Great British writer, G.K. Chesterton, last century, said there is an infinite variety of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. He's talking about truth. So it's Peter in the text we have this morning, 2nd Peter chapter 1, verses 16-21, 2nd Peter, chapter 1, verses 16-21, follow me in your own Bible, if you will, use that Bible right in front of you. If you need a Bible, take that one in front of you, welcome to, we have more out there in the narthics. Obviously you can follow me up here. 2nd Peter, chapter 1, verse 16, the apostle Peter says, we did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were eyewitnesses of His majesty. Where He received honor and glory from God the Father, when the voice came to Him from the majestic glory, saying, this is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven, we were with Him on the sacred mountain, and we have the Word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as the light shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophets own interpretation for prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank You for all good gifts this morning, for music, yes, for children, for the laughter and the ability we have to fellowship together and to pray and to give back to you of our material goods, and to lift our hearts before you in praise and worship. Now Father, we thank You for the gift of Your Word. As Neil has already said, this is Your Word, the grass withers and the flower falls off, but the Word of our God abides forever. I ask now that You would awaken us to this Word, and apply it to our hearts, our minds, our hands, our feats, and our feet and our wills so that we leave this place more like Jesus than we were when we got here, I pray in His name, amen. This was a fairly well-traveled item a number of years ago, but it's been a while, maybe you've forgotten 1987 commencement exercise at Duke University. Ted Coppel, whose daughter was graduating from Duke, Ted Coppel was asked to be the guest commencement speaker. I don't know if you know this about him, Ted is Jewish and he's a very observant Jewish man. And this is what he said in part, it was an address that really caused a lot of ways. Coppel said this, our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In his purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder, it is a howling reproach. What Moses brought down from Mount Sinai were not the ten suggestions, they are commandments and are not Word. The sheer beauty of the commandments is that they codify in a handful of words acceptable human behavior, not just for then or now but for all time. You can imagine the ripples that went out from Ted Coppel saying that, we're talking about truth this morning, that's what Peter's about here. First thing Peter says is that truth stands on its own. Truth stands on its own, look at verse 16 again, we did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. Who's the wee here? We is the other apostles and I, Peter says. This was one of the challenges that they faced. There were no six and others who said, the Jesus story, it's a great story, but it's really just a story. It didn't really happen like that, it's a cleverly invented story, and Peter says we did not follow cleverly invented stories. This isn't Hollywood, Peter didn't say that, but he would. Dan Brown, are you listening? In case you're not familiar with it, Dan Brown wrote a little book, got a little attention here last few months called the Da Vinci Codes, we're in the Da Vinci Codes, he has his main characters, Lee Teving and Robert Langdon, Langdon saying things like, let me quote here, he said, the Bible, somewhere in here, he says that the Bible was made by men, my dear. Not by God, and they began to challenge it as if it was a cleverly invented story. Christianity, ladies and gentlemen, is an historical faith. These are real events that really happen to real people at real places and real time, who would make this up? Think about what it is that we as Christians believe, that the God of the universe created a planet and on this planet he put these little two-legged carbon-based life forms, in his image, people of knowing him, and then he gave them the opportunity to rebel, and we did. In every rebellion, we burned the bridge from ourselves back to our creator, and God looked upon us and said, not, well that's it, let's scrap that experiment and start all over. No God said, I love them and I'm going to win them back to myself. How will I do that? Well, I'll become one of them, and the person of the second, the person of the Trinity I will become a human being, and I will go there, and not just teach them and lead them and guide them and heal them, I'll do all that, I'll let them murder me, and my blood will pay for their sins, and they'll simply accept that by faith, place a trust in me and me alone and they can come back and live with me forever. Now let me ask, who would make that up? That's not the religion I'd make up, folks. I'd make up the one that says, be good, don't be bad, try hard, good luck. In other words, that's the great American folk religion of moralism and legalism. That's Islam. That's every legalistic religion on the planet. Be good, don't be bad, try hard, good luck. God helps those who help themselves. This is not Christianity. Christianity is the story I just told you about God becoming flesh, laying his life down, and winning back lost men and women. That's the real story, folks. You take it or you leave it. You love it or you hate it. You accept it or you reject it, but what you don't do is you don't rearrange it to suit your purposes. You don't say, well, you know, I like parts of