Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: If you're going to believe this, I want you to believe it all the way through and not just take bits and pieces of truth. That's not coherent and that's not honest, even though we might not know it's not honest. So, I want you to be coherent from this beginning of your belief to this end of your belief. You can say, "Pastor Kelley, I don't believe anything you just said."

Okay, that's between you and God. You will stand there and I will stand there alone, and that's okay. That really is okay. I can accept that and embrace that. I just want us to be honest and coherent and rational in how we come to conclusions and our logic. Sean McDowell, son of Josh McDowell, who now has a ministry to young adults with apologetics and such, says, "Religion and morals are considered matters of personal preference in taste over which the individual is autonomous."

This is why, if you've had a discussion with a younger person, you've probably heard them say, "Well, this may be true for you, but not for me. Who are you to judge?" or, "If that's what they choose, whatever." This is not because of their postmodern sentiments—in other words, he's saying this isn't because they've really thought this out—but because their thinking has been profoundly shaped by their modernist and secular culture.

In other words, they are just voicing what has been poured into them. I've always told our young people through the years—and some of them are not our young people anymore, they're our younger families now—listen, this faith, this Christian faith of ours needs to be your faith. It can't be your mom's faith or your dad's faith. It needs to be your faith. You can grow up that way and come under your parents' umbrella, but at some point, it needs to be personal for you.

It needs to be something that you comprehend, that you affirm, that you embrace. It can't be something you just say, "I'm a Christian because my mom was a Christian, my dad was a Christian, and I grew up in a Christian home." No, this must be something you embrace, that you must say yes to. There's a point when we're little and we come under that umbrella of mom and dad, but at some point, it needs to be personal.

I remember my Hannah Grace. She wanted to be baptized when she was nine. I said, "Honey, do you know what you're doing?" She said, "No." I said, "Then let's wait until you know what you're doing." And she got baptized at 17 when she really wanted to be. Now, to track how we ended up this way is helpful, but it's not essential. In other words, I could spend half the message showing you how truth has been influenced through each period of time.

But let's just say this: it started in about the fifth century when the church took the Bible out of the people's hands. The church took the Bible and said, "We will tell you what the Bible means and you just believe us because we're the church, and we'll kill you if you don't." Christianity wasn't this gracious all the time. At that point, truth took its first major hit, and it took a major hit for almost a thousand years until the Reformation took place.

As early as 60 years ago, the Ten Commandments stood as a pillar of undeniable truth. We knew, even if you just said the Ten Commandments, those are the Ten Commandments. "I shalt not," "thou shalt," "thou shalt not." They were embraced. Now, you might not even be able to mention them in certain school systems. There have been many names which have impacted our modern thought, way too many to get into, from the Darwins to the Kants to the Einsteins.

Ultimately, my friends, we have ended up with a confused, unsustainable, and often hypocritical view of what truth really is. Let me show you what I mean. Let's look at this hodgepodge that is called truth today in our educational, philosophical, and even religious institutions. Many of these things dovetail together. Many of these things are in this jambalaya of brains of ours where we believe a little of all of it.

So, let me read, and maybe you'll see some of this resonant in your own thinking. Maybe you'll see some of these things that you've embraced, or maybe you have people that you know in your family who have embraced them. First is pluralism. This is the acceptance of all religious paths as equally valid, promoting coexistence. You can believe what you want to believe and I can believe what I want to believe. It's all good.

It works for you, and it works for me. What's wrong with that? Pluralism. There is nothing absolute. It's whatever you embrace. It's plural; we can have it all. Relativism really almost can be an umbrella over all of them. If you want to take relativism, you could put probably another 10 subcategories under this one all by itself. This is the doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context and are not absolute.

That may be your belief system, and that's okay. It really is. I'll bring that home a little bit later in the message. There are many types of relativism out there. If it feels good, do it. Remember the "do your own thing" from the '60s? Some of you say, "No, I was born in the '80s or the '90s." Well, trust me, for those people here that were born in the '60s—if I know a few of them—it was "do your own thing." I wasn't born in the '60s; I was born in the '50s.

Then you have existentialism. It's difficult to define. If you Google this word, you'll see a lot of information, and everyone who defines it says it's difficult to define. So, I took a bunch of those definitions, put them together, and this is what I came up with: a modern philosophical movement stressing the importance of personal experience and responsibility and the demands that they make on the individual, who is seen as a free agent in a deterministic and seemingly meaningless universe.

Nothing really matters, so why don't I do what I want? It's a little bit like Gnosticism of the New Testament. I find my value and enjoyment in it, so it's okay. It's all about me. I'm my own launching pad; I'm my own filter. Then we have pragmatism, and that's the approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of success of their practical application. In other words, if it works.

Hey, works for me. It's okay. The end justifies the means. Now, you can take that and say, "Yeah, I understand that," but you can take that in some pretty dark ways if you'd like. Then there's naturalism. This is what we'll talk a lot about next week: the idea or belief that only laws of nature—this young man revealed some of that belief system—only laws of nature and physical law, as opposed to supernatural or spiritual law, enforce operations in the world.

It is the idea or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world. There's a reason for everything. This is, of course, where evolution resides. We are not created; we're just a natural process. Now, we're going to talk about this subject next week. I don't want to say a lot about it now, but it's significant, and that's why I'm teaching it. I just pray that you're able to come and hear some things you might not have heard. It's going to be very simple because of time limitations, but I guarantee it's nothing you're going to hear in the educational system today.

I believe, and I know many of you do too, there is an absolute truth. There is a red balloon. I can call that balloon green, purple, fuchsia, or any color I want to call it, but that was a red balloon. And it was red because red's an absolute color, isn't it? It wasn't a changing neon balloon; it was a red balloon. You can call it whatever you want and say whatever you want, but it was a red balloon. There is absolute truth.

If you don't believe there's absolute truth, then I challenge you to jump off the ceiling and challenge gravity. There is absolute truth. Who will catch you? Anyway, never mind. Now, 54% of evangelical Christians—that would be a guy like me—do not believe in absolute truth. 54% of us don't believe in it. We believe that truth somehow is negotiable and relative to each individual life, and there will be varying degrees of that.

Again, this is very subjective. 85% of adults believe in God, yet only one in four of those 85% believe in absolute truth. One in ten teenagers believes in absolute truth. One in ten. The rest believe, "If it feels good, do it. If it works for you, it's good. No one knows what the truth is. You define truth. You make your own truth." That's the other nine of these young people.

Even amongst those who confess Christianity, there are about 4% of them who can articulate the core tenets of their faith. Before this series, we did the "Fantastic Five" series and we taught you five cardinal doctrines of the faith. That was because of this statistic. We want, at least as a church, in the limited way we can for an hour once a week, to give people sound doctrine so you know the core tenets of your faith, or at least begin to be taught it as you walk out of here.

It is found that most Christians have formed—I love this statement—a "mongrel world view." It's a world view that mixes a little Christianity, a little pantheism—different gods—and a little naturalism—a natural reason for everything—because they rarely, if ever, are challenged on the unknowing hypocrisy of their own belief system. In other words, they're not starting out saying, "I want to be a hypocrite today."

They're not doing that. But they don't realize that their thought process and their reasoning is denying itself and contradicting itself right down the line. So, in order for that, we must define our world view and figure out where we get our world view from, because you have a world view. We all do. We all have a lens in which we process life through and process our world through.

In some cases, it's very defined. I'd say in more cases than not, it's not very defined; it's very ambiguous. Now, for the definition of world view—this is my own definition, if you like it; if you don't like it, it's somebody else's: a foundational premise of values by which we as Christians see the world, see the moral, political, ethical, educational, sociological, and cultural trending of our present day through the lenses of Scripture.

So, here's the million-dollar question. As a Christian—I'm a Christian, we're here, and I proclaim Christ, and I'm assuming most of us are, but some of you might not be, and that's okay, that's between you and God—do I have a Christian world view? If you say, "Yes, I have a Christian world view," then what is your source for that world view? For the believer, the obvious answer is the Bible, this book.

But what if the Bible contradicts my preference? What if the Bible contradicts my comfort or my choice? What if I really want to do this, but the Bible tells me not to do that, but to do this? What is the final authority? Who makes that decision? Do I bring myself under the governorship and the leadership of this very narrow, intolerant book, or do I do what I want to do?

See, if my world view is a Christian world view, then I come under the authority of absolute truth. I can say I have a bunch of world views, I have a mongrel world view. Yeah, I have somewhat of a Christian world view, but I also want to do my own thing. Good enough. You can live there if you want. It's not right, but you can live there if you want.

Just be honest about it. Just be truthful about it. If you want to live an abiblical world view, then live that way. That's between you and God. I'm not judging anybody. But don't say that that's okay when it's in absolute contradiction to this. That's where the problem comes in. That's where hypocrisy happens.