Christian Atheism

I want to thank all of you, Summit Church, and all of our campuses for making Serve RTU such a success for now 10 years in a row. Serve RTU began over a decade ago as an effort for us to be able to bless our community, to be able to make the gospel tangible and felt in ways that they would understand. Over the last several days, more than 2,000 of you have served our city in somewhere near 10,000 volunteer hours. We gave 1,700 backpacks full of supplies to teachers and to students. Maybe most impressive to me, on Tuesday night, more than 1,200 of you gathered in Durham Central Park to pray for the city.

In the rain, no less, it did not stop you. The statistics are always inspiring to me, but maybe even more moving and entertaining are some of the stories that get associated that are just beginning to come in. I know of at least one family that rearranged their vacation so that they could be a part of just blessing and serving our community.

I was at the desk at Chapel Hill High School and they pulled out a tooth out of the gum that they scraped off. I'm not sure what that means, but we're glad to serve in any way that we can. Now that we've been doing this for a decade, we are launching, actually this weekend, something that we were calling Serve 365. You know that the vision has always been not for us to take three or four days and go out and do something nice and come back and purell our hands and go back to our safe communities. It's basically for us just to get this as a way of life for us. This is something that God is going to put on your heart as a way of constantly demonstrating the love of Jesus to our community and Serve 365 would be the way that you do that.

You can find out that and more on that on the website. Let me just really quickly say, some of you have asked about this. You have noticed that I do have a new book that just came out. Next, you have a copy of it. I'm not preaching from it, but it is called Gaining by Losing Why the Future Belongs to Churches That Sinned.

By the way, make sure you get the subtitle right. It's not Churches That Sinned, but Sinned. That would be a great book also, Churches That Sinned, but that's not the book that I wrote.

It is really your story, this book. It is the story of how God transformed our church into becoming a sending church. When I started pastoring this church 13 years ago, the goal that we had, the goal I gave was we wanted to grow this church as big as possible. I remember one afternoon, I think I've told you this story before, one afternoon I was praying for our city and I was praying that God would send an awakening to our city like nothing Riley Durham had ever seen.

The kind of things that 100 years from now you would write about the movement of God that took place. It was one of those moments where the Holy Spirit spoke to me, not in an audible voice, but in a voice that was louder or more clear than audible. The Holy Spirit said, okay, what if I say yes to that prayer and what if I do send an awakening like nothing Riley and Durham have ever seen, but what if I don't use the summit church to do it? What if I bless somebody else's church and they're the ones that grow and get the attention and not yours? I knew what the right answer was. I'm supposed to stand up and say, oh yes, Lord, you must increase and I must decrease, but I knew it was the right answer, but it wasn't the real answer.

The real answer was no, I'm not okay with that. I want our church to grow. And I realized kind of all in a moment that my prayers for thy kingdom come, what I really meant was my kingdom come.

And so it was about eight years ago I stood in front of this church and I said, I think I've led you wrongly. Our focus has been on growing a big church and really our focus ought to be on reaching our city and getting the gospel into places where it's never been. And so if God wants to grow a big church in the process of doing that, then so be it. But if he wants to take out some of our best resources and best leaders and send them out to plant other churches in our city or cities around the United States or across the world, then we're going to be okay with that too.

And so really this is the story of how all that's happened. You know that every single year we send out over 100 people on church planting teams to cities, whether it's in Raleigh, Durham or somewhere else in the United States. Right now 200, over 200 of our members live overseas on one of our church planting teams over there. Works out to about one in every 20 summit members has an overseas address and is on one of our church planting teams. The International Mission Board, which we do a lot of our missions through, one of the vice presidents there told me, he said, not only does your church send more people to the International Mission Board than any other church in the Southern Baptist Convention, he said, you send more by a significant margin.

He says like three or four times as many as the next church. So this book is your story. Some of you were mentioned by name in this book.

For most of you, it is positive, but you'll just have to see what's in there. If you're interested, you can pick one up at any of our campuses. And just a reminder, everything we ever sell here, ever, not me or any other pastor here makes a single dime off of that. God has allowed me a great privilege in being your pastor and I do not write books to make money off of you.

So all the things that go from selling a book here at the church goes back into the ministries of the church so that we can do things like serve RDU. So if you've got a Bible, now's the time to take it out and why don't you open it to the book of Judges. The book of Judges, every good book, every good TV series, it's got to come to an end.

This weekend, we come to the end of our study on the book of Judges. I honestly am not sure whether to be sad or relieved. How many of you are relieved? Raise your hand. You can be honest.

I'm relieved. My hands up. It has been a raw and challenging book. Judges 17. Let me give you a warning as we begin. These are some of the darkest and most gruesome stories in the Bible.