it, but I don't like other parts of it. So let's keep this part, but let's tweak that one. Let's massage that one. Let's make it a little more acceptable to modern ears. This is the story. Take it, leave it, love it, reject it, but that's the story. Let me do something with you here. I did this once a few years ago, but a lot of you weren't here then and the rest of you may have forgotten. So be good sports and play along with me here about something. I'm going to ask you just a minute, close your eyes, and yes, you may keep your hand on your wallet if you feel the need. I'm going to ask you close your eyes, and then without looking around, I'm going to ask you if you will point a certain direction, okay? Will you do that? And if you just can't do that, just be quiet and let somebody else do, okay? Close your eyes, please. And would you all, without looking around, would you just please point which way you think is straight north? Go ahead. Get your arms up, put them up there, okay? Keep them up where I can see please, everybody, all right? Okay, can you open your arms up, please, everybody look around? Oh my, oh my, we're all over the map, and I mean, we're all over the map. A lot of you are pointing that way, some of you are pointing this way, others are going, what should we do? I know. We'll take a vote. This is America, right? It's a Democratic-American thing to do, we'll take a vote. And I hope you vote right, because next time I have to go to Fort Lauderdale, or Coco Beech, or Canada, or someplace, I hope, you can tell me which way is north. Do you know which way it really is? If you go from me to that corner back there, that's pretty close to straight north. Now a lot of you got it right, some of you didn't, what should we do? Well, just go the way you think, and I'm sure it'll be all right. Now folks, north is north, and it doesn't really matter whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it, or how you feel about it, that's north. This is the gospel story. This book, this book is truth, it's not up for a majority vote. It is what it is, and it stands on its own. Harry Blamer said this, you do not make the truth, you reside in the truth, or you don't. You all have heard me, quote this man a number of times, before his death is my favorite musician, Rich Mullins, and his song Creed, which is just a musical adaptation of the Apostles Creed, and his song Creed, he has the chorus say this, I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it, no, it is making me, it is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man. Truth stands for itself. Some else here will say, or somebody not here will say, isn't that very narrow-minded view? Isn't that pretty arrogant of you to think that your truth is the only truth, and then you know the words that follow, the narrow-minded, mean-spirited, intolerant. The last sin in America has to be intolerant. Isn't that very intolerant of you? Let me tell you what would be, what would be really arrogant of me. If I take this book, which I believe to be the word of God, and I say, I think this is God's word, but we're going to change a little bit here, we're going to massage it, we're going to tweak it, we're going to rearrange it for my benefit of yours. That would be arrogant, ladies and gentlemen. That would be the height of arrogance, to say I'm going to take God's word and edit it. There's another denomination, I'm not going to name them, my point is not to make them look bad. There's another denomination that is going through great upheaval right now, over the view of the scriptures. And my point in bringing them up, most of you probably know who it is, but it's not the point. My point in bringing it up is that other members of this denomination, not in America, other members of this denomination in Asia and Africa, are asking the American members. Don't you believe the Bible you gave us? Truth, ladies and gentlemen, truth stands on its own. I have read parts of this SAT before, but this is so good, I'm going to re-read a little bit of it. Dorothy Sayers, another Brit. The greatest drama ever staged, it's a long SAT, highly recommended to you, you can find it on the internet. Dorothy Sayers, the greatest drama ever staged, but let me read just a little bit of that, a few paragraphs of that essay. Official Christianity of late has been having some bad press. We're constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist upon too much doctrine. The old dogma, as people call it, the fact is that precise opposite is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man, and dogma is the drama. That drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of the church, and we think it though is because we have either never really read those amazing documents or recited them so often as so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning. The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central question, what think ye of Christ? Possibly, we might prefer not to take this tale too seriously. There are, describing points about it, here we have a man of divine character walking and talking among us, and what do we find to do with him? The common people, indeed, heard him gladly, but our leading authorities in church and state considered that he talked too much, and he uttered too many disconcerting truths, so we bribed one of his friends to hand him over quietly to the police. We tried him on a rather vague charge of creating a public disturbance and had him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, thanking God we were rid of a nave. All this was not very credible to us, even if he was, as many people thought and think. Only a