These are serious days.
I have been in the ministry now since 1972,
so it's 46 years and counting.
I do not recall when I have ever lived through
a time where there is so much that is going
wrong and so much that is unexplainable.
And yet at the same time, the proliferation
of information so that people are reading
so many things from morning till night, and
the struggle with all of that is they don't
know what they're reading, if it is true or
false.
Once upon a time you had to earn the right
to be heard.
People had to know something about you.
They had to know your credentials, your track
record, what your life has been like and all
of that.
Today, anybody can get in front of a computer
and type out whatever they wish.
They don't have to defend it.
They don't even have to give us their name,
and yet we read and read and read and we find
out how confused our world has become.
But the tragedy is that the more we have access
to and the more that we are living within
an abundance of supplies, have you ever realized
how empty we have become at the same time?
Just this morning, a celebrity chef we were
informed, at the age of 61 took his life,
Anthony Bourdain.
A few days ago, Kate Spade, the well-known
designer took her life.
I think both were by hanging.
The fashion designer has an 11-year-old daughter
that she has left behind.
Anthony Bourdain has left a 13-year-old daughter
behind.
And the fascinating thing is the one-liners
that come out of their lives now.
The designer left a note for her daughter
in one line, "I have always loved you.
This has nothing to do with you.
Ask your father."
So what does an 11-year old do if it had nothing
to do with her and now she's going to ask
her father?
And you wonder, "Will she get the truth?"
And the celebrity chef made a comment of his
rather unguarded lifestyle and he made a comment
and he said, "I have never seen my body as
a temple; I have seen it is as a fun house."
Well, the fun evidently had run out and the
house is now empty.
Two very creative individuals, one in the
world of culinary arts, another in fashion
design, choose to end their lives.
She was 55, he 61, so relatively in the peak
of their accomplishment and their successes.
Why does this happen?
In some ways, I can relate.
I was 17 years old in Delhi when I had tried
to take my own life, and God protected me
from my own schemes and designs and sent me
the Scriptures to remind me that my body was
not a fun house, that my body actually didn't
even belong to me.
It belonged to Him, and it was the temple
of the living God.
Why does this happen, why at the peak of success
does a man who commands wide audiences wherever
he goes … there's a picture of him somewhere
in YouTube now hosting President Obama and
then having a bite together somewhere, I don't
know if it's France or where it was.
My colleague who is here with me, one of my
travelling colleague's son said to me, "Ravi,
if you had a dream life, wouldn't it be something
like what he had?
Going all over the world, tasting all of the
culinary delicacies, having an audience, wealth,
success, fame, pleasure, all that you wanted?
And yet he snuffs his life out.
Why does this happen?"
Ladies and gentlemen, it is vitally important
that you and I have the most fundamental questions
in life answered.
And the most fundamental question is this:
What does it mean to be human?
What does it mean to be human?
So many different answers are given to us,
so many different answers.
And the gospel is the only message I know
which coherently answers all of the deepest
questions of the heart and soul, but not just
coherently, but specifically to particular
questions gives us the truth.
"I am the way, the truth and the life," said
our Lord.
And if you take that triad in an answer, the
way, the truth and the life, you begin to
see how critical it was that He stated it
that way.
But we are living in a time where truth has
died.
You see, if you go back to the 1300s and 1400s,
rationalism had held sway.
Man was deemed to be a thinking being.
Then on the heels of rationalism with all
kinds of questions being asked of rationalists,
empiricism came into being in the 1700s and
1800s.
Man became an empirical being, from a thinking
being or a rational being to an empirical
being and a laboratory testing individual.
But on the heels of that also came the likes
of an Immanuel Kant, and man actually ended
up becoming a skeptical being.
Metaphysical propositions could not be trusted
anymore.
You could not trust moral statements or judgments
about issues of meaning and the purpose of
life.
We were purely empirical beings.
We could only talk about that which could
be tested in the laboratory.
From thinking and rational beings to empirical
beings or skeptical beings.
Then came the existentialists and the nihilists,
the nihilists sort of despairing to find meaning
and the existentialists come up with the response
that you have to will to find meaning.
