Oxygen18 | Michael Ramsden | Engaging with a Secular World

well good morning I am I hope you have had a lot of coffee to stay awake I've had a lot of coffee whether I'll stay awake is debatable it's one thing to fall asleep in someone else's message it's completely something else to fall asleep in your own and so we'll be praying for a small Class B miracle just to make sure that we get through this next 45 50 minutes or so unscathed and indeed not simply unscathed but hopefully actually really blessed as we consider something that this passage here has to say to us you would have heard just now in the introduction I grew up largely in a non-christian culture and really I heard nothing about the Christian gospel until my parents moved to Cyprus and at that point I was an older teenager and now all of a sudden I was in a country that had some kind of Christian background I wasn't particularly interested in that I wasn't interested in the church but I did meet some Christians who were missionaries and I could tell straight away there was something different about them different in the sense of different to anyone else I'd ever met different in terms of how they lived their life different in terms how they orientated their life and whenever they spoke about God there was a joy there was evidence in their life that I simply hadn't seen anywhere else now my own particular upbringing had in one sense been quite a privileged one with the benefit of you know the best education a lot of overseas travel and for whatever reason always raised in an area where there was a lot of money sloshing around together with a lot of influence and power and I can remember talking with one of my uncles and he was asking me what I wanted to study when I went to university and I told him I wanted to do a law degree and I remember him saying great I'm so glad you want to do law a lot of your cousin's they're all doing economics and Business Studies which is good but we need lawyers in the family too and I remember looking at him and saying uncle George we don't need lawyers what we need a psychiatrist's and if my upbringing had given me one thing which I guess I'm grateful to the Lord for a secular as it was was that no matter how much you had no matter how much status you conveyed no matter what kind of political power you could exercise that wasn't enough and so certainly even though I had no answer at that point I was sure that even if I had everything all if we think that I could see above me all of my family's self-made millionaires multiple times over incredibly successful I simply knew that if I got that and more that I'll still going to be in trouble in one way and it was in that context then I first got to meet Christians who'd sold up their homes moved halfway across the world and had come to share the gospel now where I was living and what happened was it's quite a long story but to give you the brief version I had quite a wild teenage time and got bored very quickly and then someone suggested to me a Christian missionary suggested to me that someone there should be a youth group where you got teenagers together to come and do things together and sort of just have as I've thought about it you know just enjoy each other and I thought this sounds like a good idea and he said there's a guy who's just moved here you should get him to set up a youth group and so my brother my younger brother and I went to this guy he was the area director for Youth for Christ Middle East North Africa I didn't know what that was and I just said I hear you do stuff with young people you know there's nothing going on here for teenagers in the entire country why don't you set something up and very reluctantly he set up this group we brought all of our friends to the group so it was non-christian the first meeting was a bit surprising to me when we realized this was going to be a Christian thing that hadn't occurred to me what we've done is we spent about half an hour talking about the challenges of being a teenager and the second half an hour was a Bible study and I enjoyed both parts of it immensely and thought actually this is pretty good we brought more and more friends and the group got bigger and bigger and bigger well when they're about 50 60 70 of us I can't remember how many it was I remember coming to this guys house which was now crowded with young people and he was looking a little sad I always got there early and I said Bob what's the matter and he just said well I've been trying to organize to take you kids away on a camp for the last few months but I can't because the government is stopping us from going and all the campsites on the island were under the control of the government and they were just refusing to release it to this weird evangelical group so I said I believe I can help you I said we are the government who do you need he said he said well I need permission from the chief of police and the Minister for interior do you think you can help I said don't worry it will be sorted tonight I went home I spoke to my mother I said mom you know that group I was part of and my mum was generally in favor of this group because although she was a bit worried about the strange theology they seem to be teaching she'd noticed that I was becoming you know was having a softening effect on me and so she said sure I said they want to go away on a camp this group and the government are stopping them I said I need you to help she had whose help do you need I said do you know the Chief of Police she said of course I know the Chief of Police she said when I asked you when I was 15 years old he invited me to go out on a date with him your uncle George came knocked out his two front teeth and said if you ever spoke to me again he would kill him I said I need his permission to go on a camp so my mother rang him up and as soon as the Chief of Police heard my mother's voice and then he said to her I'm so sorry I never would have stopped this if I knew it was your son I don't want to upset you or your family he said if I knew your family were involved I would have said yes immediately of course you know so my mum hung up the phone and she said the Chief of Police says yes then then she said who else do you need I said do you know the Minister for Interior so my mum said of course we do I said I need his permission - it took him a little longer to track him down he was on holiday in France but as soon as he heard who was asking and why we were asking he also faxed an apology because nobody wants to offend the family you know what I mean by the family right this they didn't want to offend the family in any way and again said of course they can have whatever they want we'll provide it no questions asked you know a man please you know tell your uncle George we didn't mean to offend him in any way so so a few weeks later after this we're having at the campsites released we go up on this camp I helped organise it planet I went up a day early helped set the whole thing up invited all of my friends to it and on the second day of that camp I became a Christian so God actually had me plan and organize my own conversion which when you think about it is a very particular privilege to have and which is why I want to take a very broad approach as we talked about doing evangelism in a secularized world now I'll be giving another talk at a different conference here in about two days time where I'll be talking about the single biggest global cultural challenge I think we face when it comes to sharing the gospel and I'm sure that that's going to be available online you'll be able to listen to that and in this context I want to look at some of the feeder reasons as to why we've ended up in such a mess without unpacking all of that in detail but then just come back to the scripture again just about to help us recapture that scriptural vision for evangelism because there's anything that the church needs today is we have to fall back in love with the gospel and we have to fall back in well with mission and vandalism all over again largely speaking as I travel around most people are living in fear of mission and evangelism that which is the lifeblood one of the lifeblood part of the church something which people so willingly went out and laid down their life for we now feel so fearful of and often hesitant even to step into that and I think it's partly because is the culture shifts so quickly around us we quickly feel so disorientated we're not even sure how to say what we want to say anymore it feels like everything's being redefined everything's being changed and everything that we say is so me easily misunderstood or twisted against us and we are living in incredibly challenging times we are now living amongst one of the most lonely generations this world has ever known in the UK they recently appointed a minister a government minister for loneliness sadly the only appointed one which seems to be tragic in so many ways but we are incredibly lonely as a generation the more we are connected through technology the more we realize that technology far from breeding intimacy between us seems to build a golf instead we have the technological means that our ends to achieve whatever ends we desire but we haven't figured out what is actually desirable and so for all of our talked about enhanced communication and connection people are feeling increasingly disconnected now I can't speak for this part of the world back in the UK earlier this a few months ago the BBC published there was of an academic survey which showed that the number one problem for people between the ages of 14 and 24 was loneliness one person who responded said social media is just social fake they said every connection I have with anyone in this world is based on falseness we're all pretending to be something that we're not and this sense of disconnect and loneliness is spreading rapidly throughout the world with people increasingly spending time online rather than with each other even in northern Nigeria where I work was there last week you can go to almost any cafe no matter how rural and you see the same situation that you see in London and no doubt Sydney to people sitting drinking coffee each of their phone now nobody talking to each other but completely locked into the Technic technology that they actually have in their hand one very famous rapper recently put it like this he said the love is fake but the pain is real so many scars I simply cannot heal and we feel utterly alone now the trouble with this is then it leads then to a collapse of what we actually think about when it comes to terms of relationships we're actually thinking about relationships in ways that we haven't in a very very long time certainly not in the way that we actually articulate them there was a book called purity written by a an American author a few years ago by the name of Franzen now Franzen only writes a book about once every two three years or so or maybe even less than that he gives a lot of thought to his work and when his books come out they tend to win a lot of prizes purity was a book that split the critics it tells the story of a woman whose nickname is purity but here's how the book starts out she's working in a coffee shop and a customer comes in she immediately likes the look of the customer and begins to wonder about having some kind of relationship with him they strike up a casual conversation and as she's talking to him this thought runs through her mind she says to herself dare I risk the intimacy of friendship or shall I retreat into the relative safety of casual sex what a question dare I risk the intimacy of friendship where you can get hurt betrayed or shall I simply retreat into the purely physical of casual sex where I can keep myself safe now just think about it no one would have written that line 20 years ago 20 years ago the sexual side we've been seeing the risky bit that's the dangerous part maybe that's where you're going to get hurt making friends with somebody is surely the best thing to do but we're now so unused to relating to other people as human beings that we're even the idea of intimacy and friendship we can feel threatening so we are caught with this desire this longing to be known to have intimate relationship and at the same time being terrified of it at the same time and we're so terribly lonely as a result now the effect of all of this is to increase ly objectify us as we look at people in purely sexual terms in terms of beauty and physical fitness and everything else that we're so obsessed with in our current culture as we look at pure ly at the physical we reduce people from people into objects now the tragedy with that is there's a big difference between the relationship between you and a person and the relationship between you and an object an object is something which I consume for my pleasure so the relationship between me and an object is one of consumption but the relationship between you and another person is one of connection you connect with someone so even in the hippy movement of the 60s as people were sleeping with anyone and anything people constantly talked about making a connection where is now in a point porn dominated culture were only interested in consumption we would use other people into objects and we consume them for some felt need trying to meet this desire for intimacy within us and finding ourselves completely alone we even talk of now marketing ourselves we even train our students who are graduating from our universities how to market themselves as if they were marketing a car we're constantly losing sight of what it means to be human and reducing ourselves into objects is it any surprise therefore that we feel lonely because the nature of the relationship between you and an object isn't a personal one does that make sense look I know there are men who comb their hair look in the mirror every morning sigh and go I'm in love but that's sad you can't be in love with yourself or love your car love requires two personal beings on either end of the equation but what do you do when the idea of a very person itself is being lost so we're living in an incredibly lonely and also hurt generation because the thing about objects is you use an object for yourself and at a subconscious level I think that explains a lot of the anger that we see going on in the world right now if if in the Q&A I'd been asked the question Michael do you like working for the organization that employs you and I were to say to you I think they've been using me now for over 20 years if that was my response to that question you would all understand I'd said something very seriously wrong I'm being used none of us want to fall into that category but subconsciously by reducing everyone into an object around us that's exactly what we're doing now this then runs then into a series of other problems that we have as well the amount of political cynicism in the world