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 a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: It’s there, and it’s been there for a while. We are a post-Christian country. We are a post-modern nation. We’re no longer who we used to be in the 50s and the 60s. We’re no longer in the 70s and even the 80s. The moral majority is not coming back, and let me tell you something, the next election won’t change it. Whoever wins. This is our world in which we’re living. We brought out last week that if you listen to the news, and especially in these election cycles, Christians represent 60 to 70 percent, depending on what poll you want to read, profess to be Christians. Another 50 to 60 percent profess to be born again.

However, when you drill down on those numbers, those people who believe the Bible to be the word of God, who believe you have to have a salvation experience with Jesus Christ to gain eternal life, those who believe basically what I just said, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the only way for eternal life, that number goes to 7 to 8 percent. Seven to eight percent of Americans believe the Bible is the word of God. Seven to eight percent of our country believes the word of God is infallible and can be trusted.

Seven to eight percent believe we need the cross of Jesus Christ and to accept the sacrifice of that cross on our behalf to be sealed with the Spirit for the day of redemption. The basically evangelical message, if we want to put that term on ourselves, that’s what we’ll call ourselves, evangelical Christians, 7 to 8 percent. We’re no longer as big as we used to be, and we’re not gaining, we’re shrinking. Ten years from now, we’ll be down considerably even more.

Cultures are changing faster than ever before in human history, mostly because of communication and processing information. It's just incredibly faster. George Barna wrote in his book, "Futurecast," he said, "America is undergoing significant changes, and the nature of those changes is both complex and chaotic. The historical foundations on which our society was developed are facing some severe challenges." Get those Ten Commandments off the wall of that courthouse.

It’s not easy to be the kind of Christian that Jesus longs us to have as his ambassadors in this place at this time. One sociologist, a non-believing sociologist, said this, and I’m not going to dumb it down, I’m just going to tell you what he said. The rate of change now in the culture for every 100 years equals what used to be 20,000 years. I don’t believe the world might have been here 20,000 years ago, but the principle is this: the rate of change is ratcheted up to a place you can’t even figure out where you’re at.

I know in churchianity, that’s what we do here, churchianity. Christianity is great, but churchianity is part of this. We are a part of the church. I watch trends, and I read trends within the church. When I first started reading all these things, I read in the 80s and this is the trend in music and this is what churches are doing, and it’s about a 20-year window there before you note that there’s change. You need about 20 years before you need to shift something and change some things. In the 90s, that 20 years became 10 years, quickly. It went from 20 to 10 in one decade. In the 2000s, it went to every three years. Now they say there is no norm. It’s just changes. I don’t think that’s bad, by the way. I think that’s actually pretty good.

A lot of that is simply because of social media. I’m not saying that’s evil, I’m just saying that’s what it is. Some of you heard the Arab Spring, when Iran and the different Arab nations rose up and they tried to oust their government from people who wanted freedom from some of the oppressive regimes. It’s still going on, and it started a whole mess in Syria. The Arab Spring. You know what drove the Arab Spring? Twitter.

The biggest rallies you saw in Iran were tweets. If you don’t know what a tweet is, the heads, the leaders of the group would tweet out to their followers, "We’re going to meet in this place for a rally at this time." Before the government could do anything about it, 50, 60, 70, 100,000 people would be showing up. Social media. The government of Iran shut it down.

The direction of change, my friends, and I know this is a sensitive subject, but I have to address it, and really in the things that I’ve read, there was a lot more pages than I’m going to even talk about today. But the tip of the spear of some of this anti-Christian reactionism is found in the homosexual-lesbian movement. That’s been the driving force in our culture. It’s not the only force, but it’s been the driving force. I’m not here to put a placard up and bash it, I’m just telling you what it is.

When we see our society, and that probably woke up more Christians than anything else, when we see our White House draped in the colors of the gay and lesbian flag, and Christians are being killed for their faith around the world and no one’s even mentioning it, but our government puts up the colors of the flag, that’s when we say this is not our world anymore.

Something has happened in America that once seemed unthinkable to me. This is a quote by Dr. David Jeremiah. "Something has happened in America that once seemed unthinkable to me. When I was a boy growing up and even a young man in school, biblical principles had a strong influence in society. I don’t mean everyone was religious or even that religion was dominant in everyone’s thinking. Yet there was a pervasive respect for the Bible, and biblical principles were evident in the shape of the culture and the mores of the people. It never occurred to me that the Bible could ever be marginalized and even vilified publicly, as it is today."

