Hope of Nations - How to Live for Christ Now, Part 1

Do you feel discouraged by the relentless discord all around us? I mean, whether it's political or racial or socioeconomic, we're being ripped apart in so many ways. In the midst of this kind of division, let me ask you, how do we live in peace? How do we walk with God? How do we make a difference?

Well, that's today. Stay with me. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. The mission of these daily programs is to intentionally disciple Christians through the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram.

I'm Dave Drouie. Thanks for joining us as we are nearing the end of our new series, Hope of Nations, led by our guest teacher, John Dickerson. For these last two programs, John gets very practical and shares how we as followers of Jesus can respond to this changing and chaotic world.

In just a minute, he'll begin walking through nine specific ways we can do that starting today. So if you haven't already, let me encourage you to get the message notes for this series. This is a useful tool that'll really help you get the most of what you're about to hear. Download them under the broadcasts tab at livingontheedge.org.

App listeners just tap fill in notes. Well, with that said, here's John Dickerson with today's talk. How do we live for Christ? How do we have a place of truth and of peace and of joy in a world that's shaking and dividing?

That's the question we're asking. How can you live for Christ in a world that's not all bubbles and sunshine and rainbows and weddings, but in the real world? How can we prepare our kids to live for Christ in a world that is shaking and a world that is so divided?

It's a question for us to answer as a group, as a church, and it's a question for each of us as individuals to answer. You know, I'd like to imagine that my kids will grow up in a world that will always be peaceful and perfect and safe, but the reality is they're going to face and inherit a world that is divided and shaking because the reality is whatever political side you're on or whatever side of a social issue you're on, half of your neighbors disagree with you. And we live in a world where half of our neighbors disagree with all of us no matter where we fall on these different political and social things. And so how do we live for Christ in a divided world? Or if we zoom out, we realize that we're on this kind of treadmill where every few weeks or month there's either another shooting or another terrorist attack, and the world shakes around us. Here's an illustration that one newspaper cartoonist made after the September 11th anniversary, and this little girl asks Uncle Sam, she says, why do we place our hand over our heart to say the pledge?

He responds, well, on this day, we do it to keep our hearts from breaking. And the world we live in, not only is it divided over politics and social issues, but there's times when the world shakes. There's times when it shakes here in the United States, and there's times globally.

You may recall when North Korea was firing off missiles and threatening to fire off nuclear missiles, and the nations of the world tried to gather around to say, how do we prevent a nuclear missile being fired? There's times in our lives when the world shakes. So how do we live for Christ in a divided world and in a shaking world? That's a question that, you know, if we're really serious about representing Christ, and if we're really aware of what's going on in the world, it's a tension that we will wrestle with. How do we live for Christ in such a divided world? How do we live for Christ in a world that's shaking?

Well, thankfully, we're not the first group of Christians to wrestle with this question of how to live for Christ in a shaking and divided world. In fact, as I was studying Scripture to find God's answer to this question, I came across something interesting. Did you know that God Himself wrestled with how to answer this question?

Here's what I mean. There was one time in human history when God decided that He would take on the form of a human. He took on skin just like you and had pain just like you and breathed the same air we breathe and drank the same water, and He chose to come down into the human story to show humans the heart of God.

And here's the thing. When Jesus was incarnated as fully God and fully man, He came into a world that was deeply divided. He came into a world where Romans and Greeks and Jews and Samaritans all had racist divisions about each other. He came into a world where slavery was a global norm.

He came into a world where women in most of those cultures I cited were treated as property and had no rights. He came into an unjust and a divided world and a world that was shaking politically, a world that would continue shaking. There was a time when Jesus looked at Jerusalem where He did most of His public ministry, and He wept because He saw that within decades that city would be burnt to the ground. God Himself came into a divided and shaking world. So to answer this question, we can actually look to the Word of God, and we can see exactly how Christ would have us live in a divided and shaking world, and I want to share that with you today. God tells us the answer to this question in the Gospel of John chapter 1. In verse 14, it describes exactly how God when He took on flesh and bone and walked among us for the purpose of showing His heart to us, how He came into a divided world. It says this, the Word, that's Jesus, became flesh just like you and me, and He made His dwelling among us. We've seen His glory, the people writing this, they'd seen His miracles, they'd seen Him raised from the dead, the glory of the one and only Son of God, who came from the Father, sent from heaven, and here's how He came, full of grace.

What is that? Grace is undeserved forgiveness and full of truth. That is, here's what's just, here's what's right, here's what's wrong, and as we've learned in this series, God's truth leads to freedom.

Here's the map to lead you out of slavery and into a life of freedom. Now, you might have heard this verse before, but I want you to just think about the significance of this. Here's Almighty God who created the galaxies and atoms and molecules and Tyrannosaurus Rexes and humpback whales and humanity. He created it all. He answers to no one.

