Tim Keller - Human Nature: To Err is Human?

thank you every night this week and I know that I can't possibly expect that anyone would come every night but I would hope that there would be some other times in which you're able to get here also I know that whatever we're doing tonight will be available so there will be in general I'm going to try to make sure what I do is a standalone but at the same time it would be enhanced if you were able to hear some of the other talks we're gonna give the rest of the week just trying to get you out each night this week we're gonna be looking at a a topic a thing that you can't live without no matter who you are no matter what your belief system no matter who you are you've got to have these things these five things we're gonna be looking at this week and you have to have a working theory of how you get it so for example you have to have satisfaction in life that's strong enough to handle the up-and-down of changing circumstances you've got to have a sense of Worth and self a sense of Worth and self that's stable enough to handle the ups and downs of your own performance you've got to have an ability to face trouble and suffering and difficulty in such a way that you don't just survive it but you actually grow through it you need a hope that helps you face the future even death you can't live without these things and everybody in this room has to be seeking them and you're looking you have to have a working theory for how to get them and tonight and every night this week I'm here to try as much as I can to be respectful to all the various views on how you get these things but I'm here to be a to make a case for why Christianity has arguably and you can argue but having said that arguably unequaled resources to give you these things now tonight the thing we're gonna look at is this you can't change the world and you can't change yourself unless you have a working theory of what's wrong with us what's wrong with the world what's wrong with human beings so if you would go to a doctor say I have a fever and a rash please treat me for a fever and a rash the doctor is going to say I can't treat you for the fever and the rash she's gonna say unless I know what's causing the fever in the rash so there she's gonna have to do a diagnosis of some kind I talked to people all the time who say I want to bring more justice in the world but the question immediately comes up well what why isn't there justice where's the injustice come from and most people I talked to have no idea well then how are you gonna deal with the injustice it's like if it's a fever and a rash you have to understand something about where it comes from so you're not going to be able to change yourself or change the world unless you have a working theory of what's wrong with the human race what's wrong with us and what we're gonna do is we're gonna look each night at a particular text in the book of mark which is all over the place around here and each night I'm gonna try to show you not only reflect on the issues around the subject but I'm going to show you how this text gives us the Christian resource for that particular thing I'm going to read chapter 7 you could follow along if you wish though it doesn't look like it's extremely bright out there and the prints small but here's what mark chapter 7 verses 14 through 23 will give us and there's some real resources in here now Jesus is starting in the middle of a conversation so we'll explain where who he's speaking to but he starting in verse 14 Jesus called the crowd to him and said listen to me everyone and understand this nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them rather it is what comes out of a person that defiles them after he had left the crowd and entered the house his disciples asked him about this parable are you so dull he asked don't you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them for it doesn't go into their heart but into their stomach and then out of the body in saying this Jesus declared all foods clean he went on what comes out of a person is what defiles them for it is from within out of a person's heart that evil thoughts come sexual immorality theft murder adultery greed malice deceit lewdness envy slander arrogance and folly all these evils come from inside and to file a person now let's ask four questions and see what the Christian resources are let's ask the question is there something wrong with us where is there something wrong with us what is the thing that is wrong with us and what to do about it is there something wrong with us where is it what is it what to do about it now Jesus says you can see would come into the middle of a conversation he starts off with a lecture and then by the way this reminds me of Oxford here notice he goes he then has a little tutorial with his disciples afterwards notice how the tutorial starts the tutor says are you so dull so just trying to contextualize to my setting Jesus's are the controversy because he and his disciples do not follow all the clean laws the clean laws of a time were enhanced Mosaic regulations and the the religious leaders of the day said you may not go into worship you are unfit for worship unless you there's a many foods that were considered unclean you can't eat those foods you can't eat in a certain way you have to wash your hands in a certain way and there was a very elaborate set of regulations to help people who felt they were unfit for the presence of God to feel that they had worked at being morally and spiritually cleansed Jesus does and his disciples did not follow all those laws and we'll explain why in a minute but if we need to start by asking the question why are we even talking about this this is modernity this is Oxford this is one of the hearts of modernity why in the world was such an arcane religious ancient religious conflict have any relevance to us today if you said that with respect you'd be wrong because modern people have just as much of a problem with feelings of shame with feelings that they're not what they ought to be that they are stained somehow and what's remarkable