So my sermon is entitled, you know, we give
these titles long before and generally we are thinking of other things when we send
the title, but it's talking about origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. Those are really the four questions on which
we do our apologetics and it will be very difficult for me to do all four questions. So I'm just going to take one of those, the
area of meaning, which I began with yesterday, and really my text was based on 1 Chronicles
12 on David's army in which it says the children of Issachar had an understanding of the times
and knew what to do. I went through the three moods that have been
prevalent over the last forty to fifty years, the mood of secularization, pluralization
and privatization that ends up with the loss of shame, loss of reason, and loss of meaning. And the definitions that I borrowed were from
social theorists of the '70s, principally Peter Berger, who did a lot in that work and
the author of the book The Sacred Canopy but through my colleague, Os Guinness, I was introduced
to those concepts and wanted to expound on that what happens really when meaning ultimately
leaves your life and you end up in quite a desolate frame of mind. This morning I want to take for you a passage
of Scripture from Psalm 74 and then one more on the heels of that. But in Psalm 74 the times that are described
are very much like our times. It starts from verse four there which says,
"Your foes roared in the place where you met with us; they set up their standards as signs. They behaved like men wielding axes to cut
through a thicket of trees. They smashed all the carved paneling with
their axe and hatchets. They burned your sanctuary to the ground. They defiled the dwelling place of your name. They said in their hearts, 'We will crush
them completely'; they burned every place where God was worshipped in the land." Now, here's the verse. "We are given no miraculous signs, no prophets
are left, and none of us knows how long this will be." It's no signs, no prophets, no certainty. They felt they were living in a time of extermination
and ours is not the first time where that has happened. When David writes of something like this,
he is reminding us of how opponents have always been there to the truth of God's Word. And when you think of these realities and
these threats with which we live, it is important for us to know that we really stand in the
corridor of time where nothing new under the sun really takes place, but like the psalmist
says in chapter 11 and verse 3, which asks us, "If the foundations are being destroyed
what then shall the righteous do?" What is your responsibility and mine? Sadly, we don't face these very well. A friend of mine told me when horses are attacked
they form a circle facing each other and kick against the attacker. When donkeys are attacked, they also form
a circle, but they turn their backs to each other facing the attacker and they kick each
other to death. So much of the fighting we do today is really
like donkeys. We start kicking away at each other, knocking
each other down for whatever reason while the ones who are really attacking us watch
us self destruct. We simply cannot do that. The goal can never be to destroy another individual. The battle of ideas that we have is somehow
to rescue the truth and preserve the dignity of the individual at the same time. It's a huge challenge and it's a huge task
that you and I face. You see, apologetics, when it is done rightly,
is not to vanquish the questioner; it is to vanquish the lie and retain the questioner's
dignity before God, how it is you answer the question. If you have vanquished the questioner, you
really have not accomplished very much. It is a beautiful thing that the answers we
give can show respect and dignity due the person who is raising those questions. When we go back across the early part of the
20th century, you began to see the results of what had happened in the 19th century with
the higher critical theories and the attack upon the Scriptures and the authority of the
Scriptures being questioned and then one holy belief after another was being felled to the
ground. But there were others who were coming from
the outside who also realized that if you really take away the truth, you take away
the foundation on which people stand. It was Huxley who said this, "We are living
today, not in the delicious intoxication of the early successes of science, rather in
the grizzly morning after where it has become quite apparent that what science may have
actually done is to improve, is to introduce us, to improved means in order to accomplish
more deteriorated ends." What science has actually done is to introduce
us to improved means, doing away at the same time and rather leading us to deteriorated
ends. While all of our advances in science give
us improved means, at the same time what is happening is the ends are becoming more and
more deteriorated all the time. You know, we were on Sentosa Island just a
few, a couple of weeks ago in Singapore and right next door to the very hotel where our
president will be meeting the leader of North Korea. Who knows what will come of that? You get two different perspectives. I'm aware of all those perspectives as we
