Standing Firm for Christ in a Postmodern World (Part 2 of 2)

And of course, as you and I know, the big challenge for Christians is how do we offend people but not be offensive? That's Dr. Erwin Lutzer from our last broadcast talking about the absence of God in the culture and what we can do about bringing Christ's light to the world.

I'm John Fuller and welcome to another episode of Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. John, I think it is important to point out that when you look at Gallup research or other research now, people who are convictional Christians are a smaller number of the population than we once were. There's still a large number of people that believe in God, but that's pretty thin.

But those that go to church, read scripture regularly, that number's come way down over the last few decades. We talked last time with Dr. Lutzer about the spiritual battle Christians are in and the importance of turning to God in prayer, maybe not bringing our emotions, especially not our negative emotions like anger and other things into those discussions. Ultimately, God is in control and we should rest in that. We might have to go through a season that should be rather exciting but may be challenging. As people's hearts grow darker, it does give us an opportunity to shed more light into these situations. So I'm looking forward to part two of the program that we started last time. Based on his book, The Eclipse of God, I'm looking forward to the discussion.

I love this kind of content. Yeah, and we've got all of day one available to you through podcasting and our mobile app and the website and YouTube. So check out that first part if you didn't get a chance to hear it or see it. Dr. Lutzer is Pastor Emeritus at Moody Church in Chicago where he served for over 36 years as senior pastor. He's written a number of books and as you said Jim, The Eclipse of God is the most recent one and that forms the foundation for our discussion. Find out more about that book on our website.

We've got the details in the show notes. Dr. Lutzer, it's so good to have you back for part two of this program. I loved it last time talking about the things in your book.

Well, thank you, Jim. And I want to pick up immediately on something that you said about the sovereignty of God and how we have to see God in our present culture. Most of our listeners will remember that the prophet Isaiah in chapter 6, the Bible says, In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. Uzziah was a relatively good king.

He ended a little badly, but here's the point. God was saying to the prophet, The throne of Israel may be empty, but the throne in heaven is well occupied. And in the midst of political wrangling, in the midst of so many cultural pressures that we're finding in the midst of our very conflicting culture, we have to remember that God is still God and the throne in heaven is well occupied. Now I'm going to pick up on a second thing that you mentioned, namely that the number of believers, the real committed Christians is smaller. But you know, when you look at history, you find throughout the ages, oftentimes the church has always been an island of righteousness in a sea of paganism. So we have to see ourselves as those who can learn from those who have gone before us.

And in that sense, our battles are not new. Now they are new in the sense of technology and all, but the church has always had to stand against the culture. You know, it raises an interesting question for me, which is when you're in that position, I mean, my pastor, Brady Boyd at New Life here in Colorado Springs says it this way, Christians do best when we're the joyful minority. That's an interesting statement, because when we have power as a church, it's been kind of disastrous. If you look at Europe and the Crusades and other things like that, when human beings have power, they struggle wielding it righteously, especially without God.

But in that context, we as Christians, how do we view the demands, the good demands upon us in this moment? I want to push back just a little bit on what you said when you said that we do best if we are joyful as a minority. Or a joyful minority, right. If we're a joyful minority. That's true.

I sign on to that. But I want to add a sobering fact, and that is that there are times when the church has been extinguished because of the culture. I'm thinking, for example, of Marxism. I've preached in the country of Albania, which was under Marxism. And you would be surprised at the number of believers today, God is really growing the church. But there was a time 40 or 50 years ago when it was said that there are no Christians in Albania. Now there were some, we discovered. But what we have to do is to recognize that there comes a time when the culture can so close in that only those who are doggedly faithful survive. And we hope that they do survive, by the way, with joy. But Christians throughout history have often had a very difficult and challenging role in the culture.

And sometimes I think, you know, that's what we are called to do. You encountered, I think, some Germans at an airport. Now a lot of your writings, you go to Germany quite a bit. It sounds like you even speak German.

Is that true? My parents spoke German at home, but we answered in English. So I know enough that I can ask questions and get along, but I really am not fluent in German.

Like, did you take the trash out? You can answer that in German? I'm sure, yes. But in that context, you encountered some Germans in an airport. You had a pretty interesting exchange with them that you noted in the book.

What happened? I always try to take an opportunity to witness to people that I meet. And there are many ways to get into a conversation about God. So here are these people.

