Blurring the Lines

SERMON: 2013-06-09--is0513--blurring-the-lines SOURCE DURATION: 00:45:25.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The sermon begins with segment [0] and concludes its main expository points in segment [31], before the sustained acoustic music interval starts. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:41:03.400-00:45:23.700 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I want to begin this morning by referencing two stories that have been in the news in the last couple of weeks. Two stories that are interrelated on the one hand, but stand in significant contrast to each other. The first story refers to a 13-year-old boy from Bayside Hills, New York. His name is Arvind Mahankali. Sounds a little like melancholy. Wonder this morning if anybody remembers why he was in the news. Anybody follow this story? He is the 2013 winner of the very prestigious Scripps National Spelling Bee in the United States. The first boy to win this since 2008. And the winning word was, and I don't know where they find these words, let's keep that picture up, the winning word was KNAIDEL, K-N-A-I-D-E-L. And I'm willing to bet you don't know what that means any more than I did. I had a look it up. It is a Yiddish dumpling. And no sooner was it announced that he had won the contest with his spelling than some Yiddish expert disagreed with the spelling and said it should be spelled like this, K-N-E-Y-D-E-L, KNAIDEL. Nevertheless they allowed his prize to stand and he walked away with $30,000. Not bad for a 13-year-old. Well that story in the news at the end of May was followed I think a day later by a story connected to Oxford University professor Simon Horobian. And he's in the news because he just authored a book published or a book entitled Does Spelling Matter? And he argues that while in some instances how you spell a word is significant, that our preoccupation with correct spelling, read spelling B, leads to what he calls a form of licensed prejudice, that is to say you make people feel bad if they're bad spellers. And therefore we need to not be so set on spelling words properly. He says whether you spell accommodates with two Cs and two Ms or not really doesn't matter very much. And all those of us who have difficulty spelling say there's a man after my own heart. Obviously the fruit of text messaging and all the abbreviations that happen there and that absolutely ruin the spelling skills of a whole new generation, teachers and editors are turning over in their graves at the state of spelling in the world today. This past week I got to thinking about these two stories side by side and it occurred to me that professor Horobian's insistence on lowering the bar as it relates to spelling, his desire to get rid of standards and settle for what is, is not unrelated to what I would call the spirit of this age. And by the spirit of this age I mean the preoccupation in today's society to blur the line if you will between right and wrong until right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. And that's what Isaiah the prophet is speaking about in the words of her text this morning when he says woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Because you see from God's perspective there is a line of demarcation, a line of separation between good and evil, light and darkness, sweet and bitter. God as the creator and the sustainer of the universe has the right to say this is right or this is wrong and that is not based on some capricious selfish motive but rather it is rooted in his character and rooted in his love for creation. The Bible calls that the law of God, God's standard by which he expects all of the universe to operate. And the law the Bible says in Psalm 19 verse 7 is good. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. God's instructions, God's version of right and wrong are intended to keep us from getting off track and they are intended to keep us safe and a wise person wants to find out what those differences between right and wrong are. But we live in a fallen world and in a fallen world people aren't particularly interested in being wise in biblical terms ever since we've eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we're pretty sure that we know better than God the difference between right and wrong. And so we find God's laws restrictive. We find his lines too narrow and in our fallen state humanity is constantly trying to blur the lines between good and evil until we get to a place where evil becomes good and good becomes evil. And in the limited time that we have available this morning I want to try to zero in for you on two practical instances where that has been happening in today's culture. Nothing of what I say will be new to you, nothing of what I say you haven't heard many times before, but Christians live in the world just like the rest of the world does and sometimes by a process of osmosis we begin to blur our own lines and good becomes evil and evil becomes good, light becomes dark and bitter becomes sweet or the other way around. So let me try to run past you then at two places where in today's society you see this kind of blurring of the lines between good and evil. The first that I want to refer to and very contentious in this day and age is the attempt in our day and age to redefine both marriage and the family. Now the scripture makes it very plain that God designed marriage from the beginning to be a lifelong exclusive partnership between a man and