travel and listen to what people have to say. But just think what stands at the table at
that point for discussion, people with the capacity to create huge tragedies, huge destructions,
with a plea from the other side to not move into that kind of lunacy. When you go into most of the hotel rooms in
Seoul, as I go many times a year, most of those hotels in the closet actually have gas
masks in case there is a nuclear attack. They live with that threat constantly. So we are finding improved means in order
to obtain hitherto unimproved or rather deteriorated ends. That's in the cosmic sense, but in the micro
sense of life and human interaction in the 1970s Malcolm Muggeridge was the chaplain
at St. Giles in Scotland and in Edinburgh, and when he resigned as chaplain … now,
Muggeridge had been a sensually driven man, and he, as editor of Punch Magazine, he said
he had the most difficult task in the world of trying to get the English to laugh but
that's the way he did it and he was very, very irreverent. You could see some of the things that he would
say that were hostile and inimical to the Christian faith till he found Christ and he
wrote the book Jesus Rediscovered. It's an amazing testimony. Now doctrinally, I cannot stand with him all
the way in the things that he believed in and the way that he believed it but he certainly
had that reverence and love for Jesus Christ. One of our own well-known journalists, Fred
Barnes, I was talking to him one day and said, "How did you come to know Christ in your life?" He said, "Well, there were two English journalists
who came and they were staying with us and when they left my wife said to me, 'There's
something different about these two men. They don't sound like very typical journalists. There's something very respectful and reverential
about the way they deal with things. Find out what makes them tick.'" So Fred Barnes said, "I wrote to them and
said my wife wants to know what makes you men tick." And in reply they sent him the book by Malcolm
Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered. It's phenomenal how Barnes also reading that
book was introduced to the Person of Christ. And as somebody said, it should really have
been called Muggeridge Rediscovered because he discovered the real Christ. But in his farewell address at Edinburgh when
things were going spiraling down morally in the university scene at that time, he gave
a powerful farewell address. It's one of the finest things Muggeridge did
when he bid that university goodbye. It had to do with all kinds of things happening. I won't go into them. A lot of crass things were happening on the
campus so he submitted his resignation. In his closing paragraph, he says this: "So
dear Edinburgh students, this is likely to be the last time I address you and this is
what I want to say to you and I don't really care whether it means anything to you or not,
whether you think there is anything in it or not. I want you to believe that this row I have
had with your elected officers has nothing to do with any puritanical attitudes on my
part. I have no belief in abstinence for abstinence's
own sake, no wish under any circumstances to check any fulfillment of your life and
being. But I do have to say to you this: that whatever
life is or is not about," I think this is key, "whatever life is or is not about, it
is not to be expressed in terms of drug stupefaction and casual sexual relations. However else we may venture into the unknown,
it is not, I assure you, on the wings of Playboy magazine or psychedelic fancies." He said, "However we venture forth this is
not the way into the future." Yesterday, I was reading Charles Krauthammer
the journalist's farewell letter to his colleagues at Fox News. He's often been there on the expert panel
discussion. He's a psychiatrist by training, a Jewish
gentleman by stock, but doesn't really know the depth of his own belief. He says, "I really don't know what to believe
about God. I don't know if all of the faiths of our time
have made their impact upon me or not." He says, "But I do know this. The least plausible of anything out there
is a philosophy called atheism." The least plausible of these! He simply could not go the direction of naturalism
which was going to uproot all absolutes in its process. Now, the naturalist will not say that. And they do not necessarily end up to being
immoral people. That's not it. But the point is in denouncing a transcendent
reality as the ultimate first, cause at the same time implicitly they debunk the very
essence of the value of life and the purpose for which you and I were created. We are sort of "each one doing what is right
in our own eyes." And Krauthammer says, "If you don't believe
what it is that atheism really does," he says, "attend a communist funeral." He said, "I have attended one."And he quotes
George W. Bush as going to bury some noted dignitary in the Kremlin, and George W. Bush
came back and made the comment he was totally taken up by how empty the whole process was
in ceremony. No mention of God, no hope, no meaning, no
ultimate reality, just another body that was going to be waxed and put on open display
for somewhere. When intellectuals like Krauthammer and all
