Chapter 17 of the Book of Acts, about
the middle of the chapter, describes Paul in
flight.
He was sent away, it says, in the
14th verse, to go to the sea.
And they that conducted Paul brought him unto
Athens, and receiving a commandment unto Silas and
to Mophias, for them to come to him
of all speed, they departed.
So here's Paul brought by circumstances in which
he had nothing to do.
In the course of his apostolic life, brought
to a place he perhaps did not intend
to visit.
But what is to ensue now is a
divine encounter, because God had his man in
his place in his time.
And it begins with this very critical 16th
verse.
Now while Paul waited for them at Athens,
his spirit was stirred in him, when he
saw the city wholly given to idolatry.
This is the beginning of the whole enormous
encounter.
He saw something that stirred his spirit.
He saw a whole city given over to
idolatry.
And I just want to say that this
is not the obvious sight of anyone who
would happen to be passing through Athens.
Every city in the earth today, including Cast
Lake, is wholly given over to idolatry.
But how many Pauls are there whose spirit
within them wints as they see it?
This is not just natural human observation.
This is seeing by the eye of the
spirit that affects the spirit of God within
the spirit of a man.
Paul was acutely sensitive and conscious to anything
contrary to God.
And he immediately discerned the whole city given
over to idolatry.
And it pained him so much that he
grieved.
His spirit was stirred in him.
Other translations are even more graphic.
He was grieved, he was cut to the
quick, he was pained at that sight.
Therefore he disputed in the synagogues with the
Jews.
What does idolatry have to do with the
synagogues of the Jews?
And the answer is everything.
Because there's no place where idolatry is more
apparent than in the houses of religion.
So this is a logical connection.
It's not an accident that the first expression
of his grieved spirit is to dispute in
the synagogues with the Jews.
So here's something we need to observe already.
When Paul saw something, it wasn't that he
just clucked his tongue and felt bad about
it.
What follows from Paul's seeing or Paul's observations
are Paul's acts.
This is the book of acts.
And that too is part of a biblical
mindset.
That God gives us things to see and
to understand, not just that we should contemplate
them in ourselves or for ourselves, but that
they should eventuate in acts that affect and
bring a change or result.
So the whole pattern here is a remarkable
thing.
I think many of us think that if
something is spiritual, it's not to have practical
consequences.
The practical thing is what we call secular,
and the spiritual thing is what we call
contemplative.
The spiritual thing is something inward or personal,
but the practical thing is outward and physical.
Paul never saw any such distinction.
He only saw one thing.
We need to see that one thing too,
and seeing that one thing that results in
an act or consequence in a practical way
that affects life and society is the spiritual
mind.
Shall I repeat that?
That's a really important point.
That's why we've left all of the decisions
to the world, and they've allowed us to
make the decisions on the church.
If we're going to paint the building, change
the carpet, invite a speaker.
But the things that pertain to war and
peace, to the rise and fall of economies,
to the whole character and conduct of nations,
to life and death itself, that is reserved
for secular men in secular councils by secular
wisdom.
We are allowed by spiritual wisdom to determine
whether we're going to have an evangelist or
whether the church will have a program.
You understand what I'm saying?
It's a false distinction that God never intended,
that Paul never would have tolerated, and that
we need to understand and to alter.
So I'm really happy just to see this
progression.
Verse 16, his spirit was stirred in him
when he saw his eyes were open.
He was not a man who would say,
well, I'm not of the world.
What they do out there, that's just tough.
I'm just concerned for the church.
His eyes were open to see what was
going on in the world, and he knew
that the earth was the Lord's, and it
cut him to the quick to see that
men who were made in God's image were
given over to idolatry, the whole city.
Athens was the crown of civilization, the proudest
thing on the face of the earth, the
glory that was Greece.
So if idolatry was rampant in this supreme
place of civilization, what could we expect any
place else in the world?
He was jealous for the honor of God
in the earth, and therefore he was hurt,
therefore he disputed with the Jews and with
the devout persons, and in the market daily
with them that met with him.
Talk about getting right into the nitty-gritty
of the secular world, in the market.
He didn't confine his conversation only to the
synagogue.
He went into the market, where we need
again to go.
When Peter was released from prison and the
angel said, Go and stand in the temple
and speak all the words of this life.
It wasn't that Peter was sent to the
temple because it was religious.
He was sent to the temple because that's
where the public congregated.
Go and speak all the words of this
life.
Paul was in the marketplace, disputing, and this
is again where the word of God, the
mind of God, the views of God need
again to be brought.
And so from there certain philosophers of the
Epicureans and the Stoics encountered him.
Some said, What will this babbler say?
Others said, He seems to be a set
-aforth of strange gods, because he preached unto
them Jesus and the resurrection.
He didn't think that that subject was too
spiritual to express in a secular setting.
He didn't bring a social gospel that just
spoke about improving the physical condition of men
or a community program.
He brought the most sacred tenets of the
faith right into the secular place.
The most hairy, the most utterly supernatural, the
ickiest, the most offensive.
He brought as a practical matter-of-fact
thing to the consideration of men in the
deepest secular place, which is exactly where God
intended it to be brought.
The resurrection is not just a doctrine that
we can comfortably speak of within the context
of a church.
It's an awesome reality that needs to be
brought to the consideration of men deeply in
the world.
Paul knew that the prince of this world
ruled over the world, but he knew also
that God loved the world.
One of our mistakes has been to think
that because we are not of the world,
that we should be indifferent to the world.
Paul was not indifferent.
He came into it and brought the thing
that it most desperately needed to hear, the
reality of God and his views.
So he preached unto them Jesus and the
resurrection, and they took him and brought him
to Areopagus saying, May we know what this
new doctrine whereof thou speakest is, for thou
bringest certain strange things to our ears.
We would know therefore what these things mean.
For all the Athenians and strangers which were
there spent their time in nothing else but
either to tell or to hear some new
thing.
Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars
Hill and said, That deserves applause, because I
think we need to appreciate that Paul is
being borne up by the circumstances.
He was brought first by believers to Athens
to escape persecution, and then by circumstances he
is now being brought by Greeks themselves to
the chief place of confrontation, Mars Hill.
It is not something he asked for, something
he anticipated.
He is caught up in God.
He is a man instant, in season and
out.
He says that we should be prepared to
give an answer to anyone who asks of
us, the reason for our hope.
And now he himself is on the spot.
And what is he going to say?
By what wisdom shall he give answer?
It is a once and for all opportunity,
never to be given again.
History is going to be affected by this.
Men are going to be eternally lost and
damned on the basis of the hearing, receiving,
rejecting of Paul's statement.
God is going to bring forth out of
this future heroes of the gospel, the effects
of whose ministry will be felt elsewhere in
Europe, even to this very day.
As I mentioned last week, that Dionysius, who
is mentioned by name in Acts 17, as
cleaving to Paul and believing, is reputed by
church tradition to be the same one who
was a martyr in Paris, on Montmartre, the
hill of the martyrs in Paris, which is
completely lost to the Parisians today.
But it is supposed to be the same
man saved in Athens, on the hill at
Athens, becomes the man who brings the gospel
in the hill in what is today France
and was then pagan Europe.
So this is very consequential.
Besides serving us and giving us a basis
for understanding and a text, there is no
way that we can see the enormous implication
through time and through eternity, through one encounter.
We need to have that sense.
Do you know why?
That is a biblical mindset.
Before we came to this building tonight, as
we prayed at home, we prayed something like
that.