is it wasn't remarkable that ancient people felt that way what's remarkable is that we still are struggling with this there's a number of scholars recently have been commenting on this over the last 10 years or so if you'd like a real summary of it you can find this online look for a an article the strange persistence of guilt by Wilfred McClay the strange persistence of Gope here's the point when Nietzsche wrote the genealogy of morality he was quite excited because he said obviously when you've wronged an individual person you should feel guilty but he says the sense that we are sinners the sense that we are bad the sense that we are unworthy he says that didn't come in that's a problem we have now and that didn't come in till God the concept of God came in and he says he was very excited because he says we're reversing direction that our world is becoming less and less religious and he actually said when we get rid of the idea of God then that sense of unworthiness and shame and guilt will go away and he actually said quote unquote it will be humankind's second innocence we'll get back to the way we were before this awful idea of God came in now the fact that forces that Nietzsche was right that the world since the Nietzsche's time the world's become a lot less religious certainly Europe has and on top of that we have a culture marked by what some someone is called the triumph of the therapeutic where everyone should feel free to invent him or herself where no one should make you feel guilty about anything and yet it's still a huge problem that what Nietzsche said it was happening the cause is there which is less and less religious the cause is there but the effect is not there we are not any less struggling with guilt and shame robert jay lifton who was a very prominent american psychiatrist he was a pioneer in brain research has a fascinating statement he also was not at all a religious man but he's a fascinating place where he says this he says even though modern people do not feel both the constraints of traditional religion they don't even feel the constraints of family responsibilities as they did in the past they feel free to invent themselves yet he says they still suffer from guilt they suffer from it considerably without awareness that they love what they are suffering there is a persistent kind of self condemnation but now without religious categories to name it rather than a clear feeling of evil or sinfulness he writes it takes the form of a nagging sense of unworthiness all the more troublesome for its lack of clear origin and Freud's book civilization and its discontents famous book but it's about guilt and notice he calls guilt what he calls he calls guilt discontent he uses the German word there for guilt wood mahogany which means a malaise a disease almost maybe a nausea and what he says there is guilt hides itself one of Freud's commentators trying to summarize what Freud said says this guilt is crafty guilt is a trickster a chameleon it changes size and appearance it disguises itself as anger boredom or a sense that nothing tastes why isn't life better we say why don't I fit in why is everything out of whack that's guilt even though bottom line first point even though we have come to explain guilt away it's a it's a form of social control Freud said it's evolutionary biology other people say we've explained it away and we say you need to be free from it we don't believe maybe in God or heaven or hell or the word sin yet there's still a voice you know it that calls you a fool that comes at you says you're not what you ought to be you working working working working work to prove yourself - well we're not exactly sure who and it's never enough no no we got a problem we got a problem with shame let go we feel stained we know there's something wrong with us and now we don't have religious categories to discuss it and we don't have any good explanation of origin which makes it all the more devastating so there's something wrong with us yes number two where is that something coming from when Jesus talks about he says listen it's it's nothing outside a person defiles them by going into them rather it's what comes out of a person that defiles someone comes out of the heart Jesus of course is wading into one of the great debates in history one of the classic examples of the debate was between Hobbes and Rousseau and of course the question is are human beings basically bad and selfish and society we need society to kind of keep it in check or our human beings basically good and we need society to ruin us is that we're basically good in society ruins us or are we basically bad in society kind of constrains us which is it now even though that's that the baits been going on for a long time the fact of the matter is that Rousseau has won in modern culture hands down is one because as we look at Wednesday night a little encouragement well we're gonna be doing Wednesday night is looking at this but at the heart of our culture is the idea that you have to be true to yourself and the way you're true to yourself is you look on the inside you don't let anybody from outside define who you are you look inside and you just find your deepest desires aspirations and dreams and that's part of the way in which you find your truth and you find who you are that assumes Rousseau it assumes that in the end what defiles you is from outside social conditions psychological conditions biological things from the outside might come in and ruin us but in ourselves were fine and therefore anything you do wrong is really the result of something from outside Clarence Darrow who if you know your US history you would know that he not that you should I don't know implication there but he was the he was the lawyer that went up against William Jennings Bryan in the very famous Scopes trial the Monkey Trial over a man who was teaching evolution in class and a state in which it was illegal many years ago and there of course was he was the he supported of course the teaching of evolution and he has a very famous speech that he made in 1902 which gets across the Rousseau