Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we want to thank You for this day we thank You for the rain that's refreshing everything that's coming. Father, thank You for Your commitment to us to teach us. And Father, thank You that You are always gracious and never cynical towards us or dismissive and we pray, Father, that You will help us. To learn to be the same towards one another and towards those around us and towards the things they write and create. Father, teach us to have that graciousness of heart that You have demonstrated so overwhelmingly towards us. We ask this for Jesus's sake, our men. Okay, last time on Thursday, we were just beginning to look at this issue of moral relativism. We're looking, you remember, at the consequences of post-modernism, in terms of how it's affecting people at the street level, so to speak. And our major point here is there are no transcendent moral commandments. People may continue to think that they are moral personally and they do. Though one of the fascinating things is to look at surveys and look at what people say about other people and what they say about themselves. It's a very good illustration of what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1 and 2 about condemning other people and then doing the same things yourself. So in all the surveys that are done, the overwhelming majority of Americans today think that they personally are moral, highly moral, but are very critical of everybody else and what is taking place in the culture. Now we were starting to look through this and I was saying that we have a series of ways this works itself out, this loss of a sense of transcendent moral commandments. The first is that everything is a matter of choice of the individual. Each person has their own moral views. Let me give a practical illustration of this. Many of you will remember the Pope coming to St. Louis a couple of years back, even if you weren't living here at the time. And one of the fascinating things about that at the time was the tremendous excitement generated by John Paul II's coming here. And the huge crowds of people who went out to hear him at the time it was said that this was the biggest event in terms of public participation that had ever taken place in this city. And he spoke of the TWA dome, for example, to an absolutely packed crowd of people. But what's fascinating I think about this was on the one hand you have this tremendous respect with which John Paul II was greeted by Catholics certainly, but by others as well. And what is interesting is this that the overwhelming majority of the people, including Roman Catholics who went along to hear him with such excitement, have absolutely no intention of following his moral teaching. And that's true of the Roman Catholics as well, who went to hear him. The Pope teaches very strongly about issues like abortion, about sexual chastity, before marriage, and fidelity within marriage, and many other issues. But the majority of the people, including the majority of Roman Catholics, this isn't a criticism of Roman Catholics, it's just pointing out how people no matter what they say they believe. And what their convictions are, when it actually comes down to it, are going to live the way they want to. They believe that in the end, even if they profess Christian commitment or submission to the Pope and his teachings, that they have the freedom to live the way they wish. But the great majority of those present had no intention of obeying the Pope's moral teaching about sexual abstinence or abortion, or about birth control, particularly Catholic issue, that the Pope teaches very strongly. Now we should notice as well, this is true in evangelical churches, this isn't simply a Catholic problem, we may teach very strongly about all sorts of moral issues, in obedience to the Word of God. But the practical reality is that you can look at almost any social indicator, and you will see that evangelical churches and their congregations are very little different from the rest of the culture, when it comes to matters of abortion, matters of fornication, we'll use that blunt word before marriage, matters of marital breakdown and adultery, et cetera, et cetera. So we, for all we may say about commitment to love Jesus Christ and obey His commandments. When it comes down to it, many of us are more shaped by the moral climate of the culture in which we live, and its emphasis on the individual making their own choices about what they're going to do morally, we're more shaped by that than we are by obedience to Jesus Christ. And I hope that all of you have the humility to recognize that this touches you too. As I said the other week, you need to reflect on those pastures of Scripture which you find difficult personally to read, which you feel resistant to. One of the most obvious areas, and I already mentioned this, is what God's word teaches about materialism and personal financial issues, where we're far more shaped by the culture than we are by God's word on those questions. And if any of you would say to me, you're not shaped by the culture at all in that area, I think I simply wouldn't believe you, unless you could demonstrate it to me very clearly that that was a practical reality in your life. So all of us are deeply touched by this. You see, we have assumed that it's simply part of being American and what we understand to be freedom, to be able to do exactly what we want to with regard to issues of money, but also sexuality and many other questions. That's the first point. Point B, what I've put here, referenda on moral issues. It would have been unthinkable like 20 years ago to have a public referendum on a matter like abortion or euthanasia or homosexual marriage, but more and more states every year are having such referenda on moral issues. In fact today, people think that that's what democracy is, to consult the people and what they think is right and wrong. Now that would have been unthinkable to the founders of this nation, whether