Removing The Plank

I want to come back this morning, then, to the subject of removing the plank out of
our own eye.
We were talking last weekend, then, about the importance of dealing with our own sins
and shortcomings before we try to point these out in somebody else's life.
And the reason for that is not only that failure to do that makes us a hypocrite if we apply
one standard to ourselves and one standard to other people, but it keeps us from seeing
clearly what the issues are in somebody else's life.
Listening into how Jesus puts it in the words of our text, Matthew chapter 7, here's what
Jesus says, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no
attention to the plank in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye" when all the
time there is a plank in your own eye?
You hypocrite first take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to
remove the speck out of your brother's eye.
So you will notice there that failure to condemn our own sin not only makes us hypocrites,
but it keeps us from seeing clearly to remove the speck from our brother's eye.
And so as we come back to this subject this morning, I want to give you three reasons.
Why especially in this day and age, it is incredibly important to remove the plank from
our own eye.
The first reason is that today more than probably anytime in history, our ability to discern
is critical.
We live in what's known as a post-modern world.
The word post means after and post-modern means after the modern world.
Now the modern world, interestingly enough, runs from the 1700s to 1950.
And both the modern world and the post-modern world are world and life views.
That is to say, it is a way of looking at the world and a way of looking at life that
predominated during those particular seasons of time.
And the modern world then is set to have existed from about the 1700s to 1950 and can be summarized
by three words, three key words, linear, orderly, and our article.
Let me just quickly talk about each of these.
By linear, is meant an understanding that history moves in a straight line.
What happens today is built on what happened yesterday and what happens tomorrow is built
on what happens today.
It is a way of looking at history that says history is moving in a particular direction.
It has a particular goal for secular people.
That is often the understanding that somehow the world is going to get better.
By orderly, there is meant that the universe is in orderly place.
It's governed by orderly laws.
And those laws can be known and studied by rational and scientific means.
And by our article, what they mean is that there is a measure of authority.
There are people who know better than other people.
And that submitting to authority figures is one way of preserving life and it is one way
of making sure that the wisdom from a previous generation applies to this generation.
Most of us, over 45 or 50, will have bought into what is known as this modern world and
life view.
The word modern sounds funny because 1700 is hardly modern, but that's the language.
And that is the term that is being used for it.
Now the postmodern era then runs from about the 1950s to the present, really got started
in the late '60s, 1968 is often given as the particular churning point.
And it defines itself over against the modern era.
And so the three key words for the postmodern era are, as you can imagine, non-linear,
non-orderly and non-archicol.
Let us to say history is not seen as moving in a straight line.
History is seen as non-linear.
There is no overarching, what they call meta-narrative, everybody has his own story.
And every group of people's story is just as valid as the next person.
It is non-orderly in the sense that there is no longer a belief in absolute truth.
Truth is how you define and experience it.
Pro values are relative.
And the question that is asked is not the question is it right or wrong, but the question
is, does it work for me?
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, put it this way years ago, he says, since
the criterion for truth, correspondence with the external world is absent.
It is entirely a matter of indifference, listen to this.
It is entirely a matter of indifference, what opinions we adopt.
All of them are equally true and equally false.
And no one has the right to accuse anyone else of error.
You'll see in a moment how critical this becomes for understanding our age.
And then non-archicol because authority is not to be trusted.
Each individual is his or her own source of wisdom and the sacred cows of reason and
science, which are held up during the age of modernity as being the keys to truth and
understanding are now seen, typically, as the tools of oppression.
And so to summarize, let me read you a quote from Ost Guinness's book, "Fid bodies, fat
minds," subtitled why evangelicals don't think and what to do about it.
Here is what he says, "Where modernism was a manifesto of human self-confidence and
self-congratulations.
Postmodernism is a confession of modesty, if not despair.
There is no truth, only truth.
There are no principles, only preferences.
There is no grand reason, only reasons.
There is no privileged civilization, only a multitude of cultures, beliefs, periods
and styles.
There is no grand narrative of human progress, only countless stories of where people and
their cultures are now.
There is no simple reality or any grand objectivity of universal detached knowledge, only a ceaseless
representation of everything in terms of everything else.
In some, postmodernism is an extreme form of relativism.
Another author, fellow by the name of William Deaver, puts it this way, he says, "such postmodern
thinking has affected nearly all disciplines since about 1950, both in the natural and
in the social sciences, to such an extent that it is now taken for granted as the raiding
paradigm."
And so if you're over 50 and you don't understand or appreciate today's movies or today's
music or today's culture, that's why.
