Culbert G. Rutenber - "The Answering God - But How?" (April 24, 1955)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| (music instruments playing) | 0:04 | |
| (choir singing) | 0:09 | |
| - | Accept these offerings, | 0:50 |
| we beseech thee, oh Lord, | 0:51 | |
| and mercifully direct and enable us by thy Holy Spirit, | 0:53 | |
| that all things which we do in thy name | 0:57 | |
| may be truly rot in thee, | 0:59 | |
| through Jesus Christ Our Lord, amen. | 1:02 | |
| (music playing) | 1:15 | |
| It is also nebulous, | 1:35 | |
| the student was complaining, | 1:37 | |
| the preachers talk and the people talk | 1:39 | |
| about a feeling in here and an experience in here and so on, | 1:41 | |
| and there's nothing public to point to. | 1:44 | |
| When you work in the world of every day, | 1:47 | |
| you can point to something that everybody else can see. | 1:49 | |
| A guy says, there's a moon, all right? | 1:52 | |
| You point to the moon and there it is. | 1:53 | |
| Everybody can see it, | 1:55 | |
| or else you accuse the man of hallucination. | 1:55 | |
| But in the Christian faith, | 1:58 | |
| there's nothing like this to point to, so the student. | 1:59 | |
| And it was precisely to this mood | 2:03 | |
| that Elijah was appealing when in the long ago, | 2:05 | |
| and in the story that we read, | 2:07 | |
| that he decided to take religion out of the stratosphere | 2:09 | |
| of theological speculation | 2:12 | |
| and make it walk on all fours | 2:14 | |
| in terms of observable consequences. | 2:15 | |
| When he said to them, why do you halt between two opinions? | 2:18 | |
| If God is God follow Him. | 2:21 | |
| If Baal is god follow him, they didn't say anything. | 2:23 | |
| But when he suggested | 2:28 | |
| some appealed to observable consequences | 2:30 | |
| and ended by suggesting, | 2:33 | |
| the Lord that answers by fire, let him be God. | 2:35 | |
| Then all the people murmured, "It is well spoken." | 2:39 | |
| Now there's obviously something very appealing | 2:43 | |
| and something very modern | 2:45 | |
| about this appeal to observable consequences. | 2:47 | |
| You find it in the New Testament. | 2:50 | |
| Our Lord did not scorn making an appeal | 2:52 | |
| to precisely this type of argument. | 2:55 | |
| He said, "If I do not do the works of my Father, | 2:57 | |
| "don't believe me." | 3:00 | |
| And when John the Baptist sent messages to Him, | 3:02 | |
| raising the question of the ultimacy of His Messiahship, | 3:05 | |
| our Lord only gave him an indirect answer. | 3:09 | |
| He just told the messengers to wait around | 3:11 | |
| for a few hours and watch Him. | 3:13 | |
| Watch Him heal the sick, | 3:15 | |
| watch Him open the eyes of the blind, | 3:17 | |
| watch Him touch the legs of the lame, | 3:19 | |
| and then just to go back and tell John the Baptist, | 3:21 | |
| what they had seen. | 3:24 | |
| He was willing to stake everything on an appeal | 3:26 | |
| to these observable results. | 3:30 | |
| Now, the church has always known | 3:35 | |
| that there is some connection | 3:36 | |
| between truth and observable consequences. | 3:38 | |
| But in its history, | 3:43 | |
| it has never been quite sure what kind of consequences | 3:44 | |
| it ought to appeal to. | 3:47 | |
| The God that answers by what? | 3:49 | |
| Congregants | Fire. | 3:51 |
| - | Shall be God. | 3:52 |
| And when we look through church history, | 3:54 | |
| we find various various answers | 3:56 | |
| to this particular type of question. | 3:58 | |
| Sometimes during church history, | 4:01 | |
| the approach that Elijah made has been repeated. | 4:03 | |
| The God that answers by signs and wonders let Him be God. | 4:06 | |
| If you came up to Philadelphia today, | 4:11 | |
| I would take you out to Fairmont Park | 4:12 | |
