John Stott - Is Jesus Christ Truth For The 21st Century?

ladies and gentlemen good evening to you all and I thank you very much for your kind and warm welcome I'm very grateful both to Ocala Monroe and to Rodney Peterson for the words that they have spoken and I'm grateful for the presentation of this book I thank you very much now you'll understand that it has always been a privilege for a graduate of that other Cambridge to visit Cambridge Massachusetts and I have a special reason to be grateful for your welcome to me tonight because on my first visit to Harvard in the fall of 1956 before I guess many of you were born nearly 40 years ago I had been invited by the Harvard Christian Fellowship to lead what might be described as a mini mission or to give a series of lectures on the Christian faith so some students with the audacity with which one comes to associate students went to president Nathan Busey and asked for his authorization to arrange a faculty reception in my honor to its president Busey replied even if the Apostle Paul were to visit Harvard the faculty would not turn out to greet him so the fact that you have turned out to greet me fills me you understand with great appreciation now you've already been told the topic on which I've been asked to address you namely is Jesus Christ Veritas for the 21st century and before we're in a position to sketch out an answer to the question I think there are two points of clarification that needs to be made and the first concerns the context of the question the context of asking our question is one of postmodern relativism according to which what is very task for you is not necessary very task for me and vice versa the context of syncretism which is the search for a common religious denominator and the search for pluralism understood as the affirmation of the independent validity of every religion and ideology I read not long ago about a social worker in Nigeria who was visiting one of the back streets of Lagos and who came across the students on whose bedside table there stood an interesting pile of books to begin with there was the Bible of course and there was the Book of Common Prayer to Episcopalians of course and then there was a copy of the Quran three copies of watchtower the magazine of Jehovah's Witnesses a biography of Karl Marx a book of yoga exercises and what I think the poem fellow needed more than anything else a popular paperback entitled how to stop worrying and then I think is typical of the world in which we live and of the context within which we're asking and going to try to answer our question whether Jesus is very chaste for the 21st century that is is it possible to affirm that he is absolute truth in a world of relativism is it possible to affirm that he is unique when there are many other claimants to religious leadership is it possible to affirm that he is final and that he has no successors or competitors now that simply indicates the difficult context in which we are to consider our question now my second clarification and introductory points concerns not the context but the nature of the question itself please note carefully that we it is not a question about Christianity in any of its traditional formulations where the Catholic or Orthodox or Lutheran or reformed or Pentecostal or whatever further it is not a question about the church in any of its cultural manifestations African Asian Latin American or western no it is not a question about any kind of Christian system or institution the question before us tonight concerns a person Jesus Christ Jesus Christ is the heart and soul of Christianity questions about Christianity are all ultimately questions about Christ and Christianity without Christ is Christianity no longer so let's be honest at the very beginning that if you could disprove claims about the uniqueness of Jesus Christ then Christianity is exploded Christianity is Christ and questions about Christianity or questions about Christ many of you will know the is arduous under sin he was born into a Sikh family in India and when he was in his teens with rather wonderfully converted to Jesus Christ through some kind of vision of him he became a Sardu a wandering holy man of a Christian variety and after many years a faithful testimony to Christ he was lost somewhere in the Tibetan mountains so Deus under sin once visited a Hindu College in which a professor of comparative religions asked him what he had found in his in Christianity that he had not found in his old religion I have Christ he replied oh yes I know said the professor rather impatiently but one particular principle or doctrine have you found that you did not have before the particular doctrine I have found said Sardis under sin is Christ so I hope that those two clarifications have helped us as we approach our subject tonight I have one further thing to say about Jesus Christ and that is the Christ we're talking about as to whether he is very chaste for the 21st century is not a Jesus of human fantasy that is to say he is not one of the dozen Jesus's who may be on offer in the world's religious supermarkets because there are many there's Jesus the clown of Godspell there's Jesus Christ Superstar the dissolution celebrity there's Jesus the founder of modern business did you ever hear of him invented by man on Madison Avenue ad man some years ago in a book called the man nobody knows published if I remember