The truth is we as believers are facing a culture that marginalizes Christians, a culture that marginalizes Christianity, a culture that marginalizes the Bible, while embracing sexual freedom as some new truth or some new liberty. The rate of this cultural change in this direction will further accelerate as the two older generations die, taking their traditional American values and their votes with them.

Let me spend a moment on this. Right now, and I’m going to use this cone numerous times in this series because this is very important to understand why the church has a lifespan. If we don’t understand this, the traditional American values, traditional Christian values, are in our elderly generation. They’re right up there. They hold the values. They give, they tithe, they’re in church, they’re in Sunday School. They’re holding the fort. Then there's that strata of society, that generation underneath them, which would be me, that 50-something-year-old person. Young for their age still, but 50-something. And that person and we too have adopted those values as the seniors, not quite as intense as they are and faithful as they are, but we too have adopted them.

But this cone, it goes like this. Here’s our senior generation, and there’s my generation. Then it goes. As it gets down into your millennial age, your 30s and your 20s, it’s like a drinking straw. So what happens when this generation dies and this generation dies? In about 30 years. Let’s say I live 30 more years. That’ll be healthy. I’ll have to stay healthy to do this. Let’s say I live 30 more years. Then what happens after me? This cone of people holding traditional Christian values all of a sudden is this big.

Thirty years. That’s not very long. Thirty years from now. That’s why I said the clock’s ticking and we’re on intensive care. If we don’t change the tide, if we don’t do something up here of us up here don't help fix this down here while we still have time to do it, then the church is on life support, and at some point it’ll be off life support. There’ll be little remnants and little groups, local churches like this, beautiful buildings like this will be closing like that because you can’t keep them open. There’s not enough money to keep them open. We have 30 years to fix it. That’s why we’re doing this series.

I can only do it in my Jerusalem, but enough of us roll up our sleeves and say, "How do we attack this problem?" And we’ll be going through this throughout the remainder of this series. The generations following us are much more anti-Christian, or sometimes not even anti-Christian, but just indifferent. They’re just indifferent. We’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks.

How has this happened? It’s not just the gay and lesbian thing, it’s not just the media. Three percent, 1,200 college professors were polled. Three percent of those college professors had negative feelings about Jews. I thought that’d actually be higher than that. Nine percent of those college professors had negative feelings about non-evangelical Christians. People that are Christian in name but not necessarily in practice. They belong to a Christian denomination, they don’t believe the word of God’s the word of God, and certainly their Christianity certainly does not influence their daily lives on a very large scale.

So, non-evangelical Christians, 9 percent of those college professors didn’t like those people, had issues. When they asked about Muslims, "Do you have any negative feelings about Muslims?" 22 percent. One in five said, "Yeah, I do. I have negative feelings about Muslims." What about those evangelical Christians? What do you think about them? 53 percent. Over double the negative feelings that the Muslims had.

Those are the people teaching our children. It’s not just from the homosexual community. It’s coming from the whole educational system of our country. A sociologist, 31 percent of sociologists said they would not hire an evangelical Christian. They wouldn't hire them. They put a little thing on your application, "I’m an evangelical Christian." You’re not getting the job. I have more of these numbers that make your head spin. I’m just using a few of them.

Emily Brooker, some of you might remember the story, it was about five, six years ago. She was a student at Missouri State University. She had to stand before her college faculty because she was accused of discrimination. This is what she did. In one of her classes, they had a required, not an optional assignment, a required assignment that they write a letter to their state legislator supporting gay adoptions. If you don't write that letter, you don't get a grade, you fail.

She went to her teacher, the only one in her class, and said, "I’m a Christian, this is how I feel, I feel this is wrong, it’s against my moral conscience to do this." And they said, "Well, you’ll fail the class." And they reported her to the faculty, and she had to stand before the faculty and give an account of herself. Because she wouldn’t write a letter of support for gay adoption. It wasn’t like she could just opt out and say, "Okay, I don't do this. My convictions are this." No. Their intolerance condemned her for her intolerance. It's a play on words there on purpose.

This is our world now. Again, I titled the message "Hated." This is our world. They hate us. Now, if you’re a senior and you’re already out of the workforce and you’re already out of your educational life, you don’t really maybe sense that much. Unless you watch a lot of news, you’ll see it there. But if you’re just out of the mainstream of culture and you’re not hanging out with people in the coffee shops and you’re not working, you’re not in the classroom, then what I’m saying is like, "Whoa." But if you’re a 20-something or a 30-something, you’re saying, "Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like."