start telling us that there is no such intellectual coherence when you attack the very existence
of God, it's the least plausible. So now when we are facing this kind of attack
and the attack is there, I don't know of a single place I go to but that you end up in
a long discussion, an intense discussion of God or no God and what the entailments are. Even Nietzsche who popularized the phrase
"God is dead" went on to criticize words. He said words are like mirrors reflecting
against each other and we end up giving it our own meaning but then he pauses and says,
"Ah! But I too I'm still too pious and believe
at the altar of what is called the truth." He could not debunk language completely. He knew truth ultimately had to triumph. So the Bible gives you and me the foundations
by which we must live, and that's really what I want to talk to you about. What are these foundations that God gives
to us that bring together both correspondence in particular questions to the answers given
and coherence in all of the answers being cumulatively put together? Do you follow what I'm saying? The particular questions have answers that
correspond to reality and the accretion of those answers forms a very coherent worldview. You go into a court. There are always the two tests been given,
correspondence and coherence, correspondence and coherence. Particular questions elicit particular answers. The cumulative effect of all of the answers
has to bring about coherence. And I want to say to you, only in the gospel,
only in the gospel do I see these two tests met; particular questions to the resurrection
issue, to the crucifixion issue. Why the cross? Why the empty tomb? Those are truth answers to specific questions. When you put it all together, you come up
with that coherent worldview of who I am, why am I here and what is my eternal destiny? What does love mean? What does truth mean? What does goodness mean? What does the family mean? What does the sanctity of sexuality mean? All of these things. And when you understand the reality of God's
answers, you actually understand it is not so much that God wants to take away our freedom. You see, true freedom is not the freedom to
do whatever you want, but it's the strength to do what you should. And when God gives you that moral law to a
man like a former adulterer and murderer like David, when he says he learned to delight
in the law, and he learned to love the law, he realized that the law was really given
for his benefit. And when you violate the law, you don't break
the law, you really break yourself upon the law that eternally stands. It's important we come to terms with these
things and grasp these things. What are the foundations on which I think
God intends for us to take our stand? The first is the dimension of eternity. He reminds us that life is not just a temporal
thing. Life is an eternal thing for you and for me. You take eternity away and you will find all
other questions become quite unanswerable. I came to Canada at the age of 20 in 1966. It was a new world for me. My older brother and I, he was 22, I was 20. My father sent us with $400 in our pocket
each and he said, "Find a job. This is all you have until you find the job." That's all the foreign exchange the Indian
government would give you. And so we went there. He was 22. I was 20. And I began to enter a new world, which I
had falsely assumed was all Christian. In fact, the first haircut I ever had was
because I saw a sign on the barbershops saying, "Christian Brothers." I said, "This is good, you know, he won't
cheat me." And then when I got the bill I figured I had
never paid so much for a haircut before. I didn't know there was a difference between
a barber and a hairdresser. Now I know I don't need to go to dressers. There's nothing to dress. You just go and get it cropped up. But the thing about that was what I'll never
forget. Within a year my family moved, my mother,
my father, my brothers and sisters, all seven of us. We were living in a small townhouse in the
East End in Toronto. It was Christmas Day, 1968. I'll never forget it. My dad sat us down because we were going to
be witnesses to a glimpse that no human eye had ever seen before. The American astronauts were going to go around
the dark side of the moon. There was going to be that period of silence
and here we are sitting riveted watching this and the silence is there and it's a breathtaking
silence. And all of a sudden the voice breaks because
the astronauts were given a glimpse no human eye had seen. Arthur Peacocke, the philosopher of scientists
from the United Kingdom, I think it is his words which I remember reading. I'm not a 100% sure but I remember reading
these words. I think they were by him. "How they saw earth rise above the horizon
of the moon, draped in a beauteous mixture of black and white, garlanded by the glistening
light of the sun against the black void of space. And as they saw earth rise, awestricken by
what they'd seen, unrehearsed were the words that no poet could help them with, no songwriter
could help them with, no philosopher could help them with, but after this breathtaking
silence come these words, 'In the beginning, God.'" I remember feeling the quivering response