| if we had the time and I would show you a little bush. | 4:14 | |
| If you looked at the bush, | 4:17 | |
| it looked like every other bush that you had ever seen. | 4:18 | |
| But around this bush is a little picket fence, | 4:21 | |
| and around the picket fence is evidence | 4:24 | |
| of thousands and thousands and thousands of people | 4:26 | |
| who have walked around that little picket fence. | 4:29 | |
| And there you'll find high on that picket fence, | 4:33 | |
| hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of rose rows, | 4:35 | |
| medals, stationary images. | 4:38 | |
| There are canes there, there are crutches there, | 4:42 | |
| there all sorts of things there. | 4:45 | |
| Hundreds of dollars were collected there by the park guards. | 4:47 | |
| For two or three years ago, | 4:50 | |
| two little girls said that they saw the Virgin | 4:51 | |
| appear in the bush. | 4:55 | |
| And although the church, | 4:57 | |
| the Catholic church never certified the vision | 4:58 | |
| tens of thousands of people flocked there, | 5:01 | |
| because they wanted to have a share in the miracle. | 5:05 | |
| It is a spirit which is very near | 5:09 | |
| to the heart of many people. | 5:11 | |
| It is the spirit of the character in Browning, | 5:12 | |
| who said, "God, if you want us to love you, | 5:14 | |
| "throw us a handful of stars." | 5:16 | |
| Now, when we turned to the New Testament, | 5:19 | |
| they lived in the atmosphere of the supernatural. | 5:21 | |
| And yet it's surprising how little this appealed | 5:24 | |
| to miracles and wonders was part and parcel of their appeal. | 5:26 | |
| Paul puts miracle working way down on the list | 5:31 | |
| and both Jesus and Paul reminded their hearers | 5:34 | |
| that Satan too could work miracles. | 5:36 | |
| And Jesus Himself was constantly in a struggle | 5:39 | |
| to play down His mounting reputation as a miracle worker. | 5:41 | |
| When He healed people, He would tell them, | 5:44 | |
| "Now, please don't tell anybody. | 5:46 | |
| "I don't want this to get around." | 5:47 | |
| You remember that in His last agonizing hour, | 5:50 | |
| He repudiated the temptation to put His Messiahship | 5:53 | |
| to the final proof by working the ultimate miracle. | 5:57 | |
| His enemies propositioned Him, | 6:00 | |
| If you're the son of God, come down from the cross | 6:02 | |
| and we will believe. | 6:05 | |
| Supposedly He had, | 6:07 | |
| suppose the nails had dropped out of His hands, | 6:09 | |
| the nails had dropped out of His feet | 6:11 | |
| and He had stepped down onto the ground before them all. | 6:13 | |
| Would this have prove that He was the son of God? | 6:16 | |
| Would this have prove that He was indeed the Messiah? | 6:18 | |
| And the answer must be no. | 6:22 | |
| And it must be no because of two things, for one thing, | 6:23 | |
| there's always a naturalistic explanation | 6:25 | |
| for almost any phenomenon. | 6:27 | |
| You remember there in John, | 6:29 | |
| when Jesus was praying to His father and said, | 6:30 | |
| "Father glorify Thy Name." | 6:32 | |
| That the father spoke from Heaven and said, | 6:34 | |
| "I both have glorified it and will glorify it." | 6:36 | |
| And then we read that those who were standing by said | 6:39 | |
| "It thundered," ah, yes, | 6:43 | |
| this is the eternal skeptic, it thundered. | 6:45 | |
| Did somebody's prayer get answered? | 6:48 | |
| Uh, it thundered. | 6:50 | |
| Did God work a mighty work here? | 6:51 | |
| Oh, it thundered. | 6:53 | |
| Did the spirit of God reveal Himself | 6:54 | |
| in a special way in his life? | 6:56 | |
| It thundered. | 6:58 | |
| There's always the possibility of a naturalistic | 6:59 | |
| explanation, but quite aside from that, | 7:01 | |
| there's another problem in appealing to signs and wonders. | 7:03 | |
