Ten Truths For the New Millennium, The Millennial Pause

I don't want to over-exaggerate the importance of things, but I also don't want to underestimate the significance of the time. I want to quote a scripture this morning. It's on the top of your outline. It's very simple. It says this, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds. But when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air nest in its branches. The kingdom of heaven starts like a little seed. I want to talk about what the kingdom of heaven has become. And I want to talk about the difference that Jesus Christ has made in our culture, whether or not you believe in him. And this is important, because I know that most of us here today, not everyone, but most of us here in this service do believe in Christ in a personal way, have put your personal trust in him. But you encounter people, you will today and tomorrow, and every day that you walk in the earth, people who don't believe in him, who are oblivious to what he's done. And I want to share with you sort of a summary of what I think of the significant contributions. And I suppose we could go on for hours, maybe until the new millennium, talking about what these particular things are. But I've landed on five specific things. And I want to underscore that these are now factual historical issues. This is what we can observe. This is looking back. This isn't looking forward and wondering. And it's important, as we look at this morning, that you realize that, well, if it weren't for Christ, none of this would be true. I said a couple of times during the Christmas season that the fact that this millennium is the celebration of the birthday, it's 2,000 years from what day? From the birth of Christ. That fact is lost on the awareness meter of most people. I mean, they know it's there, but it doesn't really register. What has Christ really done? And today, I want to look at that. I want to get our hands around a few things that are very specific. And in the end, I just have one prayer. And that is that it will fill your heart with gratitude, in the same way that Greg shared today of his own personal journey. Maybe you'll see something, hear something that will resonate with you in your personal journey. And most important, maybe something will equip you to engage others in their journey with the Lord as well. So let's look at this, five gifts that Christ has brought to the human race. And I'm going to encourage you to write these down. As I said, there could be 15 or maybe more than that. But these are the ones that I landed on after considerable study. And I want to recommend a book by D. James Kennedy called What If Jesus Had Never Been Born. Very helpful in my study in this subject. Now, the first one has already been alluded to by Pastor Jeff. I don't know if you heard my sermon in the first service or not, but he basically took the words right out of my mouth, as they say. The first is the gift of human dignity, the gift of human dignity, the value of life. Some time ago, a French professor was asking his students of geological study and mining. He said, what's the most important thing to come out of a mine? Some said gems, some said minerals, some said gold. He said, no, wait a minute. The most important thing to come out of a mine is the miner. Friends, did you know that before Jesus walked the earth, life was cheap? Human life was very cheap. Abortion, infanticide, euthanasia were everywhere. It was not uncommon for people, listen, to sacrifice their children. I've been in Rome several times. I can go to the places, the altars, where people took their little babies and sacrificed them to the false gods that they worshipped. Did you know that the average baby in Rome only lived to the age of eight, 50%, that is, of the year? The babies that lived in Rome died by the age of eight, is what I should say. 50% died. A father controlled the destiny of the child. The father basically saw the child as his property and was not challenged. If the child was deemed to be unworthy of being a family member, the father could make the decision without accountability to have the child terminated. Clean up your room, Johnny, or no exaggeration. That's the way it was. In the time of Christ, life was cheap. And you know what, friends? If you travel much, I know some of you have, it's still cheap in parts of the world where Christ has not been embraced. Life still doesn't have the same value in parts of the world where Christ has not yet permeated. It's an amazing thing to be part of a culture where, you know what? You just go ahead and die. And who's going to notice? It's a scary thing. And how many believe it really breaks the heart of God that in this culture, with all of our enlightenment, that we've decided as a people to go back to the practices that were so abhorrent to God? That in this nation, in 1999 alone, about a million babies are going to die before they're ever born? I think it's a critical issue. God said, I've come to give you life. I think life is precious. Well, let's move from that part of the subject to another part of human dignity. Let's talk about the value of women. Now, how many of you think women are valuable? Men, if you're smart, you'll wake up and put your hand up right now. But women, I don't mean this, and I'm just telling you facts now. There's no judgment on my part. But prior to Christ, the life of a woman was very cheap. Feminists take pride in bashing Christians as being intolerant, but women in ancient cultures were the property of their husbands. In India, China, Rome, and Greece, they were not deemed competent to live independently. This was not just the thinking of a few. This was the thinking of many leaders. The great Plato, the great philosopher Plato that many of you learned as you studied the classics said this. If a man lived a cowardly life, he would be reincarnated as a woman. If she lived a cowardly life, she'd be reincarnated as a bird. Going downhill, ladies, that was the great Plato. In certain cultures, women even took their own life when their husband died. Did you know that in India, prior to Christian influences, widows were voluntarily or involuntarily, sometimes taken by force, to be burned on their husband's funeral pyre? A grisly practice known as sutteh. Not saute, sutteh. The sutteh, the word itself clearly means a good woman, implying that the Hindus believed it was a good woman who followed her husband into death. These century-old practices were stopped only early in the 19th century through missionary agitation of the British authorities when India became colonized by the Brits. It's amazing what Jesus has done for the value of women, and yet so few people come to recognize. Do you remember in this story when Jesus went to the Samaritan woman and they just with horror said, what are you doing talking to her? She's a Samaritan and a woman. And right there, among other places, Jesus established the value of women. Let's talk about the elderly or the infirm or those deemed beyond usefulness. The quality of life argument, which is beginning to grow as a sort of debatable issue in our culture. Again and again, Christ's influence has radically shifted the focus from the value of life or quality of life to the sanctity of life. What does the word sanctity mean? It comes from the word sanctus, which means holy. In other words, look at your outline. Because God said, man has been created in my image, the image of God he created in male and female, Genesis 127, that determines that your life is valuable simply because you are, not because of what you do. And so friends, whether you be infirmed, whether you be handicapped, whether you be so elderly that all you can do basically is just exist, you still have value in the eyes of Almighty God. Abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and the barbarism of Rome ruled the world until Christ came along. This quote from Will Durant, widely considered the greatest historian of all time. In his book, Christ and Caesar, he says this, there is not greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors bearing all trials with a fiery tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, at last defeating the strongest state that history has ever known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena and Christ had won. Hallelujah. Did you know that Rome, the Emperor Constantine of Rome declared Rome to be a Christian nation in 337 AD? Think of it. From persecuting, from burning Christians, from using Christians as torches at their dinner parties to declaring Rome to be a Christian state in a little over three centuries. What a power. And that leads me to the second point. Jesus gives us the gift of liberty. Write it down, the gift of liberty. Write it down. What an incredible gift this is. What is life without liberty? Radio commentator Paul Harvey tells of an experiment involving a chimpanzee to which scientists were determined to teach written communications. For 14 years, project directors labored diligently and patiently with this chimpanzee, providing it things in its cage to enable them to form certain syllables. Finally, the day arrived when it seemed that the chimpanzee was actually going to construct a sentence from the symbols it had been learning. Word went out and other scientists crowded into the room and gathered around the cage. They watched breathlessly as symbols were formed into words and into a sentence. At last, the first message from the world's most pampered, most cared for, most patiently trained chimpanzee was about to come forth. The scientists could hardly contain themselves as they pressed around the cage to read the history-making sentence. Said the chimpanzee, Let me out. Let me out. You see, all the pampering, all the stuff in the world means nothing without liberty. And we take our freedom so for granted, don't we? Jesus Christ is the greatest liberator of all of history. Liberty is a consistent thing throughout Scripture. All the way back in the Old Testament, God was setting his people free from the captivity in which they entered into for their own disobedience and rebellion. And we could talk at length, and I don't have time today to talk about how God over and over again established freedom with his people. It was God's desire. Look what the next Scripture says. Where the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. The greatest liberty that God gives, listen, is the liberty to choose internally what really matters to you. The greatest liberty is an internal one. It's the liberty of the interior. It's the liberty of the soul that enables you to say yes or no. To exercise your will to go in this direction or to go in that direction. No matter what the creed or the doctrine or the activity, you have the liberty in Christ to say yes or no. That's the difference, in my view, between a Christian and a non-Christian. A Christian has been set free from the law of sin and death. A non-Christian remains under the law of sin and death. And this is a huge thing, friends. This internal liberty gives us a view toward life that frees us to make choices that are wise and life-changing. And it's only out of this internal freedom that we have found all other kinds of freedom. Economic, social, and political. So many of which we benefit from, we don't even realize. So much has been said, hasn't it? I mean, a lot of controversy about the separation of church and state. This has become, you know, last 20 years, a big hot item. Separation of church and state. But it really wasn't a big hot item all that long ago. It's interesting to me. We, as a people, have taken this so far. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political scientist, was sent to America in the 1800s to look at this country and say, why is this country so unique? Why is it so great? Here's one thing he said. Let's put that slide up, please. Here's de Tocqueville's quote. He says this, I'll read it for you. The Americans combined the notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately in their minds that it's impossible to make them conceive the one without the other. Liberty and Christianity. They can't conceive of the one without the other. And so we in America have benefited from this enormously. The whole idea of freedom of speech. We take that for granted. I can say what I want to say. Prior to 1776, if you said something against your political leaders, guess what would happen to you? You'd go to jail, or worse, you'd be dead. The whole idea of democracy was instituted because we were given liberty by Almighty God. The pilgrims came to this nation to exercise the freedom of making a covenant. We call it the Mayflower Compact. The pilgrims were people who came having had a covenant with God, and they came and established a covenant with one another. They called it the Mayflower Compact. It was the basis upon which our form of life, our culture was established. And it all goes back to the same idea that God has set people free. Interestingly, when Moses had declared to his people that they would be free if they walked under the law of God, it says this in Leviticus 25.10, they were to proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. Let me read that again. Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. Where is that written? Leviticus 25.10, I just told you, but where else is it written? The Liberty Bell. Oh, really? Yes, really. In our culture, in our country, you see, friends, we've been robbed, and we're just laying back and taking it. Go ahead and take our heritage. Take our values. We can't allow that to continue on. We need to understand the importance. Listen to this. The Founding Fathers formed a strictly limited government in the Constitutional Convention. They were following the biblical views of John Calvin who said this, Civil government has its appointed end to cherish and protect the outward worship of God. Did you hear that? To reconcile us with one another and to promote the general peace and tranquility of society. That's what government's supposed to do. To cherish and protect our outward worship of God, reconcile us with one another, and promote the general peace and tranquility of society. That's what we're here to do. Spiritual liberty and civil liberty are to go together. John Quincy Adams said this. I believe we do have this on a slide. John Quincy Adams said this. The highest glory of the American Revolution was this. It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. Look at that. The highest glory of the American Revolution. Now I want to submit to you that's a far cry from the separation of church and state. And yet, somehow all this gets lost on the people of our day. Is it really a stretch to say that America is free because of Christ? I think not. I think it's accurate. But the key issue is this, friends. It begins with the freedom of the interior. The freedom, listen, of you making a choice today and tomorrow and the next day to follow God wherever you are called to go. One of the greatest examples of that in this century, in my opinion, wasn't an American. He was a Brit by the name of Eric Little. And I want you to watch up here as Jeff Painter comes to play just an arrangement that he's made of the song, Chariots of Fire. If you remember the story of Eric Little, he was a runner from Great Britain, sent to the Olympics, I believe it was in 1932. And he got the message that it was going to be, his race was going to be on Sunday, the Lord's Day, the day we go to the malls. And he'd worked his whole life to run in that race on a Sunday. And when the word came through that it was on a Sunday, he made the decision, I'm not going to run, I'm going to honor God. Let's watch as Jeff plays. It does come down to your personal choices, dear ones. The liberty to do so. The third gift that Christ brought to our culture is the gift of compassion and mercy. On the other side of your outline, the gift of compassion and mercy. Of all the differences that Christ has made, this is the least difficult to imagine and to accept. Prior to his coming, the rule of life was simply this, might makes right. The strong survive. And that was the prevailing doctrine of the day. St. Lawrence was a deacon in the Christian church who was quite generous, especially to the poor. He lived in a part of the Roman Empire in the third century, that during one of his persecutions was ordered to bring a Roman official some of the treasures of the church. And what St. Lawrence brought was some of the poor, downtrodden, and lame people. And he said of them to the official, these are the treasures of the church. And for this response, he was roasted to death on a gridiron. Wake up a second. Wake up a second. Listen. Imagine that. Imagine the possibility that your response to a simple request could mean that you would be roasted to death. That you could suffer death by one choice of one response, a pure response from your heart. God, help us not to fritter away the freedom we've been given, to exercise the compassion and the mercy of God. This is a treasure. This is a gift. And I wonder, church, is God watching us and smiling, or is he saying, you know, they don't get it. We're wasting it. Most historians would concur that prior to Christ, there exists no trace or evidence of any kind of any organized charitable effort. Did you hear that? I mean, we walk around and we see the Salvation Army. We see the Red Cross. We see all these things and we think, well, they've always been around. Before Christ, there was none of them. There was no giving of money to people in need. There was no caring for people who were sick, the way we have hospitals and hospices now. It all came into our culture as a result of the heart of God as expressed through Christ. There was no disinterest of benevolence. Jesus came helping the poor, caring for the outcast, the brokenhearted, the sick. How brightly his light must have shone against the darkness of people's hopelessness. His example and his teaching forever changed the way human beings looked at each other. Remember the story of the Good Samaritan, where a stranger was helped by one passing by. That story changed how people viewed one another. And Jesus, using the parable of the sheep and the goats, where he said, when you help the least of these, my brothers, you help me. But we have that privilege today. We're dialed into that today because of Christ being here. The early church, rather, attracted many by showing a path out of Rome's terrible harshness. And this, over time, and many centuries of time, led to the organized efforts that we so freely embrace these days. The Salvation Army, World Vision, Compassion International, Samaritan's Purse, YMCA, the Red Cross, and all these different organizations. People like William Booth, the founder of Salvation Army, and George Mueller's orphanages in England, and Henry Donnant, who was the founder of the Red Cross, and the YMCA and the YWCA. Mother Teresa. They're all inspired by Christ and the spirit of compassion and mercy that he shows. And just a brief word about healing. I mean, you know, there's a huge political football error today about HMOs and the healing profession, isn't there? But did you know that you can largely look to the Christian faith as a point of the origin of all hospitals as we know them today? The hospital movement was solidly a Christian idea. Let me read this quote to you from Charles Rosenberg, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He said this, early hospitals of the United States were framed and motivated by responsibilities of Christian stewardship. The professionalization of nursing societies was the single most important factors for making hospitals safe and sound. How many nurses are here? Nurses, put up your hand. I want to give you a hand. Let's give our nurses a hand today. All right? Let me tell you why. You may think it's just a job, but prior to nursing, they couldn't figure out why so many people were dying. And it was the introduction of the full-time professional nurse called generally as a servant that helped doctors begin to cure the most difficult diseases and uncover the bacteria and so on that were causing the diseases. Florence Nightingale, and I could go on in a long list of names. These were people who pioneered the way and they did so because of Christ. And I know a little bit about this just from my own family situation, as you know. The Passover Hospital here in Pittsburgh was the first Lutheran hospital, I'm sorry, the first Protestant hospital in the United States. The Catholics kind of led the way and most of them had their names on it. St. Mark's, St. Paul's, and some of the different Catholic hospitals. St. Jude's. But we also have many Protestant hospitals. Why? Because Christians cared about the dying. They cared about the sick. I thank God for that and we benefit from it and we take it for granted. Let me give you the fourth one. The fourth is the gift of literacy, education, and science. Literacy, education, and science. Now in my preparations, this was the field that surprised me the most. I guess, you know, we in our culture take such pride in intellectual achievements and we applaud scientific and technological advancements as well as we should. But the fact is that prior to the Great Reformation, which was led by Martin Luther and other believers, there was no education for the masses. Christianity is responsible for the concept of education for everyone. Think about that. We all take school for granted. But prior to the Reformation, there was not education. There was no literacy. Most people could not read or write. And it was the introduction of the printing press that changed how people viewed education. Well, what brought on the printing press? Well, Johann Gutenberg, whose invention, the printing press, was deemed by Time Magazine as the number one invention of the millennium, said this. He said, I know what I want to do. I wish to manufacture a Bible. The motivation for the printing press was to print God's Word. And I might say that that led then to the reproduction of other literature that spawned the birth of the Reformation. So one literacy and the Reformation went hand in hand. And did you know that throughout the world today, where Christ has gone in, literacy has gone up. Where Christ has not been embraced, literacy remains low. Did you know that at the turn of this century, in nations like China and India where Christianity has not really been fully embraced, that the literacy rate was 0 to 20 percent? Those with the Roman Catholic background had much higher rates, 40 to 60 percent. And those of Protestant influence from the Reformation had ranges of 94 to 99 percent. That's just 100 years ago. These are all facts, friends. These aren't just things that I'm making up. And I say much in this message about the universities in America that we hold up as these bastions of knowledge and understanding. Did you know that the first 123 colleges and universities were founded for the purpose of preparing people to understand Scripture and to be trained in the faith. Engraved in a stone outside the entrance of a particular university is this quote. Let's put this up, please. After God had carried us safe to New England and we had built our houses, provided necessities for our livelihood, we had convenient places for God's worship and settled this civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was for advanced learning and perpetuated to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministry shall lie in the dust. In other words, we wanted to be sure that the next generation would carry on the ministry of the gospel. You know what university that's on? Harvard. That's right. Harvard University. And let's just go down this list. Here are some of the other schools and the things that were said of them. Dartmouth was founded to train missionaries to the Indians. William and Mary was created that the Christian faith might be propagated. Columbia University in New York City, the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage children to know God and Jesus Christ. John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University, cursed to be all learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ. I want to ask a question. What happened? Hear me, parents. What happened is a lack of vigilance. In one generation, you can lose the flame. And over a few generations, all of these wonderful universities slowly, without doing diligence, without paying attention to what was being taught, of who was being brought in, of what was being said. Over the course of a couple of generations, they lost the core values upon which they were established. Make no mistake, parents, it can happen in your family, it can happen in your schools, it can happen in this culture, it can happen in this church. Why? Because there's what I want to call a second law of spiritual thermodynamics. Some of you are thinking thermodynamics right now, aren't you? Kind of chilly. Darren, can you turn the air conditioner up a little bit, please? What is the second law of thermodynamics? Any system left to itself will increase in disorder. The law of entropy. I believe that's true in the spiritual realm. Any spiritual being, any spiritual group left to itself will increase in chaos, in spiritual confusion. God help us. In this country, that's where we've been going. And we need to do something about it. I just want to mention science. I threw this in because most people would not associate Christianity and science. In fact, most people would say Christianity and science are... Most scientists would say you can't really be... you can't believe all that stuff. And I don't want to go to... I want to say this. Again, if you're an honest student, look at the Reformation. It was the hunger to know God in nature that spawned the development of science as we know it today. Listen to this quote by Dr. Malcolm Jeeves. I don't know if he was the founder of the website AskJeeves.com, but he wrote in the book The Scientific Enterprise in the Christian Faith. He says this. It was with the rediscovery of the Bible after the printing press and Reformation and of its message at the time of the Reformation that a new impetus came to the development of science. This new impetus flowing together the best of Greek thinking and produced the right mixture and chain reaction leading to the explosion of knowledge which began the start of the scientific revolution in the 16th century and which is proceeding with ever-increasing momentum every day. You see, Christians look in nature and they saw God and they wanted to know more because they thought nature revealed God as did the Bible. And so those two things, the Bible and nature, were sought. So literacy and science grew. And we're here today with computers and, you know, electron microscopes and incredible biological advances. Because man has been given the impetus to hunger after God in nature as a result of the Reformation. Just a short list of Bible-believing scientists. Do we have that slide? Is there a slide with that on there? I don't know if I have that one or not. Louis Pasteur was one that I had in here and Isaac Newton. And these are people that, you know, lots of times you read about them and don't even know where they were from. Johannes Kepler, a great physicist. Charles Babbage, the founder of computer science. Michael Faraday of electronics. These were all Bible-believing people who helped set the way for science. And let me just end with this. Number five, the gift of hope. The gift of hope. And this final category, friends, is a lot more than just eternal hope and everlasting life. I want to talk in conclusion just for a moment that Jesus Christ has established in this world the hope that one day man will ultimately be delivered from his obsession with eliminating himself from the planet. Christians are occasionally criticized. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who said, you know, more people have been killed because of the cause of Christ than all the wars in the world. You know, just turn to someone and say, that's baloney. That's just someone trying to throw you off. Little study of this. Here's what I found. No century has been more like ours in terms of man killing his fellow man. Easily more than 170 million people have been killed by other human beings in this century. 130 million of these died because of atheistic ideology. Whether it was Hitler's racism that viewed Jews as human bacteria and he eradicated 15 million Jews and Christians. Or Joseph Stalin responding to the responsible for 40 million dying in Russia earlier in this century. Or more recently since 1948 Mao's, Chairman Mao's, you know, the great Chairman Mao. Conservatively 70 million people died in starvation camps and other forms of abuse in China in the last 50 years. Friends, these are facts. And you see, man is on this quest to dominate other men. It was Winston Churchill just prior to the Battle of Britain that said these words and these were, as you know, Churchill was one of the great statesmen of all time and when he spoke these words it was a cry of battle. He said this, I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. He realized the bond between Christianity and civility. And I just want to say as I conclude, all we know is that in the end the Book of Revelation tells us that man is going to wipe out mankind. That there's going to be something unleashed on this earth so horrible that a third of the planet is going to be devoured by it. Whether it's biological or nuclear, we don't know. And so the only hope of man in the end is Jesus coming again to redeem man from the quest to terminate himself. That's the law of sin and death you see that's in us. Aren't you glad today that we serve a God who is the Lord of history? We serve a God who in the end will prevail on this planet. We serve a God who has established His Word as the solid rock upon which we stand. Our hope remains in this that Jesus is making all of His enemies into His footstool. And one day He will reign over all the earth. Every knee will bow every time we'll confess that Jesus is Lord. But don't take it from the Bible. Take it from Napoleon. Not himself a Christian but he said this closing quote. Napoleon's quote. Let's put that up please. I know that one's up there. Come on. Come on Napoleon. They're scrambling around up there. I'm going to have to find it. Come on Napoleon. There he comes. I search in vain and history to find this similar to Jesus Christ or anything which can approach the gospel. Nations pass away. Thrones crumble. But the church remains. And to that I say hallelujah. Amen. Let's stand together and sing this great hymn of the church On Christ the solid rock I stand. Let's lift our voices as we sing My hope is built upon Jesus.