The following message by Winky Pradney is entitled
Bartimaeus and the Blinded Generation.
A lot depends on the way you look
at things.
Here's a man, Bartimaeus, who has been blind
from birth.
I'm thinking of something I heard about some
time back.
Four characters were sitting on a train together,
a train winding through a lot of dark
tunnels and things.
One was a general, one was a private,
one was an old grandmother, and another one
was a very pretty girl.
They were looking at each other, sitting in
one of these compartments that traces each other,
going through this train tunnel.
And as they went into the tunnel, suddenly
everything went black.
There weren't any lights on in the train.
And in the pitch blackness, there was a
loud kissing sound, and then a solid smack,
and then an ouch.
And then at the other end of the
tunnel, when they came out, the general had
a black eye which he was rubbing.
The pretty girl looked very embarrassed.
The old lady was touching her handbag and
looking very angry.
And the private had a beatific smile on
his face.
Now it all depends on the way you
look at things.
The general looked at the pretty girl and
he thought, I wonder what's happening to girls
in this country that she thought it was
me that kissed her and she stopped me
instead of the private.
The old lady thought, it's a pretty rotten
thing happening to this country when a young
girl like that can't even ride on a
train without being attacked by a man who
tries to romance her.
And the pretty girl thought, I wonder what's
happening to this country when the general kisses
the old lady and not me.
And the private thought, it's a wonderful country
this, when you can kiss your hand and
sock a general in the eye and get
away with it.
Now a lot depends on the way you
look at things.
But for this man Bartimaeus, the world around
him has never been clear.
Can you imagine what it would be like
to be blind?
Some of you may have relatives that are
blind.
For this man, people are voices, sound of
many footsteps on streets filled with danger.
His life has become nothing but a well
-worn path to his daily place.
The tap of his stick as he feels
for the unexpected in his way, and the
occasional coin that clinks into his cup as
he tries to live by begging.
It must be a terrible thing to be
blind.
Now we live in the 20th century now.
We don't have much problem with people who
have physical blindness now.
We still have blind people, but it's easier
to live.
Because we have affluence, technology, institute, social aid,
welfare programs, braille, records, cassettes and other things
like this.
And the man who has lost his vision
today physically can very well get along without
it.
But there are different ways to be blind.
There are different ways to be blind.
And I believe that we are faced today
in the church of Jesus Christ with possibly
the most tragic form of blindness possible.
That loss of vision, that loss of spiritual
vision, and that loss of understanding which Jesus
said through the mouth of his prophet so
long ago, without a vision, where there is
no vision, the people perish.
This blindness that has come has cut a
whole generation of kids off from their parents.
A darkness that seems to block out communication
between adults and the young people, the straight
person and the hip person, the man of
yesterday and the child of tomorrow.
And possibly the greatest tragedy we have is
this blindness has cut the church off from
seeing what is happening to the world around
us.
And I believe it's time we had a
restoration of sight to the Bartimaeuses of the
church world.
It's time we heard the voice of Jesus
as he walks along the crowd, with the
crowd, along the pathways of the sinner's world,
calling us back to vision.
Believe it's time we learned what it means
to regain our spiritual sight again.
We need to say, we need to say
ourselves, Lord, that I might receive my sight.
And I believe there are people sitting here
in this building this morning who have that
kind of cry in your hearts and in
your lives.
There are parents here who wonder what is
happening to the world in which their kids
are growing up.
Sir Winston Churchill said it, it was near
the beginning of the atomic age.
Russia just exploded its first A-bomb.
He said, as I think of this tremendous
new power, I wonder what will happen to
our kids, our children.
And all around the world it seems young
people are rising up in protest, in arms,
in revolution, sometimes violently.
It seems like we've lost contact with the
kids.
Now I work with young people, I work
with them in the streets, I work with
them in camps, I work with them in
churches.
I've tried to keep a balance between working
on the streets and working in the church
so that I can find out what's happening
in both cultures and hopefully to try and
bridge the gap for parents and for kids.
It's a scary thing to live in the
20th century.
How many of you believe that?
Let me see your hands.
Charles writes in his book, The Greening of
America, says there's a revolution coming.
It will not be like revolutions of the
past.
It will originate with the individual and with
culture and will change the political structure only
as its final act.
It will not require violence to succeed and
it cannot be successfully resisted by violence.
This is the revolution of the new generation.
And for better or worse, that revolution is
here.
And I think it's time we had some
people who profess to belong to Jesus to
be aware of it.
Now in the scriptures, in the book of
Joel, the prophet Joel spoke.
He said, It shall come to pass in
the last days that I will pour out
my spirit upon all flesh and your sons
and your daughters shall prophesy.
Your old men shall dream dreams.
Your young men shall see visions.
You know, I'm amazed at the Spirit of
God because as he looked down through history,
saw the trends, saw what was going to
happen, the Spirit of God saw there would
be three groups of people that would not
be taken care of adequately.
