East and West, Part 2

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You can find out more about Ravi Zacharias and the team at www.rzim.org. The word of God, the law of God, which is based on the absolute character of God, not on the relativistic whims of humanity, was lost. And where it was lost was in the house of God. When the law of the Lord is lost in the house of God, there is no message left to give to the spiritually minded.

We haven't got an authority left anymore after that. And you look again and again and again, and you ask yourself the question, how did this happen that our places of worship so often can be filled with thousands of young people who really don't know the word of God? How did spirituality in the West become separated from God?

Why are so many seeking out for a spiritual experience, but don't think God is part of the equation? Hello and welcome to Let My People Think with author and apologist Ravi Zacharias. Last week, Ravi began this message by describing our condition here in the West, how Eastern mysticism came to control academia and the arts, and from that the devotion of millions. Today Ravi turns a corner and looks for solutions to the problems we face. Not surprisingly, those answers are rooted in scripture. This week's message comes from Ravi's book, Why Jesus? Rediscovering his truth in an age of mass marketed spirituality.

Stay with us after the message and we'll tell you how you can order a copy. Now here's Ravi with the conclusion of his message East and West. When you think of the naturalistic worldview, unanswered questions, how does something come from nothing? How does life come from non-life?

How does a non-moral beginning through an amoral process end up with moral reasoning? You have pretty big questions. You think Dawkins will ever address them?

No. It's truly the fact that the emperor has no clothes with the naturalistic worldview, and in Christianity sometimes they sure got the clothes, but when they start disrobing that they find out they don't know what this is all about. So what did humanity do in the West? They began to see in the 1980s the commercialization of the gospel.

I remember thinking in the 1980s what we were going through at that time and thinking to myself, will we ever survive this? Will we ever get the gospel back because of what we have seen happen in the mass media? And I remember seeing some big mega churches thriving at that time with all that we were doing to lure the young in and bring them into packed audiences. At the end of it, if you ask them some of the most basic questions about the Bible, they could not even answer them.

There's a sense of relaxation in spirituality, but if spirituality is used as a seductive force, it could be the most destructive thing you have ever entered into because it actually gives you the feeling of being in contact with God when all you have ended up doing is defying yourself. So I turn over a leaf now and I want to give you three solutions to this that will need to be attended and then take you to the gospel. Where is God in all of this? Where is Jesus Christ in all of this? How did we lose him in America?

How did we lose him in America? I was sitting next to a preacher that I will not name one of the biggest churches in this country. He happened to be sitting next to me, next to each other because we're going to preach same conference.

We're going to play in one city, we're going to another city. And he looked at me and he said, aren't you Ravi? I said, yeah, nice to meet you. And he gave me his name.

I said, I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you. So we chatted. I said, how things going? He said, you know, it's going well, going well.

And we started talking. He said, you know, basically the people from my father's generation and all were fighting things that didn't really matter. What does it matter about the inerrancy of scriptures? Who cares? Who cares?

What does it matter? The guy sitting next to me and ranting this stuff off, preaching to thousands every Sunday. And I said, you don't think it matters that the source that you're using with which to guidelines is a God given source and God breathed. And therefore in its substance, it's infallible and without error.

And I told him an illustration after that in a story, he was quite stunned by it. I won't go into the details of that, but you know what actually has happened in America and in most of Europe, the same thing that had happened in Josiah's time. What happened in Josiah's time? The book of the law was lost. The book of the law was lost. Josiah became king at age eight. At about eight, 12 or 15, he started to seek after God.

In his early twenties, he began to cleanse the city and late twenties, he began to cleanse the temple. And all of a sudden they found the dusty volume of the law of God and the secretary comes to him and he says, you'll never believe what I found. You have to ask, how long was this missing? The word of God, the law of God, which is based on the absolute character of God, not on the relativistic whims of humanity was lost and where it was lost was in the house of God. When the law of the Lord is lost in the house of God, there is no message left to give to the spiritually minded.

We haven't got an authority left anymore after that. And you look again and again and again, and you ask yourself the question, how did this happen? That our places of worship so often can be filled with thousands of young people who really don't know the word of God. Now we have to make it attractive. We have to make it beautiful. We have to make it relevant.