Slap against the door of despair, push it
away, somehow pull yourself out up by your
existential bootstraps and define what meaning
is really all about.
And we became existential beings giving a
lot of vent to our emotions.
From thinking and rational beings to skeptical
beings to emotional beings.
And then postmodernism came along and basically
told you, "You define your own self kind of
being."
And what did we lose?
In postmodernity, we came to the conclusion
that there was no such thing as truth, no
such thing as meaning and no such thing as
certainty.
No truth, no meaning, no certainty.
The three very real issues with which we need
to define life.
What is true?
What does my life mean?
How can I be certain of the answers that I
am clinging to?
And it is fascinating that just as postmodernism
has taken over we are facing now a society
and a reality where the youngest amongst us
are the loneliest of us all.
My colleague who works here in Seattle held
a youth conference sometime ago.
He actually happens to also be my nephew.
We were with him last evening.
And Nathan said to me, he said, "Uncle, I
think the most turning point in that whole
conference was when a young lad, I forget
whether he was 12 or 14, walked up to the
microphone and a panel of speakers was sitting
there on the platform there.
And he looked at them and he said this, 'I
just have one question and I want you all
to be very honest and tell me what the answer
is because I'm not playing with this answer.
I want this answer to be right.
I have struggled with taking my life a few
times.
Can you please tell me what my life actually
means?'"
He's a young lad.
"I want to know what it means because I've
struggled with taking my own life."
In other words, our questions merit truthful
answers and the entailments become obvious
with the answer that you cling to.
You know, Winston Churchill years ago made
the comment.
He said, "Truth is the most valuable thing
in the world.
It's the most valuable thing in the world.
In fact, it is so valuable that often it is
protected by a bodyguard of lies."
He was talking about intelligence in warfare.
Truth is the most valuable thing, so valuable
that often it is protected by a bodyguard
of lies.
Natan Sharansky, Israel's former justice minister,
went back to the Soviet Union where he'd been
incarcerated in solitary confinement for years,
and when he went back he went to visit the
prison where they'd kept him.
His wife was with him and as they were about
to enter those dark confines, he put his arm
out and stopped his wife and said to her,
"Can I go in for a moment alone please because
this is where I found myself when I was all
alone and no input from anywhere else except
what I had inside me in this darkness."
She honored that request.
He went in, spent several minutes in there,
came out a battery of microphones in front
wanting to interview him and he said, "Can
you wait for this interview please?
I want to go to the grave of this physicist
Andrei Sakharov who gave to the Soviets the
atomic bomb.
I want to go and honor his memory."
And he went and laid the wreath at Sakharov's
grave and he said this: "The reason I wanted
to honor this man is because what he said
in the closing days of his life.
'I always thought that the most powerful weapon
in the world was the bomb.
I always thought that the most powerful weapon
in the world was the bomb.
I have changed my mind.
The most powerful weapon in the world is not
the bomb.
The most powerful weapon in the world is the
truth.'"
It's the most valuable thing.
It's the most powerful thing and yet with
our postmodern mindset, there is no such thing
as absolute truth anymore.
This is so ironic, so ironic.
Please hear me carefully.
In all that we are seeing with the moral confusion
of our time and the so-called "Me too" movement
and all of that, what you see happening is
the quintessential expression of the contradiction
with which we live.
All of our university students are taught,
primarily at least they are taught that truth
is not absolute, morality is not absolute.
They are trained to be relativistic in their
thinking.
They are trained to be relativists and so
when they go out in their professions and
live relativistic lifestyles, all of a sudden
they are smacked with an absolute.
You don't do these things.
Why not?
Why not?
If relativism holds sway, what I am told is
ultimately relative to myself.
Or if you wish when the absolutes were gone,
we had to park it somewhere and of all places
we parked it in the institution that we trust
the least.
We call it being politically correct, the
one institution that we doubt and that's where
we've parked our absolutes at the same time.
You see, every one of us has absolutes.
The only difference is whether we abide by
them or only use them by which to judge somebody
else.
The absolute is inescapable in your heart.
The question is do you live by it or do you
only use it to judge other lives.
I want to take this notion of truth now as
an absolute.