Ian idea and here's what he says he says there is no such thing as a crime in the way the world is generally understood people are not in jail because they deserve to be they are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it through an accident of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and from which they are in no way responsible if you've committed a crime it's because of it's because of psychological sociological factors systems that have come upon you and put you in that position that's why he says there is no such thing as a crime in the way the world is the word is generally understood so absolutely the Rousseau approach is what has one but question is that right now Jesus says it's what comes out that defiles us Jesus clearly votes on the side that says yes there are social systems that can aggravate evil but where the word the evil come from no where did the evil come from in the social system it came from inside the Bible by the way is not so simplistic is to say human beings are terribly evil they're just scum the Bible says that we are made in the image of God and we also are fallen and therefore we're a kind of explosive mixture of good and evil but Jesus says when it comes to the main direction the evil in the world is coming from us do you believe it I mean that's going against everything in your culture pretty much everything you're being taught or at least what is assumed if you don't let me give you an argument on Jesus behalf that I would call the argument from Auschwitz I can do this pretty briefly my wife and I got to Auschwitz for the very first time this year actually last year and it was the first time and of course those of you have been there or even it's still familiar enough that you know what I'm talking about here the breath of the evil was astounding how many people were killed so quickly the depth of the evil the emphasis on science and technology to just get more efficient so every day we could just kill a few more just to be a little more efficient in the furnaces a little more efficient with how people did this or that it reminds you of what Jurgen Habermas said that science can tell you how to do something efficiently but it can never tell you whether you ought to do it or not you're gonna have to look for somewhere else besides science to figure that out but here's the question why were those people capable of that kind of evil why I think there's pretty much three answers one answer is Clarence Darrow there's no such thing as a crime anything you do wrong is because you a social system or psychological you know factors led you to do it and therefore the Nazis were not guilty they were just simply they were victims themselves as some kind of social system in other words it really wasn't their fault they were just victims and of course if you do that you trivialize what happened you have no longer any categories even talk about the depth of evil that you saw there so to say well it wasn't nazis fault it was just social systems that that that's a you know that trivialize evil the second thing you can say is because they were because they themselves were terrible people I could not do that you could never do that most people would not be capable of that only certain kinds of really terrible people could do that they did it they're like second-class human beings they're subhuman woops wait a minute hey that's what they did that's what they said about the Jews that's how they D humanize them so they were able to justify doing what they did to them so number one if you don't want to trivialize what happened at Auschwitz number if you don't to make yourself capable of doing it yourself number three you need to say that every human being is capable of horrendous evil there's something really wrong within us it's out of the heart so you see the the world says you're fine inside it's the world out here your problems come from outside and you inside have all that you need to make things right the Bible says it's exactly the opposite the problems come from inside and you don't have the resources to make it right the resources are way outside you way outside you in heaven actually number three okay if that's where it is and where it's coming from what is it and here again just a nod to try to get you to come back we'll talk about this again actually tomorrow night but when Jesus says in his little list it's a really important list out of the heart comes sexual immorality theft murder adultery greed malice deceit lewdness envy slander arrogance and folly we don't have time to drill down very much but notice making money is okay but greed having confidence is okay but pride the background of this list is one of the main words used in the Bible for sin it's a word of awe which actually means something that's dislocated out of place it's a word that's used to mean a dislocated bone when a bone is not in its proper socket its twisted out of its shape and it's very painful and what the Bible says is and Jesus actually says this here sin is a dislocated heart to explain that I just turned briefly to Augustine who is the premier theologian of this part of Christian theology what he would say is as most famous line is our hearts are restless we were made for God and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him that means that your heart our hearts are dislocated bones they're supposed to be resting in the socket of God they're supposed to be loving God more than anything else and read thing in God for meaning and and for for hope and for significance more than anything else and to the degree that you love anything more than God to that degree your life is disordered your loves are disordered your loving some things that are worthy to be loved but your loving God too little in relationship to them and because your loves are out of order all sin is basically disordered love try that on for a second all sin is disordered love so for what is courage it's loving your neighbors safety more than your own what does coward is it's loving your own safety more than theirs your loves are out of order what is