American Gospel #2 (9)
American Gospel • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 3 viewsNotes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Announcements
Business Meeting this coming Sunday
___
We’ll start walking through 1 Peter on September 20th and that’ll probably take us through Thanksgiving, if not Christmas and then we’ll have a book study to kick off the new year
Prayer Requests
David/Carol Ward
Jim Freeman - coming back to Salem for rehab today
During this study we’ve encountered many different people who have a problem with the Biblical Gospel of Jesus Christ being fully-God, fully-man, coming to this world and living a perfect life and dying for sinners like you and I on the cross in order to save us from our sins and restore us to our Father in Heaven. Some people have a problem with this because they think that it’s not very loving of God, others don’t think that they are really that bad of a person to deserve death/separation from God, and others have simply abandoned anything resembling Christianity completely… At the same point, we’ve seen example after example of people defending what the Bible teaches by using Bible verses. As I’ve said, we should always be able to say something to someone and back it up with 3 simple words: Book, Chapter, Verse. If you can book, chapter, and verse it, your argument gets a whole lot stronger!
Many people fail to see the Bible as authoritative. This study has highlighted this sad reality as many place their feelings above that of Scripture and we know this to be true in our world as well as there are people who will use the Bible when it suits them but abandon it whenever they feel a different way. Why is it so important to submit to the authority of Scripture?
If we fail to, we’ll trust self or go with the flow in our society
11 And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers,
12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ,
13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.
14 Then we will no longer be little children, tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning with cleverness in the techniques of deceit.
Until we understand the authority of Scripture and that Scripture is God-breathed and inspired by Him and that it has the ability to tell us what to do and why to do what we’re supposed to do, we’ll fall victim to ourselves and our fallen world. If we don’t stand on Scripture, we’ll be like the man who built his house on the sand and it came crashing down whenever the wind and the rain showed up. We must stand on Scripture or we’ll fall away and be led astray by another message that sounds pleasing to our ears but fails to deliver what we really need.
Tonight as we study, we’ll see the result of abandoning the authority of Scripture and how it might lead to what we want but it takes us to a dark place where our deepest questions are unanswerable. Let’s watch tonight’s clip
___________
This section is about Secular Humanism - this is a phrase that many of us are unfamiliar with… so it might help to look at some things that people who adhere to this worldview believe in:
Nontheism (deny existence of God)
Naturalism (deny supernatural)
Evolution (deny sovereign Creator)
Relativism (deny absolute truth/morals) everything is feelings based
Self-sufficiency (deny need for divine intervention) is our only hope for solving our problems
These people have much in common with Progressive Christians
Believe in existence of God
Some deny supernatural
Many deny sovereignty of God in favor of sovereignty of science
Many deny absolute truth in favor of subjective feelings
Many believe that we can solve all of our problems on our own
Lots to unpack here from this shorter chapter. Let’s start out with Bart Campolo’s confession towards the beginning where he says this, “In the end I stopped believing that Jesus physically rose from the dead.” If you recall, he was the person who in the beginning of the film said, “The Bible is wrong about this one.” What is the slippery slope of placing yourself above Scripture?
You get to pick and choose what you like and what you believe rather than believing all of Scripture
You can water down the hard parts where there is some tension
This photo on the screen will be hard to see, but I’ll break it down for us as I’ve seen this to be true with several people I grew up with and I trust you have as well
Christianity
The Bible is not infallible
We are not made in God’s image
Denial of supernatural/miracles
Denial of virgin birth
Denial of deity of Jesus Christ
Denial of atonement / forgiveness of sins on the cross
Denial of bodily resurrection
Maybe there is a god…?
Full-fledged atheism
This is that slow fade and slippery slope that is hard to stop the moment that you believe that you know better than the Bible and that the Bible is wrong and not authoritative… where does that train stop? Almost always, deconstruction doesn’t stop until the person believes something not even resembling Christianity but themselves. We can think of the word deconstruction in a positive light if we’re deconstructing man-made traditions that are not found in Scripture - for example: I know some friends who were raised in a denomination that taught them that unless you were water baptized, you were not going to go to heaven - to the point that they believed that if you were saved by grace through faith in Christ and you were to have a heart attack on the way to the river to get baptized, you wouldn’t go to heaven. The thief on the cross proves to us that this isn’t true because he wasn’t baptized and Jesus told him that they would be together that day in paradise! That is a healthy thing to “deconstruct” from because we want to be Biblical, not always necessarily traditional. We can think of other examples of healthy things to deconstruct from that are traditional in some churches and denominations but not taught in the Bible… the problem comes whenever we deconstruct based on our feelings, and not based on God’s Word - that always leads to problems and this is what we see in our clip tonight!
One of the main things that skeptics attack in Christianity is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe it was John Stott who said that Christianity hinges on the Resurrection. Either Jesus really did rise from the grave and, if so, He was who He said He was… Or He did not in which case He was a liar and a fraud. Why do people wrestle with the Resurrection?
Goes against the normal pattern in our world: Life to Death
We don’t see it happen often
Some believe the Resurrection was a made up lie that didn’t really happen but was a coverup by the disciples
Consider some of the complications with this theory, though.
We read in Scripture that Jesus didn’t just appear to the 11 remaining disciples (Judas is gone) and a few others…
6 Then he appeared to over five hundred brothers and sisters at one time; most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep.
500 people at one time saw the resurrected Christ! We aren’t told in any literature that it was a lie or only a small number of people saw Him post-Resurrection
13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised;
14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith.