They're kind of like a Quentin Tarantino movie. They're all darkness and seemingly no hope. Let me also mention, if you are a parent and you have a young child in here, my kids who normally sit through the service are not in here this morning.

If your kid is less than 13 years old, this might be a great week for you to acquaint yourselves with the excellent kids programing we offer here at the Summit Church. I'm not going to be risque, but these stories are just disturbing. I could find, by the way, very few sermons that have been preached on these chapters.

I think you'll figure out why here in just a few moments. In fact, maybe when I get done, you'll be like, I wish you hadn't preached a sermon on these chapters, but I feel like there's some things that are really important. I know they're in the Bible for a reason. They depict a state that I like to refer to as Christian atheism. Christian atheism.

These people in these stories believe in God, but practically speaking, as I'll show you, they live like atheists. I'm going to try to show you that we've got a lot of people in our culture and maybe some of you that fit in that same category. As I tell these stories, they may remind you of the time and the age that we live in. What I've picked up is that most of us, regardless of which side of the political aisle that you sit on, most of us are genuinely concerned about where our country is headed. This has certainly been one of the most morally turbulent summers that I can remember. It seems like every time I turn on the news, there's some mass murder or gun violence or racial turmoil.

It seems like it's as bad as it's been in my lifetime. People are asking legitimate questions about our justice system and whether it treats people of color fairly. A lot of Christians feel like the sky is falling morally.

A couple of weeks ago, we watched as Bruce Jenner, who has changed to being Caitlyn Jenner, got the ESPY Award for Courage, ESPN's annual awards. In his speech, he basically says, you know, we've got to get beyond where we say that any issue of sexuality is a matter of right and wrong. We've just got to treat this as everything's okay.

The whole place stands to their feet in applause, standing ovation. The message seems to be pretty clear that if you don't accept this as normal, then you have no place any longer in civilized discourse. Then, of course, there's the recent revelation of what goes on behind the scenes at Planned Parenthood, confusion over the moral outrage that takes place at the death of a lion on a different continent, but the seeming indifference over little boys and little girls that are dismembered in the womb.

It seems like the one thing that both right and left have in common, as they both feel like this country is in turmoil and it's in trouble. Judges 17 through 21, these five chapters are going to describe an age very similar to ours. And I hope that it will not only show you that there is nothing new under the sun, that what we're living in is not a new age, but it shows you where our hope lies and how you and I are supposed to respond in an age like this one. Judges 17, Samson, the last judge, has just died. And so chapter 17 opens up with a story of a seemingly random man named Micah, who overhears his mom utter a curse on the person that stole her money. Well, it was Micah. Micah's the one who stole his mom's money, and he believes in God just enough to be scared of the curse.

So he goes to his mom and is like, Mom, sorry, it was me. Please, here's your money. Please take off back the curse. And so his mom is so grateful to get the money back that not only does she lift the curse, she says, verse 4, I solemnly consecrate this silver to the Lord for my son Micah to make an image overlaid with silver. In other words, I'm going to say thank you to God for giving me back this stolen money by making a statue of God. Now notice, this is not a statue of Baal or Ashtaroth or a Canaanite god. This is a statue of Jehovah, Israel's god.

Verse 5, so Micah makes a shrine and he installs one of his sons as priests. In those days, Israel had no king. Everybody did what was right in his own eyes. In other words, they had no ruler.

Everybody has become his own ruler. Christian atheism, here they are, characteristic number one. Christian atheism redefines God rather than submits to God. What this woman did was in direct violation of the second commandment that we not make any images, graven images or likenesses of God. Now let me stop here for just a minute because a lot of believers say, you know, I get the first commandment that we shouldn't have other gods besides God, but what's the big deal about making an image out of God? Maybe it helps you worship or it makes you feel good or whatever.

Here is why that commandment, God gave us that commandment. An image of God cannot possibly capture the full range of God's glory. So inevitably, in your image that you make, you will highlight the parts of God's nature that appeal to you and you will conceal the parts that don't. For example, you will magnify his strength but obscure his compassion, or you will celebrate his grace while ignoring his purity and his justice. And what you end up with is a distortion of God, God not as he actually is but a God as you would prefer him to be, which is not really God at all.

It's really just a deified version of you. It is a rejection of God and a choice for yourself. Hand in hand with that always goes a redefinition of morality. You see verse 6, when there was no king, when there was no rule, everybody did what was right in their own eyes. Just as you redefine God, you will redefine right and wrong according to your preferences as well. Now in many ways, this is the primary sin of our culture, is it not? It's not that we completely reject Jesus, we just want him to be a certain way. So we make statements like, well my Jesus is like this, and I would never believe in a God who would say this or a God who would do that. The problem is that's a full scale rejection of God.

