Oh thank you very much.
And then a book that covers a particular
subject, it's the subject of bullying and what
can parents do.
I wonder if you have a child who
is a bully or who is being bullied.
Here's the only book I know, a Christian
book on this whole matter and you might
find this very helpful.
Help your child break free.
Bullying is a widespread social problem both in
school and at home.
It doesn't just involve a minority of children,
it affects all of us in one way
or another.
I remember bullying was an issue at the
school that I was at, particularly it seemed
in the later years where we had trouble.
But so it's good to have a book
on that subject.
Then Being OM, the Logos story, the Doulos
story.
If you haven't read about the ships then
there's two books both about them.
Logos 2 hopefully will be coming here next
year.
I mean here to Bromley, that would be
a miracle.
It'll be coming to the Port of London
we hope sometime next year.
Riding the Storm, Pioneer Missionary Adventures with OM.
If you want a good night's sleep and
some exciting dreams, read a chapter of that
every night before you go to sleep and
you'll read about some of the incredible things
that go on in Russia, Iraq, Canada, Egypt,
India, Hong Kong and Jakarta plus a tour
of the Mediterranean on board the Doulos.
Then what do we have here?
Ah yes, God That's Not Fair.
I think this is the best book I've
ever read on the whole issue of eternal
punishment and the Christian's urgent mission in the
light of what the Bible says about these
things.
Written by a man with a great deal
of experience, Dick Dowsett was a missionary for
many years and now has a preaching, international
preaching ministry himself.
Superb book.
And then the best book I read last
year, this one, The Church Is Bigger Than
You Think.
How many people have read this book?
Good, well that's obviously a big hit in
this place.
It's an indispensable companion it says here to
Operation World.
It's an extremely well written, very informative, challenging
picture of the situation of the world today
vis-a-vis the unfinished task of world
evangelism by Patrick Johnston who also wrote Operation
World.
You will love this.
It's full of the most amazing statistics and
facts.
It's both encouraging and also very challenging on
what needs to be done.
Enough said.
We've got a good few copies of that
around and of course Operation World.
I hope all of you have a copy
of Operation World and are using it.
If you are, you've just been praying for
Nigeria, Africa's largest country.
And again, although written some years ago and
we are waiting for the next book and
Patrick Johnston told me that he hopes to
have the next edition out by September of
2001.
He'd hoped to have it out by the
beginning of 2000 but probably because he was
writing the other book, he hasn't got around
to finishing this one.
So we look forward to the next edition
but this is still very relevant and very
challenging and helpful.
And of course there's the children's edition of
Operation World.
You too can change the world.
Actually it's not just children I find who
read this.
I've found a lot of older people also
learning about countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria
and Vietnam.
If I was still in teaching I'd definitely
have this book in my class library so
the children could come and read about the
nations and maybe even getting inspired to pray
for the nations.
We actually used to run a prayer meeting
in our school.
Can you imagine for primary school children praying
for the nations?
I don't quite know how I got away
with it but it ran and it was
great to hear them crying out for lands
they never even heard of five minutes before
they were praying for them.
So great book.
You too can change the world.
And then for the penniless we have some
free literature.
We have our own current prayer letter.
I have a whole stack of these.
Please feel free to take a copy of
that and read about the tour of West
Africa that we did on the Logos 2.
We also send out monthly updates.
There's this month's and last month's.
I've also been handed a whole load of
leaflets on the November Missions Conference in Freiburg
in Germany featuring Reinhard Bonnke who appears on
the magazine that my wife is just reading
which she picked up from the vestibule there.
That should be great.
And India Link Ministries and many other things.
That's on the right of the table.
Do have a look afterwards.
By the way we have a very simple
pricing system here.
Large books £5, small books £3.
If you're not sure if a book is
large or small you just pray.
God will show you.
We had a great time at Amsterdam 2000
with some key speakers from around the world
and I always like Chuck Colson because he
always starts off with a very good story
and he was telling us that he was
in a car with a Christian.
They were driving along and the car in
front of them had one of these little
bumper stickers.
You know little funny provocative things and this
one with its double entendre said if it
feels good do it.
You've probably seen similar stickers here you know.