Yes, I understand all of that. But if the word of God is not there from the pulpit and the word of God is not central to the teaching, what on earth are we doing with the masses of people Sunday after Sunday? And so even Bill Hybels years after the experiment comes out and says, I made a mistake, big time mistake. He said, I brought in this consulting agency to study the products of our church.

And he said, when we found out, I really actually didn't even want to print it. So shocked because I found out we'd really not made any disciples. I'll tell you, if this country is going to change, it'll have to begin with the church. We talk of all the symptoms of cultural war, and we've not dealt with the cause that we ourselves have lost the capacity to engage the mind of the young with the power and the potency of the very law of God. So we lost him in the temple.

Secondly, where did we lose him? And Luke chapter two, you've got Mary and Joseph in the midst of the Passover good godly people. They had to be to make all this trek. They're riding back home in this long caravan.

And it was a long while after one of them said, where's Jesus? I thought you had him. I don't. Didn't you have him? No.

Do you think one of our friends has him? They walked through the whole caravan. Nobody has Jesus. They'd gone for the Passover.

False assumptions that you actually believe it'll be somebody else's responsibility to make sure Jesus in the center of your home, your life, your family. Can you imagine how the parents felt? You know what is astounding about Jesus's response? His mother and father come to him. And what does he say to them? Did you not know I needed to be in my father's house? Place of worship had become a hangout for crooks.

And so he's debating with the doctors of the law. Didn't you not know I need to be my father's house? And then as an adult, you haven't said you made my house a den of crooks, a den of thieves. Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be honest with you. I wish sometimes I could now say I've done my part.

I wish so because easier I could write. I could enjoy not doing many things that travel entails but I believe God has called me to have a responsibility and God's called you to have a responsibility. Please don't assume that it's somebody else's. Don't assume this is somebody else's responsibility and if there's one thing I'd like you to do and there's nothing to do with RZIM, it's got everything to do with your relationship with God. Ask him what is the load he wants you to lighten and where?

What is the load he wants you to carry for him and where? I think of how easy it is to be at the Passover and lose Jesus, to be in the temple of God and lose the law. And then the third scene is John 18, the most defining moment of political power gone wrong when he looks at Jesus eyeball to eyeball and he asks him if he's the king and when he received the answer he didn't like it and he looks at Jesus and Jesus says that they that are on the side of truth listen to him. Pilate made the ultimate blunder of looking eyeball to eyeball into the eyes of truth saying what is truth and walked away. And walked away. At least if he paused for a moment to allow to see what Jesus would say, he didn't. What is truth? It's almost like he's teaching Jesus.

You've got nothing to say to me and he's gone. Political power gone wrong, ecclesiastical power gone wrong, ceremony gone wrong. So what do people do? They go into a spirituality mode with all these esoteric sounding words. One of the authors I quoted, her own life got terribly messed up. I read some of her thoughts. Her own life got terribly messed up. That spirituality thing didn't do a thing for her. You see what happened after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died and the lawsuits that ensued, people grabbing after this, after that same thing happened after Yogananda died. The same thing has just happened after Sai Baba has died in Bangalore. This billion dollar empire of this man with that huge hairdo, millions of followers all over the world and now they are finding out under the carpet all that was messed up personally, privately and the money is being squabbled over, bank accounts are being frozen and everybody's laying claim to the money.

That's all this has become about. Not spirituality, it's the mass marketing of spirituality. You know, when you read the life of Oprah Winfrey and see the power in her early days, she'd always write a word about Jesus and a verse from there and I've given a whole chapter to her own involvement in what happened as she shaped the medium and the medium shaped her. She shaped the medium and the medium shaped her. She wanted to become a goddess. She assumed she was a goddess and millions today with her pronouncement take her at her word and you say to yourself, is this where we're at?

Is this where we're at? I want to take you to three conclusions about the gospel. The number one conclusion is this, that there is something so unique about the gospel of Jesus Christ that is not found anywhere else.

In December of 2008, a rank atheist and a man who chose to live a rather personally sensuous lifestyle, name is Matthew Paris. He went to Africa because when his young boy's parents were there and he went and saw a tiny missionary movement called the pump fund or something like that from project. And he took a look at some missionaries there. They so overwhelmed him with their lives. He said, I couldn't believe such deeply dedicated people.

