"You shall be my witnesses" - John Lennox (Session One)

[Music] good morning Barada that's much better I must say I am humbled by Lindsay's generous efforts to make me a virtual welcome you will notice the word virtual and that's something to do with virtual reality I think but it is a real pleasure and an honor for me to be here at this first forum in Wales as Lindsey said I spent 25 years here and they were very important years I shall always be indebted to this country for the patience and Christian endurance they showed when I appeared among them in the early 1970s and proceeded to speak expounding Scripture and many churches up and down the valleys and I'm amazed looking back how they were prepared to tolerate me coming so often I think I went to trigger for example for was at 16 weeks in a row giving talks but the tradition of Wales as a country that generates preachers certainly was of enormous importance to me in those days and I look back with great fondness to the many friends we made and the opportunities we received here which was a great training ground for the world beyond Wales so it is for that and many other reasons that I'm pleased to be here and yet there's a poignancy about the fact but last week I think it was officially the statistics of belief in God in the United Kingdom are no less than 50 percent so that Christianity is by definition and mine rooty position I'm hoping that they will grant us all the opportunities that minorities are granted now to communicate the Christian faith and it's therefore very important that we go to a part of scripture that encourages us as it did the early disciples to be witnesses to the Lord Jesus and I simply want to share with you some of the things from the book of Acts the book of Acts of course is the second volume of a two volume history that dr. Luke wrote he was not unusually these days he was both a historian and a medical doctor and he was chosen by God to record for us the way in which Christianity launched on the world but the statement at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke is of immense importance many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word therefore since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you most excellent Theophilus so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught now there are several very important emphases here the first is that Luke had received what he wrote from people who are described as eyewitnesses and servants of the word that is twin appellation eyewitnesses and servants of the word and it seems to me in an age where in general although we've heard delightfully that there are some exceptions there is great loss of confidence in God in His Word in Christ and in the Christian faith we need to have something to witness to and what we witness to needs to be firmly embedded in our understanding of the word you will notice the exact purpose of the Gospel of Luke which I have emphasized in yellow at the bottom so that you may know the certainty of the things that you have been taught the Gospel of Luke is about certainty not simply about information when we read it many of us who have been Christians for years we know what's there but the question is do we know it with certainty how can we measure that we measured it simply by our willingness to engage with the world outside with its content and that is a challenge it's a seriously important challenge I can remember that when I first came to Wales I knew a fair bit about scripture not as much as I should but the big issue for me was how do you get that across how do you translate it into a credible message for your contemporaries it was one thing and a very important thing to preach it in the church but it was an entirely different thing to communicate it into your community and our certainty as we sit here this morning will shew itself in just how engaged we are in communicating this message are we confident enough of it to speak into a culture that undermines that every conceivable turn now of course Luke has proved himself to be a brilliant historian and a lot of work has been done on the authenticity of his work Sir William Ramsay spent over 20 years doing research in the areas in which Luke wrote and he especially concentrated on Luke's references to factual detail country names city names Islands names of officials and so on and he discovered to his amazement that Luke made no mistakes and the Roman historian Sherwin white said four acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd matters of history are very important and I'm not simply saying that because Lindsey Brown is a historian I'm saying it because the older I get the more important I see the the fact of Christianity is embedded in historical revelation and again and again increasingly of course the Bible as a source is being questioned and the only way to answer the questions is to know some of the facts we cannot be content simply with vague platitudes we need to know the facts and that's going to introduce a question that will become increasingly relevant we've got to start these days a lot further back than we used to start we cannot start even in Wales blessed as it has been with people knowing the Bible they may not be as far back as some other countries but nevertheless knowledge of the biblical worldview is very limited so we have to get to know it in terms that make sense to people that do not share that worldview and the book of Acts of course will bring this to us very clearly indeed now we proceed straight to the message of Acts and I'm going to speak with fair rapidity really and try to summarize basic points this is not going to be a full exposition if you want an exposition there are many