They have a layover at O'Hare, and I was there also with some time on my hands. I began to talk to them about God, and then they said that they had just read the book Conversations with God by Neil Donald Walsh. My heart sank because I had just read the book. Conversations with God, in the opening section, the author mentions that he felt as if he was writing by inspiration. In other words, the ideas came to him.

This is very common in occult circles. What the book says, and I have quotes, of course, that I can back this up, but it says basically that you don't have to worry about God's will because God's will for you is your will for you. He says the big illusion is the fact that God has a certain will that you have to find when all that he wants is what you want. So here's an idea of God that brings God down to the common man that really says, God is like us. If you believe in a God who agrees with you about everything, you're actually agreeing with yourself, all right? It's called a mirror.

It's called a mirror. So what we have to do is to get back to the God of the Bible, and that's really my burden in this book, to show how God is necessary for truth, how God is necessary for law. And then the last chapter of the book, I think, is going to raise some eyebrows because it is getting back to the God of grace and wrath, not the God of unconditional love. Erwin, so much of today's conversation in the cultural space is about, well, your truth is good for you, and my truth is good for me. I mean, again, it's absurd to even say that.

I mean, there's gravity, things fall from the sky, there's science, things happen the way of a predictable nature. Is it even close to the fact that we can't know spiritual truth the way the world's talking about it today? Jim, I can't thank you enough for asking that question because in my book I have an entire chapter on truth or truthiness. Yeah, truthiness. Truthiness.

That's a better way to say that. It might be true, maybe sometimes it's true, it's not always true, it might be false, but it has some truthiness. Here's what parents need to understand. They send their child to university or college, and oftentimes the children come back thinking very differently than their parents, and their parents say, what happened?

Well, this is what happened, among other things. Truth no longer is something to be sought. You know, there was a time when you and I believed that truth was something that existed outside of us. We would have to seek it, we might disagree as to how to get there, we might even disagree on whether or not we did get there, but truth was objective. Now according to Karl Marx, truth is culturally conditioned, it is culturally constructed. So now we have teachers who tell their students, what you have to do is to read texts, but they're all propaganda, what you have to do is to find out why is this person writing that, it's to hang on to power, and so you have multiple readings, even for something like the Constitution, and history oftentimes becomes not a search for facts, but rather an opportunity for minority groups to express who they are, and here's the bottom line, truth now becomes something that resides in me, and it becomes a matter of feeling.

If you look at the LGBTQ plus community and its advances, it has advanced primarily because of feelings and compassion, now we should have compassion, Jesus had compassion on the multitudes, so compassion is very important, but compassion cannot be the means by which we determine all truth, because we might be compassionate even toward evil things. So we're living in a culture where therefore, as you described it, you have your truth, I have my truth, and what happens, by the way, if our truth conflicts, well, don't worry about that, because we're living in an era in which you can live with conflicting truth, and what we have to do is to help people to understand this. Number one, truth has objectivity, two plus two is equal to four, and you can argue, as Winston does in the book by George Orwell, that it's equal to five at times, but that's wrong. We all know that truth has objectivity, it exists outside of us.

The other thing is that truth is truth whether we believe it or not. Fascinating story, the 18th chapter of the book of John, Jesus is standing before Pilate, and Pilate is asking him, who are you, and so forth, and Jesus said, I came to bear witness to the truth. Interestingly, Jesus didn't say, I came to earth to make people feel better, although we would all argue that the gospel makes people feel better.

I came to bear witness to the truth. Pilate says, what is truth, and you remember the story. He immediately leaves Jesus and goes and talks to the mob. Don't you wish Pilate had stayed there and listened to Jesus? Well we know that Jesus made truth statements elsewhere, but here's the point. Pilate learned that you can kill a man, but you can't kill truth, and Jesus is standing there as the truth with objectivity, and truth can be very offensive. A number of times in the gospel it says that when Jesus spoke to them they were offended, but it is better to offend people, lovingly of course, but to offend them with the truth than it is to whisper lies to them, thinking that that is more loving. I like to emphasize this, that when it comes to love, when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, they didn't stop loving.

They just started to love the wrong things, lovers of money, lovers of self, lovers of pleasure. So we must understand that when it comes to truth, all truth ultimately is rooted in God. And when we begin there, we begin to understand why it is then that we need God in our culture.

Dr. Lutzer, let me clarify something. In the book you mention idolatry. I think those of us that have seen the gladiator, we think of idolatry as little wooden statues that we create and we bow and worship to this thing. That's not what you're talking about with modern day idolatry. So give me a description or definition of what modern day idolatry looks like.

All right, I'll go directly to the scriptures, Ezekiel chapter 14. These people have set up idols in their own hearts. So modern idolatry does not bow before the images, but it bows to itself. It is really self that is the modern idol. And idols do have some value. Jeremiah talks about the idols. He says it's like a scarecrow in a garden.

In other words, it may cause some birds to fly away. The other good thing about an idol and the reason it's so attractive is you control it completely. You choose your idol and then you go for that idol and you pretend that that idol is real and you take it from there. So we're living in a culture undoubtedly that has taken man and put it in the place of God. And that of course is the ultimate idolatry. And as all of us know, that's what happened in the Garden of Eden when the serpent said, you can be like God knowing good and evil.

You take the place of God. And we think, for example, of those who say, I am God, and we smile and we say, I don't think that you are. You know, so often when I've encountered people like that, what screams at me is pain. Somewhere something's happened where they have been profoundly hurt.

Maybe by a parent, a father, a mother, whatever it might be. But as I've dug into many of the communities you're talking about and talked with people, there's a lot of pain in people that have rejected God. Somebody once said to me, to an atheist, he said, you know, for not believing in God, you talk a lot about God, about how much you hate God, about how God can't be real. But what an interesting observation that a lot of the irritated non-believers spend a bit of time talking about a God they don't believe in. Yes, because it's very difficult to chisel God out of the human heart. You remember Augustine on the first page of his Confessions where he said, thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find they're all in thee.

But I find what you've said very interesting. What we have to do is to help people to understand that even if the church hurt them, even if their parents hurt them, ultimately truth is constant. And while that might be an excuse to avoid the truth, ultimately God is a God of truth.

And I'm sorry about your past, I hope that you can forgive your past, but at the same time just recognize that truth is still truth even if it is rejected. In fact, you illustrated a play on words with this idea that sinners are in the hands of an angry God and you flip that, that God has been placed in the hands of angry sinners. I mean that's actually because of Jonathan Edwards' sermon, you know, sinners in the hands of an angry God and today we have indeed God in the hands of angry sinners. I think that's the way in which I talk about it.

That's powerful, but what's the net of that and the way we get that wrong and how we need to be careful about that expression. We have so softened the image of God that we have made him so tolerant of everything. And that's why the subtitle of my book says, America's disastrous search for a more inclusive deity. We want a God who's going to save everybody. We want a God who's going to allow for all kinds of infractions without any judgment. And yet at the same time as you and I agree that as even as we speak about the God and we speak about hell, we at the same time speak about the unbelievable grace of God and we point sinners to a God who is willing to forgive, a God who sent his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ to forgive us of our sins and to welcome us into heaven as if we are Jesus because we get there on the basis of his merit and not our own. We've all heard the song, clothed in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. So what we have to do is to realize that even though God is a God of wrath, he's not the God of popular culture, he is also a God of unmistakable, unbelievable grace. I have to add this, many people who sing the song, Amazing Grace, I just want to say this that I think many of them have no idea what they're singing about because they think they deserve grace. If you think that you deserve grace and have it coming to you, you do not understand grace. Grace is totally undeserved and yet we have a gracious God who is willing to forgive the vilest of sinners.

Yeah, oh my goodness. Let me ask you this, this idea of values within the culture. It seems that the greatest value in the culture is tolerance today.

I mean everybody lifts that up really at risk of all the other more important values. In that context, we're told to avoid offending others at all costs, yet you're arguing for the point that Christians should be willing to offend people. Now I'm sure you mean that within the context of God's love and those things, but how do we shift that gear being saturated in this idea that we need to be tolerant at all costs toward others and then say, oh, by the way, Bob, I've noticed something and I just want to, as a friend, point this out and let you deal with it like you want to, but here's what I'm observing.

How do we go about doing that? Well, what we have to do is to follow the example of Jesus. He offended people. The Bible says very clearly he offended people. In the sixth chapter of John, when he made some very hard statements, his disciples came to him and said, don't you realize that you offended people? And Jesus didn't care. Now it's not as if he didn't care in the sense that he was hard-hearted, but rather he was willing to offend people if they needed the truth. And of course, as you and I know, the big challenge for Christians is how do we offend people but not be offensive?