And he wrote an article that month. Listen to what this atheist actually has to say. I went to see this work. It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith and development charities, but traveling in Malawi refreshed another belief too. One I've been trying to banish all my life. It confounds my ideological beliefs and stubbornly refuses to suit my own worldview. It has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. Now as a confirmed atheist, I'm convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa, sharply distinct from any secular NGOs. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa, Christianity is changing people's hearts.

That's what it's going to take. It brings a transformation and this rebirth is real. There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence beyond critiques founded in theirs and therefore best for them. I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively. This feeds into the big man and gangster politics of the African city.

The exaggerated respect for the swaggering leader and the literal inability to understand the whole idea of a loyal opposition. Anxiety, fear of spirits, of ancestors, of nature and ancestors and of nature and wild strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. A great weight grinds down the spirit of the people. But Christianity, with its teaching of a direct personal two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosophical spiritual framework I've just described. Those who want Africa to walk tall amid the 21st century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the know-how that accompanies what we call development will make that change.

No. A whole belief system has to be changed and I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the speech doctor, the mobile phone and the machete. Wow. From an atheist. Christian conversion. Do you believe that? Do you believe that?

The whole way of thinking has to be changed. I love it when I hear my colleagues speak because there's such beauty in what they say. I won't even name some of them, but I hear them saying it again and again and again. This transformation that Christ brings, I hear them in their tapes and read it in their books and I was in Washington and sitting down when we were all there listening to Michael speak at Georgetown and he presented the gospel that night. Very clearly, very clearly spoke from the book of Jude. The changed heart, the transformed heart.

That's what it is. Spirituality will not do that for you. There's a second thing and that is this Christ presence outside of yourself will bring you the mystical, but it is not enough in and of itself and then I'll close with my last thought. Many of you know that one of my good friends passed away this year, Nick Charles. Nick was exactly my age. 15, 17 years ago I met Nick Charles.

I was speaking in Atlanta. I don't know who he was. I've not watched much of the night sports programs, but he was quite a big icon. Handsome looking guy, big mop of hair, a Greek ancestry, handsome features. He was quite the playboy in his own words. He said, Ravi, just run the mail. Nick said, I've done it all. He said, I'm a mess.

Help me. So we got talking and became one. He's one of the few people I actually devoted specific amount of time to quite a bit. He became quite close to our family. Two years ago, Nick phoned me in Atlanta. He said, can I have lunch? I said, sure, Nick.

I went out and had lunch. He was sitting right in the table in front. I didn't recognize him. He said, Ravi. I looked at him. I was shocked, shocked. His hair was gone.

His skeletal looking face. And I sat down and he said, man, I'm dying of cancer, dying of cancer. I've been given 20 months to live.

I've told them to use their biggest guns and help me get rid of this. I cried sitting in front of Nick. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. He wanted to live in Santa Fe and he decided to build a home, their beautiful home. He said, I know I'm dying, but I want my wife and daughter to have a place and I'm going to do it. So they moved to Santa Fe and he was in touch with me. I was about to be on a seven week tour and he said, will you come and visit me one last time?

Because I don't think I'll be around when you finish this trip. So Margie and I flew to Santa Fe. When I walked into the room, it was like his body was on a vibrator.

It was like this, but it was just completely out of whack. It was nurse sitting there trying to grab his arm and he was, the nurse, the male nurse was trying to get something into him. He called me over and he wanted to grab my hand and just grabbed my hand and just going like this. I prayed with him. He looked pathetic. Gradually he calmed down. He said, I'm so sorry.

I'm really so sorry. He said, sit down here. And he said, please pray for me again. So I stood up so that I could hold his hand comfortably. And as I was standing up to hold his hand and the male nurse sitting on the other side of the bed, his wife, Corey, with her arm around Margie, there's a little daughter trying to keep herself busy. His dog came over a labradoodle, big guy, nuzzled against my legs there quietly and his chin on his bed. And I held his hand and prayed for him. And after it was all over, he said, please, let's go out for dinner. I said, Nick, you can't do it. He said, I want to do it.

Let's do it. Somehow got his clothes on and we went out and we're sitting four of us for dinner in a country club that he belonged to. And he has a CNN sports cost, her big success story now, dying. He'd come to know Christ and his life had been so radically transformed. He looked at me and said, can I tell you something? He said a few weeks ago, I was lying in bed, my little girl next to me and my wife.