As we reflect on these early followers of Jesus Christ, we see that they proclaimed the truth of the resurrection. They went to their deaths still holding onto the truth of the resurrection - if this were to be a made up lie, not only would they have had to steal His body and fool the most powerful empire the world has ever known, they would have had to maintain this lie to their painful deaths and not have a single one of them waver and spill the beans. In philosophy there’s a thing you learn called Occams Razor and it is a principle that says that whenever you have different possibilities, the simplest one is the right one. What is the simplest answer: That 11 disciples, their family members, and 500 others all successfully lied and deceived everyone else, or that the Bible is right and Jesus actually rose from the dead like He promised that He would?
We understand the difficulties with the Resurrection as it does seem to go against conventional wisdom. You and I don’t just see people come back after being dead for 3 days… but we also know from this study that Jesus Christ is no ordinary man… yes, He was man… but He was also fully-God! He never once sinned. His death was God’s plan from the foundation of the earth. Scripture promised that this snake-crushing Savior would be pierced and bruised
15 I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.
5 But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds.
Jesus Himself promised this
22 saying, “It is necessary that the Son of Man suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, be killed, and be raised the third day.”
23 Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.
This is the clear teaching of Scripture - that Jesus would not only die for our sins but rise from the grave and win for us our ultimate victory over sin and death!
Fewer and fewer people are standing on the truth of the Resurrection, but they still claim to be Christian… Can you be a Christian and deny the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ?
NO!
We look around our country today and we see fewer and fewer people being “members” of Churches than in generations of the past. If you look at studies that investigate this trend, you see that the denominations that are shrinking faster and faster are those who have abandoned the Bible’s teaching on Jesus Christ, sexuality, and truth in order to “cater” to the world… The moment that we structure our beliefs and services for unbelievers, we lose. We stand on what the Bible teaches - so long as the Lord has me here, you’ll always here from this pulpit, “The Bible says it, that settles it.” And I mean that! What we need in our world is the church to actually practice what the Bible teaches. This means that we believe what the Bible says. We worship how the Bible commands us to worship - not with TED Talks and KC Wolf on stage with a fog machine pumping everyone up before the first song… We practice discipline when and how the Bible commands. In the SBC right now there is a lot of attention being given to how we used to have 16 million members and now we only have 13 million members. What has happened? For one, I know of multiple large churches with thousands of members that hadn’t looked through their membership list in decades that actually reviewed their list and discovered that in some cases 1000 members have passed away. In some cases 1000 have moved away to another town or another state and are attending a different church. And, sure, in some cases there are those who still live in the same town but simply don’t come to church… All of these represent problems - but it is the final category that especially presents a problem and it’s a growing problem. People who grew up in church, learned the songs, knew the stories, walked the aisle, did some stuff, and haven’t been to church in years or decades. I want those people back - don’t you?
One of our problems in our post-modern world is that people came to church for a period and were told that church doesn’t really matter, you can be a Christian by yourself, go and read your Bible at home every now and then and you’ll be fine! That’s a low view of Church for one, but for two you wonder why we have so many crazy ideas floating around now about Jesus and things that we’ve seen in this documentary, you know how some of them started? Because people abandoned church, went off on their own, and had no discipline, accountability, and were led astray by false teachers… and that ought to break our hearts! It’s so easy to be deceived if we’re standing in our own - even to deny the resurrection entirely. As one of the people said, “The only difference between me and the atheist is the grace of God.” I would rather people who no longer believe in the resurrection or authority of Scripture or the importance of gathering with God’s people to be honest enough to say so and say that they want nothing to do with Christianity anymore than those who want the benefits of Christ and the comforts of the world to suit whatever need they have. That’s where we’re at in our messed up world.
Bart Campolo said that as he began to deconstruct his faith, he began to really like god because the god that he had made during his deconstruction began to look a whole lot like himself… Do you see this show up in our world at all?
God wouldn’t do _____ because I wouldn’t do ________
He went on to share that the sum of Christianity is to love God and to love others as ourselves and you can do good without God… Voddie Baucham shared, though, that what this mentality does is it leads us to the Law of the Old Testament. The same Law that God’s people could never keep…! What we need is not more law, we need grace - we need the Gospel which shares that Jesus Christ did that perfectly because we couldn’t… therefore, go and follow Jesus.
Some mistake the root for the fruit. The fruit of our salvation is good works (think Loving God and Loving Others), but that cannot be the root of our salvation. The root of our salvation is faith in Jesus Christ.
8 For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—
9 not from works, so that no one can boast.
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
We are saved by faith FOR good works! Once we are saved, we should desire to help those in need and to share the good news with the lost… but our pursuit of justice or goodness or any of those things does not save by itself. Faith in Jesus alone saves!
As we wrap up, I want us to consider this final observation. Secular Humanism, or the belief that humans can be moral without believing in God, puts you in unanswerable places when it comes to evil and injustice in the world. Bart Campolo said as much… After this life, the humanist has no hope because they believe that this life is naturally all that there is. Because of this belief, humanists will stop at nothing to see the earth become their perfect utopian society of perfect justice for all. But in doing so, they have to practice injustice as we saw play out with Marx in the last century. Humanism leaves its proponents hopeless because there is an endless amount of work ahead… How does Christianity stand out from humanism in regards to morality and hope for the future?
Morality is found in God. Without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6)
Hope is found in God - He will make all things right one day when He returns.
15 The seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven saying, The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever.
That’s the utopia we all need - and if we are saved by grace through faith, that is our blessed hope!