I had in my body looking at that saying, "Imagine looking at this tiny little speck from thousands
of miles away that they call home, where humanity inhabits that place and seeing the vastness
of space." One astronaut came and visited our office
and told us the inspiration he saw, Colonel James Dutton. He was the one who brought the spaceship down
several years ago, and I think in that, one of the other projects into space, and he said,
"Just looking out the porthole in my spaceship looking at the grandeur of space, do you realize
every flame of the surface of the sun is 40 times larger than the dimensions of this earth,
that massive ball of fire." And if you could start counting the stars
with a hundred billion of them, one astronomer from South Africa told me, "If you started
to count those stars and took one for every second you'd need to be on this earth for
2,500 to 3,000 years just to count the stars one second at a time." In my course in quantum for the brief time
I was in Cambridge, the famed quantum physicist John Polkinghorne was one day lecturing on
the specified complexity of this universe, the specifications and the exactitude in the
microbe and the picoseconds of the formation of this universe. He said, "Do you know how exact it needed
to be if you just take one contingency, the expansion and contraction rates?" He said the exactitude demanded was so great
and the margin of error so small he said it would be like taking aim at a one square-inch
object, 20 billion light years away and hitting it bullseye. Stephen Hawking reminds us that even if a
fraction of a numerical was off in that we would never have had this universe. It would have collapsed upon itself, such
fine-tuning, so much so Frederick Hoyle, Frederick Hoyle the astronomer says it is like a tornado. To think it happened by accident is like imagining
a tornado going through a junkyard and generating a Boeing 747. How magnificent is this! There's not a soul here who believes that
we got our dictionary because of an explosion in a printing press and yet we believe this
3.1 billion bits of information of the human DNA just happened to come into being from
primordial slime to an Einstein. How irrational! That's why the Bible just dismissed it in
one verse, "The fool has said in his heart that there is no God." The dimension of eternity, there are hints
of this you know? Aren't there hints of this? Have you ever heard a song that sometimes
goes into your thinking and it takes back you, takes you back to memories years ago? You're carried back into that. I still speak Hindi very fluently. I love it. In fact I talk to myself in Hindi just to
be able to remind me of those words that were so precious as I was growing up in Delhi and
of all my friends spoke Hindi, a beautiful language. And sometimes I'll hear a Hindi song right
from the past and all of a sudden it carries me back forty, fifty, sixty years into my
childhood. C.S. Lewis talks about this in a very remarkable
way and he says this. He says how he was standing in front of a
flowering bush with his brother and he says, "For some unexplained reason, a memory was
triggered. There suddenly rose in me without warning
as if from a depth not of years, but of centuries, the memory of that early morning at the old
house when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough
for the sensation which came over me. Milton's enormous bliss of Eden comes somewhere
near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire,
but desire for what? Not certainly for a biscuit tin filled with
moss, not even though it came into it from my own past. And before I knew what I had desired, the
desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned into commonplace
again. It was almost like a fading sight in front
of a bush." Then he says, "It only stirred a longing for
the longing that had just ceased. It had only taken a moment of my time and
in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. But what does that mean?" he says. "What does that point to?" He goes on to answer his question. "The books of the music in which we thought
the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them. It was not in them. It only came through them and what came through
them was a longing, these things, the beauty, the memory of our own past, our good images
of what we really desire. But if they are mistaken for the thing itself,
they turn into dumb idols breaking the hearts of their worshipers because they're not the
thing itself. They are only the scent of a flower we have
not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited." And then he says this, "We are so little reconciled
to time that we are even astonished at it. 'How he's grown,' we exclaim. 'How time flies,' as though the universal
form of our experience were again and again a novelty. But that is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly
surprised at the wetness of water and that would be strange indeed unless of course the
fish were destined one day to become a land animal." It's amazing. My, how he's grown! My son Nathan is taller than I am. He says, "Dad, why do they keep saying that
to me? My, how he's grown! They ought to be surprised if I hadn't." My, how time flies! He says it's as strange as a fish reacting