And he said, I was in such pain. I said, all right, Jesus, enough. It's enough.

Enough. Can I come home tonight? Please take me home. He said, my wife and daughter are sound asleep.

And I propped my head up in the pillow and I was crying. Please take me home tonight. He said, Ravi, a light shone in the corner of the room and a person I've always pictured the way Jesus would probably be walked over towards me and held my hand the way you did it today. And he said, Nick, I'll take you home, but not tonight at the right time. I'll take you home. He said, my brother, I have not fretted since that day. When the right time comes, he will take me home. I was traveling overseas and a CNN producer phoned me, said, I'm writing a story on Nick.

Thousands of his fans were writing in tens of thousands. He said, Ravi, did he tell you the story about this vision and all? I said, yeah. He said, what do you think of it? I said, what do you think of it, Craig? He said, I'm an atheist.

I said, let me tell you what I think of it. The important thing to me is, Craig, that God's revelation is based to us in history, in his word and confirmed in personal experience. The vision to me at that moment is secondary, but it's precisely what Nick needed. Nick needed it at that moment and God met him where he needed it most. That's not what Nick's faith was based on, based on something larger than that. I said, what do you think of Nick?

He said, he's for real. I said, then take the story that way too. Take the story that way. You know what we've often missed with the spiritual hunger of people. We made this Christian faith so far away in doctrinaire stuff. We've spent very little time talking about how deeply spiritually minded Jesus was too, in the spiritual reality of worship, music, the mystical and the prayer.

And we've made him some kind of a theoretical figure. The last thing I want to say to you is one day it will all come together. It will all come together when body, mind, soul, and everything are in sync. And I close with this now. And I remember when I finished praying with Nick, I opened my eyes and I was looking across a mountain range called the blood of Christ, the dog by my side, his wife, his daughter, his nurse.

And he finished praying. All of creation seemed to come together. One thing the spiritualists are teaching us, they're hungry for harmony. They're hungry for harmony. You don't like discord in music. Why would you like discord in your belief? It's time for the church to sound that harmonious message. Till finally in heaven, it'll sound that grand amen.

Is there discord in your life? Are you searching for the meaning and consistency that can only come through belief in Jesus Christ and allowing him to control your life? As Ravi said in the conclusion to today's message, it is then that you will hear that grand amen.

You've been listening to the conclusion of Ravi's message East and West. If you've missed any of this series and would like to order this message in its entirety, call us at 1-800-448-6766 and ask for the message East and West. To send us any questions or comments or to make a donation by mail, write to RZIM post office box 1820, Roswell, Georgia, 30077. You can also order online at rzim.org, where you'll also find a wide selection of books, CDs and DVDs. The Ministry of RZIM specialises in evangelising through apologetics. And if that's an area that you feel called to, you might want to sign up for one of our online publications, each of which can be delivered right to your inbox. We offer a daily reading titled A Slice of Infinity, a monthly newsletter and a quarterly magazine called Just Thinking, in which Ravi and members of the RZIM team address the most pressing topics of the day.

That web address again is rzim.org or rzim.ca for those in Canada. Years ago, Reader's Digest printed an article entitled When We're Alone, We Dance. Within that private world, though, each of us also wrestles with some heart-consuming battle. For one, it may be the inner ache of loneliness. For another, the daunting spectre of guilt. For still another, it may be the question, why do I not feel God to be near when I've done all I know to be right?

Or it may be the question of all questions, who are you, God? Consider, my friend, the range of our existential struggles. If anything unites our cultures today, it is the felt reality of the unanswered questions we face. The loneliness of an unloved life is the same in Bombay as it is in Barcelona.

A life tormented by guilt bears the same weight for a movie icon in Hollywood as it does for a school teacher in Havana. If the cries in any community were to be cumulatively sounded, the noise would indeed be deafening. Where then can we go? There is a place where there is an aggregate of human suffering and questioning. That place is the heart of God. The Bible repeatedly portrays for us the cries of those in need, pleading for one who might bring hope. In its pages we find that the cries are the heart of the same in every generation, and so is the heart of God. Let My People Think is a listener supported radio ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia.