We need to remember that this series of
talks is under the auspices of the Cass
Lake School System.
That is to say, it's a secularly established
framework.
But we're speaking a spiritual subject.
And my intention is even more than to
speak it, but to bring the sacred into
the secular.
So for example, if we begin by praying,
what in fact are we doing?
We're bringing the sacred into the secular.
And some might say, well, is that legitimate?
And the question of whether it's legitimate, whether
it's moral, whether it's ethical, whether it's legal,
is already a reflection of what has preceded
us in terms of the mindsets of men.
Because if there's a prevalent mindset that says
that you should not mix the one with
the other, and they have established laws on
the basis of that concept, we tonight are
restricted by the thinking of men as it
has been translated into law.
So we need to understand that what is
called law is really just the institutionalized thought
of men that determines the practices of a
community.
And we know that part of the controversy
of this hour, and it shall increase, is
what is validly the territory of God, so
to speak, that which is spiritual?
And what is the territory of society?
And isn't there an understanding of the separation
of state and church?
And how is that established?
I'm going to hand out something in a
moment, the first statement of which is that
the separation of church and state as a
principle in American society was not established in
order to protect the state.
It was established to protect the church.
But what has happened through the course of
time is that it has become interpreted as
not just the separation of church and state,
but the separation of the sacred and the
secular.
When I use these two words, sacred and
secular, do you have some sense of what
they mean?
If you don't, that understanding will grow just
by the course of these nights together.
And maybe I'll just stop at some time
and take a stab at trying to define
what these words mean.
It's really important to understand them.
Secular means worldly, sacred, holy or pertaining to
God.
And one of my premises is that this
is not a distinction that God intended.
And that the purpose of God through the
church is to penetrate the secular world by
the sacred.
And so what we're experiencing tonight, and even
raising the question of praying, is a first
installment of what I expect to be increasing
activity of God into the secular realm.
So let's pray that this will be a
historic beginning and that the grace of God
will be with us.
And this is not just some kind of
unctuous reference to God.
It's not a ceremonial thing, but we're praying
because we have a conviction that if God
is not with us, we are not going
to prosper.
That anything that pertains to influencing the minds
and heart and understanding of men and therefore
their conduct or society, requires the presence and
the enablement of God.
See, that is already a premise.
And to begin a class or to function
without prayer, without invoking the presence of God
or His blessing, already speaks for a certain
kind of an attitude that has no need
of God and can proceed on the basis
already of its own ability.
That last statement is a secular premise, which
pervades the whole of society and was even
very much reflected in the three nights of
telecasting on the subject of chemical dependency.
How many of you saw those programs?
Okay, I'm going to speak about that in
just a moment.
Let's now pray.
We bless your holy name and we look
to you now, thanking you and praising you
for the grace that will be with us,
for your kingdom and for your namesake.
In Jesus' name, amen.
For those that did not watch the telecast
on chemical dependency, that wasn't the actual kind
of the chemical people.
You need to know that this was a
national phenomenon, a problem of such magnitude that
three nights of prime-time TV attention was
given to the subject in a very elaborately
prepared series of telecasts, followed by community discussions
throughout the nation, of which there were 500
in the state of Minnesota alone.
Some of us from Ben Israel attended the
local discussions at Cass Lake.
And we just came, prompted by the Spirit
and because we are concerned for the community,
concerned for the nature of the problem, and
it was an experience.
And out of that experience, which is to
say really the rejection of what we represented
in God, in the faintest expression even of
His name or anything pertaining to Him, introduced
into a secular discussion, the Lord began to
open our eyes that there really is a
warfare going on, that it is for the
most part veiled.
But when you have the audacity or the
impertinence to come in His name and to
express His name and God as reality into
a secular context and discussion, it's remarkable the
kind of resistance and force that rises up
against it.
And so we were inspired just to medicate
on that and to write a statement, which
I want to hand out to you tonight.
And maybe we'll read it together and you
can take it home.
It may be part of our text.
There's a place on some of the sheets
for comments and notes that you can take
tonight as we discuss or as you yourself
are reading it.
And maybe it's as good as any introduction
into the subject that I can think of,
because it's vital, it's fresh, it's recent.
Everybody's now got a copy of this?
Okay.
I'm going to read aloud and maybe make
some comments as we're going.
It was entitled, A Plea to Our Community.
Actually, it's the second statement that we made.
If you'd like to first, I can make
that available also.
And we came with the first statement to
the first night's meeting, sensing that we might
not have too great an opportunity to express
the burden of God as it pertains to
this epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction, and
that we want to therefore have some statement
to show a position, a biblical and godly
position toward the problem.
What we found out by the last night
was that though we did not distribute it
wholesale and made it available selectively to those
who expressed interest, it was a point of
offense for many who were there that somehow
even to circulate or to make available a
printed statement that made reference to God into
a secular discussion.
So that was part of the response that
prompted this second statement, which I think is
sharper than the first.
And it is a plea to our community.
It's interesting to note that the principle of
separation of church and state, ironically intended for
the protection of the church and not the
state, has come also in our time to
mean the separation of the secular from the
sacred.
This is a tragic and false deduction, especially
in an hour when the secular world is
desperately in need of the knowledge, perspective, and
counsel that can only come to it from
outside itself.
A true church, which is radically biblically oriented,
as against the nominal, man-affirming religious institutions
that confirm society in its present conventional wisdom.
So just to pause there for a moment.
It's already dynamite.
Because what we're saying is that there's a
true church and a false.
As a matter of fact, maybe I shouldn't
be this pointed or particular, but I'm sure
that in about every one of these community
discussions, there was a representative of the clergy
on the panel, as there was with the
one that we attended.
And I think in more times than not,
the representation was not of the true church,
as I'm describing it here, but of that
institutional church that affirms or confirms the wisdom
of men.
In fact, we were shocked by some of
the statements made by that clergyman.
It was to us a real disservice to
the gospel.
He would have been better off silent than
to wear the clerical identification of the turned
-around collar and an enormous cross dangling from
his neck, and then to contradict everything that
that cross bespeaks in every word that he
uttered.
So what we're saying now to these people,
that they need to know that what they
call the church needs to be analyzed or
understood as not necessarily representing God or God's
view, and that there's a perspective that needs
to come to the world which of necessity
must come from outside itself.
For example, have you ever contemplated that truth,
righteousness, true morality are things that can only
be known to believers because they come down
from heaven?
Truth is not just or merely scientific accuracy.
That's the most minimal of definitions.
Jesus said that he would send the spirit
which even the world could not receive, the
spirit of truth.
So truth is more than just factual correspondence
or accuracy.
It's the spirit of truth.
One of my fond definitions is that truth
is everything as God himself sees it.
See why you need to take notes?
And maybe I can just extend that tonight
to say that the only way that we
can have it is through the revelation of
what God sees given to us by his
spirit.
You realize the enormous statements that I'm making?
I'm giving you sacred premises that ought to
be the foundation of our life if we
profess to believe.