they were individually Christian or not, some of them were, many of them were not, many of them were deists or rationalists like Jefferson and Franklin, but they all shared a common conviction that they're, we are living in a moral universe where there is a transcendent moral order which is above us and which governs our life, whether they were individually Christians or not. That was taken for granted by almost everybody a couple of hundred years ago. And the notion that democracy meant consulting the people as to what was morally right and wrong in terms of sexuality or human life wouldn't have entered anybody's head. But we are living in a context where we have what Shafi used to call sociological law, that is, that we simply, laws and morality change with cultures, that there are no fixed standards by which a society should live. And it's from that approach to moral issues, that this matter of having a referendum, on whether we're going to allow homosexual marriage, whether we're going to allow euthanasia, whether we're going to allow abortion or all sorts of other issues, is becoming increasingly common. And along with that notion is simply the consulting of opinion polls. You see politicians doing this all the time but the media constantly do it as if we have an opinion poll on some moral issue and that that determines what's right and wrong for us. Of course it doesn't and Christians need to be very careful about how we approach such issues, such moral questions in our own states or in the nation as a whole because of course the majority can choose to do dreadful evil, William Golding, the English novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature some years ago who some of you have read his book, Lord of the Flies, it's his most famous book which was made into a movie that he wrote many other novels as well, the Spire, Free Fall and many many others. But he said this, if God is dead, if man is the highest, good and evil is decided by majority vote. That's exactly what's happening when you have a referendum on a moral issue or you simply consult an opinion poll, what do the majority of the people think about this? Christians can never accept this as an appropriate way to make moral law or to discern what is right and wrong because obviously the majority can do dreadful evil. We have to only think about the history of our own nation and the practice of slavery to recognize that, the majority can do great wickedness and that's so in our own moment of history as well, we haven't grown past that. So that's a second reality which we're going to find more and more that is we consult the people to know what is right and wrong and what our laws should be about all sorts of moral issues and simply go with the majority. That brings us to point C, the will of the experts, the will of the experts, one of the challenges that we face is because there are such rapid changes in the area of medical technology in particular that all sorts of questions which come up, moral questions, get left simply in the hands of the experts and let me use an illustration for you. If you think about the issue of experimentation on human embryos, is it appropriate to experiment on a human embryo? And of course initially these were embryos that were so to speak spare in produced in the process of in vitro fertilization trying to help couples who were having a difficult time having a baby and so there were embryos created in a dish and then put into the mother's womb. Now regardless of what we think about that particular question and there are all sorts of moral issues which are problematic with regard to it. The question I want to think about here is what is it appropriate to do with spare embryos that are created? Is it appropriate to create spare embryos? Is it morally right? And what do we do with them? Well there has been an enormous pressure from the medical and scientific community to use such embryos to purposely create spare embryos and to use those for medical research. Now how do we deal with such questions? Because there are no laws addressing such issues. The issue itself is created by advances in medical technology. So how do we address such issues? Well the way they've been addressed and I'll give you an illustration both from Britain and also from here. In Britain what happened with regard to this issue was the government, this was under the leadership of Mrs. Thatcher when she was prime minister. Many Christians just assume that somehow Mrs. Thatcher was a friend of Christian morality, that's simply not true in all sorts of areas. That may be how she was presented here but there are many areas where that simply isn't so and this is an illustration of it. Mrs. Thatcher's government appointed a committee and it was given the title of the Warnock committee, Warnock, W-A-R-N-O-C-K and it was under the leadership of Baroness Warnock and there were all sorts of doctors and philosophers and even some theologians appointed to this committee and they were asked by the government to address this question of experiments on human embryos and come up with some recommendations and at the time something like 95% of the British population were totally opposed to experiments on human embryos. There was an overwhelming majority against this and I mentioned this not simply to come back to the previous point about opinion polls and majorities but the overwhelming majority responded with moral revulsion to this, that this could not possibly be right to experiment on a developing human person even in early stages and the British parliament as well something like 90% of the British parliament were totally opposed to experiments on human embryos but this committee which was appointed by Mrs. Thatcher's government came up with its recommendations and parliament itself never had the opportunity to address the issue. A private members bill was introduced just as can be done here in the United States by a member of the parliament to prevent experiments on human embryos happening and it was never allowed by Mrs. Thatcher's government the time it was just simply filibusted out of existence by the time a minority of people who were against this bill because it would have passed overwhelmingly to prevent this happening but this committee came up with the only issues it really considered with these it considered one oh what is scientifically possible can we do this can we create embryos and do experiments on them and the answer to that was yes we can at the moment we can only keep them alive for about two weeks something like that but that's the situation and this is one of the problems we face scientific advances or want to use the word advance carefully there as a neutral word scientific advances have an enormous kind of impetus of their own that if you can do it then you should do it simply because you can and that was their fundamental argument we can do this so we should do it the second argument they considered issued they considered was might this be useful now might we learn something helpful from doing these experiments and they basically said yes we hope we will we hope we will and in particular they mentioned that it might be useful at dealing with the issue of dance syndrome helping to prevent children being born with dance syndrome and at the time the world's leading expert in that area Jerome Lezure testified against this and said this is not necessary we are making advances anyway and it's not needed to experiment on human embryos to help but that was their basic argument this might be useful and thirdly the only the other issue they dealt with is what will the public bear what will the public put up with and they said well at the present time we feel even though the public appeared to be against this they'll put up with us experimenting for the first couple of weeks of life in fact they chose that cutoff date because they couldn't keep them alive any longer at that point now those were the only issues they considered there were no if you like really moral issues addressed by the report and then at the end of it they recommended that that the medical scientific community appointed zone sort of watchdog board to review what was being done and they recommended that they should be 16 laboratories around Britain that would be licensed to carry out experiments on human embryos and they would simply police themselves and so that's what happened and of course it happened in many other laboratories as well because there's no law addressing the issue at all there were no teeth to it whatsoever and so experiments on human embryos have been carrying on in Britain now for the last 15 years or more something like that now exactly the same thing has happened here in the states as well I won't go into all the details of the history of it but basically that's what's happening here as well there are no laws which address the issues it is simply self-policed so to speak by the medical scientific community and all over this country as well there are experiments taking place on human embryos and who knows whether those are simply the spare embryos produced by laboratories as they try to help infertile couples or whether they're actually embryos created for the purpose of experimentation and there are all sorts of issues like this where basically moral issues are simply decided by experts the people who are thought to be in the know about these issues and the only way they're really in the know is that they're the ones who develop these techniques it doesn't mean they have any moral foundation whatsoever for addressing the issues and that's the one of the biggest challenges morally at the time in the moment we're living in that we are facing all sorts of new moral dilemmas created by the advances of science and technology and we have no means of dealing with them and our governments don't pass laws to address them you may have read just in the last couple of weeks a doctor here in the states who says that he is going to be able to do human cloning and he plans to do it now in this case he feels that at the moment there are laws dealing with this issue here in this country but there are plenty of other places in the world he can go and do it he's just going to go do it somewhere else and it's going to happen because there's just such huge pressure for it because there is not any longer any moral framework within which to address such issues as to what is right and what is wrong what should be done and what should not be done we're not very far actually from what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s where the scientific medical community worked together with Hitler in his programs of trying to cleanse to ethnically cleanse the human race and to produce a superior race and to prevent people who were considered to be inadequate in terms of their intelligence or their physique or their race or anything else to prevent such people from being able to their children and you should know that happened here in the states as well in the 1920s and 30s but in many places in this country people who were considered to be inferior in some way were sterilized without their own will so they're very serious problems that we need to reflect on here and we're living in a moment we're living in a time where there is absolutely no context whatsoever in which these issues can be addressed in any way and find a constructive way forward because they're such enormous enormous pressure from what is scientifically possible in the end being the primary deciding factor as to what should take place so this is a third area that is the will of experts becoming the fundamental deciding factor and the fourth issue here is what I've called the loss of persuasion and rational discussion in the public square pointy and we've already spoken a little bit about this but the growth of what James Davidson hunter called the culture wars where in a context where once you've lost shared moral convictions in the society as a whole it becomes