Love Worth Finding

Adrian Rogers: Do you have a Christian worldview based on truth? Listen to Adrian Rogers. In this century, we're being haunted by some philosophical ghosts that came into being in the 19th century. And we're going to talk to you about that because the need for the hour is for Christians to have a Christian worldview that is based on truth.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Love Worth Finding, featuring the timeless teaching of pastor and author Adrian Rogers. There's a famine in the world for truth. This is why as Christians we can never lose our driving ambition to discover, know, and practice truth.

In Job chapter 8, Job's friends respond to his suffering by looking for answers from the philosophers of yesterday. Obviously, this doesn't help their friend in the slightest. But America has been shaped, molded, and skewed by a few philosophers of yesterday. They still haunt us even now.

We need to identify the lies we've been fed so we can live in truth. If you have your Bible, turn now to Job chapter 8 as Adrian Rogers shares more about the ghosts that haunt us.

Adrian Rogers: Would you be finding the book of Job, chapter 8? We're talking tonight on a Christian worldview and the title of the message is "Ghosts of the Past That Haunt Us" or "Ghosts That Haunt Us," I guess we'll call the message tonight. Because in this century, we're being haunted by some philosophical ghosts that came into being in the 19th century.

And we're going to talk to you about that because the need for the hour is for Christians to have a Christian worldview that is based on truth. Now, there is a difference between knowledge and truth. For example, knowledge will double and triple, but genuine truth does not.

And when young people go to school, they study facts, but there's a difference between facts and truth. Facts are like a recipe. Truth is like the meal. Digest a truth and it will change your life. God wants us to have truth. Why did God give us the Bible?

Jesus said in John chapter 17, "Thy word is truth." Why did God send us the Holy Spirit? He's called in the Bible the Spirit of Truth. Why did the Messiah come, the Lord Jesus? He said, "I am the truth." Why do we have churches? Churches are the pillar and the ground of the truth.

What is the greatest desire for every Christian parent? They echo the words of the apostle John: "I have no greater joy than to know that my children walk in truth." It's truth that we need today. Truth is to your spirit what food is to your body, what light is to your eyes, and what sound is to your ears.

You only have one short life to live. And in this life, you ought to make it your desire, your aim, your burning ambition to discover, to know, and to practice truth. To know truth is to know God, and to know God is to know truth. Now, secular education is not enough. Our young people have to have a Christian worldview.

And when you have a Christian worldview, you're going to find out that all of these facts intersect in truth and that it's all related. You don't just snitch out your church life and put it over here and think none of the rest of these things matter.

And the marks of a good education is that it is so interwoven inextricably with truth that all things begin to intersect and cohere together. And there is a famine in the world for truth. We need truth. We need devotional truth to feed our hearts.

Now, you don't eat the cookbook. Thank God for the facts, but you eat the meal. That is, we need to feed on devotional truth. We need doctrinal truth to feed our minds. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it. We need practical truth to send us out to build churches, to go to mission fields, to build Christian homes and families.

And we need truth that will move us, not just truth that warms our hearts. I'm glad for love and all that, but it needs to go beyond sloppy agape. We need to have a truth that has concrete and steel in it that causes us to stand. We need a Christian worldview.

Now, Job was in perplexity. He was sick, he was in difficulty, and he had some visitors to come see him. They were called comforters, but they were more tormentors than comforters. And one of them was a man named Bildad. And this was the advice that Bildad gave to Job.

It's found in Job chapter 8, verse 8: "For inquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers: For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon the earth are a shadow: Shall not they teach thee, and tell thee, and utter words out of their heart?"

Now, what Bildad said to old Job was this: "Job, you need some answers. And what you need to do, Job, is to go to the library and blow the dust off of some of those ancient volumes and begin to study. Study the ancients. Study the philosophers and study their fathers and they will tell you what the answer is."

Now, this was not an appeal to divine revelation, was not an appeal to the word of God, but was an appeal to the human mind, to substitute "thus saith the mind of man" for "thus saith the word of God." This is an ancient appeal to humanism. Humanism, like new ageism, is not new. It's one of the dustiest, mustiest things around.