But the fact of the matter is that
it's not, and that's why the world is
in the condition that it is, one of
which symptoms is the epidemic of drug and
alcohol addiction.
Truth can only be known by the church,
and therefore it is the agency intended by
God by which it is to be brought
into the world and to men.
If the church does not bring the understanding
of truth, it is not to be had.
You can have it scientifically.
You could have it physically in terms of
things that are measurable, but the kind of
truth that I'm talking about, the truth that
affects the way in which men live morally
and ethically, that must come down to us
from God.
And what does he tell us in his
word?
My way is not your way, nor are
my thoughts your thoughts.
As great as is the distance from heaven
and earth, so great is the difference between
my thoughts and your thoughts and my ways
and your ways.
God doesn't want to restrict the knowledge of
his way only to a small presence on
the earth called the church.
But the church is the agency or the
instrument by which truth is to be made
known and to permeate the society in which
it is placed.
So to confine our activity and our knowledge
only to services is to defeat the very
purpose for which God has established us.
To allow the world to go on with
the understanding that the sacred and the secular
are separate distinctions and legitimate is to honor
them in a lie that God did not
intend.
And the fact of the matter is that
we have been patsy for too long and
the church has submitted itself to the premises
and the understanding and the definitions of the
world, which is completely the reverse of what
God intended.
It's the world that should be submitting itself
to the definitions of the church.
For the church alone has the truth by
the spirit.
True church, that is.
The recent community discussions on the epidemic of
chemical dependency is a case in point.
You say, Art, why did you put the
phrase chemical dependency in quotation marks?
I wanted to indicate that I do not
agree with the term, that the term itself
is a lie.
It's a euphemism.
You say, what's that?
A euphemism is the world's ability to disguise
the nature of something by giving it a
nice-sounding ring, mortuary, mortician.
Maybe you can help me with some words
like that, that disguise the ugliness or the
terror or the stark nature of death or
other things.
In the old days, we used to talk
about junkies and somehow there was a stab
with a word like that, a junkie or
a drunk.
It brings a vivid thing home.
You see shattered families.
You see pain.
You sense anguish of soul and devastation of
what is made in God's image.
But to speak about a chemically dependent person
or an abuser has a much milder and
therefore deceptive connotation.
You see, the kind of analysis that I'm
bringing is the kind that the church should
be continually expressing in the world.
We have been silent far too long.
We have accepted the unspoken premises by which
the world conducts itself and we use its
terms and therefore, by doing so, we subscribe
to their meanings.
And therefore, the whole moral content that should
be stabbing the hearts of men unto repentance
is removed.
See, it makes a difference whether you see
a problem as a dependency or as sin.
One requires repentance and the other requires institutional
care.
The way you define a problem is the
way that you respond toward its solution.
And the reason that the problem has reached
epidemic proportions is because they have no solution,
because they have not adequately defined it in
the truth as God himself sees it, because
the church has been silent and does not
see and move by the spirit and has
restricted itself to only its Sunday religious activity
punctuated by mid-week Bible studies and things
of that kind.
The greatest fallacy under which the church itself
is suffering and I'm going to repeat this
many times in the course of these days
is that we have allowed the world to
define the church and therefore, by that definition,
to restrict its activity.
God never intended church as a mere Sunday
phenomenon but as a salt in the earth
and a light unto the world.
And if that light does not come to
illumine what is the nature of our devastating
social problems, what then shall be the answer?
So this is a tragic and a false
deduction.
Why is it tragic?
Because it removes the one saving ingredient that
could alter the conditions that are.
Even that the secular world is desperately in
need is only a statement that could be
made by a believer because the world is
incapable of perceiving its own condition.
Only a believer has a biblical context out
of which he sees the world.
For example, the scripture says that in the
last days, in the last times, perilous times
shall come.
Men shall be lovers of self and lovers
of pleasure more than lovers of God.
Disobedient, unruly, unholy, unthankful.
And it goes on like that.
So we who know these scriptures and believe
them as the truth of God spoken in
anticipation of the hour in which we now
live see the world about us through the
word that is given.
So therefore what others would dismiss as harmless
or just a passing phenomenon, or that's the
way kids are.
They've got to grow up.
It's only adolescent culture.
We are not impressed by this kind of
dismissal because we see it in the context
of the word.
We bring something to our view of reality
that is very much profoundly affected by the
word that is given by God.
See, who else has this but those who
believe?
And the question again is, is that to
be confined or restricted only to those who
believe or does God intend that that concept,
that seeing, be shared with those who do
not have the advantage of those who do?
Just as a little anecdote.
I hope there won't be too many.
I've just come back from an overseas trip
and not the least of which was attending
the Billy Graham Conference in Amsterdam on world
evangelism for about nine days.
And on a Sunday toward the end of
those days they sent out 4,000 evangelists
from all over the world into Amsterdam and
various other towns and cities, beaches and places
of recreation.
I was on bus number one to the
Jew first.
And we went to the beach.
It's strange that the films that I took
were completely destroyed.
Maybe God didn't think it tasteful to show
them.
But I shot a whole roll of film
of that day on the beach where I
would say that, if I could give a
percentage, maybe almost a half of all women
were bare-breasted.
Can you imagine the culture shock for a
man like myself to see a mother, a
middle-aged mother, and, say, a daughter in
the twenties walking side-by-side down the
beach bare-breasted with complete equanimity and poise?
Not an iota, a scintilla of embarrassment or
social discomfort.
Why?
Because it has become normative in the society
in which they live.
It was to be seen everywhere that day.
And so they had an outreach on the
boardwalk sponsored by Billy Graham Crusades and a
big musical group and a few testimonies about
how great it is to be saved and
how good God is, which was good.
But there was something in my spirit burning
that there needed to be a word spoken,
something out of the word.
So I went to the platform and I
said, Can I just say something just for
a few minutes?
And they gave me the microphone.
And what do you think my text was?
It was Sunday in Amsterdam, a great Reformation
country, a place where believers have in times
past historically sought refuge from religious persecution in
the world.
It does not take long for an enormous
deterioration to set in to where this is
one of the mildest phenomena that we saw
in those days.
The punk rock culture, which was formerly limited
to the periphery of society, the most extreme
cases, is now permeating the mainstream of middle
class Dutch culture.
So when you pass barbershops or beauty shops,
you see pictures of the punk rock haircut.
And on the trolleys and buses and in
the streets, respectable so-called middle class young
people wearing punk rock style clothing and punk
rock haircut where the hair is dyed scarlet
electric shocking colors and it is now becoming
the normative pattern of middle class life.
See, there is something permeating the lump till
it becomes normative, no longer questioned, no longer
a shock.
And by such a means, society is brought
to its Sodom and Gomorrah stage and extinction.
I have been in Holland many times and
I went this time as in past times
to the Red Light District, which exceeds any
in the world to my knowledge.
It runs for miles around certain canals.
Interestingly, in the very area that was occupied
by orthodox Jews before World War II.
In the vacuum that was created by their
cremation has come now the pornographers, the peep
shows, the prostitution, perversion of every variety and
form where you can see live demonstrations on
platforms of every kind of incestuous, filthy, animalistic
orgy.
And what shocked me this time was that
as in past times I could always distinguish
between the natives of this bizarre quarter and
those who came to gawk.
This time I was unable to make the
distinction.
Something has so already worked in Dutch and
European culture that the line of distinction between
the bizarre and the straight is dissolving.
And it's hard to say who is the
queer, who is the freak or who is
the prostitute and who is the one who
has come to gawk or to purchase.
You can imagine that God's conversation with Abraham
that he would scare a city if he
could so much as find ten righteous men
is not just a story out of the
Bible.
By the way, that word story is usually
spoken by people who are unbelievers or whose
belief is minimal.
It's not a story, it's an actual event.
And we're coming again to a time except
that the church become the church and begin
to roll back this enormous secularizing process that
is taking place in the earth called culture,
called rock, called music, called dress, called fun,
called escape, called a high.
The world is going to be inundated and
there'll be no alternative but for the judgment
of God again to come upon it.
In fact, I would not think it extreme
to say that the charge of responsibility for
the present condition of the world is not
to be laid at the world's door but
at the church's door.
The priest shall teach the people the difference
between the holy and the profane.
And if the church is not priestly, neither
is it the church.
If it is not performing a teaching function
in the world, let alone at Sunday school
classes which are often drab enough, it is
failing in its priestly task.
It's interesting that if you look up the
word secular tonight or tomorrow, you know what
you're going to find?
A synonym for the word secular is profane,
the absence of the sacred.
By using such deceptive phrases as chemical dependency,
and we're going to say more about that
in this article, space forbids reiterating the frightening
magnitude of the problem sufficient as it is
to initiate free successive nights of prime TV
attention followed by community meetings throughout the nation,
including 500 in the state of Minnesota.
What became apparent both in the programs and
the discussion that followed is that our society
is being faced with a new order of
problem that is irrational.
What do you mean by that?
I mean by that that the rational mind
cannot understand it.
It is not susceptible to analysis by intelligence.
That's what it's meant.
And just to make a further statement, the
entire world is becoming irrational, freaking out, and
there's so much I want to say to
you.
When you begin to see irrationality having its
sway in the world, the world itself becoming
increasingly irrational, beserk, without reason, without mind or
reason, you can readily see from that the
activity of Satan.
You say, how do you connect this?
Because Satan's purpose in earth is to profane
everything that is made by God.
He wants to maw and to destroy that
which is made in God's image.
And if God intended mankind to be an
intelligent being and rational, then the activity of
Satan in our generation is to work against
that kind of rationality and reason and to
move men toward impulse and to bizarre conduct
that is its opposite.
So, society is being faced with a new
order of problem that is irrational, destructive, and
peculiarly unsusceptible to sociological or psychiatric explanation.
For those of us whose view of spirit
reality is biblical and experiential, the all-too
-familiar evidences of Satanic power working through alcohol
and drugs was evident.
The effect on human personality from disorientation to
mindlessness to suicidal impulse, this is a progression.
It begins with the disorientation of personality.
They get dull in their minds, hazy, in
a strange state.
And from that beginning it goes to a
mindlessness.
They don't know where they are or what
they're doing.
There are complete losses and gaps and lapses
that they just don't know what they did
from between Friday night to Monday morning.
So suicidal impulse bore the mark of the
evil one who was called by Jesus a
murderer from the beginning.
It's interesting that on the one occasion in
the three nights where we had some opportunity
to stand and to speak something from the
perspective of God, that was my statement.
I wanted to show them that there's a
Satanic character in the nature of the problem
that is being described that they must recognize
because where there's death, and it was admitted
from the platform, that there's a death every
week in Cass Lake from alcohol, from drugs,
through auto accident, through suicide, one form or
another, that the Grim Reaper is taking an
enormous harvest over the modern world because he's
a destroyer.
And you can add to that Beirut, Lebanon,
you can add to that Granada, you can
add to that every place where there's violence,
killing, murder, Central America, bloodshed, everything predicated on
violence.
You know that Satan is there because he's
a murderer from the beginning.
It's remarkable that even to make a reference
like that into secular discussion could not have
been worse than if someone had dropped his
pants and defecated in the middle of the
room.
Excuse me for the analogy, but if you'd
been there you would have not thought it
extreme.
The shock, the horror, the recoil, the look
of offense on faces needs to be described.
You would think that some horrible thing had
been spoken that is so tasteless, that was
in such bad taste, that how could you
have had the audacity to sound it?
You know what that's a statement of?
That the world is so unaccustomed to the
mention of God in its secular discussions that
they are affronted and offended when it comes.
That should never have been.
They should be far more accustomed to hearing
a divine perspective in every secular discussion.
You say, Robert, isn't the Lord just concerned
with the church?
No.
The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness
thereof, and the nations, and those that dwell
in them.
Psalm 24.
We have a right, we have a mandate,
those of us who believe, to bring the
divine perspective of God at every secular level,
to challenge its unspoken, unquestioned premises and assumptions
by which it operates.
One revelation that came to me in this
regard in the field of medicine, because every
one of these areas is ruled over by
principalities and powers.
If you don't know what that means, wait
for the next series of lectures, and I'll
tell you, if God has ever stood a
subject to me, it's that subject, which was
the last lecture at Walker in the recent
seminar, principalities and powers.
If we are living and operating in ignorance
of that phenomenon, we are valueless in terms
of the kingdom and likely to be victims
ourselves as much as society by their tremendous
influence in the earth, especially through institutions.
Education, the media, medicine, culture are principal areas
of activity for principalities and powers to influence
entire society away from God, including the church,
to profane it and to disfigure it from
the image that God intended.
So my one reference, for example, the way
the illumination came, as often it will through
experience, and that's why I say that our
view of spirit reality is not only biblical,
but it is experiential.
How many of you in this room believe
that there's actually a devil?
That there's a demon spirit, that he has
a host of workers called demon spirits and
that they're operative in the earth?
The only reason you can raise your hand
to that is not only because you believe
it, because it says so in the scripture,
but because since you became an active believer,
you have experienced the resistance and the opposition
of that spirit entity.
I never was bothered by demons.
I never knew there was a Satan for
35 years, so long as I was lost
and in his kingdom.
He had no necessity to reveal himself.
I was already well in his hand and
operating perfectly according to his premises.
But from the day that I crossed over
from death unto life, I was made aware
that there's an enemy.
Very real.
And because we have that awareness, we need
all the more to press that upon the
consciousness of those who are living without any
such awareness and therefore they have no alternative
but to predicate their solutions on a completely
secular basis.
And so what was the solution according to
these three days of discussion?
Community-wide task forces.
I mean, it's quaint.
It's sad.
It's melancholy.
You don't know whether to laugh or to
cry.