I've tried to illustrate it to you before like this. If somebody came up to you and said, hey, I find you to be a fascinating person and I want to write a biography about your life, you would be flattered. Wow, here I am, somebody's not even dead yet, somebody wants to write a biography. And they say yes, but let me tell you, in this biography you're a strict vegetarian. You're just psycho about it, and you always vote independent, and you're angry about it, and you tried to be an astronaut, but you failed out of it, and you're a loser, and you're lonely, and you live with 18 cats. And you're like, well, that does sound like an interesting person, but none of those things are true of me, I'm scared of heights, and I don't vote independent, and I eat lots of meat. And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm a vegetarian, and I'm independent, and I really want you to be those things because it makes you more interesting. Naturally, you would be insulted because they are rejecting the real you for a version of you that they find to be more palatable, more interesting. When you and I begin to redefine God and say, God, you offend me when you say this, so my God is going to be this, it's not really God at all. All it is is a deified projection of yourself. When that happens, you will inevitably begin to redefine morality, as you prefer it to be as well, as a worshipping of your own preferences.

And by the way, when I say that, I'm not just talking about the pundits on MSNBC doing this. People in churches like ours do it when they decide, for example, that they're going to sleep together before they're married, even though God's word very clearly says that the sexual relationship is reserved for marriage. Some will even have the audacity to say, oh, but we prayed about it, and God gave us a piece, as if that has any relevance at all. Just admit to yourself that what seems right in your own eyes has more weight to you than what God says. You say, yes, I am a Christian, and I believe in God, but practically speaking, you are an atheist because you reserve the right to define what God says as right and wrong according to your own preferences.

Let me continue on with this story and show you the second thing that Christian atheists do. Verse 7, after Micah makes a statue and puts it in his house, he meets a Levite who they are part of the priestly class traveling through town. Micah says, oh, good, look, a priest.

I got some extra money from my mom. I can hire him to be a priest for my statue of God. So the priest says, well, technically you shouldn't do that, but how much are you paying? Micah says, well, I'm paying a lot because my mom gave me a lot of money. The priest says, hmm, let me pray about it.

I feel like God has called me to say yes. Verse 13, Micah said, now I know that the Lord will be good to me since the Levite, this Levite has become my priest. I got God on the hook now, he's obligated to be good to me. Second characteristic of Christian atheism, Christian atheism uses God rather than worships him.

You see, Micah assumes two things here. He assumes first that his God exists to serve him, and then secondly, he assumes that if he does the right things, then this God is obligated to bless him. I've told you this before, but the great substitute for true faith in God is this kind of religiosity. It is not faith in God at all, and it is built on two premises. Premise number one is that God exists for you, and number two, if you do the right things, God is obligated to bless you, he owes you. By contrast, true faith says, God, I exist for you.

You don't owe me anything, I owe you. So religion will ask questions like, how can I get God to help me out in my business? How can I get God to give me a good family? How can I get God to keep me healthy? And when you do whatever you think it is he is telling you to do, and those things don't happen, you look at God and shake your fist in his face and say, God, I did everything that you asked.

I gave the money here, and I went here this many times, and I said these things, and I behaved, and I obeyed these things, and you let down your part of the deal. True faith never makes statements like that. True faith says, God, it all belongs to you.

What do you want to do with it? And when God sends pain into your life or frustration, you end up saying something like, God, I still can't believe I get a chance to know you and be saved. How can I glorify you through this pain? False religion seeks control of God. True faith surrenders to God. Religion seeks access to God to get him to do what you want. True faith gives God access to your heart so that he can tell you what he wants. Here's my question for you.

What kind of relationship with God are you seeking? Let me show you what happens real quick when you shrink God down to a size you can't control. In the next chapter, chapter 18, there's going to be another group of Israelites that show up at Micah's house, and they got more money than Micah does, so they hide, they convince this priest to go with them. And he steals the statue, and so the priest and the statue leave, and Micah wakes up in the morning, figures out what's happened, so he goes chasing after him, and he's just yelling at them, and he's like, you got to bring back my priest and my statue, and they're like, hang on, bro, don't get bent out of shape.

We'll pay you some money for it or whatever. What's wrong? Verse 24, Micah says, but if you take the gods that I made, what have I left? If you take these gods away, I ain't got nothing left. You see, when you shrink God down to a size you can't control, you will always live in fear of losing him.

