Releasing the New Generation, Part 1

You know, what is fascinating about the computer age is that it is built on logic.

A combination of algorithms and logic that you do this and that follows, you do that and this follows, and yet reasoning on ethics and life itself, we don't see cause and effect connections whatsoever. In an age where almost anything goes, how can we equip and empower our young people to believe and live the Christian faith? Hello and welcome to Let My People Think. This week, RDAM's founder, the late Ravi Zacharias, focuses on the next generation of Christians. Our young people live in a time unlike any other in history.

They have accessed almost anything both good and bad. They are also the daily target of a global culture centered on postmodernism. Why should they believe Christianity is the way?

How can we reach them with the message of Jesus Christ and prepare them to further that message? Here's Ravi with part one of his message titled Releasing the Next Generation. You know, the story is told of Sherlock Holmes and Watson who were on a camping trip. And in the middle of the night, Sherlock Holmes woke up and he looked up into the night sky and he was kind of shocked. So he woke Watson up and he said, Watson, look up into the sky.

What do you see? He said, I see stars and stars and stars. He said, what does that tell you, Watson? He said, well, it tells us that we have millions of galaxies and potentially millions of billions of planets. It tells me astrologically that Saturn is in Leo.

He tells me orologically that it's about quarter to three. It tells me theologically that this is a vast universe and we're just a tiny little speck on it. And it tells me meteorologically that tomorrow will probably be a nice day.

Why? What does it tell you, Holmes? He said, Watson, you idiot. Somebody has stolen our tent.

You know, you can sound very sophisticated and miss the big picture. All the ogicalies were in sequence and fluent, very logically flowing, but he missed the fact that the tent had been lost. It's also like the story of these two Australian sailors who had disembarked in London and they were out at late at night into a bar imbibing their liquid refreshment. And at the end of a long night of that imbibing, the two of the boys stepped out wobbly on their feet.

It was a typical London night, a dense fog had descended on the city and these two boys didn't know where they were. So standing outside, they were just a bit giddy and they saw a man coming up unknown to them was a highly decorated British naval officer, medals and all flashing. And as the officer came close, one of the Aussies said to him, say you bloke, can you tell us where we are? And the British naval officer thoroughly offended said, do your men know who I am? And one Aussie said to the other, we are really in a mess now. We don't know where we are and he doesn't know who he is.

The tents gone and all the verbosity continues, but we don't know where we are and we don't know who we are. Paul is to ask yourself this question 2011, when the 21st century, you ask an average person to define for you, what is the meaning of life? Ask a person to define for you, how you know the truth about life. Ask a person to define for you why life is essentially valuable.

Ask a person to define for you what is normative sexually. You'll find a plethora of meanings and a total lack of substance in the answers, but we can describe things are logically meteorologically and all these kinds of things, but you don't know who we are and we don't know where we are. Do you know that the most difficult thing in life right now, you know what it is to define why the human mind is so corrupt. Last year in November, a survey conducted by the BBC globally, what is the biggest problem facing the world? For the first time, poverty and environment were relegated to two and three. The number one problem that was stated by humanity across the globe last November 2010, BBC survey, the number one problem is identified as corruption.

And if you read the first three chapters of the book of Genesis, you'll see that's where it all began. Somebody wrote this, in the 1960s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well paying jobs, cars and lyrics and music that gave rise to a new term, the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protest. Church, state and parents were all called into question and found wanting.

Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of meism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self, self image, self esteem, self assertion.

It made for a very lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex, forgot everything there was to know about love and very few had the nerve to tell them that there actually was a difference. In the 1980s, kids have lost their hope, stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation have stopped believing in the future. And if I were to add one more to that, I would say now in the 21st century, kids have lost their capacity to reason.

Lost in a world of cyberspace, we are now able to relate much more to ideas than we are to relate to people. This is your generation. This is your generation. This is what you are actually going to face and are beginning to face. In fact, it's happening with such rapidity that even those in their mid 20s will tell you they seem too far removed from the late teens.