It's like the proverbial kid with his finger
in the dike trying to hold back a
flood.
That somehow through some humanistic task force by
well-intending citizens they're going to come together
and intelligently discuss the problem and devise remedies
and enact it.
When already the night before they confessed, and
it's written here, that every person who is
an addict or an alcoholic who has been
submitted for treatment in the Cast Lake Rehabilitation
Program is today back on either drugs or
alcohol.
A zero success rate.
What then can be hoped for in any
kind of a task force that seeks a
solution outside of God and the understanding that
comes from Him and the power that is
provided by Him?
This kind comes not out but by fasting
and prayer is a statement that will completely
befog the minds of unsuspecting secular authorities.
And the reason is that they're not church
-oriented.
And maybe even if they are it's some
kind of harmless innocuous Sunday activity where they
get an uplift.
And the ugly subject of demonism or Satan
and the conflict between kingdoms is never once
mentioned because the pastor and the entire system
wants the people to leave feeling good.
So while the world is dying dragging on
its vomit, its puke, we're feeling good.
So what I'm describing in that fourth paragraph
are the evidences that Satan is at work
in what is called chemical dependency.
Disorientation, mindlessness, suicidal impulse.
Bear the mark of the evil one who
was called by Jesus a murderer from the
beginning.
Indeed the fatalities of suicide, death by auto
accident and death while yet living are to
us persuasive evidences that we are contemplating a
phenomenon that cannot be understood secularly and therefore
need to be solved on that basis.
Whenever you see death you know that Satan
is at work.
The last enemy to be conquered.
He's a destroyer.
The unmistakably characteristic work of Satan has also
to be seen through the lie.
He was a liar also from the beginning.
He's the father of lies.
You can quit when you want.
How many have begun the step-by-step
path to disintegration by just experimenting on the
phrase given by a friend who wants to
induce them.
You can quit when you want.
How many of them even while they were
increasingly into the habit kept deluding and deceiving
themselves by still believing that they could quit
when they want.
And the realization that they could not quit
came when they sought earnestly to stop and
realized by then it was too late that
they could not quit and that it was
a lie.
Are you sufficiently sacredly minded that you know
that when you see a lie and when
you see evidences of death that Satan is
working?
That is to have the mindset of God
required of his people.
Okay.
You can quit when you want.
You need this to cope with the tensions
of life.
We ought to be raising the question why
does life have its tensions?
When God says, My grace is sufficient for
you.
And we're either going to come awake as
the church and say that that is God's
statement for mankind.
That life is not a picnic.
It's a trial.
It's a place of preparation for eternity.
Of necessity there's going to be abrasive and
challenging things that are intended by God to
break the power of the world, the flesh
and the devil and to fit us for
an eternal relationship with God in ruling and
reigning in the earth.
That the basis of life is not the
pursuit of pleasure.
See, that's the secular premise.
The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of
pain is the unspoken premise by which the
whole of modern civilization is predicated.
But it is not a biblical view.
What is the biblical view?
The inevitability of suffering and the centrality of
the cross.
So can you see that not only are
these different views, they are diametrically opposed and
in vital collision.
And this collision is going to result in
sparks.
There's going to be a fierce collision and
we need to be in anticipation and preparation
for it for the issues are becoming increasingly
sharp.
And there's a remarkable anti-Christ spirit in
the world that resists even the faintest mention
of his name or the introduction of God
into what they think is a secular discussion.
So we need this to cope with the
tensions of life or to be socially acceptable
by others.
If I wrote all that could be written
here, we would have a book.
But every one of these statements is so
remarkable.
The very lies that Satan uses are at
the heart of all of human life.
Why are men and women concerned to be
socially acceptable?
The one phrase that came up repeatedly in
the community discussion that we attended was peer
pressure.
Kids are going to drugs and drinking because
of peer pressure.
They don't want to be outside the car.
They want to be one of the boys.
They want to be accepted.
They need the esteem of their peers.
Well, that's a foundational psychological principle.
We need a sense of acceptance.
But what we need is the acceptance of
God, not the acceptance of men.
It's for the want of that deep sense
of acceptance by God, the knowledge that we
are accepted in the beloved, that we are
so susceptible and so easy to be manipulated
for the necessity of being one of the
boys or being socially acceptable.
Well, we should be divinely acceptable.
And we know there's only one basis for
that divine acceptance.
It's not by our virtue, nor by our
works, but by his blood.
But try mentioning the subject of the blood
of Jesus Christ in a secular audience as
a basis for the acceptance that would save
men from the necessity for alcohol or drug
dependency and see what you get.
God has truly chosen the foolish things to
confound the wise.
This is offensive to the secular mind.
And you know what I suspect?
It's offensive even to our mind.
We might whisper it meekly in church where
we think we're among kindred spirits, and even
then we're not too comfortable with the concept.
But to come into the marketplace and speak
all the words of this life, that really
staggers us.
We are offended ourselves and ashamed ourselves of
the gospel.
And we cannot say with Paul, for I
am not ashamed of the gospel, for it
is the power of God unto salvation to
everyone who believes.
Paul did not limit his activity to synagogues.
He went into the marketplace, and he made
known the way of God to men.
Some scoffed, some doubted.
Some said, we'll hear again of this later.
They never did.
But some claimed unto him and believed.
And that's where we need to be, in
the marketplace, speaking all the words of this
life.
But I'll tell you what, if we do
not ourselves believe those words, we might just
as well save our breath.
If it's only for us a kind of
catechism or biblical precepts or doctrine that is
lifeless, and we do not know the power
of the gospel and the power of the
blood, our words will not be convincing or
penetrating.
It's to stand and to speak.
So you can see how much is resting
on ourselves, coming into the mindset of God,
not just conceptually, but also experientially, that we
can stand and speak.
I never did give that illustration about the
medical profession.
What about eight years ago, just when we
came up to Minnesota here for the first
time, I had broken my leg in Minnesota,
my kneecap.
And I believe that a believer does not
have accidents.
How many of you believe that?
See, that's a sacred premise.
What does the world say?
Well, I had an accident, or we couldn't
help it.
See, they dismiss the very things by which
they should be seeing the hand of God
in their lives, moving them to the acknowledgment
of God and to salvation.
You know why they dismiss things as accident?
Because the church itself deeply and inwardly believes
that it's accident, or just a change of
season, or an upset in the cycle or
the economic order or something like that.
The fact of the matter is that we
tend to interpret nature and society in exactly
the same way as the world itself does,
which is to say naturally rather than spiritually.
We do not see the hand of God
operative in nations and in the conduct of
men through judgment, through social upheaval, and through
upheaval in nature.
We call it an accident.
We call it an earthquake.
We do not see it as God seeking
to shape men to an awareness that he's
the God of all this earth, and that
what they're suffering is a calamity designed to
bring them to an awareness of himself, lest
they eternally perish.
You say, brother, you sound like you're from
the Middle Ages.
You have a medieval view.
Well, I want to tell you that I
believe that the view that I'm stating is
God's timeless view.
It's the sacred mind.
It's spiritual mindedness.
Well, I don't have accidents, but I was
baptizing a number of Lutherans in a YMCA
swimming pool.
I think it was Austin, Minnesota, one of
those towns south of Minneapolis.
And on my way to the locker after,
I don't know, it was about 15 baptisms,
I slipped on a puddle on a wet
tile floor.
And in a frozen moment of time, I
found myself up in the air, looking down
at the tile floor, suspended, with my Bible
in my hand, asking myself the question, what
are you doing here?
And before I could get the answer, I
came crashing down on one knee with such
a tremendous impact, I found out two days
later it was x-rayed.
The kneecap was not just fractured or broken,
it was smashed.
And I went for two days waiting for
God to heal me with a big, bloated,
inflated knee.
Well, finally, he did not.
I was taken to a hospital, x-rayed,
and a chief orthopedic surgeon, happened to be
a Jew, was examining me, happened to be
a Jew.
Accidentally.
Accidentally, right.
And he said, looking at the x-ray,
he said, your knee is really shattered, he
said.
This needs to be wired.
You need an operation.
I said, well, okay, when can you perform
it?
He said, Thursday.
I think it was that time, Tuesday.
I said, no, I said, I can't wait
that long.
I need to be up in northern Minnesota.
The Lord is giving us a property.
He said, the who?
See what happens when the sacred comes into
the secular?
And how far God will go to bring
it into the secular?
At the expense of a servant's knee.
And I'll tell you, if God says that
if your eye will fend you, pluck it
out.
Or an arm, remove it.
It's better to enter into eternity blind or
without an eye, without an arm, than to
suffer with all your members and burn in
hell.
There's something that's not just a little flurry
in scripture.
It's an awesome and authentic statement that ought
to affect our present attitude and conduct.
If it did, we would not think it
so monumental to have a shattered knee.
If it is going to save someone from
eternal death.
I won't even ask you to raise your
hand.
But how many of us really believe in
hell?
Notice I said, really believe in hell.
You see, there's a believing that is an
acknowledgement of a biblical truth to show that
we subscribe to the correct doctrinal view.
But that kind of believing is not sufficient
to save one from hell.
The kind of believing sufficient to save one
from hell is the kind that Paul had,
where he said, knowing the terror of God,
I persuade men.
See, he had a biblical mindset.
He had a spiritual mind of such a
vividness and such a power that it affected
his conduct and his speech so as to
save men from the hands of an angry
God.
But that kind of mindset is not characteristic
of the church today.
Why?
Because the secular mind has made an enormous
incursion into the church.
We are more secular minded than we know.
Maybe I'll read you a quotation from the
beginning of this remarkable book.
He writes that, as a thinking being, the
modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.
He accepts religion, quote-unquote, its morality, its
worship, its spiritual culture, but he rejects the
spiritual view of life.
Is that sinking in?
In other words, on Sunday he operates by
one mindset, but from Monday through Saturday he
operates on a secular mindset.
He agrees with the world in its unspoken
premises, and his decisions, his conduct in his
life, is predicated on the basis of secular
rather than spiritual thinking.
For example, should your kid go to college
after he graduates high school?
Of course.
If he's going to be a success, if
he's going to obtain a career, that is
the unspoken premise by which the middle class
people order their life.
But should it be the premise by which
we order our lives?
Should it be automatic that a Christian kid
goes to college simply by virtue of graduating
high school?
Aren't we supposed to operate from another premise?
The kind that says, Lord, what would you
have for me to do?
And if God says, go and become a
garbage worker, or sweep the streets because I
have instruction for you through that experience in
discipline and humility, we ought to be doing
it.
So what are the premises?
What are the unspoken things, the mindset by
which we live?
That's what he's getting at.
He accepts religion only for Sunday purpose, but
he rejects the religious view of life, the
view which sees or sets all earthly issues
within the context of the eternal.
The view which relates all human problems, social,
political, cultural, to the doctrinal foundations of the
Christian faith.
As for example, drug addiction as being sin
rather than a dependency.
To see it as a dependency is to
accept a secular or sociological definition.
To see it as sin is to see
it biblically and requires, therefore, another kind of
answer, namely repentance and atonement.
The view which sees all things here below
in terms of God's supremacy or lordship and
earth's transitoryness, its passing value in terms of
heaven and hell.
Do we see the present in terms of
eternity?
Are we taken up in an awesome way
with the realities of heaven and hell?
In such a way that it not just
colors our view, but it affects and determines
the way in which we presently live.
God never intended eternity as a concept of
something that we're going to experience after we
die.
He gave us the privilege of an advanced
knowledge by his word and by the spirit
that it would influence our present living.
Are you living with eternity in mind?
I'll tell you what, it'll change all your
values.
You'll not be that materialistic.
You'll not be so hung up on what
is happening today or tomorrow.
You'll not be so moved by the fashions
and fads of the world because you're seeing
something that is invisible but infinitely more real
that affects all your present living and inoculates
you and keeps you from the powers of
this world.
See, eternity is not just a concept.
It's a reality which needs to be taken
into present consideration and that is the biblical
mindset that God intends for us to have.
The secular mindset may acknowledge the truth of
eternity but does not take it into vital
consideration.
Okay, back to my kneecap.
I don't know if I can.
Somebody help me.
The secular mind acknowledges technically the truth of
eternity but does not take it into his
vital consideration.
That's why we're jerked by strings.
That's why most believers are as gray, as
unhappy, as sad, as listless, as insecure, as
nervous as those who are not believers.
We're so deeply ensconced in the world, so
much affected by the rise and fall of
present things, so little considering the things that
are eternal.
Paul said, seeing that which is invisible, he
counted his present afflictions as momentary and light,
seeing that which is invisible and eternal.
See, that seeing affected the way he viewed
and experienced his afflictions.
They were momentary.
Why momentary?
Because he saw everything in the context of
eternity.
Endless time with God.
I want to say that the way Paul
sees is the way God sees, and it's
the way that we ought to see.
That's true seeing.
It's apostolic seeing, and it needs to be
restored to the church today.
We need to recognize that what Harry Blommeyer
says is true.
The church has succumbed to secularization.
We've allowed the world to do a number
on us, and we have therefore dulled or
nullified the principal concepts and suppositions by which
we ought to be living.
Yes, we believe in hell, but not sufficiently
to warn someone away from it.
Yes, we believe in heaven, but not sufficiently
to affect our present living and values.
Yes, we believe in sin, but chemical dependency
is something else.
Everywhere one meets examples of the church's abdication
of intellectual authority which lies at the back
of modern Christians' easy descent into mental secularism.
It's an easy descent.
You can go down into this very easily,
and it's happening.
Except what?
Except that you keep your heart with all
diligence.
Except that you're conscious of the power that
is being manifested in the world in subtle
ways by the use of language.
Unless you bring in an active way your
biblical view into your present reality and circumstance.
Unless you acknowledge that devils and demons are
not just a Halloween thing, but a fairly
present phenomenon in the earth and increasing in
its power and vexation to mankind.
Unless you recognize that violence and social upheaval
and disorder is the result of the working
of Satan through the sin of men.
The spirit of violence, the spirit of rebellion,
and the spirit of death, the spirit of
the lie, have their origin in hell.
You say, this sounds very simplistic.
Are you a college graduate?
You speak in a very simplistic way.
The way you carry on, it sounds like
it's either or, or it's black or white.
Now the modern world sees everything in shades
of gray, nuances, and, you know, there's always
an explanation or conditions, or, you know, you
have to take this and this.
It depends upon its relative.
But you're so absolute, why you're even dogmatic.
Am I really?
Are you afraid of being dogmatic?
I'll tell you that when the world wants
you to be eclipsed and to shut up,
you'll be assured, you're going to hear that,
that charge.
You're dogmatic.
That sounds so terrible.
But what it really means is that you're
so absolute in your convictions.
You make no room and no latitude for
anything else but what God says.
You're dogmatic.
So is Jesus, and so is Paul, and
so ought we also today.
But it is an offense to the secular
mind, because the secular mind is relativistic.
Many paths to truth.
Who is to say?
In this culture it's this way, but in
another culture, it depends.
It's relative.
How can you be so absolute?
The Bible was written thousands of years ago.
That was just the phraseology, the terminology of
the people who did not have the advantage
of psychology, so they had to talk about
demons.
And you know that most Christians will wither
under the blast like that and retreat and
descend into secularism.
You've got to keep your heart of all
diligence and not be ashamed of the faith.
If God says so, it is.
And it's a mercy to communicate that to
those who have not the understanding, because they
have not the access to the Scripture, nor
the Spirit of God yet.
In fact, your speaking will be a key
to their coming to that place.
Okay, back to my kneecap.
And while he had his hands on my
knee and telling me I needed an operation,
I said I couldn't, I have to be
up, the Lord is giving us a property,
which we now have.
His eyes became large, and he said, oh,
something's happening.
And he just felt the pieces coming to
place.
He was just like click, click, click, I
could feel something going on in my knee.
And he said, wow, he said, if we
only put this in a cast right now,
you might be saved in operation.
And he did, and I was saved in
operation.
I never needed it.
And so they put me in a cast.
I had to be in a bed that
night.
The next day I got some instruction about
13, and I left the hospital.
And as I left the hospital, I was
on crutches, walking through the lobby.
A man came running up to me in
a white medical top garment, and he said,
aren't you Art Pence?
I said, yeah.
He said, what are you doing here?
I said, well, I had this accident.
He said, well, who was your doctor?
I said, Dr. Walter Indyk.
He said, Wally?
I've been praying for him for years.
I said, thanks a lot.
But that night, here's the point I want
to make.
Picture me in bed with a smashed kneecap
and two nurses trying to give me a
needle.
And I'm saying to them, I do not
need it.
I am not in pain.
You know that talk about things being relative,
pain is.
Very much matters whether you have a spiritual
or a sexual attitude toward pain, toward your
body, toward affliction.
If God's grace is sufficient, it's remarkable how
different pain will affect you as against an
attitude that does not believe that.
It's different whether you see pain as being
brought by God to fulfill purposes in himself
as against the pain that comes from mindless
accident.
But I want to say with every sincerity,
and I've spoken this in many places, I
was not experiencing pain.
I did not experience pain in the whole
episode.
I experienced discomfort, but not sufficient to be
drugged against pain.
You see, what does this suggest?
It's the premise, the avoidance of pain and
the pursuit of pleasure.
That somehow pain is not something to be
experienced if it can be avoided.
But I'll tell you what, there's something in
my spirit that would rather suffer a modicum
of inconvenience and discomfort than receive something into
my being that is pharmaceutical.
And I don't know that I can explain
it.
It's just a spiritual, a spirit reservation against
pharmacia, which is the same word as witchcraft,
and drug dependency.
This whole generation, this whole civilization is steeped
in chemicals and pharmaceuticals that have influenced their
conduct and made them senseless and mindless and
disoriented and suicidal.
I don't want anything in me.
And these nurses were arguing that I had
to have it.
They were stupefied.
How can a man suffer a smashed knee
and not be in anguish of pain requiring
himself to be doped by drugs?
They went to get the doctor.
And by the time it ended, there was
a little nod of souls, like two doctors,
three nurses, talking with one, whispering back and
forth.
You should have seen their faces.
It was a statement.
It was a statement of shock that for
the first time in their professional experience, and
I have great respect for the professional, but
it too, especially Christians in it, need to
know the unspoken premises which is foundational by
which it operates and which may often frequently
be in contradiction of God.
Someone said that we need to read the
Hippocratic Oath, and there are statements in that
Hippocratic Oath that every physician in medicine must
take that acknowledges and prays to, or so
to speak, mythical figures and gods of the
ancient world, which is to say spirit beings,
as an oath.
I know one doctor who has left the
profession and is now in missionary work who
said he could not go on in the
profession of death.
I don't know what he meant by that,
but maybe you have more understanding than I.
What I saw was that for the first
time, they would be confronted and challenged in
a premise until that moment had never been
questioned, and they could not take it because
it was an attack at the very foundation
of their whole professional understanding.
What would be the application then of bringing
the spiritual mindset into other areas?
Education, psychology, sociology, business, economics, farming.
What we're learning about farming and what the
world has done with farming, with chemicals, with
fertilizers, with the use of the soil that
is so contrary to God's intention in scripture.
I just read an article that there's a
monopoly that is growing.
It was in the pioneer, in the manufacture
of seeds, that it's almost impossible now to
get a seed for a plant that will
reproduce itself, that the seeds are hybrid and
they only serve for one generation.
Isn't that remarkable that through the experimentation and
by removing certain genealogical aspects of seeds, they
have produced this that makes the consumer dependent
every year afresh on another supply.
But what happens if that supply should somehow
become destroyed or exhausted or unattainable?
We would be hurting because we have left
the natural foundations, or that is to say
the biblical foundations that God intended in the
care of the earth.
God has made man in his image that
he should have dominion over the earth and
be plentiful, to multiply, to replenish and to
fill the earth and to take dominion.
That is a biblical premise to which we
need to return.
And because we have departed from it, it
is costing us.
In the ravaging of the earth, in the
kind of thing that is produced that looks
much more attractive, but the nutritional content has
greatly been diminished and many other consequences.
What would you say, for example, to a
Sabbath rest for the land?
Which God prescribed for Israel.
But you know what's wrong with everything that
God prescribes?
It requires faith to do it.
Faith at the end of the sixth year
that somehow you're going to be provided not
only the seventh, but the eighth until that
year's harvest comes in.
See, to obey God requires a faith, an
obedience that is costly, whereas the wisdom of
the world makes no such requirement.