a woman. Genesis 2.24 quoted several times in the New Testament both by Jesus and the Apostle Paul puts it this way, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, be united to his wife and they will become one flesh." As you've heard me say many times the mystery of marriage is how God takes two different individuals from two different backgrounds, two different personalities and he wants to make them one. As the form that we use in this church for marriage indicates the purpose of marriage is threefold, it's for companionship, it's for sex and for the conception and the birthing of children should that happen. And the reason this is so important of course is that the family is the basic social unit of society and you can readily argue that as goes the family so goes the nation. The stability and the love of a committed marital relationship is of critical importance in the development of the next generation. Michael Hamburg when he was with us here talked about the importance of attachment and there is no doubt in terms of studies today that many of our problems in society flow out of a lack of attachment at the very early stages of marital and family relationships. Now again that limits our options and so in the Western world in particular we have been busy redefining both marriage and the family. It's no longer viewed as a lifelong exclusive partnership between a man and a woman. On the one hand we have for years now made divorce easier and easier. In Canada the divorce laws were changed in 1968 and in 1985. Statistics now indicate that four out of ten first time marriages will end up in divorce over a period of 50 years, that's a long stretch. People often use the figure one out of two marriages fails but that's actually inaccurate because that refers to the number of people that marry in a given year versus the people that get divorced in a given year. That is about one out of two but in actual practice statistics are a little skewed, it's more like one out of three. Nevertheless families fall apart at a prodigious rate, not only that but of course we live in a society that has been gung-ho in redefining marriage and in bringing in the whole gay issue and gay marriage. There are 13 countries in the world as of last month that have legalized gay marriage. You'll be interested in knowing some of you, the Netherlands was the first to do that, I think Canada was number four, a couple more nations are geared up towards that. It's probably the polarizing issue of our society but is rapidly gaining acceptance because the Canadian figures are that two out of three citizens of our country is now in favor of gay marriage and the United States it was 48% or was 68% opposed in 1996, that has dropped by 20% to 48% in 2012, a huge social issue in our day, a battle pretty much lost from a Christian perspective and a Christian point of view and even as marriage is being redefined in today's society so is the family because as soon as you depart from a traditionally biblical model of family then you end up with a whole mish-mash and just to show you what that looks like a little bit, let me show you just a couple of charts here that will give you a picture of how things have changed. On the left here you see the statistics for 1961, father knows best, that's a little dig at the 50s, in 1966 households with five or more people, 32.3% in 2011 that figure had dropped to 8.4, divorce rate per 100,000 in 1961 was 36, in 2011 it is 210 almost 211, in 1961 91.6% of couples were married, in 1967 or 2011, pardon me, the figure is down to 67% and lone parent families go from 8.4 to 16.3, let me give you another chart here that shows you this changing family structure, back in 1961, 91% of the families were married and you have 8.4 lone parent families, now follow that trend back to 2011, the last time stats can did their surveys and we're now down to 67% of families are married, we have 16.7% of people living common law and we have single parent families that have moved up to 16.3% and so the times they are changing and as the times are changing the laws change to reflect the changes in today's society, now please understand, I have and we need to have great sympathy for people whose relationship styles are far removed from the biblical norm, my heart goes out to moms and dads who are single parents, they have an incredibly difficult role to hold and we can have great sympathy and understanding for people who struggle with same sex issues, it's not as simple as sometimes we try to make it sound and we can have great sympathy for all the varying forms of blended family that are happening in the world today, we must always avoid standing on a perch looking down our noses at the struggles that other people or we ourselves perhaps experience, that having been said here's what we need to be careful with, just because something is broken in the world we need to avoid the temptation to normalize what is broken, do you understand the difference? Just because I'm a bad speller doesn't mean that my bad spelling is every bit as good as your good spelling, the standard remains because unless we hold on to a standard that remains we have no goal towards which to work and we normalize what is broken instead of accepting it as broken, I'll never forget years ago I happened to catch just a short clip of Phil Donahue and a lot of you won't remember him but he was one of the early talk show hosts and sort of in the tradition of Jerry Springer but not as bad as