| And that is the fact that there is no essential connection | 7:06 | |
| between character and miracle working. | 7:08 | |
| If I said to you this morning, | 7:11 | |
| I want to demonstrate that what I am telling you, | 7:12 | |
| is the absolute truth. | 7:16 | |
| And I'm going to demonstrate it by making this cow | 7:17 | |
| jump over the moon. | 7:19 | |
| Now I want you to watch me very closely. | 7:20 | |
| Abracadabra Bup bup adup. | 7:23 | |
| Now watch it it goes up, up, up, up. | 7:24 | |
| Now, watch it over. | 7:26 | |
| Over, over, here It comes down there. | 7:27 | |
| Now I have prove to you what I say is true. | 7:30 | |
| No, I haven't really proved this at all. | 7:34 | |
| The only thing that I have demonstrated is that I can make | 7:36 | |
| cows jump over moons. | 7:38 | |
| And that's quite a different thing than proving the honesty | 7:40 | |
| of what I am saying or the truth of what I am saying. | 7:43 | |
| The God that answers by signs and wonders. | 7:47 | |
| I don't think that this will bring us where we wanna go. | 7:49 | |
| Well, the church has tried another answer in its history. | 7:52 | |
| The God that answers by the greatest amount of force, | 7:56 | |
| let Him be God. | 7:59 | |
| Now in the early centuries, | 8:01 | |
| there was no appeal to this type of thing, | 8:04 | |
| but by the time that the church developed a state in culture | 8:06 | |
| at the time of Constantine, | 8:09 | |
| the possibility of making its appeal | 8:11 | |
| to the superiority of Christianity | 8:13 | |
| on the basis of force became a live option. | 8:15 | |
| Kenneth Latourette, in speaking about the threat | 8:21 | |
| of the Muslims in the ninth and succeeding centuries | 8:24 | |
| says that the first reaction of the Christian Church | 8:27 | |
| to the Muslim invasion was an appeal to military force. | 8:30 | |
| And he traces the Iberian peninsula campaign in Cecilia | 8:35 | |
| down through the crusades. | 8:39 | |
| Commenting on the crusades he says, | 8:41 | |
| "Never in the history of the world | 8:43 | |
| "has any religion with a possible exception of Islam, | 8:45 | |
| "given rise to such a prolonged procession of holy wars." | 8:48 | |
| The superiority of the Christian faith | 8:53 | |
| over the Muhammad faith | 8:56 | |
| was to be proved on the battlefield. | 8:58 | |
| The God who answers with the greatest force, let Him be God. | 9:01 | |
| We don't have to do it quite as strongly on the battlefield. | 9:05 | |
| There are all forms of other ways. | 9:09 | |
| There are all sorts of other ways of coercion, | 9:10 | |
| by which this same appeal is always a temptation | 9:13 | |
| of a religious group. | 9:17 | |
| Whenever a majority try to suppress a minority, | 9:19 | |
| whenever a majority seek to use the apparatus of government | 9:22 | |
| in order to coerce the centers, | 9:25 | |
| they are making of the gospel, | 9:29 | |
| the power of God under coercion, | 9:30 | |
| and are assuming that the mark of God's favor | 9:32 | |
| is the ability to survive in a power struggle. | 9:35 | |
| But how foreign this is to our Lord Jesus Christ, | 9:39 | |
| for when we turn to our Lord, | 9:42 | |
| we find that this is precisely the thing that made Him | 9:44 | |
| a perpetual stumbling block to His contemporaries. | 9:47 | |
| He would not do the thing that He ought to do | 9:51 | |
| in the way of coercing the minds and hearts of men. | 9:55 | |
| From His entrance to His exit, | 9:58 | |
| His meekness was a stumbling block. | 10:00 | |
| They all were looking for a king to smack their foes | 10:03 | |
| and lift them high. | 10:07 | |
| Thou came us the little baby thing that made a woman cry. | 10:10 | |
| Where is the power of God in that? | 10:13 | |
| There at the very end of His life, | 10:17 | |
| that thing that we call a triumphal entry, | 10:18 | |