When you have surrendered to the true God, you quit worrying about losing him because you know that he'll never lose you. Listen, I honestly tried this week to come up with a story that would better illustrate this than this one I'm about to tell you, but I've only had so many things happen to me throughout my life, I can't just make stuff up, right? So I just got to tell you some of the same stories a couple times.

So this one, because it just so perfectly captures this kind of sentiment here, it took place in an airport, which most of my stories seem to take place in airports. In Atlanta Airport, I'm in the waiting room because that's what Delta stands for, doesn't ever leave the airport, and I'm just sitting there in the waiting room, in the waiting area, and I strike up this conversation with this woman who finds out I'm a pastor, which always leads to interesting places, and she says, well, I'm a religious leader too. She says, what I do is I have a shop where I sell, I collect different religious kind of artifacts from different religions, and I try to take the best out of every religion, and my shop is kind of like a religious smorgasbord, you can come in and just kind of pick and choose and come up with your own religion. And I'm like, you know, I don't want to be that guy and like start preaching at her, you know, so I'm just like, I'm trying to be polite, and so I'm trying to figure out how to turn the conversation when the people right across the aisle from us is an older couple, and they were talking to each other, but, you know, they were kind of at the age where they think they're talking to each other, but they're really talking to the entire Atlanta airport. And the woman is reading the newspaper, and she says to her husband, she's like, oh, look, you know, the horoscope says that if you're a Taurus, then, you know, that you're going to have safety today. And she says, I am a Taurus, so that means that our plane is going to be safe.

So I'm just, you know, I'm kind of, you know, listening. Well, this woman, she perks right up, and she says, that's awesome. She reaches into her bag, and she says, I've got this little thing that I call a rosary ring. This is what I get from the Catholics. This is my favorite part of the Catholic religion. She says, this is a rosary ring. It's got all these beads around it, and it's got Jesus crucified, and if you hold on to it when you fly, then it guarantees that you'll be safe. And so the older couple are kind of shaking their heads, and she's like, this is my favorite thing. Well, you know, I'm watching, again, I'm just trying to process. When all of a sudden the person next to the older couple, I don't even know he's in the conversation, he suddenly perks up, unzips his carry-on bag, and pulls out a statue, a little statue of St. Christopher, and he says, this is St. Christopher, the patron saint of traveling.

I always travel with him in my carry-on, and right before we take off, I rub his head, and that means that I'm going to be safe. And I'm like, what episode of Star Trek did I just get beamed into? How did these things happen? And so, you know, I'm kind of dazed, then they start calling, and so me and this woman are walking down the jetway, and I'm just kind of like, fail, witness fail. And this woman reaches in, it's out of her pocketbook, and she says, you know, I happen to have two of these. And she says, and the people are behind us, and she says, y'all, do you realize how lucky we are? She says, the horoscope says we're going to be safe, I've got a rosary ring, he's got St. Christopher, and we've got a Baptist pastor with us on this flight, it's going to be awesome. And she says, here's this rosary ring, I've got two of them, she hands one to me, and she says, since you're a Christian, I know that you'll want to have this.

She said, if you'll just hold it when we take off, when we land, then everything will be okay. And y'all, I don't want to be that guy. And I'm like, I gotta be that guy. And so I said, ma'am, I say, no offense to you, this is a really sweet gesture, I will gladly receive your gift. But I said, you see this guy, you got crucified on top of your rosary, yeah, I said, that's the God of the universe. And he spoke all these things we see into existence, and the reason they have him crucified up there is because when he saw that we were in danger and we saw that we were perishing, he actually came himself to give his life to die for us. And see, when I trusted him as my savior, John chapter 10, he said that he literally put me inside of his hand. What that means is that when this plane takes off, if it ever does, I'm from Atlanta, if it ever takes off, I'm going to be in his hand. And when we land, wherever we're going, I'm going to be in his hand, and if we blow up in midair, I'm still going to be in his hand. And no offense to you and your rosary ring, but if the God of the universe holds me tightly in his hand, I don't have to hold so tightly to him in mind. What you're seeing, listen, is a picture of how different you can reproach God differently. There are some people who are always concerned about, am I doing the right things to get God's blessing? And it always ends with you being very anxious.

Am I doing this or that? The other way is you just surrender to God. And you say, God, I belong to you, and I surrender myself to your love because you saved me, you died for me. And there's this feeling of peace and safety that come in that keeps you from being someone like Micah.

Here is the question. Which way do you try to relate to God? Which way are you seeking to relate to God? The next several stories are going to show you what happens when you redefine God and when you try to use God. They show you what life looks like on a cultural scale and on an individual scale when God is absent. I'm going to try to summarize them as best I can and move through them, but you're going to have to hang on.