And I want to give you two comments and you'll
have to listen to them very carefully because
I'm moving you along a trajectory of one of
these two comments and I'll tell you why I
am doing that.
One comes…both of them come from Malcolm
Muggeridge.
I loved Muggeridge because of the way he knew
how to use language.
In fact, Muggeridge said when he stood before
God he would have to ask for forgiveness for
being so fatally fluent.
He knew how to turn a phrase.
But here is what he said in his autobiography,
The Green Stick (A Chronicle of Wasted Years),
here's what he says, "Truth is very beautiful,
more so I consider than justice which is today's
pursuit and easily puts on a false face.
In the nearly seven decades I have lived through,
the world has overflowed with bloodshed and
explosions whose dust has never had time to
settle before others have erupted, all in
purportedly just causes.
The quest for justice continues and the weapons
of hatred pile up, but truth was an early
casualty the lies on behalf of which our wars
have been fought and our peace treaties concluded,
the lies of revolution and counterrevolution,
the lies of advertising of news, the salesmanship
of politics, the lies of the priest in his
pulpit, the professor at his podium, the journalist
at his typewriter, the lies stuck like a fish
bone in the throat of the microphone, the
handheld lies of the prowling cameraman.
Ignazio Silone told me once when he was a
member of the old Comintern, some stratagem
was under discussion.
And a delegate, a newcomer who had never attended
before, made the extraordinary observation
that if such and such a statement were to
be made, it ought not to be made because it
wouldn't be true.
There was a moment of dazed, stunned silence.
Then everyone began to laugh.
They laughed and laughed until tears ran down
their cheeks and the Kremlin walls seemed
to shake.
The same laughter echoes in every council
chamber and cabinet room wherever two or more
are gathered to exercise authority.
It is truth that has died, not God.
What Muggeridge is talking about here is propositional
truth, whether an answer as it is given conforms
to reality as it is.
He's talking about propositional truth.
We use this in a courtroom, "Were you at such
and such a place when this event actually
happened?"
They're looking for a corroborating answer
that is in actuality in keeping with what
happened.
But then Muggeridge is able to take that slender
thread of truth and slice it up in two with
this perception here, and this is what I really
want to zero in on but you're going to have
to listen carefully what he says.
"In this Sargasso Sea of fantasy and fraud,
how can I or anyone else hope to swim unencumbered?
How can I learn to see through and not with
the eye?
How do I take off my own motley and wash away
my own makeup?
How do I raise the iron shutter, put out the
studio lights, silence the sound effects and
put the cameras to sleep?
Will I ever watch the sun rise on Sunset Boulevard
and set over Forest Lawn?
Can I find furniture among the studio props,
silence in a discotheque, love in a striptease,
read truth off an auto cue, catch it on a
screen or chase it on the wings of muzak,
view it living color with the news, hear it
in living sound along the motorways?
No, not in the wind that rent the mountains
and broke in pieces the rocks, not in the
earthquake that followed, nor in the fire
that followed the earthquake, but in a still
small voice.
Not in the screeching of tires either or in
the grinding of brakes, nor in the roar of
jets or the whistle of sirens or the howl
of trombones, the rattle of drums or the chanting
of demo voices.
Again and again it comes back to me that still
small voice if one could only catch it."
He goes on to say, "It's the voice of God."
Can I find furniture in a studio prop?
Can I chase it on the wings of muzak?
Where do I find what's real?
That's the area of truth that I really want
to address because that's where I think we
have picked our own pockets and lost the reality
of what has happened to us.
We do not know which way to turn to anymore.
You see, what has happened at the end of all
of our experimentation is basically this:
philosophy has become existential, art has
become sensual, education has become skeptical,
religion has become mystical, our culture
has become trivial and Christianity is made
minimal.
They drive us into a minimalistic worldview
from the existential side of philosophy to
the sensual side of the arts to the skeptical
side of education, mystical side of religion
and the trivial side of existence.
We have now come to minimalistic beliefs and
we wonder what has happened to us as a society.
I want to give you the roadmap to how we got
here and I will race through this and share
this with you.
These are not really my categories.
In the 1970s and '80s social theorists were
talking about this and giving us all these
definitions that were so relevant to our time.