The gap is getting wider in shorter spans of time. A 25 year old says I can't connect with the 19 year old and the 19 year old says I can't connect with the 12 and 13 year old who are moving at such exponential speed, connecting in a different kind of reasoning. You know what is fascinating about the computer age is that it is built on logic. Combination of algorithms and logic that you do this and that follows, you do that and this follows and yet reasoning on ethics and life itself, we don't see cause and effect connections whatsoever. Once upon a time, you could make a statement like this to display certainty.

You can take that to the bank. Well, you better not say that now because you're not sure that bank is still going to be there or that bank actually is been bailed out by your tax dollars. We have failed to see the connection between the economic crisis of our time and the spiritual confusion that preceded it. We have become illogical and irrational and young people, you are living in this kind of world, high powered and irrational. So I want to tell you the changes that have taken place or the last century, what actually has come about and within the time, I'll just move through very quickly and then give to you three responses of what it is going to take to reach this next generation. I will tell you nothing new. I may just give you some illustrations or some approaches to argument that might be new to some of you, but the deductions will be totally familiar to all of you.

Chances are you have come to these deductions yourself anyway. So let me begin. The first change that took place in the last 20, 30 years significantly is the change that I believe is the popularization of the death of God movement. Now I want you to listen very carefully to this next statement, the popularization of the death of God movement and a stridency of willing to live with its ramifications. Once upon a time, a fellow like Nietzsche living in the late 1800s talked about the death of God, but he was very sober about the ramifications. He said, the problem with the idea of the death of God is that we have wiped away the horizon. We will have to invent new games. There will be no up or down left.

Lanterns will have to be lit in the morning hours. All of his metaphors indicated the fact that we were in trouble because he said that which was most sacred in humanity has been wiped out. See, God was the defining entity between good and evil. And what Nietzsche said was, look, if we've killed God, how are we going to see in the light anymore without his light? How are we going to define up and down?

If we can't see the horizon, how do we even navigate anymore? He recognized that today. Not so.

Yeah, that's the ramifications. You define what's good. You define what's evil. Listen to Richard Dawkins of Oxford. He says there was a well-known television chef who did a stunt recently by cooking human placenta and serving it up as a pate fried with shallots, garlic, lime juice, and everything. Everybody said it was delicious. The father himself actually had 17 helpings. A scientist can point out as I have done that this is actually an act of cannibalism. Worse since cloning is such a live issue at the moment because the placenta is a true genetic clone of the baby. The father was actually eating his own baby's clone. Science cannot tell you if it's right or wrong to eat your baby's clone, but it can tell you that that's exactly what you are doing. Then you can decide for yourself whether you think it's right or wrong.

Fascinating. What he gave with one hand, he took back with the other. Science can't tell you whether it's right or wrong for you to do it, but science can tell you that that's exactly what you're doing. Then you can decide how does he determine that. Science can tell you that you are autonomous morally.

The very thing that he removed, he smuggled in through the back door again. That's not physics. That's metaphysics. He has moved into a completely different realm, but he makes you think he's talking as a scientist.

He's not. He's talking as a philosopher. See, this is exactly what I mean. This is exactly what I mean when I say to you a stridency of willing to live with its ramifications.

Peter Singer of Princeton University can tell you you actually may have a choice up to one year of the baby's life to determine whether you actually want to keep this child or not. Same with the Department of Ethics. You look at a Down syndrome child and tell you a pig is better off than that baby.

I know parents who've raised Down syndrome children and tell you they've learned more from that little child about love than they did with any other normally chromosomes human being. Young people, listen carefully. There is going to come a brazenness once the absolute has gone.

There's going to come a brazenness. I was giving a talk at Oxford once and at the end of it, a young man came up to me along with some of his friends and he looked at me and he said, I can't buy this thing of absolutes from you. I just can't believe there's an absolute. I said, okay, let me ask you this. If I took a newborn baby, a beautiful little child and took a sword and carved out that baby for my own enjoyment, do you think I'd have done anything morally wrong? And he's standing there and he looks at me and he says, you know, I wouldn't like what you did, but I cannot honestly tell you you'd have done anything morally wrong.