He can do whatever He chooses. He made this beautiful creation, and we know from the whole of God's Word starting in Genesis that He didn't create cancer. He didn't create genocide and war and rape and injustice and division and hatred and murder.

All those evils come from us and come from Satan who our ancestors invited into this world. I want you to think of you spending time working on a masterpiece of a creation, and you hand it over to someone for them to take care of it or manage it, and they destroy it. And then you return. You know, imagine you buy a rental house and you pick someone to manage it, and you come back and the house is just completely trashed.

It's going to cost more than you spent on the house to fix it back up. How would you return to that person? Would you come full of grace and truth? If I were in God's shoes knowing the whole story of God and humanity as told in God's Word, I would not have shown up in grace and truth. I would have come full of anger and wrath. I would have come, as some people say, taking names and kicking buttskies. You know, I would have been angry. I would have been mad. I would have been, what have you guys done? Why did you destroy all this? I told you if you make these choices, you'll mess it all up and you'll mess yourselves up.

Why did you do that? He would have had every right as God to come in that way. But instead, he came quietly, humbly, full of undeserved forgiveness, but also full of the truth. Christ came into this world full of grace and full of truth, not full of anger and attitude, not full of guilt and shame. I mean, this verse could read, the Word became flesh, made His dwelling among us. We've seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father full of anger and wrath.

You could say that. He would have been justified to do that. But instead, He came full of undeserved forgiveness and saying, here's the map to set you free from your own slavery. So how do we now follow Christ in this world? Here's very simply what we're learning today. God sent us to show His grace and His truth to people He wants in heaven. Why do we exist in this world today?

It's not to just survive and make it. As followers of Christ, we're on a mission. Just like God sent the Son into the world, He has sent us here for a purpose. And our purpose is more than just making it through. Our purpose is more than just hoping the next crisis will pass and we'll be okay. Our purpose is more than just making sure our kids and grandkids are taken care of even while the rest of the world falls apart. No, we're here on a mission. And our mission is for very specific people, people you know who God wants to be in heaven.

And how are they going to get there? Well, the only way they're going to know God's heart is through a relationship with a follower of Christ like you who can show them God's grace, His undeserved forgiveness, and His truth that there's a standard, that there's right and wrong, that there will be a judgment someday, and that forgiveness is available to all people who turn to Christ full of grace and truth. We're sent here on a mission. There's a verse in Scripture that says that God desires His heart is that all people would come to salvation. That's what God desires. But God also made us in His image, and we have a free will, and God allows people to choose if they want His salvation or not, just like He allowed Adam and Eve to choose if they wanted perfection in the Garden of Eden or sin, and they chose sin. And so God's heart is that everyone you know would be in heaven someday.

That's what His heart is. And so as we navigate a changing world, the reality is that everyone around us is a person who God loves and wants in heaven. Every Republican, every Democrat, every conservative, every liberal, every socialist, every capitalist, every Muslim, every atheist, every person of every tribe and tongue and nation were all broken by sin but were all made in the image of God, and Christ came into this world to reconnect humanity back to God. And why, after we place our faith in Christ, why doesn't He just teleport us to heaven right away? Because there's a mission for us to continue, and that is to show His heart of grace and truth to specific neighbors, classmates, relatives of ours who God wants to be in heaven. I wonder who in your life is one specific person who God wants to be in heaven. Would you picture a face in your mind or if you're taking notes, write down a name, one specific person in your life who God wants to be in heaven.

Are you thinking of someone? It might be someone who is a follower of Christ right now, maybe a child or grandchild of yours, and they're on that track, and by you showing God's grace and truth, you're gonna keep them in that path. Or maybe it's someone who is far from God right now. Maybe they don't believe in God right now or they hate God or they're just far from God, and for them it'll be a miracle of God reaching out to them and them responding, who's that person in your life who God wants to be in heaven, who you want to be in heaven?

And as we go through this material today, I want you to be thinking of that person and praying and saying, God, would you use me to show your grace and your truth to Sally, to George, to Evie, to Allie, to some specific person who you know and love who God wants to be in heaven? Well, how can we be full of grace and truth in a world that's rapidly changing? In this series, we've been looking at what's going on in the world, where it may lead.

We can't predict the future, but we see some social trends and some global trends. And in this week, we're answering the most important question, and that's how do we live for Christ now in a changing and shifting and shaking world? So I want to share with you some ways, some specific things you can cling to that will help you be full of grace and truth in a rapidly changing world, full of grace and truth in a rapidly changing world.

And I'll just mention these nine ways we can respond. I'll mention that they come from a book I wrote called Hope of Nations. And the reason I mention that is that I'm going to cruise through these. And if you want to go deeper, there's a lot more in the book.