very good ones the one that has helped me most is the one by my friend and mentor David Gooding quote true to the faith you can even don't know that one free but there are many other ones that I have used through my life and found extremely helpful indeed what we discover in that book is the spread of the gospel geographically from Jerusalem to Rome it is as if a priest called it the record of a spreading flame and there's nothing I long and I know you long to see more than that flame spreading and we've heard of various initiatives are ready to spread the flame in Wales that sense that the gospel doesn't stop anywhere it is not a Cody sack it is not a dead-end street it needs to spread and the spread in the book of Acts is from Jerusalem and it ends up with Paul under open arrest in Rome awaiting his trial but unhindered communicating the gospel to the Roman citizens but as we go through the book of Acts we ask ourselves obviously why is Luke choosing what he does choose and the answer to that is in principle that we should know exactly the key emphases in the gospel are we find that Christianity actually defines itself against opposition now we should know what that means we're going to know it if we don't know it already the moment you stand up in public to try to explain the Christian gospel you discover that you will mate misrepresentation mess up understanding opposition and maybe even persecution and then you've got to decide what do I stand for you will remember as we think in this Reformation year of Martin Luther here I stand I can do nothing else but where do we stand there are so many issues major issues are not simply peripheral issues where the culture is undermining any standing in fact the very idea of standing for anything comes into disrepute nobody wants clear-cut positions and certainly no absolutes anymore now the encouraging thing about this is the book of Acts is written to counteract that in the very first century and what we find is at the beginning two major emphases first of all we discover that the gospel is a super natural gospel and secondly we see that it makes exclusive trains it's a supernatural gospel that is it clashes head-on with the currently dominant worldview in the west of naturalism the idea that nature as we see it is all that exists this universe is all that is was our I shall bathe there is no transcendence there is no supernatural dimension into that world Luke speaks and says that someone came from heaven he was born he did various miracles He healed the sick raised the dead but he himself after being crucified rose from the dead ascended into heaven and will visibly return and I guarantee if you say in our contemporary world as I do that not only do I believe that Jesus rose but that he ascended and that he will return people can actually see that you believe in the supernatural even though they may think you are crazy so it was a supernatural dimension and I want to point out that this was something that initially offended the ancient world the offense against Christian supernaturalism didn't arrive in the middle of the 19th century or the 20th it was there at the very beginning because they understood as Luke points out to us the laws of nature to their limited extent as well as we do today and they knew the dead people didn't rise so they could understand very clearly that what was being presented was supernatural but the thing that went with that that sometimes the more difficult to get across these days is that the claim the central claim of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is unique He is God become a human and he is unique and especially as regard to the question of salvation now this is a striking thing as you read the book of Acts there is not a great deal about the ethics of Christianity although there is some we are shown the Chris living ethically in their society but there's no much teaching about ethics there are vast amounts of teaching about salvation we need to recover their balance because the danger is of course are simply Christianizing a social attitude to other people and of course the care of our fellow men and women is enormous ly important Christ demonstrated it but if it is done and explained at the expense of keeping quiet about salvation then we're not offering people the most important thing that we have to offer them and so Luke is packed full of the preaching of salvation and we need to recover that emphasis there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved the world through electronics has become very small and many people fail and think and say that the last thing that you can afford to do in a politically correct society is to say that there is only one way of salvation we cannot compromise on it why not because the Apostles didn't once that goes the message goes so the two things the supernatural dimension that is questioned by many of the leading thinkers in our world and the exclusivism in a positive sense not exclusive shutting people out but exclusive in the sense that this is the only way that anybody can be saved this is something that we have to stand for and we face some very sobering statistics a third of Church of England clergy and this occurs elsewhere doubt or disbelieve in the physical resurrection and only half are convinced of the truth of the virgin birth a poll of nearly 2,000 of the church's 10,000 clergy also found that only half believe that faith in Christ is the only route to salvation that is tragic isn't it what is the point if you do not believe in those two things and this increases the difficulty for our fellow men and women if they turn to look at the church I remember a Cambridge I had one of the brightest mathematicians of the 