increasingly difficult to have discussions which are carried on in a thoughtful respectful and rational manner if you've lost the notion of truth and you only have individuals and groups with their views and if you've lost the notion of a transcendent set of moral commandments you've just simply got groups with their own moral agenda and you see this going on all the time in the public square whether you've got somebody like Rush Limba on one side or Howard Stone on the other basically you've got people just shouting at each other without any possibility of communicating with each other and Christians again have to be very aware about getting caught up into this the more we simply become a shouting placard holding advertising advertisement producing commercial producing lobby group then we are simply dismissed by most of our contemporaries we have to be very careful about how we take part how we participate in moral discussion in the public square it's absolutely essential that we commit ourselves in obedience to God to treating people with honor and respect and engaging in discussion graciously and whether we agree with people or not for the sake of God for the sake of the gospel for the sake of the people to whom we're speaking but it becomes increasingly difficult to talk to each other once we have lost shared moral convictions and for the moment we'll go on to this next major heading the breakdown of relationships at every level one of the challenges that we face as Christians at the present time is the loss of commitment to relationships in our culture and fundamentally it's related to the passionate commitment of our society to the freedom of the individual that I do what I want to do for myself but that undermines relationships at every level
and I want to look at this in several areas per day the loss of trust and respect for marriage and the family oh I don't need to tell you this but we are living in a time where people have less and less respect for the institutions of marriage and the family it's not just simply that we can look at the figures of divorce for example and say somewhere between 60 percent and two-thirds of those who get married will end up getting divorced and many of them several times so that we look at a society in which commitment to marriage itself as an institution is breaking down and this may have touched the lives of some of you as well I'm sure it has but there are a growing number of people who have no intention of ever getting married it's something else that has taken place so I would say this you are working in the brief of many years in a residential setting where we had people many of whom Christians met some of whom were not coming to stay with us my estimate would be that at any one time between a third and a half of all the people who came to stay with us came from situations of either broken marriages from their parents or very unhappy ones and I would say again between a third and a half of the people were completely cynical about the possibility of marriage working or there are huge numbers of people in their 20s and 30s who have no intention of getting married because they've had such a negative experience of marriage in their own family setting when we were over in Europe this past summer and I was leading this how should we then live tour around various European cities the tour guide who was appointed to us who stayed with us for the whole of our 10 days together that was exactly like this she had grown up in a situation where her parents had a very poor marriage and eventually divorced and she just said as a child I decided I would never get myself into this situation and here she is now in her 60s and has never had any kind of a long-term commended relationship with anyone because she is so suspicious and so cynical about the possibility of marriage working so there's that problem at the same time there are there is the weakening of the protective and educational functions of the family the weakening of the protective and educational functions of the family
oh many parents do not have a sense that they are truly responsible for the education of their children this is true of many Christian parents one of the questions you know I'm a Presbyterian personally and some of you aren't but I often will be involved in the baptism of a child and one of the questions I'll ask the parent when I'm baptizing a baby as a child of the covenant but I would say for those of you who are Baptist as well in your convictions this is an issue you need to think about too whether you believe in infant baptism or not but what the questions I ask is this do you recognize that you have the primary responsibility to raise this child
in the nurturing admonition of the Lord that this is first of all your responsibility not that of a church or of any education institution but it's yours God has given it to you as the parents of course you may be glad for the help that you can get from the church and I will always ask the church a question about their sense of responsibility to pray for this child and to be an example to the child and to help teach the child so of course you can be glad for the help of the church and of a school or whatever but fundamentally this is the parents obligation according to the word of God do we recognize that in our culture many many people have lost the sense of responsibility for the education of their children I'm not talking here about home education it's not my point the parents are the ones who before God have the fundamental responsibility of education and the same with protection what you actually see in many homes and this is another problem is the isolation of family members in the privacy of their own worlds that's the you've got a many homes and the really isn't a home at all it's simply a house which people inhabit together a maybe from time to time share a meal together but not often not even that oh for my sons when they were in high school and college many of their friends here