rightly in 1929 and his final chapter is called Jesus the founder of modern business and he begins but don't you know that when he was a boy of 12 he asked didn't you know that I must be about my father's business he actually said that I've read the book but then we're also not talking about Jesus the capitalist or Jesus the socialist or Jesus the freedom fighter or Jesus the first century Che Guevara with black beard and flowing hair whose characteristic gesture was the overthrow of the money changers tables in the temple now these are all different attempts to represent Jesus to a modern world in a way that resonates with them but I'm not interested tonight in Jesus of fantasy or speculation but only in the historical figure to whom the New Testament writers bear a consistent testimony no but I would like to do for the rest of my time its attempt to introduce to you five consecutive events or aspects of the earthly and historical career of Jesus and I want to suggest that the facts indicate that each of these five is unique and has no parallel in any other religion or ideology and I begin first with the uniqueness of his claims now of course the founder of every religion is to some degree unique in his character or activity or teaching that our claim is that there is something unique about the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the first relates to his extraordinary claims and their credibility you know nothing is more disturbing about Jesus of Nazareth than the egocentricity of his claims and the prominence of the personal pronoun in his teaching he was in fact always teaching about himself and although it is true he announced the arrival of the kingdom of God it was only by adding that he was the person who come to inaugurate kingdom it is also true that he spoke of the Fatherhood of God but only adding that he was the father's unique son I found it helpful in my own thinking to summarize the claims of Jesus under three words the first is the word fulfillment you probably know that the first recorded words in the public ministry of Jesus according to the record of mark are in the Greek Tapley wrote I hope carros fulfilled is the time the kingdom of God has drawn near repent and believe the good news and when a little later he went into the synagogue in Nazareth the village in which he'd been brought up and he was given the scroll of the prophecy of Isaiah to read and he found what in our books is chapter 61 and he started to read the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me etc when he finished and wound up the scroll and gave it back to the synagogue attendant and sat down he began to say verily I say unto you this day this scripture pepperi wrote I has been fulfilled in your ears in other words if you want to know who Isaiah was writing about he was writing about me and so Jesus continued to affirm Abraham he said rejoiced to see my day meses wrote about me and he expounded on to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself on one occasion he said blessed are your eyes for there see and your ears for they're here because I tell you he went on many prophets and wise men wanted to see what you see and did not see it and wanted to hear what you hear and didn't hear it in other words they were living in the age of anticipation and you are living in the days of fulfillment your eyes are actually seeing and your is a hearing what had been spoken about for centuries in the profits in other words in Jesus's own estimation of himself he was not another prophet there are many people are prepared to concede that he was a prophet he was not he said one more prophet in the endless succession of the centuries on the country he was the fulfillment of all prophecy and the converging streams of prophecy all found their climax and conclusion in himself it was in and with his coming that the kingdom of God had arrived the word fulfillments and then the second word is the word intimacy jesus claimed a relationship of intimacy with the father which was shared by no other being we have to admit that the title son of God in itself is by no means conclusive son of God is used and daughter of God two of a number of people in the Bible angels are called sons of God Adam was called the son of God so with Solomon and other kings and the children of Israel so the title is not conclusive but the way in which Jesus used it does seem to be because he added the definite article he said nobody knows the son except the father and no the dinners the Father except the Son and he to whomsoever the son chooses to reveal him in other words that existed between the one he called the father and himself a unique reciprocal relationship and nobody knew the one but the other this word intimacy of relationship and then the third word that impresses me is the word Authority exuse eeeh Jesus contemporaries were utterly astonished by the authority with which he spoke he was quite unlike the scribes who never taught without quoting their authorities Jesus didn't quite any authorities his own Jesus didn't hide behind another Authority he said I said to you and that was his favorite formula but in addition to teaching with authority he claimed authority to forgive sins and when people heard him they dress their eyebrows and said but who is this who can forgive sins except God only to which we reply exactly who can and then in addition to authority to