Culbert G. Rutenber - "The Answering God - But How?" (April 24, 1955)
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(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 |