Jerry Springer but he was going on and on about cutting down the traditional model of the family and traditional marriage and you know he was trying to elicit sympathy and normalizing that which was broken and so in order to try to get his point across and I remember this so clearly he turned his attention to one of the single moms who was there and he talked to her he asked her this question he said and I don't remember exactly how it went but it was something to the effect that well how would you describe your situation and he was trying to get her to describe her situation as normal and I'll never forget the sad look on her face and the consternation on his face when she turned around and said well you know my relationships, my life is broken, it's broken and as long as we know the difference between broken and unbroken we've got something we can fix I remember the story John Wimber years ago tells the story of a guy that was cleaning the carpet for him and he was leaving these big streaks behind him with a vacuum cleaner and he said he called his attention to the streaks in the floor and he said what are those and the guy that was doing the vacuuming for him kept on making excuses vacuum cleaner is no good it's a poor brand it doesn't do the job and Wimber kept bringing it back to the question what is this on the floor and the guy finally said it's dirt and Wimber said good because unless you know that it's dirt you can't clean it up and I thought that was incredibly profound marriage and family are being redefined in our day and age good becomes evil and evil does good becomes good and the longer we move in that direction the more we end up where Romans 1 ends up in verse 32 where it says though they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them it's one thing to do what's wrong we all do things that are wrong it's a different thing to approve of what you're doing is wrong because now your value system has turned upside down unless you think this is alarmist talk understand what is happening in today's society because in Germany they are now having discussions about bestiality which has been which is legal in that country in Switzerland the debate is ongoing about consensual incest and in the Netherlands the conversation is about polygamy slippery slope good becomes evil evil becomes good light becomes dark and vice versa and sweet and bitter same kind of thing all right moving along the second area very closely related to this where redefinition is happening so fast that most of us aren't even aware of it is in the area of sexuality we are redefining sexuality because again scripture makes it very clear the sexual intercourse is to be limited to a husband and a wife within the confines of a committed marital relationship the book of Hebrews is clear Hebrews 13 for marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed kept pure for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral and again God's not against sex he created it some of the most happy sexually or sexually happy people statistics repeatedly show are Christians who are following biblical guidelines what we live in a fallen world we don't like to restrain our passions or limit our conduct and so particularly in recent decades the Western world has been redefining what is normal don't you love that commercial on TV for Tylenol what's the slogan do you remember it whatever your normal is isn't that the spirit of the age whatever your normal is anything is normal if I define it as being normal well sexuality is being redefined and I have to be quick because we're fighting against time this morning but sexuality is being redefined in today's culture on at least four levels let me run them by you as quickly as I can first of all we have uncoupled sex from marriage we have uncoupled sex from marriage now understand that since time immemorial people have been fooling around outside of marriage that's simply a fact of life but in places where the gospel has gone and in many other cultures also people at least have understood that it is frowned upon and that is that it is unhealthy and dangerous to the very fabric of society but all of that has changed in our day and age and it has changed largely because of contraception and abortion let me show you a couple of quick charts once again here you see the fertility rate in Canada from 1921 to 2009 the average number of children a woman aged 15 to 49 would have in her lifetime notice in 1921 it was 3.5 then drops during the dirty thirties climbs somewhat during the war really climbs after the war that's the baby boom and now notice what happens here in the early sixties it drops precipitously that is the influence among other things of birth control and so today the statistics the average in actually 2011 is 1.67 I think is the figure children per woman that's our birth rate it is not enough to replenish the generation that dies and hence the emphasis in her country on immigration that's contraception but contraception is offset on the other end by abortion and here is a fascinating figure percentage distribution of outcomes of teenage pregnancy women aged 15 to 19 in Canada from 1974 to 1997 notice that in 1974 70% of live births took place versus about 25% abortions now notice how in this teenage group this has dropped to less than 50% and the abortion rate has climbed to over 50% in Canada every year now we have a little less than 100,000 abortions one in four live one in four births ends up in abortion