And that's why we have these two totally
different mindsets that are in collision.
And the reason why the secular mindset is
predominating is because there are not enough believers
who are willing to live the life of
faith on the premises for the faith that
God has given.
Go ye into all the world.
Preach this gospel to every creature.
Go into the temple and stand and speak
all the words of this life.
All authority is given beyond the heaven and
the earth.
Go ye therefore.
How many of us are going into the
secular place because all authority is given unto
him?
And I'll tell you what, you'll never appear
more foolish than when you do.
You'll never feel more weak.
You'll never feel more like a jerk, like
somebody so totally asinine as to stand up
or to make a statement in a completely
secular environment that makes reference to the supernatural
as being the invisible but true, unseen foundation
of all reality in life.
You'll be looked upon as a widow, as
we call dogmatic, irrational, superstitious.
I preached one message in New Zealand on
Sabbath at a minister's conference as not just
an interesting curiosity in the Bible but as
a timeless requirement of men before God.
And I never saw a greater shriek and
howl and outrage than I saw with those
men phenomenal when they were required to hear
a word in order to do it.
And I'll just leave that with you as
you drive home tonight.
Just contemplate what actually observing or keeping the
Sabbath would mean in terms of its radical
requirement on your life.
If you took the definition in Isaiah, I
think 55, where it says that you desist
or cease from your own thought or speaking
your own words or doing your own thing
or seeking your own pleasure, what would you
then do in a secular world that is
predicated upon seeking your own pleasure, doing your
own thing and speaking your own words day
in and day out?
How do we pray when we begin tonight?
Lord, we don't know how to proceed.
There's a monumental, vast material here but how
do we begin and how do we proceed?
Except you unfold by your spirit.
We don't know.
So in other sense, we're practicing the Sabbath
even as we're laboring, which is God's intention
to save the earth from being profaned and
being made sacred.
He wants his shalom and his peace to
come over the earth and save it from
the frenzy and the fury and the franticness
of men who are in a boil to
do, who do not know the rest of
God.
See, that needs not only be proclaimed, speaking
needs to be demonstrated, or we have no
right to proclaim it.
Whether it's the lie, whether it's escape, invitations
to a high, unbelievable experience or feelings, through
lust, deceit, rebellion, opposition to parents and authority
and finally in drivenness and compulsion, all of
these things are earmarks of the operation of
Satan.
One former victim of a TV documentary unwittingly
but accurately described the demonic nature of her
addiction.
This is an actual quote.
She said, it changes your whole personality, takes
you over and tells you what it wants
you to do.
You'll hear that the whole nation was watching
a drug addict, former drug addict, making that
kind of a statement, rehearsing how it dominated
her personality, jerked her by strings.
And so did Peter describe the devil as
a roaring lion walking by, seeking whom he
may devour.
And then I conclude in that paragraph, pity
them who are ignorantly unaware of the evil
and malignant one, the devil, whom we ought
to resist steadfast in the faith.
Well, what if you don't have a faith?
How can you resist him?
What if you don't have a spiritual perception
or mindset?
How can you perceive him?
Woe to them that have neither the perception
nor the resources of the faith to resist
him steadfast in the faith.
It's not through task forces.
It's through resisting steadfast in the faith that
this kind of problem is going to be
met.
Are you guys getting wearied?
Okay.
I want to direct you to the text.
I'll go back to this, or if I
don't go back to this tonight, you read
it through carefully, make your own comments, and
we'll go back and then maybe next week
we'll take up another segment of it because
there's a tremendous amount of material there.
In fact, I would ask you to pray
for the statement that's in your hands.
It's really interesting that when I was a
teacher at last at the Cass Lake Adult
Education, it came right on the heels of
the school strike in Cass Lake, and that
event very much affected what we spoke and
discussed in those days.
Now here we are again, I think around
a year later, and now it's the chemical
dependency issue from the community discussion that just
preceded the beginning of this class and has
resulted in the statement that is in your
hands.
I think God somehow has arranged this.
And what we did last year, we also
wrote a statement, and we put it in
the boxes or sent it, mailed it, to
every teacher on the Cass Lake faculty and
to the administrators, and you can imagine what
that caused and how the Lord used it.
Remind me, I'll tell you about it at
a future time.
And then we took a copy of that
letter to the Pioneer, the Bemidji newspaper, and
they printed a portion of it.
In fact, the editor, as he read it,
he said to me, well, he said, this
is well written.
I thought to myself, why shouldn't it be?
Same spirit that inspired the scriptures.
And he printed it.
It was printed.
And so it had a wide circulation to
bring a divine and sacred view into a
larger secular community.
What do you think of believing the Holy
Spirit for writing a letter to the editor?
Do you think that we're going too far
now and that we're exceeding the prescription that
God intended for the church?
That it's okay to have Sunday service and
Bible school and clinics and so on, but
to bring a letter to the editor is
going too far?
I think it's only a point of nearest
beginning.
Nearest beginning.
And we need to have a mindset that
understands that God wants the sacred to penetrate
the secular.
And to accept it be done by the
instruments that we are, it shall not be
done.
But in what power shall it be done?
And by what wisdom?
By the wisdom that cometh down from above.
Not by might, not by power, but by
my spirit, saith the Lord.
The text that I want to direct your
attention to, I don't know how far we'll
get into it tonight, but just to warm
you up for what I think will be
the text that we'll come back again and
again to.
It is loaded.
Look at the way my page is.
I've covered it with so many comments I
can barely now see the text.
It is so rich, it's opening up like
a font.
Because it is a classic encounter between the
sacred and the secular as was exhibited by
Paul coming into Athens in Acts 17.
Acts 17.
If I suggested that there are two symbolic
ways to look at the sacred and the
secular and say that one is Hebrew and
the other Greek, would you understand me?
Do you understand that Greece was the birthplace
of humanism?
And that secular humanism is the worldwide religion
of the modern world today?
And that it is Greek in its origin
and its concept that it makes man the
measure of all things rather than God.
If you're a pastor and your definition of
a good service is one that makes people
happy and that they enjoy, are you on
that occasion being Hebrew or Greek?
Greek.
Because your view is predicated on what pertains
to man rather than what pertains to God.
Now Paul was passionately Hebrew.
Not by virtue of his natural birth, but
by virtue of his convictions and his mindset
that saw everything in the context of God.
He was a fool for Christ's sake.
Now what happens in Acts 17 is an
ultimate confrontation because God brings this total Hebrew
into a total secular environment where the Stoics
and the Epicureans were, the philosophers of that
generation.
And in the marketplace and in the synagogues
he disputed daily with men.
Whether it's the marketplace or the synagogue, whether
it's the philosopher or the nominally religious person
whose mindset is Greek, Paul was in exact
collision and opposition to what they represented.
And he came in the foolishness of the
gospel.
He came in weakness to confound those who
think themselves wise.
Do you believe that what happened there was
just once and for all?
Just a historic episode that's put in the
scriptures here as a curiosity?