One were his servants and his handmaids.
The church has always been unpopular in the
secular world.
Another group were the old people, the old
men especially.
Most people feel some sympathy for old women
and they'll take care of them, but the
old men often, I've seen many of them
on the streets, lonely, alone, walking with that
emptiness.
And then the kids.
God saw that the young people were losing
touch with things and so God did a
beautiful thing.
He said, In the last days, I'm going
to adopt all three.
I'm going to pour out my Spirit upon
the sons and upon the daughters, upon the
servants and upon the handmaids, upon the old
men who are going to dream dreams.
And God is beautiful.
He poured out his Spirit.
He began to adopt this whole generation.
And I thank God that there is no
real generation gap in the Spirit of Jesus.
Now that day, I believe, has arrived.
Joel told us the signs of those days.
He said, I will show signs, wonders in
the heavens and in the earth, blood and
fire.
And then the Hebrew uses a very unusual
word.
It uses the word palm trees of smoke.
That's only used twice in the whole Old
Testament, palm trees.
Now the King James translators came to this
word palm trees and they said you can't
have a palm tree of smoke because smoke
either goes up like a pillar or like
a plug.
But a palm tree looks like both.
So they said you can't have a palm
tree of smoke.
And that's why your Old Testament is usually
translated pillars.
But not so many years ago, a white
silk parachute blossomed out over a little city
called Hiroshima.
The anti-aircraft crew only saw one plane
about 18,000 feet from the ground.
A little white silk parachute blossomed out.
And I suppose if they saw it at
all, those two things were the last two
things that ground crew ever saw again.
Then hell was literally reborn in the sky.
Their bodies were cooked by streamers of radiation.
Their brain cells seared and their eyeballs melted
and ran down their cheeks.
And the age of terror had begun for
the planet earth.
For the first time, our generation saw the
effects, the devastation of a palm tree of
smoke.
On the ruins of that city, Mr. Ripley
of the Ripley's Believe It or Not series
stood with a tape recorder and he said
these words, I am standing at the spot
where the end of the world began.
And this is our generation.
This is your generation.
This is my generation.
And this is the generation to which Jesus
said he would return.
So we're living in very critical times.
Strange things are happening.
We can expect this generation to be different
from any other generation in history, and it
is.
Now, this morning we want to look at
what makes this generation different.
Why is it that many parents seem to
have lost contact with their kids?
What makes a kid from a little farm
community drop out within a year of leaving
home and wind up a couple of months
later in a hippie commune?
What is it that has changed the heads
and even the hearts of this generation of
young people to make them different from any
others in history?
Bob Dylan was a young man who introduced
some of the very first protest songs, and
here's the way he said it in his
song, The Times Are Changing.
He said, come mothers and fathers throughout the
land, and don't criticize what you can't understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your
command.
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out on a new one if
you can't lend your hand.
But the times, they are changing.
I want you to look with me, please,
first at an important change, what I call
a change in awareness.
This is one of our key first changes.
A change in awareness.
Young people today have a different kind of,
I could call it, sense life, often than
their parents do.
And I suppose one of the most powerful
contributing factors to this has been television.
Now we're not talking here about what is
said on television, but the fact of television
itself.
For instance, this is the first generation in
history that has grown up with what you
could call an electronic babysitter.
You know, you put that boob tube there
and the kid stares through the bars in
his cage, and he looks out at Sesame
Street or something else, and that's the way,
you know, you don't even have to look
at him.
You can come back and he's still glued,
watching Dark Shadows or something.
Now, the average kid today has watched about
15,000 hours of television before he even
graduates from high school.
During that time, this is just the average
kid, now some of your kids are on
average, during that same time he has only
attended some 11,000 hours of lectures at
school.
You can see the power of the media.
This, of course, is disregarding the fact that
he may take a lot of time off
from school.
And the important thing about television is not
just the message that it gets through, but
rather the media, what it actually is.
Now, television is something that can put people
together instantly, especially kids.
Now, who can forget the commercials?
Can any of you forget the commercials?
Do you remember, Mamma Mia, that's the spice,
you need the ball, do you remember that
one?
And who can, who doesn't know that you've
got a lot to live, and Pepsi's got
a lot to give, or that coke is
the real thing?
Do you want some Absolut?
Now, it was a little different when you
only had a radio or Granddad had a
crystal set.
You could listen to the words or to
the music as background noise.
You could listen to them out here.
You didn't really have to concentrate too much.
You could work and music could play.
You didn't really have to be too deeply
involved.
You could shut out what you heard.
But television has changed all that.
To make any sense at all of that
little flickering two-dimensional screen, you have to
be deeply absorbed in it.
Marshall McLuhan, who was king of the communications
theorists, has given it two names.
He's called hot and cool communication.
Hot was the radio generation.
Cool is today's television generation.
Hot means lots of facts.