right now is reaching new highs in every country I go to as a matter of fact in the last two three years in the 80 or so different countries I've traveled in east-west north-south political cynicism is one of the common staples of our culture lesson new begun the bishop anthem the anglican bishop many years ago spotted this trend when he said what the trouble is is that we're all watching TV programs which are saturated and we watch people live in possibly beautiful people living impossibly opulent lives and we assume it's normal we then very quickly conclude it's the responsibility of the state and the government to provide it for us when they don't we feel disappointed so the next group of incoming politicians promised something to their society they cannot deliver happiness they are the ones who will fulfill that dream for them they're promising something which in the past we thought only God could deliver happiness fulfillment ultimate security so they promised something which they can't deliver and then when they fail to deliver again that level of cynicism grows and we dis locked in that cycle well we've been through that cycle so many times now with some group of people are promising something which they can never alternately deliver the levels of cynicism run all time high not that you in Australia would anything about changing your political leadership regularly but in some parts of the world our patience is is now so short we just can't wait for anything anymore now this feeds off another problem and really all of these is every single one of these issues are might landing for you if you wanted to go in-depth it would take or take me 45 minutes on each one to run through but the next thing we then run into which is also becoming a Grob global problem as we have a huge amount of economic cynicism in our culture's - there was a very famous book written a couple of death of years ago by a French economist called Thomas Piketty entitled capital now I don't have you ever tried reading that book if you haven't you may want to think about buying it for a couple of reasons number one it's 1,200 pages long in hardback edition it looks very impressive on any bookshelf number two being that heavy in hardcover you can also use it for personal defense and number three the book is so large when you die they could actually bury you in it now what Piketty says although controversial at some points but I think the heart of what he has to say is correct is the rate of return on capital in global economies around the world has greatly outstripped the rate of return on income what does that mean that means if you're sat in this audience and you are what most people would call middle class and you have teenage kids it means if you're in that category the number one question you're wrestling with right now is will my children ever be able to afford to buy their own home it means that in every single major metropolis around the world house prices and capital appreciation is far outgrown the rate of growth of income which means even if you get a decent job you're gonna be struggling to provide a family house now this deserves a huge amount of unpacking but the result is you breed a generation that feels economically excluded from the political society of which it's a part and when you start to have large swathes of a society feeling somehow they cannot buy in to the economy of which they are a part resentment and anger begins to grow there's a growing sense of injustice and distrust and historically at leads to civil war so these problems are huge and they're this growing sense of injustice is feeling the sense of global anger which has been evidenced all around us right now so big is this distrusted in this cynicism that four days ago a German think-tank published the results of one of the largest political attitude surveys done in recent times they serve we surveyed 125 thousand people in over 50 different countries one of the questions which they asked was do you think your government acts in your best interests and here's what interesting if you live in a democracy because actually people in dictatorships are happier on this one if you live in a democracy the top ten democratic systems in the world as listed by this think tank sixty four percent of the people said never my government never or rarely acts in my interest and if you want to know who these are pressures oppressive democratic countries are that right at the top of the list is Sweden Denmark and other countries like that there is whole scale massive political disillusionment at every single level now because we think our problems a man-made and therefore can be man solved the solution to all of these things is one of the most one of materialism so we're constantly asking ourself only one question which is how can we actually make the level of wealth within our nation grow now there's nothing wrong with the nation growing in terms of wealth but when that's the solution to every problem that's presented to it it's gonna fall what far short and it quickly collapses into greed now what I find interesting is that Jesus Christ warns us to watch out for greed more than any other sin in the New Testament now you may ask me Michael how do you know that and how do you make that last statement with such authority and the answer is I heard Tim Keller say that and there's the new Protestant Pope I know I can trust him completely but why on earth does Jesus Christ tell us to watch out for greed more than any other sin and the answer is it's largely invisible to most of us as someone famously said it's hard to see the wall of your prison when the cell is made of glass in other words unlike adultery which is very obvious or murder which is very obvious still I mean I mean no one sleeps with you know another woman and it goes oh that's not my wife and I says you don't get confused on that it's obvious to you greed is largely invisible to us when's the last time you heard anyone in your church or a small group say yeah and the main thing I wrestled with is greed we have become an increasingly materialistic focused society now when you add on to that the historical causes of disintegration that we have that we've never resolved within our political economies you see that we have a huge problem now I I want to move I want to start to transition from this into that parable we just read because if I keep expounding all of these things to you we're going to end this room feeling depressed rather than motivated for the course of mission but let me just say one last thing very quickly on that last point to about political disintegration another very well-known author who's won a huge amount of prizes in the last thirty years is a Japanese author by the name of issue guru now issue guru wrote a lot of famous novels like remains of the day which was made into a film with Anthony Hopkins you may have seen that and he publishes about the book once every five to seven years now his latest book the Buried giant was hated by almost every critic on the planet it was one of his first books not to be nominated for multiple multiple prices everywhere in the world and if you read the reviews you'll come to the conclusion it wasn't even worth reading in the first place but issue gurus book the Buried giant I think is possibly them a single most brilliant novel I've read in the last two years here's why in the berry giant issue guru tells the story of this elderly couple