And so we have come to a very serious matter in America. Let me just describe that for a moment, then I'll tell you how we got there. Many of you have heard the famous prayer now that a pastor prayed in the Kansas House of Representatives.

He was called on to pray. They were expecting the normal platitudes and pious phrases that so many times the clergy pour out when they're called on, honored they think, to pray in one of these enclaves. And here was the prayer he prayed.

I want you to listen to it because you talk about a prayer that sounded like a rock thrown into a hornets' nest. Here was the prayer. He said: "Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance.

We know that your word says, 'Woe unto those that call evil good,' but that's exactly what we've been doing. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values. We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your word and called it moral pluralism.

We have worshiped other gods and called it multiculturalism. We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.

We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem.

We have abused power and called it political savvy. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, oh God, and know our hearts today, and try us and see if there be some wicked way in us. Cleanse us from every sin and set us free.

Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas and who have been ordained by you to govern this great state. Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will. I ask it in the name of your son, the living savior Jesus Christ. Amen."

I'd say that's a good prayer, wouldn't you? Well, they didn't think it was a good prayer. I want you to know, folks, that it upset them so much, one just sat down in the middle of the prayer, refused to stand anymore. Another one turned and walked out.

And they began to buzz and to talk. And one man said, "I've never heard in ten years as divisive, sanctimonious, self-serving, overbearing prayer as I heard this morning." That was a representative. Well, I'm glad he prayed that kind of a prayer.

But what is wrong in America? Did you know, folks, that we are in a crisis? No longer in America do we believe in absolute truth. And if you'll go back to a period that began in 1962 through 1982, you will find out that the courts, in 20 years, reversed the principle of "one nation under God" that had been the principle of American history.

In 1962, in a court case, Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black ruled that voluntary prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. That's 1962. Right hard upon that, in 1963, the Schempp decision, and Justice Thomas Clark set in motion the dismantling of classroom Bible reading.

Then came 1980, and the posting of the Ten Commandments was declared unconstitutional. Then came 1982, and the courts prohibited the teaching of creationism, that men, boys and girls were created by Almighty God.

20 years it took them to expel God from the public schools and tell him not to come back. Now, what has been the result of that? Well, presently children need parental permission to have any medication given to them, even an aspirin, in many schools.

But aided by high school counselors, they may have an abortion without parental notification. A high school student can be aided by high school teachers to have an abortion and to kill a baby. We're in serious problems in America, in serious times.

God has been so systematically excluded from so many of our public schools. A study by the United States Department of Education, headed by Dr. Paul C. Vitz, that's spelled V-I-T-Z, he was professor of psychology at New York University, was released to the American public.

And this study by Dr. Vitz was a study centered on elementary textbooks used by millions of boys and girls across America in the elementary schools. Dr. Vitz and his colleagues, after the study, concluded this, and I'm going to read a portion of their report.

After studying these textbooks, he says this: "Those responsible for these books appear to have a deep-seated fear of any form of active contemporary Christianity, especially serious, committed Protestantism. This fear has led the authors to deny and repress the importance of this kind of religion in American life.

The nature of the bias is clear. Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks.

The exclusion is particularly disturbing because it is found in a system paid for by taxpayers and one that claims, moreover, to be committed to impartial knowledge and accuracy.

Textbooks are so written as to present a systematic denial of the history, heritage, beliefs, and values of a very large segment of the American people." That's not a preacher saying that. That is a report by a professor of psychology at New York University and a study funded by the United States Department of Education.

What they're saying is there has been a systematic move to exclude those things that you and I hold dear and that we believe are the foundation of this nation. And as a result, we see values clarification being put in schools. We see value-neutral sex education put into schools.

We see the dispensing of birth control devices and condoms in public schools. We see abortion counseling without parental notification or approval. We see homosexuality being introduced in textbooks as an acceptable lifestyle.

How did all of this happen? What has happened to America? How have we lost the Christian worldview that we once had? Well, there's a man named Roger Freund. Roger Freund is quite a scholar, and he has given us an overview.

I'm going to try to encapsulate it and squeeze it down to a little bit. Remember what Job was told by Bildad. He says, "I pray thee, inquire of the former age and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers." It was to get Job to appeal to the philosophers of yesterday.

Who are some of the philosophers of yesterday that have so skewed the American thinking today? It's an amazing thing if you'll find out what happened in the 1800s, in the 19th century.

You're going to find out that there are five men who have basically shaped and molded what is going on in America today. Now, don't check me out, even though these names sound strange. You need to know this and your children need to know it. And if your children are grown, your grandchildren need to know it.

The first was a man named George Frederick Hegel, H-E-G-E-L. He lived in the 1820s, and he was a philosopher. Now, for 1,500 years people had accepted without question the fact of moral absolutes, that right was right and wrong was wrong universally.

Everywhere murder was thought to be wrong. Everywhere adultery was thought to be wrong. And if it were not thought to be wrong, it was only an aberration. The consensus was there's a fixed standard of right and wrong.

But Hegel came along and he rejected moral absolutes. He had what he called a dialectic theory. And dialecticism is just simply an argument. He had a reasoned argument, a dialectic theory. And what was his dialectic theory?

You've heard it, I suppose, if you have studied philosophy, and I'm going to give it to you in shorthand. But he said all history's made up of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thesis is an idea, a proposition that people believe to be true, and they hold that idea until somebody comes along with an opposing idea, an anti-thesis or an antithesis.

And so these get into a battle, a thesis and an antithesis. And they begin to battle back and forth until both of them give a little and they meet somewhere in the middle or one or the other wins and you come to a synthesis, which is a thesis-antithesis coming together.

And that synthesis becomes the new thesis. That becomes the new accepted model for truth. And Hegel said, "Therefore, there are no moral absolutes." Now, he's not talking about biological evolution. He's talking about philosophical and social evolution, that society is always in a flux, it's always moving, and there is no fixed standard of right and wrong.

Now, folks, if you were to ask in our high schools today, how many of you students believe that there is a fixed standard of right and wrong, you would be shocked. If you were to ask in our colleges how many believe that, you would be shocked.

Do you know what people say in America today? "Well, what is right for you may not be right for me." You will hear that over and over again. And so what Hegel said was ideas come under the heading of the survival of the strongest.

The strongest idea wins and therefore history is evolutionary and there can be no absolutes. One professor was teaching this. He said, "There's nothing that you can say is absolute." A student lifted his hand and said, "Professor, are you sure about that?" He said, "Absolutely."

Now, after Hegel in the 1820s, there came along another man in the 1830s. This man's name was Ludwig Feuerbach, F-E-U-E-R-B-A-C-H. He was another German philosopher. And you see, one of these things begins to build upon another.

Feuerbach said if there are no absolutes, if Hegel is right, and he accepted that Hegel was right, then there can be no God. Because if there is a God, then that God would have absolute truth.

And so he said there can be no God. And he said man creates the idea of God. That man is not made in the image of God, but God is in the imagination of man. That all of this moral flux, this no-absolutes, causes a deep insecurity in the heart and mind of man.

So Feuerbach said that God is created in the imagination of man, that man just simply invents God. I want to quote from him and I want you to hear what he pompously stated. He said, quote, "Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from reason, but from the life of mankind. It is nothing more than a fixed idea."

Now, are we haunted by that ghost today? Absolutely. It's called humanism. Now, humanism sounds so much like humanitarianism, but there is a vast difference between humanism and humanitarianism.

Humanitarianism means we love one another, we care for one another, and we love the human species that God has made: man. But humanism makes man the center and the circumference, the sum total of everything, has no room for God. It is a fine-sounding name, but it is atheism just simply wearing another coat.

Guest (Male): And with that we'll conclude today's portion of the message and pick up with part two coming up Monday. We hope you can join us then. Are you looking for answers to life's significant questions about purpose, about the broken world and God?

I want to invite you to our "Find Answers" page at lwf.org/radio. Here you'll learn more about God's word and find resources to explore it for yourself. You can even take a seven-day email challenge to delve deeper into questions about truth and discover God's love for yourself.

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