| they knew what triumphal entries were. | 10:21 | |
| They'd seen them, men coming in horses and chariots | 10:23 | |
| with their captives behind them. | 10:26 | |
| Here comes a man on an ass. | 10:28 | |
| If I may be excused to play on words. | 10:31 | |
| He was a little asinine. | 10:34 | |
| He was a little ridiculous. | 10:36 | |
| There was no appeal here to the normal instincts | 10:38 | |
| of the human heart. | 10:41 | |
| It was not that our Lord did not know anything | 10:45 | |
| about the blandishments of worldly power. | 10:47 | |
| He'd been tempted by worldly power | 10:50 | |
| at the very beginning of His career. | 10:51 | |
| A tempter came and offered him all of the accoutrements | 10:54 | |
| of political success and worldly kingdoms. | 10:56 | |
| And He had trampled them under His feet, | 10:59 | |
| no power of this type for Him only at Calvary. | 11:00 | |
| No allegiance of angels would come to scatter His foes | 11:05 | |
| when He needed the most to demonstrate | 11:08 | |
| that God was still with Him | 11:10 | |
| and that His father was still on His side. | 11:12 | |
| Oh no! | 11:14 | |
| The only power He permitted Himself | 11:15 | |
| was the power of suffering love, salvation by cross. | 11:17 | |
| Yeah, but salvation by club, never. | 11:22 | |
| No, the God that answers by the greatest amount of force | 11:28 | |
| can never be the Christian God. | 11:30 | |
| There's another kind of appeal, which the church has made. | 11:34 | |
| It is an appeal which E. Stanley Jones is referring to, | 11:39 | |
| when he tells of how one day | 11:43 | |
| he slipped into a debate in India | 11:47 | |
| between a Hindu and a Christian. | 11:49 | |
| Christian was a very educated man. | 11:53 | |
| And in the process of the give and take of the debate, | 11:57 | |
| the Christian propounded a very profound question | 12:00 | |
| to his antagonist. | 12:06 | |
| It involved a lot of knowledge, a lot of eradiction. | 12:09 | |
| And when he had propounded it, he stopped for a minute. | 12:12 | |
| And then he said to the Hindu, | 12:15 | |
| "If you will show me | 12:18 | |
| "that you understand my question, | 12:21 | |
| "quite aside from answering it, | 12:23 | |
| "I will concede the debate to you." | 12:26 | |
| Here is another appeal, an appeal of a different kind. | 12:31 | |
| The God that answers by the cleverest arguments, | 12:35 | |
| let him be God. | 12:41 | |
| Now there are those who would tell us that arguments | 12:47 | |
| have nothing to do with Christian faith. | 12:49 | |
| A man like Soren Kierkegaard will remind us of the fact | 12:52 | |
| that to defend anything is to discredit it. | 12:55 | |
| If a man walks in and says, | 12:58 | |
| "Gentlemen, I want to make an announcement this morning. | 13:00 | |
| "I am in love," period. | 13:03 | |
| "And I want to defend my condition." | 13:05 | |
| or, "I want to interpret my condition by suggesting | 13:07 | |
| "that there are three things to be said for being in love. | 13:10 | |
| "The first is this, and the second is this | 13:13 | |
| "and the third is that." | 13:16 | |
| This guy's making himself ridiculous. | 13:19 | |
| What a lover does, if he's genuine, | 13:21 | |
| is not to defend his love by saying, | 13:22 | |
| here are three reasons for falling in love, | 13:24 | |
| but by coming in and throwing up his hand and saying, | 13:26 | |
| "Boys, I'm in love." | 13:28 | |
| And so says Soren Kierkegaard with the Christian, | 13:31 | |
| the Christian is a witness. | 13:34 | |
| And when he witnesses, | 13:35 | |
| he witnesses not in the language of logic, | 13:37 | |
| but in the language of experience, | 13:39 | |
| who so have felt the spirit of the highest | 13:41 | |
| cannot confound him nor doubt him nor deny ye though, | 13:43 | |
| with one ye though, | 13:48 | |