20th century as a research supervisor and in my youthful way I tried to talk to him about God and I remember he just quietly said in his friendly voice that John he said I discovered the bishops don't believe so why should I that was desperately sad what could you say well I believe that yes but who are you the official representatives don't believe now of course there are many bishops who do believe and I thank God for them but the impression given is another thing that does tend to under - so in the middle of this we have to do what the early apostles engaged in and that was persuasive evangelism that phrase that Peter May has used to describe what is often called apologetics a word that I would love to abolish the reason is very simple apologetics is not an English word it's a Greek word it's not quite a Greek word the Greek word is apologia and it simply means defense and instead of translating it as defense we've made a subject of it which to many people is part of philosophy 101 Christianized and is therefore only for the intellectual elite that is desperately sad you see in that famous statement Peter of the major preacher the beginning of action in 1 Peter 3 he explains that we always ready to give a defense and a reason for people that ask us and it's very interesting to notice he is talking about dialogue I wonder if you've ever noticed that so often this is referred to preaching it's nothing to do with preaching be ready to give those who ask you an answer and I ask you each one of you when was the last time anybody did I was troubled by that when I was 19 at Cambridge I thought I was ready to give answers but nobody did and I remember a younger Christian than may said have you ever tried asking them I said of course not he said why not what he said they don't have any hope he said you try asking them the very next time I was travelling to London on the train and engaged someone in conversation and the way I used to by buying a newspaper and holding it up so the opposite person could read it and I would Whitley were reading it then and say would you like a bit of this and we'd engaged in conversation and this particular man he turned out to be a scientist that he started reading one of his own books of metallurgy and I said are you reading about science he said yes so I took out a New Testament and started reading it and held it so as he could see it of course and after a few minutes he said is that a New Testament you're rating I said yes but I continued reading and he continued reading but he kept looking over again and after another two three minutes he said sorry I don't really mean to interrupt but you are reading a New Testament I said yes that's right and I kept on reading and of course his provocation got greater and greater but he said I thought you were a mathematician I said that's exactly right he said why are you reading New Testament so I remembered this young man had said to me so I turned to him said have you got any hope and there was dead silence and he went white there's a man in his late 50s they started to shake and then he said I guess we'll all just muddle through I said you know that's not what I meant have you got any personal hope he said none whatsoever and I said that's why I'm reading the New Testament so I gave him one oh by the way you believe scripture is the Word of God when was the last time you gave anybody a copy of anything do we really believe it and have confidence in it Gideon Testaments my wife won't let me leave host without two of them and she hopes at least one of them won't come back so I gave him this we were coming into Paddington and as I give it to him a lady appeared behind us and she had hair away up like this and she interrupted and she said I believe in Mother Earth you can see where she was coming from and she said I've been listening to you have you got one of those books for me now you see I expect that to happen all the time because I believe it's a Living Word and we can test ourselves if we haven't got any with us we clearly don't believe that we'll ever meet anybody to give it away we've got to measure the difference between our theoretical beliefs ladies and gentlemen and our real beliefs and that sometimes are hard question because it touches all of us out so when we look at the book of Acts what we discover it falls into two two major halves firstly mainly preaching and defending the gospel with Peter at its head until you get to chapter 12 and in verse 24 where it says the word of the Lord continued to increase spread and then you move on to a slight change in emphasis where it's mainly Paul and Paul is defending and preaching the gospel for the rest of the book so there's a great deal of this kind of activity and it's an interesting thing to note I haven't time to dwell on it that the centerpiece of Luke coming up to the climax at the end of chapter 12 is where Herod the King sits on a throne and the people say the voice of God and not a man and he gives not God the glory and God strikes him the center point of Luke's Gospel is up in a mountain where Jesus is transfigured and the voice of God does come this is my beloved son listen to him and the contrast is so vivid the eternal world of glory of fenty cating who Jesus is and the authenticated Herod and the trouble is that in acts this is the kind of thing we face in the extreme it's man playing God at all kinds of different levels now acts is a big book and as I have read dozens of commentaries and so on and look at it myself in great detail I can see that the Acts of the Apostles is divided very carefully by Luke himself now this is recognized by many people including John Stott who's been mentioned David girding and a whole long list of people