July 4, 2024 1:00 am
A culture that rejects Christ is a culture that says it's the yardstick for moral choices. America is fast approaching the moral point of no return, where what's wrong is celebrated as right. The Judeo-Christian morality that many of us grew up with is like a train that seems to be stopping, and we need to find a way to restoke it.
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Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. A culture that rejects Christ is a culture that says it's the yardstick for moral choices.
And those choices lead to polling place choices that determine a nation's destiny. So where does true morality come from? Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, America is fast approaching the moral point of no return. What's up is down and what's wrong is celebrated as right. Dave, you're right and that of course breaks our hearts, doesn't it? You know speaking about politics and this is of course a very political year as you implied, speaking about politics I remember being in Washington and a congressman spoke to us and said these words, you expect us to enact righteous legislation but how can we do that unless you send us righteous people? So I've often thought about that. And yet at the same time in a book I've written entitled Christians, Politics and the Cross, I emphasize that the cross of Jesus Christ must always be unopposed. It doesn't mean that we don't get involved in politics, it means that the cross has to always fly high above the flag. This is one of the last days we're making this book available for you, Christians, Politics and the Cross.
Here is what you do, go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now at the end of this broadcast I'll be giving you that contact info again. For now let us listen carefully. Well I know you won't believe this.
In fact you'd better not believe it. But I still remember the days when there were these locomotives that used coal. In fact when they pulled into town, a town of about a hundred people but several elevators filled with grain, when the locomotives pulled in even though we lived six miles from the town we could on a clear day see that the train had arrived. Especially when it started up.
Every one of those chugs just billows of smoke. I don't know where the EPA was in those days but the atmosphere was polluted. One of the things that the engineers used to say about those trains once they had about a hundred boxcars filled with grain and going about 55 or 60 miles an hour is that it would take several miles to stop. Just the inertia of the weight on those iron railings would keep the train going. So long after the motor could be stopped and the engine come to a halt, the train could still go along the tracks. As we look at America today we can see that the train, the Judeo-Christian morality that many of us grew up with, the train seems to be stopping.
The motor seems to have come to a point where it no longer generates the power and the steam. And what you have in society is the memory of a Christian consensus to quote the words of Francis Schaeffer where people know that at one time we really did as a nation generally speaking believe in absolutes. It's not that everybody agreed as to where the line should be drawn but they knew that somewhere there was a line that should be drawn. And even though the Bible was not widely believed it was nevertheless widely respected and there were certain expectations that we had of people and of course they frequently disappointed us.
But still everybody knew what the standard should be even if they didn't live up to it. And now the train seems to be stalled on the tracks and everybody is wondering how in the world can we get this engine going again? How can we reverse directions and turn this country back? I think that one of the evidences of the confusion that exists in today's world is the increasing role of law in the United States in our courts. Let me illustrate it to you and it's hard for me to say it exactly but maybe some illustrations will get at what I mean. On the one hand you have radical individualism fueling every ambitious every greedy desire that the human heart might have and encouraging us to go for it. On the other hand you have the courts constantly being brought to play to douse the fuel of this individual passion.
The if it feels good do it crowd. And so you have the conflict there that takes place. Did you read this past week about the couple that killed their newborn baby, crushed its skull, little baby born in a motel room with a father and the mother present, the unmarried father and mother? I mean I don't know how you felt but I was shocked when I discovered that not only were they going to be tried for murder but if they are correctly found guilty as it appears that they are they might receive the death penalty. I read that and I was I was surprised.
Were you surprised? I mean they could have killed this baby a week before and done so legally. So on the one hand you have the abortionists who say that it is legal to have an abortion whenever you want it for whatever reason at whatever point of the pregnancy. So on the one hand you have that fueling society and then on the other hand you have the law suddenly coming up and saying now you committed murder.
Logically you might say if it was murder an hour after the baby was born why might it not be murder a week before it's born? But you can't ask those kinds of questions in our society and so what you have is on the one hand you have this fueling of individualism with its arbitrary morality and then suddenly it is doused by law that comes on the other side. Maybe that helps you understand what I'm getting at but perhaps not yet am I clear. What we have in society today is this this middle point that existed in American life. This middle area between law and freedom where people were able to resolve their own tensions and their own problems and only occasionally resort to law. That middle area has now been squashed.
In many instances it no longer exists. People can't resolve their own differences anymore. The law has to be brought in.
Did you read the Trib front page today's newspaper? Here's a man who is harassed sexually by other men at work. He goes to the management. The management won't do anything about it so now he has a court case and the judges are looking at it and they're beginning to prosecute in such instances and you say to yourself why can't this just be resolved? Why can't there be compromise? Why can't there be understanding?
Why can't a an organization a factory in which he works have some rules and and why do the courts have to be brought into it? The problem is that America has so smashed character. It has so depleted those resources between relationships between people where it used to be able to solve those problems where where reasonable people could come to some agreement. Now it is being thrown to the courts. I think that we should have guessed should we have not that a society that a country that has 70% of the world's lawyers would eventually take every single desire and turn it into a right and so you have reproductive rights and you have group rights and you have PC politically correct rights. They found a new right in the Constitution. The new right is that nobody should ever have to ever hear something with which they disagree and so everybody has to say the same thing. Everybody has to approve of various kinds of behavior and what you have in society therefore is enforced tolerance and as a result of that people are beginning to ask the question of where do we go with this intrusion of the courts into our lives to to resolve what should be disputes that reasonable people should be able to deal with. Did you read in the newspaper some time ago where a judge issued a restraining order to a three-year-old boy in a sandbox who was harassing a three-year-old girl? I'm not making it up.
I wish I were. How can you have that? It used to be that two mothers used to be able to work something out and if the mothers couldn't do it the fathers did it and if the fathers weren't around maybe the church resolved it and now a judge has to adjudicate between two toddlers in a sandbox. It is evidence of the decadence of our society that no longer can reasonable people work out even the most basic human relationship problems and they have to resort to law because character and reasonableness and trust and decency no longer exists, at least not in large quantities. It's there but so often the public square has been depleted that we have to go to the courts. Well understandably people are concerned and some of you parents you're concerned about what your teachers are teaching your children in school and you ought to be concerned and you ought to be involved. You cannot throw your children to those who would teach them how to be immoral and and teach them some of the things that are going on in the schools and so you're involved but then the larger question is asked what about the whole nation and you have groups today who say we need to reclaim it morally.
I wish I could find it but I have the habit of receiving things which disappear on their own somewhere in a mountain of information but this week I received a brochure from a very reputable minister having another meeting on how to reclaim the moral ground that we have lost. I don't object to that. There are things that we can do together even with non-Christians that are important. I think that in Cincinnati there are no adult bookstores, no x-rated videos are sold.
That would be wonderful if that were to happen in the city of Chicago but it would not be a victory that would be that great because there's a lot of other things that can be purchased here in the city that would soon take the place of those videos and magazines. Years ago my wife and I in our home we had ants. I don't know if you've ever had ants in your home but it's not something that you want to necessarily go out and campaign in behalf of. I mean we discovered that if you close the basement they come through the door. If you close the door they come through the attic.
We don't know where in the world these ants came from. We're just glad that they aren't there anymore. You know that's the way it is with sin. You block this door and it comes through here. During the days of prohibition they said you know no whiskey.
Well whiskey was bootlegged and people got it from here and if they weren't able to get it from here they stole it from there. It's a tough world out there and when you're all finished you wonder whether or not it was worth the effort because unless you keep up some kind of a campaign all the time your gains first of all are minimal. They don't last long and they never really change the human heart. Now what I need to tell you today that if we want to put fire back into the train, if we want to restoke that old locomotive, we have to buy into some biblical propositions and let me give them to you today. The first is this that morality is based on God.
It's based on God. You can't have morality without God. It's like asking for leaves without a tree. It's like asking for petals without a flower. It just does not exist. Now this would take one separate message.
I could probably do it in 45 minutes in a lecture but that's not what you're getting today. To prove that out of atheism no morality whatever can arise none. Now the minute I say that you say oh I know an atheist who's trustworthy.
We even give him our keys when we go on vacation. Yes of course because atheists too are created in the image of God and therefore they have a sense of rightness and wrongness. Augustine referred to them as well as those who were virtuous pagans he said and there are such but their morality arises out of the fact that they are creatures created in the image of God. It does not arise out of atheism. Logically out of atheism no morality whatever can arise. Morality is tied to God. When God said these are the Ten Commandments he meant this is what I am like.
You look at those commandments and you get a glimpse of me. Remember the liberals who thought that they could do away with the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and still keep the Sermon on the Mount? Boy I'll tell you that didn't last long because once they got rid of a supernatural Jesus and once they got rid of a transcendent God they were left with the Sermon on the Mount that nobody wanted to obey and so it was constantly rewritten to fit the fallenness of human nature because you cannot have morality without God. Secondly morality ultimately is changed through the transforming work of Jesus Christ. The transforming work of Jesus Christ. If any man be in Christ he is a new creation. All things have passed away.
All things have become new. It is the transforming work and that is the unique message of the church that you can't find in any of the political parties and that's not wrong. I'm just simply stating a fact that there is a transformation of heart that God wants to bring about and then there's a third supposition that I want to give you today that is the most direct to us today and that is to say that we clean up the world the best. We clean up the world the best by cleaning up the church first. By cleaning up the church first. Take your Bibles and turn to 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians chapter 5.
A culture much like ours. We've been to Corinth some of us and we remember the temple up on the hill which was dedicated in those days to a thousand prostitutes. Homosexuality rampant. As a matter of fact as Paul sat down to write this Nero was about to marry a boy by the name of Scorpus and it is said that 14 out of the first 15 Roman emperors were either homosexual or bisexual. So you have all kinds of permissiveness. You have adultery.
You have fornication. You have everything that you could possibly think about sexually and other kinds of sins in this pagan Corinthian culture and Paul is writing a letter to the church and he says in chapter 5 verse 1 of 1 Corinthians it is actually reported that there is immorality among you and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles that someone has his father's wife. Very probably a stepmother.
His mother probably died. His father remarried and so the son and the stepmother are involved sexually and Paul says you know things are bad in Corinth but you don't even hear of that. I mean there even the pagans draw some kind of a line in the sand. Now this is a good time for us to pause for just a moment and to realize why it is that we should be so careful when we point our fingers at the world and the reason that we should never come off as self-righteous as as pharisaical as on a pedestal pointing our fingers to all of the people in the world who disobey God's laws is one of the reasons is because the very same sins frequently exist among us. That's why Paul is writing this.
He's saying this should have humbled you and yet you've become proud and you've ignored it. Look at the sins that destroy society whether it is abortion or divorce or homosexuality or alcoholism or drugs you name it it is within the church. It happens among us and and what Paul is saying is that those are the kinds of things that must be taken care of. Now it's not wrong to say that this was in people's past. In fact as we shall see in a moment that's going to be Paul's emphasis is that people are converted out of all kinds of different sins and that is understandable and that's why a church body such as ours or any other church in America is a collection of people who have been saved out of some very very damnable sins and iniquities.
That's the way it should be. I'm talking about people who claim to be believers people who say yes I am a follower of Jesus and they continue in their former lifestyle. So what the Apostle Paul is saying here is that I'm not I'm not interested he says in what happens in other parts and currents.
I want to know what's happening in your assembly. As a matter of fact Paul says that the whole body is affected by what this one person is doing. Last part of verse six, do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Don't you know that one man living in immorality in a church actually poisons the entire church? You take some leaven and you mix it in the dough and pretty soon the bread expands and just a little bit of it a cup of it or whatever expands the whole loaf and Paul says that in the very same way this one man's compromise and sin affects the testimony of all of you all of you are compromised by it. You see you can't quarantine sin you can't you can't cut it off you can't say well here it goes and no further I mean it's like trying to burn incense in a dormitory room no matter how many towels you put under the door somehow it'll waft into the hallway up the elevator and soon they can smell it on the second floor.
You just can't keep it neatly contained and and that's Paul says that's my great concern. In fact he says in verse nine I wrote to you my letter not to associate with immoral people and some people evidently misunderstood it and said well if that's the case we're gonna have to go live on an island somewhere. He said I did not mean with the immoral people of this world or with covetous or swindlers or with idolaters for then you'd have to go out of the world.
You'd have to live with yourself I guess. You know I have a friend bless him who doesn't think that he should attend a restaurant where a liquor is served because he's contributing toward the liquor. Well that's fine that he has that conviction but I wonder what happens when he eats somewhere else. How does he know how the money that is being given is going to be used? If you have that view that you're not going to associate with idolaters and swindlers and immoral people then you're have to going to go to northern Wisconsin and buy a little plot of land and a little bit of acreage and not see anybody for at least five years but watch carefully the man from whom you purchase that plot of land. He might misuse that money for immoral purposes. Now Paul says that's not what I'm talking about.
Of course you have to do business with these people. Verse 11 but actually I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he should be an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or reviler or drunkard or swindler not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?
He said that's your responsibility. You're pointing your fingers at them and you have not cleaned up your own act but those who are outside God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. You see what Paul is saying is I don't come here to Corinth with a with a morality campaign to clean the place up. Well this is Pastor Lutzer.
I want to clarify something. When we read the New Testament or when we look back on history we realize that Christians have reacted differently to the state to the laws that are made by governments and of course that's why it's so important for us to understand our present context because it does depend on the nation in which you are living. I've written a book entitled Christians Politics and the Cross. Now it's a book that is really based on much of American history and what our involvement should be.
I hope that this book is going to help all of us to think through what our relationship should be to the state during this very political year. Very quickly hope that you have a pen or pencil handy because this is one of the last days we're making it available for you. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.
Ask for the book Christians Politics and the Cross. Once again want to emphasize this is one of the last days we're making it available for you. Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. And from my heart to yours I want to thank you so much for your love, for your support, for your prayers for this ministry Running to Win that goes around the world.
You can write to us at Running to Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Americans are adrift in a sea of moral relativism. We need a moral compass. The cross of Christ is that compass and the church must live by that cross if our culture is to survive. Next time on Running to Win, Erwin Lutzer turns again to 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Here, Paul the Apostle will clarify how believers should live amid moral chaos. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-07-04 02:10:45 / 2024-07-04 02:19:20 / 9