in St. Louis never had meals with their parents they never sat down to eat together as a family people lived in isolation within the same building and simply passed and said hi to each other a couple of times a day now again let me challenge you how much are you affected by this you know that's not what a family is biblically it's not what a marriage is biblically that's not what parenting is biblically you must be committed before God to sitting down and eating together the Bible has a great deal to say about eating together now that's how God speaks about his relationship with us that he is going to sit down and eat with us and we with him it's no accident that you know the the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is a meal a fellowship with God just as many of the things that took place in the Tabernacle and Temple in the Old Testament were they were meals fellowship meals there's one the primary context in which human relationships are made as we sit down and share at a table together so I want to challenge you you know what kind of family life do you have and if you're newly married or considering getting married what kind of family life are you planning to create and it isn't going to happen accidentally it's going to happen because you make choices to make it happen that you recognize that if you commit yourself to marriage and to having children you have an obligation before God to create time I was talking to a friend yesterday who has three little boys who were four and two and a half and just about one and he said I used to hear lots of people talking about having quality time with your children but he said maybe they need quality time but they need quantity time that's what they really need now the average American father has spent something like 20 seconds a week with their children I mean really that's what it is
you can't possibly be a father you might just as well not be there if that's what you think that being a father is and what family life is about their children need quantity time lots of it a lot of time every day it's not something that you can put off to the vacations or even to you know your one day off you see so many guys will just go out and you know do the own thing with their friends when they have a day off work well you have no responsibility you have no right to be married if that's your attitude I'm very serious here you know how much are we shaped by the culture at this point and it's radical breakdown of the family and of relationship of marriage so we see the fragmentation of life within the family do people actually know each other and spend time together within the context of the family it's one of the primary reasons that so many teenagers have their primary input from their peer group because their parents simply are not committed to spending quantity time with them or quality time or any kind of time but you need to set a patent early on if there are things that are far more important than the amount of money you have or the size of house you have or the kinds of cars you drive or anything else like that the time you spend in your marriage and the time you spend with your children is far more important than those things and here we're facing a problem not simply of an idea within a culture that is the idea of the centrality of the individual you know that what is important to me more than anything else is my personal success and my vivid personal feelings because those are the two greatest idols of our contemporaries that's those aren't my words are the words of Robert Bela who is one of the most thoughtful commentators on our way of life he says the two primary goals of Americans today are personal success and vivid personal feelings now as a Christian my primary goals are loving God with my heart and soul and mind and strength and loving my neighbor is myself starting with my family and not vivid personal feelings and personal success or having a certain lifestyle or having a kind of certain kind of house or anything else like that if we think those things we just demonstrate that we are totally shaped by the culture rather than by the word of God so we have a problem both in terms of the idea but also the practical reality of our culture you know this idea of the centrality of the individual and the happiness of the individual see this is this is not a biblical theme but I have an absolute right to pursue my own personal happiness that we may feel that that's what it means to be a member of this culture but you won't find that in the Bible anywhere and it's not what God teaches us that our calling is and it's extraordinarily destructive of marriage and of family life so the breakdown of marriage and the family secondly here the difficulty of making relationships
in polls taken of our contemporaries people say over and over again that their primary personal difficulty is personal loneliness and that's extraordinary you think of all the contact we have with people in this culture but people's number one identified problem is personal loneliness people simply don't know how to make close relationships it's the reason for the extraordinary proliferation of dating services and this isn't something to laugh at so some of you smile as soon as one says it it's not just that now we have a lonely hearts column in the paper dating services are a multi billion dollar industry because people don't know how to meet people and make relationships this extraordinary thing if that's the culture in which we live again it's related to this centrality of the individual of course if you love yourself only how can you ever make any in-depth relationships but of course there are many practical issues as well I'm not suggesting it's primarily or even only the area of ideas that affects us here in these regards that all sorts of sociological factors as well you can demonstrate for example on the issue of marriage that if a young couple are moved away by their job from the support of their extended family they are much more likely to have a divorce that that's the private why should we be surprised by that your people need the support of their parents and their extended family when they're newly married there all sorts the Christian can't just look at this and say either one this is the result of an idea only nor two that it's the result of of personal sinfulness only there are all sorts of other issues involved when we look at matters like this in our culture oh business has not been a friend of the family very often moving people around all over the place actually simply increases divorce
