The Macedonian Call

SERMON: 2014-09-21--ac14141--the-macedonian-call-part-2 SOURCE DURATION: 00:36:16.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: This candidate represents the final theological summation/benediction of the sermon. Since no subsequent non-sermon material (music, announcement) is provided, it is selected as the last token of the sermon content. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I pointed out last week that Paul's Macedonian call here in Acts chapter 16 was truly an epic event, epic in the sense that it was not only dramatic because he received this heavenly vision, but it has powerfully affected human history ever since. Macedonia, you will recall, is in Greece. Greece is in Europe, and here for the first time at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, the Gospel goes west rather than being confined to the east. Paul, you will recall, wanted to preach the Gospel in the province of Asia. The Holy Spirit wouldn't let him. Then he wanted to preach the Gospel in the province of Bithynia. The spirit of Jesus would not allow him to. And you can imagine his confusion as he was trying to figure out what in the world is going on didn't become clear until he came to Troas on the western end of what is today Turkey. He has this vision, "The men from Macedonia come over and help us." And here's a very interesting point. You will recall that Greece was the epitome of culture at that time. It was a place that prided itself in its wisdom and in its accomplishment. And catch the irony here of a man from Macedonia reaching out to Paul saying, "Come over and help us." And you see how the Lord is preparing this Greek empire for the good news of the Gospel because though they are stuffed with human wisdom and human sensuality and human riches and glory, they know something is missing. And this is a very important principle here that it helps us to understand no matter what the world accomplishes outside of Jesus, there will always be a whole. And that whole provides opportunity for preaching the Gospel. And so the passage concludes with a verse that Paul, once he had seen the vision, got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them. And Macedonia, as I said, is part of Greece. The Gospel now goes to Greece. From there eventually it spreads to Rome, eventually through the missionary work of people like St. Boniface and St. Patrick and Colombo to the Scottish people. It spreads all over Europe, eventually to Africa and of course to North America. And as I said last week, you and I are here because we are the fruit of that mission effort. And what that did, and I'm just taking a few moments to review this because these principles are so profoundly important that we need to have them deeply rooted inside ourselves, what this did was it helped establish a biblical world and life view in the West. And this biblical world and life view, in the words of Dr. Peter Jones, is best summed up in the phrase "tuism." Tuism means that God and creation are two separate entities. God is eternally self-existent. Creation flows from God. God is outside of space and time. That's a hard concept to get our heads around because time is a created thing. St. Augustine, by the way, many, many years ago, was one of the first theologians to figure that one out, that God is outside of time and that helps explain a lot of things about how God knows the future, just for the record, because there is no time from God's point of view. He spans it all. Don't ask me how that works, we just know from scripture that it does. And so, because God is the creator and we are creation, he has the power and the right to define who we are and what is normal. And so, he defines that he is creator, we are the creatures. Big difference between the two. He defines that humankind is created man and woman. He defines that marriage is between a man and a woman. He defines the difference between right and wrong. And all of creation is expected to bow before his authority, to worship him, and to serve him. That's why God's people get together corporately, like we do here, because we acknowledge that he's the source of life. The very breath we breathe, the tasks that we're able to accomplish, the joys that we have, and they are so many, they come from the hand of God. And God wants us to express our gratitude to him, not because, you know, he's got a big ego that needs to be patted on the back, because he wants us to understand that we understand what the truth is. He is life and we derive our life from him. That's why in Genesis chapter 4, when the sons of God began to develop the kingdom of God, the first thing that we're told about them, and the only thing that we're told about them, besides the fact that they knew that they were weak, is that in the days of Enosh, they began to call on the name of the Lord. Well, in contrast to two-ism, there is this philosophy that is known as one-ism. And one-ism means that God and creation are one entity. It is classic paganism. Paganism is pantheism. You see the symbol of it there once again. Pantheism means God is in all and all is in God. The word pan means all, theism means God. So the distinctions between God and man, the distinctions between God and creation, the distinctions between men and women, the distinctions between right and wrong, the distinctions on every level are constantly being annihilated. And creation, according to this view, does not proceed from the hand of God. It comes in and of itself. You will recognize that as one of the dominant theories of science today. It is the dominant theory of paganism from the very beginning. What you see here is the tree of life in a philosophy called one-ism that supposedly gives life to everything. And so we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth. It's no longer God out there telling us how to live and what to do. No, it is all the forces of nature and all our own insights and all our own thoughts. Tremendously