with surprise to the wetness of water "My, how wet this thing is?" he said unless the
fish were intended one day to live on dry land. We are not accustomed to time the way we should
be because deep in our hearts is that longing for eternity. That's the existential rub, but I want to
take you beyond the existential. I want to take you to the legal side of it. If there is no eternity, whatever happens
to justice? Whatever happens to this thing we call justice? Some time ago I was in Las Vegas with my colleagues
and we were shown the hotel where this man had gone and busted two windows and was just
ramming down people, slaughtering them like cattle and fortunately what happened was he
had rented two rooms and he was going from window to window so that he couldn't be targeted. But in one of those instances, once the windows
were shattered, the wind came in and slammed the door shut between the two rooms and he
couldn't go back and forth. He was stuck in one place which gave the law
enforcement people the ability to identify what floor he was on and ultimately stop the
carnage but so many were slaughtered in the process. Where is justice in all of this? Is there not somebody to stand before? When you go into the death camps in Auschwitz
and Treblinka and Majdanek, you see the hundreds of thousands, yea, millions that were exterminated. Who brings justice to this all? If time is all we have, there is really no
sense of ultimate justice. So I say to you, the concept of eternity is
not just that beautiful sense of a longing, but also that sense of justice. C.S. Lewis puts it this way. "In speaking of this desire for our own far-off
country which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I'm trying to rip open the inconsolable secret
in each one of you, the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by
calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence, the secret also which pierces
with such sweetness when in very intimate conversation the mention of it becomes imminent
we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves. The secret we cannot hide and cannot tell,
though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it's a desire for
something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is
constantly suggesting it and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of the name heaven." R.C.'s there now. Just imagine when you find out what Jesus
said was true. "I go to prepare a place for you so that where
I am you may be also." It's marvelous to see the two realities. It's a place and it's a relationship. It's a place and it's a relationship. That's why the poem by Francis Thompson, The
Hound of Heaven. "I fled Him, down the nights and down the
days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways. Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears. I hid from Him. Adown Titanic glooms I sped up vistaed hopes." And it ends by saying, "Ah, poorest, blindest,
weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest. Thou dravest love from thee, that dravest
Me." If you drive God away from you, you're driving
heaven away from you for the Hound of Heaven is on your heels asking you to look up. I buried both my father and my mother actually. My older brother and I have outlived both
of them. My mom died in her fifties, my dad in his
sixties. And now my mother-in-law, the last surviving
of any of the family, she's 98. She lost her husband several years ago, my
father-in-law. And every time I see her, her words are the
same, "I'm just waiting to go home. I'm just waiting to go home." The body is giving way now, but her mind is
still so clear. She's just waiting to go home. Eternity. God has prepared a place for you and for me
that where He is we may be also. We talk of transubstantiation and consubstantiation
and all of these. We need to talk a little more about the gospel
being involved in a transtemporalization transcending all of time, transcending all of time. "And Lord, haste the day when the faith shall
be sight and the clouds be rolled back as a scroll. The trump shall resound and the Lord shall
descend, even so it is well with my soul." The foundation of eternity. Secondly is the foundation of morality, the
dimension of morality. You see, when you deal with eternity, you're
dealing with your existence. When you deal with moral reasoning, you're
dealing with your essence. Gertrude Himmelfarb of Columbia University
has written a book called Roads to Modernity. It's a brilliant book. She devotes one chapter to the evangelical
message and its preaching. Can you imagine that, this Jewish scholar? And you know what she says the difference
was in America because of that and of the United Kingdom? I want you to hear me. She said the difference between America and
the United Kingdom on one hand and the rest of Europe, when you think of what Europe has
really given to this world a lot of it are the 'isms' that brought an awful lot of confusion
to us: existentialism, Marxism, postmodernism, rationalism, all these isms that E.V. Hill
used to say "Some of these 'isms' should be 'wasms.'" What made the difference between America and