Cool means basically direct experience.
Just feel it.
Experience it.
Hot means statistical, straight-line thinking.
Fact one, fact two, fact three, statistics, this
kind of thing.
Cool means often mystical, intensely personal communication.
Now, you can tell this by a change
in the commercials.
When somebody used to sell a product over
the radio, they used to give a lot
of facts on it.
Say they had a miracle hairy scorer, and
some of the gentlemen here may be interested
in this commercial.
They used to say something like this, Men,
do you get embarrassed when you go bowling
and people stick two fingers in your ears?
Then you need Fuzzo, our patented miracle hairy
scorer.
Fuzzo is made from a secret list of
special ingredients that are guaranteed to restore your
hair and your dignity.
Here's what one of our satisfied customers has
to say about Fuzzo.
This is Mrs. Margaret Floyd Flugelhorn from Liverpool,
Antarctica.
And she says something like this, I've been
rubbing Fuzzo into my scalp for nigh on
forty years now, and man, I got the
hairiest hands you ever did see.
Now, this commercial would be followed by benefits
of Fuzzo, plenty of facts, a lot of
statistics about people who used it.
Now, consider the late television commercials, especially the
late cigarette commercials.
One we will call an advertisement for Slam
cigarettes.
Here is the scene, a beautiful girl dressed
in a long flowing granny dress, big bonnet.
Action, girl speaks, her accent is very southern
and intimate, she says, hello, you know, this
kind of thing.
Then the camera pans out to a big
country scene, backs up, the girl unfastens the
bonnet, the music changes, she shakes her hair
out, and then there's a flare of jazz
trumpet, and then she sings, her voice changed
totally radical, now throaty, while she says, you
can't take Slam out of the garbage, but...
And then a little ding on the end,
see, a ding.
You fill in the rest of the words,
but you can't take the garbage out of
Slam, see, that's what you fill in.
Now, the point is here, no facts are
used, no statistics, what you are sold is
an experience.
And that seems weird to me, having sat
in planes and nearly been killed by people
who...
and fill a whole plane full of smoke,
seems weird to me that they could sell
a country freshness of a Slam cigarette.
I don't know about you, but I think
I'm going to take on all my plane
flights a can of aerosol deodorant, and every
time somebody goes behind me, I'm going to
go back.
Television has done three major things to kids
of this culture.
Firstly, it's taught kids to love in-depth
experience.
Notice one thing about young people, is they
like to be deeply involved with things.
Give you an idea.
When a lemon-lime commercial was running at
Zenith, a company took a survey, remember the
lemon-lime commercial?
It involved a man coming up to a
grocer, and he asked him for a dozen
lemon-limes.
The man replied, Mister, we got lemons, and
we got limes, but we ain't got no
such thing as lemon-limes.
And whereupon this guy took out a can
of lemon-lime shave cream, let's say, and
he put a bunch of dollops on the
guy's hand.
Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.
Now, the survey took an equal number of
parents and kids.
It said, to both of them, how many
blobs of shaving cream did they put on
the man's hand?
The adult said, oh, it looked like, well,
about a dozen.
That's what he asked, it was probably about
ten or eleven.
The kid said, no, wasn't anything like that,
it was only about seven or eight, or
less.
And guess who was right?
Kids were.
They took another screen, and they shot on
it about twenty different scenes happening simultaneously, like
this.
Then they shot this for sixty seconds.
They asked the parents, how many scenes could
you remember?
The parents got about four or five.
The kids got nearly seventy-five percent of
the scenes on that screen.
And that's a taste for in-depth experience.
Secondly, television has taught them to adapt quickly
to change.
One of the big gripes that young people
make is that parents never want to change
things.
It may help you to understand that kids
have been brought up on fast-flowing changes.
For instance, if you watch any serial on
television for any length of time, you'll soon
see how TV sequence tricks have altered the
new consciousness of young people.
Often, they'll take the soundtrack of the scene
before it and play it right over into
the next frame, a totally different scene.
So you're still hearing the soundtrack from the
last scene when the next one is playing.
How many of you have ever seen that
kind of thing?
All right, that'll give you an idea.
Watch a man, he's opening up a drawer
inside a room, and then suddenly the light
switches on, the camera backs up, and the
guy looks up in shock, and then it
comes right into his face, and then it
backs off again, and he's no longer in
that room.
He's in the detective's office being questioned.
And there's no explanation.
It's just suddenly bang, bang.
And you're supposed to shift and think, oh,
in between he got caught, he got arrested,
taken to the detective's office, and now he's
being questioned.
Now, no explanation.
Do you see that?
That has done something to kids' feelings.
They can change very fast between this and
that without feeling terribly ripped up about it.
The kid just simply shifts gears and takes
it all in his stride.
And then, thirdly, and very important, television has
caused kids to be able to recognize the
phony.
There's one thing about the TV camera, and
that is it exposes sincerity or phoniness.
Young people have been used today to seeing
the best actors in the world play out
dramatic scenes so embarrassingly real you'd swear you
were peeking through somebody's keyhole.
They're just so real and so direct.
And these kids have had a decade or
so, about 20 years of old pictures and
old movies, to compare acting talents with.
So you can see that they're learning to
spot what really good acting looks like.
And now it is no longer possible in
a great number of homes to fool a
generation of young people brought up on acting
with some kind of phony experience of Jesus
Christ.
There must be a real, in-depth knowledge
of God because these kids in the new
generation will pick it.
Maybe that will explain to you why The
top hit song of 1969 was a song
called Mrs. Robinson.
Mrs. Robinson was a slightly nutty church-attending
woman who was trying to seduce her daughter's
boyfriend in the film The Graduate, which she
succeeds in doing.
It was one of the two songs on
the list out of the five nominated for
the Grammy Awards of that year.
The other one, which was also an adult
hypocrisy, was called Harper Valley PTA.
Do you see that young people today are
learning to spot unreality?
And whether it's in the home, the family,
the church or the government, they'll come out
strongly against it.
We must move on rapidly here.
I want to move also to one other
thing before we leave.
Rock music.
Three brief things about rock music.
First of all, it is the universal media
of the young.
All kids across the world can hear pretty
much exactly the same songs and the same
themes.
Timothy Leary was asked at the beginning of
the revolutionary movement, what did he believe were
the two most powerful and profound influences contributing
to what you could call the youth revolution.
Leary said two things.
One, he said, I believe the minister of
the sacraments.
By that, Timothy Leary meant the guy who
deals drugs.
LSD, the hallucinogenics.
Because to Leary, LSD was a sacrament that
would bring you in direct, mystical, intense personal
communion with God.
So he called the man who deals the
mind drugs a minister and the drug itself
a sacrament.
And secondly, he said the rock preacher.
And when he used the word preacher, he
used a significant term because the vast majority
of young people get their sermons from rock
music.
I went to Israel with my wife and
over there I heard hit songs that had
only just come out now in the United
States were being played at the same time
in Israel.
It is a worldwide communication link among young
people all across the world.
It is probably the greatest single link among
the young.
When I had my rock band in New
Zealand, before I got saved, we would monitor
constantly shortwave broadcasts from overseas and bring out
new songs, repolish them or do our own.
It's a universal link with young people all
across the world.
Secondly, rock is an automatic generation screen, I
guess you could call it.
How many of your parents have ever turned
on a car radio and hit the buttons
in between your Christian stations and it moved?
And it hit a rock station and you
heard this weird wah-wah-wah, and somebody
mumbling.
How many of you have ever heard that?
How many of you stopped and listened for
more than 1.5 of a second?
And that's amazing that we even had one
or two.
Because rock becomes an automatic generation screen, the
new forms of music, and often groups will
deliberately do their music louder than their words.
Now you can say, many parents have said
to me, how in the world do they
understand the words?
I can't even tell what they are.
How many of you have had that problem?
Let me see your hands, all right?
Now, this, sometimes the kids don't understand the
words either.
But you see, they listen a hundred times
and you only listen 1.5 of a
second.
So they'll get it eventually, even if you
don't.
And often, they'll put the music deliberately louder
than the words to get across a message
that they don't want, particularly, adults to hear.
Thirdly, rock, young people today, use rock to
communicate the new philosophies which come out in
the thinking world.
In other words, today's young person does not
simply listen to some guy sitting on a
leather chair in a university, telling about his
particular philosophy.
All it takes is one of these often
genius young people, and understand they may be
musically geniuses as well as very highly informed
young people.
I can't always call them wise, because I
don't believe there's any wisdom out of Jesus.
But informed kids, young people today are not
listening to people sitting in leather chairs, because
the kids who are pushing philosophy today are
doing it behind recording mics in rock studios.
Now, if you can see that a great
deal of the philosophies of today are communicated
directly to young people through the rock media,
then you'll understand why it is that a
kid can have his whole head set.
He goes to college, he suddenly runs into
a philosophy, and he says, I've always believed
this.
I've grown up thinking about that, ever since
I was nine years old, which is the
time he first started to listen.
He may not understand the message.
What he will understand, however, what he will
understand is just the ideas of it stuck
down in the bottom of his head.
When he gets old enough to understand, he'll
think it's his idea.
All right?
I must move on rapidly, because we just
got started here.
Second, profound revolution has taken place in philosophy,
in the way people think.
I'm going to sum this up very simply
for you, by dividing young people into two
extremes of kinds of kids.
The first one I call the all-thinkers.
The all-thinkers.
Now, these are a group of young people
who like to use their minds.
I was a young person like that, because
my background's organic research chemistry.
I love to use my mind to think.
I like this philosophy, thinking, of understanding.
All my life, I guess, I've wanted to
be a scientist.