appealing to the human race because now God cannot tell me what to do. I become God myself. And so according to Romans 1, I reject a creator. I begin to worship creation. And now creation becomes my God. And God gives me over to darkness. And the implications are incredibly huge. Because now there is no outside authority to tell me what to do. I can do what I want to do. And so we are in the process, as I said last week, of redefining reality. And Dr. Peter Jones makes a very interesting observation that the increase in popularity of homosexuality in the Western world corresponds directly with the rise of New Age-ism or one-ism in the 1960s. And he says that is not coincidental. Because if everything is one and the idea is to get rid of distinctions, then homosexuality is part of the product of that according to Romans 1 when God gives us over to our scene. And he makes the observation that if you look at paganism, historically, all the way through space and time and history, the leaders of those organizations have been what he calls "adrogynous people." Adrogynous means embracing both elements of masculinity and elements of femininity. And he says the high priests of all those religions are homosexual men often dressed as women. Fascinating concept. And that's not to point fingers at anybody or to not sympathize with the complexity of gender confusion. Understand that. But it is to say that there's a spiritual power behind all of this that represents the ultimate rebellion against God. Because the ultimate rebellion against God is to disagree with God on how he has created me. Do you understand that? If he's created me a male to say that I'm not a male, if he's created me to be a female, and I refuse to be a female, then I'm saying to God, "You don't know what you're doing. I disagree with what you have made me to be. I'm given over to darkness." And unless we understand that and understand where that is coming from, we will always be wringing our hands wondering why the world is going where it is going. Well, it's going where it's going because it has pushed God out of the picture, God gives us over to darkness, and now everything becomes confusing. And our children will pay the price, because you can talk to any number of teachers now, and this whole idea of a confused sexuality is being foisted on our children in much of the education system. And the rejection of authority has gone so far, one of the teachers was telling me this past week, that they dare not correct a child hardly in her school, because it isn't worth the hassle. Can you imagine that? Nobody wants to hassle. And so, how do you keep that all together eventually? Of course, that all cascades down into chaos, and in the final analysis, what happens is that the societies begin to fall apart, and that gives birth into tyrants, historically, because how else do you keep it all together? And so we lose the very freedom that we think we have. So, here's how you can summarize the difference between these two philosophies. Twoism says salvation lies in being reconciled with our Creator God through faith in Jesus, right? Oneism says salvation lies in obtaining freedom from your Creator, because to be truly free is to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it. Try that on your household and see how long that lasts. It becomes chaos. Well, don't want to belabor it, other than to say that this paganism was overcome in Europe to a very large degree by the biblical world and life view. And the tragedy of our day, as I've been trying to illustrate, is that as we lose sight of the influence of the Gospel, we are losing the biblical world and life view and replacing it with a world and life view that is pagan in its origins. Did you know that George Lucas, Star Wars, for example, is a disciple of a man called Joseph Campbell? Joseph Campbell had a mission in life to take pagan fables and to foist them upon society. And you get movies like Star Wars, and I know some of you really like them, and forgive me for pointing this out to you, and Avatar, which are prime examples of the natural force of life empowering, breaking down the differences between, you know, God and man, a man and nature, everything eventually becomes one. And we're sucking it in, and our only antidote is to know a biblical world and life view and to stand firm on it against the spirit of the age. So this biblical world and life view, then, though it's declining today, biblically and historically gave birth to many of the values that we hold dear in the Western world. In the time that remains, I want to try to run you through just a couple of those, just to give you a concrete picture of how the Gospel impacted the Western world. First of all, it surfaces in an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms. In the Western world, those are some of our highest values, are they not? So much so that in Canada we have the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and we pride ourselves in being free to be our own persons, free to do what we want to do, go where we want to go, associate with whomever, the only restriction being that somehow or another we don't impact too badly the freedom of other people. What we forget is that this notion of individual freedom and rights is deeply rooted in a biblical world and life view. It's rooted in the fact that God is creator, we are his creation, and we are made in his image, and he has a plan and purpose for the lives of each of us, regardless of who we are, or where we have been born. The great Malcolm Muggeridge, the famous Russian writer and Christian, put it this way, he said, "We must not forget that our human rights are derived from the Christian faith. In Christian terms, every single human being, whoever he or she may be, sick or well, clever or foolish, beautiful or ugly, every human being is loved by his creator who, as the Gospels tell us, counted the hairs of his head." That's also why the U.S. Declaration of Independence, penned