How can we make sure that it's the truth that offends people and it's not we who are offensive? I believe this as a pastor, you can preach on any hard doctrine that you want. At Moody Church, at least on two occasions, I preached a message on hell.

I could scarcely sleep the night before because it's terrifying. It's a doctrine that is not discussed today. I mean, when is the last time you heard a sermon on hell? It's avoided.

Yeah, it's avoided. But we have to preach it with brokenness, with tears, and with a redemptive mindset as Jonathan Edwards did in his famous sermon. And we have to urge sinners to come to Christ because he saves us, as the Bible says, from the wrath to come. So we exalt Christ. We show that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and we exalt what he has done.

So even though this is terrifying over here, there's good news here that you need to hear. So along with, and maybe this answers your question, maybe it doesn't, but along with the judgment, we always have to keep redemption in mind, and we can't just focus on one without the other. You know, Erwin, as we zero in on the end of this part two program, you make mention of the fact that we need to be go-to people for the culture.

Now one that should indicate that people will want to come to us, to ask us, what do you think? So I think my question is kind of a two-parter. How do we create that environment where people feel, it's kind of like parenting, do your kids trust you enough as a father or mother that they could come and be honest with you about what they've done?

I mean drinking, drug addiction, sex, whatever it may be, do they have, do you have that good a relationship with your child that they can do that? And then how do we extrapolate that to being that present for people around us in the culture, friends and family members? Maybe I'm answering your question, I'm coming at it a little differently, but you know when we come to truth like John 14 6, I am the way, the truth and the life, we have to explain to people that we ourselves are not perfect. If we come to people with a judgmental spirit putting ourselves on some kind of a pedestal, they will turn against us, no question about it. But if we come with a sense of humility, aware of our own need, it's amazing how we are able to communicate truth to people. They may be offended, but at the same time they may respect us.

So to pull that off is difficult, but that's our assignment. So I think the main issue, Jim, has to do with a prideful spirit, a prideful judgmental spirit that drives people away. We have to help people to understand. We're coming from a position where we are not perfect, but at the same time we have found hope in the gospel, and they can come also where they are at to the same gospel and believe. And that's what I think parents should do, that's what I think pastors should do, but not to avoid the hard teaching of scripture, but at the same time to always make sure it is balanced with grace.

That's so good. Erwin, right at the end here I want to talk about a scripture that's particularly important to you in the book of John. What was that scripture and why does it ring so true?

I've already referred to it, but we can't refer to it often enough. John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. So here I am, I'm witnessing, and somebody says, well, I believe that this religion is just as good as this religion and so forth. Why is it that Jesus made such an exclusive claim?

And the answer is this, he's qualified to do it. Read about all the other religions, and what you'll discover is none claim that they can forgive sins. They teach us how to manage our sin, but nobody can say you are forgiven. Only Christ has the authority to be able to say that because of what he did on our behalf, and God receives what Jesus Christ did. Only Christianity has that, only Christ is qualified to say that. I love Christ, I know you do too. Yeah, absolutely, and there is brokenness and pain in the culture that only Christians have the answer to.

I know that sounds bold, but it's true. Even though the world is full of chaos, we have nothing to fear because God is in control. And to our listeners and viewers, I hope you'll take the opportunities around you to spread the kingdom of God.

If you are looking for some more insights into navigating the confusion of the culture, check out Dr. Lutzer's book, The Eclipse of God. When you make a monthly pledge of any amount to the Ministry of Focus on the Family, we'll send you a copy as our way, saying thank you for being part of the ministry. We are listener supported, so your donations are what allows us to keep providing resources like this. Or if a monthly donation doesn't work for you right now, a one-time gift is great, and we will also send you a copy of the book for that one-time gift.

And once again, Dr. Erwin Lutzer's book is called The Eclipse of God, Our Nation's Disastrous Search for a More Inclusive Deity. Get a copy of the book when you call and donate today. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family, that's 800-232-6459.

Or look in the show notes for further details. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Hey, this is Dr. Gregg Smalley with Focus on the Family. If you're married, you know it takes work for two lives to become one. Your wins and losses are often tied to who you are and how you work together. The Focus on the Family marriage assessment provides a combined report that considers your individual strengths, areas of growth, and how unique people like you can better come together. To get started on your marriage assessment, visit MarriageStrengths.com. That's MarriageStrengths.com.