Well the car in front drew up at
the traffic lights and so did Chuck Colson's
car and the driver in Chuck Colson's car
instead of stopping drove gently into the back
of the car in front.
Actually hit the bumper and slightly shunted the
car forward so the driver got out very
annoyed and said what on earth do you
think you're doing?
What did you do that for?
The driver said it felt good.
Shows you the emptiness of such philosophy doesn't
it?
Very brave wasn't he?
Romans chapter one.
I'm going to read from verses 21 to
25.
A very serious
powerful passage here.
Romans 1 21 to 25 says for although
they knew God they neither glorified him as
God nor gave thanks to him but their
thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were
darkened.
Although they claimed to be wise they became
fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal
God for images made to look like mortal
man and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful
desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for
the degrading of their bodies with one another.
They exchanged the truth of God for a
lie and worshipped and served created things rather
than the creator who is forever praised.
Amen.
Now would you turn back to the one
verse I'm going to speak on this morning.
It's in the book of Proverbs.
I don't know if you've ever heard a
message on this proverb but you're going to
this morning.
Proverbs 23 23 Proverbs
23 23.
Buy the truth and do not sell it.
Get wisdom, discipline and understanding.
Let's just pray shall we.
Father we want to thank you that we're
here this morning not just because our friends
are here, not just because we enjoy the
singing, not just because of a fellowship, not
just because it's a tradition or a custom
we do on a Sunday but because Lord
we believe that you are the truth and
it's the truth that set us free.
Lord as we consider this important matter in
the light of a society in the 21st
century we pray that you would really speak
to our hearts and our minds in Jesus
name.
Amen.
Buy the truth and do not sell it.
Get wisdom, get discipline and understanding.
Now the Ten Commandments which were delivered as
you know to Moses by God on stone
tablets on Mount Sinai are considered the backbone
of historic Judeo-Christian belief.
In the Ten Commandments both our relationship to
God, you shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and our relationship to
one another, you shall love your neighbor as
yourself, are defined.
Long before the church was a founded or
established the Ten Commandments were accepted as the
timeless standards by which we should judge all
behavior and in fact by which we should
regulate our society.
Sin of all types is exposed by the
Ten Commandments whether it's adultery or murder or
stealing.
But they weren't only given as rules by
which we should live but they were also
given to us to demonstrate our complete and
utter inability to keep them and to live
by them.
They are God's standards and our failure to
keep those standards simply proves that we're all
sinners.
They are unchanging truths that we believe we've
been given by God.
Now in the 23rd chapter of Proverbs Solomon's
wisdom has given us a command to be
obeyed.
We are told to buy the truth.
So truth clearly wears a price tag.
It comes at a price, a high price
which to acquire may well involve some self
-sacrifice but it's completely worth the cost that
is involved in obtaining it.
Once you've obtained the truth it must not
be resold, it must not be exchanged for
anything else, it is not negotiable, it cannot
be bartered, its value is completely beyond estimation
for with it comes wisdom, discipline and understanding.
They are the inseparable partners of truth and
truth is always true, it is unchanging, it
is unchangeable and it is eternal.
However over the last hundred years or more,
particularly here in Western Europe and the so
-called developed or first world, a slow insidious
change has been taking place.
You see at the turn of the 20th
century a shift occurred from which we're still
feeling the repercussions.
Man began to turn and put his faith
in the belief that scientific advance was the
hope for the future and so the truth
was put up for sale.
It was sold, still being sold, in exchange
for other ideas and philosophies.
So the truth that we are here commanded
to buy and not sell has actually been
handed over for a price and what a
price!
Because you see today truth is now a
matter of opinion, it's a matter of feelings,
it's a matter of your own personal circumstances
and situations.
To state today that something is true or
to state that something is wrong because it
contravenes or goes against God's law is no
longer acceptable on either a personal level or
a judicial level.
The final arbiter about any situation is now
no longer God or his word, but it's
man.
So can you see the goalposts have been
moved?
Clive Calver wrote this recently, he said everything
has become relative and only one absolute truth
remains, the one that says there is no
absolute truth.
The postmodernist stares blankly at any claims to
the truth and shrugs, okay if it works
for you, my truth is mine, your truth
is yours and so fact and fiction have
become blurred.
So man has replaced God, feelings have replaced
facts and personal opinions have replaced scriptural standards.
But you see once absolute truth has been
sold, our reference point, our foundation, it's gone.
And what are we left with?
We're left with what happens to be true
for you as you feel it's true, what
happens to be true for me as I
feel it to be true.
It's a tragedy.
Once truth is sold or abolished, society is
left with a major problem.
On what grounds do you now judge if
something is right or wrong?
You're left only with our opinions, our subjective
reactions, our individual ideas.
And so what we have now is what's
called situational ethics.
Don't let that worry you but it's become
the order of the day.
In other words something is judged to be
right or wrong depending on all sorts of
different factors at the time.
So objective truth has ceased to exist.
Today we're told you must have an open
mind.
Tolerance is the order of the day.
This is the great virtue, this is the
sign of enlightenment.
Gone are the old attitudes of saying if
something is right or wrong based on the
authority of God's word.
For instance think of the words of Jesus
Christ as recorded in John's gospel.
Your word is truth.
That sounds very archaic, very strange to modern
man.
Freedom is the order of the day.
Absolutes of right and of wrong have been
abolished.
We are free is the cry of the
modern philosopher, the politician and sadly even the
liberal theologian.
We are free to both reinterpret the bible
or reject it if we can't understand it
or agree with it.
I wonder how many of you have heard
of Bishop Spong.
He's an episcopal cleric in the US Episcopal
Church and he's published 12 theses of the
Christian faith.
I won't bore you by reading them all
but number nine says this.
There is no external objective revealed standard written
in scripture or on tablets of stone that
will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
So what have we lost when the truth
has been sold?
This verse tells us three things.
Wisdom, discipline, understanding.
Firstly when you sell the truth you will
always lose wisdom.
The two go together.
Wisdom is the most coveted and desirable virtue.
I counted in the book of Proverbs the
word wisdom comes 52 times alone.
I've no idea how many other times it
comes in the rest of the bible.
But wisdom isn't just about having knowledge.
It's not about knowing a lot and having
lots of facts committed to memory.
Wisdom is about the right use, the correct
application of that knowledge.
The wise person is the one who when
presented with a variety of choices makes the
right choice and if he or she continues
to do so consistently he or she is
considered a wise and mature person.
But the Christian wisdom of the bible speaks
of even more than that.
Christian wisdom is about making the right choices
that result in a life that is lived
according to God's expectations.
Every day we are faced with choices and
all of us are the results of the
choices that we have made.
The opposite of wisdom is foolishness and in
Proverbs chapter one it says that fools despise
wisdom.
So the abandonment of God and of Christian
truth is only going to lead in one
direction.
The church and the western world, especially here
in the UK, began the 20th century in
great optimism.
The world was excited and fascinated by scientific
advance, aeroplanes were taking off, the titanic was
built and the church itself was thoroughly engaged
in social issues, evangelism and in mission.
Then came two world wars.
The optimism in the church was replaced by
pessimism and introversion.
Evangelicals retreated and liberal theology occupied the vacuum
they left.
So to continue to believe literally in the
bible was disdained.
It was considered the act of someone who
jettisoned or discarded their brains.
Religion was seen as a private matter and
the bible was quoted less and less in
public or political circles.
When did you last hear the bible quoted
by any politician?
A hundred years ago frequently the bible was
quoted in the house of commons.
No part of society has remained unmoved by
this move away from God's wisdom to man's
wisdom.
The slow slide from truth to error.
For years the law of our land has
been shaped according to God's eternal truth.
The ancient law of God handed down to
man on mount on tablets of stone called
the ten commandments but now a change is
taking place.
Paul wrote to the romans and we read
the verse earlier although they claim to be
wise they became foolish and nowhere was this
felt more than in the way justice and
the legal system operated.
For instance it's come to be considered that
anyone could live by the law which says
an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth.
How barbaric, how primitive.
Modern man is much more compassionate.
Modern man deals far more sensibly with those
who are guilty of committing an offence but
an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth.
It's God's truth.
It's never been declared obsolete.
It has never been rescinded.
What does it say?
An eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth.
It says this.
It says that the punishment must always fit
the crime.
It's completely fair.
It ensures that the isn't too severe on
one hand or too lenient on the other.
So what has happened?
Well you know as well as I.
Almost daily the law is now found to
be unjust and unfair.
Wisdom has fled with the truth.
I read recently about a man who'd been
burgled so frequently he set a trap in
his house so that anyone breaking in would
receive an electric shock.
A burglar broke in one night and received
an electric shock.
The burglar took the owner of the house
to court and successfully charged him with assault.
The burglar received compensation for his injuries while
the house owner was found guilty of a
criminal offence.
You know more than once the book of
Proverbs says this.
Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent the
Lord detests them both.
And of course I was out of the
country at the time when a farmer shot
a burglar and that seemed to have caused
quite a lot of consternation in terms of
the law perhaps not being fairly dealt with
in that instant but I wasn't around so
I can't really comment on it.
But when you lose the truth you will
inevitably also lose wisdom.
But wait a minute I hear somebody cry
yes but didn't Jesus say we had to
turn the other cheek?
Didn't he do away with the old law?
Surely he removed that when he said we
must turn the other cheek to our enemies.
But it doesn't say that Jesus came to
abolish the law in the bible says he
came to fulfil it.
When Jesus said we should turn the other
cheek he was seeking to prevent a Christian
from retaliating against another Christian who's upset him.
The Christian principle hard though it is is
that we should love our enemies.
Malou and I have just come back from
Liberia a country that saw 10 years of
civil war and we found there are some
Christians who are painfully trying to put this
biblical truth into practice to turn the other
cheek.
If you want to know more about it
read one of our updates there we have
an actual example of a man who is
having to love those in his church some
of whom previously had tried to kill him
before they come into the before they become
Christians they're now part of his congregation.
How we handle personal conflicts is very different
from the way the judicial process in a
country should operate.
There isn't a contradiction.
Appropriate retribution and punishment are for the courts
to decide.
If you sell the truth you're going to
begin to lose wisdom.
Society is going to become very very unbalanced.
Secondly when you sell the truth you lose
discipline.
Discipline has two sides to it.
On the positive side it's simply instruction or
training.
On the negative side when we don't live
according to God's instructions we can experience correction.
I noticed the word discipline comes 21 times
in the book of Proverbs.
I don't know how many of you have
had the chance to visit the ships Logos
to or Doulos or even maybe some of
you in the past have stayed on them
but if you've spent any time on our
ship you'll know that they are very good
at imposing all sorts of external disciplines on
you.
For instance there's a curfew you have to
be in your cabin I think it's by
11 o'clock at night and woe betide
anybody who's found walking around the ship and
they're not in their cabin they're sent before
the personnel manager I think the next day.
You walk in the dining room you see
the food and what do you see written
beside the most beautiful tasty dish?
One scoop only.
Then you walk a little further and you
discover that this is the girls section.
No guy is allowed in a girl's cabin
not even in a girl's section they're completely
separated.
However when you leave the ship after you've
spent two years there you can do exactly
what you want to do.
You can go to bed at any hour
you like or no hour at all.
You can eat as much as you want
to and you can have whoever you want
whenever you want wherever you want in your
home with you.
See it's one thing to be disciplined it's
an entirely different thing to be self-disciplined
and there's poles apart.
You see when a building's being constructed initially
it's supported by scaffolding.
Scaffolding is an external support system that prevents
the building from collapsing while it's being constructed.
However as the building rises inside the scaffolding
it's strengthened internally maybe with reinforced concrete or
whatever until finally scaffolding is taken down because
it's rendered unnecessary.
Why?
Internal strength has replaced the need for external
support.
The building can stand unsupported as its inner
strength is sufficient.
Now I have to say it worries me
if all our ships do and the rest
of OM and other mission works is just
to give some external structure which is never
really internalized it'll be more or less a
waste of time.
I came to the ship after 20 years
of teaching.
I learned as a teacher and I pass
this on to teachers here.