the United Kingdom on one side and the rest of Europe? This is real, pointed to us by Gertrude Himmelfarb. For the Europeans as a whole she said rationalism,
reasoning was supreme. Human reasoning was supreme and so out of
all of these rationalistic abilities came all of these 'isms.' She said for the English and the American
there was a distinctiveness. It was not reasoning that was supreme for
the American people or for the English people. It was moral reasoning that was supreme. Moral reasoning. That's why this tremendous challenge between
liberty and law, always facing this tension of how you come together desiring liberty
and facing the absoluteness of the law. And the moral law properly understood really
was reduced by Jesus to two propositions. You see, Moses gave 613. David reduced them to 15, Isaiah to 11, Micah
to 3, "Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly before your God." And Jesus is asked, "What's the greatest commandment?" He could have given them one very reasonably. One. He could've just said, "Love the Lord your
God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength." He would've been spot on. But He didn't. He said to "Love the Lord your God with all
your heart and soul and all your mind and all your strength and to love your neighbor
as yourself. On these two hang all of the laws and the
prophets." Because of one the second necessarily follows. Without the first you're standing with your
feet firmly planted in mid-air. You love Him and you love your fellow human
being. This extraordinary imperative is given to
us because of that other conversation which is very straightforward. "Should I pay taxes to Caesar?" Don't you wish the answer were "No?" And what does Jesus say? "Do you have a coin?" They give Him the coin. He says, "Whose image is on this coin?" The man said, "Caesar." He said, "Give it to Caesar." He said it's Caesar's image; give to Caesar
that which belongs to Caesar. But He didn't end there. He said, "Give to God that which belongs to
God." The man should have had a followup question. "What belongs to God?" And Jesus would have said, "Whose image is
on you?" The coin has the image of Caesar. You give to Caesar that which belongs to Caesar. God has His image on you. You give to Him. You belong to Him. Amazing! No other worldview pays you this compliment. No other worldview pays you this compliment. They either take you to the extreme of as
Pascal said, of deifying you or reducing you to the lot of lust which is the lot of animals. He puts you right in the middle there, the
glorious thing of making you in God's image. And yet what has happened today? We have lost this moral reasoning and we are
raising up our children with no ontic referent of where to find the difference between right
and wrong. You know there's a movie a long time ago called
The Emperor's Club. I'm not a big movie watcher I have to say
that to you although I was raised in India and watched one every week. But those days you didn't have to do any thinking
when you watched those movies. All you watched was a man running around some
wilderness with a woman singing songs to her, and at the end of it the moment they catch
up with each other, the scene would change and you missed absolutely nothing, just the
song, if you fall asleep. In fact, an Indian comedian at that time was
asked "What's the difference between love on the Indian screen and love on the Western
screen?" He answered in one word, "Trees." You just run around trees chasing each other. I grew up like that, loved those movies. So fanciful! And now the West has caught up. We have all these bizarre fanciful stories
to watch. Only we call it sci-fi. So it is. We have this imagination that's going, and
you want to watch it in the movies and so on. But when you look at the reality of how in
the process of all of this we have lost the image of God and the Person of God in these
things, we ask the question, "Does it really matter?" And so in this movie, The Emperor's Club,
the teacher is played by Kevin Kline and there's a group of students, prep school, highly paid
for. And a person through a lot of bribery gets
his son into that school, and he's a hooligan guy. He really didn't want to study. It's a school specializing in Shakespearean
literature and so they have to know Shakespeare through and through. And on the final day, the top five are taken
to compete in their knowledge of Shakespeare. And this guy through cheating all the way
has made it to the top five. And so the teacher is throwing these questions
at them and it comes down to the last question and this particular guy gets it and he's watching
very carefully. He cheats and he wins. He gets No.1. The teacher knows he's cheated. The teacher knows he's cheated, but he doesn't
know how to pin it on him. Years go by and this guy has become the head
of a big business and he's running a country club. He contacts the teacher and says, "I know
what you think. You think I cheated and all of that and that's
how I got here, but look at where I am, look at where the other guys are now." He said, "Tell you what. Bring them back again. I'll host it at my country club. You can throw questions you want on Shakespeare. We'll brush up on it and we'll do the test