And I have borrowed it from many great social
thinkers.
There were three moods that took place.
The first was the mood of secularization and
they defined it for us in these terms: Secularization
is a process by which religious ideas, institutions
and interpretations have lost their social
significance.
Secularization is the process by which religious
ideas, institutions and interpretations have
lost their social significance.
It is important to know that it is a process.
It works itself through culture and in that
culture its value diminishes anything transcendent,
anything that you believe of an eternal perspective
or a transcendent perspective.
You cannot invoke the notion of God in arguing
for a sense of morality.
And yet when you think of those who've warned
us what exactly has happened over the centuries,
was it not Solzhenitsyn who told us that the
West is on the verge of collapse and how much
damage has been done by the reality of this
notion that we no longer need to believe in
God.
Solzhenitsyn said when he was a little boy
in the dimly lit room of his home, he would
be running around playing and he'd hear his
grandfather leaning over a table talking to
the family.
He said, "I knew the evening would be coming
to an end when his grandfather would say to
everyone around, 'Do you know why all this
is happening to us here in Russia?
Do you know why all this slaughter?
Do you know why all this killing?
Do you know why the Gulag and all of this?
Because of one reality, we have forgotten
God.
We have forgotten God.'"
And so his thousands of pages that he wrote
and the tens of thousands that he read reminded
people in the West that we are on the verge
of collapse instituted by our own hands and
our own thinking when we forget God.
So religious ideas and institutions have lost
their social significance.
Just imagine, in any university if you believe
in the sanctity of marriage or you believe
in the sacredness of what the body is all
about you are looked as some kind of strange
specimen that has walked into an educational
institution.
This is the horror of our time.
But, you know, C.S. Lewis wonderfully illustrates
the tragedy of what it is that happens when
you lose that source of defining right and
wrong.
You know, many years ago a famous pornographer
was on trial in Atlanta, Georgia.
His magazines were supposed to be so perverse
that they even made Playboy magazine look
pretty ordinary.
But this man had one of the finest lawyers
defending him and the lawyer was very clever.
He would build an argument something like
this.
Those who were testifying against his client
he would say something like this to them.
"Do you ever go into or have you ever gone
into an art gallery?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever gone into an art gallery where
there are paintings by the great masters of
art?"
"Yes."
"Have you paid to go into an art gallery where
there're paintings of the great masters of
art, where there are disrobed people or nude
paintings of somebody in the nude?
Have you ever paid to go into an art gallery
like that?"
And then somebody would say, "Yeah, I have
gone into an art gallery like that."
"Will you please tell this jury why you call
that art and why you call my client's stuff
pornography?"
You know, a very logical question would be
how many marriages do you know have broken
up because the husband went too often into
a museum of art?
We don't have common sense anymore, do we?
But C.S. Lewis puts his finger on the nerve
here.
It's so brilliant and in his Abolition of
Man he does the same thing, but Pilgrim's
Regress is a brilliant book.
It's an allegory of a man in search of meaning
and answers, and when you read it you find
how brilliant Lewis' mind was.
So he talks about this young man by the name
of John who is going from philosophy to philosophy
and ends up at the mountain called the Spirit
of the Age.
But fascinatingly, Lewis describes him not
as free in living for the Spirit of the Age
but his hands are bound in chains living for
the Spirit of the Age.
And the mountain who can demand, who controls
the Spirit of the Age, is with that Neronic
stare looking down upon him.
And all of a sudden he is given his breakfast
and his hands are unbound to enjoy that breakfast.
And as he takes a sip of milk and says, "How
delicious and nourishing it is," the waiter
who brings it to him representing the Spirit
of the Age says to him, "Ah!
You only call it delicious and nourishing.
All it is is the secretion of a cow, isn't
it?"
The cow secretes urine.
The cow secretes milk.
"You call it delicious and nourishing.
It's just a secretion of a cow, isn't it?"
And then John doesn't know where to go from
there and he made a big blunder.
He commented on the tastiness of the eggs.
And now you should've seen what the waiter
compared the eggs to and he had no way to
respond.
But as he's put back in chains, Reason comes
riding on a horse to lift him up and rescue
him.