oh if you put too much pressure on couples they simply won't survive let me give you a practical illustration my one of my brothers-in-law was married when he and his wife went through medical school
for years old adopters have had the view since we found residency medical residency and internship so difficult and they worked so hard will make you work so hard too but when he and his wife went through medical residency their marriage was the only marriage that survived and it wasn't simply because of personal sin or post-modern ideas it was just simply the practical pressure of the situation they saw each other for two minutes a day at breakfast while one of them worked twelve hours from eight in the morning to eight in the night and the other the other shift and they had a baby at the same time but their marriage was the only marriage that survived that situation in their medical school and I was up in Rochester Minnesota a week and a half ago speaking at the library conference and I spoke to a group of medical residents and they're facing this issue right now all around them people's marriages are falling apart so there are lots of practical reasons as well as ideas here which affect this but coming back to this issue of the difficulty of making relationships oh people simply don't know how to make close relationships because if they have no pattern of that in their families either their parents just abandoning each other or getting along very poorly how will they learn I remember just a story here from one of my youngest son's friends I think of my for my boys in high school every one of their friends came from a home which had either a broken marriage or one in a very bad state of repair and one of them said to my son Philip one day said I had a dream last night about your dad and he was shouting at me and he said you know this of course was completely unreal because I've never heard your dad shouted anybody and I know he wouldn't have been shouting at me or you for that matter he said if he had been my dad I'd have understood it perfectly well because that's how he writes to all of us all the time he just yells that was his experience of family and consequently he has no idea of how to make relationships and this is one of the very great challenges to the Christian how do we are we going to commit ourselves to the practice of hospitality to deep friendships with people because the many of them the only way they are going to learn to make relationships themselves is if they see an example in our lives so one of the very great challenges to the church right now you can't just tell people this is what it takes to make a relationship people have got to see it in practice but most of us have homes which we would never consider letting anybody inside to see what our marriage is like or our family life is like one of the very great needs for the church right now is for the practice of hospitality and I don't mean you know entertaining once a year and showing your home off in your China you know what a good cook you are I mean really welcoming people into your home at any time whether it's convenient or not that's what hospitality is biblically
no hospitality literally biblically means to to love a stranger the Greek word is philaxenia to love a stranger and that's why Jesus says you know when you when you have a meal don't just invite your relatives and your close friends who are going to invite you back you know invite the people who are really in need you know I think of the friends of my youngest son here in high school and I don't say this to sort of boast about myself this isn't my point of job just trying to use this as an illustration you know they have learned far more from the many many times they've been in our home and had meals in our home they've learned far more from that about what marriage is about and what family life is about then they have ever learned from their own families they saw for the first time a marriage where there was respect and tenderness and love and cherish and they saw a family life for the first time where there was respect and care and appreciation and those things were enormously powerful and when my youngest son was married a year and a half ago five of his friends here from high school in St. Louis came all the way to England his wedding and none of them were Christians but the reason they came was because they have been so welcomed into our home they felt really part of our family and they have begun to learn something about human relationships as well as about the gospel from spending so much time in our home and the wedding and was the the wedding service was the first time any of them had been to church and God used it very powerfully in their lives because for the first time they heard some teaching which went with what they had been experiencing in our home for the previous three or four years and it affected them all very powerfully but people simply will not learn what it takes to make relationships and marriage or the family unless you give them an example and the only way you can do that is by having an open home some of you feel called to work with young people in a church youth ministry let me tell you this you cannot possibly do that work in any biblical manner unless your home is open to those kids
you cannot possibly do it in any biblical manner unless you have an open home because young people whether they have been raised in Christian homes or not whether they are believers or not they all desperately need to see the example of love and respect and care which you carry out in the context of your home and for those of you who feel called to be pastors I'd say the same thing to you one of the biblical requirements for a pastor is the practice hospitality it's just as much a requirement is not being greedy or being faithful to your wife or being able to teach God's word it's just as much requirement to be hospitable now this is very challenging what I'm saying here I intend it to be we are so much more shaped by the culture here and it's emphasis on on individualism than we are by the word of God and we need to be shaped by the word of God if God is called to you to minister his word he calls you to have an open home to really have an open home the people can come there people can come whether you've invited them or not can come to you at any time and you won't come to the door and say what are you doing here or behave as if you thought what are you doing here you know what what you really this is the gospel actually this is the gospel isn't there any other gospel in the Bible and this kind of gospel which teaches us to share our lives with people and to share our homes with them yeah let me just open it up for some questions here and yes sir that's a very good question let me try to summarize it here first of all the comment about the man choosing singleness so that he could pursue his career and let me just comment on that and then I'll I'll come back to I'll come back to the other issue yeah that's something that we really need to reflect about vibrically because Jesus himself makes this point that that there are some who choose to be single for the sake of the kingdom of God Paul adds his comments in first Corinthians 7 that that one must only make that choice if one has the gift of singleness and he uses the word charisma there the same is for a gift of the spirit that if one has the gift of singleness given to one by God then one should be prepared to make that choice because clearly a person who is single is able to do all sorts of things in their life which a person who is married with a family cannot I think for example John start is a is a personal friend of mine I'm privileged to know him very well I think of him so just got a letter from him a couple of days ago but he is on the best known Bible teachers in the world today in the evangelical community and he felt called to singleness and as a consequence he has been able to give his life to to studying God's word to teaching God's word to preaching to speaking at conferences to writing in a way that somebody like me who is married never could no I don't envy him I'm very glad to be married I love my wife and I'm glad to have a family but but there's no way I could ever produce the kind of stuff that he's produced and it wouldn't be appropriate if I did because if I did it would show that I wasn't living faithfully as as a husband and as father and this is something we need to reflect about because there's a kind of low view of singleness within the within the evangelical community as if there's somehow something wrong with you if you choose to be single scripture doesn't speak that way it does not regard the state of singleness as a superior moral state it's a mistake that the Catholic church made because it in the end has a low view of sexuality so singleness is seen as superior but the scripture doesn't teach that but it does teach us that that's something we need to think about is God calling me to singleness and if I reflect on that I have to ask the question has he gifted me for singleness or would this be unbearable for me to to try to live the life of a single man or woman the second point is is a question about the challenge of communicating about the issue of absolute truth and the questioner was saying in relationship to his father um what sort of issues can he address well we're going to come back to this over and over again but let me just give you this illustration right now um it'd be nice I if we we as Christians say that acknowledge that we're living in a universe where there is truth truth that God has made known absolute truth people around us are denying that and saying there is only personal truth now how do I ever get from this circle to this one you know where can I communicate that if in fact we were living in completely separate universes communication would be impossible but this is not an accurate picture of the situation um we might present it more accurately this way and say that
there's always an overlap every individual is living we might say between two worlds this is true for the unbeliever and it's true for you and me as believers we just been talking about this in terms of of the issue of our marriages in our families and hospitality we as Christians know very well what God's word has to say about these things but we don't practice them because we're deeply influenced by the emphasis on individual fulfillment and personal happiness of the culture and so we think of our home as a place where I have an absolute right of privacy and nobody is allowed there and even pastors think like this and would be horrified if people turned up at their doorstep and and you know and there are many pastors who hardly ever have people for a meal except on just some special occasion where like everybody else we're going to show off our China and and has etc which has got to be perfectly tidy for for the situation and we'll get the children out of the way so that we'll be well you know that's not anything to do with hospitality biblically so even at this practical level or materialism we are shaped by by the culture so this circle on the right represents you know that let's say the postmodern universe both in its theoretical and its practical aspects and here is God's world now I as a Christian am living between two worlds and that's why Paul says to me in in Romans 12 