Your head is in an entirely different space.
If you're under 40 and have gone through the public school system and are media savvy,
then these views of postmodernity are part and parcel outside of the grace of God of
your thinking and the implications of this for engaging our culture if you understand
what I'm talking about are huge.
Let me zero in on two things and then you'll see how we come back to the importance of
removing logs out of our own eyes.
Because one of the implications of this is that we live in a culture where not only are
all kinds of viewpoints, but every viewpoint is equally valid.
And so it used to be, for example, that Western civilization held itself up as being a dominant
culture and it was good.
And let's say heathens or pagans or whatever else were a lesser or an inferior culture.
Well, today you can no longer say that because they all represent different points of view
and they're all equally valid.
So everybody not only has a different viewpoint, but the different viewpoints are equally
valid.
And so the whole gay movement or the whole sexual revolution that is taking place today
or people who live a very different lifestyle, you're not allowed to criticize that because
who are you to say that the way you live is better or more right than the way somebody
else lives.
You see how that breeds the kind of intolerance directed at believers who say we're followers
of Jesus who says this is the way the truth and the life walk in it.
So we live in a culture where every viewpoint is increasingly seen as equally valid.
Somebody has put it this way.
We have now moved from the conviction, listen to this, we have now moved from the conviction
that everyone has a right to his own opinion to the notion that every opinion is equally
right.
So all viewpoints are seen as being equally valid, not only that, but people embrace contradictory
values.
It used to be you see that if A equals B and B equals C, then by logical reference A equals
what?
C makes good sense does it not?
Well welcome to today's world because in today's world A does not necessarily equal C because
logic is no longer one of our values and so here's what you have happening.
You can have people in today's society who will confess that Jesus Christ is their Lord
in Savior.
They will even confess that He is the only Savior and then at the same time they will defend
to the healed, the fact that other religions are all equally valid.
In you and I we come to that with hopefully some measure of logical thinking and we say
you can't square those two.
Well welcome to today's world you don't need to square anything in today's world because
not only is society fragmented, people's own hearts and lives are fragmented and so they
can hold on to a whole variety of different opinions, many of which are in logical contradiction
to each other and people no longer see the illogical position which they adopt.
That folks is the postmodern world that we live in and that is being taught and fed in
today's society by many of our educational institutions and by a great deal of our media.
So back to removing the log out of our own eye.
You can appreciate this presents an incredible challenge for engaging our culture.
I remember talking to Trevor Crow when he was working on his second DVD that's the one
you've all seen here busy dying.
His first DVD was his own personal testimony and as he shared it with his friends and
the people that he was associating with he got a very typical postmodern response.
Can you guess what that was?
We're happy for you that you have found something that works for you but we don't buy
into it. Why? Because in a postmodern world remember the issue is not what is right and
what is wrong, what is truth and what is falsehood, now the question is does it work for you?
And one of the reasons he produced the second DVD in the way that he did was to try to engage
a postmodern culture and say listen there are values that are right and that are wrong.
And so you and I if we're going to engage this culture, if we're going to try to make
an impact in our world it is critically important for us to have the kind of discernment that
can discern truth from error, one system of belief versus another system of belief and
the inconsistencies in people's lives so that as we engage one another and the broader society
we cannot only understand what is good and what is right in somebody's life but we can
also see where the thing has been skewed and where their convictions and their beliefs
are the product of their own brokenness and the product of brokenness in society.
Remove the log out of your own eyes as Jesus so that you can see clearly. I mean think
of this as being a physician and the whole world is your patient and now you have to try
to diagnose and you have to treat the patient but you don't have a thermometer, you don't
have the means for taking blood pressure or any of the diagnostic tools that are normally
a part of the medical trade. All you've got is your intuition and your skill in trying
to diagnose what's wrong with your patient. How important then that we don't just read
our own prejudices into other people's lives, how important that we can really step into
their space, meet them for where they really are at and then help point them in the way
to Jesus. So am I making sense here? We need to understand our day and age. We can just
write it off and say, "Oh, I hate your music and I hate your movie movies and I don't like
the way you dress." But if we're to engage our world then we have to understand what makes
them tick so that entering into their world we can share with them Jesus and bring them
into the reality of God's kingdom. So discernment is critical not only but we live in a day
and age in which people's hypocrisy detectors are on full alert. Jesus says, "You hypocrite,
take the plank out of your own eye first, then you will see clearly to remove this speck
from your brother's eye." What happens when you try to speak into somebody's belief
or actions and you try to point out where they're off base? Well, the first thing that happens
almost inevitably is they will turn on you and they will try to find in your life the things
that are wrong. Jesus addresses that in more detail as we'll see later on further on
in the passage when He says, "Don't give dogs what is sacred. Don't throw your pearls
to pigs because if you do they may trample them under their feet and then they're going
to turn and tear you to pieces." Now, sometimes when the world attacks us as Christians, it just
comes out of their own place of brokenness, their own defensiveness and they're just trying
to justify their own existence. Unfortunately, however, all too often there is a grain of
truth to their accusations because one of the problems faced by much of the Christian
world today is that we are notoriously inconsistent. We say one thing but do another.