again." And so they're adults now. And so there they are in front of the microphones,
the who's whos are attending, and the teacher starts throwing the questions. This guy has made a backup plan again to cheat
if he's not going to win. The plan succeeds. He cheats again and wins. The teacher doesn't know how to catch him
on it. So he goes back to his room, picks up his
briefcase wondering, "How did he do this? I know he doesn't know this stuff. How did he do this?" So he goes into the men's room and he is washing
his hands at the sink and this man comes in and he says, "I know what you're thinking
again, that I've cheated. Is that what you think?" He says "I know you've cheated. I just don't know how to pin it on you." He says, "What I want to ask you is this. What does it matter? Why does it matter to you that I have cheated
my way into this? Look at where I am. Look at the rest of them. This is where it's brought me. I have succeeded." The teacher didn't know what to say. He's just washing his hands, drying his hands
off and this guy is going on with his speech "What does it matter?"All of a sudden there's
the sound of a toilet flushing. None of them knew there was somebody else
in the restroom. And the cubicle door opens and it's the little
son of this businessman. And he comes and looks at his father eyeball
to eyeball. He doesn't say a thing. His eyes just fill with tears and he walks
out of there. The teacher says, "What does it matter? Why does it matter?" We're raising a whole generation of young
people telling them it doesn't really matter how you do it. Just get ahead. Just get there. And the truth of the matter is what made America
what it is is they believed in moral reasoning. That reasoning is being taken away from us. We're moving in the same direction of what
the French philosophers and other thinkers brought about centuries ago that man is the
measure of all things, eternity, morality, existence and essence. Thirdly and quickly, accountability. Accountability. God expects you and me to be accountable for
how we live and why we do the things that we do. You know, my colleagues and I … even now
I hate to tell you this but here I am at age 72 still spending over 200 days a year on
the road. God's blessed me with an amazing wife. Maybe that's why our marriage has lasted so
long. I'm on the road. I don't know. People ask me, "Why do you stay so busy?" I said, "I don't know. My wife takes my bookings. Maybe she just says, "Get this guy on the
road for some time." No, no, we have a beautiful love for each
other. In fact, last night she just arrived back
from India accompanying my daughter and she just wrote to me and said, "Nice to be home,
but I miss you." That sums it up. "Nice to be home, but I miss you." But what I want to say is we spend half of
our lives on the road alone in a hotel room. If you don't learn how to organize your life
when no one else is watching, the itinerant life is a disaster where you can spend hundreds
and hundreds of hours alone. I used to do a fair bit of speaking to professional
ball clubs and oftentimes the Atlanta Braves because that's my home. And when you do their chapel, you speak to
the opposing team first and you speak to the home team next. It's only about a twelve to fourteen-minute
devotional and then they go out on the field. And I remember I'd spoken to them on the problem
of pleasure. And one of these guys who was multimillion
dollars into contracts, one of the biggest hitters in the league, after I had finished
while the others were going he said, "Can I talk to you alone?" And he put his hand on my neck so firmly and
I was the only one who failed the physical when I walked in. These guys did so well. I've got titanium rods in my back, but he
grabbed me by the back of the neck. He said, "Hey man, I want to tell you something. You touched a nerve today." He said, "I have more money than I've ever
had, but I have less things of value than I've ever possessed. I've squandered everything on the road, squandered
everything on the road." If you live like a journeyman in life, you
will never really have roots of value. We are in this world as pilgrims. Our values and our roots have to come before
God and we are accountable to Him. We are totally accountable to Him. You know Hobart Mowrer who was a Ph.D. from
Johns Hopkins, four years instructor at Yale, eight years professor at Harvard, in 1954
appointed as President of the American Psychological Association. He was an atheist but committed suicide later
on in his life at the age of 75. But he wrote an article in the American Psychologist. He said, "I got more hostile response to this
article than anything I'd ever written." Here's one of the paragraphs: "For several
decades, we psychologists have looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability
as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch-making. But at length we've discovered to be free
from sin in this sense is to also have the excuse of being sick rather than sinful. It is to court the danger of becoming lost. This danger is I believe betoken by the widespread
interest in existentialism, which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and
free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of self and identity,