teach and authority to forgive was his claimed authority to judge the world jesus said on several occasions that he would return at the end of history that he would sit on the throne of his glory that all the nations would parade and be assembled before him and that he would proceed to separate them from one another as a shepherd separates sheep from goats in other words he held in his hand their eternal destiny he made himself the central figure on the Judgment Day now these claims of Jesus to fulfill prophecy to know God to forgive sins and to judge the world are so outrageous that we inevitably begin to question his sanity whether his mind was deranged and whether perhaps he had a fixed delusion about himself but Jesus of Nazareth showed no signs of imbalance there was no trace in him of the fanatic still less the psychotic on the contrary he comes before us in the pages of the Gospels as the most sane and balanced of human beings and even those who reject his claims admire his character far from being obsessed with himself as psychotics are he was preoccupied with the will of God and the glory of God and the welfare of other people he never thought about himself he was not preoccupied with himself so this brings us again I'm sharing with you just really my own thinking and where my own mind has found a resting-place this brings us to a startling paradox Jesus's claim sound very proud but he was the humblest of men he spoke like a megalomaniac but he was the less balanced and modest of human beings his teaching was fundamentally self-centered III mimimi but he was absolutely unselfish unter dand gave himself away in the self sacrificial service of others he made himself the central figure on the Judgment Day and then got on his hands and knees and washed his Apostles feet their Lord and their judge became their servant and I want to suggest you that that is not only beautiful but it is also unique they have of course been many self-centered religious leaders down the edges but they've all behaved like it there have also been very humble people but they didn't make the claims that Jesus made it is you see the combination of authority and humility of self-centered claims and unselfish anted character which we say is unique in the whole history of the world now that's a fasting the uniqueness of his claims now secondly and more briefly I come on to the uniqueness of his death the circumstances of the death of Jesus set him apart from the deaths of all other religious teachers they all died of natural causes in a ripe old age Muhammad at 62 Confucius at 72 the Buddha at age moisés at 120 there died of natural causes with their disciples around them having successfully completed the mission which they had set themselves by contrast Jesus died in his early 30s by the horrible death called crucifixion repudiated by his nation forsaken by his disciples deserted even it appeared by his father why have you forsaken me and apparently a total failure yet in spite of the ignominy of his crucifixion the cross has become the symbol of the Christian faith the adherence of every other religious leader focus on his life and his character and his ministry and teaching the followers of Jesus focus on his death and this is our focus only because it was his did he not repeatedly predict the necessity of his sufferings saying the Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected and die did he not refer to his death as the hour for which he'd come into the world did he not on his last evening on earth deliberately make provision for his own memorial service telling the disciples to eat bread and drink wine in memory of him and death speaks to us and both the elements the bread is broken the wine is poured out the bread doesn't stand for his body as he lived on earth but as it was broken on the cross the wine doesn't stand for his blood flowing in his veins during his lifetime but his blood spilt on the cross and did he not say as he took the cup this is my blood of a new covenant with God in which the forgiveness of sins is made available it's an amazing statement that through the shedding of his blood in death God was forming a new agreement with the human race within which the forgiveness of sins was available so thus Jesus regarded his death not as the tragic and premature end to an otherwise promising mission that is its intended climax by which he would achieve what he'd come into the world to do and what that was the rest of the New Testament writers tell us really with one voice they linked his death with our sins that death is the penalty for sin throughout the Bible and he died there we were the sinners bearing our guilt in his own innocent person so Peter can say he bore our sins in his own body on the tree Paul could write he was actually made sin with our sins for us and he was made a curse in order that we might be redeemed and John writes this is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins now this whole concept is almost beyond belief namely that Almighty God creator and sustainer of this vast universe should have loved us self-centered self-serving rebels as we are so much that he came after us in the person of his eternal son pursued us even to the desolate agony of the cross where he took our place assumed our guilt bore our sin and died our death friends you may reject it if you consider the evidence to be insufficient but in God's name