injustice injustice is loving your own power more than the rights of other people what is you know what that's at me par me what is injustice loving the rights loving your own power more than the rights of other people what is justice it's putting the the needs and rights of other people loving them actually more than your loving your own power and your self-interest but ultimately the ultimate disordered love is if you love anything more than God you ruin it and you ruin yourself if I love my wife more than I love God then I crush her with my expectations if I don't love God more than I love my wife I will not love her well there'll be bitterness there'll be jealousy they'll be anger they'll be pressure in other words all sins come from that and if somebody says I thought the Bible says I've already Christians say sin is disobeying the law of God yeah because Jesus says all the law of God can be summarized in to love God with all your heart soul strength in mind love your neighbor as yourself and therefore what is wrong with us it's really rather relatively simple our loves are out of order and our loves are out of order because we don't love God supremely we were built for that our hearts are like dislocated bones and only if our hearts find that resting place the bud gets back in the socket will do things start to order themselves here's what happens if that's true three things happen in other words we learn three things about about this this is what's wrong with us which is what the Bible calls sin and three things if this is true there's three results injustice to you injustice to yourself injustice to others and injustice to God very briefly injustice to yourself if you love anything more than God it'll ruin you and anything else you love especially the things you love more than God which is almost everything in most cases can't help but look at this very famous quote by David Foster Wallace who was a you know very famous postmodern poet and an writer author novelist and at one place in his very famous it was a commencement speech at Kenyon College he says this he says in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism there's no such thing as not worshipping everybody worships the only choice we get is what to worship and the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship be it Yahweh or something like that is that anything else you worship will not will eat you alive anything else you worship will eat you alive if you worship money and things if there were you tap real meaning in life then you will never have enough never feel like you have enough worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly and when time and age start showing you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you worship power you will end up feeling weak and afraid and you will never you will always need more power over others to numb you to your own fear worship your intellect being seen as smart you will end up feeling stupid of fraud always on the verge of being found out Oxford I mean he didn't say that but the insidious thing about these forms of worship is their unconscious their default settings I mean I don't know the I don't know if he was channeling or gustan there I don't even know if I ever read I guess in there but he couldn't have said it any better for a modern audience so if you love anything more than God you're doing an injustice to yourself but secondly if you love anything more than God you do an injustice to God if he exists think of the injustice somebody told me this to illustrate this I'll give it to you imagine a woman single mother very little in the way of financial resources but she has an only son she loves the son and she works day and night all of her life just to give him the best education the best life eventually goes to the best University and as she goes to the University she says son I want you to of course have a good career and and and become a learning person but what most of all I care about is that you be a good person I want you to always work hard always tell the truth and help the poor so integrity industry integrity generosity I want you to be a person like that so he goes to school and he gets his degree and he goes off into a great career and he never talks to his mother after that oh maybe he sends her a card at Christmas and Easter but it doesn't talk to her he doesn't call her he doesn't have a relationship and if somebody says what are you doing he says well if I'm being the person she wanted me to be that's what really matters right over the years I've had so many people say well I don't know whether I believe in God or not but what really matters is I'm a good person no that's not enough not at all any more than that that man is right to say well I'm the person she wanted me to be no you owe everything to her you owe everything to him and to Notley living for him is just an injustice lastly you gotta get to wind this up here when Jesus says love God with all your heart soul strength and mind and love your neighbor himself they're clearly a linked as we've seen only when your ultimate source of love and significance is God are you not going to be trying to steal it from other people Simone Vey the French philosopher said all sins are efforts to fill voids all sins are efforts to fill voids you are going to trample on other people you are going to treat people unjust if your empty so lastly what can be done about it when Jesus says it's a it's a it's a it goes by awfully quickly when he says thus Jesus declared all foods clean thus Jesus declared all foods clean he that goes by awfully fast but in light of the rest of the whole New Testament it's very significant notice he didn't say it didn't it doesn't read jesus said all foods are unclean are all foods are clean it doesn't say he said it if he had said I say unto you all foods are clean then he might have been meaning you know all that mosaic stuff the tabernacle the clean laws the sacrifices the blood and all that that you know lighten up we don't need to do that he doesn't say that there was something wrong with it he says