Fine young oxonian, brilliant and someday he could be the chairman of ethics in some of the universities somewhere. This is the danger of what is happening. GK Chesterton said the tragedy of disbelieving in God is not that a person may end up believing in nothing.

Alas, it is much worse. A person may end up believing in anything. So the first is that the population of death of God and the strident seat deliver this ramification. Secondly is the gathering storm of Eastern pantheism in a Western setting and a disorientation of the cultural ethos.

I've just finished a book of mine. I'd actually wanted to call it from Oprah to Chopra, but the publisher didn't like it. So I called it why Jesus rediscovering his truth in an age of mass marketed spirituality. And there are three gurus that I traced. Swami Vivekananda, Swami Yogananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of TM and the seeds that they sowed for the bringing in of an idea of health with a metaphysics that you are one with the impersonal absolute in the universe. Tapping into the energy of this universe, you actually can engender all kinds of realities in your own mind and through proper, proper kinds of reflection and meditation and all you can read the seventh state of consciousness where there is no distinction in an I or a you and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the patenting of transcendental meditation. Do you realize today there are tough wars going on between various yogic disciplines where they are fighting each other to patent breathing techniques.

So if it's three long, two short, five long, four short, then I patent that. I'm not kidding you. There's a turf war going on. How to find peace through proper breathing, but it's my way of doing it and I own the rights.

That's what's going on. Swami Vivekananda in 1893 came to America and delivered a blistering talk at the parliament of world religions. It changed America permanently. I won't go into this.

I'll be sensitive to the subject, but in my book I've dealt with it extensively what his speech actually said, how he basically took a hit at all of the other world religions except what he called the peaceableness of his own worldview. We shall leave it at that. There's a third change. The third change is the power to inform through the visual. Now you're not going to like what I'm going to say here, but with white hair and a balding paint, these things don't worry me too much anymore. So if you don't like it, pray for me.

Here it is. You may think that video was the greatest invention since sliced bread. I've got news for you. The video is nowhere near the power of the word. The Bible doesn't say in the beginning was video and a video is all that we crack it up to be. Why didn't Jesus wait till video was invented? Wouldn't you love to show the someone on the Mount on TV?

No, no. You see the word will always give you the sovereignty of your imagination. The visual will circumscribe your imagination and basically impose upon it to get you to see the way the person wants you to see.

Sound bites are not truth. It is not at all accidental that since the invention of the television world harnessed by people mainly who use it to seduce other young minds that now we see that plague of pornography that is destroying millions of young men and ultimately destroying homes. The visual will never fully satisfy.

It'll only leave you for more and more kinds of hungers. It was William Blake who said this decades ago about the eye. This life's dim windows of the soul distorts the heavens from pole to pole and goads you to believe a lie when you see with a not through the eye. This life's dim windows of the soul distorts the heavens from pole to pole and goads you to believe a lie when you see with a not through the eye.

What the Blakey and was a warning was this. We are intended to see through the eye with the conscience. When we start seeing with the ID void of a conscience, we reconstruct and reconfigure reality to our own desires. This is a dangerous phenomenon in our times. The visual is hijacked truth and we now think we know the truth when we see something. The visual has the capacity to make a person think of themselves more than what they actually are. Look at the 1980s and the devastation of the television evangelists in their own personal lives. People sitting in the front row actually saw them as icons.

In the back private rooms they were completely messed up financially and morally but on the stage they looked very, very well made up. I'm not demeaning it. I'm just telling you be careful of it. The visual has extraordinary capacities. I love to think of the fact that I can sit in my living room and watch the landing on the moon. It's marvelous. I love to think of the fact that I can sit in my living room and see the three tenors performing in somewhere in Greece or Italy and enjoying it. Love to think that I can sit in my living room and watch a royal wedding and see all of the pomposity and all of it and see how grand these things are.