Or do you recognize that with God there's
neither past, present, or future?
That God sees things timelessly and what is
represented here is also timeless.
This is a classic, timeless confrontation between two
different minds, the secular and the sacred.
And therefore it deserves our deepest study and
examination.
I want to talk about how he came
to be there, which is also fascinating, not
by his own arrangement.
He was brought by men by circumstance, which
is to say he was brought by God.
Are you equating circumstances as being the same
as God?
Yes.
What, do you see it only as circumstances?
Then you have a Greek view.
Do you think you blessed your husband by
circumstance?
Were you unemployed by circumstance?
Were you got this problem by circumstance?
These are just circumstances that prevail in the
world?
You've allowed yourself to be suckered into a
secular Greek view.
God is in circumstances.
God is the author of circumstances.
That is the divine view.
That's the sacred view.
And I'll tell you what, to believe that,
and to live as if you believe it,
will change everything.
See, I don't believe that this is a
circumstance tonight, that somehow there was a little
hole in the program and there was a
need for some class.
You know what I believe?
You can shoot me.
I believe that this was divinely ordained.
And to believe it when you're the speaker
really requires faith.
We're laughing, but you know that's why we
don't believe it?
We cannot believe that we're vessels of God's
use.
We think that Paul was some kind of,
wow, I mean, bulging spiritual biceps or something
like that.
You know what he was?
Flesh and blood like his way.
The measure of his greatness was the measure
of his emptying that he could say for
me to live as Christ.
It was Christ in Paul who came up
to Mars Hill, and God is waiting for
a Christ in you to come up to
Cass Lake and to the school board and
to the community meetings and to the board
of education and to the faculty meeting and
to the physician's fraternity and wherever else it
is that God has appointed your life.
The same one who is in Paul is
in you, and God wants that one brought
to the Mars Hill where you are in
ultimate confrontation that some might cleave unto you
and believe.
This is classic.
What an opportunity, and Paul wasn't even looking
for it.
God brought the prepared vessel to the place
of his own choosing, his own time.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe in the timing of God?
I think that an hour has struck.
There ought to be a trembling in our
spirit.
There's a high, a new, deep and seriousness
in God.
And one of the indications of it is
that God is even bringing a subject like
this into the secular place.
The church has not sponsored this meeting tonight.
In fact, most of the churches around here
won't touch me with a ten-foot pole.
But the school system has given the auspices
of this meeting.
And when God has got to use the
world to bring his view to believers, you
can believe that we have come to an
urgent hour.
The timing is with God.
And when God brought Paul to Mars Hill,
it was right on in an express and
specific moment.
What an opportunity.
What would you have done if you were
there to confront the finest of Greek civilization,
the philosophers, the influences of society?
What would you have said to them?
God has a plan for your life.
Let me show you the fourth spiritual loss.
You know how Paul began?
While I was passing by in verse 23
and examining the objects of your worship, I
also found an author with this inscription to
an unknown God.
What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I
proclaim unto you.
And he proceeded that into verse 22 when
Paul stood in the midst of Areopagus, Mars
Hill, and said, Men of Athens, I observe
that you are very religious in all respects.
I like the King James better.
He says that I note that in all
things you are superstitious.
You want to know what a calculated insult
to an intellectual is?
Tell him that he's superstitious.
I mean, Paul could not have done worse
than to begin his remarks by saying, I
observe that in all things you're all superstitious.
It's like a slosh right in the kisser
by men who celebrate their intellect.
So Paul began with a point of offense
rather than to placate and make nice and
build up to his subject.
Do you know why?
He was not ruled by conventional wisdom.
He was ruled by the Spirit.
And when the Spirit required even a word
of offense, he spoke it.
The just shall live by faith is a
premise of the spiritual mind.
And if we're not prepared to do that
on Mars Hill, we can just forget what
we profess to be as Christians.
God has called us as his people to
a final hour of confrontation with the secular
world Greek in its spirit and in its
mentality in the same way that God brought
Paul.
And if it begins by an insult, if
it begins by collision, if it begins by
offense, will you retreat?
Will you back off?
If they call you dogmatic, prejudiced, superstitious yourself,
religious, narrow, you don't have a broad mind,
what could be a worse condemnation than to
be told that you're not broad-minded?
Would you retreat?
I don't get the sense as I read
Acts 17, and I've done it many times,
that Paul was kind of wishy-washy and
hoping.
I just sense such a boldness, such a
clarity.
It's a man talking to those who think
themselves wise who are really fools.
Children, infantile in their understanding, on their way
to hell and eternal death except they hear
the word of life out of the mouth
of a man whom they despised and called
a babbler.
For while I was passing through and examining
the objects of your worship, any people who
have for worship objects, there's a name for
them, idolaters.
When you have substituted objects for God, you
are guilty of idolatry.
And Paul lets them have it right in
the puss.
When I examine the objects of your worship,
see, this is either a man who deliberated
long before, what would I say if ever
I get to a place to speak before
philosophers?
Or he's a man who was brought in
the moment of God, but he was God's
man, full orb, who lived so habitually in
the spiritual mind that he had but only
to open his mouth to speak forth the
view of God.
Are we living habitually in the spiritual mind?
Are we heavenly minded?
Do you know what the world says?
If you're heavenly minded, you're no earthly good.
That's what the world says.
You know what God says?
Except you're heavenly minded, you're no earthly good.
Are you heavenly minded?
Do you see the things that are invisible
and eternal as being greater than that which
is visible, but momentary and transient in passing?
Do you treat the world with just the
faint kind of regard that it deserves and
you're not entranced by it and you don't
need its esteem and acceptance because it shall
pass away, but the word of God endures
forever?
For while I was passing through and examining
the objects of your worship, I also found
an altar with this inscription, to an unknown
God, where therefore you worship in ignorance, this
I proclaim to you.
What you worship in ignorance, I proclaim unto
you.
Doesn't that sound presumptuous?
Doesn't that sound arrogant?
How dare he profess to give a one
view that is authoritative and true as against
a whole host of men who have great
reputations and claim that what they believe is
ignorant.
Does that offend you?
I'll tell you what, until we become that
offensive, we're not yet the true church.
If our witness and testimony has not brought
offense, it's not probably true witness nor testimony.
If the world can receive it without adverse
reaction, it's not a true word.
Of necessity, our word has got to be
the kind that causes shock and displeasure to
those who are steeped in a secular mindset
and do not like the audacity of someone
who comes and says, this is the way
and I'll show it unto you and there's
no other way except I show it to
you, you're likely to perish.
See, that kind of an attitude is contrary
to the pluralistic spirit of the world that
says that there are many paths to truth.
To absolutely insist on one as being authoritative
and true mocks you as a dogmatist and
worthy of the derision of society.
We need to be that single-minded.
We need to see the realities of heaven
and hell and we need to be able
to identify false worship and name it and
speak it to those who are its victims
and show them another way.
So, I just feel like leaving it at
that point.
We didn't take any break.