originally by Thomas Jefferson and then modified by some committees, put it this way, he says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," sometimes the word is inalienable, the two words are used interchangeably, "that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here's a good geography question for you, or social studies question. Anybody know what the Canadian equivalent of that phrase is? You find it originally in the British North America Act, it's now called the Constitution Act of 1867, and the Canadian words are peace, order, and good government. We're not as interested in being happy as we are interested in being orderly. It might explain why the Canadian policy, until recently at least, was always viewed in terms of keeping peace among nations of the world. It's a value that ran deeply in this particular country and still does. Now this, of course, all stands in sharp contrasts to ancient societies, because in ancient society, individual freedom was often a function of social, economic, or political matters, not to mention gender. In fact, in ancient societies, your individual freedom was typically a function, was typically subordinate to the well-being of the state. And you can understand that because the challenge was always, how do you keep a society together? And in order to keep a society together, you can't have everybody doing what they want to do individually. And that's why in my judgment, and that's all it is, democracy really only works in places where there is truly a deep world and life view embedded in God's people, so that subject to God's authority, we can have the self-control and the discipline that we need to place the interests of the community ahead of our own. See, only Christianity can make that happen from the inside out, which is why states always have to resort to power to try to hold everybody together. And that, I think, is why it's rather foolish to try to impose democracy on countries that are tribal by nature. Because if you don't have a population that is living a biblical world and life view, and ready to put somebody else's interests ahead of their own, you're always going to have chaos, and you always need the power of some powerful tribal leader to keep this all together. So the biblical world and life view has led to an emphasis on individual freedoms and rights, rights and freedoms that we're losing rapidly, by the way, as we give up our biblical world and life view. But secondly, it has produced an emphasis on equality before the law, an emphasis on equality before the law. And again, one of the main principles of our Western judicial system is that everybody is equal before the law. The same law applies to everyone, rich or poor, we're all innocent, supposedly until proven guilty, and we all have the right to do process. We don't always practice it perhaps, mistakes are made, but as a society coming up through many, many historical developments in Britain particularly, those are the values that drive our judicial system. We would rather set nine guilty people free than convict one innocent person. And that again, derives from a biblical world and life view. God determines what is right and wrong, he entrusts the state with carrying it out, and he demands that due process and justice be applied regardless of where people find themselves. And of course, that is rooted already in the Old Testament Mosaic law, when God says through Moses, "Do not show partiality in judging. Hear both small and great alike. Do not be afraid of any man, for judgment belongs to God." And that is why historically, Lady Justice is often pictured as having a blindfold. The concept of Lady Justice goes back all the way to ancient Egypt, it was adopted by Greece, it was adopted by the Romans, and even today, many courthouses or many places of law, you will see Lady Justice with the balance scale in one hand, sometimes the left, more often the right, sword in the other, blindfolded most commonly, because justice is blind. And again, while we don't always practice that, and the rich sometimes get away with things that the poor wouldn't get away with, at least we are philosophically committed to fairness in the judicial process, and we hold even the powerful people in our society accountable for how they manage money and how they live their lives and how they abuse their power and authority. Now compare that with cultures around the world that have not bought into a biblical world life here. I mean, we've all heard the stories of ISIS over these past number of months. I listened to the testimony of a young Iraqi soldier who had been included in the roundup of about 250 young men who were all forced to lie on the ground and who were shot through the head one after the other. And somehow the bullets only grazed him, and when night fell, he was able to get up and eventually find himself a place of getting his wounds tended to, and live to tell the story. And we've all heard stories of the beheadings that take place. If you listen to the war in Gaza, how Hamas took what they believed were collaborators with Israel and without due trial or process just shot them dead in the street. And then you understand what a precious gift justice is because what's going to stop anybody from getting caught up in that kind of a system? I have a number of friends who have been extensively involved over the years in aid work in Africa, and they've been telling me some of the challenges that they faced. And I have one book that I have started to read called "Dead Aid, Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa" by Dembissa Moyo, who herself is a native of Africa. And she makes the observation that over the years, a trillion dollars worth of aid has been poured into the African continent. And generally speaking, the more aid countries have received, the worse off they have begun. And countries, in fact, that have refused aid, by and large, have done better. And my friend went on to explain why some