Do Not Give Up; God Will Bring You Back To Yourself! - [SPECIA PRAYERS] - With Ravi Zacharias

these are serious days I have been in the ministry now since 1972 so it's 46 years in counting I do not recall when I have ever lived through a time where there is so much that is going wrong and so much that is unexplainable and yet at the same time the proliferation of information so that people are reading so many things from morning till night and the struggle with all of that is they don't know what they're reading if it is true or false once upon a time you had to earn the right to be heard people had to know something about you they had to know your credentials your track record what your life has been like and all of that today anybody can get in front of a computer and type out whatever they wish they don't have to defend it they don't even have to give us their name and yet we read and read and read and we find out how confused our world has become but the tragedy is that the more we have access to and the more that we are living within an abundance of supplies have you ever realized how empty we have become at the same time just this morning the celebrity chef we were informed at the age of 61 took his life Anthony Bourdain a few days ago Kate Spade the well-known designer took her life I think both were by hanging the interior the the the fashion designer had has 11 year old daughter that she has left behind Anthony Bourdain has left a 13 year-old daughter behind and the fascinating thing is the one-liners that come out of their lives now the designer left a note for her daughter in one line I have always loved you this has nothing to do with you ask your father so what does an eleven-year-old do if it had nothing to do with her and now she is going to ask her father and you wonder would she get the truth and the celebrity chef made a comment of his rather unguarded lifestyle and he made a comment and he said I have never seen my body as a temple I have seen it as a funhouse well the fun evidently had run out and the house is now empty two very creative individuals one in the forever world of culinary arts another in fashion design choose to end their lives she was 55 he 61 so relatively in the peak of their accomplishment and their successes why does this happen in some ways I can relate I was 17 years old in Delhi when I had tried to take my own life and God protected me from my own schemes and designs and sent me the scriptures to remind me that my body was not a fun house that my body actually didn't even belong to me it belonged to him and it was the temple of the Living God why does this happen why at the peak success does a man who commands wide audiences wherever he goes is a picture of him somewhere in YouTube now hosting President Obama and then having a bites together somewhere Jonah does France or where it was my colleague who's here with me one of my travelling colleagues signs said to me Ravi if you had a dream life wouldn't it be something like what he had going all over the world tasting all of the culinary delicacies having an audience wealth success fame pleasure all that you wanted and yet he snuffs his life out why does this happen ladies and gentlemen it is vitally important that you and I have the most fundamental questions in life answered and the most fundamental question is this what does it mean to be human what does it mean to be human so many different answers are given to us so many different answers and the gospel is the only message I know which coherently answers all of the deepest questions of the heart and soul but not just coherently but specifically to particular questions gives us the truth I am the way the truth and the life said our Lord and if you take that try add in an answer the way the truth and the life you begin to see how critical it was that he stated it that way but we are living in a time where truth has died you see if you go back to the 13 and the 1400s rationalism had held sway man was deemed to be a thinking being then on the heels of rationalism with all kinds of questions being asked of rationalist empiricism came into being in the 17 and 1800's man became an empirical being from a thinking being or a rational being to an empirical being in a laboratory testing individual but on the heels of that also came the likes of an Immanuel Kant and man actually ended up becoming a skeptical being metaphysical propositions could not be trusted anymore you could not trust moral statements or judgments about issues of meaning and the purpose of life we were purely empirical beings we could only talk about that which could be tested in the lab taury from thinking and rational beings to empirical beings or sceptical beings then came the existentialist and the nailless the nail is sort of despairing to find meaning and the existentialist come up with the response that you have to will to find meaning slap against the door of despair push it away somehow pull yourself out up by your existential bootstraps and define what meaning is really all about and we became existential beings giving a lot of vent to our emotions from thinking and rational beings to sceptical beings to emotional beings and then post-modernism came along and basically told you you define your own self kind of being and what did we lose in post modernity we came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as truth no such thing as meaning and no such thing as certainty no truth no meaning no certainty the three very real issues with which we need to define life what is true what does my life mean how can I be certain of the answers that I am clinging to and it is fascinating that just as post-modernism has taken over we are facing now a society and a reality where the youngest amongst us are the loneliest of us all my colleague who works here in Seattle held a youth conference some time ago he actually happens to also be my nephew we were with him last evening and Nathan said to me he said uncle I think the most turning point in that whole conference was when a young lad I forget what he was twelve or fourteen walked up to the microphone and a panel of speakers was sitting on there on the platform there and he looked at them and he said this I just have one question and I want you all to be very honest and tell me what the answer is because I'm not playing with this answer I want this answer to be right I have struggled with taking my life a few times can you please tell me what my life actually means it's a young lad I want to know what it means because I've struggled with taking my own life in other words our questions merit truthful answers and the entailments become obvious with the answer that you cling to you know Winston Churchill years ago made the comment he said truth is the most valuable thing in the world it's the most valuable thing in the world in fact it is so valuable that often it is protected by a bodyguard of lies he was talking about intelligence in warfare truth is the most valuable thing so valuable that often it is protected by a bodyguard of lies natan Sharansky israel's former justice minister went back to his of soviet union had been incarcerated in solitary confinement for years and when he went back he went to visit the prison where they kept him his wife was with him and as they were about to enter that those dark confines he put his arm out and stopped his wife and said to her can I go in for a moment alone please because this is where I found myself when I was all alone and no input from anywhere else except what I had inside me in this darkness she honored that request he went in spent several minutes and there came out a battery of microphones in front wanting to interview him and he said can you wait for this interview please I want to the grave want to go to the grave of this physicist Andrei Sakharov who gave to the Soviets the atomic bomb I want to go and honor his memory and he went and laid the wreath at sakharova's grave and he said this the reason I wanted to honor this man is because what he said in the closing days of his life I always thought that the most powerful weapon in the world was the bomb I always thought that the most powerful weapon in the world was the bomb I have changed my mind the most powerful weapon in the world is not the bomb the most powerful weapon in the world is the truth this most valuable thing it's the most powerful thing and yet without postmodern mindset there is no such thing as absolute truth anymore this is so ironic so ironic please hear me carefully in all that we are seeing with the moral confusion of our time and the so called meter movement and all of that what you see happening is the quintessential expression of the contradiction with which we live all of our university students are taught primarily at least they thought the truth is not absolute morality is not absolute they are trained to be relativistic in their thinking they are trained to be relativists and so when they go out in their professions and live relativistic lifestyles all of a sudden they're smacked with an absolute you don't do these things why not why not if relativism hold sway what am i told it's ultimately relative to myself or if you wish when the absolutes were gone we had to park it somewhere and of all places we parked it in the institution that we trust the least we call it being politically correct the one institution that we don't and that's where we parked our absolutes at the same time you see every one of us has absolutes the only differences whether we abide by them or only use them by which to judge somebody else the absolute is in escapable in your heart the question is do you live by it or do you only use it to judge other lives I want to take this notion of truth now as absolute and I want to give you two comments and you'll have to listen to them very carefully because I'm moving you along a trajectory of one of these two comments and I'll tell you why I'm doing that one comes both of them come from Malcolm Muggeridge migrate I loved Muggeridge because of the way he knew how to use language in fact Muggeridge said when he stood before God he would have to ask for forgiveness for being so fatally fluent he knew how to turn a phrase but here's what he said in his say in his autobiography a greenstick the chronicle of the greenstick a chronicle of wasted years here's what he says truth is very beautiful more so I considered injustice which is today's pursuit and easily puts on a false face in the nearly seven decades I have lived through the world has overflowed with bloodshed and explosions whose dust has never had time to settle before others have erupted all in purportedly just causes the quest for justice continues and the weapons of hatred pile up but truth was an early casualty the lies on behalf of which our wars have been fought and uh peace treaties concluded the lies of revolution and counter-revolution the lies of advertising of news of salesmanship of politics the lies of the priest and his pulpit the professor at his podium the journalists at his typewriter the lies stuck like a fishbone in the throat of the microphone the handheld lies of the prowling