| with one voice Oh world though, | 13:49 | |
| vow deny stand vow on that side for on this am I. | 13:51 | |
| Now I think there is much to be said | 13:57 | |
| for suggesting that the Christian faith | 14:01 | |
| moves on a level different from argument, | 14:02 | |
| in spite of the fact that I think that Soren Kierkegaard | 14:04 | |
| and some of his followers have overcome. | 14:07 | |
| After all, we do not have to be obscurantistic, | 14:10 | |
| because we are Christians. | 14:13 | |
| There is still in the Bible, | 14:15 | |
| the injunction to love the Lord, | 14:16 | |
| thy God with all your mind. | 14:18 | |
| And mind is still part of the God- given function | 14:20 | |
| of a human being. | 14:23 | |
| But still after all is said and done, | 14:25 | |
| there's a lot to what Soren Kierkegaard says. | 14:27 | |
| We must have reduced the Christian faith | 14:30 | |
| to a parlor game for egg heads. | 14:32 | |
| It's not the clever in mind after all that will see God, | 14:36 | |
| it's the pure in heart. | 14:40 | |
| And when Jesus said, if any man wills to do God's will, | 14:43 | |
| He will know. | 14:49 | |
| He put His finger upon our human dilemma. | 14:50 | |
| Our trouble is not in the thoughts in our minds, | 14:54 | |
| but in the desires in our souls. | 14:56 | |
| And that's what needs cure. | 14:59 | |
| Several years ago, | 15:02 | |
| when I was preaching out at Stanford University, | 15:03 | |
| the first Sunday that I was out there, | 15:06 | |
| a man came up in the line afterwards just to shake hands | 15:08 | |
| with the preacher. | 15:11 | |
| He wasn't one of the students, he was a man in his forties, | 15:13 | |
| I would say. | 15:16 | |
| And in shaking hands with me, | 15:16 | |
| he merely said that, "I'm an agnostic. | 15:17 | |
| "I just happened to be here this morning. | 15:20 | |
| "But something that was said interested me." | 15:22 | |
| And I thanked him and he moved on with the crowd | 15:24 | |
| as others pushed in. | 15:26 | |
| But when the next Sunday he came back in, again, | 15:28 | |
| spoke to me and again said, | 15:30 | |
| that something had been said interested him. | 15:32 | |
| I stopped him and suggested that we make a little date. | 15:35 | |
| So he was satisfied that we should, | 15:37 | |
| and we made a date to discuss his intellectual difficulties. | 15:39 | |
| When I went over to the office | 15:43 | |
| and the time that the date had been made, | 15:45 | |
| there was a note tacked up there. | 15:47 | |
| He was awfully, sorry. | 15:48 | |
| He had been called out of town on business. | 15:49 | |
| Very sorry that he couldn't meet me and that was that. | 15:51 | |
| When I got back to Philadelphia at the end of the summer, | 15:54 | |
| I got a letter from him from Florida and again, | 15:56 | |
| he expressed his regrets | 15:58 | |
| that he had had to leave town so suddenly. | 15:59 | |
| But incidentally, he said something about, | 16:01 | |
| he had to go to New York from Florida, | 16:03 | |
| and I immediately wrote back and said, | 16:04 | |
| well, if you have to go to New York, | 16:05 | |
| don't you have to go through Philadelphia? | 16:07 | |
| Why don't you stop off, | 16:09 | |
| and we'll discuss your intellectual doubts. | 16:10 | |
| So he wrote back and said he was sorry, | 16:13 | |
| he was in an awful hurry he couldn't do that. | 16:14 | |
| So again, I wrote back and said, | 16:16 | |
| tell me your hotel in New York. | 16:17 | |
| And I'll come up to your hotel | 16:18 | |
| and we'll discuss your intellectual doubts. | 16:20 | |
| Well, he couldn't get out of this one. | 16:22 | |
| So he told me his hotel. | 16:24 | |
| And on the day appointed I went up to him | 16:27 | |
| to argue with him about the Christian faith. | 16:30 | |
| Well, we went round and round and for two hours, | 16:33 | |