You ready? Chapter 19, verse 1, now another priest, a different Levite, a different guy, took a concubine from Bethlehem and Judah. A concubine is like a fake wife, and so the story got off to a bad start. But she was unfaithful to him, and she left him and went back to her mom and dad's home in Bethlehem. So he goes and tries to convince her dad to make her come back with him since he purchased her fair and square.

And so she, to make a long story short, he convinces her dad to let her come back, and he puts her on his donkey and starts the journey back up to where he lives. Well, as the sun is about to set, while they're traveling, they get near this town called Gibeah in the tribe of Benjamin. And when they stop there to spend the night, they go out into the city square because that's what you did before embassy suites.

You would hang out in the city square until somebody invited you to come and stay with them. But nobody took them in for the night, which is kind of rude. Finally, an old guy shows up, and he says, verse 20, you're welcome at my house, the old man said, but whatever you do, do not spend the night in the city square. Well, they're settling in for the night when suddenly, verse 22, some of the wicked men of the city surround the house. Pounding on the door, they shout to the old man who owns the house, bring out the man who came to your house so that we can have sex with him. Well, the old man and the priest, now scared, offer up the concubine and say, why don't you take her?

Leave us alone, you can have her, rape her instead. Verse 25, so the Levite took his concubine and sent her outside of them, and they raped her throughout the night. At daybreak, the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, and she fell down with her hands outstretched on the threshold of the door, and she lay there until daylight. When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, apparently with no thought for her at all, there lay his concubine falling in the doorway of the house with her hands on the threshold. Then he said to her, get up, let's go.

But there was no answer. So when the man put her on her donkey and set out for home, verse 29, when he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into 12 parts and sent them into all the different areas of Israel. Verse 20, then all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, came together as one and assembled before the Lord in a place called Mizpah. And they said to the priest, the Levite, tell us how this awful thing happened. So the Levite explains the story, conveniently leaving out the part where he sent his concubine out to get raped to save his own skin.

Well, the story provokes moral outrage. Verse 11, so the Israelites get together and unite as one against the city, and they amass an army of 400,000 soldiers to go march against the Benjamites, and they demand that the Benjamites surrender the men of the city who did this thing, but the leaders of Benjamin won't do it. So this massive fight breaks out, and at first the armies of Benjamin are winning. Verse 26, so all the Israelites, the whole army goes up to Bethel, where they sit weeping before the Lord.

And the Lord responds to them, go again, for tomorrow I will give them into your hands. And God did, it was a rout. Verse 48, the men of Israel put all the towns of Benjamin to the sword, killing the animals and everything else they found. They didn't leave a single thing alive.

All the towns they came across, they set on fire. Only 600 Benjamites escape, and they're all male soldiers. They flee, and they go hide in some caves in the mountains. Chapter 21, the Israelites, knowing that these 600 have escaped, take a vow. They say not one of us will give his daughter in marriage to a Benjamite if these guys ever emerge.

Well, a few months go by, temper's cool. These 600 Benjamites come out from hiding, and they say, look, all of our wives and our daughters are all dead, and we're a bunch of guys, and so we have nobody to marry and have kids and continue on the lineage of our tribe. Well, now they're in a pickle, because all the Israelites have made this vow that nobody can ever marry a Benjamite.

But now that they've cooled down, they don't want this tribe to go extinct, because it's part of their heritage. So verse two, the people go up to Bethel again, where they sit before God until evening, weeping bitterly. Lord God of Israel, they cried, why has this happened to us? Why should one tribe be missing from Israel today? As if it's God's fault. What are you gonna do, God?

Why did you let this happen? Well, they, not God, they come up with a plan. Verse eight, they say, well, okay, was there any tribe of Israel that when we sent out the summons to go to war, was there any tribe that didn't show up?

Any region that didn't send representatives? And they figure out there was this one region called Jabesh Gilead that didn't send anybody to the war council. All right, so here's what they do, verse 10. So they sent 12,000 of their best warriors to Jabesh Gilead, who didn't send any representatives, with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children. This is what you are to do, kill every male and every woman who is not a virgin. So they do that, but they keep alive 400 virgin girls to serve as wives for these Benjamites.

But that's not enough, there's still 200 short. So verse 20, they tell the men of Benjamin, there's this other region in Israel where they have a tradition where every fall, they come out before the harvest and they do this ritual dance, but they don't bring the men with them. So why don't you go hide in the woods, and when these women, verse 21, when you see the young women come out for their dances, well then rush out from the vineyards and each one of you can take home one of them to the land of Benjamin to be your wife.