And Reason looks at he who runs the Spirit
of the Age and says to him, "Sir, you lie.
You lie because you don't know the difference
between what nature has meant for nourishment
and what nature has meant for garbage."
You don't know the difference between what
nature has meant for nourishment and what
nature has meant for garbage.
That distinction is lost today.
We have no understanding of what is true,
good, and beautiful, what is evil, heinous
and destructive.
We consider all choices equally valid because
we no longer know the difference between what
nature has meant for nourishment and what
nature has meant for garbage.
So you see, this pornographer when he's peddling
his stuff to destroy lives, to destroy men,
to make them so hooked on to this that no
one human being can ever satisfy that mind
anymore because he's taken away the value
of the human being and replaced it with the
pursuit of a feeling.
That's all they’ve done and nobody can fulfill
that.
When a woman or a man sits in front of the
lens of a camera purely to titillate the basic
instincts and imagination of a person, to
do that and provoke them to the erotic and
the sensual and the self-gratifying immediately,
they ought to put their arms in front of themselves
and say to the cameramen or the publisher,
"Don't do this to me.
Don't do this to me.
You are reducing me to something so base."
But the person who doesn't say that and continues
with the process will continue with the process
because they have lost their sense of shame.
And when secularization has done its bidding
in your heart and mind, it will all be because
it will destroy a legitimate sense of shame,
which is a God-given reminder to us of that
which is wrong.
Just a few days ago, my colleagues and I were
hosting somebody who is in the media world.
That's all I'll say to you.
And their marriage has fallen apart.
What does it have to do with anything?
It has to do with the husband's addiction
to pornography that she no longer can trust
him when this is what he does to feed his
mind and his brain again and again.
Jim Dobson says when he talked to Ted Bundy
shortly before his execution, that mass murderer
and cannibalist, he looked at Dr. Dobson and
said, "This all began for me with pornography."
He said, "Dr. Dobson, tell the young never
to get into this.
It builds an insatiable hunger that nobody
can ever satisfy and nobody can ever fulfill."
That is only one illustration of what has
happened in our society, where the quotient
of shame has been removed.
Secularization, saeculum literally means "this
worldly."
You live for the moment, and when you desacralize
the body and you see your body as a fun house
you end up wanting to destroy it and say,
"I cannot face life anymore."
Ladies and gentlemen, when God sends conviction
to you for something that is wrong, it's to
guard you and protect you from going further
down the line into things that are more decimating
and things that are more destructive.
So many homes have been victimized today by
the mass media and the seduction of the conscience.
Secularization.
But we move from that to pluralization.
Pluralization is where there's a competing
number of ideas in our worldview and no one
worldview is dominant.
A competing number of ideas in our worldview
and no worldview is dominant.
Again, social theorists have given us this
definition, a competing number of worldviews
but no worldview is dominant.
You know, culinary-wise I'm glad for pluralism.
When I arrived in Toronto while I was 20 years
old, there was only one Indian restaurant,
which was an embarrassment to Indians.
Awful!
They didn't know how to make a curry.
I just looked at that and I said, "Boy!
If nobody ever likes this food, I can't blame
them."
But today you go to Toronto.
When I got to Toronto in 1966, there were
five hundred Indians in Toronto.
Five hundred Indians, so that if you saw an
Indian across the street, you'd go over and
start talking until you find out he's generally
trying to sell you something and then you
moved on.
Today, if you stop at the airport in Toronto
Pearson airport and you just say, "Mr. Singh,"
about five hundred will turn around and think
you're calling them because today in Toronto
there are five hundred thousand Indians.
There were only five hundred then in the mid-sixties.
You can go to Los Angeles and as one sociologist
said, "You can see a Korean in a fast food
outlet selling kosher tacos."
That's pluralization.
That's pluralization of cuisine.
So man, you know on our team of apologists,
we have 70 plus of them.
I love their accents.
I love how they represent their country.
I love that the -- pluralization is a great
idea.
Pluralization is a great idea, but pluralization
not properly understood can lead to relativism
when there's no dominant worldview undergirding
our culture.
What is the worldview that's undergirding
America now?
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows what the worldview is.
And when you have this kind of a pluralized
mentality, you end up with systemic contradiction
again and again and again and you say to yourself,
"Why is life falling apart?
Why don't I ever get a proper answer?"
And so the songwriter says, "Cat's foot iron
claw, neurosurgeons scream for more, from
paranoia's poison door, twenty-first century
schizoid man.
Blood rack barbed wire, politicians, funeral
pyre, innocents raped with napalm fire, twenty-first
century schizoid man.
Death seed, blind man's greed, poets starving,
children bleed.
Nothing he's got he really needs, twenty-first
century schizoid man."
Now notice this.
"The walls on which the prophets wrote is
cracking at the seams.
Upon the instruments of death, the sunlight
brightly gleams.
Will no one lay the laurel wreath as silence
drowns the screams?
Between the iron gates of fate, the seeds
of time are sown and watered by the deeds
of those who know and who are known.
Knowledge is a deadly friend, but no one sets
the rules.
The fate of all mankind I see is in the hands
of fools.
Confusion will be my epitaph as I crawl a
cracked and broken path.
If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh,
but I'm afraid tomorrow I'll be crying."
This brokenness, this emptiness, this sense
of desolation and aloneness is what is now
systemic in our culture because we are living
with systemic contradiction.
It's systemic contradiction.
Ladies and gentlemen, when God gave us the
first commandment, it was only one, only one.
"Don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil because the day you do, you
will surely die."
And the enemy of our souls came and what did
he say?
"Not true.
Not true."
But he did tell us the truth.
He said, "You will be as God knowing good
and evil."
Do you know what he was placing as a temptation?
Play God.
Play God.
Be the definer of good and evil.
Today for our healthcare laws we need 20,000
pages.
Before, there was just one.
As Norman Geisler, my professor, used to say,
"The problem was not the apple in the tree;
it was the pear on the ground."
Very real.
They became the definer of good and evil.
The moment you do that you die the death of
a thousand qualifications with every moral
stipulation.
So you get onto a plane and what do they tell
you?
"Do not touch, tamper, disable or destroy."
Why all those words?
The smoke detector, "Don't touch, tamper,
disable or destroy."
Why don't you just say, "Don't mess with that
thing?"
You know why?
Because every one of those words can die the
death of a thousand qualifications in a courtroom
because we can play God.
It's fascinating today what has happened to
the courts of law where so much goes on in
language and you never know who's telling
you the truth and what the truth is all about.
Secularization leads to no shame.
Pluralization ends up bereft of reason, which
brings you to the closing one, which is privatization
where there's a cleavage in the modern experience
between your public and your private life,
and in that cleavage you are forced to find
meaning in your private life.
You know, India is facing some very, very
challenging days.
One of the members of the Congress Party has
gone onto YouTube saying India is planning
to redefine, rewrite its Constitution.
They say the Constitution was defined to contain
within that geographical boundary, but there
are extremists on one side that say we ought
not to be defined by geographical boundary,
we ought to be defined by our religious inclination
and who we are here predominantly.
And so philosophically they plan to rewrite
the Constitution, so says at least one Member
of Parliament out there.
We may not be rewriting our Constitution here
but we in effect are doing the same thing
by not honoring the intent of what it was
all about to start with.
We are controlling the way thinking goes on
and what we are told now is you can believe
whatever you want to believe, but believe
it in private.
Don't bring it out into public.
The moment you bring it out into public you're
violating the public space and you are now
infringing upon the rights of somebody else.
So here we are, 2018.
We do not know how to define anything.
We cannot define who we are in gender.
We cannot define who we are in marriage.
We cannot define who we are in our proclivities.
We cannot define anything of any worth or
of any absolute.
We toss it up into the wind as it were and
decide which way we're wanting to go.
This is a dangerous time in which to be alive
because there are no definitions.
When you don't have any definitions, how are
we going to deal with reality?
You know, I have…Winston Churchill was once
told by a corporal, "Mr. Churchill, have I
ever told you about my grandchildren?"
And Churchill said, "No, and I want you to
know how much I appreciate it."
Well, I have five grandchildren and since
I'm not Churchill I will violate it.