and this past week was it we saw the death of Henry Murgenthaler was it this week or the week before and he proudly boasts of the fact that he himself aborted 100,000 infants in his own lifetime and that's not counting the clinics that he established and here you get a picture of how values have been turned upside down because of course he was awarded with what the order of Canada for his behavior you see black becomes white good becomes evil light becomes darkness bitter and sweet are confused I know the issue is complicated I have incredible compassion for those who have unwanted pregnancies but I'm pointing out that in our day and age sex has been separated from marriage and therefore we end up in a very unusual kind of situation where the population is constantly shrinking all right secondly we have separated sex from love I think we can all understand two people in love getting carried away crossing the line and whatever doesn't necessarily make it right but we understand that but today's society has gone much further than that today's society has separated sex from love and in many youth cultures today we have this phenomenon called hooking up and hooking up is engaging in a variety of sexual practices apart from commitment and apart from relationship and it's debatable how common it is in society but I find it fascinating that on many university campuses today dating as we traditionally know it is passe instead kids hang around in parties and then they hook up for whatever purposes of sexual gratification as always it's the women who suffer because the guy sold their oats freely don't have to be committed why buy the cow if he can drink the milk then when they finally decide it's time to settle down when they're in their 30s or 40s or 50s they abandon the women that they have been sleeping around with and they go back in time and find some young chick and in the meantime the older women are left struggling with where do I go now we have separated sex from marriage we have separated sex from love and we have separated gender and sex time was when gender and sex were two terms that were used almost synonymously today that is no longer the case because of feminist studies in particular sex is viewed as what you are biologically gender is how you express who you are inside that body and so now it's possible for me to physically be male but emotionally I'm female and you can see where that goes in terms of transgender emphasis intersex situations in our culture and many other ways in which we confuse sexual identity very high-powered very smart people have spent a lot of time separating gender from sex and leading to a blurring between what it is to be a male and what it is to be a female all right one more just very quickly we have of course become accustomed to sexual explicitness in the public discourse Ephesians 512 it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret we've always done things that are wrong we've always been smart enough generally speaking to do it in the dark because we knew intuitively that it was wrong but remember the values are getting changed and so now we boast of the things that we do that are wrong and so just this past week in the news was Michael Douglas he has just starred in a film playing the role I believe of Liberace who was a homosexual man and Mike Douglas blurted out that his throat cancer a number of years ago was caused by a particular sexual practice that is causing an upsurge in throat cancer in the western world and nobody blinks an eyelash at it anymore because you see good becomes evil and evil becomes good and light becomes dark and dark becomes light and bitter becomes sweet and sweet becomes bitter why do I mention all of that not so that we can sit on our righteous perch look down our noses at how the rest of the world is redefining marriage and family and sex I mention this because the spirit of the age is a spirit that lives literally in the air it is spiritual power that gains control over the media that gains control over people's thinking that gains control over society and you and I are just as susceptible to absorbing the spirit of the age as anybody else because it's like the old story of the frog put a frog in the frying put a frog in a pan on a stove heated slowly and the frog will boil to death without jumping out because he doesn't know what's happening it's like I often say it's like carbon monoxide poisoning by the time you wake up you're dead it just grows on you as normal how many of us today are even scandalized by the things that we were scandalized about 10 or 20 years ago and how many of us haven't moved far away from biblical standards in some of these areas if not in our practice then at least in our thinking and the tragedy of that is that it diminishes the effectiveness of our witness to the world because Jesus puts it this way you are the salt of the earth but if the salt loses its saltiness how can it be made salty again it is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men so very quickly how do we avoid blurring the lines how do we avoid getting caught up in the spirit of the age whereby our values change not in keeping with biblical standards but in keeping with worldly standards I believe it was Oscar Wilde many years ago who said he who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widow because you see society keeps on changing all the time but God's word stands firm very quickly as we wind this up three things that we need