| I of course thought I answered his problems. | 16:36 | |
| He thought that I didn't. | 16:38 | |
| And finally I remembered what sometimes | 16:40 | |
| in the heat of my own interest in debate, | 16:42 | |
| makes me sometimes forget | 16:45 | |
| the thing that I've just been saying, | 16:48 | |
| that Christianity is not the conclusion of an argument | 16:51 | |
| with the beginning of a commitment. | 16:53 | |
| And finally I said to this fellow, I said, | 16:54 | |
| "Now, listen." | 16:56 | |
| Of course I was sticking my neck way out. | 16:58 | |
| "Suppose that I could prove to your satisfaction, | 17:00 | |
| "that Jesus Christ were the Son of God | 17:03 | |
| "and the Savior of men. | 17:04 | |
| "Would you promise me that you would give yourself to Him | 17:06 | |
| "body and soul? | 17:08 | |
| "No holes barred?" | 17:09 | |
| I can see him right this minute. | 17:11 | |
| His eyes began over here. | 17:14 | |
| They went up the wall, up over the ceiling, | 17:16 | |
| down the other wall, | 17:21 | |
| over the floor and back on my facing it. | 17:23 | |
| And then he said, "Well, well, I don't think I would." | 17:27 | |
| When I pressed him, what his problem was, | 17:34 | |
| it was almost the new thing. | 17:36 | |
| During the war, he'd been a major | 17:39 | |
| and he'd been stationed in India | 17:41 | |
| and he hated it. | 17:43 | |
| Absolutely hated it. | 17:44 | |
| And somewhere along the line, he'd gotten a fear. | 17:45 | |
| If he ever became a Christian, | 17:49 | |
| God would send him back to India, | 17:51 | |
| which was the end of the line, as far as he was concerned. | 17:53 | |
| (crowd exclaiming) | 17:56 | |
| Know when the best said life, | 18:01 | |
| but a poor player that threats | 18:02 | |
| and struts his hour upon the stage | 18:04 | |
| and then his heard no more. | 18:05 | |
| It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fear, | 18:06 | |
| signifying nothing. | 18:09 | |
| When he talked that way, | 18:11 | |
| he wasn't giving a philosophy of nihilism | 18:13 | |
| out of a well reasoned argument, but out of a wasted life. | 18:16 | |
| We think with our characters | 18:22 | |
| and in all matters of truth that matter, | 18:25 | |
| truth is a function of character. | 18:27 | |
| Though I'm afraid that apologetics | 18:30 | |
| will never solve our problem either, we must say goodbye | 18:34 | |
| perhaps regretfully to the God who answers | 18:36 | |
| with the cleverest arguments, | 18:38 | |
| as indicating the truth, which we seek. | 18:40 | |
| Obviously I have to stop somewhere | 18:48 | |
| and I have to stop on a positive note. | 18:50 | |
| So let me come to my final one. | 18:52 | |
| About a month ago, | 18:55 | |
| I was in Washington DC and in a committee meeting, | 18:56 | |
| and a man came up to me and he said, | 18:59 | |
| "I bring you greetings from the Reverend Robert Wells | 19:01 | |
| "in Denver, Colorado." | 19:04 | |
| And I thank him. | 19:06 | |
| The Reverend Robert Wells. | 19:08 | |
| He hadn't always been a Reverend. | 19:11 | |
| When I first knew him, he was a communist. | 19:13 | |
| And he got out of communism the hard way | 19:16 | |
| before it was popular to get out of communism, | 19:18 | |
| at the very end of the 1930's. | 19:20 | |
| When he decided to go into the ministry, | 19:22 | |
| he became a Christian and go into the ministry. | 19:24 | |
| One of his friend's said, | 19:26 | |
| "I don't believe that your conversion is genuine, | 19:27 | |
| "unless you go down to Headquarters | 19:29 | |
| "and tell them that you're a Christian | 19:31 | |
| "and turning your card face to face, | 19:32 | |
| "and that you're going into ministry." | 19:34 | |
| We went down to Headquarters | 19:36 | |
| and felt like he ran into | 19:38 | |
| the only one that was there at the time was the librarian. | 19:40 | |