cameraman Ignatius alone told me once when he was a member of the old Comintern some stratagem was under discussion and a delegate a newcomer who had never attended before made the extraordinary observation that if such and such a statement were to be made it ought not to be made because it wouldn't be true there was a moment of days done silence then everyone began to laugh they laughed and laughed until tears ran down their cheeks and the Kremlin walls seemed to shake the same laughter echoes in every council chamber and Cabinet Room wherever two or more are gathered to exercise authority it is truth that has died not God what Muggeridge is talking about here is propositional truth whether an sir as it is given conforms to reality as it is he's talking about propositional truth we use this in a courtroom were you at such in such a place when this event actually happened they are looking for a corroborating answer that is an actuality in keeping with what happened but then Muggeridge is able to take that slender thread of truth and slice it up into with this perception here and this is what I really want to zero in on but you're gonna have to listen carefully what he says in this sir gasps OC of fantasy and fraud how can I or anyone else hope to swim unencumbered how can I learn to see true and not with the eye how do I take off my own motley and wash up the marsh away my Wickham my own makeup how do I raise the iron shuttin shadow put out the studio lights silenced the sound effects and put the cameras to sleep will I ever watch the Sun Rise on Sunset Boulevard and set over Forest Lawn can I find furniture among the studio props silence in a disc effect love in a striptease read truth of an autocue catch it on a screen or chase it on the wings of music view it in living color with the news hear it and living sound along the motorways no not in the wind that rent the mountains and broken pieces the rocks naught in the earthquake that followed nor in the fire that followed the earthquake but in a still small voice not in the screeching of tires either or in the grinding of brakes and on the roar of jets or the whistle of sirens or the howl of trombones the rattle of drums or the chanting of demo voices again and again it comes back to me that still small voice if one could only catch it he goes on to say it's the voice of God can I find furniture in a studio prop can I chase it on the wings of music where do I find what's real that's the area of truth that I really want to address because that's where I we have picked our own pockets and lost the reality of what has happened to us we do not know which way to turn to anymore you see what has happened at the end of all of our experimentation is basically this philosophy has become existential art has become sensual education has become skeptical religion has become mystical our culture has become trivial and Christianity is made minimal they drive us into a minimalistic world view from the existential side of philosophy to the sensual side of the arts to the skeptical side of Education mystical side of religion and the trivial side of existence we have now come to minimalistic beliefs and we wonder what has happened to us as a society I want to give you the roadmap to how we got here and I will erase through this and share this with you these are not really my categories in the 1970s and 80s social thingy theorists were talking about this and giving us all these definitions that were so relevant to our time and I have borrowed it from many great social thinkers there were three moods that took place the first was the mood of secularization and they defined it for us in these terms secularization is the process by which religious ideas institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance secularization is the process by which religious ideas institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance it is important to know that it is a process it works itself through culture and in that culture its value diminishes anything transcendent anything that you believe of an eternal perspective or a transcendent perspective you cannot invoke the notion of God in arguing for a sense of morality and yet when you think of those who warned us what exactly has happened over the centuries was it not Solzhenitsyn who told us that the West is on the verge of collapse and how much damage has been done by the reality of this notion that we no longer need to believe in God Solzhenitsyn said when he was a little boy but in the dimly lit room of his home he would be running around and playing and he'd hear his grandfather leaning over a table talking to the family he said I knew the evening would be coming to an end when his grandfather would say to everyone around do you know why all this is happening to us here in Russia do you know why all the slaughter do you know why all this killing do you know why the gulag and all of this because of one reality we have forgotten God we have forgotten God and so his thousands of pages that he wrote and the tens of thousands that he read reminded people in the West that we are on the verge of collapse instituted by our own hands and our own thinking when we forget God so religious ideas and institutions have lost their social significance just imagine in any university if you believe in the sanctity of marriage or you believe in the sacredness of what the body is all about you are looked as some kind of strange specimen that has walked into an educational institution this is the horror of our time but you know CS Lewis wonderfully illustrates the tragedy of what it is that happens when you lose that source of defining right and wrong you know many years ago famous pornographer was on trial in Atlanta Georgia his magazines was supposed to be so perverse that they even made Playboy magazine look pretty ordinary but this man had one of the finest lawyers defending him and the lawyer was very clever he would build an argument something like this those who were testifying against his client he would say something like this to them do you ever go into a have you ever gone into an art gallery yes have you ever gone into an art gallery where there are paintings by the great masters of art yes have you ever paid to go into an art gallery where the paintings the great masters of art where there are disrobed people or new paintings of their somebody in the nude have you ever paid to go into an art gallery like that and then say that somebody's here I have gone into an art gallery like that will you please tell this jury why you call that art and why you call my client stuff pornography you know very logical question would be how many marriages do you know have broken up because the husband went too often into a museum of art we don't have common sense anymore do we but CS Lewis puts his finger on the nerve here it's so brilliant and in his abolition of man he does the same thing but pilgrims regress is a brilliant book it's an allegory of a man in search of meaning and answers and when you read it you find how brilliant Lewis's mind was so he talks about this young man by the name of John who's going from philosophy to philosophy and ends up with a mountain called the spirit of the age but fascinating the Lewis describes him not as free in living for the spirit of the age but his hands are bound in chains living for the spirit of the age in the mountain who can the man who controls the spirit of the age is with that neuron Xterra looking down upon him and all of a sudden he's given his breakfast and his hands are unbound to enjoy that breakfast and as he takes a sip of milk and says how delicious and nourishing it is the waiter who brings it to him representing the spirit of the aid system ah you only call it delicious and nourishing all it is as the secretion of a cow isn't it the cows accretes urine the cow secretes milk you call it delicious and nourishing it's just a secretion of a cow isn't it and then John doesn't know where to go from then he made a big blunder he commented all the tastiness of the eggs and now you should have seen what the way to compare the eggs to and he had no way to respond but as he's put back in Chains reason comes riding on a horse to lift him up and rescue him and reason looks at he who runs the spirit of the age and says to him sir you lie you lie because you don't know the difference between what nature's meant for nourishment and what nature's meant for garbage if you don't know the difference between what nature's meant for nourishment and what nature has meant for garbage that distinction is lost today we have no understanding of what is true good and beautiful what is evil heinous and destructive we consider all choices equally valid because we no longer know the difference between what nature's meant for nourishment or what nature's meant for garbage so you see this pornographer when he's peddling his stuff to destroy lives to destroy men to make them so hooked onto this that no one human being can ever satisfy that mind anymore because he's taken away the value of a human being and replaced it with a pursuit of a feeling that's all they've done and nobody can fulfill that when a woman or a man sits in front of the lens of a camera purely to titillate the basic instincts and imagination of a person to do that and provoke them to the erotic and the sensual and the self gratifying immediately they ought to put their arms in front of themselves and say to the cameraman or the publisher don't do this to me don't do this to me you are reducing me to something so based but the person who doesn't say that and continues with the process will continue with the process because they have lost their sense of shame and when secularization has done its bidding in your heart and mind it will all be because it will destroy a legitimate sense of shame which is a god-given reminder to us of that which is wrong just a few days ago my colleague is and I were hosting somebody who's in the media world that's all I'll say to you and a marriage is falling apart what does it have to do with anything it has to do with the husband's addiction to pornography that she no longer can trust him when this of what he does to feed his mind and brain again and again Jim Dobson says when Itoh saw dr. Ted Bundy shortly before his execution that mass murderer and cannibalism he looked at dr. Dobson and said this all began for me with pornography he said dr. Dobson tell the young never to get into this it builds an insatiable hunger that nobody can ever satisfy and nobody can ever fulfill that is only one illustration of what has happen in our society where the quotient of shame has been removed secularization Sekulow literally means this worldly you live for the moment and when you desica lies the body and you see your body as a funhouse you end up wanting to destroy it and say I cannot face life any more ladies and gentlemen when God sends conviction to you for something that is wrong it's to guard you and protect you from going further long down the line into things that are more decimating and things that are more destructive so many homes have been victimized today by the mass media and the seduction of the conscience secularization but we move from that to pluralization pluralization is where there's a competing number of ideas in our worldview and no one worldview is dominant a competing number of ideas in our worldview and no worldview is dominant against social theorists have given us this definition a competing number of worldviews but no worldview is dominant you know culinary-wise I'm glad for pluralism when I arrived in Toronto while I was 20 years old there was only one Indian restaurant which was an embarrassment to Indians awful they didn't know how to make a curry I just looked at that and I said boy if nobody ever likes this food I can't blame them but today you go to Toronto when I got to Toronto in 1966 there were 500 Indians in Toronto 500 Indians so that if you saw an Indian across the street you'd go over and start talking until find out is generally trying to sell you something and then then you moved on today if you stopped at the airport in Toronto Pearson Airport and you just say mr. Singh about 500 will turn around and think you're calling them because strange Rondo there are 500,000 Indians only 500 then in the mid-60s you can go to Los Angeles and as one social sociologist said you can see a Korean in a fast food outlet selling kosher tacos that's pluralization that's pluralization of cuisine so many you know our team of colleges we have 70 plus of them I love their accents I love how they represent their country a love that the pluralization is of great idea pluralization is a great idea but pluralization not properly understood can lead to relativism when there's no dominant worldview undergirding our culture what is the worldview that's under girding America now nobody knows nobody knows what the worldview is and when you have this kind of a pluralized blue eyes mentality you end up with systemic contradiction again and again and again and you say to yourself why is life falling apart why don't I ever get a proper answer and so the songwriter says cats foot iron claw neurosurgeon screamed for more from paranoia's poisoned or 21st century schizoid man blood wrack barbed wire politicians funeral pyre innocents rape with napalm fire 21st century schizoid man debt seed blind man's greed poet starving children bleed nothing he's got he really needs 21st century schizoid man now notice this the walls on which the prophets wrote is cracking at the seams upon the instruments of death the sunlight brightly gleams will no one lay the laurel wreath as silence drums the screams between the iron gates of fate the seeds of time are sown and watered by the deeds of those who know and who are known knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules the fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools confusion will be my epitaph as I crawl a cracked and broken path if we make it we can all sit back and laugh but I'm afraid tomorrow I'll be crying this brokenness this emptiness this sense of desolation and aloneness is what is now systemic in our culture because we are living with systemic contradiction a systemic contradiction ladies and gentlemen when God gave us the first commandment it was only one only one don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they you do you will surely die and the enemy of our souls came and whatever you say not true not true but he did tell us the truth he said you will be as God knowing good and evil you know what he was placing as a temptation play God play God be the definer of good and evil today for our healthcare laws we need 20,000 pages before there was just one as Norman Geisler my professor is to say the problem was not the Apple in the tree it was the pear on the ground very real they became the definer of good and evil the moment you do that you die the death of a thousand qualifications with every moral stipulation so you get onto a plane and what do they tell you do not touch tamper disable or destroy why all those words the smoke detector don't touch stamp or disable or destroy why don't you just say don't mess with that thing you know why because every one of those words can die the death of a thousand qualifications in a courtroom because we can play God it's fascinating today what has happened to the courts of law where so much goes on in language and you never know who's telling you the truth and what the truth is all about secularization leads to no shame pluralization ends up bereft of reason which brings you to the closing one which is privatisation where there's a cleavage in the modern experience between your public and your private life and in that cleavage you are forced to find meaning in your private life you know India is facing some very very challenging days one of the members of the Congress party has gone on a YouTube saying India's planning to redefine it's gone rewrite its constitution they say the Constitution was defined to contain within that geographical boundary but there are extremists on one side that says we ought not to be defined by a geographical boundary we ought to be defined by our religious inclination and who we are here predominantly and so philosophically the plan to rewrite the Constitution sources at least one member of parliament out there we may not be rewriting our Constitution here but we in effect are doing the same thing by not honoring the intent of what it was all about to start with we are controlling the way thinking goes on and what we are told now is you can believe whatever you want to believe but believe it in private don't bring it out into public the moment you