I love to be able to get onto the internet and look at the works of Michelangelo and so on and enjoy it right at my desk. Yes, it's good but it is fraught with danger. Because the eye can seduce you. All you need to do is take a look at the lives of the rich and famous on television and you'll find out how messed up most of them really are. I remember one young man whose father I shall not name. He was a very famous actor. This young man has come to know Christ and he sat across the table from me and talked about his father and he said my dad was in this television series glorifying country living and glorifying the farm and the family and prayer around dinner and the breaking of bread and communion and the graves near the home going and thinking and all of this.

He said his television series was one of the all time most winning ones. He said but my father lived exactly the opposite in his private life and I'll never forget coming home from school as a teenager one day and my uncle waiting at the door and sitting me down and telling me your dad's gone. He's left your mom and you and your 11 year old sister now have got to take care of her. Go upstairs. Your mom's lying in bed. She is so intensely depressed.

She cannot believe what has just happened. And this young man sitting across the table with tears running down his face said to me I never ever believed that would happen to my dad. And he said you know what Ravi in my dad I had both my dad and my mom because he's the one who took me to school. He's the one who made my lunches. He's the one who took care of me.

And all of a sudden I found out that his life was so duplicitous and suddenly fell apart on the whole family. Television's power to make you into thinking you're a petty potentate. You're just an ordinary human being. It seduces both the one on the platform and the one on the view in the viewing. And so be very careful of how we handle this because young people if you do not monitor your viewing it will monitor you and you in this generation will never be able to harness your imagination for the good. You see in reality nothing is so beautiful as the good. Nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil. But in the world of entertainment it's the other way around. Fictional evil is intriguing, attractive. Fictional good is boring and flat.

And so you're seduced. So we've got the popularization of death of God, a stridency of willing to live with this ramifications, the gathering storm of the pantheistic world view, the power to inform through the visual and lastly I would say the complete shift to a younger world. That's your world. You are the ones who are making advertising what it is. You're the ones who are getting the movie makers to make what they do because the word in Hollywood is this.

If you can win the attraction of an 18 year old young man you've got a big blockbuster in the making because the influence an 18 year old young man has. These are the changes. What do we do? I'll give you three very simple responses. Number one, what does the word apologetics mean? I'm a Christian apologists. The word apologetics actually comes from the Greek apologia, which means to give an answer to Peter says, always be prepared to give an apologia, an answer to them that ask you and to do that with gentleness and kindness to do that.

When Peter stands up after Pentecost and they're all confused, he says, let me explain, let me give you an apologetic for this. So apologetics does two things. It clarifies truth claims and it gives answers. It clarifies truth claims and it gives answers in the light of what's happening in our world. We're going to need one, an apologetic that is not merely heard but is also seen.

You can't just give answers that are theoretical if your life is not going to back it up. If you would like to purchase a complete copy of this message, call us at 1-800-448-6766. Be sure to ask for the title, Releasing the Next Generation. You can also order online at rzim.org or in Canada, that website is rzim.ca. There you will find numerous resources to aid you in your search for truth, including past broadcasts, articles, and a wide selection of books from Ravi and other RZIM speakers. It's also a great way to keep up on the schedules of the global RZIM team, upcoming events, and see the latest ministry initiatives.

Suffering, God's silence, the existence of truth. Those are just a few of the topics covered in RZIM's Just Thinking magazine. Editor, Danielle Durant. I'm often encouraged by letters we receive regarding just thinking.

You never know what one sentence can do in the life of an individual. We've gotten a number of letters from those who are outside of Christianity, but they found something intriguing in just thinking and said, I want to read more. Sign up for email delivery of justthinking at rzim.org. RZIM has a global team of speakers with offices in more than 12 different countries, and training men and women to defend the power and coherence of the gospel of Jesus Christ is a fundamental part of the mission of RZIM. Our hope is to empower you to engage in earnest conversations with those who have honest questions about the Christian faith. For more information about our ministry or to learn how you can partner with us, be sure to visit our website. Let My People Think is a listener supported by Radio Ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia.