Welcome to From the Pulpit and Classic Sermons.
Each week we bring you a different message
from some of history's greatest speakers in the
Christian faith, and powerful sermons from modern preachers
too.
This week we have Tim Keller with his
message, Absolutism.
Don't we have to find the truth for
ourselves?
The scripture is found in Galatians 2 verses
4 through 16.
This matter arose because some false brothers had
infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom
we have in Christ Jesus and to make
us slaves.
We did not give in to them for
a moment so that the truth of the
gospel might remain with you.
As for those who seem to be important,
whatever they were makes no difference to me.
God does not judge by external appearance.
Those men added nothing to my message.
On the contrary, they saw that I had
been entrusted with the task of preaching the
gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had
been to the Jews.
For God, who was at work in the
ministry of Peter as an apostle to the
Jews, was also at work in my ministry
as an apostle to the Gentiles.
James, Peter, and John, those reputed to be
pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand
of fellowship when they recognized the grace given
to me.
They agreed that we should go to the
Gentiles and they to the Jews.
All they asked was that we should continue
to remember the poor, the very thing I
was eager to do.
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him
to his face because he was clearly in
the wrong.
Before certain men came from James, he used
to eat with the Gentiles, but when they
arrived, he began to draw back and separate
himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid
of those who belonged to the circumcision group.
The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy,
so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was
led astray.
When I saw that they were not acting
in line with the truth of the gospel,
I said to Peter in front of them
all, You are a Jew, yet you live
like a Gentile and not like a Jew.
How is it, then, that you force Gentiles
to follow Jewish customs?
We who are Jews by birth and not
Gentile sinners know that a man is not
justified by observing the law, but by faith
in Jesus Christ.
So we, too, have put our faith in
Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by
faith in Christ and not by observing the
law, because by observing the law, no one
will be justified.
This is the word of the Lord.
Each week we're looking at a...
We're choosing one of the things that trouble
folks in our culture, and especially in New
York City, the most about Christianity.
So we're trying to take each week one
of the things that people say, This is
my biggest problem with Christianity, or this is
my trouble, or this is my objection to
Christianity.
And today, tonight, we look at one that
could be put like this.
Christians believe they have absolute truth.
That is, they see that they have some
things that everyone should believe, and everyone should
do.
So Christians believe they have absolute truth.
But people who have absolute truth, the objection
goes, undermine freedom.
First of all, they tend to oppress people
who are different than they are, and they
tend to impose their views on others, so
they tend to harm other people's freedom.
And people who believe they have absolute truth
are themselves not really free.
Here they are under the burden of trying
to comply with this set of divine directives.
And our culture believes everyone should be free
to determine for themselves what is true.
Everyone should be free to determine their own
truth and what is right or wrong for
them.
So absolute truth is the enemy of freedom.
It harms and erodes freedom.
That's the objection.
What do we say to that?
How do you respond to that?
You know, the Supreme Court itself, by the
way, has actually enshrined the cultural mindset on
this in a famous passage in a 1992
ruling in which the Supreme Court actually said,
quote, the heart of liberty is to define
one's own concept of existence of the meaning
of the universe.
So there it is.
What do we say?
There's three things to say.
Truth is a lot more important than you
would think.
Freedom is a lot more complex than you
would think.
And Jesus is a lot more liberating than
you think.
Now, those three principles that, you know, oh,
absolute truth doesn't fit freedom well, truth is
more important, freedom is more complex, Jesus is
more liberating than you think, those principles are
found in this passage.
It illustrates these three principles.
Let's look at them.
First, truth is more important than you think.
The passage is a story.
It's an account of what happened in the
earliest days of the Christian church.
The earliest Christians were Jewish.
And because of that, they observed the Mosaic
ceremonial law, the ritual purity codes of what
you ate and what you could wear.
But when Paul went to the Gentiles and
preached the gospel, and many of them were
converted, when the Gentiles started coming to the
church, the question arose, has Jesus Christ so
fulfilled the ceremonial law, all the sacrifices and
the priests and the temple and all the
dietary restrictions and so on, has Jesus so
fulfilled all that that now they're obsolete and
we don't have to observe them?
And Paul's answer to that question was yes.
And amongst the Gentile converts, they didn't have
to do any of that.
Now, there was a controversy about that because
there were many people who said, no, that's
not right.
And see verse 4 and 5 at the
very beginning of the passage.
People came and spied on what Paul calls
the freedom we had in Christ.
So Paul had to go to a special
meeting with all the other apostles in Jerusalem
where he contended for the truth, verse 5
of the gospel.
And as we will see, everyone came to
agree that what Paul was doing was right.
But the point is, verse 4 and 5
says, we have freedom in Christ because of
the truth of the gospel.
And in a moment, later on, we're going
to get back to what that truth of
the gospel is.
But for a minute, I would like you
to just consider the relationship between truth and
freedom that Paul lays out in those two
verses.
Freedom, verse 4, comes from the truth.
That's the reason why Paul was fighting for
it.
Freedom comes from the truth.
And that's exactly the opposite of the way
in which we in our culture think.
We feel like if you have to comply
with the truth, if you're forcing the truth,
if you're having to obey the truth, that's
a lack of freedom.
Why do we feel that way?
One of the great, most influential philosophers, French
philosophers of the last few years was Foucault.
And Foucault writes something that you may not
have heard this quote, but the idea has
been extremely influential in our culture.
Foucault says, quote, truth is a thing of
this world.
It is produced only by multiple forms of
constraint.
And that includes the regular effects of power.
And what Foucault is saying is simply this.
Truth claims are power plays.
That when you claim to have the truth,
what you're really doing is trying to get
power over other people.
Claiming to have the truth is a method
of control.
Claiming to have the truth is a form
of constraint, a way of controlling other people's
behavior and getting power over them.
Now, that's the view.
And maybe you think that as a Christian
minister, I'm going to start off my response
by saying, what a lot of malarkey.
But I'm not.
I am not.
I think we need to hear that.
See, Foucault was probably the number one disciple
of Nietzsche in the 20th century.
And Nietzsche established the hermeneutics of suspicion.
And what somebody once said is the hermeneutics
of suspicion is really philosophical squinting.
And this is what they meant by that.
If you would make a truth claim to
Nietzsche, if you would say everyone should promote
social justice, everyone should do justice in the
world, Nietzsche would go, hmm, you're calling everyone
to justice, are you?
Why are you calling everyone to justice?
Is it because you love justice?
Or is it because you want to start
a revolution that will put you on the
top and give you power?
Or someone would say to Nietzsche, everyone should
obey God's Word, and Nietzsche would go, everyone
should obey God's Word, huh?
Of course he'd say this in German, but
I can't do that.
Everyone would obey God's Word, huh?
Why do you call everyone to obey God's
Word?
Is it out of love for God?
Is it out of love for His Word?
Or is it as a way of establishing
your moral superiority?
Is it a way for you to justify
yourself and to justify your oppressing and abusing
or marginalizing at least or ignoring people who
don't believe God's Word?
The reason I want you to listen to
what Nietzsche says and what Foucault says is
because it's exactly what Jesus says about the
Pharisees.
Jesus also says, when he looks at the
Pharisees, he says, your truth claims, you're claiming
to have the truth, but your truth claims
are ways of getting power.
They're ways of justifying yourself.
They're ways of justifying your group.
They're ways of getting control over God.
They're ways of getting control over other people.
Listen, truth claims in general, says Jesus, are
power plays.
And listen, when Foucault and Nietzsche and Jesus
Christ all agree on something, you know, it's
just got to be true.
I mean, it just has to be true.
But if you insist that all truth claims,
all the time, always are all power plays,
they always destroy truth, that all truth claims
destroy truth, that anybody who says they have
the truth destroys freedom, you're wrong.
C.S. Lewis's little book, The Abolition of
Man, is a great book.
And maybe my favorite passage in The Abolition
of Man reads like this.
He says, you cannot go on explaining away
forever, or you will find that you have
explained your own explanation itself away.
You cannot go on seeing through things forever.
The whole point of seeing through something is
to see something else through it.
For example, it's good that you can see
through a window, but that's only because the
garden behind is opaque.
But if you could see through everything, if
everything was transparent, a wholly transparent world would
be an invisible world.
And to see through everything would be the
same as not to see.
What's he saying?
See, he's talking about Nietzsche, and here's what
he's saying.
If you say all truth claims are power
plays, so is that.
What is that?
That's a truth claim, and so is that,
so I don't have to listen to you,
do I?
Or if you say, like Freud says, all
statements about religion and God are really just
psychological projections to deal with your own guilt
and insecurity, well, so is that.
What is that?
That's a statement about God and religion, and
so is that, so I don't have to
listen to you.
You know, you've explained away your explanation, see?
Or if the evolutionary biologists say, you know,
everything your mind tells you about God, morality,
and truth, everything your mind tells you is
really just hardwired brain chemistry that's there in
order for you to pass on your genetic
code.
Well, everything their brain tells them about everything,
including the evolutionary biology, is the same, so
why should I listen to it?
See, to see through everything is not to
see.
And to say no one should make truth
claims because that's just a power play, that's
the biggest power trip of all because that's
a great big needle.
You can go around and you can puncture
everybody's balloon.
You better puncture your own, and guess what?
You're back to square one.
Because everybody does make truth claims.
Everybody believes in truth claims.
To say no one should say they have
the truth is itself the most incredible power
trip.
It's a way of getting on top of
your sophistication, you know, and your jadedness over
everybody else.
Look, everybody does make truth claims.
You have to.
And therefore, it's not making a truth claim
per se that leads to oppression.
It's what's in the claim.
It's what's in the truth claim.
Example.
I have just been absolutely amazed by the,
like a lot of you, by the reports
coming out of Lancaster County in the aftermath
of the terrible tragedy.
You know, a man comes into a school
and slaughters these little girls, these Amish school
children.
All right.
And what do we see?
One of the things that most amazed me
was we understand that one of the little
girls who was killed offered to die for
the rest of them.
Said, kill me and let the rest go.
And by the way, they did not watch
television.
They did not see movies.
Where would she have gotten that idea of
dying for her friends?
And when it was all over, the amazing
thing, in fact, usually you could see the
reporters themselves were amazed, that the community and
the bereaved families not only forgave the man
who did it, but took up a collection
and prayed and forgave the widow and the
children of the man who did it.
Now by anyone's definition, the Amish are fundamentalists.
And they believe they have the truth.
And have you ever heard anybody say, oh,
fundamentalists, they think they have the truth.
That leads to oppression.
It didn't there.
Why not?
Because it depends on what the fundamental is.
And the fundamental in this case is a
man dying on the cross for his enemies.
A man with whose last breath he blesses
the people around him and prays for their
forgiveness.
And if you take that into the very
center of your life, then you begin to
see that it's not truth claims per se
that erode freedom.
It's what's in the truth claim.
It's true, of course, that truth claims can
be used to destroy freedom.
But there is no freedom without the truth.
Because as Jesus himself said in John chapter
8, the truth will set you free.
So it's not just that truth claims aren't
necessarily eroding of freedom.
You've got to have the truth and be
in touch with the truth to have freedom.
Only the truth will set you free.
What do I mean?
I've always wished I was a ship's captain
in say the 16th century.
I always wanted to be the captain of
one of those incredible ships.
And if I was a ship's captain and
I was trying to take my ship into
the English Channel, you know, between Britain and
France, but I made a mistake and I
sailed up the Bristol Channel, which is far
more shallow and I didn't realize it.
And I just plowed right across thinking it
was the English Channel.
Very soon I would have run aground.
Very soon my ship would be wrecked.
Everybody would be killed.
Why?
I was out of touch with the truth.
I was out of touch with the truth
of how deep the channel was.
I was out of touch with the truth
of where I was.
Maybe somebody lied to me.
Maybe I was just miscalculated.
But either way I was out of touch
with reality.
I was out of touch with the truth
and the truth would have set me free.
And only the truth would have set me
free.
And you see, the idea, the modern idea
that you have to get away from the
truth somehow to be free and get out
from under the truth and get away from
the truth to be free is silly.
It's actually stupid.
Only the truth will set you free.
Being closely in touch with the truth and
living in accordance with the truth will set
you free.
You say, well, maybe that's true in the
empirical realm, you know, the scientific realm, but
not necessarily in the moral spiritual realm.
Oh, really?
There you can live any way you want.
Oh, yeah?
I think I can say without fear of
contradiction, if you live for money and only
for money, if you live only to make
money, if you live only to spend money,
if you live only to have money, nothing
else matters to you.
You will shrivel your soul.
You will destroy all your relationships.
You might work too hard and ruin your
health and your body.
Why?
Because you have run aground on the rocks
of a moral spiritual reality that's there, every
bit as much as the Bristol Channel was
there.
It's there.
It's the way things are.
You are out of accord with the truth
of how human beings ought to live.
Only the truth will set you free.
The truth is much more important than you
know.
Freedom comes from submission to the truth, not
getting away from it.
Well, you say, now that leads us to
a question.
Wow.
I guess I always thought of freedom as
being able to create your own truth, so
you're saying that freedom is submission to the
truth.
Why?
How's that?
Well, you see, what we're getting to is
point two, fortunately.
And point two is freedom now is much
more complex than you think.
Paul gets up to Jerusalem and has this
debate, has this discussion, and everybody says, yeah,
you're okay.
Your mission to the Gentiles is legit.
And so they shake hands, and we see
down here in verse 9, it says, so
we all agreed that we should go to
the Gentiles, they to the Jews.
But then look at verse 10.
All they asked was that we should continue
to remember the poor, the very thing I
was eager to do.
Well, we can't, I think I've told you,
in this series, we don't go that deeply
into these passages.
But there's a lot there, and here's what
it is.
Paul was going to the Gentiles, and that
was a place where the power was and
the money.
And what the apostles in Jerusalem were trying
to remind him of is the Judean Christians.
In fact, the people of Judea had far
less money and far less power.
And what they were saying is, remember what
the Bible says about the poor.
You can win them to Christ, but they
have to see what the Bible says.
They have to care about the poor.
And suddenly you begin to realize something really
weird.
In verse 4, Paul says, we're free in
Christ.
We're free, free.
But now in verse 10, we see that
Paul says, yes, of course, we're still restricted
to the biblical ethical norms.
You can't live any way you want.
You can't spend your money any way you
want.
You have to tell the truth.
You can't commit adultery, all that.
So now, wait a minute.
Here in verse 4, we're free, he says.
But in verse 10, we're restricted.
We're still restricted to certain living in certain
ways.
And our response as modern people is, wait
a minute.
I thought that freedom is the absence of
restrictions.
I thought freedom is the absence of all
constraints and boundaries and restrictions.
The fewer restrictions there are, the more free
I am.
Freedom is not having any restrictions on anything
I do.
Wrong.
Oversimplification.
I'm here to try to show you that.
Freedom is much more complex than that.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
First of all, as you get older, as
you will find, you can't just eat anything
you want.
And at a certain point, the doctor will
say to you, now look, there's a lot
of these things that you love eating.
You can't eat them anymore.
And so what you're going to have to
do is you're going to have to restrict
your freedom.
You're going to see them on the table.
You're going to see them on the shelf.
You're going to get near them, and you're
going to have to go, no.
And you're a constraint.
That's constraint.
That's restriction.
So you have to give up your freedom
to eat anything you want if you want
to be released into the richer, deeper freedom
of good health and long life.
Or if you want to, you can just
eat anything you want.
No restrictions.
Be totally free.
And then you will lose both your health
and probably have a shorter year.
So you can't have them both.
And obviously, the freeing, the liberating restriction of
freedom is to be restricted here so that
you can get that richer and deeper freedom
of good health and long life.
Let me give you another example.
It's not as simple as just loss of
restrictions.
A lot of you have musical skill because
this is New York City.
And at some point in your life, you
made a decision.
And that is you were going to restrict
your freedom because you were going to practice,
practice, practice.
You're going to practice every day.
You're going to practice a long time every
day.
You're going to practice, practice, practice, which means
all kinds of stuff that other people can
do you can't do.
You don't have time.
So you're restricting yourself now, but only if
you restrict yourself then would you eventually be
released into the far richer, deeper freedom of
being able to perform, being able to express,
being able to thrill a crowd, being able
to compose, all kinds of stuff you could
never even begin to do if you didn't
restrict your freedom here.
You could never be released into that freedom
there.
Oh, you're starting to say, OK, I see
it.
I see it.
So this naive idea that freedom is an
absence of restriction, no.
Discipline, restriction can release you into a greater
freedom.
So discipline is a good in itself, right?
No, no, no.
Oh, no.
Hey, freedom is not the absence of restriction,
but freedom is not the presence of restriction.
In a more liberal culture like ours, we
think of freedom as the absence of constraint.
But in traditional cultures, there's a feeling like
discipline is a good per se.
Discipline is always good.
That freedom comes through discipline.
Really?
Well, for example, imagine a young guy, 22
years old, 5'3", he's 115 pounds, and
he dreams of being an NFL lineman.
And because he's gone to American schools all
his life, every year his teacher has said,
you can be anything you want to be.
And like an idiot, he believed.
And so now he gets up and he
says, this is my dream.
I'm going to be an NFL lineman.
I'm going to practice, and I'm going to
discipline myself, and I'm going to restrict myself,
and I'm going to work out, and I'm
going to build myself up, and you know,
he's going to waste his life.
Because freedom is not the absence of restriction
or the presence of restrictions, but it's freedom
is the presence of the right restrictions, the
ones that fit in with your nature, with
who you are, the truth of who God
has made you to be, the truth of
the givenness of your nature.
And if you find the truth of who
you are, the truth of what you've been
given, see, the musician, because of her aptitude,
restriction releases her.
The little guy who wants to get into
the NFL because he doesn't have the nature
and the aptitude, restriction destroys him.
Freedom is not the presence of restriction or
the absence of restriction, it's the presence of
the right restrictions, the ones in accord with
the truth, who God made you to be.
And then when you give up your freedom,
you surrender to those restrictions, it will release
you into richer, deeper freedom.
The truth will set you free.
This is the reason why, for example, a
fish out on the grass, a fish out
on the grass isn't free.
A fish out on the grass has lost
its freedom to move, even to live.
You have to restrict the fish to the
water.
And in the water, its strength returns, and
its power returns, and it can swim away
like lightning.
And therefore, freedom is a lot more complex,
is it not?
It's the right restrictions, the restrictions that fit
in with the givenness of your nature, the
restrictions that fit in with the truth of
who you are, and the truth of how
things are.
And the ultimate example of the complexity of
freedom is love.
Oh my goodness, yes.
You see, love is a way to get
free, is it not?
I mean, doesn't love bring you the freedom
of security and fulfillment and joy?
But Francoise Sagan, the famous French writer, some
years ago when she was having a magazine
interview, she was, I think, kind of up
in years at the time, and they asked
her, have you lived the life you wanted
to live?
And she said, yes, I have lived to
be free.
And then the interviewer said, then you have
had the freedom you wanted.
And Sagan said, yes, well, I was obviously
not free when I was in love with
someone, but one's not in love all the
time, fortunately.
Apart from that, yes, I've been free.
Very realistic, and I'll tell you why.
The freedoms of love only come if you
surrender all kinds of individual freedom.
I remember very shortly after I was married,
like days or maybe the most weeks after
I was married, I remember I was coming
home from work, and I suddenly had an
idea.
I don't even remember what it was, but
I took a detour.
I went someplace to buy something or something,
and I got home about 25 minutes late.
And my wife looked at me and said,
where were you?
Now, you have to remember, this was before
cell phones, and as some of you probably
suspect, it was before phones.
But the whole point was, so I should
have written her a letter, I guess.
Pony Express probably would have been a good
idea.
But the point was, I mean, all of
my life, I had, you can make a
little, I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I'm
married, and therefore my right to make even
small unilateral decisions is over forever.
The scripture is found in Galatians 2 verses
4 through 16.
This matter arose because some false brothers had
infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom
we have in Christ Jesus and to make
us slaves.
We did not give in to them for
a moment so that the truth of the
gospel might remain with you.
As for those who seem to be important,
whatever they were makes no difference to me.
God does not judge by external appearance.
Those men added nothing to my message.
On the contrary, they saw that I had
been entrusted with the task of preaching the
gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had
been to the Jews.
For God, who was at work in the
ministry of Peter as an apostle to the
Jews, was also at work in my ministry
as an apostle to the Gentiles.
James, Peter, and John, those reputed to be
pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand
of fellowship when they recognized the grace given
to me.
They agreed that we should go to the
Gentiles and they to the Jews.
All they asked was that we should continue
to remember the poor, the very thing I
was eager to do.
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him
to his face because he was clearly in
the wrong.
Before certain men came from James, he used
to eat with the Gentiles, but when they
arrived, he began to draw back and separate
himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid
of those who belonged to the circumcision group.
The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy,
so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was
led astray.
When I saw that they were not acting
in line with the truth of the gospel,
I said to Peter in front of them
all, You are a Jew, yet you live
like a Gentile and not like a Jew.
How is it, then, that you force Gentiles
to follow Jewish customs?
We who are Jews by birth and not
Gentile sinners know that a man is not
justified by observing the law, but by faith
in Jesus Christ.
So we, too, have put our faith in
Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by
faith in Christ and not by observing the
law, because by observing the law no one
will be justified.
This is the word of the Lord.
Each week we're choosing one of the things
that trouble folks in our culture, and especially
in New York City, the most about Christianity.
So we're trying to take each week one
of the things that people say, This is
my biggest problem with Christianity, or this is
my trouble, or this is my objection to
Christianity.
And today, tonight, we look at one that
could be put like this.
Christians believe they have absolute truth.
That is, they see that they have some
things that everyone should believe and everyone should
do.
So Christians believe they have absolute truth.
But people who have absolute truth, the objection
goes, undermine freedom.
First of all, they tend to oppress people
who are different than they are, and they
tend to impose their views on others.
So they tend to harm other people's freedom.
And people who believe they have absolute truth
are themselves not really free.
Here they are under the burden of trying
to comply with this set of divine directives.
And our culture believes everyone should be free
to determine for themselves what is true.
Everyone should be free to determine their own
truth and what is right or wrong for
them.
So absolute truth is the enemy of freedom.
It harms and erodes freedom.
That's the objection.
What do we say to that?
How do you respond to that?
You know, the Supreme Court itself, by the
way, has actually enshrined the cultural mindset on
this in a famous passage in a 1992
ruling in which the Supreme Court actually said,
quote, the heart of liberty is to define
one's own concept of existence of the meaning
of the universe.
So there it is.
What do we say?
There's three things to say.
Truth is a lot more important than you
would think.
Freedom is a lot more complex than you
would think.
And Jesus is a lot more liberating than
you think.
Now those three principles that, you know, oh,
absolute truth doesn't fit freedom well.
Truth is more important.
Freedom is more complex.
Jesus is more liberating than you think.
Those principles are found in this passage.
It illustrates these three principles.
Let's look at them.
First, truth is more important than you think.
The passage is a story, it's an account
of what happened in the earliest days of
the Christian church.
The earliest Christians were Jewish.
And because of that, they observed the Mosaic
ceremonial law, the ritual purity codes of what
you ate and what you could wear.
But when Paul went to the Gentiles and
preached the gospel, and many of them were
converted, when the Gentiles started coming to the
church, the question arose, has Jesus Christ so
fulfilled the ceremonial law, all the sacrifices and
the priests and the temple and all the
dietary restrictions and so on, has Jesus so
fulfilled all that that now they're obsolete and
we don't have to observe them?
And Paul's answer to that question was yes.
And amongst the Gentile converts, they didn't have
to do any of that.
Now, there was a controversy about that because
there were many people who said, no, that's
not right.
And see verse 4 and 5 at the
very beginning of the passage.
People came and spied on what Paul calls
the freedom we had in Christ.
So Paul had to go to a special
meeting with all the other apostles in Jerusalem
where he contended for the truth, verse 5
of the gospel.
And as we will see, everyone came to
agree that what Paul was doing was right.
But the point is, verse 4 and 5
says we have freedom in Christ because of
the truth of the gospel.
And in a moment, later on, we're going
to get back to what that truth of
the gospel is.
But for a minute, I would like you
to just consider the relationship between truth and
freedom that Paul lays out in those two
verses.
Freedom, verse 4, comes from the truth.
That's the reason why Paul was fighting for
it.
Freedom comes from the truth.
And that's exactly the opposite of the way
in which we in our culture think.
We feel like if you have to comply
with the truth, if you're forcing the truth,
if you're having to obey the truth, that's
a lack of freedom.
Why do we feel that way?
One of the great most influential philosophers, French
philosophers of the last few years, was Foucault.
And Foucault writes something that you may not
have heard this quote, but the idea has
been extremely influential in our culture.
Foucault says, quote, Truth is a thing of
this world.
It is produced only by multiple forms of
constraint.
And that includes the regular effects of power.
And what Foucault is saying is simply this.
Truth claims are power plays.
That when you claim to have the truth,
what you're really doing is trying to get
power over other people.
Claiming to have the truth is a method
of control.
Claiming to have the truth is a form
of constraint, a way of controlling other people's
behavior and getting power over them.
Now, that's the view.
And maybe you think that as a Christian
minister, I'm going to start off my response
by saying, what a lot of malarkey.
But I'm not.
I am not.
I think we need to hear that.
See, Foucault was probably the number one disciple
of Nietzsche in the 20th century.
And Nietzsche established the hermeneutics of suspicion.
And what somebody once said is the hermeneutics
of suspicion is really philosophical squinting.
And this is what they meant by that.
If you would make a truth claim to
Nietzsche, if you would say everyone should promote
social justice, everyone should do justice in the
world, Nietzsche would go, hmm, you're calling everyone
to justice, are you?
Why are you calling everyone to justice?
Is it because you love justice?
Or is it because you want to start
a revolution that will put you on the
top and give you power?
Or someone would say to Nietzsche, everyone should
obey God's Word, and Nietzsche would go, everyone
should obey God's Word, huh?
Of course he'd say this in German, but
I can't do that.
Everyone would obey God's Word, huh?
Why do you call everyone to obey God's
Word?
Is it out of love for God?
Is it out of love for His Word?
Or is it as a way of establishing
your moral superiority?
Is it a way for you to justify
yourself and to justify your oppressing and abusing,
or marginalizing at least, or ignoring people who
don't believe God's Word?
The reason I want you to listen to
what Nietzsche says and what Foucault says is
because it's exactly what Jesus says about the
Pharisees.
Jesus also says, when he looks at the
Pharisees, he says, your truth claims, you're claiming
to have the truth, but your truth claims
are ways of getting power, they're ways of
justifying yourself.
They're ways of justifying your group.
They're ways of getting control over God.
They're ways of getting control over other people.
Listen, truth claims in general, says Jesus, are
power plays.
And listen, when Foucault and Nietzsche and Jesus
Christ all agree on something, you know, it's
just got to be true.
I mean, it just has to be true.
But if you insist that all truth claims,
all the time, always, are all power plays,
they always destroy truth, that all truth claims
destroy truth, that anybody who says they have
the truth destroys freedom, you're wrong.
C.S. Lewis's little book, The Abolition of
Man, is a great book, and maybe my
favorite passage in The Abolition of Man reads
like this.
He says, you cannot go on explaining away
forever, or you will find that you have
explained your own explanation itself away.
You cannot go on seeing through things forever.
The whole point of seeing through something is
to see something else through it.
For example, it's good that you can see
through a window, but that's only because the
garden behind is opaque.
But if you could see through everything, if
everything was transparent, a wholly transparent world would
be an invisible world.
And to see through everything would be the
same as not to see.
What's he saying?
See, he's talking about Nietzsche, and here's what
he's saying.
If you say all truth claims are power
plays, so is that.
What is that?
That's a truth claim, and so is that,
so I don't have to listen to you,
do I?
Or if you say, like Freud says, all
statements about religion and God are really just
psychological projections to deal with your own guilt
and insecurity, well, so is that.
What is that?
That's a statement about God and religion, and
so is that, so I don't have to
listen to you.
You know, you've explained away your explanation.
See?
Or if the evolutionary biologists say, you know,
everything your mind tells you about God, morality,
and truth, everything your mind tells you is
really just hardwired brain chemistry that's there in
order for you to pass along your genetic
code.
Well, everything their brain tells them about everything,
including the evolutionary biology, is the same, so
why should I listen to it?
See, to see through everything is not to
see.
And to say no one should make truth
claims because that's just a power play, that's
the biggest power trip of all because that's
a great big needle you can go around
and you can punch everybody's balloon.
You better punch your own, and guess what?
You're back to square one.
Because everybody does make truth claims.
Everybody believes in truth claims.
To say no one should say they have
the truth is itself the most incredible power
trip.
It's a way of getting on top of
your sophistication, you know, and your jadedness over
everybody else.
Look, everybody does make truth claims.
You have to.
And therefore, it's not making a truth claim
per se that leads to oppression.
It's what's in the claim.
It's what's in the truth claim.
Example.
I have just been absolutely amazed by the,
like a lot of you, by the reports
coming out of Lancaster County in the aftermath
of the terrible tragedy.
You know, a man comes into a school
and slaughters these little girls, these Amish school
children.
All right.
And what do we see?
One of the things that most amazed me
was we understand that one of the little
girls who was killed offered to die for
the rest of them, said kill me and
let the rest go.
And by the way, they did not watch
television.
They did not see movies.
Where would she have gotten that idea of
dying for her friends?
And when it was all over, the amazing
thing, in fact, usually you could see the
reporters themselves were amazed, that the community and
the bereaved families not only forgave the man
who did it, but took up a collection
and prayed and forgave the widow and the
children of the man who did it.
Now, by anyone's definition, the Amish are fundamentalists,
and they believe they have the truth.
And have you ever heard anybody say, oh,
fundamentalists, they think they have the truth.
That leads to oppression.
It didn't there.
Why not?
Because it depends on what the fundamental is.
And the fundamental in this case is a
man dying on the cross for his enemies,
a man with whose last breath he blesses
the people around him and prays for their
forgiveness.
And if you take that into the very
center of your life, then you begin to
see that it's not truth claims per se
that erode freedom.
It's what's in the truth claim.
It's true, of course, that truth claims can
be used to destroy freedom, but there is
no freedom without the truth, because as Jesus
himself said in John 8, the truth will
set you free.
So it's not just that truth claims aren't
necessarily eroding of freedom.
You've got to have the truth and be
in touch with the truth to have freedom.
Only the truth will set you free.
What do I mean?
I've always wished I was a ship's captain
in, say, the 16th century.
I always wanted to be the captain of
one of those incredible ships.
And if I was a ship's captain and
I was trying to take my ship into
the English Channel, you know, between Britain and
France, but I made a mistake and I
sailed up the Bristol Channel, which is far
more shallow, and I didn't realize it.
And I just plowed right across thinking it
was the English Channel.
Very soon I would have run aground.
Very soon my ship would be wrecked.
Everybody would be killed.
Why?
I was out of touch with the truth.
I was out of touch with the truth
of how deep the channel was.
I was out of touch with the truth
of where I was.
Maybe somebody lied to me.
Maybe I would just miscalculate it, but either
way I was out of touch with reality.
I was out of touch with the truth,
and the truth would have set me free.
And only the truth would have set me
free.
And you see, the idea, the modern idea
that you have to get away from the
truth somehow to be free and get out
from under the truth and stop, get away
from the truth to be free is silly.
It's actually stupid.
Only the truth will set you free.
Being closely in touch with the truth and
living in accordance with the truth will set
you free.
Ah, you say, well, maybe that's true in
the empirical realm, you know, the scientific realm,
but not necessarily in the moral spiritual realm.
Oh, really?
There you can live any way you want.
Oh, yeah?
I think I can say without fear of
contradiction, if you live for money and only
for money, if you live only to make
money, if you live only to spend money,
if you live only to have money, nothing
else matters to you.
You will shrivel your soul.
You will destroy all your relationships.
You might work too hard and ruin your
health and your body.
Why?
Because you have run aground on the rocks
of a moral spiritual reality that's there every
bit as much as the Bristol Channel was
there.
It's there.
It's the way things are.
You are out of accord with the truth
of how human beings ought to live.
Only the truth will set you free.
Truth is much more important than you know.
Freedom comes from submission to the truth, not
getting away from it.
Well, you say, now that leads us to
a question.
Wow.
I guess I always thought of freedom as
being able to create your own truth, so
now you're saying that freedom is submission to
the truth.
Why?
How's that?
Well, you see, what we're getting to is
point two, fortunately.
And point two is, freedom now is much
more complex than you think.
Paul gets up to Jerusalem and has this
debate, has this discussion, and everybody says, yeah,
you're okay.
Your mission to the Gentiles is legit.
And so they shake hands, and we see
down here in verse nine, it says, so
we all agreed that we should go to
the Gentiles, they to the Jews, but then
look at verse 10.
All they asked was that we should continue
to remember the poor, the very thing I
was eager to do.
Well, we can't, I think I've told you,
in this series, we don't go that deeply
into these passages, but there's a lot there,
and here's what it is.
Paul was going to the Gentiles, and that
was a place where the power was and
the money.
And what the apostles in Jerusalem were trying
to remind him of is the Judean Christians,
and in fact, you know, the people of
Judea had far less money and far less
power, and what they were saying is, remember
what the Bible says about the poor.
You know, you can win them to Christ,
but they have to see what the Bible
says.
They have to care about the poor.
And suddenly you begin to realize something really
weird.
In verse four, Paul says we're free in
Christ.
We're free, free.
But now in verse 10, we see that
Paul says, yes, of course, we are still
restricted to the biblical ethical norms.
You can't live any way you want.
You can't spend your money any way you
want.
You have to tell the truth.
You can't commit adultery, all that.
So now wait a minute.
Here in verse four, we're free, he says,
but in verse 10, we're restricted.
We're still restricted to certain living in certain
ways, and our response as modern people is,
wait a minute, I thought that freedom is
the absence of restrictions.
I thought freedom is the absence of all
constraints and boundaries and restrictions.
The more, the fewer restrictions there are, the
more free I am.
Freedom is not having any restrictions on anything
I do.
Wrong.
Oversimplification.
I'm here to try to show you that.
Freedom is much more complex than that.
Let me give you a couple examples.
First of all, as you get older, as
you will find, you can't just eat anything
you want.
And at a certain point, the doctor will
say to you, now look, there's a lot
of these things that you love eating.
You can't eat them anymore.
And so what you're going to have to
do is you're going to have to restrict
your freedom.
You're going to see them on the table.
You're going to see them on the shelf.
You're going to get near them, and you're
going to have to go, no.
And you restrict your constraint.
That's constraint.
That's restriction.
So you have to give up your freedom
to eat anything you want if you want
to be released into the richer, deeper freedom
of good health and long life.
Or if you want to, you can just
eat anything you want.
No restrictions.
Be totally free.
And then you will lose both your health
and probably have a shorter year.
You can't have them both.
And obviously, the freeing, the liberating restriction of
freedom is to be restricted here so that
you can get that richer and deeper freedom
of good health and long life.
Let me give you another example.
See, it's not as simple as just loss
of restrictions.
A lot of you have musical skill because
this is New York City.
And at some point in your life, you
made a decision.
And that is you were going to restrict
your freedom because you were going to practice,
practice, practice.
You're going to practice every day.
You're going to practice a long time every
day.
You're going to practice, practice, practice, which means
all kinds of stuff that other people can
do you can't do.
You don't have time.
So you're restricting yourself now, but only if
you restrict yourself then would you eventually be
released into the far richer, deeper freedom of
being able to perform, being able to express,
being able to thrill a crowd, being able
to compose, all kinds of stuff you could
never even begin to do if you didn't
restrict your freedom here.
You could never be released into that freedom
there.
Oh, you're starting to say, okay, I see
it, I see it.
So this naive idea that freedom is an
absence of restriction, no.
Discipline, restriction can release you into a greater
freedom.
So discipline is a good in itself, right?
No, no, no.
Oh, no.
Hey, freedom is not the absence of restriction,
but freedom is not the presence of restriction.
You know, in a more liberal culture like
ours, we think of freedom as the absence
of constraint.
But in traditional cultures, there's a feeling like
discipline is a good per se.
Discipline is always good.
That freedom comes through discipline.
Really?
Well, for example, imagine a young guy, 22
years old, 5'3", he's 115 pounds, and
he dreams of being an NFL lineman.
And because he's gone to American schools all
of his life, every year his teacher has
said, you can be anything you want to
be.
And like an idiot, he believed.
And so now he gets up and he
says, this is my dream.
I'm going to be an NFL lineman.
I'm going to practice and I'm going to
discipline myself and I'm going to restrict myself
and I'm going to work out and I'm
going to build myself up.
And you know, he's going to waste his
life.
Because freedom is not the absence of restriction
or the presence of restrictions.
But it's freedom is the presence of the
right restrictions, the ones that fit in with
your nature, with who you are, the truth
of who God has made you to be,
the truth of your, the givenness of your
nature.
And it's a great, if you find the
truth of who you are, the truth of
what you've been given.
See, the musician, because of her aptitude, restriction
releases her.
The little guy who wants to get into
NFL, you know, into the NFL, because he
doesn't have the nature and the aptitude, restriction
destroys him.
Freedom is not the presence of restriction or
the absence of restriction.
It's the presence of the right restrictions, the
ones in accord with the truth, who God
made you to be.
And then when you give up your freedom,
you surrender to those restrictions.
It will release you into richer, deeper freedom.
The truth will set you free.
This is the reason why, for example, you
know, a fish out on the grass.
A fish out on the grass isn't free.
A fish out on the grass has lost
its freedom to move, even to live.
You have to restrict the fish to the
water.
And in the water, its strength returns and
its power returns and it can, you know,
swim away like lightning.
And therefore, freedom is a lot more complex,
is it not?
It's the right restrictions, the restrictions that fit
in with the givenness of your nature, the
restrictions that fit in with the truth of
who you are and the truth of how
things are.
And, you know, the ultimate example of the
complexity of freedom is love.
Oh, my goodness, yes.
You see, love is a way to get
free, is it not?
I mean, isn't love bringing you the freedom
of security and fulfillment and joy?
But Francoise Sagan, the famous French writer, some
years ago when she was having a magazine
interview, she was, I think, kind of up
in years at the time, and they asked
her, have you lived the life you wanted
to live?
And she said, yes, I have lived to
be free.
And then the interviewer said, then you have
had the freedom you wanted.
And Sagan said, yes, well, I was obviously
not free when I was in love with
someone, but one's not in love all the
time, fortunately.
Apart from that, yes, I've been free.
Very realistic, and I'll tell you why.
The freedoms of love only come if you
surrender all kinds of individual freedom.
I remember, it was very shortly after I
was married, like days or maybe the most
weeks after I was married, I remember I
was coming home from work, and I suddenly
had an idea.
I don't even remember what it was, but
I took a detour.
I went someplace to buy something or something,
and I got home about 25 minutes late.
And my wife looked at me and said,
where were you?
Now, you have to remember, this was before
cell phones, and as some of you probably
suspect, it was before phones.
But the whole point was, so I should
have written her a letter, I guess.
Pony Express probably would have been a good
idea.
But the point was, I mean, all of
my life, I had, you can make a
little, I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I'm
married, and therefore, my right to make even
small unilateral decisions is over forever.
Because the more intimate a love relationship, the
less independent you can be.
The only way to get the freedoms of
love is to surrender freedom, all kinds of
freedom, drastically.
And this is, now we've come to the
place where New Yorkers really start to freak
out.
Because first of all, we saw what?
You've got to know the truth.
You've got to know the truth, and you
have to surrender the truth, and have to
surrender your freedoms to the truth to get
the reach of your freedom.
In every area, and a lot of you
are saying, and here you're being, I understand,
you're saying, look, I have done that in
a couple of love relationships where I gave
up my independence.
I gave up my independence.
I started sacrificing, but the other person didn't,
and I felt dehumanized and exploited.
And I'm afraid of going back into those
kinds of relationships, and I'm certainly afraid of
what you're trying to get me to.
I know what you're doing.
You're a minister.
You're a preacher.
It's a church.
You're trying to get me to say, you
need to surrender to the truth of God.
I'm afraid.
I'm afraid of being exploited.
I'm afraid of being used.
Point three.
Jesus is more liberating than you thought.
There's a movie.
In the movie, I, Robot, it's only a
couple years old, right?
The movie, I, Robot, not the book, because
the movie has nothing to do with the
book at all.
But in the movie, the main character, I
think pretty much, is Sonny, who is a
robot.
And Sonny the robot has been created by
his maker to head off a robot rebellion.
And at the end of the movie, he's
already done that.
So he's fulfilled his design program.
But now he has nothing to do because
he wasn't made to do anything past that.
And he says to Detective Spooner, who's the
other main character, he says, now that I
have fulfilled my purpose, I don't know what
to do.
And Detective Spooner says, I guess you'll have
to find your way like the rest of
us, Sonny.
That's what it means to be free.
And the movie's script writer has perfectly enshrined
the modern understanding.
What it's saying is this.
If there is a design program, if there
is a set of divine directives from your
maker that you have to comply with, you're
just a robot.
You're dehumanized.
You're not free.
You're only free if there's nothing you were
made for.
If there's no purpose that you have to
comply with, no design purpose that you've got
to submit to, then you're free because then
you can live any way you want.
And of course, it's disorienting to say, oh,
I'm not made for anything.
I have no purpose in life.
But at least you can create your own
purpose, then you're free.
But the gospel writer John, gospel writer John,
John chapter 1, verse 1, reads this.
In the beginning was the Word.
Now that doesn't grab you probably.
That's the English, what it says.
But in the Greek, and the original readers
read it and they were amazed.
It said in the beginning was the logos.
That's what it says in Greek.
And John deliberately used an absolutely loaded Greek
philosophical technical term when he said in the
beginning was the logos.
What is the logos?
Well, the logos, you can see the word.
The logos means it's related to our word
logic or reason.
But it's not talking about reason in general.
It's talking about the reason for life.
And the Greek philosophers were asking this question.
What is our reason for life?
What is our reason for existence?
What were we made for?
Look at the fish.
It's so obvious that the fish is designed
for the water.
And when you put the fish in the
water, it experiences freedom.
What were we made for so that if
we give ourselves and surrender to it, we'll
experience freedom?
What is our logos?
What is the absolute truth, the absolute reality
that we were made for, that we put
ourselves into that?
That's the environment that we experience freedom.
What is it?
And they had debated for years, centuries actually.
And some of the Greek philosophers had said,
it's this.
This is the logos.
This is the absolute truth that we were
made for.
And some said, no, this is the absolute
truth.
This is the logos we were made for.
By the time of Jesus in the New
Testament, a lot of Greek philosophers had gone
the way of Detective Spooner.
A lot of them had come up and
started to say, maybe there isn't any absolute
truth that we're made for, and that's the
best we can do.
We just have the freedom of knowing that
we're not made for anything.
There is no design purpose that we're made
for.
But along comes John, and in John chapter
1, first of all he says to the
skeptics, he says, no.
A, there is a logos.
There is an absolute truth.
In the beginning was the absolute truth.
But he then says to the traditionalists, it's
not an abstract absolute truth.
It's not a set of divine directives that
comes down from God and that I have
to comply with or else be destroyed.
He says, there is an absolute truth, but
it's not an abstract absolute truth.
He says, in the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and we
beheld His glory.
And John says, there's an absolute truth, but
it's not an abstraction.
It's a person.
The absolute truth has become a person, a
personal absolute, an absolute person, not an absolute
principle, an absolute person.
And here's what you were made for, Him,
to love Him, to know Him, to serve
Him, to enjoy Him.
This is the bombshell in the history of
philosophy when John said, we're not relativists.
There is an absolute truth, but the absolute
truth has become a person to know, a
person to hug, a person to love.
And you say, well, what's the big difference
between there being an absolute truth that's an
abstraction versus a person?
All the difference in the world, friends, because
if the absolute truth is an abstraction, it
is dehumanizing, but if it's a person, it's
liberating.
Let me show you what I mean.
Go back to the love thing.
We said, and we already hinted at this,
that if you enter into a love relationship,
you have to surrender your independence.
But two people have to do it together.
You both have to do it.
Each of you has to surrender.
And if each one of you says to
the other, I will give up my independence
for you, I will adjust to you, I
will sacrifice my needs for you, and the
other one does it too, it's heaven.
But if one of you does the surrender
and the other one does not, you hold
on to your own life, then you're exploited,
then you're dehumanized, and it's almost worse than
having, it's certainly worse than having no relationship
at all.
And that's the reason why for Nietzsche and
Foucault and maybe Detective Spooner, all relationships with
God have to be dehumanizing because they're one
way, right?
There's God up in heaven, and He says,
here's the Ten Commandments, here's this, here's that,
thou shalt not, thou must, thou shalt not.
And if you have a relationship with a
God like that, it's only one way.
You do all the shifting.
You give up your independence, now you have
to live according to His rules.
You give up, you do the adjustment, you
do all the sacrificing, it's one way, so
it's exploitative and it's dehumanizing.
And Nietzsche would say, relationship with God is
dehumanizing by definition, but not with this God.
Not with this God.
Look, there's a lot of gods put out
there by these various religions and philosophies, but
the only one, Christianity, there's only one Christianity
that says, God, the absolute truth, became a
person and went to the cross.
And on that cross, Jesus Christ, God, said,
I will lose my independence for you.
I will adjust to you.
I will sacrifice for you.
And guess what?
He was exploited.
See, Jesus comes to you and says, I
already did the surrender part to the human
race, and I was killed for it.
My arms are open to you.
I've already done the surrender.
Now I'm just asking you to surrender to
me.
How could you possibly ask anything more from
a God than that?
How can I trust God?
Here's a God who's lost His freedom for
you.
Philippians 2 says, Jesus Christ did not hold
on to His Godhood, but rather His equality
with God, but He emptied Himself and became
a slave and was obedient even under the
death of a cross.
Here is a God who was the ultimate
free being, and He was bound, and He
was nailed, and He lost His freedom, and
He opened Himself, and He adjusted, and He
surrendered His freedom.
God surrendered His freedom so that you could
know you can trust Him.
And this is liberation.
Think.
If God just gives us an abstract truth,
a set of rules, and says, Now obey
it, and you will go to heaven.
I'm obeying it.
Why?
Out of fear.
I'm driven by fear.
I'm a slave to fear.
I better do this.
I better do that, or else God's not
going to...
He's going to get me.
He's going to punish me.
He'll send me to hell.
He won't answer my prayers.
It's all out of fear.
See?
I'm a slave.
But if, instead of God giving me an
abstract truth that I have to obey in
order to save myself, I have a personal
truth that comes down and lives the life
I should have lived, and dies the death
I should have died on the cross, and
saves me by sheer grace, that's liberating.
And only if the absolute truth is a
person who's done that am I liberated.
That's the reason why here at the very
end, Paul can look at Peter and go
after him about his racism.
Do you see that interesting case study?
At the very end of the passage, we
see that Peter, though in principle, he agreed
that the Gentiles are acceptable in Christ.
He agrees in principle.
But first of all, did you notice there,
out of fear of the circumcision party, a
certain group of people, and out of probably
just the habit of being told all of
his life that Gentiles are unclean, unclean, unclean,
he stopped eating with the Gentiles.
Which, of course, in that culture was major
social rejection.
So he was falling back into racist habits.
But you don't see Paul going to him
and saying, Peter, you're breaking rule number 18
in the Bible against racism.
He could have, because there's lots in the
Bible against racism, but he doesn't go that
way because he doesn't treat truth that way.
What does he say?
Verse 14.
I love verse 14.
It's changed my life, by the way.
In verse 14, Paul says, Peter, you're not
walking in line with the truth of the
gospel.
You're not thinking out the implications of the
gospel.
You're saved by grace.
You're not saved by your pedigree.
You're a sinner saved by grace.
How can you feel superior to anybody else?
But here's what he's really saying is, Peter,
you're a slave.
You're afraid of what those people think, the
circumcision group.
You're afraid of what this person thinks.
You're anxious.
Peter, think.
In Jesus Christ, you're an absolute beauty in
the eyes of God, the only person whose
eyes matter.
Think.
You're absolutely loved.
You're absolutely valued by the creator of the
universe.
You should be, if you really understood the
gospel, if you really understood the gospel, you
shouldn't be afraid of anything.
You wouldn't be a slave to anything.
You're not a slave to anxiety, a slave
to being afraid of criticism.
You wouldn't be a slave to anything.
You should be absolutely free, Peter.
If you're a racist, it's because you're not
thinking out the freedom and experiencing the freedom
that you've got in the gospel.
Think, Peter, until there's enough joy in your
heart.
Think, Peter, until you have enough fullness as
to what Jesus has done for you.
Think, Peter, until the racism is squeezed out
by the joy and then you'll be free.
If you understand the truth of the gospel,
it frees you from everything.
How about you?
Has it freed you?
Do you know, in 2 Corinthians 5, 21,
I think it's 1 Corinthians 5, someplace, where
Paul says, the love of Christ constrains us,
constrains us.
The only thing that constrains you in a
way that doesn't feel oppressive, the only thing
that moves you to do the things you
should be doing, and yet it feels like,
it feels like heaven, is the love of
Christ.
The love of Christ, what He's done, the
loss of freedom so we could have freedom,
constrains us.
And John Newton puts it in his hymn,
Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before,
since we have seen His beauty, are joined
apart no more.
To see the law by Christ fulfilled, and
hear His pardoning voice, transforms a slave into
a child, and duty into choice.
Let's pray.
Father, it is true that claiming to have
the truth can be a terrific way to
destroy freedom, and yet, there is a truth
that we've got to have to be free.
It's the truth of the gospel.
It's the truth of Jesus Christ, the ultimate
free being, losing His freedom for us, surrendering
to us, adjusting for us.
And if we take that into the center
of our being, that makes us so free
from fear.
We're not afraid of death.
We're not afraid of people's disapproval.
We're not afraid of anything.
We want to live that kind of life.
And we ask, therefore, that You would show
us how to bring into the center of
our hearts Your gospel truth so that we
would be set free.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.
You've been listening to the From the Pulpit
in Classic Sermons series.
This week you heard Tim Keller with his
message, Absolutism.
Don't we have to find the truth for
ourselves?
Tune in next week to hear Chuck Smith
talk about Beware of Ambition on the From
the Pulpit in Classic Sermons.