I never wanted to be a fire engine
driver, or a policeman, or something like that.
I wanted to be a scientist ever since
I was little.
When I was eight years old, I was
trying to find a cure for cancer.
My mother gave me a microscope, and I
was looking at a piece of that hairy,
blue-veined cheese.
Have you seen it, where the fur coming
out of it, and all the blue things
that run through it?
Well, I figured if Alexander Fleming found penicillin
in cheese, if I started young enough, I
could find a cure for cancer in the
same stuff.
I put this cheese under this microscope, focused
it up, and I saw that cheese walk
right off the slide, and I've never eaten
cheese.
My plans to color the local swimming pool
an iridescent crimson.
And then, when we had our gang fights,
we didn't fight like ordinary kids.
We didn't fight.
You know, I'm skinny.
I've always been this way, I have no
excuse.
But we didn't come up with brass knuckles
and all this kind of brutality.
I designed a little pill that looked a
bit like a contact coal capsule.
And there's a guy I didn't like, he
just licked it into his back pocket.
And when he sat down, it broke a
cap, and five minutes later, the back of
his trousers burned out.
I wanted to know how things worked, and
to make them work for me.
But I believe just making sense of things
is not enough to make you act right.
If education could solve all our problems, then
we would have solved them in the last
century.
I think most kids find out as time
goes by, it's possible to be a real
thinker and be a dirty stinker at the
same time.
And the trouble with a lot of young
people today, if you wanted a fancy name
for this philosophy, you could call it rationalism.
They've run right into a real problem, and
the problem is this.
If there is no God, and we're talking
about secular young people, if there is no
God, then who or what is man, and
how did the universe get here?
You've only got one answer, and the answer
is this.
Time plus chance plus blind matter equals everything.
Now, is time a person or not?
No, it's impersonal.
Is chance personal or impersonal?
Impersonal, it's not a person.
Is blind matter, just bits of stuff floating
around, is that a person or not?
No, it isn't.
And the great problem of today's young people
has been this.
If time plus chance plus matter equals everything,
how can three impersonals add up and equal
a person?
And what has happened to the thinking young
people of today is they've put man into
the machine.
And today's kids feel that many of them
are rationalists, are trying to treat people as
if they are machines.
This has spawned a whole way of thinking
in our generation.
You would call it communism or Marxism.
If man is really a machine, then it
should be possible to alter him chemically or
physically to make him a better person.
Now, my parents had a rotten old car
that used to break down every Sunday, and
us kids had to push it to church.
We had a big hill running down the
side of our place, and I don't know
why my parents had to go to a
Pentecostal church.
There were perfectly good other churches within walking
distance of our home, but our parents wanted
to go to this wild Pentecostal church, which
was 20 miles into town.
So every morning my dad would get up,
sit in front of his car, nothing.
So us kids would get out on our
Sunday best, mother would get in the car,
dad would get out grunting and puffing, and
we'd push this car down this hill with
all the people walking past saying, there goes
those snotty patneys again.
We pushed it down the bottom of the
hill, halfway down the thing would stop.
And then we'd all chug off to church.
In church there was a big long hill,
which was easy enough to just park the
thing on, so we didn't have to worry
about coming back.
One day we pushed it down the hill,
it didn't stop, we pushed it up the
hill and then backwards.
We pushed it everywhere and it didn't stop.
So my dad pushed it into a ditch
and we caught a bus.
What do you do if a machine breaks
down and no longer becomes worthwhile?
You simply salvage it for its spare parts
and throw the rest away.
Today's young people, some of them thinking man
is nothing more than a machine and for
about a hundred and something years they've been
told there is no God, there's no heaven,
there's no hell, man is just a machine.
So they've gone right into what we could
call a violence revolution.
Tear the whole system down, rip it down
and start again.
And later on I'll be talking about the
violence revolution.
Another group of kids reacted against this and
said well, maybe, maybe the problem is that
we're thinking.
If thinking has turned us into machines then
there must be something wrong with thinking.
Like the guy who read an ad that
cigarette smoking causes cancer.
So he gave up reading.
And a group of young people all across
this nation, much earlier in Europe, suddenly begin
to reject thinking.
They just dropped right out of thinking and
they made what you could call a leap,
a blind leap trying to search for some
kind of meaning in their lives.
This was the beginning of what you could
call a drug, hippie or subculture.
Young people today who use drugs do not,
and I'm talking about the street people now,
do not usually take drugs for kicks, for
escape or for a number of the other
reasons we most of the times have assigned
to them.
The kids who I've met on the street,
the serious kids, and we have plastic hippies
today, the little junior high school and she
sees her rock idol as a hippie so
she puts on, you know, she grows her
hair long and then she buys some marijuana
and smokes it so she can be in.
I'm not talking about that young person.
I'm talking about the kid who was a
real hippie, the one who intelligently dropped out,
deliberately dropped out.