We call that kidnapping. And so they do that, and then the book of Judges just ends. Verse 25, in those days Israel had no king, everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

That's the last verse. When God is absent, when somebody lives like an atheist, atheism always results in two things, always. The strong oppress the weak and despair. When God is absent, the weak are abused. The inevitable result of casting off the rule of God is defining morality in a way that benefits the strong.

What runs through these last chapters is a horrific callousness toward the weak. Israel is mercilessly oppressive toward weaker tribes and weaker groups like Israelite women. One scholar said that you could evaluate Israel's relationship with God in the book of Judges by how they treat women. At the beginning of the book of Judges, they are the protectors of women. By the end of the book of Judges, they're the ones who are oppressing women themselves. It's not the Canaanites doing it, they're doing it. What's even worse, they seem oblivious to what they're doing.

They talk like they're right with God, like they're just trying to do the right thing. But where is the Levite rebute for A, having a concubine, and B, sending her out as a peace offering to a group of men looking for a gang rape? That part just sort of gets brushed to the side because women are not as important as the men.

Where's the concern for the women that they kidnap to provide brides for some of the men? Where is the concern in these chapters for the innocent people that the Israelites kill in their process of perverted justice? When you take God out of the equation, the strong inevitably begin to oppress the weak. The most profound achievement of the American Constitution was to ground our rights not in democracy, not in the will of the majority, but in God's created order. We are endowed by our creator, they said, with inalienable rights. They are inalienable because they don't come from the majority, they come from God. And the majority didn't bestow them, the majority can't take them away. So they're not subject to the whims of the majority.

That's why I think it was Ben Franklin who said, democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. The liberty is the lamb having grounds before God on which to contest the vote. So when a guy like Martin Luther King comes along, he could say that the American majority was wrong in how it treated black men and women. Even though it was the law of the land and the will of the majority, it violated, he said, a higher law, the law of the creator. If Martin Luther King had only had the will of the people to appeal to, he would have had no leg to stand on. He said there is a higher law that gives inalienable rights and no majority, no matter how strong, can ever take them away because they didn't give them in the first place, it was the law of the creator. When a society or a person dismisses God, the strong inevitably will begin to oppress the weak.

So let's ask this question. Who are the weak among us today? For many years in our country, it was people of different races. For a large part of our history, the African, the Native American, the Hispanic, was subject to a different standard of justice than the majority was.

Even today, though the laws themselves have been corrected, we who are in positions of strength ought constantly to make sure that justice is not being skewed toward the strong because that happens inevitably and very easily, and we ought to empathize with those around us who have not enjoyed the same positions of strength throughout history that we have. I read an article recently on the Gospel Coalition site. It caught my attention because it was written by a guy named Isaac Adams. The reason it caught my attention is because Isaac Adams came to faith in Christ on the fourth row sitting right there. He was an African American Chapel Hill University student, came to faith in Christ in our church.

He hung over from being drunk the night before, got saved the next Sunday morning here in our church. He was writing on the anniversary of the death of Eric Garner. He was not trying to pass judgment on the merits of the case. He was just trying to urge his white brothers and sisters in Christ to at least put themselves in the place of their black brothers and sisters and try to see some of these situations through their eyes. He says, and I quote, imagine being white and every cop who surrounds you is black. The cops pulling up in their car to your once peaceful scene, well, they're black too. You're the only guy in the situation who is white. One of the cops just descends on you.

Then two of them, then three of them begin to pin you down. He says, imagine this happening to you. You wouldn't think twice about whether race were a factor?

Imagine them saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, only to have your face further pressed into the unforgiving sidewalk. And now imagine all of this in the context of having seen the slaying of 12 year old Tamir Rice and the brutal murder of 14 year old Emmett Till and the memories of situations like Rodney King or the lynchings that took place throughout history. Might you be even just a little weary of the police, maybe a little discouraged? Now he is not saying that the police are bad. He is not saying that police are even guilty in each of those situations. He's not in a place to judge that and he knows that and he supports the due processes of law. He just wants those of us in the majority culture to consider things from the viewpoint of somebody who has not walked in our shoes and speak up for them the way that we would want someone to speak up for us or our children. Why, why do we think that?

Because all people, black, white, brown, or whatever color are created in God's image and are given the same inalienable rights and ought to be subject to the same due processes of law of anybody else and ought to be treated like such. Here is another group, the fatherless, the fatherless in our country. One in every three kids in the United States is growing up in a single parent home. In most cases, it's the absence of a dad. In Durham County alone, 20,000 kids will never know what it's like to have the love of a father.

That group, by the way, would fill the Durham Bulls Athletic Baseball Stadium twice. Foster kids, many of them are in the foster care. There are 716 children in foster care in Wake County alone.

It's up 200 from last year. Many of them bounce from one house to another, constantly feeling like nobody wants them or loves them. Every year, hundreds of them age out of the system where 99% of the time they say they end up on the streets. Do they not deserve the love of a parent? Are they not created in the image of God just like your kids are?

Would you not want your kids to know that kind of love? Are these kids invisible to us? Have we felt their pain?

Have we treated them like people made in the image of God like us and our children? The homeless, tonight in Durham and Wake County, these 333 children will go to bed homeless. Recovering prisoners, I read a study recently talking about how one of the primary predictors of whether somebody goes back into crime when they're released, primary predictor is whether they have healthy relationships with people on the outside. But 40% of prisoners in Durham and Wake County have no one, not a single person, come visit them a single time when they're in prison. Not family, not friends, not somebody from church. We have a ministry at this church that does just that.

In fact, I found out last night that we got 53 prisoners who have signed up and said, I'm ready to have this kind of relationship and for the people to bring me to church, but we just don't have the volunteer families that are ready to escort them and be a part of that process. How about the unborn? The revelation that Planned Parenthood traffics the body parts of aborted babies ought to make us ask a very uncomfortable question. What does it say about us as a society that we have a use for aborted human organs, but not a use for the baby that provides them?

Let me press this a little farther because I know this is controversial. You know, in one sense, Planned Parenthood's logic makes sense. They maintain that the unborn's not human, just a piece of tissue, it's like a piece of hamburger.

If that's true, then nobody should have any problem destroying it or selling it. A woman does have a right to her body, and if she wants to remove part of her body and sell it, that's on her. What does not make sense is when somebody says, you know, the unborn is a human being, but a woman still ought to have the right to kill it, but selling it, no, no, that's barbaric. Listen, if the unborn is not human, then no justification for abortion, no justification for selling body parts is really necessary. If the unborn is a human being, then no justification could we ever give would be adequate.

Are children in the womb human beings made in the image of God? If so, then how could we ever be okay with a human being being killed simply for our convenience? And if you say, well, I don't know if it's really human life, well, then what kind of life is it?

Both science and logic demand that it's a human organism, it's human life, it is life. In Wake County alone, there are 23 abortions every single day. And we need to be brokenhearted about it. And we need to be righteously angry and we need to do something.

Why? Because every human created in the image of God has the same right to dignity and respect and love as any of the rest of us. What we cannot do is be silent. And I should see in the face of every aborted, unborn child the face of my own children because no children that are killed in the womb are not any different than my own children. They're both made in the image of God. If there is no God, we do not need to be worried about anybody's pain but our own. But if there is a God, then we recognize that each person created in the image of God is worthy of respect and dignity and ought to be loved. We believers, we Christians ought to speak up for anybody in the position of weakness. That's how you can measure whether or not we understand God and the gospel.

In fact, let me switch gears for a minute. High school students, do you speak up for those who are being picked on in the lunchroom? There are few times you are more like God than when you stand up for someone who is being oppressed. And there are few times that you anger God like when you participate in or sit silent during the bullying of somebody else.

Let me give one more. Christians, for us, we know that there are millions of people in the world who've never heard the name of Jesus. Each one of these people is made in the image of God just like you and me. They know what it's like to feel pain. They know what it's like to feel lonely.

They know what it's like to be afraid. For them going to hell would be every bit the tragedy that it would be for you or me for our kids. And so now it's when we talk about people around the world that have no access to the gospel, we kind of just put it into the category of statistic.

Oh, 2.2 billion people have never heard the name of Jesus. Joseph Stalin, who I typically don't quote during sermons, but Joseph Stalin said, the death of one is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic.

This is not a statistic. These are people made in the image of God. And what that means is that we ought to love them the way we want somebody to love us because their eternal suffering would be no different than if it was for us or our children. I realize some at church that each of you cannot be involved in all of these ministries. But one thing is true of people who really believe in God and really understand the gospel is that they give themselves away for the week.

It is the sign that you have met God. You can't be involved in all of them, but you should be involved in some of them. That's what Serve 365 is really all about.

You go to summitrdu.com. There ought to be a way that you can point to and say, I am giving my life to restore dignity to the oppressed. I am giving my life to take healing and gospel to the weak because that is the sign that you know God.

Here's the last thing here. When God is absent, we live with despair. When God is absent, we live with despair. As I noted, this book ends with a note of desperation. It tells these horrific stories and the author kind of puts his hands up and then just says, in those days Israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

It was so appealing at the beginning, was it not? You're watching a story, Mike, and you're like, oh look, he gets to make his own God just like he wants? And this God guarantees that his life is going to go good and he's going to be blessed? And then it always ends in darkness. I get to define God as I want him to be.

