>> I have maybe just a few points to make. Now although as a child I was raised in Saudi
Arabia and much of my ministry is outside of the West, I have been asked to make a comment
on the crisis of truth that we seem to face within the West, and speak to the issue that
the Archbishop has raised as to why is it that the West is exporting the highest quality
cynicism when it comes to the Gospel you could possibly imagine. I know it's not uniformly true, and there
are many people from the West who are here at this conference who do not, who do not
do that, are doing the absolute opposite but at the same time we have to realize that we
have a struggle. And so we'll now take a step down both in
the quality of depth, quality of oratory, and also of experience as you now have to
listen to me. And Archbishop is a man who has achieved a
higher ecclesiastical rank in the church than even Jesus did and I am humbled to have to
follow one. One of the challenges we face is that for
many people, faith has become a psychological condition. Professor Umberto Eco recently voted one of
the, the most influential thinker, intellectual in Europe, has written many, many books and
indeed many novels. If you have not been bothered to read his
novels, you may have seen some of the films that have been produced out of his novels,
like "Name of the Rose." In "Name of the Rose" the story is told of
clerics, Christian clerics who have a mystery that needs to be solved. They go in pursuit of truth and reality. They are able to obtain truth and reality,
and the longer they delay in finding truth and reality, more lives will be lost. In his most recent novel, "Baudolino," it
tells the story of a man, African man in Alexandria after the burning of the library there who
has to flee the great city in order to make money. He invents maps and documents and letters
about the hidden location of the holy grail and he then sells these fake maps, letters
and documents to other people. The novel ends with him heading off on a quest
to find the holy grail using the map that he himself forged. He is now so persuaded of his own lie that
he is living in light of it. He has psychologically persuaded himself it
is true, such is the nature and depth of his deception. And for many people who have been exposed
to the system of philosophy, it has completely under minded their confidence in the nature
of faith and the nature of truth. Now Becky asked me to speak particularly about
truth, but I have two problems. Os Guinness spoke this morning on truth. It is very unfair. If a tongue of fire came down and landed on
his head it could not have been more powerful. Secondly, I am doing a dialogue session on
truth tomorrow with one of my colleagues, Amy. Let me just simply say this in relationship
to that. We must understand there is a strong connection
between the nature of faith and truth. Now, when I first came to the West having
been raised all of my life in the East and I, no one had told me I couldn't share the
Gospel and see people converted and I went around sharing the Gospel and people were
converted I was inoculated by ignorance. I didn't know the Gospel didn't work. I just assumed what the Bible said was true
and found it did work. But I can remember many people would sometimes
say to me, ‘Michael, I’m so that happy you are a Christian, I wish I could believe
what you believe but I can't.’ Have you ever heard that? I heard it so many times, I thought what do
these people mean? This is what they mean. Michael, there seems to be a joy, this passion
in your life we have heard about, a completeness that I find enviable. I wish I could have it. But the reason you have it is because of Jesus. You believe in something that isn't there. What do you call people who believe in things
that don't exist? Mad people. They are saying Michael, you are insane. But the main thing is that you are happy and
insane. I am happy, that you are happy. I'm so desperate to be happy myself, I, too,
would embrace insanity just to join you. I wish I could, I’ve thought about it but
I can't. This is not biblical faith. There are only two words, or there are two
words for faith in the Greek New Testament, I don't have time to go into all of this with
you but if you are reading a translation every time you see the noun faith, it is always
a translation of the word from Greek pistis, from the derivative of to be persuaded. It means that you are sure something is true
and more importantly, there is a moral depth and certainty about it. You can completely entrust yourself to it. You cannot put your faith in a God who you
believe isn't there. And so if we have a crisis of confidence in
the truth, this is what Os Guinness was saying this morning, it is impossible to have a true
biblical faith, because we are no longer trusting in the God who is there. We are trusting in our ability to trust in
the God who was there. Faith becomes psychological. It is idolatrous. We have faith in faith as opposed to faith
in God and so we find ourselves uncertain and we will never discover the boldness nor
the trust in the power and provision of God through the cross to see people, come to know
him, unless we understand that the Gospel is true. It is not true because you believe it to be
true, it is not true because you want it to be true. It is not true because you wish it to be true,
it is true. Even if you didn't want it to be true, tough. It is true. I was speaking in this city, I’ll use this
example since we are in Cape Town, a few years ago. The meeting was hosted by one of the most
senior members of the board of the organization for which I worked, Ravi Zacharias International
Ministries. He set up a dinner here in Cape Town. He's a very successful businessman. His father was a very successful businessman. They actually own part of Wall Street. Which if you are familiar with that piece