to hold on to number one we need to know the truth truth is the way things are from God's perspective it's apart from how you and I feel about it it is apart from what all the philosophers of the world philosophize about it it is God's to decide what truth is God reveals that truth in creation he reveals that truth in scripture and of course most of all he reveals that truth in the person of Jesus who says I am the way the truth in the life no one comes to the father except through me and it's only in relationship with Christ that God grants us the Holy Spirit so that our eyes are opened so that we can discern the spirit of the age not only must we know the truth we must love the truth Proverbs 23 23 by the truth and do not sell it get wisdom discipline and understanding truth by definition is painful any of you that have ever been in my home office will know that for many years now I've had a poster hanging on the wall a rag doll being cranked through an old-fashioned ringer of a washing machine and the caption says the truth will set you free but first it will make you miserable it's misery to discover my sin it's misery to know that I can do what I want to do and that the values that I have been brought up with are maybe not the right values at all it's a terrible discovery to make but as John said earlier it's the most liberating discovery that you can make because once we know the truth about ourselves we can know the truth about God in Christ and we can know that in him we are absolutely righteous we must love the truth failure to love the truth will always lead to deception and number three we must live the truth if you continue in my word says Jesus you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free I think sometimes in evangelical circles particularly we are so anxious to know that we are saved by grace through faith and not by works that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that the purpose of salvation is not just to get us to heaven and to get our sins forgiven but it's to make us a people who are obedient to God from the heart Paul puts it this way through Christ we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all nations and God calls you and me in a world filled with confusion in our own walk with God and in our walk with each other to model what biblical marriage looks like for all of its struggles we can model God's grace we can model what a biblical family looks like and we can model what biblical sexuality looks like and even while you know people may laugh at us and they may think we're old fuddy-duddies and we're not with the times and who do you think you are anyway there is something very wholesome about the truth shining through us and there will be men and women out there who are sick and tired of sin who are sick and tired of being fed the lie who are more than anxious to discover the saving grace of God in Christ Jesus now none of us can do this on our own and I'm keenly aware that when I talk like I'm talking this morning there may be some of us here that get rather self-righteous like the Pharisee and say Lord God I thank you that I'm not like one of those sinners out there I haven't done all those many things and it may well be too that some of you are sitting here and you're saying you know I've crossed the line more than once and this doesn't make me feel very good at all and it may also be that some of us are sitting here and we're saying I don't know how to live the way that God wants me to live and you know all of us we need Jesus because at the end of the day there isn't one of us who can live up to the biblical standard in the way that God wants us to and the invitation of communion is regardless of where we find ourselves where we have been if we will come just as we are He will meet us and He will show us the way and He will [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:41:03.400; remove through 00:45:25.000] help us to live it and we can testify to the world [CUT] that God's ways are still the best ways. Everyone needs compassion, love that's never failing, let mercy fall on me. Everyone needs forgiveness, the kindness of the Savior, the whole foundation. Savior, He can move the mountains, my God is mighty to say, He is mighty to say. Forever, Author of salvation, heroes and conquer the grave, Jesus conquered the grave. So take me and define me, all my fears and failures, fill my life again, I'll live my life to follow everything I believe in, now I surrender. Savior, He can move the mountains, my God is mighty to say, He is mighty to say. Forever, Author of salvation, heroes and conquer the grave, Jesus conquered the grave. Jesus, shine your light and let the whole world see, we're singing for the glory of the risen King, Jesus, shine your light and let the whole world see, we're singing for the glory of the risen King, Savior, He can move the mountains, my God is mighty to say, he is mighty to say. Forever, Author of salvation, heroes and conquer the grave, Jesus conquered the grave. Savior, He can move the mountains, my God is mighty to say, he is mighty to say. Forever, Author of salvation, heroes and conquer the grave, Jesus conquered the grave. Jesus, shine your light and let the whole world see, we're singing for the glory of the risen King, Jesus, shine your light and let the whole world see, we're singing for the glory of the risen King [CUT]. [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:45:25.000; resume after this marked segment]