Lord, we know that there is going to
be an amplification, a consequence of this night,
far beyond those who come.
Far beyond Cass Lake, far beyond the state
of Minnesota.
We don't know, we can't imagine what it
will be.
It may come through someone who is in
this room tonight, and who is going to
be peculiarly touched by something expressed or done,
affected in a certain way that maybe sometime
in the future, ten years hence, in a
certain crisis that may come, something will be
quickened to them by what is being sown
tonight in their hearts that will give answer
for someone else in terrible crisis and save
them out of death.
And maybe it will be more than an
individual.
Who knows?
Maybe it will be consequential for many.
Or the tape going far beyond this room.
There is no way to estimate what will
be the reverberation unto the day of eternity
by anything that happens in any particular moment
of time.
Are you understanding me?
If we really believe that, how ought we
to live?
Another thing that we prayed tonight was, Lord,
save us from thinking that this is just
an ordinary evening.
That this is not a big encounter.
This is not standing before thousands.
It's just a handful of souls, local saints,
others, the curious.
You know, it's just a class, a lecture.
We can pray, but we don't have to
really get deeply in prayer as if everything
depends on it.
It's not one of the larger things.
It's just, you know, that's already a secular
attitude.
That by its own human opinion determines the
value of any certain thing in a scale
that it establishes, usually in terms of numbers.
The greater the number, the greater the value.
But how many were Marcel when Paul spoke?
Or who met him in the marketplace or
in the synagogue?
If we're measuring by numbers and that determines
the value or the importance, we have already
surrendered to a premise by which the secular
world itself determines its values.
Got the picture?
How desperately do we need to be returned
or restored to the radical spiritual mind?
Because if we had it, our whole life
would be different.
There would be nothing that we would consider
insignificant or unimportant.
There's nothing that we would think that we
could perform on the basis of our own
ability because we have the experience or the
skill.
We would have such a sense of the
manifold possibility of any single event that we
would be continually invoking the blessing of God
and the presence of God and saying, as
Paul said continually, who is sufficient for these
things.
People think that Paul was some kind of,
I don't know what, outstanding spiritual man that
we can't even begin to approximate what he
was.
He's just a rarity.
We could never hope to aspire to be
anything like him.
But that's wrong.
Someone has said that the world has yet
to see what God can do with any
man and woman who is totally yielded to
him, who totally would say with Paul, who
is sufficient for these things, and who not
only preaches the resurrection and Jesus, but lives
by the resurrection and Jesus in the secular
place.
Did I ever tell you how I tried
that as a high school teacher?
For those of you who have heard this
before, my apologies, but I just feel like
interrupting myself with this little anecdote because I
was quite young in the faith.
See, I'd heard about the resurrection.
I believed it because I was a young
believer.
I believed everything that God said.
But was it a doctrine or is it
a reality?
Is it something that happened 2,000 years
ago when Jesus broke the fetters of death
and burst forth out of the tomb?
Or is it something presently available to those
who believe for the very actualities and realities
of their life in every situation?
See, what was happening to me is I
had five classes a day of students who
didn't want to be there.
I taught a compulsory class on American history.
I had kids, black and white, of every
kind of shape and description.
They were out of it.
Crocked on drugs, prostitution.
It was a metropolitan school.
They were dull.
They were up all hours.
They hated teacher because he was white.
And in that context, I was required to
teach.
And what accentuated everything was that I was
not content merely to be a teacher of
history, even a good teacher of history, because
I was now a believer.
The Spirit of God was in me.
And I recognized that God was wanting to
transact something more than names, dates, and places.
We need to recognize what a ministry public
school teaching is and that the teacher has
greater access to the lives of young people
than do their pastors.
And things come up in classroom situations that
are so revealing and such openings for the
Spirit of God to move.
If we really believed and thought that the
Spirit of God can move in a secular
classroom.
And I could keep you up for the
rest of this whole session filling the time
with one anecdote after another of how the
Spirit of God moved in my classes.
The whole, virtually the whole youth section of
our assembly's church was filled with converts out
of my classes.
I had day classes of teenagers and I
had an adult night class.
And God went to town in both places.
I saw Him challenge and shake.
I saw the convicting presence of the Spirit
of God come right into the material.
We had a discussion on life after death
one day that was out of the history,
world history, about what the Egyptians believed.
And we began to discuss what death is.
Is it only the final cessation that comes
in what we call death when you bury
the body?
Or does death have yet other meanings?
Can you know death even while you live?
What does the Bible mean when it says
that the wages of sin is death?
Is that a valid question to ask in
a secular class?
Can the Bible be brought in as a
source and a text as being worthy of
the consideration of men as well as what
some atheist and non-believer has had to
say on any subject?
God just began to take that.
You could just feel the atmosphere heightening.
Under such conviction, the kids even forgot what
time it was or when the bell was
going to ring.
And before we knew it, I had seven
cardinal sins on the blackboard.
And that the wages of sin is death.
And I said, what's the answer to save
us from dying?
I said, some of you guys are in
death right now because of those very sins.
Sin is reduction of life.
Sin is restriction.
You're already experiencing that right now.
What's the answer?
Dead silence.
But what a silence.
What a hush.
Holy hush.
And some kid piped up in the back
room, Mr. Katz, he said, didn't we read
when we studied Israel that they practiced sacrifice
for sin, something like that?
Oh, yes, I said.
Yes, we did, didn't we?
I took my Bible up off the desk,
turned to Isaiah 53, began to read Isaiah
53.
He went to the lamb, went to the
slaughter as a lamb.
By his stripes we're healed, and the whole
of the atonement of God.
And one of the last things that was
said before the bell rang was, because you're
not going to a church, God has brought
his church to you.
And I gave an invitation to receive the
Lord and to have the sins wiped away.
I took the oration, I went to the
board, and I wiped away the sins.
Seventeen kids raised their hands and followed me
in a prayer for salvation.
Other such adventures, wholly unplanned, unpremeditated.
I don't know if I would have had
the courage, let alone the intelligence of how
to take a secular subject as a means
of leading kids to a place of eternal
salvation.
But it was beyond my intelligence, beyond my
planning, and beyond my courage.
And, of course, there was complaint.
You want to hear how God answered that?
By the same wisdom?
Because by that time, and shortly thereafter, I
was getting rather frequent invitations to the principal's
office.
It's interesting that the ones who complained were
Christian parents.
By and large, few if any complaints from
Jewish parents or others, but Christian parents of
a certain kind were offended by the supernaturalness
of the God that I was proclaiming or
setting forth in the course of our discussions.
It was getting their kids stirred up.
And they didn't like their kids getting agitated
about God and getting interested why it might
actually interfere with their prospect for middle-class
success.
What if he decides to become a missionary
instead of an engineer?
Then what?
His whole life is ruined.
Have you ever heard, I don't know if
you believe this, but there are Jewish parents,
I've heard this many times from Jewish believers,
who have said to their kids, formerly drug
addicts, and just the most desperate specimens, I
would much rather see you continue in drugs
or even dead than you should have called
on that name.
You've ruined your life.
Isn't that remarkable?
Well, I was called up to the principal's
office.
He was a Presbyterian lay preacher, something like
that.
It's getting warm in here, isn't it now?
And he said, he was really steaming, getting
these calls.
Mr. Cassie said, don't you know you're going
beyond the rules and regulations?
I thought, yeah, that's right, I am.
I was stroking my chin and then I
look up and I said, without any deliberation,
I said, but what would you do if
you were at a beach and you saw
someone going down for the proverbial third time,
crying for help with the water coming out
of their nose and ears and just a
moment away from death and there was a
sign on the beach that said, no swimming
allowed.
What would you do?
Get out of my office!
Yes, there's a rule and regulation, but when
it's a matter of life and death, you
need to set aside or the law transcends
the limitations imposed by men.
It's another statement of why there is so
desperate a need for the sacred to come
into the secular.
The fact that men have raised up their
laws and their regulations shows how far we've
allowed their definitions to prevail.
And one of the most melancholy practices is
to be found in evangelical churches on Sunday
night when they have an evangelical meeting to
those who are already believers, already saved, hoping
that maybe somebody will come in through the
door.
So the message that should be going out
to the secular world in the secular place,
stand and speak all the words of this
life, is being rehearsed with the same believers
week after week after week who are already
saved.
So much are we boxed in by the
definition and the restraint that society has established
to protect its own interest while the issue
of life and death and eternity goes unattended.
One of the reasons that we allow it
without complaint is that we are not really
that persuaded about the issues of eternity.
We do not really burn for the sense
of hell that awaits those who have never
called upon his name.
It's a doctrine which we technically believe in
very much the same way that we believe
resurrection.
But we do not believe burningly to the
place where our spirit can wince within us
as we see the condition of our students
before us.
And therefore we dispute daily or open our
mouths or give the Spirit of God the
opportunity to move in a place where he's
not expected and to bring up the nets
himself.
Well, at any rate, given the kind of
situation that I was in as a student
who didn't want to be there and the
other kinds of opposition, it was exhausting to
carry on five times a day.
So you can learn to coast as a
teacher.
You can put your assignments up on the
board, turn to a chapter so-and-so,
do problems two, three, and four, and then
pick up your newspaper and read it from
the desk.
But if you're going to lecture, if you're
going to speak, if you're going to lead
this discussion and seek to bring something forth
out of that, that's tremendously demanding.
And five times a day is an exhausting
thing.
And I never made it to the fifth
class.
By the third class, my legs would go
weak, my voice would go hoarse, my mind
would go numb.
And I realized if I'm going to make
it to the end of the day, I've
got to restrict myself and parcel myself out
a little bit at a time.
But as I became intrigued with the issue
of resurrection, I asked, how far could I
go?
If I come to the end of myself
and trust God, would his resurrection life be
available to me that I might say that
I live by him?
Because there's a scripture that says that as
Jesus lived by the Father, so ought we
also to live through him.
This is the love of God toward us
that God gave his Son, that we might
live through him.
Do I dare try it?
And what if that life doesn't come?
And what if I'm there by the third
or fourth hour of class with my face
sticking out?
No voice, no strength, no ability.
I'll tell you what, if you don't have
a command over the class by your very
presence and your look and the energy of
your life, those students could just about come
up out of their seats and let you
have it.
Because I had never forgotten when I was
a merchant seaman how a flock of pelicans
were flying over where we were in Florida
and some character picked up a big heavy
nut and bolt and threw it up into
the midst of that flock and hit a
bird.
They were flying so peacefully together in formation,
but when that one bird was struck and
fell out of formation, went into a nosedive,
to my utter shock and amazement, the rest
of the birds that had been flying peacefully
with it now came down to attack it
and began pecking this thing to death, the
wounded and weakened member.
I'd never forgotten that sight.
You know what I thought?
If I ever get weak before these kids,
if they ever sense that I'm losing control,
that I don't have the voice and the
authority and I'm beginning to wobble and my
mind goes dull, they might just about get
up out of their seats and let Whitey
have it.
Do I dare take the risk?
Well, I was going to trust God for
the resurrection.
I came that day and I pulled out
all the stops.
I just gave everything I had.
I talked, I led, I carried on.
By the second period, I could feel the
third period, I was really weakening, and there
came a perilous moment.
Hey, you'd better be wise and conserve your
strength.
You'd better not be too extreme and take
this risk.
Remember, God understands you're only young in the
faith.
But that still small voice that was beckoning,
and I went all the way, I gave
everything I had, and I ran out.
My voice went, my mind, I couldn't remember
my name.
I didn't remember what period of the day
it was.
I just lost my whole presence and my
legs were weak and sagging.
I was just about to go down and
I thought in that last moment, I began
to see them coming up out of their
seats.
In that last, utterly pitiful moment, and in
that moment, I want to tell you, something
came into me, a strength, a power, a
source of life.
I could just feel from my legs up,
that the strength not only came back, it
exceeded what I had before.
My throat cleared completely, my mind cleared, I
had real command presence, I knew where we
were going, and we moved into another dimension.
We shifted gears, and we moved into a
transcendent dimension on the basis of His resurrection
life.
I just want to go on record, and
I've said this before, I want to say
it tonight.
I think that the issue of the resurrection
is going to be the issue at the
end of the age.
We know that there's going to be a
world church, an apostate church, and we know
there's going to be a true church, and
the two are going to be in collision.
And I think that the difference is not
going to be the difference in vocabulary.
They will all speak the same essential doctrines,
but the difference is going to be a
church that is moving in the life and
the power of the resurrection, and those that
are moving in that which is human and
opposed.
That issue is not going to be decided
in a final moment.
It's an issue that's being decided day by
day now, even in the way that we
conduct ourselves in things in which we think
we do not need the power or the
life of God.
We need to come to a transcendent place.
We need to shift gears to believe for
and expect and move in that life.
When Paul preached to the Greeks, Jesus and
the resurrection, he was not just technically speaking
the subject, he was demonstrating it even as
he was speaking.
Because I'll tell you what, if he did
not speak the resurrection in the power of
the resurrection, I don't know that he would
have come down from that hill.
It says, Some clave unto him and believed.
Indicates that they were not just persuaded by
technical arguments or the technical truth.
They clave unto him and believed suggests to
me that they saw the very reality and
the demonstration of the words in the man
who proclaimed them.
He didn't just speak the resurrection, he demonstrated
it.
And it's a place where we need to
be.
To expect it is part of the spiritual
mind.
To come to a transcendent place above human
energy and ability.
So Paul stood in the midst of Mars
Hill and said, and that's where we spoke
and discussed last week, said what?
What would you say having this one opportunity?
What are the right words if you're not
going to have this chance again?
You'll have to get the tape, I don't
want to go back over that material, but
it's not at all what one would expect.
It's not a conventional evangelical sermon.
He seems to rub his hearers the wrong
way.
He insults them.
I perceive that in all things you're too
superstitious.
Him whom you ignorantly worship, I declare unto
you.
It was not a nice statement calculated to
appease men or to warm them up toward
the speaker as we see so often in
our church and conference practice.
It was almost offensive.
It was offensive.
But they were the words that God gave
out of God's own wisdom that do not
need to be explained to those to whom
they're being spoken.
It was the strategy of God and not
of Paul.
Given in the moment by the life.
We just came back from a weekend's ministry
around the Minneapolis area, New Ulm, places like
that, Redwood Falls, and we stayed at the
home of a dentist who came to two
of the full gospel meetings, Friday and Saturday
night.
After Saturday night's meeting he said, this meeting
was altogether different from last night's meeting.
I said, yes, that's right.
And if you'll be with us tomorrow morning,
you'll see yet something altogether different from tonight.
Why is that?
Because each has its own requirement.
And God measures out what is appropriate.
Not just in the word, but even the
manner of speaking, the atmosphere, the whole course
of each of those occasions was totally different,
given of God.
Which is as it ought to be.
If there's something that's coming with predictable regularity,
we can suspect it is probably more merely
the work of man than the work of
God.
In the beginning, God created.
And we ought to see that creativity still,
if it indeed is his life that is
being expressed.
Okay.
The last thing that we discussed at the
end of last week's meeting was verse 24.
Posted in the midst of various pages, it
said, Men of Athens, I observe that you
are very religious and superstitious in all respects.
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.
What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I
proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and all
things in it, since he is Lord of
heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples
made with hands, neither is he served by
human hands, as though he needed anything, since
he himself gives to all life and breath
and all things.
That may just sound like a little piece
of preaching, or a nice true statement, but
it is loaded.
It contains a whole theology.
It contradicts the whole wisdom of the Greeks.
It introduces a totally different perspective of men
who like to believe that God is unknown
and beside that, unknowable.
And that the world itself is a kind
of chaos or cosmic accident that just came
into being in an unexplainable way.
If God is unknown, how then can you
understand creation?
And therefore, whatever order there is, whatever sense
there is, whatever purpose there is, has got
to be provided by men rather than by
God.
I'm going to repeat this because this is
so important.
The issue of whether the universe is an
accident, a chance creation, or whether it is
the creation of God is tremendously important for
everything that follows.
If it's an accident, then men themselves, finding
themselves in it or on it, are required
to fashion their own life, their own morality,
their own ethics, what they think is right.
What else shall they live?
But if there's a creator who is God,
by that very fact, if he made the
heavens and the earth, there must be a
purpose, there must be a way that he
intends for men to live in the earth
that he created and the men whom he
fashioned in his own image.
So this is not just simply a statement
about the origin of something.
It has an implication for life now.
And so it's no accident that we find
Paul saying that God who made the world
and all things in it, which means he
made you Greeks too, don't take credit for
yourself to think that your life is your
own.
Since he is Lord of heaven and earth,
does not dwell in temples made with hands.
The issue of creation is the issue of
lordship.
And not just Lord of the heavens.
See, we don't mind, okay, so God made
the earth, okay, praise the Lord.
That's nice.
And we'll allow him even to be the
Lord of heaven.
But the Lord of earth gets a little
sticky because that's where we live.
And what we do not want is his
lordship on the earth where we are.
We want to be self-willing, freewheeling, independent,
autonomous men doing our thing.
So in one statement, Paul cuts right into
that whole secular Greek mentality.
He's not just making a chance remark about
the origin of creation.
He's showing what the implication is.
Since he is the Lord of heaven and
earth.
I don't have the ability or the time
just to tell you of the consequence that
flows from these two different views, secular or
spiritual, about the issue of creation.
The whole rise of dictatorships, of Nazism, of
fascism, of elite minorities leading mankind down into
rivers of blood.
The dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxism, every one
of the ideologies of modern times is a
direct result of the fact that men believe
that the universe is an accident which leaves
a vacuum for man to fill.
But what kind of man?
Elite man.
A leader, a fueler, an ideologist, a Karl
Marx, to lead the rest of the fools
into the brotherhood which ends up into being
unspeakable death.
If there's no God, then men have a
complete vacuum to fill themselves.
But if he's the Lord of heaven and
earth, that changes everything.
One of the ways in which this conflict
has a final expression is when someone who
believes as Paul does falls into the hands
of those who believe as the Greeks do.
And it's remarkable that the torture and the
horror that is perpetrated on believers by secular
men, I just read that this afternoon in
a report from Richard Wurmbrand how in Nicaragua,
assemblies of God's people, a man watched his
daughter being raped and he had his eyes
gouged out, other men were found dead with
their bodies mutilated, their sex organs cut off,
and they stepped into another in the most
horrendous, unbelievable, demonic torture of believers.
They're not just content to kill them, but
there's something in them that's malicious, that's bitter,
that wants somehow to rub dirt in their
face and I can't articulate this, but my
spirit senses and understands why it goes back
to this.
They want to hear these men, we can't.
Yes, we never did really believe it was
only foolishness.
They want some contradiction because these men represent
something that is so contrary to everything upon
which their secular life has been predicated.
They can only get them to contradict it,
to disparage God, even to curse God because
of their suffering.
Where is your God?
Look how we're treating you and he does
not interfere and we have complete sway over
your body even to this torture.
But you know what the testimony of saints
have been through the generations?
They die gloriously even at the hands of
those who abuse them pitifully.
And the same thing took place in the
crucifixion of Jesus.
He wasn't just executed.
He was tortured.
He was marred more than any man.
He had no comeliness that we could desire
him.
The world and its hatred against God, who
is the Lord of heaven and earth, had
opportunity to ventilate its hatred and bitterness against
this stubborn fact, against that one who represents
this view.
We're not just talking about an idle difference
of opinion.
We're talking about something that strikes at the
heart of the whole way in which men
order their thought and live their lives and
have their values.
That goes back to the issue of is
God the creator of the universe and therefore
also the Lord of heaven and the earth?
And can you believe that he is the
Lord of the earth and yet he's allowing
you to suffer at the hands of those
who despise him and not interfere for your
release?
The remarkable thing is that the glory that
is revealed and that kind of patient endurance
and suffering is the final revelation of the
God who is the Lord of heaven and
earth.
Because you remember what that centurion said who
stood at the base of the cross and
watched Jesus die?
He said, truly this is the Son of
God.
Something was revealed in the suffering, the patient
suffering and magnanimity of Jesus in death who
didn't curse those who were killing him but
prayed instead for their forgiveness.
He exhibited something that's beyond human nobility and
human character.
See, this centurion had seen many squirming, shrieking,
howling, cursing, spitting, pleading, weeping, self pity but
he saw men exhibit none of these things.
He saw men praying for those who persecuted
him and yielding up his spirit to the
Father.
Receiving what was coming upon him as somehow
serving the purposes of the Father and therefore
willing to endure it with great grace.
He said, truly this is the Son of
God.
So, we need to see that though we're
speaking about one or two verses what is
contained in these verses are unspeakable depths of
things that Paul knew in his heart and
though it was confined only to one or
two statements the spirit of all that Paul
comprehended and understood was somehow carried by his
words and I sense that the Greeks who
heard them were stung in their hearts.
They recognized that he is the Creator and
also the Lord of Heaven and Earth.
What is the implication of that for me
who is doing his own thing if he's
the Lord of both Heaven and the Earth.
And I hope that we'll get a chance
to finish this in our one more session
next week but Paul does not leave them
without letting them know also that God has
appointed a day in which he will judge
all men by that man whom he has
raised from the dead even Jesus Christ.
He does not allow them to be ignorant
of the fact that God commands all men
everywhere now to repent for he has appointed
a day in which he will judge all
men.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
That not only is he the Lord of
the Earth but you're going to be judged
and suffer an eternal consequence for living in
complete indifference to that fact that he is
the Lord of the Earth because the way
you've been conducting your life you would think
you were the Lord.
You made the decisions.
You called the shots.
You picked up and went when you wanted
and did this and did that and raped
and looted and had your relationships and enjoyed
yourself with complete indifference to what his will
is who made the Heaven and the Earth
and is the Lord of them and you.
You're going to be judged.
If you think Paul went up there just
to have a light discussion he was wrestling
for the souls of men who ignorantly worshiped
him.
I boldly declare unto you this is an
eternal confrontation.
It contains all of the elements that will
ever be found when the world is going
to be confronted by the people of the
Spirit.
That's why we need so deeply to be
instructed.
And the fact that we are not today
confronting and expressing these things and warning them
shows that we really do not deeply believe
them as Paul did.
That our Spirit is not wincing when we
see the whole city given over to idolatry.
And you don't have to go to Athens
to find that.
You can stay right here in Catholic and
watch the people looking into their boot tubes
or shining their cars or farmers with their
equipment and the myriad forms of idolatry that
are everywhere in human life and practice.
But our spirits are not wincing because to
a certain degree we're ourselves given to it.
We're not seeing as Paul saw and we're
not speaking as Paul spoke.
Paul was a man who exemplified the spiritual
mind.
And that's why God brought him to an
ultimate place in confrontation with that which is
its opposite to secular.
I mentioned the books that have been an
inspiration for me both by the same author,
The Secularist Heresy.
And here's what he says in the introduction
of why he wrote this book.
One of the questions which this book tries
to answer may be framed thus.
In what ways is the Christian message contaminated
by the intellectual temper of the civilization in
which it is now preached?
Many others have tackled the problem of how
to present the Christian message in a way
that's intelligible to 20th century mind.
I have addressed myself to the opposite problem.
That of keeping the Christian message free of
corruption by 20th century habits of thought which
are fundamentally hostile to it.
You say, Art, what is he saying in
your words?
What he's saying is this.
The thing that occupies him is how to
preserve the Christian message in its truth and
purity and power in a secular world that
is everyday impinging upon it and toning it
down and reducing it and removing its radical
content and making it a little patsy addendum
to the busy world.
His concern is to preserve it, keep it
free of corruption from the habits of thought
which are fundamentally hostile to it.
What are the habits of thought?
They're the world's way of seeing.
They're the secular mind.
Yes, there's an eternity.
Most people will acknowledge and think that there's
an eternity.
But we'll worry about that when we die.
That's the habit of mind he's talking about.
See, they recognize something is technically true, but
they do not see it in the power
of the truth and the fullness that God
intends.
Not that it's positionally there, but that eternity
ought to be considered now.
If we're going to be judged, we're going
to be judged for eternity.
So our present acts now affect everything that
is set in the context of eternity.
This writer goes on to say, and I'm
not good enough to find exactly the passages
to put my finger on it.
Maybe I can.
That if we believe that, all of our
acts would be different.
Because everything that we did, we would be
thinking of in terms of how it will
affect eternity.
In fact, even taking eternity into consideration will
affect your present in terms of pleasure, pain,
suffering, hardship, trial, difficulty.
If you're just living in the present moment,
these things are going to have such a
proportion as to wholly possess your life.
But if you see them in the context
of eternity, as for example, that God may
by these very things be shaping your eternal
character, that your life does not end when
you die, but you take with you what
has been formed in this lifetime as an
eternal possession.
And if you've allowed the process of God
to be worked through the things that have
come into your experience, even suffering, even hardship,
that somehow there's a refinement, then a purging
and a refining that brings you to a
place in God closer to the presence of
the Lamb and to the light that He
is than you would otherwise occupy.
If there's an outer darkness, is there an
inner light?
And are we having something to do with
where we're going to be eternally stationed?
Yes.
Because we know that there'll be those who'll
be cast out into outer darkness.
Why?
The way they lived in this lifetime determined
their eternal position.
Do we really believe that?
That the way that we live in this
lifetime determines our eternal position?
And therefore, do we have a view about
this lifetime that is appropriate?
Do we treat it as the transient, temporary
thing it is in the light of the
eternity that is endless, that follows?
See, I'm almost speaking of a medieval view.
I sound like something out of the Middle
Ages, before the age of reason and enlightenment
came.
And it's interesting that when it came, what
happened?
Men became this world-centered and we saw
the whole rise of industrialism, affluence, prosperity, sensual
living, all the things that pertain to this
life and with it a corresponding loss of
the sense of the life to come.
The question is, which of these two views
is true?
And is it really true for us if
we're not living in such a way as
to reflect it?
Paul was extremely conscious of God as judge.
That's a spiritual mind that needs to be
restored.
He writes in this other book, the Christian
mind has allowed itself to become subtly secularized
by giving a purely chronological status to the
eternal.
Do you understand that?
It's just a matter of time.
But eternity is much more than just endless
time.
That is to say, the Christian has relegated
the significance of the eternal life to the
life that succeeds this one.
He only sees it as something that follows.
He does not see it as something that
has a present value and significance.
In doing so, it has enabled itself to
come to terms with the secular mind on
a false basis.
The basis is that here and now, Christians
and secularists can share the same conceptions, attitudes,
and modes of action since the essential difference
between them is the dispute whether or not
there is God's eternity beyond this world is
one which begins to be applicable only when
this life has ended.
What he's saying is we have already so
reduced ourselves and compromised that the only issue
of discussion is when it will take place
and not whether there is a present significance
of anticipating eternity that affects your conduct now.
Would history have been history if nations had
a consciousness of eternity and eternal judgment?
Would Stalin have been Stalin?
Would Hitler have been Hitler?
Would there have been wholesale rivers of blood?
Would abortion be taking place now in the
volume that it is by the millions if
men really believed that they were going to
stand before the God of heaven and earth
in judgment?
Why is it that this is absent from
their consciousness?
Because it has not been pressed there by
the only agency that God has given in
the earth to do so, the church.
Because what this man is saying is true.
The secular thing has permeated the church and
has dulled our spiritual mind until while we
still technically hold the doctrine, we do not
hold it as a burning truth.
And it's reflected even in our own life.
We're not living in such a keen sense
that we ourselves will be judged.
And that's why there's so much scandal even
in the church, running off with the organist,
seducing the woman you're counseling, divorcing your wife
and marrying another, which is now going on
in wholesale proportion in the finest expressions of
our modern day Christianity.
Scandalous!
By men who are completely oblivious that God
is a judge.
It's an old-fashioned concept.
It's not in keeping with our modern mind
that you're going to be judged, held accountable.
This statement of Paul that he does not
dwell in temples made with hands, neither is
he served by human hands, as though he
needed anything.
Can open up a whole another volume of
things.
What does it mean if men think that
they can establish temples with their hands in
which God will dwell, or that they can
give God something that he needs?
It's completely setting something upside down and on
its ear.
It makes God dependent upon man.
It makes man the central and the primary
thing, and God is the secondary and the
subservient.
Lord, give me grace right now.
You need to understand what was in Paul's
heart.
It's more than he's not served by human
hands, but that what you Greeks need to
see is that you've got a complete distortion
that puts you at the center of all
of your consideration and makes God a supplement
for your life.
When it's exactly the opposite, that is true.
You're here for his purposes.
He's not here for yours.
So if you understand what I'm saying right
up to now, I want to ask you
a question.
Which view prevails today in the church?
The Greek view or the spiritual view?
Is man being served by God or is
man serving God?
Is the purpose of church to advance the
purposes of God and to obtain his glory
and to establish the triumph of his death
and resurrection?
To rule and reign in the earth?
To bring honor to the Father?
Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be
thy name.
Or is it that church has become a
kind of institution, an agency to provide comfortable
and pleasing services and other kinds of features
to augment and to make happy the life
of those who come?
What view is being promulgated in seminaries where
ministers are being trained?
Is it a jealousy, an insane jealousy for
the glory of God no matter what cost?
Or is it how to conduct church in
such a way as to benefit men, ensure
their continuation and not rock the boat?
See, Paul was striking at something very deep.
These Greeks were deceived because there was an
unknown God and therefore whatever notion they had
of him was of their own making.
It wasn't man made in the image of
God, it was God being made in the
image of man and diminished so that we
could serve him with our hands which makes
us the primary thing and him the secondary.
How much of that is possible even employing
the name of Jesus and the terminology of
Christianity?
We all in this room can use the
word Jesus or in Christianity today and in
fact it's remarkable how facile the name of
Jesus is on everyone's lips.
The Jesus revolution and the Jesus movement and
Jesus rock and roll and Jesus superstar.
The name has never been spoken more frequently,
liberally, easily.
But what is meant by the name?
Who is actually being invoked?
Who is being referred to?
Is it the authentic and awesome son of
God?
Or is it something conjured up in the
imagination of a man himself that serves his
ends which he labels Jesus?
That's idolatry.
That's putting God in your box and being
guilty of the very error that Paul was
pointing in this text.
You ever hear the statement about a liberal
religion will do you good, but don't get
extreme about it.
Don't get carried away and don't get fanatical.
But a liberal religion, fine.
What does that show?
Man is going to determine the amount and
the extent to which you can dabble in
God.
But the important thing is don't get carried
away.
Don't get lost in God.
Don't get fanatical.
After all, it's you that counts.
How it affects you, what benefit, and if
it enhances your life, good.
It's great for the kids.
Sunday school, nice.
Family that prays together, sticks together.
But don't get carried away to the point
where your self-interest or identity is somehow
lost or dissolved in God.
It's very much the same spirit and the
same wisdom being expressed.
The whole issue is the issue of religion
as serving human ends or divine ends.
And if it is not serving divine ends,
is he the Lord of heaven and the
earth?
And if divine ends are being served, does
that mean that we're left out in the
cold?
We really are throwing our lives away because
we believe that he's Lord and that the
whole purpose of our being and our salvation
and the church itself is to serve his
purposes and his ends.
Does that mean we become nothing?
We lose our identity?
We're lackluster?
We could have had a brilliant career.
Could have been in pictures.
But I became a preacher.
The paradox is that you'll never find your
life until you lose it for his sake.
And the phrase for his sake punctuates many
of Paul's epistles.
For his sake.
And I want to tell you that Paul
was no non-entity.
He didn't lose his identity.
He didn't become some lackluster piece of grey
thing, a little piece of religion because he
lived for his sake.
Because he was so spent for God and
for his sake, there never was a more
formidable man on the face of the earth
in stature, in fullness, in full orb glory
of true man with true God as what
Paul himself expressed.
That's what makes him an apostle.
To the degree that we lose the God
as the center, we move from the apostolic
frame and we become something much less.
I just want to point to what, though
the text is very brief, each statement is
like a sword.
It is sharp.
It goes right into the kishkes.
It finds its way right into the depths
of these Greeks and finds them out and
reveals their phoniness and removes their false posture.
To the unknown God, you phonies, you never
really desire to know him.
He's only unknown because you choose to have
him unknown.
He's available.
He's the God who made the heaven and
the earth.
He's the Lord of all.
But God winked at your ignorance in times
past.
But he's commanding.
He's not making it an option.
He's commanding men now everywhere to repent.
What an upstart.
This Jewish pipsqueak.
How dare he?
On their turf.
Hey, shouldn't he have respect for them?
I was in Egypt in Cairo and five
times a day you hear the Islamic call
to prayer with the loudspeakers that drown you
out.
It's right out of the pit of hell.
Your hackles go right up.
You're preaching and your mouth is so good
but you can't even hear your own words.
You know what they do?
They have planted these loudspeakers right by the
churches.
They have bought property right alongside the churches.
I was awake at five o'clock in
the morning in a hotel room from the
call to prayer.
I could hear them in, breathing over the
loudspeaker.
It's a Muslim country.
They can do what they want.
They can drown out and blow out the
small bands of saints that are there.
And in one of my messages I said
something about this satanic thing, this Islamic revolution
that is sweeping in.
The audacity to drown out the voice of
God.
And I was taken aside by a very
sincere young Christian man.
He said, you need to speak more respectably
about other religions.
After all, we are intolerant.
See how far the secular mind has gone?
It's as if other religions have a validity
that need to be recognized by us.
I hope you understand the spirit of which
I'm saying this.
I'm not saying we're going to go in
and tear out their wires and thumb the
nose.
We love them.
They're in a terrible deception.
But I'll tell you what, we reinforce that
deception by treating it with a kind of
respect as if it has a legitimacy and
a value and not let them know that
we believe that it came out of the
pit of hell.
But what does that say for the man
who spoke to me like that, who's a
leading Christian in that congregation?
We need to respect other religions.
Paul didn't have that attitude.
Plurality.
Many paths to God is one of the
most hideous satanic lies and deceptions.
I spoke at the University of Ohio a
few months ago and the first meeting was
with an international student.
10% of the student body is from
all over the world.
There were men there from Red China.
Instead of coming on tippy toes and being
very nice and just expressing a certain Christian
view for their consideration which should be considered
with other views, I went right to the
jugular vein.
I said every other faith is a lie
out of hell that God has commanded that
this gospel shall be proclaimed to all nations.
Go ye into all the world.
Preach this gospel to every creature.
It's not for the Jews alone.
It's not for the western world.
God intended it for China.
He intended it for Abyssinia, for Ethiopia.
Do you think they were offended?
They were leaning forward with such an intensity
like, wow, this is the truth.
Why haven't we heard it before and had
to come to us in a university setting?
I had two audiences with a man from
Red China who were so impressed.
He wanted to see me privately.
I left him with books, with tapes, and
he goes back to Red China to begin
to infiltrate.
And if ever we get to that country,
it's going to come through a man whom
we met in a situation when we spoke
boldly about the God whom they ignorantly worship.
Him declare I unto you.
If we think that we need to respect
and not offend, we have allowed a secular
attitude to subdue and to nullify the role
that we ought to be playing to save
men out of deception and death.
Paul was earnestly contending for their lives and
he was not mincing words.
Man needs to see that his religions have
put him at the center and therefore it's
a false center and that man is still
the measure of all things.
Do you know that statement?
The axiom of humanism is that man is
the measure of all things.
What would you say is the adage of
or the axiom of the spiritual mind?
If the secular mind says man is the
measure of all things, what then is the
opposite statement of the spiritual mind?
God is the center of all things.
But I'll tell you what, the world will
never believe it until we not only say
it but demonstrate it in which everything is
such a revelation, so exhibits the fact that
this is true.
Since it says he himself gives to all
life and breath in all things.
What was Paul's proof?
Since he gives to all life and breath
in all things.
See that's either a nice piece of poetry,
it sounds nice, or it's an awesome statement.
You know why it was an awesome statement
on Paul's lips?
Because Paul lived in him.
He moved and lived and had his being.
He gives to all all things.
Before we take a break, I want to
ask you a question.
Do you really believe in an apostolic way,
in a spiritual mind, that God gives to
all things?
If you don't, you'll never get up to
Marsau.
You'll never be used of God in the
significance that he intends and desires unless you
believe he gives to all all things.
Since he gives to all all things, do
you believe that?
Does that include unhappy things, trials, difficulties, suffering?
When Paul said he gives to all all
things, he meant all things.
How many times was he left for dead?
How many times was he shipwrecked and in
the sea day and night?
How many times was he stoned, beaten with
rods?
Where was his God then?
Paul said he gives to all all things.
You know who else believed that?
Job.
He said the Lord giveth and the Lord
taketh away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Have you seen my servant Job?
Have you found anyone on the earth like
him?
Perfect and upright in all his ways.
You know why?
He believes that the Lord gives all things.
And if he gives, what can we do?
We can either receive it and when he
takes it away, he takes it away.
If we're going to stand before this world
and confront them on the spiritual things that
touch eternity, we've got not only technically to
believe this, we've got to manifest it because
it is so deeply part of our life
and being.
The all things that are bad as well
as good.
Do you rejoice for the suffering?
Do you rejoice for the trial?
Do you rejoice for the difficult time as
coming from the same God who has blessed
you and blessed your finances and blessed your
fellowship and blessed your ministry and blessed your
marriage?
But what if he takes an infant?
As I found in a conference I attended
a few weeks ago, a woman's two-year
-old son was burned in a fire in
a community.
They got out and then, where's little Joey?
They didn't know where little Joey was and
the older sister who was supposed to be
responsible for him had fallen asleep or forgotten
or in the panic that he was up
there by himself and was burned to a
crisp.
What are you going to do?
Curse God?
Knock your fingers in his face and say,
where is he?
Which is exactly what the world wants to
hear you say.
Are you going to say, the Lord giveth
and the Lord taketh away?
It seems accident but surely God was able.
He's sovereign.
After all isn't he the creator of the
heaven and the earth and the Lord over
all?
Do we really believe that?
And how do we make an exception for
this tragedy?
I don't understand it, but I don't have
to understand it.
He's not obliged to give me an explanation
and I've got to praise and bless his
name.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
The Lord gives to all.
He said all things.
See Paul wasn't just crackling.
He wasn't a little professional minister who had
cheesy phrases.
This was out of the totality of a
life lived in a God who gives all
things.
And Paul could take the beatings the whippings
as well as the blessings of the use
of God that for which he shall be
eternally celebrated.
And that's why God brought that man to
that secular place.
Another aspect of that is that do we
really want a God who gives all things?
Who gives all things?
Hey, isn't there any room left for us?
Can't I deserve anything or get anything or
make anything because of me and my effort?
You want to know what every religion is
outside of the faith?
Whether you call it Judaism or Presbyterianism or
whatever name, it's a religion of self-effort.
Men want to do for themselves and obtain
by themselves, but they don't want to receive
from him who gives.
Paul went right to the juggler and he
knew those Greeks because they were men.
He knew why they wanted a false religion.
Because they wanted to earn and obtain by
their own works and their own efforts.
It's the same issue today.
Even within the church.
But Paul spoke of a God who gives
to all, all things.
What does that make us then?
We can only be receivers.
Blessed are the poor for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.
They have nothing.
Therefore God is able freely to give them
all things.
No pride.
But to whom does he give?
To this man I will look.
He who is of a broken and contrite
spirit who trembles at my word.
Somehow there's something in man that is vain
that would rather do and perform and obtain
than to come as a beggar to acknowledge
his poverty and to look at a God
who can only give.
He came to his own and his own
received him not.
But to as many as received him to
them gave he the power to become the
sons of God.
This statement that he gives to all is
unbelievably deep.
So let's just pause there.
Have a little break.
So seeing that he gives to all life
and breath and all things.
Do we really see that he gives to
all?
Do you see that in nature?
Do you see that in the circumstances of
your life?
Do you see it in the way that
you personally made that he gives to all
all things?
Do we have a sense of the givenness
of God?
Or do we attribute things to circumstance or
accident?
Or we do not have the respect or
the appreciation or the reverence for the things
that God has given?
You know to disrespect the earth, nature, the
creation, or even God's own people.
Do we really see them as given?
As treasure?
How privileged we are to be in fellowship
with the people of God.
They're given.
We didn't put an ad in the paper.
Wanted people to come and join us in
community or anything like that.
They're given.
And they're each rich, precious in themselves.
Do we really relate to each other and
to nature and to drinking water and to
breathing air and to enjoying good health and
a sound mind as things that are given?
If we do not, and I suspect that
we do not sufficiently, we cannot say to
the Greeks and to the secular minded as
God who has given all things.
See, the thing that makes Paul's word penetrating
is that he so deeply believes it and
lives as if he does.
That he has given to all, all things.
Do we have a sufficient appreciation for the
givenness of God?
I'm praying that I would have this for
my wife, for my children.
It's the very area where we take things
for granted.
For each other as believers in the body.
For the fact that we have peace.
That while we're talking tonight, there's not going
to be a knock at the door and
men with boots come in and knock down
the chairs and yank us out by the
hair and stick the police dogs on us
and put us into jail without any knowledge
of when we're going to get out.
Which is happening to other believers right tonight
in different parts of the world.
Are we receiving with gratitude in our hearts,
thanksgiving in our hearts the givenness of God?
Maybe we didn't recognize it as something given.
We had our eye on a certain boy
or a girl and it was going to
be a beautiful romance and marriage and it's
taken.
But do we see that as a provision
from God that saved us from our own
vanity?
From the fabrication of our own mind.
It was something given from God.
To keep us even from ourselves and the
messing up of our own lives.
I'll tell you what, maybe you need to
be 50 years old or more to begin
to have a sense of the givenness of
God that younger people don't seem to have
because there's a matter-of-factness and a
taking for granted which is contrary to the
spiritual mind.
The spiritual mind sees all things as given
and has thanksgiving in its heart for that
which is given from God.
Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is senseless, everything is
given.
And that changes everything, doesn't it?
What a difference if you think that things
are just happening, just an accident, I couldn't
help it, I guess that's the way it
is, the cookie crumbles.
I'm a victim as against one who sees
all things as given and that every day
is the Lord's day.
The whole character of your day is changed.
The whole way in which you perceive reality
and walk through it is altered because you
have another mindset, another perception as being given
from God.
You can't wait for tomorrow.
If tomorrow is going to be given by
God in His sublime wisdom, perfectly appropriate in
His love and righteousness for me and those
with whom I'm joined, I can't wait to
see that day unfold.
And if it comes in a disappointing way,
or we didn't have the Sunday service that
we could have hoped for, or the finances
are down, instead of you yet rejoice in
the adversity because it's not aimless, it's not
accidental, it's not mindless.
There's a God whose day that is in
whom He's given this situation and though we
don't presently understand it, we rejoice still and
can yet enter His gates with thanksgiving and
His courts with praise.
I tell you what, it may be the
very reason that He's given you the hard
time in finance or the marital difficulty, or
your own kids acting up, or the problem
in community or at school or job.
He wants to see if you'll be thankful
and rejoice and enter His gates with thanksgiving
and with His courts with praise.
That's the whole reason for the test.
Because it's the Lord's day.
This is the day the Lord has made.
Because there's something to Him that's more important
than your momentary happiness.
It's fitting you for eternity.
That you might enter His eternal courts with
praise.
What do we read in Revelation?
Every tongue, every tribe, every nation around the
throne of man doing what?
Praising Him.
I tell you what, if we don't begin
now, we're going to be very uncomfortable and
out of place then.
We have got to enter into this mindset.
We have got to come into this seeing
and act and live and walk as if
we really believe that.
This writer raises this question, do we as
Christians mentally inhabit the world presented to us
by the faith as the real world?
What world do we actually inhabit and practically
walk in?
Is what we believe on Sunday our technical
religious vocabulary but from Monday on through Saturday
we're living in another world, another mentality, another
vocabulary, another understanding.