We profess one thing but we do another. Let me read you just one paragraph from the book
that I have referred to previously, "UnChristian." What a new generation really thinks about Christianity
and why it matters by David Kiniman and Gabe Lyons or Leons. In virtually every study
we conduct representing thousands of interviews every year, "Born Again Christians" failed
to display much attitudinal or behavioral evidence of transformed lives. For instance,
based on a study released in 2007, we found that most of the lifestyle activities of born
again Christians were statistically equivalent to nonborn agains. When asked to identify their
activities over the last 30 days, born again believers were just as likely to bet or gamble,
to visit a pornographic website to take something that did not belong to them to consult
a medium or psychic to physically fight or abuse someone to have consumed enough alcohol
to be considered legally drunk, to have used an illegal non-prescription drug to have said
something to someone that was not true, to have gotten back at someone for something he
or she did, and to have said mean things behind another person's back. No difference.
That's trouble. Don't you think that's trouble? Let me read you some responses. This is questions
addressed to the generation between 23 and 41, they're known as the Busters. People who
are born again, these are their statistical responses to questions whether this is a morally
acceptable behavior, now listen to this, cohabitation living together. 59% of that age group,
self-professed born again believers between 23 and 41 years of age, 59% believe that's
okay, gambling 58%. Sexual thoughts or fantasies about somebody, 57% sex outside of marriage,
44% using profanity 37, getting drunk 35, having an abortion 32, having a sexual relationship
with someone of the same sex 28, using non-prescription drugs, it's dropping off now to 16, but here's
the interesting thing. The one category, the one category for that age group, that is
the lowest on their rating of approval is guess what, allowing the F word on broadcast
television 7%. Now think this through with me for a little bit. Here you've got 59% of
this age group saying it's okay to live together before you get married, 7% of this age group
saying oh but the F word on television, that we cannot accept. I look at that and I would
say with Jesus you're straining out the net and swallowing the camel. So how do we find
ourselves in a situation where so many people can reject the Christian faith because so
many of us who name his name live lives that are not substantially different from the way
the world does. Well I can think of two reasons and we're talking now about North American
evangelical Christianity. We're not necessarily talking about us or our church or our denomination
though Lord knows we all need to look at ourselves and not be too quick at pointing fingers
to other people, but one reason is because North American evangelical Christianity has a
very shallow view of faith and by shallow view of faith I mean people are said to be encouraged
to pray the sinner's prayer and to have their sins forgiven and to expect Jesus one day
to take them to heaven. But we know from Scripture that being a follower of Jesus is more than
just praying this sinner's prayer don't we? It is to follow him as Lord later on at the
end of the servant of the mount he says why do you call me Lord Lord but you don't do what
you want me to do here. Their statistics and their surveys have discovered that only
three percent of North American Christians have what can be described as a Christian
world and life here. That is to say a comprehensive view of the world where God is at the center
where we have a relationship with God the Father through faith in Jesus and where that
faith in Jesus has an impact on everything that we do. Do we fail? Of course we often fail.
But it's one thing to fail and it's another to never admit it or to even see that you're
failing. So there is a very shallow view of Christianity that contributes to this problem
and of course this is the other reality that to follow Jesus and to allow him to truly
change him is an exceedingly painful business because it means examining your views. It
means allowing Scripture to speak into your life. It means obeying the Holy Spirit when
he says you're out of line, your attitude or your words or your behavior is not measuring
up to what you profess as a follower of the Lord Jesus or smart now. It means being part
of community where I allow others to speak into my life and where I'm willing to humble
myself and allow God to transform me by the renewal of our mind. There's one thing that
we've learned around here is how difficult that process can be and how painful but how
important in terms of the kingdom of God because as we all know a handful of grain is
more valuable than a truckload of chaff. And so what's the antidote? Well the antidote
obviously is to take seriously our union with Christ. It's to understand that He's not
only our Savior, He's also our Lord. We take seriously Scripture. We allow Scripture
to speak into our lives and to correct us and to correct even our most cherished notions,
prejudices and beliefs. It means that we allow the Lord and give authorization to other
significant people in my life. We give them authority to speak into my life and to struggle
with the realities of what is right and wrong because I want to be everything that God
wants me to be. We live in a world where hypocrisy detectors are finely tuned and they're
always looking at you and me and they're trying to find out are we consistent? Do we really
love God the way that we say we do? Do we love other people the way that we say we do?