tend to take these markers as authentic meant by Luke to divide his gospel up and I list them because they are extremely interesting they begin to communicate a message to us in chapter 6 verse 7 we read so the word of God spread and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith notice the word of God spread and various words are used that indicate multiplication in particular here not just ordinary people but a great number of the priests came to faith 931 then the church throughout Judea Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace it was strengthened and encouraged by the Holy Spirit it grew in numbers of living in the fear of the Lord 12:24 but the Word of God continued to increase and spread 16-5 so the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers 1920 in this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power and then finally at the end of the book for 2 whole years Paul stayed there at his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ I am sure you've noticed the poetic repetition and alternation in those the Word of God spread the church increased the word increased the churches were strengthened the word spread the word the church the word the church the word the church not saying something isn't it you want to see the church increase well you'd better ensure that the word increases but please ladies and gentlemen this is not the word preached in the church it's the word preached to form the church preaching the word to believers is enormous ly important but there won't be any believers to preach to and bless the word spreads in the word in the world and what is being emphasized here is precisely that it's the word growing in the world and then the treacherous grew as a result of it of course and these men and women in the book of Acts had their eyes on the world that took a lot of courage didn't it there weren't many of them to start with and the world was exactly like it is today pluralistic relativistic also and this tiny band of people dared to believe that they knew the truth not simply as a formulated religious or philosophical doctrine but for them and for us that truth is a person that's extremely important the truth is a person I am the truth said Lord Jesus and they had the courage empowered by God's Spirit to go out into the world and see real progress see the word begin to undermine all the philosophical political religious prejudices and influences of the day and prevail and it is just thrilling to read this account the word drew the churches grew the word grew the churches increased and so on we don't want that confined to past history do we we'd love to see more and more of it today and there are parts of the world of course in which it is happening but the very structure of the gospel is indicating to us what has to happen for progress to be made the word must roll I'm so grateful to have had mentors and one in particular who muddled what it means to spend time in the Word of God you know and I speak freely because I don't know who's sitting in front of me apart from a few friends lovely to see you but if we spend five minutes a day reading Scripture we're not going to reach the world and let me speak to young people what do you spend your time on let me make that more precise look over the past 24 hours and ask yourself how much time you spent watching an electronic screen that has nothing to do with your work or your study or anything else and then tell me that you've no time no delays don't the scripture talks about fasting I would like to suggest that one of the absolute necessities for many of us is electronic fasting we're twittering and tweeting you know when I was young that was the birds that tweets dare I say nowadays it seems to me to be producing bird brains so of course I use either clumps I'm using them right now they're very important but ladies and gentlemen we're rewiring our brains according to the psychologists if you reduce every content to 160 characters and we're spending them ascending about into cyberspace you will never get to know scripture and I would be thrilled that there were some young people for whom today and morale would be a turning point or you say right I'm going to spend real quality time getting to know the Word of God and as it grows in you you will grow in confidence and as you read it prayerfully and think about it and simultaneously engage with your friends as these early Christians did you will discover it begins to have a deep effect now I'm not saying that because I'm a grumpy old man I know I'm an old man and I can be grumpy unfortunately because as you get old you discover bones you never do were there but apart from that it is just so important for me to say things to you that were important when I heard them as a teenager I was very very blessed to hear them but unfortunately not every body does hear them so bear with that because it will require you to make up your mind there is time as my electronic point makes but you've got to it's not sacrificing because giving up something that's useless is not sacrifice some Christians think it is my ice sacrificed and you ask them what they sacrificed while I was going to spend 10 hours watching a soap opera that's not sacrifice ladies and gentlemen so off we go into the book of Acts and we're going to look briefly a part of this first section so it the first run from chapter 1 verse 1 to chapter 6 verse 7 deals famously with the day of Pentecost and Peters and John's healing of the man at the temple gate and the opposition that comes up against the gospel the basic message on the day of Pentecost is of course the fact that Jesus is the risen Lord the message that Peter preaches in the second half of the