of retail estate, is valuable even after the crash. And if there are any American brothers and
sisters here, let me say as an English person how disappointed we are to see, that a rebellious
nation like yours is recovering faster out of your broken economy than ours is. But that's another issue. But I remember speaking in this town and the
man who was hosting it said, ‘Michael, I am going to invite my friends to dinner. These men are some of the most highly placed
men and women in industry and financial services in this nation. I don't mind what you say to them. So long as you explain the Gospel and you
ask them to give their lives to Jesus Christ. Otherwise, it's entirely up to you.’ I remember preparing that message, praying
over that message, I got to the venue early. We were praying for 60 people to come. 137 people came. The man hosting and I were talking about what
would happen and a man came up to me, he looked at me, he said, ‘Are you speaking?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘This meeting is a mistake.’ He said, ‘The people you are not talking
to, these people are not simple people. These are secularized, skeptical, men and
women. They are white Afrikaners. Many of them are of Jewish background. They are thoroughly secularized. They will not hear the Gospel and give their
lives to Jesus like that. It's not the way it works. This meeting is in more danger of doing harm
than good.’ Exactly what you want to hear before you preach. I looked at my host. He said, ‘I don't care what you say, so
long as you ask people to give their lives to Jesus at the end.’ I preached. Without exaggeration, I can honestly say it
was possibly the worst message I have ever preached. Now, some of you here are preachers. You know what it is to be in the flow of a
message and for it to almost carry you. You also know what it is to struggle in a
message. I don't care how good you are. If you preach regularly, you would have experienced
moments in your life where it felt like it was a physical impossibility to continue. I remember I was halfway through my message
hoping Jesus would come back. It was terrible. We came to the end of the meeting. I remember saying to myself well, I need to
offer them to pray, to come to Jesus now. And I heard a voice go off in my head that
said ‘why bother?’ So, without any faith in my heart, I wish
I could say my faith rallied. I simply said, ‘I have explained the Christian
Gospel to you as clearly as I can. If it is possible that any of you have heard
this and know you need Christ, you understand that he is Lord, that he is Savior, that he
died for you, that he is alive, he's paid the price for your sin, I would invite you
to pray this prayer.’ I talked a little bit about repentance and
faith and I bowed my head and I prayed. Now, I’m so glad about my Middle Eastern
origins, because my face was burning red but my color could hide it. I sat down at my table and I felt like crying. My host stood up. He said, ‘On your table there are cards. Please pick them up.’ He said, ‘There are also pens. Please take one.’ He said, ‘I would like you to write your
name, your address, and your phone number on the card.’ He said, ‘Underneath you will see there
are five boxes running horizontally across the card. A to E. I would like you to grade the message
you heard today, A, being excellent. E, being terrible.’ He said, ‘Underneath that, there are five
vertical boxes. Labeled 1 to 5. Number 1 says I gave my life to Jesus Christ
for the first time today. Number 2, I’m not ready to become a Christian,
I would like to join a Bible study to find out more.’ I can't remember what 3 and 4 were, the last
one stuck in my mind. Option 5, never invite me to an event like
this again. He said, ‘I invited you here, you are my
friends. I'm glad to buy you dinner but if you are
telling me that this is it, I really don't want to keep bothering you over and over.’ By the time I got home we were in a rented
house in Hout Bay, if any of you are from this area, you know where it is, and this
meeting was held in Constantia, actually not in Constantia, I think it's Steenberg Golf
Estate, and I drove back. I finally got home. My wife woke up, she said, ‘How did it go?’ And I said, ‘Terrible.’ She said, ‘How bad?’ I said, ‘Terrible.’ I couldn't sleep. 4:00 a.m. was the last time I looked at my
watch. Before I fell asleep I said to my wife, ‘When
this guy rings in the morning, I can't speak to him. Will you take a message for me?’ Three hours later she woke me up. He's on the phone, he wants to speak to me,
he will not give me a message. I came to the phone, I remember, I felt like
crying. He said ‘Michael, no doubt you want to know
what happened last night.’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and felt convicted for
lying. He said, ‘Well, you may be encouraged to
know that 47 people ticked box one, I gave my life to Jesus Christ today.’ He said ‘48 people ticked box 2. I would like to join a bible study group.’ There were 137 people there, Christians bringing
their non-Christian friends. He said, ‘I think most of the people in
the room, we got them.’ Now, at this point I didn't care about the
other boxes. Box 5, by the way, had 6 ticks in it. Never invite me to this again. I learned an important lesson that day. The Gospel is not about me. We are not asking people to accept us. With humility, with dependence on God, with
dependence on the Spirit, with a clarity from his word and a conviction in our hearts, we
preach Christ crucified. We ask people to accept him. The crisis we have is that people are beginning
to doubt whether it is possible to do this anymore. We must recover our confidence in the truth
of the Gospel, otherwise we will never proclaim it. Just out of interest, eight weeks later, the
man who organized the meeting rang me. Of the six people who said ‘never speak
to me again,’ four of them had become Christians. May God bless you.