bring it out into public you're violating the public space and you are now infringing upon the rights of somebody else so here we are 2018 we do not know how to define anything we cannot define who we are in gender we cannot define who we are in marriage we cannot define who we are in our proclivities we cannot define anything of any worth or of any absolute we toss it up into the wind as it were and decide which way we are wanting to go this is a dangerous time in which to be alive because there are no definitions when you don't have any definitions how are we going to deal with reality you know I have a Winston Churchill was once told by a corporal mr. Churchill have I ever told you about my grandchildren and Churchill said no and I want you to know how much I appreciate it well I have five grandchildren and since I'm not Churchill I will violate it I have a little grandson who is but about to turn seven later on this year he has an amazing vocabulary an amazing vocabulary I don't know where he comes up with the words sir but he was about five or something like that he looked at me one day across the dining table and said Papa what is the meaning of sophomoric and I sounded sophomoric trying to define it for him recently he'd learned about the whole issue of slavery and so on and it really crushed his heart he's a guy with a little tender heart he came back to his mother and he said how could this happen how can this happen how do people get hurt so badly how did you justify this how do we justify this and then he paused it's a little kid he looked at his mother and said you know I have a friend he comes from another country do you think one day people may treat him badly too because he comes from somewhere else and no me my daughter said why do you ask that here's what he begins his answer by saying he said mummy my hypothesis my hypothesis is this if you want to hate somebody you will find a reason to hate them if you want to hit somebody he will find a reason to hit them this is the same little guy when he was three and a half who looked at his mother when she had lost her car keys and couldn't find it Naomi Midori he slapped her forehead and said I must be losing my mind and he looked at her and said mommy whatever you do please don't ever lose your heart because I'm in there he has learned from a young age what it means to be in the heart of somebody what it means to be in the heart of somebody and what it means to be loved in a home where you're valued and where you care let me ask you this do you know anybody in your life who doesn't have that feeling feels there is no home for their heart there are scores of people in our world devoid of that relationship who are living desolate desperate lonely lives without meaning without purpose I sometimes think about the cross and shut my eyes and try to see the cruel nails the crown of thorns and Jesus crucified for me but even could I see him die I wouldn't but see a little part of that great love it's like a fire is always burning in his heart the love of God for you for me when a man can leave a little girl and choke himself to death he obviously didn't understand that God really loved him that God loves his girl when a woman can say I love you this has nothing to do with you put ends up leaving that little girl for the rest of her life trying to figure out what happened to my mom I was in Iraq last year with both of my colleagues here the last day we were taken out for lunch by a man who was a killer he was avenging any killing done by Isis all that kind of stuff and one day he was avenging the deathless the killing of his brother and he walked into the room of the man at night and at point-blank range pulled the gun the trigger against the temple of the man and killed him unknown to him the four-year-old son of the boy man was lying next to him and this blood comes spurting out and gushing out and the little boy sits up and he says where's my father and he was so stunned he looked at him and he said uh he's gone to Paradise I says take me to him but reached out and held the hand of the killer take me to my father I want to be in my dad this fellow goes out into the night and he sits in a garbage heap which he said which is where I'm belonged with what I done to myself and as he's struggling to hold back the tears coming out like a fountain sobbing his heart out as to what he done to himself but he said I've struggled to sleep but every time I slept in a few minutes I would see Jesus in my dream again and again and again I was getting angry so finally I surrender didn't gave my life to Jesus Christ he is working now in a ministry a hospital which binds the wounds of the broken including the enemy and he drives people back and forth he was driving us when he told the story I kept looking at him I said who was he before who is he now the difference is what Christ had done in his heart and turned him from being a killer into a being a healer of people ladies and gentlemen when privatization has done its work it strangles the sacred and strangles meaning from your life secularization no shame pluralization no reason privatization no sacred no reality of the holy and no meaning tomorrow when I speak to you I want to give you the answers how then does the Christian worldview respond to secularization pluralization and privatization and see the beautiful answers of the gospel in all of this may God richly bless you thank you for giving me a hearing you you

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Id: 3FI0Dl3tW7A

Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020