that as of now I declare that these things are obsolete in light of the rest of the New Testament I can tell you what he's saying he's saying the Klaine laws the sacrifices all of those parts of the Israelite worship were shadows pointing a ring out to a reality that I bring and what is that reality you're stained you feel like there's something wrong with you Jesus says I can make you clean when Nietzsche pointed out that in German it's not true in English and the word debt and the word guilt are two different words but in German the word debt and the word guilt are the same word shoeld and Nietzsche was trying to make the point that guilt always is a sense of debt we owe somebody and he felt like when you get rid of God that sense of debt would go away well it hasn't as we've tried to say and you know what we owe we sense that because we're not we ought to be that we sense we deserve shame Cathy and I had a Christian teacher at Elizabeth Elliott that once said look at a clam you see that clam that claim is glorifying God better than you you know why the clam is being exactly what God made the claim to be a clam but you are not being anything like the heat man or woman that God meant you to be and you know it and you see the reason why we feel stained is because we feel we deserve shame but what happened when Jesus Christ came to earth there's a hymn that goes bearing shame and scoffing rude in our place condemned he stood bearing shame you know they didn't just kill him they mocked him and they crucified him which was to strip every bit of dignity away from him and he took it why Kathy and I one of my favorite movies is the 1938 movie Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien angels with dirty faces and as a story about the west side of Manhattan back in the 30s which was called Hell's Kitchen it was a slum at the time and there were all these Street kids out there gangs there's two kids that were friends they grew up differently one was rocky Sullivan got to be a gangster and he was a hero to all the other kids on the street and he killed people as if they didn't respect him he just killed them the other guy Gerry Connolly Pat O'Brien grew up to be a priest who worked with at-risk kids then rocky gets caught at the end of the movie and he's you know he's a criminal he's a gangster he gets caught he's on death row which meant he was going to go to the electric chair the night before he's gonna go to the electric chair Pat O'Brien Gerry Connolly father Gerry comes and says I got a request rocky says what is it he says tomorrow when you go to the chair I want you to start screaming I want you to start crying I want you to start crying out for mercy I want you to say I'm scared I don't want to die it on a die rocky look cinema says what are you talking about you want me to die without courage and Jerry says no no oh no he's I'm talking about a courage that only you and I and God will see because he says rocky you're the you're the hero of these kids if you die in glory they're gonna live lives of shame they're gonna go right where you are they're gonna end up on death row many of them only if they think you're doing a coward only if you clothed yourself in shame well they'd be disillusioned and they'll follow the right path hold on to your glory and honor they live a life of shame if they're gonna have a life of Honor you've got to close yourself in shame and of course rocky says not on your life you're taking the the last thing I've got left but as you might guess since this is a 1938 Hollywood movie at the very end as you just see the shadows of them taking him to the electric chair suddenly at the very end he starts crying out I don't want to die I want to die and of course Pat O'Brien looks to heaven and tears and you know even you ironic oxford grads undergrads I dare you to watch that and not have it catch your breath have you catch your breath but you know he's only and he's only doing what Jesus Christ did Philippians 2 said he stripped himself of his honor he made himself of no reputation he took on shame so we could have the honor that would last forever now that's a long way from explaining how that it becomes an identity you can live in - and we'll talk about that later if you're able to get back here but here's what I want you to know do you feel like you're not what you ought to be you feel in any way stained Lady Macbeth you feel that damn spot just won't come out Jesus can get the stain out into the questions so Tim the first one we have is this it seems like a lot of the Christians I know still feel guilt and shame if what you're saying is true why is that well I don't want to I don't want it I don't want to keep running dis joke too long but I I did say that Wednesday night we'd talk more about it I hunted that Christianity is an identity that needs to be lived into so there are plenty of people who right off the bat immediately for for some things they've done wrong can get a sense of certainly get a sense of that that that particular guilt is taken off of them but when it comes to the the deep the voice I talked about that calls you a fool that you're not living up you're not doing it right that voice you could call it conscience but I think that's probably stronger than that something else is going on there it's a sense we Christians would say is a sense of that you know you're alienated from the person God meant you to be whether whatever you believe whether you're an atheist we would believe that you have that sense Romans chapter 1 talks about that that is a harder thing to get over and I think I do think it takes a pretty good amount of time and I also think that we live in especially you know a place like Oxford I don't have any of you seen what is the TV show dear the good place have you seen that at all it's it's a joke about people nobody in America know well nobody in in on earth is getting to heaven anymore because there's so many things you can do wrong if you eat the tomato and you don't really do the research you might be harming people who are using pesticides in some part of the world there's also