harmless, crazy preacher, but if the church is right about him, it was more discredible still. For the man we hanged was God Almighty. So that is the outline of the official story, the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten. When he submitted to the conditions he had laid down, he became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull. This terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero. If this is dull then, what in heaven's name is worthy to be called exciting. The people who hanged Christ never to do them justice accused him of being a boar. On the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality. We have very efficiently paired the claws of the lion of Judah, certified him meek and mild, and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale preachers and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a meek and mild person. They objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. We may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating. We may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish. But if we call it dull then words have no meaning at all. Any journalist hearing of it for the first time would recognize it as news. Those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news and good news at that. So we are so likely to forget that the word gospel ever meant anything so sensational. Perhaps the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried, perhaps it is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been spoken with complete conviction and that was upon the eve of the resurrection. Truth, my brother and sister, stands on its own. We did not follow cleverly inventive stories when we told you about the power in coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty, eyewitnesses. This is the only place in the whole New Testament where that word is used. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the majestic glory saying, this is my son with whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Marisels heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain. Peter says, don't give me cleverly invented stories. I was there Jack, they didn't say Jack, I said it, but Peter says I was there on that mountain. I saw what happened now. Some of you know what we are talking about here, story from Matthew 17, we call the transfiguration. Luke's gospel has it as well. Some of you, this will be brand new news, so let me read to you from Matthew 17 versus 1 through 9. I don't know what page it would be on your Bible, in the Pew Bible there. Matthew 17, 1 through 9. After six days Jesus took with him, Peter, James and John, the brother of James, led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shown like the sun and his clothes became white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped him and a voice from the cloud said, this is my son whom I love. With him, I am well pleased, listen to him. When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came up and touched them. Get up, he said, don't be afraid. If I could put a parenthesis in the store here, this might have been the one time I would have said to Jesus, excuse me, don't be afraid. We just came up this mountain and saw Moses, who has been dead for 1,200 years, and Elijah has been dead about 800, and the voice of God just shook this mountain. I am not to be afraid, I am afraid, pardon me, I am a mess if I am there when this happens. But I wasn't there. Peter was. And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, don't tell anyone what you have seen until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead. You don't forget that one, folks. You don't forget an encounter like that. If you were there and you saw that, that will make you bold. That will make you cheerful in the face of death. Truth stands on its own. Peter also says that truth shines a light into darkened places. Truth shines a light into darkened places, verse 19. And we have heard, and we have, the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart. Peter here refers to the word of the prophets, which is just code for the entire, what we call our Older Testament. He refers to the word of the prophets as a light shining in a dark place. The presence of light with God when God appears. For light accompanying and announcing the Proclamation of God happens to all throughout scripture. Think with me for a moment. Genesis 1-1. God said, let there be, I'll start with verse 2, God said, let there be light, and there was light. In Exodus 3, Moses encounters a burning bush that is not consumed. Exodus 13, we get the pillars leading the people of Israel, the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. Isaiah 9, verse 2, this is the verse we read around Christmas time every year. The people walking in darkness have seen in great light on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned, and when the kid said earlier during kid's corner when the angels came, just at the birth of Jesus, what happened? And the glory of the Lord shown round about them and the shepherds and the other were so afraid. In Exodus 17, we just read about the transfiguration when Jesus became light, became light. Acts 9, conversely, Apostle Paul, when he's riding off to persecute Christians and a bright light from heaven, knocks him on the ground. Hebrews 12, 29, our God is a consuming fire, Revelation 21, the eternal seed of God has no need for the Son of the moon because God himself is in the midst of her, and he is their light. John sums it all up this way in 1 John, chapter 1, verse 5, this is the message we heard from him, and declare it to you, God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Man by the name of T-bone Burnett, you probably, not heard of, he's a musician, also a Christian, used to do some recording of his own, now he basically produces others. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, T-bone Burnett said this, I learned a long time ago that if you believe that Jesus is the light of the world, there are two kinds of songs you can write. You can write songs about that light, or you can write songs about what you see by that light. Why does Peter call the word of the prophets a light shining in a dark place, and compare Jesus' coming to the day dawning and the morning star rising in your hearts? Why does Peter talk that way? World seemed a little dark to you, this world seemed a little dark to you, it seemed dark to them too, but the gospel of Jesus Christ, the impact, the influence of Christ himself upon life on this planet Earth, is a light shining into a dark place. Let me read to you from a book Kenneth Scott Latterad, who's a professor of Occidental Studies at Yale, also probably probably the greatest church historian alive until his death a few years back. Kenneth Scott Latterad, a history of Christianity, I had these volumes if you want, they're only about 1500 pages, but it's a really good 1500 pages, I promise. I won't read it all to you, but here's what he says, at the very end, from its beginning with Jesus of Nazareth and a group of 12 and then 11, rather unimpressive followers, Christianity grew out of its status as a small sect within Judaism until today, it is the largest faith planet Earth has ever seen, and I would add, in growing more rapidly than any other, in growing faster than it's ever grown before, back to Dr. Latterad. Not only has it produced a staggering number of spiritual converts, it has made an impact on the world like nothing else. Across the centuries, Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than any other force. More than any other power in history, it has impelled men to fight suffering, whether that suffering has come from disease, wars, or natural disasters. It has built thousands of hospitals, inspired the emergence of the nursing and medical professions, and furthered movements for public health and the relief and prevention of famine. And then Latterad writes of the roles of men like William Wilberforce, who almost single handly champion the cause of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. He writes of other men and women, Christians advancing the cause of human rights for the native peoples of the new world, the rights of women and children, other minorities and oppressed peoples. Not that we've batted a thousand folks, we have not, Christianity, we have our ugly, dark skeletons in our closets. But more than any other force, the gospel of Christ knows who follow it, has taken that life. And then Dr. Latterad says, by its name and symbol the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross bears witness to its Christian origin. Don't let anyone ever make you feel as though you should be ashamed or as though you're unenlightened because you name the name of Christ because of your faith in Jesus. The only reason we even have the freedom to make such a criticism in this country is because this country was founded on biblical principles. Christian principles planted in and soaked in the soil of Judaism. It's the only reason we have the freedom to make those Christians try doing that in an Islamic or a Hindu territory. We're not criticizing the powers that be in Iran or in Indonesia. We have those freedoms because our Judeo-Christian heritage, because we believe that every single person is made in the image of God and is deserving of freedom and dignity and respect. Anyone that looks down on Christianity as an oppressive or repressive force is simply showing his or her ignorance. And a non-Christian says to you that Christianity is a repressive or backward system. You need to say to him, compared to what? Communism, Marxism, Hinduism, humanism, Darwinism, Islam? You don't like the Christian system, try another one and see where it goes. Anyone who looks down on our ideology, ask them to come up with another one that's made a more positive impact on the planet. Let me ask you how many mercy hospitals do you know that have been raised up by Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims or atheists? And let me ask you this too, if you as a Christian were to go to a Buddhist or Hindu or a Muslim hospital, dedicate to Allah or to Muhammad or to Cali or to Buddha, would you go as a non-Buddhist, non-Hindu, non-Islam, non-Muslim, would you go? But you can go into this mercy hospital or into the other hospitals that have been founded upon Judeo-Christian principles and know you'll be treated with respect and dignity because that's what we believe. The gospel's gone forth and it continues to go forth bearing fruit and liberating and uplifting people wherever it goes, individually, corporately, globally, wherever men and women will listen and receive it, the truth shines a light into darkened places and then finally and very briefly, truth stands on its own, shines a light in darkened places, truth comes from God no matter who speaks it or when or where, truth comes from God no matter who speaks it or when or where, they're basically two kinds of revelation from God. There's natural general revelation where you go outside and look around and say, this God's a God of order and beauty. Psalm 19, the heavens are telling of the glory of God and the sky is declared the work of His hands. There's natural revelation which all men everywhere can see and Romans once is all men everywhere are responsible