do not despise it or ridicule it if it is true it is the most wonderful love story in the herwe and let me quote from Kagawa the Japanese Christian between the wars he said I was I am grateful for Shinto the Buddhism for Confucianism I am much to these faiths the fact that I was born with the spirit of reverence that I have an insatiable craving the values that transcend this earthly life etc I owe to the influence of these ethnic faiths but these three faiths failed to minister to my heart's deepest needs I was a pilgrim journeying upon a long road that had no turning I was weary I was foot so I wandered through a dark and dismal world where tragedies were thick Buddhism teaches great compassion but since the beginning of time who has declared this is my blood of the Covenant toward out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins that's where Kagawa found the uniqueness of Jesus in the uniqueness of his death now thirdly I move on to the uniqueness of his resurrection at least it is another than claimed by any other religious leader that he rose from the dead or if you know the name of august court the french philosopher in the 19th century he rejected Roman Catholic Christianity in his youth and he was determined he said to invent a new religion which would supersede all the others including Christianity and he bragged about his intention until he met this Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle his contemporary who had also rejected organized Christianity and declared him but he declared himself unimpressed by Auguste court's ambition if court were to succeed thomas carlyle said he would have to fulfill three very simple conditions first he must live a life of selfless love secondly he miss get himself killed and thirdly he must experience a decisive and glorious resurrection and then said Carlyle the world would listen to him that not otherwise we don't hear much of auguste comte after that now let's be clear while we're talking about the resurrection what is the Christian claim that Jesus rose from the dead it is not that his influence survived death it is not that we can sing Jesus lives as the Latin American students chant che guevara lives that is not what we mean che Guevara was not resurrected from the dead and again we do not mean that Jesus was resuscitated in other words that he was brought back to this life that's what Jesus did - for example Lazarus when he raised him as we say from the dead he brought him back to this life and it's that that roused CS Lewis's sympathy when he said poor Lazarus had to do is dying all over again but not Jesus he was not brought back to this life he went on to a new life he had new powers well I should have begun by saying of course he was rescued from the natural pest mortem process of decay and decomposition and after that his body was changed into a new vehicle for his personality which had new powers undreamed-of faculties and which was immortal and would never die again that's what we mean by resurrection now the cumulative evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very compelling I have no time to elaborate it tonight and there are many books that have been written about it if you're interested you can easily find one suffice it to say that the tomb was empty and the body had gone or the rumors of resurrection would never have arisen and that no satisfactory explanation has ever been given of the disappearance of the body except the Christian affirmation that he rose from the dead secondly the appearances of the risen Lord which followed do not fit what is known to be the pattern of hallucinations and thirdly the disciples were so dramatically changed from despair to confidence that nothing can account for this transformation except that they were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead so the disappearance of the body and the reappearance of the Lord and the emergence of the church together constitute a three-fold evidence of the resurrection which is very compelling but I want to go on beyond the historicity of the resurrection to the significance of it and I think you'll find it too interesting as I do and moving that the New Testament authors relate the resurrection to our past present and future first by the resurrection god vindicated jesus reversing the verdict which had been pronounced on him by birth a Jewish and a Roman Court and declaring publicly to the world that he had not died in vain secondly by the resurrection God demonstrated his power so that the power that is available for you and me today to change and transform our characters is called in the New Testament the power of his resurrection and then thirdly by the resurrection God demonstrated the hope that we may have for the future that one day we too are going to be resurrected and indeed the whole creation is going to be liberated from its bondage to pain decay and futility Christians belief there's going to be a new hell and a new earth and that the universe itself is going to be regenerated for and the evidence of this is the resurrection the resurrection body of Jesus is the first bit of the material order to be redeemed and it's itself a pledge that the rest of the material order will follow well our world needs this message it's full of fear not least of death and Woody Allen I think speaks for all of us in his famous quick quip I'm not afraid of dying I just don't want to be there when it happens but there is a great lack of hope in the world today and the resurrection can give it to us so the resurrection of Jesus brings assurance of forgiveness for the past parlor for the present and hope for the future now let me hurry on the uniqueness of his claims the uniqueness of his death uniqueness of his resurrection and fourthly the uniqueness of his exaltation but the Christian claim is that the same Jesus who humbled himself to plumb the depths of shame and pain on the cross has now been exalted to the highest place of honor and executive power and authority in the universe as we say symbolically at the right hand of God Paul wrote these words God has super exalted Jesus he may have been quoting an early Christian hymn writer that well that is somebody else or not he endorses this statement that God has super exhorted him given him a name above every name that is a dignity beyond every dignity and a rank beyond every rank that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord now whether this is Paul a fragment from an earlier hem doesn't matter the most extraordinary thing is that porn is actually quoting from the Old Testament in reference to Yahweh or God the Creator in Isaiah 45 it is Yahweh himself who is soliloquizing and says by myself I have sworn says the Lord that every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall swear by 9 my name and with astonishment it Paul lifts these words from the Old Testament where they apply to your way and he reapplies them to Jesus that God has exalted Jesus that every knee should bow to him and every tongue confess that he is Lord so we have no Liberty to place any restriction on that repeated word every every knee and every tongue means that everybody should worship Jesus now this of course is the basis of the worldwide Christian mission the worldwide Christian mission is not a horrid form of religious intolerance or arrogance it is not even proselytism it is simply a recognition that if God wants universal honor to be paid to Jesus then we should want it to the unique exaltation of Jesus Christ now fifthly there is the uniqueness of his gift of the Spirit now of course there's a great deal of confusion about who or what the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit may be I don't know if you know there are other delightful story about the little boy who was perceived by his father one day to be playing with his teddy bear in the backyard and he was dipping the teddy bear up and down in a puddle so the father readily recognized that because this little boy being to his sister's baptism his baby sister's baptism the previous day her brother was now practicing a kind of pseudo baptism with the teddy bear but her father was wandering his father was wondering what on earth the boy was muttering while he was engaged in this pseudo baptism so he crept up on tiptoe and this is the rather unusual baptismal formula he heard in the name of the Father and of the son and into the Olli goes now I hope nobody here will be offended by that because it is an authentic story about an authentic little boy who didn't understand the Holy Spirit and there are many others who are like him even if they don't play with their teddy bears now during his public ministry jesus promised that after he had gone back to the father as he put it he would send to take his place the one he referred to as the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Truth or the comforter and that the major Ministry of the Holy Spirit would be to bring Jesus out of history into experience and to make Jesus a personal reality to us all so let me enlarge on that for a few moments before I conclude first the Holy Spirit makes the presence of Jesus contemporary so that we no longer think of Jesus only as a dead teacher of the distant past that is a living reality whom it is possible for us to know for ourselves as the Apostle Paul said I can to everything loss in comparison with the other whelming gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for whom I've lost all things etc etc he claimed the personal knowledge of Christ through the Holy Spirit and so that's another unique thing about Christianity for Christ let me quote from the Cambridge theological essays the relation of Jesus Christ to Christianity differs in tyre LIF from that of all other founders towards the religions or philosophies that bear their names platonism for example may be defined as a method a philosophic thought derived from Plato Islam is the belief of the real in the revelation vouchsafe to Muhammad Buddhism is the following of principles enunciated by the Buddha but Christianity is in essence adherence to the person of Jesus Christ not to his teaching but to his person said that we may know him so the holy spirit makes the presence of Jesus contemporary second he makes the presence of Jesus universal when Jesus was on earth he was of course his presence was localized he could only be in one place at a time so his disciples were often separated from him and he was in Jerusalem and they were in Galilee and vice-versa that now the Holy Spirit has universalized the presence of Jesus so that he Jesus says to us I am with you always even unto the end of the world and then thirdly the Holy Spirit makes the presence of Jesus internal as well as universal and contemporary already in the air Testament God had promised I will put my spirit within you and now Jesus repeated the promise saying that he is with you but he will be in you what Lord Reath the first director general of the BBC called the mystery and the magic of the indwelling Christ Christ dwelling within our personality by his Spirit it is a most marvelous reality and it is the great secret of living a holy self controlled and christ-like life the secret is not struggling to live like Christ it's allowing Christ to come and live in us by his Spirit William temple the Archbishop of Canterbury put it very well when he said it's futile giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write to play like that Shakespeare could do it I can't and he said it's no good giving me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that Jesus could do it I can't but he said if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me then I could write plays like that and if the spirit of Jesus could come and live in me then I could live a life like that that is the secret of Christian discipleship the indwelling of Christ by his Spirit so we speak about the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit and the unique fellowship with one another that the followers of Jesus enjoy within the Christian community the new messianic community of Jesus this unique fellowship we enjoy is our common participation in the Holy Spirit if he dwells in you and you and you and you and in me it is our common share in him that makes us one he makes the presence of Jesus communal now let's see how we're getting on I've got a couple of minutes left and I want to conclude that before I do I'll give you one more quotation that I like I hope you do throw the eloquent Bishop Stephen Neal who died a couple of years ago an itinerant Anglican scholar put it like this within the fellowship of those who are bound together by personal loyalty to Jesus Christ the relationship of love reaches an intimacy and intensity that is unknown elsewhere friendship between the Friends of Jesus of Nazareth is unlike any other friendship and this ought to be normal experience within the Christian community and where it is experienced especially across the barriers of race ethnicity nationality and language it is one of them as convincing evidences of the continuing activity of Jesus among human beings so let me recapitulate and conclude here are five aspects of the uniqueness of Jesus his claims his death resurrection exhortation and gift of the Holy Spirit the evidence for his fivefold uniqueness is not conclusive otherwise everybody would have to be Christians but it is very persuasive indeed and in conclusion I want to draw your attention to two facets of these five things which strike me as being impressive the first enter coherence with one another these five truths dovetail beautifully with one another we're not conscious of any incompatibility between them that urn that only of a certain coherence his claims and his character belong together his life death resurrection and exaltation history on the one hand 2,000 years ago where Jesus lived and died and experienced today in the Holy Spirit the past the present and the future there is a beautiful coherence about these aspects of the uniqueness of Jesus and the second thing that strikes me if not their coherence with each other but their correspondence to our Esper human aspirations are self conscious human aspirations they seem to speak exactly to our human need I take the liberty of ending on a rather more personal note if the older ones among you and I had met 55 or 60 years ago realized it would disqualify the majority here but if we had met 55 or 60 years ago I think I could have told you two things about myself the first was that if God existed I didn't know him he seemed to be shrouded in mist that I was utterly unable to penetrate and the second thing I knew about myself is that I was defeated I had a a picture of the kind of person I wanted to be and an equally clear picture of the kind of person I was and there was very little resemblance between the two pictures then somebody told me about Jesus that he died on the cross to turn my alienation into reconciliation that he'd risen again and was alive and by his Spirit could enter my personality and turn my defeat into victory and the correspondence between Christ's objective offer and my subjective needs seemed to be too close to be a coincidence they led me on the 13th of February 1938 57 years ago next Monday they led me to make the great experiment and to open the door of my personality my heart and life and invite Christ by His Spirit to come in and I saw no flash of lightning I heard no peals of thunder no electric shock passed through my body I had no emotional experience so I hopped into bed and went to sleep and the next morning I knew that something had happened it took weeks months years for me to understand exactly what it was but I've now had 57 years in which to prove that Jesus Christ is very TAS for the 20th century and it gives me a great confidence that he will be very TAS for the 21st century as well

Channel: Apologia Acts 17:17

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Keywords: Jesus Christ, Truth, John Stott, History, Theology, Lecture, Relevance, Modern Time, Bible, Scripture, Gospel, Christian, Harvard

Id: jddJqWrG3uw

Length: 45min 21sec (2721 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2012