a one of our favorite jokes is it's said that well you wouldn't even know this unless you're from the United States there's a great chicken sandwich that if you eat it it means you hate gay people you probably haven't heard about that that's that's chick-fil-a and there's a consits conservative a conservative chain and of course they they met many people in the gay and lesbian community was say you can't go and eat there it's what's happening is more and more you live in a world in which it feels like everything you do seems unjust it might you might be involved with hate you you certainly aren't living up to your own standards and therefore the the malaise of guilt and shame is actually stronger I think in the world than it was 40 years ago when I still remember being an adult unlike many of you which means I think that Christians probably need a lot more Christians in a sense have money in the bank emotional money they've got theological money you could call it they've got spiritual money for dealing with that sense of shame and guilt that they have they don't know how to draw on it that so there's there's a there's usually an instant relief but I totally agree with you to say that Christians themselves are not drawing on the resources but but they're there and I I could just say from 45 years of ministry I have seen people drawn in it and it does feel to me like unique I don't but I'll be talking a little bit more about that on Wednesday great and so next question if God loved us why did he give us the ability to love disordered Li dis oh well if you if you ask you're actually asking a question which I don't think it's wrong for Christians to say I don't know the the traditional idea is that because God made us human beings in His image meaning we're rational and we have free will of course then the possibility of disordered love is is a reality certainly the whatever else you believe about the story of garden the Garden of Eden when God said don't eat that tree and he didn't give people a good reason I mean he had he said in the story and he said Adam and Eve don't eat that tree and if you do let me show you a little you know 20-minute documentary what's gonna happen he didn't do that instead he said just only that tree which was another way of saying don't eat that tree just because you love me not because it benefits you or because you know just just do it because you love me so the story is trying to say love me and and the world will be the way it ought to be don't love me in the world will not that's what that story means why didn't even give us the ability to do that there is a mystery there free will when I was younger I used to think that the free will answer was enough to say well of course we're not robots we're not animals we have free will so of course we have free will which means the possibility of of sin and disordered love I have to say over the years I that's probably not good enough for me altogether I still think there's some mystery there why if God knew the suffering that would come for him why did he allow it but I'm I'm here just to try to be candid with you and not feel like I've he you do not in order to be a Christian a really thoughtful assured Christian you do not have to have the answers to all those things I could arguably say I could argue I will that if you believe there is no God and we're just a product of evolution only and yet there's such a thing as human rights and all human beings are equal that's also an enormous leap of faith and by the way an enormous mystery why would that be true how could it be true I mean every whatever your every anything from Hinduism to secularism to Christianity you're gonna have some places in your belief system get some questions your belief system can't account for so you can't just say well because I don't have a good answer to that therefore why should I be a Christian but it's a great question and I don't have a full answer to it other than the fact that loving God is what we're made for and therefore it does seem in the end that if is you can't love someone unless it's a free choice and that's the reason why there's a possibility of disordered love thank you we have another question as you mentioned the Garden of Eden I did maybe that was a mistake we'll see but you say yeah I'll just read the question you talked about the evil from us but don't Christians believe in the devil where does he come from what's the explanation well that's the same that's a great question but it's the same there's a sense in which the depth the debt the devil must have had a Garden of Eden of some kind you go back further because obviously there you have a a sentient being we know you know we hardly understand ourselves let alone an understanding angels and demons and things like that but evidently there was somebody there were some others that were made in the image of God who also they were finite creatures they're not infinite they're not God they're not gods and it was there also they were made to God with all their heart soul strength in mind and they failed as well so there is a sense in which I don't know whether I shouldn't say this because somebody's gonna tweet this and then that's the end of my reputation of the Orthodox Christian minister but but I mean there must have been something behind the Garden of Eden where something already happened when somebody says where did evil come from I had a professor once that said it actually probably came from somewhere before the Garden of Eden which would have meant something that happened in the life that produced Satan and so yeah so Satan comes before but it's the same basic idea human being part of me I shouldn't say human beings this way beings made in the image of God who are built to love because our God is a trying God the Christian God is not a unit personal God who would not have had love as something that didn't come into God's life until God created another person we believe in a tri-personal God Father Son and Holy Spirit from all eternity which means the Christian God really can say love is intrinsic to who God is not something that comes in later and therefore to be made in the image of God is to jump is to step into that incredible joy and glory that the Father Son the Holy Spirit already have in loving one another with their entire beings so it wasn't just human beings evidently there are other beings for all I know there may be other beings besides that we don't know about but anything any one made in God's image was made for love and not to be loved God supremely is to basically put yourself on a road toward darkness and hell and so yes it started before the Garden of Eden so I'm saying on the question of loving God and and if that's what we're made for so if our problem and the question is our problem you're saying is that we don't love God enough but can you love God and not be a Christian oh yes I actually would say that there's a I've been here to try to say there is unequalled resources for that though I mean I only I just better speak personally here because that's actually a tough if I try to love God in the abstract I said well God made me and he's keeping me alive every minute that gives me a sense of gratitude I mean how would I develop love for God not just belief in God so I'm glad we're talking about this because it's not believing in God that that in a sense heals your heart of what's wrong with it it's love of God that's the Saint Agustin absolutely right I can believe in God and then go out and be very unjust if I love God perfectly I would never do an act of injustice that's Agustin makes a great case for that I think he's right so if that's the case then how do I add I can't just say I should love God yeah I have to it I'm a whole person I can't just say it to myself I've got a I've got to feel it okay presbyterian actually said I got to feel it it's amazing how do you do that you can you get grateful to you think about gratitude think about God gave you everything but when I think about God coming to earth emptying himself of his glory being born in a manger bearings shame and scoffing rude going to the cross almost every night I'll be talking about this I believe that gets that gets me to a very new level of love when I see sacrifice i one time I said a woman did come to me and actually ask me this question and I must have been in a bad mood I'm sorry for even telling you this because it was I was younger I was less mellow and they came and said I believe I love God and I believe I can love God without being a Christian and maybe I was like I said I should have said I said let me ask you a question what has your God sacrificed in order to love you what has your God given up what does he sacrifice in order to love you and she said nothing I said well it's when I see someone sacrificed for me that it pulls me out my heart out toward them and as far as I know Christianity is the only God that's got a God that does that so she by the way wasn't offended she said hadn't thought about that so I probably was I probably was smiling when I said it so I'm saying it to you like this we've time for one more question I'd say I'm just trying to choose which i think is make it really hard well the this is on a similar theme to where you were just say okay and perhaps you could yeah unpack it from a different way see this person says I didn't understand why it wouldn't be enough just to love each other rather than love God could you explain that in a different way right I tried to speak to that I probably only gave it 90 seconds I gave an illustration there was some years ago somebody did come to me and say I love other people why do I need to love God and the argument I tried to give you in that whoever asked the question the story you probably remember the story but I probably did not my wife often says I didn't ring the changes I didn't I let it go by too quickly the story of the woman who gives everything to get her son a good education and a good career and then the son ethically does the things the mother wants but has no relationship I was trying to say if there is a God who made you created you keeps you alive every second and of course in in the Christian case it came to earth and and sacrifice in order to deal with your debt it deal with your shame and so on if there is a God like that then to not love him is an injustice it's a terrible injustice it would be jut it'd be far more a greater injustice than if that young man acting like that to his mother I don't know there's anybody anywhere they would think that what he was doing was was just that's an injustice because he's saying hey I'm good to the poor I'm good to everybody else I'm honest I'm working hard so you might say horizontally to everybody else I'm loving other people no I don't love my mother but I'm being the person that you want and I'm saying if there is a God then it is not enough just a lotta people and I tried to say if well this is my wife my wife who said agrees like saying this my wife my wife Cathy's over here if Cathy and I only tried to love each other without loving God more and it's a struggle to love God more than your spouse it's particularly if you have a good marriage there's absolutely no way we would be doing it well we would we would be putting too much pressure on each other we would be getting too disappointed if the each of us would feel like well the other person is having a problem we'd melt down because the other person is almost like your God because it's the main person's the main source of affirmation for you there's all kinds of ways in which simply loving other people simply it's not enough not only that you won't love other people well unless you love God so from the justice point of view you need to love God not just other people and from the practical point of view you need to love God or you won't really be able to love other people in the same way brilliant well thank you very much Tim that's all the time we have for for questions shall we give Tim a round of applause [Applause] you

Channel: OICCU

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Id: 6ZpqY3xRmKQ

Length: 47min 38sec (2858 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019