to see and then there's special revelation, the kind of revelation we have in that book we're reading, special revelation that only comes from God. Our Bible is God's word to us, explain to us all that we need to know about salvation and about growing to become more Christlike. It tells us how to raise our children. It tells us how to relate to one another and how to relate to the world. Our Bible is all we need. God made it, He wrote it down for us, He preserved it down through the ages. And now I'll flip back to what Dan Brown has his characters say in the Da Vinci code about how the the Bible is a product of man, my dear, not God. And then he has his characters cast out. Says, though, there were really dozens of on dozens of gospels and hundreds of other documents and a council in 325, Eddie picked and chose the ones they liked and they voted and it was a close vote. None of which is true. None of which is true. The older testament that we have, it was recognized coherently, cohesively at the time of Jesus. Those 39 books we have that we call the Old Testament, that was their Bible, it was well known. Jesus recognized and affirmed it so the apostles, what we have is our newer testament, our second testament. It was largely together by the end of the second century. And here are the tests, I'll give them to you very briefly, here are the tests for how a book was to be included in the New Testament. We call it the canon because that word means measurement or rule. Here are the tests for a book being included in the canon. They need to either have been written by an apostle or approved by one. They need to agree with the rule of faith, that is the core of the Christian faith, as it's taught by the Old Testament prophets by Jesus and the apostles. Thirdly, the books needed to have been widely accepted by various church bodies. That's how you have the 27 books you have as the newer testament. By the time of the council of Nicaea, the first list we have, complete list, yes, it's in 367 AD by a member of the name of Athanasius. But that list was widely accepted by them, widely accepted. And the council of Nicaea merely recognized and affirmed what the church was already doing. We have exactly the Bible got intended to us to have. And it is sufficient for and authoritative and all matters of faith and daily living. Above all Peter says you must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. Folks, we encourage you to read your Bibles. I hope you do. Read your Bibles. Study them. God will speak you through them. But know this. If you come up with an interpretation of a verse or a passage that no one else has ever come up with, you're wrong. I'm sorry. People come up with these novel interpretations all the time. If you cannot find anywhere in church history where the church has said this is Orthodox Christianity, you need to put it on the side. Study it some more. Pray about it. Talk about it with other believers. If you're the only one that sees that, you need to submit to the teaching and the authority of the church. The church needs to be our guide over how we understand scripture and scripture needs to be our guide over how we live our lives. When we sing these are the days of a lie to why do we sing that? Because God said to Elijah and through Elijah he says to us, what God said through the prophets, through Moses, through David, what God said through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, through Peter, through Paul, for the others. When he said through them he says to us, God's word is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword and cuts all the way down, all the way down into our innermost being. These are the days of Elijah we sang, declaring the word of the Lord has there ever been a time? Has there ever been a time when we needed to hear the word of the Lord declared more clearly as a light shining in the dark places? The grass withers of the flower follows off but the word of our God abides forever and it doesn't change folks. Technology advances, knowledge accumulates, human nature doesn't change, the nature of God, God does not change, God's word does not change. Do you not think the 3,000 years ago and 4,000 years ago they struggle with the same things we do, money, sex, power, money, sex power, family relationships, husband and wife relationships, parent child relationships, human nature does not change, technology advances, knowledge accumulates, human nature doesn't change, God doesn't change, the word of God doesn't change. Truth comes from God, no matter who speaks it or where or when. Pilate asked what is truth. Jesus said, I am the way the truth in life and no one comes to the Father but by me. And He also said that if you know the truth, the truth will make you free, free indeed, an infinite variety of angles at which we follow. There's one at which we stand. You've heard it this morning. Let's pray together. My Father, we thank you for the nature of truth that your word is truth and that you use your word to mold us and to shape us and make us more like Jesus. I pray that's what we've done this morning. More importantly, I pray that what we've done this morning is pleasing in your sight and that we have honored you and glorified you in what we've done. Lord take this word now, take this service of worship. We do lift it before you as an offering in this entirety and we pray that what's happened here will make us more and more acceptable offerings in your sight for I pray in Jesus name. Amen. Now receive the benediction and go now in the love of God the Father, grace and mercy of God the Son, fellowship and companionship of God the Holy Spirit and live the life. Amen.