Are we the same when nobody is watching? Then when the bright spotlight is shining on us.
So discernment is critical, hypocrisy detectors are constantly active and then interestingly
enough there are those all around us who in their heart of hearts are longing for truth.
They are what I would call truth seekers. It's true of course there's a lot of people.
They live in self-deception. They are deceived and deceivers as Paul says and yet in the middle
of all of that there are those who are hungry for reality who are looking for something
very solid to build our lives on and who are looking everywhere they can to find something
that is solid enough for them to hang on to. Interestingly enough one of the publishing
phenomenon in the last 12 years or so was a book called The Rules. Maybe you've heard
of it maybe not it's by Ellen Fein and Sherry Schneider. It made the New York best seller
list within the first week of being released. Totally unexpected thing. The book of rules
tries to outline for women in today's culture how to not only find a man but to find one
that you can marry. It's a fascinating little study because it goes back to traditional
views of the man pursuing the woman and they have all kinds of variations on that and it's
become quite a little subculture. This book not only has been phenomenal but they've made
a whole industry out of it for 150 bucks. You can send a short email to these two ladies
and they will advise you in your love life for those of you that are single here. For
a 350 bucks they'll spend an hour consultation with you on the telephone to help you in
your love life and for a lot more money you can go to New York and they'll give you a complete
makeover to help you succeed in pursuing the opposite sex. I read that the other day
and I said to myself boy if this is your and the wrong business altogether you can make
a lot of money if you were smart like they are. But here's my point. Why has that book
in a post-modern world been so phenomenally successful? I'll tell you why because everybody
is confused as get off and people no longer know how the dating game works and particularly
women are the ones who suffer in this era of sexual promiscuity as we often say why
buy the cow if you can drink the milk fray. And so there is this longing for stability.
In Christian circles it comes to expression in the fact that there's a whole generation
of youth that are now sort of drifting back into highly liturgical churches. They won
form and they won substance why because their lives have been all over the map and they're
looking for somebody who cannot only tell them the truth but who can leave it. And that's
an incredible opportunity for you and me because even while the world drifts into its post-modernity
and even while people are illogical in their thinking and they are fragmented in their
beliefs and in their behavior there is still underneath for many of them a longing for
truth. And if you and I can show them that we understand them if you and I can engage
them in a way that honors their positions but that doesn't compromise truth then while
there will be all kinds of people who want nothing to do with this there will be those
deep down that are hungry for stability and that are hungry for us to love them enough
to speak into their lives. And to drive that point home now when I end this message with
a short video clip called an urgent plea it will capture the heart of this generation
a generation that by God's grace we're going to try to reach so look at this.
When's it going to happen? Here I am, there you are. Here I am desperate for love, for
truth. What are you going to do when you leave this building? Are you going to share
with me what you've been learning here today? Or are you just going to bottle it up and
pull it out next week for your friends? Now when I say share, I'm not talking about
every tactic you've used on me in the past. Like judging my every move, telling me I'm
a bad person, pointing fingers, giving me disgusting looks. And my favorite is when you tell
me that I'm lost. I don't even know what that means to be lost. Do you really think
judging me is going to make me change? Would it make you change? Now I know I'm a bad person.
I've done bad things, but I don't need you to tell me that. What I need is for you to
pick me up when I fall down. To be there when I'm broken. Yes, there's something missing
in me. There's a void in my heart that I don't know how to fill. You have it. You have
that thing that makes you hold. You know that person that I need to know. So I'm watching
your every move. I'm watching where you go and what you say and do. Because I'm desperate
for something real. I need something genuine to know that there's something more here
than this. I mean, this can't be it really. And I think you know that. Listen to me.
I need you. I need you to be here for me. I need you to walk out right now ready willing
to do whatever it takes. It may not be comfortable. It may not be easy. I need you to show me love.
No matter the cost, show me what unconditional love really looks like. Stop telling me about
this God of yours and show me who he really is. Honestly, I'll probably resist you. I'll
probably argue with you and laugh at you. You know, even when you fall, I'll probably call
you a hypocrite. But don't give up on me. Please don't give up on me. So I'm gonna ask you,
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