What world do we really mentally inhabit?
Do we inhabit a world with a heaven
above it and a hell beneath it?
A world in which man is called to
live daily, hourly in contact with the God
whom neither time nor space can limit?
Do we think Christianly?
Does our personality bear the imprint of our
attempt to live the spiritual life?
These are the real questions.
The spiritual mind is not a luxury, it's
a mindset.
Set your mind, Paul says, on the things
which are above.
Have this mindset in you because our mind
determines our conduct in our life.
What is our thought?
What is our attitude?
What are the unspoken assumptions of our life?
We may sing the songs but deep in
our heart we're rankled, we're irritated, we're vexed,
we're unhappy.
This didn't happen right.
We don't like this because we do not
have the mind of Christ, the mind of
Paul.
We do not inhabit that mind.
This will blow you right out of your
seat.
He says for the Christian mind, earthly well
-being is not the summum bonum.
That's a Latin phrase that means the ultimate
good.
What is the secular mind?
For the secular mind, earthly well-being is
the ultimate good.
How you feel, how you dress, how secure
you are, how happy you are in your
personal circumstances is the ultimate good in the
whole purpose of your being.
He says for the Christian mind, that is
not the ultimate good.
What a basic, absolutely foundational and radical difference.
If we don't think that our physical and
personal well-being is the summum bonum, what
is?
Pain and death, he says, are not the
worst evil.
It is for those who are in the
world.
Eternal well-being is the final aim and
ends of things here.
This means that success and prosperity within the
earthly setup cannot be regarded as a final
criterion, nor indeed can happiness within time be
regarded as a final criterion.
Why?
Because your spiritual view takes something into consideration
that goes beyond time, beyond earthliness, beyond your
present feeling, beyond your health and beyond your
happiness.
It brings eternity into consideration and the God
who dwells in eternity.
This is the foundational and basic difference between
two mindsets and I don't know if we'll
take this up next week but I want
to say it now.
He raises the question, how long can these
two different absolutely opposite frames of mind continue
to go on without there being friction and
conflict?
Can I give you my little scenario for
the end of the age for which we're
rapidly tending?
Why it is that we shall be persecuted
in all nations for his namesake?
Because we're going to be insufferable.
We're going to be a presence in the
world that the world cannot tolerate because we
have a different mindset.
Because their concern for progress, social change, if
we're able to do this, manipulate that, handle
that, arrange that, we'll have bodily comfort, we'll
have this, we'll have that.
But there's going to be in the midst
of people who have another seeing, speak another
sound, have another set of values, see another
purpose, who will be not just an irritant
to be mildly tolerated but an actual obstruction
to the progress of mankind.
That it will be said of us what
was said of him, it is better for
the nation that one man die.
If we want to get this Jesus out
of the way, then our religion, our rule,
our mindset, our happy arrangement, our rabbinical Judaism,
our temple practice, our alliance with Rome can
go on unhindered.
But this one guy, his strange doctrine, what
he's about, the way men run to him
is an obstacle that can only be removed
by removing him.
And it's for that reason that the love
of many will grow cold.
We're going to find ourselves either moving toward
a more radical position in God which will
invite reproach from the world or we're going
to find ourselves day by day condescending to
the world and nodding our heads.
Have you ever been with a group of
people when they're making jokes, cracking jokes, and
you're sort of like standing there and there's
something almost involuntary that rises up in you
in which you nod or you smile or
you kind of chuckle or laugh to be
one of the boys.
But to stand there stone-faced, unmoved, not
entering into their joke and the premises of
their joke marks you as different.
We're making decisions every day right now, hour
by hour and moment by moment of which
we're not even conscious that is moving us
to one pole or the other, either to
an increasing accommodation to the world or a
further remove and alienation from it, standing radically
with the people of God.
We need to be conscious of what is
happening and the pressures and the kind of
mind that we need consciously to have and
to inhabit and to live and to have
our being in him who gives all things.
So we need to cultivate the eternal perspective.
It will not come to us accidentally.
This mindset, this spiritual view, this alternative to
the secular mind needs to be consciously nurtured,
cultivated, sought for, contended for, held and consciously
lived in or elusive.
And it's going to go right against the
grain of the entire world.
It's going upstream against current.
And you'll only do it for one reason,
for his sake, for his glory, because he's
first.
If you've got yourself as your first consideration,
you'll never move against the current that is
so forcibly going the other way.
So we're not talking about light things, but
great things.
And we're coming to a final collision between
these two minds.
So I don't want to send you discouraged.
You know why Paul could say these things
to the Greeks?
This is my final thought for tonight.
I've just got to share this.
That God gives all things and say it
with credibility and with penetration.
In Acts 17, because you know where Paul
was in Acts 16?
Who knows where Paul was in Acts 16?
In jail in Philippi.
In the inner dungeon with his feet in
the stocks, with his back cut with 39
strokes of the cat and nine tails till
his flesh hung in ribbons.
But it says at midnight, Paul and Silas
prayed and sang praises unto God.
Because they did not look upon that beating
and that humiliation and that imprisonment as an
accident.
They received it as a praise and as
a glory that they were privileged to share
in the sufferings of the God who had
called them to Europe.
That's why Paul could say to the Greeks
in Acts 17, the God who giveth all
things.
But when he says it while there's a
bite, there's a penetration, there's a power, there's
an authority.
Not because he has some magical formula, but
because when he had to suffer the things
that God gives, he prayed and sang praises
unto God.
We have no more credibility, no more penetration,
no more anointing, no more impressiveness to affect
men in the world than to the degree
to which we've lived through and experienced that
which comes from the hand of the God
who gives all things and still enter his
gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.
Put on a spiritual mind and praise him.
I want to pray a blessing over all
of those who have come tonight.
Okay, we'll end with a prayer.
Thank you, Jesus.
Great Yeshua.
Lord, the more we talk about you, the
more we investigate your way, the more we
see the splendid thing that Paul is, who
is the very epitome of the expression of
the incarnate God.
And hear the way he speaks and the
way he confronts and what he represents.
The more we rejoice, Lord, that by your
grace we have been brought into a wonderful
way.
Lord, may we see, may our understanding be
opened.
May we be free, my God, from the
theories, the thoughts, the opinions, the subtle ways
in which the world wants to subdue us
and dull us and make us mediocre and
just go along with a kind of Sunday
religion sufficient for services.
May we see the fullness of the expansive
faith to which we're called and be able
to proclaim it and demonstrate it to men
with penetration, with force, because we are living
in that frame of mind.
Lord, I bless these children who have been
here tonight.
May they leave with rejoicing.
May they believe that their being here was
because it's the Lord's day and this is
the day that the Lord has made because
he wanted them to hear these things, because
he gave grace to a teacher to share
them and gave us a glorious text that
is not a fiction but out of the
life of an awesome man who profoundly believed
and walked out these things even unto death
as did his Lord before him.
May we walk also in this faith, my
God, this true faith, this mind, this way
of seeing.
Thank you.
Bless these children and seal these thoughts in
their hearts.
May it affect their whole week, everything that
comes before them and they see it in
another kind of light and live in that
light.
Bring us again for your conclusion next week,
my God, we pray.
We're so grateful for the way you've led
us.
Change us, my God.
Hallelujah.
Save us out of selfishness and narrowness and
self-centeredness.
To glorify the God whose earth this is,
who is the creator and the Lord both
of heaven and earth.
We'll thank you and praise you in Yeshua's
holy name.
Amen.