You don't need to get the book, but if you're interested in this, you can get it. Also in your notes, you'll see under each of these nine things, you'll see Bible verses. And I don't have time to open up every one of those passages of Scripture, but each of these nine things we're going to walk through, they all come from the heart of God and the word of God. And they're specific responses to cultural challenges that we'll see in our lifetimes. The reason there's nine of these is as I looked at how's the world changing, I wanted to know for my kids and grandkids, what are the specific challenges they'll face?

And then what does the word of God say about those? So one of the first challenges we have learned is that we now live in a post-truth world. And that is according to Oxford Dictionaries in 2016, they had a word of the year. And their word of the year was post-truth, meaning they said that America and Europe have moved to a place where truth is no longer defined by written objective standards, but truth is all about people's feelings and opinions. So one person's truth is this, another person's truth is that.

And as this affects lawmaking and lawmakers and social norms, it will continue to divide the world around us. So how do we instruct our kids to live in a post-truth world? Well, according to the word of God, it's to keep them rooted in Scripture. And that's the first of these nine ways that if we adopt these things, it'll keep us balanced to be full of God's grace, His undeserved forgiveness and full of His truth. We should be, if we're full of grace and truth, we will be the most illogically forgiving, loving, patient people in the world. And at the same time, we are unapologetically committed that we believe the Bible is God's word. It's the standard for what we do and believe. And even if it's unpopular, we don't change our beliefs. We're full of grace and truth.

And so remaining rooted to Scripture is the first of these really nine solutions to keep us balanced in a manner that's full of both grace and truth. So in a world where truth is feeling based and more and more of our neighbors will say, well, I feel really strongly about this. And we ask why. And they say, well, I don't necessarily know why. I just know I feel really strongly about it.

We'll be able to, not in a judgmental way, but in a loving way, know that what we believe isn't just because it's what we feel or what a teacher or professor told us, but because it's the heart of God. I've told you guys the story of the house I had in California, how we had orange trees in the backyard when I lived in California. And these orange trees were awesome.

They produced great fruit. And I never planted those trees. I never watered those trees. I never cared for those trees. But I just inherited the fruit that was on those trees.

I don't know who planted them or watered them, but they were great. Kids would go out there. They'd fill up their red wagon with oranges. We had more oranges than we could eat, and we'd make fresh orange juice.

It was awesome. And we've likened this to the society we've inherited in the United States and in nations that were predominantly Christian for the last few hundred years, that we have inherited some fruits that seem normal to us because they've always been in our backyard. So the way women are treated in our culture, while it's still not perfect, to us, that's normal. But what we don't understand is in the scope of human history, women have more rights in this society than ever before.

We don't often understand that our life expectancy is twice, two times what human life expectancy was before a couple hundred years ago. So many of these fruits like the courts we have, the rights we have, the abolition of slavery, our ability to read, the modern universities, all these things came from people who planted seeds. And in this series, we looked at those seeds, and we saw that not as opinion, but as history, the people who planted the seeds that founded those universities were looking to this word.

Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all started as Bible seminaries to teach the Bible. And that's not my opinion. You can look it up. And so what we've kind of used as a picture in this series is there's a society that's not perfect, but does have some great fruits because it once had roots that were in God's word. And we've made the parallel of, first of all, a generation neglecting that and saying, yeah, that's not that important. But now, increasingly, people being trained to take out an ax and actually chop at the roots of what produced these fruits.

And so I want to give you now a kind of second layer to that picture. And it's a true story of a city called Singapore, Michigan. In Singapore, Michigan, this is a real town, and Singapore had a number of mills, a couple banks, a number of hotels, and a whole bunch of homes. And after the great fire of Chicago in the late 1800s, there were actually three major fires around the Great Lakes region, and there was a whole bunch of lumber needed to rebuild those cities. So Singapore, Michigan sold off all the trees between it and Lake Michigan.

If you've been to Lake Michigan, it's almost like being to the ocean. There's these big sandy beaches, and there's big sand dunes. And Singapore was right between the lake and the sand dunes. There were all these trees, and they chopped down the trees, and they sent off the lumber.

They sold it to Chicago and other cities that were rebuilding. What they didn't understand is that those trees were acting like a barrier from the winds that come off the lake and the sand. And with the trees gone, the sand started creeping into Singapore, Michigan.

And here's how one historian puts it. Without the protective tree cover, the winds and sands coming off Lake Michigan quickly eroded the town into ruins. Within four years, it was completely buried in sand and vacated.

So you can go there today, and it's just a giant sand dune, and you wouldn't know it unless you knew the history, but underneath the sand dune, the old hotels, the old mills, the old banks, and the old homes. They cut the trees down. They didn't understand the implications of cutting the trees down.

And here's the thing. I believe that as societies that are imperfect but did once look to the standard of God's Word, as they turn further and further away from it, we'll see a similar effect. And here's the thing for us as parents, as grandparents, as a church. We can't control what happens in our society at large, but we can control what we do with our families and with our church.

So to use the metaphor of Singapore, Michigan, we can't control if Harvard and Yale, who once were founded to teach the Word of God, that they cut down all the trees around them. We can't control that, but we can control our homes, and we can say we will be a people who remain true to the Word of God, understanding that when we hold God's truth as our standard, it actually protects us from the winds and the storms of life. And the best way we can prepare our kids, our grandkids, the best way we can be full of grace and truth is to say we'll continue to make the Word of God the standard for what we do and believe. You've been listening to the first part of John Dickerson's message, How to Live for Christ Now, from his series, Hope of Nations.

Chip will join us here in studio with some additional thoughts and his application in just a minute. John's subtitle for these messages is Standing Strong in a Post-Truth, Post-Christian World. And sadly, we're living in a time when God is being disregarded, right and wrong are considered subjective, and followers of Jesus are persecuted.

But it didn't used to be this way. So what happened? How did we get here?

And what can be done, if anything, to right the ship? Through this series, John will reflect on the impact of the Christian faith throughout history and where the society and America in particular is headed. He'll also highlight opportunities we could take advantage of to engage the culture around us. For complete information for Hope of Nations, just go to livingontheedge.org.

App listeners tap Special Offers. Chip, it's not often that we have guest teachers here. Would you talk with us for a second about how you and John know each other and why you believe this series is important? Well, as you've heard John speak, you realize that we are living in a post-truth, post-Christian world. And John is a very bright millennial who we had the privilege of working together.

I actually hired him years ago before he was a senior pastor as one of my teaching pastors when I pastored in California. And I just saw this intellect. And what most people don't know was that intellect was used first as an award-winning journalist, a research investigative journalist. And what he's done in this series and also in the book that we're offering in Hope of Nations is he's doing some digging and some firsthand research that really changes the paradigm and gives a completely different narrative based on truth of where the world is and where it's going and what we need to do versus the common narrative that we're hearing through social media or some of the major outlets.

And so I wanted you to hear John firsthand. And then let me encourage you, get this book. If you have a kid, get this book. If you're a leader, get this book. If you need to think clearly about the future, get this book. It is well researched. He doesn't go to secondhand sources. He goes right to primary sources and you can trust what he says.

Thanks, Chip. Well, to get your hands on this insightful book from John Dickerson called Hope of Nations, visit livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. This is a well-researched commentary on the challenging times we're living in. John looks at the decay of society's morality and how Christians are called to engage this lost world. Again, to order your copy of Hope of Nations by John Dickerson, just go to livingonttheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003. Well, now let's get to Chip's application. As we wrap up today's message and get near the end of this series, you heard a strong charge from John to say, step up, step in, be bold.

I love that illustration about the trees in Singapore, Michigan. They thought they were doing something good, right? I believe with all my heart, the people that are undermining morals and values, I think a great majority of them fully believe their ideology.

They think they're doing something good. And yet when you see the undermining of morality, the confusion about gender, the morals and the family that gets dissipated, what we see is more and more hurt, more and more chaos, more and more people in need. We have to stand strong. We can do it without militant attitudes. We can do it in love, but we have to lay hold of God's word, God's truth, and say, blessed are those who are persecuted.

Have you thought about that? In my time around the world, especially in China and the Middle East, I will tell you when people live in a culture that are persecuted for their faith, they read the Bible differently. And maybe you need to start reading the Bible differently. I've actually had people look at me and say, I want to die well for Jesus.

I've had a person in China tell me they beat up my wife to a pulp. And then he paused and I thought to myself, what would I do? And then he looked at me with sincerity and said, can you imagine what a privilege it is to suffer for Jesus?

There was no thought of bending or compromising. What I want you to know is things may get more and more difficult. God will give us grace to be strong, to be firm, to not deny him. But you got to get prepared.

You got to be equipped. These messages along with the notes are available at LivingOnTheEdge.org. I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of the book, Hope of Nations, Standing Strong in a Post-Truth Post-Christian World by John S. Dickerson.

And go to our website and look through the store. We have content there that helps you come before God, do life in community, be on mission, teach your children, figure out how to raise kids and grandkids in a way that the truth will dominate their minds and their hearts and they be difference makers in a hostile world. God has always raised up young people to change the world.

Let your children be one of them. You know, a great way to soak in God's truth for both you and your family is through the Chip Ingram app. Access many of our past series or get connected with our popular resources like Daily Discipleship with Chip or Mealtime Conversations. Let us support you and your family along your faith journeys. Well, be sure to join us next time as our guest teacher, John Dickerson, wraps up his series, Hope of Nations. Until then, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.