I began every day reading the bible and
praying and said Lord you go ahead of
me today through those school gates into the
staff room into the classroom I give the
day to you and I learned to spend
time with God each day so that as
the day unfolded I reminded myself throughout the
day already I've given this day to God
and unless we can learn to strengthen ourselves
and be self-disciplined the whole exercise of
the ships or whatever other organization you're in
will be futile and ultimately it'll be pointless.
Once you sell the truth discipline will be
seen as unnecessary even as bad.
I mean when I mentioned the word discipline
sometimes in a company of people there's a
negative reaction yet it's a biblical word and
one area where this has been observable in
the 20th century and now in the 21st
century is in the whole area of sexual
morality.
See a hundred years ago the vast majority
of society observed the law of God they
honored marriage and they despised adultery.
Generally speaking self-discipline was taught and practiced
in the area of sexual relationships.
I mean living together was unheard of it
wasn't even a phrase that would have been
understood and to be illegitimate or a bastard
was considered a terrible social stigma.
But what happened?
Truth was sold.
When you sell the truth you lose discipline.
Discipline became to be associated with negative behavior
and some psychologists even associated discipline with repression.
They said oh this is physically and mentally
harmful.
We were told that if you wanted to
do something as that bumper sticker said if
your body was urging you to a particular
course of sexual activity just go ahead there's
nothing wrong as long as nobody gets hurt.
Few realized the psychologists were pulling the wool
over our own eyes and that wasn't the
right word at all.
Yes of course repression is bad but that's
not what the bible says we're to do.
The bible doesn't talk about repression the bible
talks about suppression which is something very different.
Suppression means control, it means restraint, it means
obedience, it's the self-discipline which is good
for everyone and good for our own positive
development.
When Paul wrote to Timothy he said this
each of you should learn to control his
own body in a way that is holy
and honorable.
Few recognized the terrible consequences of this sexual
abandonment when God and the truth of his
word has been completely removed from the equation.
Let me read you a report written 11
years ago now which says this talking about
the statistics in Britain in the whole area
of marriage or non-marriage relationships.
Divorce is now over six times what it
was in 1961 and is the highest in
the European community.
Over a third of all British marriages now
end in divorce.
70% of second marriages also end in
divorce.
A quarter of children under 16 will experience
their parents' divorce.
The average age of divorce in England and
Wales is 38 for men and 35 for
women.
Cohabitation that's living together has doubled since 1981
and a fifth of all non-married women
now living in what was formerly regarded by
many as sin.
Over a quarter of British women getting married
for the first time had lived with their
husbands before marriage.
The consequences on the birth statistics are that
more than one third of all pregnancies in
1987 were conceived outside marriage resulting in a
quarter of births being illegitimate.
That compares with just six percent in 1961.
That comes from of all places the Nat
West money care magazine.
I can't quite understand why they featured it
but I did notice they used that phrase
what was formerly regarded by many as sin.
Living together.
Peter Maiden who's the associate international director of
OM said this in a recent article.
He said 30 or 40 years ago we
lost the argument on divorce.
Are we losing the argument on homosexuality right
now?
You know the British government was on the
verge of changing the law so that the
age of consent for homosexual acts could be
lowered to 16 and Ken Livingstone the mayor
of London is committed to the legalisation and
registration and authorisation of gay and lesbian marriages.
And there in Amsterdam 2000 as we were
enjoying that tremendous festival was the great gay
celebration going on at exactly the same time
there in Amsterdam.
1992 was my last full-time year as
a teacher.
That year I had a number of teenage
girls whom I taught only well a few
years previously coming back to visit me their
former primary school teacher.
Each one proudly holding a baby in their
arms.
They wanted to show me the latest addition
to their life and they expected me to
rejoice with them.
I tell you this friends my heart broke
as I thought of the future of these
fatherless children being brought up by those who
were still very much children themselves.
This is all because of an abandonment to
biblical truth.
The consequences are very serious.
You lose wisdom and you lose discipline.
And thirdly and finally when you sell the
truth you also lose understanding.
35 times I counted in the book of
Proverbs the word understanding appears.
Life is quite meaningless without truth.
I'm a Christian today not because as I
said in my prayer you know I enjoy
singing choruses or I've got Christian friends.
I'm a Christian because Christianity is true.
Because Jesus is the truth.
Because his word is truth.