and the elderly couple have lost their memory not through age their whole society has lost its memory no one can remember back more than a few weeks ago everything after that is blurred they can't even remember if they have children but no one else can remember they have children either so this couple set off on the quest to recover their memory and as they go off on this quest they're joined by a young boy and a warrior and an old knight on a horse and they set off to discover the source of national forgetfulness and towards the end of the book they finally find it they finally find what is causing them to forget and now they have the question do we help our nation recover its collective memory or not and as they're debating it the warrior who was with them says this he says if you end the state of forgetfulness and allow people to recover their memory quick tongued men will make ancient grievance rhyme with current complaint and the result will be war and mayhem quick tongued men will make ancient grievances rhyme with current complaint and the result will be war and mayhem in the United Kingdom right now there are six independence movements as everyone traces back their cultural heritage if everybody gets their own way in a couple of years time the United Kingdom will be six different countries not one our ancient grievances the things which divided and split us and set us against each other to the point that we were willing to kill each other as we remember and retell those stories with an incapacity to reconcile and forgive I mean that was simply in the process of tearing ourselves apart and there isn't a single country I've visited in the last four years in which this isn't an issue I think the only country where this would be exempt from this would be Singapore and Singapore is so tiny that it can't possibly split itself into anything smaller unless sentosa island decides it wants to become some kind of you know Disneyland Inc or something all by itself it's just simply not possible it's just too small but everywhere else you'll see this force at work now it's for all of these reasons these eight reasons that AB as I've been traveling around the world for the last few years if I ever have the privilege of speaking with a government in a closed session which I sometimes get to do just to sit down with the cabinet and just listen to them without anyone else there so they can ask whatever they want or whenever I sit down with major business leaders to talk about where they think the globe is going all of them are struggling with these issues and all of them - a person will say the biggest single problem we have right now is this global disintegration there is no possibility for reconciliation now what does it tell you that we live in a world in which every political leader I've had the privilege of meeting in the northern hemisphere southern hemisphere east and west are all asking the same question and not only that major business owners around the world are also asking the same question I was with the Financial Group a few weeks ago speaking with a guy who's heads up a Banking Group that's got about 20 trillion dollars under management that's a significant part of the global economy and as we were meant to meet together for an hour we talked for two as we came towards the end of the second hour he said I see absolutely no hope for this world whatsoever 10 more 10 to 15 years and we're going to destroy each other billions of people will die but there is a message that speaks to this problem if you can't if we can't learn to preach the gospel in a world that is disintegrating and feels that reconciliation and impossible in forgiveness is impossible if we can't relate a gospel to a culture that's asking that at almost every global level of its existence then we have a problem as a church this plays straight to the sweet spot of why we're here the gospel we have is a message of reconciliation it was entrusted to us as if God was making his appeal through us be reconciled to God God made him who had no sin to become sin for us it is the most incredible message we have and it brings an enormous amount of hope now the problem is as we say but Michael you look at all of those problems and they're so big what can I possibly do how can I possibly deal with all of those things and the good news is you'd have to deal with all of those things one or two of you in this room may be called to think and say something very directly in to them but there's the heart of it that's behind all of it which is to do with our sinfulness into which we're all qualified in this room to speak all of us have something to say all of us have a message of hope to bring into a world which is collapsing at all of these different levels and mission has never been easy it has never been easy that's the subject matter of that parable that we were look at there had we had read to us so well a little bit earlier there we now we jumped in with the reading where the chapter did well they where the subheading divisions ker in scripture but actually this story starts a few verses earlier Jesus is sitting eating in the house of a Pharisee and someone's healed that caused a lot of interest and then they start talking about having a banquet and Jesus talks about the fact and says look if you throw a banquet don't invite the important people they'll repay you instead invite the poor the blind the crippled in the lame they can't repay you but at the banquet of the resurrection of the righteous you will be repaid so they are literally talking about the end of the world Jesus is saying live your life in such a way so that when the end of the world comes you will be repaid by God himself not by the people you help but by him and when someone hears Jesus at the table say this they say blessed is the one who will eat at that feast in the kingdom of God well of course you would be blessed you would be supremely happy and filled with joy to find yourself eating at that feast on the day of the resurrection of the righteous in the kingdom of heaven well you don't know that excited about that but believe me you should feel excited about that we so often don't think about these things I remember once teaching a group of theological students in Oxford and I asked them what happens at the end of the world and they said well you know there'll be judgment yes you have a new earth yes and I kept asking what else what else what else after five minutes of me asking what else there was quiet and then someone said a banquet now for me as someone raised in the Middle East the banquet the food is the first thing you think of not the last but here's the question what kind of banquet and of course because they're bright one of them goes Oh a wedding banquet and what happens before a wedding banquet a wedding imagine you are having coffee with someone in the coffee shop just down the road from here you're about to order a second cappuccino and they look at their watch and they go oh my goodness is today is that today is it the 28th and you say yes and they go I have to go I'm getting married now the wedding started half an hour ago and they run out the coffee shop what would you make of this person surely there's something wrong with them when someone falls in love and they're looking getting married you doesn't matter what you try to talk about that's all they want to talk about you ask them about the weather you end up talking about their wedding you will you ask them about their family wind up talking about the wedding you ask them about politics they'll say yes isn't it terrible what's happening but I'm so looking forward when I get married yeah it's all four it's sickening you can't stop them thinking about it what on earth does it say about the life of the church when we asked what happens at the end of the world the very last thing we remember is there's going to be a wedding banquet so they're talking about the feast that will be held on that day when God returns there's a resurrection and God holds a feast so jesus then replies a certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests so they're just been talking about the resurrection of the righteous someone says blessed is someone who will eat at that feast and now Jesus tells the story of a man who hosts a great feast can you see the connection that I mean this is a very obvious parallel this is not a hard parable to interpret they've been talking about the great banquet at the end of the world someone says blessed is the man who it to that great banquet Jesus says there was a man preparing a great banquet I mean hopefully the parallels are obvious now notice that the invitations and the preparation of the banquet happened simultaneously okay you can see that in verse 16 he's preparing the banquet and invites many guests why do you do that well the answer for that is simple in the ancient world there's no form of refrigeration you need to know how many people are coming and you prepare enough food now I can't speak to Australian culture I actually understand there's some of you here walk right across Asia but in most parts of the world Hospitality is central to the culture if someone comes to eat at your house the last thing you want to do is run out of food you can go to incredibly impoverished communities as some of you will have experienced and they will bring out the very best for you and they'll keep feeding you till you can't eat anymore so as the invitations go out would you like to come and people say yes or no the preparations the two happens simultaneously the host is requiring on his guests coming if they don't come to eat the food can't be kept for another day is either eaten or it's thrown out to be eaten by the dogs but either way it will be eaten so what happens next is remarkable at the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited come everything is ready notice these are the people who had been invited the servant isn't going out into the community saying would you like to come at this point the servant is going out into the community saying hey you said you were coming dinner is ready so they've been asked a few hours before now they're being told to come now they're obliged to come now in most parts of the Western world the longer the gap between the invitation and you growing the more obliged you are to come the shorter the time the less in other words if you saw me today and said Michael would you like to have dinner and I said yes and then a few hours later I changed my mind culturally in most Western cultures I can ring you very easily and say you know what I know I said that yes I was coming in an hour and a half ago but something's come up is there any way we can do it next week and culturally that's fine however if you invited me to dinner three months ago and I said yes and then on the day I didn't really feel like it it's very hard for me to get out of that invitation well since I'm obliged to come now in most middle Middle Eastern cultures it's reversed you can promise to go to something ages in advance that means nothing but if on the day you're invited and you say yes you have to go everything's being prepared all the food is being prepared you've now expected to turn up not to turn up is a big deal so the servant is going to those who said yes I'm coming he's ringing the dog ding about the dinner bell ding ding ding ding ding dinner is served and they all begin to make excuses so do you understand the significance of this they had been invited they had said yes now their dinner is ready now they're certainly saying actually now I can't come after all the first one says I've just brought a field and I must go and see it please excuse me now what do you make of this excuse imagine I was to say to ya I know I said us coming to dinner but I've just bought a car and I don't know if it's a Volkswagen or a Bentley so I'm just gonna go and look at it I mean what would you make of that excuse there are only two possibilities number one I am a that word comes from the Greek it means to be a fool we translated it from the Greek into the English so either I'm a or I think you're a because it's not even possible to do what I've just described between being invited to dinner and saying yes and buying the field that's simply not legally possible it's not like you can click on the internet and say yes I want this piece of land and transfer the money that whole process takes a long time first of all you don't know what the land is until you go and see it you have to be shown it because there are no maps with it all neatly mapped out with lines around it so you get shown the piece of land and you say okay where is it and they say well you see that big rock over there you go yeah well that if you draw a line from that rock and that tree stump over there and then you follow the drywall ebed that way and then you see that little ridge sort of running along there and then it comes back up that's the land that's the only way you can see what you're buying the buying and selling of land takes a lot of time so someone saying I'm going to I'm gonna go and look at it now I know I said I was coming for dinner but something else has come up that would be like a boy saying to his teacher yeah I don't have my homework the dog ate it well my sense is it's stretching the realms of imagination and possibility now the second excuse that the guy gives is even more interesting because he says I've just bought five yoke of oxen and now I'm gonna go try them out now you always buy oxen in pairs you don't buy them one at a time you buy them in a pair you have a yoke that go across the back of the oxen and the reason you buy them in pairs is if you're selling oxen you have your animals and you have a small strip of land nearby and you have a yoke and you take two animals off you put them on the yo can you blow a line then you take one animal if you put another alimony you plow relying backwards and you've seen do they carry their weight equally do they pull to the left they pull to the right you always sell them in pairs so for someone to come along and say yeah I've just brought five yoke of oxen I'm gonna go and try them now I mean we thought we met the world's greatest an excuse number one but we now have a new number one ladies and gentlemen this person is even more stupider than the first one this is like the boy who says yeah teacher I don't have my homework the dog ate it and the teacher says but the excuse you gave last week for not doing your homework was your dog died do I mean it's just this cannot possibly be true it's patently false the implications of this are enormous people who've been invited to attend the banquet of the resurrection of the righteous when they are told everything is ready or to put it in another language the kingdom is now at hand they all begin to excuse themselves on going and their excuses are the most pathetic ridiculous set of excuses you've ever heard in your whole life a third one said I've just got married so I cannot come now I find it interesting that some people in the West when commentating on this text say well you know in the Old Testament if you're newly married you're excused from going to war for a year and so you know maybe he has a good excuse the guy isn't being asked to fight a battle he's been asked to dinner there is a big difference not only that he said yes the tense of the translation I have here in my NIV is correct to those who had been invited they had already been invited the servant went and said come everything is ready he's don't ask him if they want dinner he's saying you said you're coming a few hours ago the food is ready so what this guy is actually saying here isn't so much funny as it is incredibly rude he's saying look I know I said I'm gonna come to dinner but I now have a different desire and it doesn't involve you but it does involve my wife so I won't be coming to dinner I'll be doing something with her tonight instead and this excuse isn't funny this excuse is shocking the audience would be shocked to hear this imagine using sex as an excuse not to be there but what kind of culture do we live in ladies and gentlemen how many of us maybe even in this room so locked into a world of porn and sexual addictions we're excusing ourselves on the banquet of the resurrection of the righteous because there's something else would be rather doing this is a shocking excuse and whatever laughter was going on around the table beforehand because I think they would have been laughing as Jesus gave the first two excuses they're so ridiculous as to be funny this is a conversation stopper now the servant comes back and he reports it to his master and the owner of the house became angry now isn't that interesting well of course the master of the house would become angry everyone who said they were gonna come is now saying I'm changed my mind I'm not coming and the rindy the excuses they have are ridiculous their insults their lies and the master quickly turns to the servant and he says you go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor the crippled the blind and the lame you go find the crippled and the lame they don't go proving option they can't walk you go find the poor they don't go buying fields they don't have any money you find the blind they don't get married people are reluctant to marry them you go and find them and you tell them to come and so now the servant is commissioned by his master to go out to his community and find everybody who was there and bring them in and now the servant is beginning to get involved in this great evangelistic endeavor as a matter of fact not only does he go out to bring people in after he's done that he comes back to the master and he says sir what you have ordered has been done but there is still room and the master the servant is now getting to in tune with his master's heart being told hey you guys who were ready let's go and they all begin to like make excuse he then goes to a group of people who thought they had no invitation says these invitations for you and they start coming and now the servant sees something he walks into the room he says there's still space here it's not full up yet there are empty spaces and he's looking to the master master what will you do next have you caught that vision from God yet there is going to be a banquet held at the end of this world the greatest feast you've ever had is going to be provided to you largely by I believe cooks from my part of the world but there's still room there are spaces to be occupied and there are people who've yet to receive the invitation and so the servant is saying Master what are you going to do next this is the most surprising turn of events now those of you who live in Christianized cultures will understand the first part of this what we talked about so far the second parts for everyone there are parts of our world right now where people think that they have said yes to the invitation they think they're holding in their hand some kind of religious ticket that they got from somewhere saying I'm going to go and they have no idea that whatever this piece of paper is they're holding saying hey I can go they're actually excusing themselves from being there and on that day they won't be sat at that table there's a part of this message that has to be preached to those who think they have a long standing invitation to go to heaven God's eagerly anticipating their arrival but actually they're excusing themselves from attending they have to meet Christ they have to say yes to him but there's this more general part there's a part of the culture which doesn't know yet so the servant says to the master says to the servant you go out beyond now the community you go to the roads and the country lanes and compel them to come so my house will be full now let's just say a historical note here this particular verse in Luke was used during the times of the Spanish Inquisition to justify a very in missionary strategy you compel them to come you make them come so they took it literally and they would find non-christians and attach them to Iraq and as they were slowly stretched and pulled apart not only did they grow longer but amazingly 99 percent of the people who went in profess Christ coming out so not only were they taller physically but spiritually there now professing to love Jesus now hopefully you and I would have a problem with this missionary strategy because however we expose it that verb that's not what this means this is not about somehow exerting physical pressure to make someone believe something the master knows he's asking his servant to do a hard thing this is not going to be easy if the excuses from within the community who knew the person was so great imagine what the excuse is outside of the community will be you're gonna have to make them believe the Masters saying to his servant you go out and be compelling your words your actions how you live you have to make people realize this is for real this is for them you need to change go make them believe this is for them there are all kinds of cultural obstacles that we can anticipate with this command you know in some cultures of the world if you receive an invitation from someone much more powerful than you your culture requires you to refuse you basically have to say no no no I'm not coming you have no idea if your host means it when they ask you this exists at multiple levels I remember in my own family my all of my Greek uncles and aunts married em English people and the first one of my uncle's to get married married an English woman they move back to Cyprus and as that when they're living there they had a Christmas dinner and what happens is you put all the food out and everybody takes a small amount of food because the host can't run out of food that would be embarrassing so what you do is everybody takes a little bit and then you're meant to invite then you have to say to everybody when everyone's finished eating would you like anymore and everybody says no I'm completely full I couldn't eat another thing and then you say for a second time please have some more and everyone has to say no no I'm full the third time you say please just have a tiny bit more I prepared all of this I are we so sad if you went from here and left all of this food behind on the third time you go back and you have three to four times more than you had the first time round because everybody's had something now don't make sense you have some idea how much is left now you can really tuck in she was completely unaware of this so at the end of the main course she says to everybody does anybody want anymore and everybody says no thank you so she stood up and cleared all the food away came back into a very silent room carrying the Christmas cake and wondered why everyone was sat there so silently sometimes the invitation has to be repeated multiple times for people to realise you mean it there's a problem not just outside the culture but is this even believable imagine you made this long distance and you're talking to someone now saying he wants you to come and they'll be saying well who is this person why would they be interested in me this happened a long long way away from where I am was it possibly got to do with me you're gonna have to make them explain that this invitation is meant for them it's real it's not made-up it's not a fantasy you're not crazy it's actually true it may sound unbelievable but actually no it's true it's real and it is for them in Luke 14 we begin to see something about Jesus Christ's own vision permission he already anticipates some of the problems that he knows we're going to have there'll be those who begin to make excuses and what they say is utterly ridiculous and we're not to be discouraged by it we're to keep going out to that community again and again and again issuing the same invitation over and over and over we're going to have to somehow make people believe that this is real and is actually intended for them now the parable finishes with some very strong imagery I tell you not one of those who were invited will even get a taste of my banquet now the imagery is very strong because after you have your invited guests come even the uninvited guests get to eat some of the delicacies because you can't keep the food you just distribute it everywhere and after that whatever is left you throwout on the dogs eater so even the dogs taste it this is not the wholesale rejection of that first community this is the rejection of those within that community who absolutely refused to come and Jesus is very clear there is coming a time when you will realize the extent what you have done and there's no way back from it but the thrust of this the thrust of this parable in terms of us you and I sitting here is we're his servants he's the master he's putting on the great banquet there's still room at his banqueting table he sent his outings as well but have you seen the room that there is their space I had the huge privilege while I was speaking last week spending some time with some Christians there who whose families have literally been terrorized by Boko Haram in some cases they've even lost close family members they're living in a situation where the government isn't protecting them where people are just disappearing and there seems to be no response justice is collapsed and the question is what do we do what do we do and the question has to come back to us do we believe that we're being called to go and reach even people like that with this gospel or are we gonna write some people off and say they can never return I'm actually beginning to wonder if in the Western world we've concluded that evangelism is so difficult it's not worth even trying anymore which is why we have to keep hearing again and again from the lips of Christ about us about the fact that he has a mission for his church and he wants us to go several years ago I was speaking in a Masonic country and I got talking with this guy there and this guy came to me and he said Michael I want you to pray for me he said I want to reach the people in my country they're destroying my country he says they're literally blowing it up so I prayed for him well the next year some people from his country travelled over to London and blew themselves up on buses and on the London Underground system and caused all kinds of havoc about 10 years ago shortly after that he rang me and he said Michael I have an invitation for you I said what is it he says while I enrolled myself in a madrassa for the last year to study memorize the Koran has studied the hadith and learn Arabic he says now I've been their best student I said that sounds interesting he said it's the same school that trained the people who did what they did in London a few months ago that got my attention he said I've told them all I'm a Christian I said you did and you're still alive he said brother they're very angry with me I said why didn't they kill you he said I gave a speech to the entire student body in which I said I'd come back with a friend and explained to them why what I'm telling them about Jesus is true so I said to him who's gonna do that and he said you are my friend then he said brother he says I have eight Peter six friends who are part of the police force they have machine guns they will come with us to protect us I said we're speaking to a room filled with suicide bombers eight six men with machine guns isn't gonna help well we talked and prayed about it and decided we should go and so now here we are we take one guy with the gun who stays in the car so when the cars parked outside and we're inside they can't put a device in the car that seemed sensible and first of all we went to the wrong door to the compound that we'd been invited to come to because when we arrived at the compound and they opened the doors they were body targets at one end and guys with ak-47s at the other and they were doing target practice and I turned to my friend and said have you arranged for me to speak open air or what is this when they found out who we were they said no no you need to go half them we weren't half a kilometer down the road the front half of it look like a school like a primary school and so we went into the school and they were about fifty people in a room that's not even as big as this stage so it was packed and as we got to the point of explaining about Jesus Christ in the cross and what actually makes forgiveness possible and how we can be reconciled to God the the people the people on the front row were about a far far away from if I stand here the front row that would have started just here just over an arm's reach away and in the room of 50 people there were about 15 women and 35 men now the women all you could see were their eyes everything else was covered up and when I began to explain about the cross and some of them started to cry I I clocked their body language which I shouldn't have done and recognized they were crying so now they had to pull the veil over their house over over over themselves completely so you couldn't even see through the tiny little slits where their eyes were and as I looked around the room quite a few of the men were crying too but I've often realised this happens when I preach a lot of people cry normally in desperation as soon as I finished speaking the head of the madrasa stood up at the back and he said well it's totally different for us if you respect us we may respect you but if you don't respect us you leave us no option we will kill you and I said it is very different I said because in the Christian faith we're going to be saved through this free offer of grace the Christ made for us through the cross through his death and resurrection it's a totally different and at this point everyone else in the room stood up and so now the guy at the back of the room because everyone stood up in the room was so small he couldn't get to the front so I sort of tried to force my way through the crowd to get to him and your lungs done the significance of this if you know anything about these cultures cuz the first person to come up to me publicly was a woman and although I couldn't see her face she said to me in perfect English this gospel is the only hope for our nation and dropped a tiny little ball of paper in my hand as if by the time I got to the back of the room my hand was filled with tiny little rolled-up pieces of paper and what people had done is they'd torn off a tiny strip of paper written down their cell phone number rolled it up into a little ball just dropped it into my hand now you think I remember being encouraged by this by the way this is these converted Taliban they make excellent church planters because they didn't join the Taliban to have an easy life so the same commitment they had there they now bring but for very different purposes so I gave all these pieces of paper to my translator who's part of the underground Church in that country to follow them up and as we're driving away back to the city were staying this a one and a half hour drive his phone rang and after he got off the phone he said they're very angry with you I said they are he said yes he said that wasn't meant to happen I said what are you gonna do so I'm gonna drive back and see them I said are you sure he said I have to go and see them I got on my knees I read literal I stayed on my knees praying in my room for him and after five six seven hours I still hadn't heard from him and I began to fear for his safety so I rang him only discovered got home hours of government have been dinner with his family and I said what I know I said why didn't you ring me to tell you where okay said and of course I'm okay I said what do they say said they're not happy I said well you told me that before I said what have you done he says I have invited them to come in here you speak tomorrow night I was like I said this is not a good idea well the next night we're in this room it's a dinner event and there are large round tables and people sat around the tables and this group come into the room and everyone knows who they are we even had the head of the army in the room and even he moved out of the way when they came in because this is one group of people who didn't want to upset and there's literally like a parting of the crowd and they came all the way down to the front and they sat on the table and my file right and so now I have to come up and speak and one of the guys was on the table he should have had his back to me but he picked up his chair and he turned it around so he was looking straight at me and I don't know if you've ever heard the phrase death stare before I've never experienced anything like it before or since it was almost tangible it's like you could touch it it was like there was this beam of hate coming from him to me it was so distracting it was causing me I could I was having trouble breathing when I was preaching so I actually ended up turning like this and turning my head like that so as I preached to the room my sense if I was looking naturally I was that way just to block him out so he wouldn't throw me anymore and after we finished explaining about the cross I thought there were two sets of steps off the platform one to my right and one to my left and I can remember I'd already made up my mind halfway through my talk that I was gonna pick up my Bible and go left and that's exactly what I did as soon as I finished speaking I picked up my Bible I started walking off to my left and as I got towards the stage I just felt God say to me Michael you're a coward and I just stopped in my tracks and I turned around and walked back the other way down the step straight up to this man held up my hand to him and said it's nice to meet you and was immediately convicted for lying because I didn't believe that at all and he took one step towards me said Michael listening to this gospel is like watching flowers grow in a bear unfilled and then he threw his arms around me and wept who is it who you think is beyond the reach of the gospel of Jesus Christ the gospel that Christ has given us and sent us out into the world is the most incredible thing you can possibly imagine he is inviting us he's asking us to invite people to the banquet of the resurrection of the righteous and there is still room all of those spaces have yet to be filled he is looking to his servants to you and me to go out an issue that invitation in his name and as you do that you will see some of the most surprising things you can possibly imagine happen in this world Jesus Christ never promised a safe return when we go out on a mission like that but he did promise that if we are walking with Him that's the only safe place to be and he will take us to those he has to take us to and whatever it may cost us when as that gospel takes root within that culture those people will then take it onto others that we ourselves will never be able to reach and see and that's the commission he's giving us now that's what he's asking of us why don't we pray together father we want to thank you for this conference we've had together which is literally about youth it is literally about you the air that we need to breathe the spiritual life outside of which we have no hope and no life Lord you came into a world which was dead in its sin and transgression and through your death and resurrection who breathed life back into it and Lord it's such a joy in a privilege to be part of that Lord as we sing about it Lord would you refresh our hearts and remind us again of the incredible truth and the wonder that there is a knowing you and walking with you and all at the same time father will you open our eyes to the challenges which are around us and begin to equip us to respond to them but Lord far from being overwhelmed lord by the myriad of challenges that we see little problems on a scale there are sometimes even hard to imagine or even get our own hearts and minds around Lord Father we pray Lord may we be faithful to your call Lord will you send us far the way you want us to Lord may we be like that willing servant who came before you Lord may we catch something of your heart and your vision and realize that there is still room father may we respond door to your call to to go out father may we take that invitation Lord faithfully with father wherever we go but whatever hardship we may enjoy and rejections we may face along the way father will you remind us again father of this royal commission that we've been given father may we delight in you and father will you give us that great joy father have seen some say yes to you know that we may pray with them that when we get there father there will be people that we already know and Lord we pray father more than anything else that we may know that endorsement from you so that when we come to join you at that banquet that you will say to us that we were faithful in our service of you and we did well before you and we pray all of this in the precious name of Jesus Christ you

Channel: Katoomba Christian Convention

Views: 32,828

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Keywords: Michael Ramsden, Oxygen, Oxygen 2018, Oxygen Conference, KCC, Katoomba Christian Convention

Id: 2nhEOpBRXGU

Length: 58min 14sec (3494 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018