and with neurotics themselves find ourselves asking, 'Who am I? What is my deepest destiny? What does living really mean?'" "In losing the sense of sin," he says, "we've
lost a sense of who we are." It's a secular thinker saying this, we needed
to have that vertical dimension to define for us who we are? You see, "The worst effect of sin," said a
theologian, listen please very carefully, "the worst effect of sin is manifested not
in pain or suffering or bodily defacement but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy
loves, the low ideals, the brutalized and the enslaved spirit." The enslavement. That is the greatest effect of sin. We think of it as sickness and suffering and
pain. That is the minor symptom of a real imprisonment
of our soul to sin. Once we understand how devastating sin is
to us personally, we will then understand that these symptoms are really lesser expressions
of a very serious malady that's wrong deep inside. People don't like to hear that but it's the
truest thing about you and me. We are all depraved. The first line ever printed in America, the
first line ever printed, "In Adam's fall, we sinned all." None of those categories are believed today
by our secular thinkers. "In Adam's fall, we sinned all." And we think by sending them to jail we'll
correct them. We think by exposing them in the news media
we will correct them. Uh-uh. You may symptomatically correct it. What has to be corrected is inside, deep inside. Accountability. And lastly, the question of charity and love. John 3:16, thirty-two or thirty-three words,
depending on which version you have, is the greatest verse. It starts with the filial relationship, takes
you through eternal, through the process of relational, but bound up in all of that is
legal, the law of God. "For God so loved the world that he gave his
only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal
life." I'm just writing a whole chapter on that particular
verse because it's so powerful and pregnant with meaning. We quote it again and again. Time's run out. So I want to give you a quick illustration
and application. You know, I don't know what it is but the
older you get the more you think back of your roots. This is the country I want to live in. This is the country I love and make my home
and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I've lived here now for 40 some years. Atlanta, Georgia, is our home. My wife and children make it home as well. But there's the long reach of nostalgia that
takes you back to the land of your birth. I love going to India. I was born in a little street in Chennai in
the South, raised in Delhi. I always go to those streets and I walk by
myself. I visit the homes where I was raised. I talk to the people where I ate their beautiful
samosas and all that stuff. I speak Hindi to them and they always still
call me Ravi baba, Ravi little boy. I have not grown up in their eyes. Sometime ago, and I remember clearly, I was
60 then so that's quite some time ago, 12 years ago. I was riding in the auto rickshaws, those
three wheelers. We don't need Disney World in India. Just get into those auto rickshaws, you'll
have all the breathtaking feelings you've ever wanted, you know, but all the time you're
singing the song, "Nearer my God to Thee." So this guy is whizzing in and out of traffic
and I tapped him on the shoulder. I said, Bhai saab, ek minute hai? Hum aap se bhat karna chahte hu. "Brother Sir, step aside for a minute. I want to talk to you for a moment." He said Kyoon, kya bhat hai? "What's it?" I said, "Please pull over. I want to talk to you." So he pulled over. I said, "How old are you?" In Hindi he said chabees, which means 26. I said, "Ah!" I said, "How old do you think I am?" He said pachaas, which means "50." I said, "See, already you've proven your judgment
and eyesight is not that good." I said, "Do you have a wife?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Do you have children?" He said, "Yes." I said, "You keep driving like this and one
of these days your kids are going to be waiting in the home for you and you're not going to
get back." I said, "I'm a father. I have children. They want me to always come back home after
every trip. You keep driving like this you're not going
to get back home." I said, "I'll pay you a little more, just
slow down. You may have a death wish, I don't." I said, "But you know what? I follow Jesus Christ. I care about you. He cares about you. Don't drive like this." The guy looked stunned and he drives me to
my hotel and I put my hand in my wallet, and he said, nahi ji, "No sir." Nahi ji. "No sir, what you have given me is more than
any money can buy for me. I thank you for caring about me." Sometimes it takes simple things for them
to see the love of Christ. Eternity, existence, morality, essence, accountability,
conscience, charity, beneficence. Existence, essence, conscience, beneficence,
eternity, morality, accountability, charity. With the strength of God, go and build your
life upon those foundations. May He bless you and show the love of Christ
to this world that desperately needs to see it more than ever. And it's been my honor to be here and bring
these messages to you. Thank you so much.