That's the foundation.
That's the reason.
That's the apologetic I have as a believer.
But without truth well life has no point.
It has no reason.
It doesn't make any sense.
And many people who've honestly considered this who
are not Christians and who have denied the
existence of God and the truth of the
gospel have been forced to admit that the
fact of their existence leads them to a
hopeless despair.
Jean Paul Sartre said this Now God has
gone what have I left to cling to?
I cling to nothing.
So what happens if you do not buy
the truth or if you decide having once
possessed it to sell it?
Tell me what do you exchange for the
truth?
What do you get in exchange for the
truth?
Well I hear someone quoting behind me we've
already read it in the Paul's epistle to
the truth of God for a lie.
Once truth is abandoned whatever you're left with
there's only one alternative.
There'll only be one thing.
If you don't have truth then you have
a lie.
Those are the only options.
So how does this embracing of a lie
manifest itself?
How can we recognize when people are living
a lie?
Well what did the people do that Paul
was speaking of here?
See the answer is all in the scripture.
The verse goes on to say this.
They worshipped and served created things rather than
the creator.
Man and not God in other words became
the center of the universe.
Man's achievements rather than God's achievements became man's
concern.
I read a quote from a woman called
Gloria Steinem.
I don't know if you've ever found heard
of her.
She was the founder of MS Magazine but
years ago she said this.
By the year 2000 we will I hope
raise our children to believe in human potential
not God.
Do you remember how much talk there was
and how much discussion there was in the
media as we approached the millennium about what
would be the best and fitting way to
celebrate it?
Everything I heard or everything I read revolved
around man's achievements and man's progress.
I didn't see one article outside of Christian
magazines that suggested that perhaps we might just
consider God's faithfulness over 2,000 years and
God's goodness.
It was all man-centered despite the fact
that the date 2000 of course is looking
back to an event that's absolutely pivotal in
the whole of world history.
Those who wanted to include God as an
integral part of the celebrations had to fight
very hard to keep their corner and not
be completely marginalized.
If you do not buy the truth not
only will you have no understanding but you'll
also buy a lie, a deception and an
untruth.
Now our world is full of those people
who admit that created things have not satisfied
them, have not brought them peace, have not
brought them meaning or understanding.
One man said this, listen to his words,
you can have everything in the world and
still be the loneliest man and that's the
most bitter type of loneliness.
Success has brought me world idolization and millions
of pounds but it's prevented me from having
the one thing we all need, a loving
ongoing relationship.
Those words were spoken by Freddie Mercury, one
-time lead singer of the rock band Queen.
Here's a quote from somebody else who you'll
also know, he said this, there remains deep
in the soul, if I dare use the
word, a persistent and unconscious anxiety that something
is missing, some ingredient that makes life worth
living.
Those words were spoken by Prince Charles, the
heir apparent to the English throne.
They're admitting if you don't have the truth
then you don't have understanding, you don't have
meaning to life.
Augustine who became bishop of North Africa was
as a young man extremely immoral, searching for
the truth.
Towards the end of his life he recalled
his search, these were the words he wrote
down looking back on his youth, oh truth,
oh truth, how intimately did even the very
marrow of my mind sigh for you and
then one day as he read Paul's epistle
to the Romans, God broke through and he
discovered the one who said I am the
way, the truth and the life, no one
comes to the father but by me.
Friends the truth has a value that is
beyond calculation, its cost simply cannot be estimated.
You and I should consider very carefully the
implications of owning the truth before you buy
it and after you have possessed it and
obtained it you should spend much time contemplating
your valuable possession because never forget for us
the truth was purchased at a most incredible
cost.
Buy the truth do not sell it and
with that comes many precious promises and perhaps
none is greater than the one which assures
us you shall know the truth and the
truth shall set you free.
Father we thank you that we can have
100% confidence in your word and in
your truth and in Jesus Christ your son
who said I am the way, the truth
and the life.
Lord as we go out into this week
into this world where truth is not considered
as any absolute unchangeable reality may we show
through our lives and through our words that
it's the truth that's changed our life and
it's the truth that is alone the only
hope for our society and for our generation.
We thank you, we praise you in Jesus
name.
Amen.