of these things are. There are many, many reasons, but one of course is graft and corruption. We know that much of the aid that is being sent to Africa ends up in the pockets of the rulers and their tribes. And you and I, we look at that through our Western eyes, and we say what a travesty of justice. How can these people be so crooked? What we don't understand is that it flows out of their world and life view. Because in their world and life view, you have an obligation to your tribe. And if you succeed and you get material goods, then you're obligated to share it with your tribe. And so what we think is crookedness from their perspective is smarts and wisdom. And so you understand that unless you change that world and life view, nothing is going to change. And that's why moving some of those societies forward is so incredibly difficult because these values are so deeply rooted. And most of the time, those of us from the West who come into these countries can get our heads around how this works. My friend tells me this story. He works with World Renew, by the way, and he went to Indonesia after the tsunami a number of years ago to rebuild those cities. And part of their culture is to honor their elders. And so when it came to rebuilding, the significant people in the community got the first choice at where they wanted to build their house. Well, they all decided to build their house on the edge of the town that had been destroyed on the prime keys. The end result was, now listen to this, by the time all those houses were built, it was an enclosed space, and they couldn't get any machines into the interior of that property to build everybody else's houses. You and I, we look at that and we say, "How stupid can you be?" But understand that I'm not making fun of them. It is the fruit of cultural values. And unless you can identify those cultural values and cause them to be transformed into biblical values, you're always going to wonder how come this is not working. And for my friend, that was an incredible eye-opener, why giving aid to third world countries can so often be so difficult and so counterproductive. All right, just want to name one more here while I can. And that is the fact that a biblical world and life view has also given us an emphasis on universal education. Now you and I, we take it for granted that our children should go to school, get an education, and hopefully find a career. What we fail to understand is that historically, that has not always been true. Historically, those advantages went to the rich and the powerful. The common people did not have that opportunity. But the emphasis on universal education was an outflow of a biblical world and life view that said, "God's out there. He reveals himself through nature not only, but he especially reveals himself in his word." And so we have a vested interest in our children being able to read the word and thereby acquire a biblical world and life view. And so in the Western world, the earliest schools were typically associated with cathedrals and with churches going back all the way to AD 500. Out of that came the European university system, a system by the way that was unique to the Western world. And out of that came eventually day school education in much of the Western world. And here's an interesting little tidbit that I ran across just this past week doing some research. When the Puritans came to North America, they of course wanted their children to learn how to read because knowing the Bible was their protection against the delusion of Satan. And so in the state of Massachusetts, in 1647, they passed what is known as the Old Deluder Satan Act, which I thought was kind of an original name. And the Deluder Satan Act legislated that if a given community had more than 50 families, they were obligated to establish a school and hire a teacher to teach their children to read so that they would know the Bible and they wouldn't be deluded by the devil. Can you imagine passing a Deluder Satan Act today? How times have changed my land. And so throughout the course of history to this very present day, where missionaries go, literacy follows because Christians have always valued and educated people, as opposed to some societies that would like to keep their people in the dark so that they are not a danger. While we could go on, science in the Western world is often pictured as being at odds with the Christian faith. The reality is that most of the early scientists were deeply devout Christians. You know why? Because they believed God was rational and created a rational universe. And therefore, by studying nature, they could learn how God, through his word, was revealing himself to all his people. And the conflict between science and faith has arisen in part because the further science moves away from submitting to biblical authority, the more God's people have had to question is God in this or not. But in a day and age where new age and all of its manifestations is trying to redefine life, the kingdom comes not by big campaigns, not by big legislation. The kingdom comes by individual Christians being points of light as we submit to the Lord and his authority and live by his values. Because eventually that's what breaks Satan's power and that's what ushers in the coming of God's kingdom. It's very easy to be in despair because of the way darkness is descending. But all it takes is one little light to expel the darkness. Never forget the influence of an individual Christian, let alone a Christian community, if we let our light shine and embrace a biblical world and life view through to the core of our being. That's what God calls us to be and to do and that's why he has given us the Lord Jesus [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:36:11.000; remove through 00:36:16.000] who is the light of the world and in whom and by whom all things hang together. [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:36:16.000; resume after this marked segment]