| So he said to the librarian, "I'm turning in my card, | 19:42 | |
| "I'm going to the Christian ministry." | 19:45 | |
| And the librarian thinking | 19:47 | |
| that this was a new way of infiltrating said, | 19:48 | |
| "Jeez, that's a swell idea who thought up this one?" | 19:50 | |
| But I'm getting a little bit ahead of my story. | 19:54 | |
| What I want to tell you is how he became a Christian. | 19:56 | |
| I was holding meetings in Syracuse | 20:00 | |
| and this young communist leader from Syracuse University | 20:02 | |
| came one night. | 20:06 | |
| And after the service, | 20:08 | |
| he came up and introduced himself to me. | 20:09 | |
| And we got into an argument. | 20:12 | |
| We went over to the pastor's house and we argued and debated | 20:14 | |
| till 1 O'clock at night, | 20:16 | |
| over the relative merits of Christianity and communism. | 20:18 | |
| I didn't win my boy. | 20:22 | |
| But during that week of special services, | 20:24 | |
| there was a young fellow with the name of Carl | 20:26 | |
| who had a genuine and real experience of Jesus Christ. | 20:29 | |
| And he, and this young communist became fast friends. | 20:32 | |
| Now, Carl was a very average mentality | 20:35 | |
| and the communist was smart as a whip. | 20:37 | |
| And they used to debate and they used to argue, | 20:40 | |
| the communist always won. | 20:42 | |
| He could always push the Christian to the wall every time. | 20:43 | |
| No problem. | 20:46 | |
| Every time he could push the Christian to the wall. | 20:47 | |
| So finally one night, | 20:49 | |
| they were arguing and the Christian said, | 20:50 | |
| "I don't know the answer as usual. | 20:52 | |
| "I haven't the slightest idea of what to say, you got me." | 20:54 | |
| But he said, "I do know that Jesus Christ is real, | 20:57 | |
| "and I know what He's done for me. | 20:59 | |
| "and I know the change that has come into my life | 21:00 | |
| "as a result of His touch upon my life." | 21:01 | |
| Then I started to see a strange thing happened, | 21:06 | |
| and yet it wasn't so strange | 21:08 | |
| or it's the miracle of the Christian faith. | 21:10 | |
| It has repeated itself in every age and in every generation, | 21:12 | |
| the armor of defense | 21:16 | |
| with which the communist had surrounded himself, | 21:17 | |
| was shattered as if by a blow from the legendary | 21:19 | |
| hammer of Thor. | 21:22 | |
| And he stood defenseless without a word | 21:24 | |
| before this young man, Carl. | 21:28 | |
| For he had noticed this boy's life, | 21:30 | |
| he had noticed this strange quality of living | 21:33 | |
| that had come into this boy's life. | 21:36 | |
| He didn't know what it was. | 21:38 | |
| He couldn't tell where it was from. | 21:40 | |
| He recognized that it was more than human, | 21:42 | |
| and it finally broke him. | 21:45 | |
| And late that night, my communist friend | 21:47 | |
| knocked at the door of my minister friend | 21:49 | |
| months after I had left town, of course, and said, | 21:52 | |
| "I want to find out how to become a Christian." | 21:55 | |
| And this is the end of our search. | 22:00 | |
| Is it not the God who answers by changed lives, | 22:02 | |
| lives that are changed in the likeness of our Lord | 22:06 | |
| and Savior, Jesus Christ. | 22:08 | |
| Is not the thing, this is the thing to which we point to. | 22:11 | |
| And if there's anything that is public to which we can point | 22:14 | |
| as the young student with whom I began complained, | 22:17 | |
| is it not precisely to this? | 22:20 | |
| Is it not the wonder of the Christian faith, | 22:24 | |
| that all types of men, savages and students, | 22:27 | |
| PHD's and all learned, | 22:30 | |
| ancient Greeks and modern Americans, | 22:33 | |
| Orientals and accidentals, garbage men and geologists, | 22:34 | |
| they all witness to the same experience, | 22:39 | |
| they all are transformed in the same image, | 22:42 | |
| in the same likeness, the image and likeness | 22:45 | |
| that is so unlike what we are by nature, made to be | 22:48 | |
| that the very libido itself | 22:52 | |
| is transformed in the process? | 22:53 | |
| Is it not here that psychology and the Christian faith merge | 22:56 | |
| in telling us that only a life that can give | 22:59 | |
| and to receive love is a life worth living? | 23:01 | |
| And the Christian faith takes this insight, | 23:04 | |
| expands it and builds around it and points | 23:06 | |
| to the lover of our souls, | 23:09 | |
| as the one norm of what a love life might be. | 23:10 | |
| And then points through the reproduction of this love life | 23:12 | |
| and the power of the Holy Spirit | 23:15 | |
| in life after life, after life. | 23:17 | |
| And when men of all cultures and of all generations, | 23:20 | |
| and of all temperaments, and of all different backgrounds, | 23:23 | |
| and of all different educations, | 23:26 | |
| and of all different economic spread, | 23:27 | |
| all find precisely the same type of character, | 23:30 | |
| the character, Jesus Christ, Himself being formed in them. | 23:34 | |
| Is there not here emerging, | 23:38 | |
| the possibility that they are dealing, not with illusion, | 23:39 | |
| but with something real. | 23:42 | |
| The God that answers by change lives, lives, | 23:44 | |
| change in the likeness of Jesus Christ, | 23:47 | |
| let Him be God, yes. | 23:49 | |
| And is it not from this perspective | 23:52 | |
| that we can go back and say, | 23:53 | |
| is this not the sign and wonder that we point to? | 23:54 | |
| The miracle of the new birth in and for and through love. | 23:57 | |
| And is this not the force also that we appeal to the force, | 24:00 | |
| not of crude and craft and naked power, | 24:03 | |
| but the force of omnipotent suffering, | 24:07 | |
| the omnipotent force of suffering that reproduces the power | 24:10 | |
| in other people to love infinitely | 24:13 | |
| even while they are being infinitely rejected | 24:15 | |
| and is not the old source still true, | 24:18 | |
| that the best argument is a practical demonstration in life. | 24:20 | |
| No, the thing that emerged in the long ago from Palestine, | 24:24 | |
| the thing we've captured the imagination of generations | 24:28 | |
| and which broke the Roman empire, | 24:31 | |
| what emerged was not a new speculation, | 24:34 | |
| but a new spectacle behold, | 24:36 | |
| how these Christians love. | 24:38 | |
| What emerged was a new manhood. | 24:40 | |
| If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. | 24:43 | |
| All things are passed away. | 24:48 | |
| Behold, all things are become new. | 24:50 | |
| The God that answers by changed and transformed lives | 24:57 | |
| in the direction of Him who loved us | 25:01 | |
| and gave Himself for us. | 25:03 | |
| Let Him be God. | 25:06 | |
| Thy lover of our souls, we seek thy face will Christ | 25:23 | |
| that beyond our sin, | 25:30 | |
| beyond our self will, | 25:33 | |
| beyond our impoverishment | 25:36 | |
| might come thy power and thy grace and thy mercy | 25:39 | |
| to reconstitute us in thy own likeness, | 25:43 | |
| that men might know that there is a God in Israel | 25:46 | |
| who is able and willing to save | 25:48 | |
| because He can reproduce, | 25:52 | |
| thy own self, | 25:55 | |
| within us. | 25:57 | |
| May grace and mercy and peace | 25:59 | |
| from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit | 26:00 | |
| be with us and abide with us | 26:02 | |
| and pursue us through each succeeding day, | 26:05 | |
| and week, and month and year | 26:07 | |
| until we see thee face to face, amen. | 26:08 |