Most kids I know take drugs not in
order to escape or for kicks, but as
part of a serious search for meaning, personal
meaning in their lives.
And Satan has used this today to lead
a whole generation into deception.
Kids today then have sort of hung up
this whole thinking world and have made a
jump into feeling, to directly experience something that
will give them back their humanity because they're
not men down here.
Do you see how God has made our
world?
If we throw him out then everything falls
apart.
We lose ourselves, we lose our understanding of
the universe.
Kids today then have said, I can't find
meaning by thinking, it must be by experience.
And there's different ways you can use it.
Some have used music, some have used sex,
some have used drugs, some have turned instead
to the east and tried techniques like transcendental
meditation, self-realization and some of these other
funny things.
But it's important for you to see this.
If it's true that a young person can
only find meaning by throwing his mind away,
then true meaning must lie in rejecting all
reason, which is madness.
And that's the way society is going.
A very frightening thing.
This has led us to what you could
call the occult revolution.
And there are the two revolutions that are
facing young people today.
Very deeply powerful revolutions.
You'll hear about it all over the place
and that's the philosophies behind them.
To sum these up, H.G. Wells had
a thing he called the time machine.
In the time machine a traveler goes forward
into the future.
He comes upon the human race and it's
very frightening because it's been divided into two
people.
One are called the Eloi and they live
on top.
They are beautiful people, they look beautiful, they
sing, they dance, they do all this, but
they're almost mindless.
They don't think, they're like little children.
The other group of people he finds out
live underground.
And they are the thinkers.
But unfortunately they're also monsters.
They're ugly and what they do is they
live on the Eloi.
They eat Eloi.
What a scary choice for our generation to
be an Eloi or a Moloch.
To be part of a machine or into
the madness.
And I thank God there is an answer
in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Because Jesus gives us a way to feel
and think together without throwing out our humanity
or throwing out our universe.
And that's why I'm excited about the gospel.
That's why on a university campus the gospel
comes in like a bombshell to the modern
intellectual.
It blows his fingers.
Now quickly, brethren, there has also been a
change of values.
I want to talk about briefly three people.
One I'll call the pioneer people.
This is the adult generations now.
And I'm just going to sort of sum
them up for you.
The pioneer people were the hardworking people of
this nation.
You could call them the farmers, small businessmen.
They are people who believed in virtues like
honesty, plainness, hard work.
It was the kind of people who first
carved out the United States of America.
Now you can often recognize the pioneer people
by the things they say when kids step
out of line.
One of them is this.
Don't know what your kids are coming to
nowadays.
Another one is this.
When I was your age I used to
have to walk through the snow to go
to school.
And another one is if you want to
get ahead in life you're going to have
to work for it.
And another one is I never was one
to trust these newfangled schemes.
So that, if you belong there then you're
a pioneer people.
Mark it down and smile, that's who you
are.
For the pioneer people there are some tremendous
strengths.
And I say the strengths of the pioneer
people, if you wanted to sum it up,
would be called character.
There was a great weakness.
Success for the pioneer people was measured by
material success.
And value was placed on possession.
The man who was the hardest worker had
the biggest car, the best house, etc.
Then their kids grew up.
These are a different breed.
We'll call them the Madison Avenue men.
I'm sorry I'm erasing this so fast.
This is a different breed of people.
It is a group of people who, their
great strength was that they learned to use
technology.
The Madison Avenue men, you could call them
the organizational men.
They inherited some of their value systems from
their parents, although often less of their parents'
virtue.
You see, God has no grandchildren, unfortunately, and
he doesn't pass on virtue down through the
generations.
But this is a generation that built technology,
that built the machine.
Here are the lawyers, the doctors, the scientists,
the big businessmen of the United States.
They are often status conscious people.
Status is tremendously important here.
For the organizational men or the Madison Avenue
men, your strength or your position on the
social ladder becomes a criterion of value.
In other words, you could recognize a Madison
Avenue man by this kind of statement.
You can never get ahead without an education,
you know.
And another one is this.
It pays to pick a profession and carries
a lot of social standing with it.
Now, you can find out whether you like
your profession or not after you start making
$150,000 a year.
But you can see the strength of this
thing, of this group of people, was that
they learned to master technology.
They learned to use the machine.
The only unforgivable sin in this particular culture,
I could say, is failure.
You are not allowed to fail.
You're allowed to do anything, but you can't
fail.
That's one sin.
And you see this in this graduate that
I talked about.
The graduate in it, Dustin Hoffman, comes home.
His dad yells at him, What did I
send you to school for?
And he says, Search me, Dad.
And I'm told when this happens, all the
parents go, Oh!
And all the kids go, Hooray!
That's generation gap.
Thirdly, I'd better give you the weakness.
Got the strength here and no weakness.
The weakness, of course, I guess you could
call it the status consciousness of the thing.