I have a little grandson who is about to turn
seven later on this year.
He has an amazing vocabulary, an amazing vocabulary.
I don't know where he comes up with the words.
When he was about five or something like that,
he looked at me one day across the dining
table and said, "Papa, what is the meaning
of sophomoric?"
And I sounded sophomoric trying to define
it for him.
Recently, he'd learned about the whole issue
of slavery and so on, and it really crushed
his heart.
He's a guy with a little tender heart.
He came back to his mother and he said, "How
could this happen?
How can this happen?
How do people get hurt so badly?
How do they justify this?
How do we justify this?"
And then he paused.
This is a little kid.
He looked at his mother and said, "You know,
I have a friend.
He comes from another country.
Do you think one day people may treat him
badly too because he comes from somewhere
else?"
And Naomi my daughter said, "Why do you ask
that?"
Here's where he begins his answer by saying,
he said, "Mommy, my hypothesis is this.
If you want to hate somebody, you will find
a reason to hate them."
If you want to hate somebody you will find
a reason to hate them.
This is the same little guy when he was three
and a half who looked at his mother when she'd
lost her car keys and couldn't find it, Naomi
my daughter, she slapped her forehead and
said, "I must be losing my mind," and he looked
at her and said, "Mommy, whatever you do,
please don't ever lose your heart because
I'm in there."
He has learned from a young age what it means
to be in the heart of somebody, what it means
to be in the heart of somebody, and what it
means to be loved in a home where you're valued
and where you care.
Let me ask you this.
Do you know anybody in your life who doesn't
have that feeling?
Feels there is no home for their heart.
There are scores of people in our world devoid
of that relationship who are living desolate,
desperate, lonely lives without meaning, without
purpose.
"I sometimes think about the cross and shut
my eyes and try to see the cruel nails, the
crown of thorns and Jesus crucified for me,
but even could I see Him die I would but see
a little part of that great love which like
a fire is always burning in His heart, the
love of God for you, for me."
When a man can leave a little girl and choke
himself to death, he obviously didn't understand
that God really loved him, that God loves
his little girl.
When a woman can say, "I love you.
This has nothing to do with you," but ends
up leaving that little girl for the rest of
her life trying to figure out "What happened
to my mom?"
I was in Iraq last year with both of my colleagues
here.
The last day we were taken out for lunch by
a man who was a killer.
He was avenging any killing done by ISIS and
all that kind of stuff.
And one day he was avenging the killing of
his brother, and he walked into the room of
the man at night and at point blank range
pulled the gun, the trigger, against the temple
of the man and killed him.
Unknown to him, the four-year-old son of the
man was lying next to him, and this blood
comes spurting out, gushing out, and the little
boy sits up and he says, "Where's my father?"
And he was so stunned.
He looked at him and he said, "He's gone to
paradise."
He says, "Take me to him."
He reached out and held the hand of the killer.
"Take me to my father.
I want to be with my dad."
This fellow goes out into the night and he
sits in a garbage heap, which he said which
is where I belonged with what I had done to
myself.
And as he is struggling to hold back the tears
coming out like a fountain, sobbing his heart
out as to what he'd done to himself.
But he said, "I've struggled to sleep, but
every time I slept, in a few minutes I would
see Jesus in my dream again and again and
again.
I was getting angry until finally I surrendered
and gave my life to Jesus Christ."
He is working now in a ministry of a hospital
which binds the wounds of the broken including
the enemy and he drives people back and forth.
He was driving us.
When he told the story, I kept looking at
him.
I said, "Who was he before?
Who is he now?"
The difference is what Christ had done in
his heart and turned him from being a killer
into being a healer of people.
Ladies and gentlemen, when privatization has
done its work, it strangles the sacred and
strangles meaning from your life.
Secularization, no shame.
Pluralization, no reason.
Privatization, no sacred, no reality of the
holy, and no meaning.
Tomorrow, when I speak to you, I want to give
you the answers, how then does the Christian
worldview respond to secularization, pluralization
and privatization, and see the beautiful answers
of the gospel in all of this.
May God richly bless you.
Thank you for giving me a hearing.