don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind scripture recognizes that we're constantly being shaped by the ideas and practices of the culture in which we live and we have to resist that so we know that we have committed ourselves to serve God to love him to to try to think about life as he calls us to think about it whether it's about questions of absolute truth or questions of hospitality we're trying to think in a way that's obedient to God to take make our thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10 4 and 5 but the beauty of this picture is the unbelievers also in this situation he is also living between two worlds because there is nowhere else for an unbeliever to live except the universe that God has made and every person whether they knowledge God or not whether they worship him or not whether they acknowledge they're created by him in his image or not that's who they are and they cannot escape that they cannot escape that so they're always living in God's universe now in terms of talking to your dad or anybody else about absolute truth or absolute morality or any other issue what you need to find is those areas in his life where he is holding on to God's truth and it is important to him that I used earlier when I was giving my illustration for the paper the mean semester the example of my dad you know who's a Marxist now there were three areas where I could start communicating to him where he was holding on to God's truth one was his commitment to marriage and the family which for him was an absolute the second was his understanding of moral values which were basically the second half of the 10 commandments he didn't think the first half was necessary but the second half he thought was self-evidently true and the third was his understanding of of economic justice and at many points you know what he had to say about the way employers treat their workers was exactly what God's word has to say and those were three points where we could start to talk what you need to find with your own father is where is he constrained by the reality of God's truth whether it's a question of absolute truth or absolute morality or anything else whereas he constrained by the reality of God's truth and whereas this precious to him now those things that are precious to him which come from God's world from God's truth may have no place whatsoever in his post-modern universe his Marxist universe whatever it is gay universe whatever the person is that you're going to be writing your paper for but remember I talked about identifying bridges those are the points where you're going to start being able to communicate with anybody the point where they're still holding God's truth in their own lives and to anybody you're ever going to talk to they're going to be points in their life where for them truth really matters whether it may be for example whether the president tells the truth or not it may be a very practical issue but wherever it is that that's the point where you're going to be able to start talking where it matters to him of course he's going to say well I experience the sun shining I'm not ridiculing you for using that illustration it's a good illustration but the rubber doesn't hit the road there for him it needs to be something which really matters to him which does not fit into his view of reality but at the same time is absolutely precious in his heart and he will not let go of it that's where you can start talking and that's true for all of you as you write your papers for people those are the things you need to find those points of content okay other questions here yes it's a very good question you know some of the people who are who are most lonely are people who are very difficult to get to know and how will run away from any attempt to get to know them yes that's true and sometimes there are there are very practical reasons for that you know many people who are deeply lonely and alienated from relationships are people who have been terribly hurt by others children who've been abused by their parents in all sorts of ways people who have had relationships where women who have had relationships where men have used them they're all all sorts of people out there who are really hurting and who are afraid of relationships because of the damage that's been done to them when they trust it I remember for example someone who came to stay with us years and years ago and she was abandoned at birth by her mother and had gone to a series was basically lived in an orphanage and then at various times was taken into someone's home for a few weeks to see whether they wanted her and you know people said no they didn't want her because she was too difficult well after you've gone through that a few times you you stop ever trusting anybody and you can't afford to make yourself vulnerable to getting close to anyone because you're hurt so deeply when you do and you know that's an extreme example of course but many people who are very lonely have never experienced any kind of relationship which they have found fulfilling to them personally and the only way to get through to somebody like that is patience or lots of patience for the long term you commit yourself to getting to know somebody to caring for them to getting alongside them whether they are easy or whether they're difficult and again means again lots of hospitality really opening yourself to somebody and actually sharing your life with them in a way that's costly you see love is costly and you can't ever get to know lonely people unless you're prepared to be to live in a costly manner and God is not called us just to get to know people who are easy to get to know that the scripture says a great deal about how God Himself commits Himself to caring for the lonely are many pastors like some beautiful pastors at the end of Isaiah addressing that issue of God's commitment to care for those who are alienated and lonely and you see this in the ministry of Christ Himself and takes time takes