The emphasis on making it all, moving up
the ladder properly.
If you wanted to use another word, you
could say it's hypocrisy.
People are evaluated by their place in social
standing instead of what they are.
Now, finally, we come to the street kids.
These are kids I'm working with.
Some of them may even be your kids.
I call them the personal people.
There's a difference between personal and personable.
Some of them smell.
You know, they have hair looking like an
explosion in a mattress factory.
You have to stand a reasonable distance away
sometimes.
But I love these kids because they are
kids who have souls that need to be
saved.
They are kids who Jesus died for.
And their great search, and this is their
strength, their great strength is that they are
human beings.
They will share anything with you in the
culture.
It's really weird.
They'll share things with you.
They'll do things for you.
Often, if you're long-haired, you're walking along
the road, one of them will pick you
up, put you in the back of his
van, give you his bread and his wine
or anything else he has, and his marijuana,
if that's what he's got.
And then he'll just dump you off, sick,
drunk, and whatever else, you know, whenever he's
got to move on.
But he'll say, you know, bless your brother
and go on.
But they really are human beings.
I know they don't look often like human
beings, but they have an interest in people,
and they don't put you down because of
what you look like or your color or
race or creed.
They don't care about status.
That's why they don't dress.
You know, there's dress in blue jeans, and
you can put on Indian feathers and be
an Indian if you want to.
You can wear a cowboy hat and be
a cowboy.
You can swim in your clothes.
You can run up a hill, roll down
it in it.
You can sit on a beach with it.
You can do anything with the same clothes,
and they do.
The weakness of the personal people is they
have no absolute.
They have no real sense of right and
wrong.
And brethren, what I've just put on the
board in those last number of minutes has
been the basis of what you could call
a generation gap.
Now time is running out.
I do want to give you quickly a
fast answer to this thing.
I believe sight comes to blind-bodied masses
when Jesus restores it.
And spiritual sight must come from Jesus, who
is the way, the truth, and the life.
That's the way the pioneer people look for.
This is what the organizational Madison Avenue man
needs, truth.
And this is what the personal people on
the streets are looking for.
Let me show you quickly how to restore
sight.
Is it just guidelines?
Spiritual blindness is caused by selfishness.
Selfishness can be true of both kids and
parents.
So parents, here's my sort of guidelines for
you.
I would say live a life of true
discipleship in front of your kids.
Don't tell them about Christianity.
Live it.
You show them two parents who are in
love with each other and in love with
God and willing to sacrifice for right and
to do that which is best, whatever the
cost.
So many preachers have lost their kids because
they've said to them, Listen, you ought to
do this because you're a preacher's kid.
Remember that.
That's not the reason.
They ought to do it because it's right
and because it hurts God not to do
it, not because they're preacher's kids or anything
else.
And secondly, for the kids, I'd say learn
to submit to older people.
Learn to submit.
Even when it's hard.
The scriptures tell us children, obey your parents
and the Lord.
Now, your kids here do not, you do
not have to agree with an older person's,
let's say, principles.
They may even have wrong principles.
But you ought to respect them for their
position in God's path.
You could just tell us, except the man
forsake all that he has, he cannot be
my disciple.
Truth is necessary.
We've got to deal with this thing called
hypocrisy.
Honesty.
I'd say, parents, you live what you believe.
Don't tell your kids this.
Don't lie to them in ways like, I
know some parents, they're just absolutely shocked when
they find out the kids have been cheating.
And yet that same mother will say, Oh,
Mrs. So-and-so's at the door.
I don't want to see her today.
You go down and tell her I'm not
in.
Or Dad will boast how much he got
out of the income tax thing by cheating.
Do you see this?
You must live it.
They've got to see it.
Jesus did it.
He showed, he put God on display so
they could look and see what real truth
was like.
And these kids know how to spot phony.
But parents, you must learn to be real
with your kids.
Be sincere, I think, if you wanted to
use the word.
Be genuine with them.
If you don't understand, ask them.
Kids, I'd say this, don't judge.
Judge not that you be not judged.
You must, see this microphone around my neck?
This microphone is recording everything I'm saying.
Do you know the way the Spirit of
God says?
He records things.
He measures our actions, our words.
Imagine I'm standing here and I'm saying, This
person's a hypocrite, that person is wrong, etc.
Now, everything and every time I make a
moral judgment, that goes down on this microphone.
There's a kid and he stands before God
and he says, God, the reason why I'm
not a Christian is because of the hypocrisy
of the older generation.
God says, oh really?
Sit down, we're going to have a movie.
This kid said, God, I wasn't even allowed
to go to movies, I came from a
Pentecostal church.
He said, well, you're going to see one
now, watch.
And he sees on the screen, This is
Your Life.
God says, I have a special edited version.
And there underneath, the subtitle is this kid's
name.
The kid says, oh, what is this?
God says, watch.
And he sees himself on the screen, doing
something very hypocritical.