first section of Acts is that Jesus is the only name so let's just look a little table of contents of this first section there appeared to be eight major parts there is the Ascension and then very surprisingly there's the very odd description of the fact that Judas has to be replaced with someone else to bear the witness then we have the events of Pentecost and the healing of the lay man then the opposition starts from the Sanhedrin from the religious authorities we're then given an insight into church life but a fearsome example of God's discipline of Ananias and Sapphira because of deception and then there's a second Halling before the Sanhedrin and finally there is the work of the Deacons that leads up to the second part of the book just look at that for a moment we see the very strong emphasis on the supernatural the Ascension their miracle of tongues of fire and foreign languages of Pentecost the healing of the lame man the judgement of Ananias and Sapphira and so on I have tremendous emphasis on the supernatural but then there is and emphases on the material Judis gets into trouble and the money is used to buy a field you remember that Ananias and Sapphira the issue is over possessions in fact a field and in the final little section you read of Barnabas selling a field what is all this about fields and possessions and material well it's striking a balance because the supernatural if it's real will have an effect on the material and what we see in the insights were given here into the life of the early church is precisely that what effect has our belief on the supper supernatural on the material so let's now look at some of these things they're so interesting I wish ad hours and hours to talk about them but perhaps you don't but we'll have a look just at a few of these for our encouragement first of all we have the Ascension the book of Acts begins with a very important statement of our Lord after his suffering says Luke he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive he appeared to them over a period of 40 days of spoke about the kingdom of God on one occasion while he was eating with them he gave of this command do not Lea leave Jerusalem but wait for the gift my father promised which you have heard me speak about for John baptized with water but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit so when they wrapped together they asked him Lord are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel he said it is not for you to know the times or dates the father has set by his own authority but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes in you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth after he said this he was taken up before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight so the resurrection is emphasized and of course if you're asked to explain the existence of the Christian Church you come straight back to the resurrection professor mole charlie bowl of Cambridge wrote if they're coming into existence of the Nazarenes a phenomenon that undeniably attested by the New Testament rips a great hole in history a hole the size and shape of the resurrection what does the secular historian proposed to stop it up with the birth and the rapid rise of the Christian Church remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the church itself now I have not got time but I've written about it in my book gunning for God while I think Davidson was wrong when he influenced many of the contemporary thinkers today to believe that it is impossible to believe in supernatural miracles of the new testament in an age of science I think he was wrong and demonstrably wrong but I haven't time to go into that what I want to do is concentrate on what acts encourages us with because the Lord not only rose from the dead he ascended why do that why do that and the reason is given in the explanation afforded to the disciples when he had gone in verse 9 of chapter 1 it says after he'd said this he was taken up before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight they were looking intently up into the sky as he was go when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside him men of Galilee they said why do you stand here looking into the sky this same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you've seen him go into heaven why the Ascension it's a thought model of the second coming notice that five times over in these verses Luke says that they saw it and they didn't see it because they believed in a three-decker universe was held beneath earth in the middle and the heavens above they're describing what they saw it was physical and visual and the reason for it is given you will see him so coming in the same way as you saw him go it was given to them at the very inception of Christianity to give them certainty that this earth had not seen the last of him he will come again and we need to recover that sense don't we it is quite clear from this first section of the book of Acts that the disciples were empowered by God's Spirit with a great sense that history had taken a huge step forward now they must took a step and so do many people because the question that they were asking Lord do you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel he'd risen from the dead he got power surely he was going to move in and throw out the occupying Roman forces and authorities are you going to do it no please notice by the way because the question was not are you going to restore the kingdom of course it wasn't because they all believed it on the basis of the Messianic promises in the Old Testament it was are you going to do it and the Lord answered that in two ways he said it's not for you to know the times of the seasons