And then the soundtrack comes on the screen,
and you know whose voice it is?
His own voice.
And this is what it says.
He is a hypocrite.
The Bible says, by your words you'll be
condemned, or by your words you'll be justified.
So if we point a finger, either way,
remember the three that point back, and remember
the words of Jesus.
And lastly, life.
We have to have an experience of God
that is real.
It must be real.
That means parents, I'd say, learn to be
social with your kids.
Learn to have fun with them.
Learn to play with them, as well as
teach them the Word of God.
They've got to see their parents are real
people, who love them.
And then, they must see the supernatural.
They must see it happen.
And I would not call it even the
supernatural.
I'll call it the spirit natural.
Because with God, there's no really freaky supernatural
thing.
There's the spirit natural.
In other words, when you walk in the
Spirit of God, there is a natural outflow
of miraculous things that happen whenever you need
them.
I have some stories here of young people.
This will give you an idea of their
feelings.
I don't know how time is going.
How many minutes have we got?
Five?
We've got enough?
Six minutes, all right.
I've got just enough time to read you
some letters, and then give you a closing
thing.
Here's a letter from a girl.
She says, I have two problems.
My mother and my father.
They're driving me nuts.
They don't realize I'm a grown woman of
15.
They want to know who's on the phone
every time it rings.
They want to know where I'm going every
time I step my foot outside the house.
They want to know the life history of
every guy I go out with.
Mother says I'm still a child until there's
work to be done.
Then suddenly I'm an adult and must take
my share of adult responsibility.
She's on my back every minute about something
or other.
My dad acts as if going steady is
a crime or something.
I've taught myself horse, but they don't seem
to understand we're living in a different century
than when they grew up.
I need more freedom and I wish they'd
see this letter.
And please hurry your answer.
I think I'm cracking up.
Here's a guy, 17.
My dad works 100 hours a day.
He brings work home every evening.
He goes to his office on Sunday.
A month ago he went into the backyard
and he shot some baskets with me.
He thought he was a hero because he
spent 15 minutes there.
I could scarcely wait until he left.
I literally have no idea who he is.
How could I?
I used to wonder why he was hiding
from me.
Now I don't care.
Another kid says I have few problems with
my parents because I don't have that much
to do with them.
Why should I?
What do they know about me?
They know I go to school and I
come home.
I have freedom.
Boy, do I have freedom.
I wish someone would tell me what to
do sometimes.
And here's a guy, 17.
My dad and I have only two topics
of conversation, cars and grades.
If I come home with a C on
a test, he reminds me he was an
honor graduate from Harvard.
And mom and I fool him now.
She signs everything bad from school and doesn't
tell him.
Why the pushing?
There are so many things to worry about.
Why invent problems?
And if I realize this, why doesn't my
father?
Love.
L-O-V-E.
Love is what most of the kids on
the street are longing for.
They never found it.
They never found that marvelous relationship of love
and discipline in their homes.
It can only come when selfishness is given
up and people surrender their lives to Jesus
Christ.
Listen to this sad letter.
I'm a girl, 11 years old, who is
very sad.
My father carries a picture of my sister
in his wallet, who is 16, as a
Madison Avenue man.
She is very pretty.
I'm ugly compared to her.
Everyone tells her how beautiful she is and
she sure does know it by this time.
My father also carries a picture of my
little brother, who is 7.
He looks just like daddy, which makes him
the second favorite in the family.
My father doesn't carry my picture at all.
I gave him my picture and made sure
it was put in his wallet.
It wasn't very pretty, but it looks like
me.
He put it in the drawer.
What can I do to get my daddy
to carry my picture?
Love.
Simple love that comes from the Holy Spirit
operating through parents who really care about their
kids.
We'll break more through this generation gap than
anything else I've put on the board.
And the Spirit's natural.
Kids today, faced with the challenge of the
occult, must see a life that really works.
Power of God.
And I heard a beautiful thing.
Tommy Tyson was one praying for people, laying
hands on them, crushing their heads and things.
And the Lord spoke to him and said,
Son, are people healed by the pressure of
your hands or by the power of my
Spirit?
And then God said to him, Son, if
you'll be natural, I'll be supernatural.
Parents, if I had one thing to say
to you, I would say, really be yourself.
Really be yourself.
And if that is ugly, then get it
cleaned up with your kids.
Deal with hypocrisy, selfishness, and get the power
of God to rule your life and your
home.
And you'll know what it means to begin
to break through that generation gap.
Shall we close in prayer, please?
Heavenly Father, it is not an easy problem
to solve these changes of values and of
thinking that have taken our world by storm.
Young people are reacting to violence and anger
and bitterness across this nation and around the
world.
We pray that parents will reach out in
compassion and wisdom and try to understand that
you will give that generation-bridging and communication
-bridging love of God.
We ask this for Jesus' lovely namesake.
Amen.