but he didn't say I'm not good to do it at all he said the opposite he said the father has set them in his own authority it's already been organised don't you worry about it you get on with the gospel that is a very important that vs. isn't it they were to believe he was returning they were not to spend their time worrying about exactly when it was going to occur in the power of that conviction that he was returning they were to get on with the gospel because the restoration and it's full of sense wouldn't happen yet now that's one of the major themes of the first section of Acts understandably so how could these men stand up in front of Jews in Jerusalem and the Sanhedrin and all the Pharisees and Sadducees some of them believed in Scripture and claimed that Jesus is the Messiah when he wasn't there was a very convenient belief you could imagine the skeptics a very convenient sewer some evidence of it well they did show the evidence of it but it was crucially important at that stage and it still is today especially if you like me have many Jewish friends to demonstrate from Scripture that this was to be expected and Peter stands up but he explains it from Scripture wonderfully he said you know what's happened Joel predicted this would happen these people are drunk but something magnificent has happened you know what it is the Lord said unto my lord sit at my right hand that means he wasn't always sitting at the right hand but now it's just happened the Messiah Jesus has been invited to sit at the right hand of God and he's going to be there until when Peter fills in the rest of it in his second sermon he says until the time of restoration of all things now why is this important I'm just going to come to a conclusion with one major point here Pentecost was utterly thrilling it was a reversal of Babel here were people who had not learned these languages and the others heard them speak their languages it was a miracle they were telling the mighty works of God but notice the very phenomenon of the way they were telling the mighty works of God was itself a mighty work of God it was a spectacular demonstration that this universe is not a closed system of cause and effect and they were proclaiming the mighty works of God and it seemed utterly irresistible and thousands of them came to faith when Peter told them who Jesus was that had set this all in motion but then Peter and John went up to the temple and there was a lame man in front of it he was positioned there of course because people tend to feel more generous when they're going to places of worship how can you go to worship God when there's someone like that at the gate isn't that the problem of the poignant world what's your hardest problem I know what mine is by far in witnessing to this gospel it's the lane at the gate of the temple it's the cancers it's the tsunamis it's the genocides that's the problem if there is a God and he's got the power of Pentecost why doesn't he clean the hospitals of all disease and rid the world of all troubles don't you feel that because you do I feel it and yet somehow we have to navigate what scripture teaches here because what it teaches is very carefully balanced first of all there are these supernatural activities the Holy Spirit is real he did things then and he can do things but the ultimate restoration is not yet Peter and John healed the man and he left and will became a powerful witness to the theologians in the Sanhedrin but they didn't heal everybody and Peter explains that and he says you know Jesus has gone to heaven and he puts it this way he said whom that the heavens must receive until the time of restoration of all things it's not yet you know what one of the hardest things is it's to believe in all of this and to somehow navigate your way credibly through a world that's full of questions now of course I believe that atheism is no solution because atheism removes all hope straight away by definition it is no solution to the problem of evil but there are no easy answers and I'll finish with this and if you want to see what I say about this in some detail I arrived in New Zealand two days after the earthquake and I have to change all my talks television interviews radio broadcasts and if you google my name in New Zealand you can see in detail how I tried at least with God's help to face these issues in a very living situation but what the beginning of the book of Acts raises to me is there is a supernatural realm it has invaded our world Jesus Christ he's ascended he sent his Holy Spirit and the churches started again by a powerful supernatural invasion but now the restrictions come not everybody gets healed though the gospel is open to everybody how do we go for that and the question I put to myself I'm not going to answer in detail because I haven't time I have a detailed answer in my book gunning for God towards the end and it's this we look at a mixed world we see evidence of God and Supernature and we see barbed wire bombs and poverty and starvation it's a mixed world and the question that comes to me is this we got a face it's like that to pretend it's not like that is crazy so granted it's like that is there enough evidence to believe that there is a God who we could safely trust with it father we just pray that you would grant us understanding in these things open our eyes to see the Lord Jesus through his work and give us the guts and the courage to get out into the world and get the word across so that it might increase of the churches might increase as well for we ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord

Channel: Wales Leadership Forum

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Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2017