He becomes my lucky rabbit's foot, but it ends with hell on earth. But see, that's where this story takes a turn. The book of Judges does not exist by itself in the Bible. In fact, listen, there is another book in the Bible that is written in parallel with the last chapters of the book of Judges.

You may not know this, but there's another book that comes right after Judges that actually overlaps with Judges. When chapter 17 begins, so does this book, and that book is called the book of Ruth. Ironically enough, Ruth is a woman who's not even an Israelite, and she's a widow.

When you're a non-Israelite widow in Israel, that's about as low on the totem pole as you can get. But unlike the Jewish heroes of faith, unlike Samson, she's going to trust God in the face of impossible odds. And though she is weak, and though she is poor, her book ends with this verse, Ruth 4.21.

Remember Judges ends with there's no king and everybody's doing what's right in his own eyes. Ruth ends this way, and Boaz, who married Ruth, threw her father to a guy named Obed, and Obed fathered a guy named Jesse, and Jesse fathered a guy named David. And David one day would have a son, who would have a son, who would have a son, who would have a son, who would have a son, whose name would be Jesus. You see, these books, written in parallel, show you that where the strength of Israel fails, God would save through one considered weak, like Ruth. One who was an outcast, like Ruth. The king that Israel did not have, but clearly needed, would come, not as one who was strong, like Samson, not as one who would force people to obey, like Samson did, he would come as one who was weak, like Ruth.

Who would be an outcast, like Ruth. Who would not force people to obey, but he would change their hearts, so that they wanted to obey. His death would be a horrible, gruesome thing, a distorted perversion of justice, just like we see here in the last chapters of the book of Judges. You see, though these chapters in Judges are dark, and they are gruesome, they are not the darkest and most gruesome chapters in the Bible. The most gruesome, perverted, distorted, dark chapters of the Bible are about the crucifixion of Jesus. The Roman historian Cicero said that when the Romans crucified somebody, their goal, their goal was to send a message that would make somebody terrified of the thought of ever, ever rebelling against Rome.

So they come up with a way of torture that they thought was sufficient. They would beat a man before they crucified him. With a cat of nine tails, that would basically rip the flesh off of their abdomen and their back, Cicero, the historian, says it was not uncommon during the beating to see a rib go flying off of a man's frame during the scourging. They say that Jesus was almost surely at least partially disemboweled after the beating. The prophet Isaiah said that he was beaten to a point that he didn't even look like a man, he was unrecognizable.

You wouldn't have known, you would have had to know who he was to tell that it was Jesus. They would choose a public place to crucify because they wanted to humiliate them, they would strip them naked, and it was so painful that men would weep and vomit and urinate all over themselves, all the while the Jewish leaders patting themselves on the back saying, we're doing justice, we're doing God's work. Why, why are those chapters so dark and bloody and gruesome?

Because he's going into Judges 17 to 21, that's why. Dark is the stain I cannot hide. What can avail to wash it away?

Look, there is flow in a crimson tide brighter than snow you can be today. The reason the cross was so bloody was because our sin was so bad. And the price that Jesus paid for our sin had to be equal to or greater than the wickedness of our sin. So yes, dark was the stain that I cannot hide.

What can avail to wash it away? Grace, grace, God's grace. Grace that can pardon and cleanse within. Grace, grace, God's grace, grace that is greater than all of our sin. You see, his death not only pays for our sin, it transforms us into being the kind of people who begin to obey because we love, not because we have to, but because we want to.

It is his love and his gift for us that makes us into the graceful, loving people he always wanted us to be. You saw this played out recently in one of these horrific stories from this summer. A few weeks ago when Dylann Roof went into Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine African Americans there, you remember some of you at Roof's hearing at his arraignment when they brought him in.

Several of the families stood up and said to him, you took something from us that we can never get back. But Jesus has forgiven us and we forgive you. What gives somebody the power to do that? It's not a general sense of morality. It's not even really a belief that God exists. The only thing that compels that is a belief that in your moment of weakness, when you deserve the condemnation of Judges 17 to 21, he took it for you. He became weak for you so that you could live. Grace, grace, God's grace, grace that will part and then cleanse within, grace that is greater than all of our sin, marvelous, infinite, matchless grace, freely bestowed on all who believe.

You who are longing to see his face, will you this moment his grace receive. You see, maybe you're living in Judges 17 to 21. You kind of are whether you realize it or not. It may not be as gruesome as Judges 17 to 21, but it's only different by degree.

It's not different by substance. You've redefined God, haven't you? You've always kind of said, God, I want you to be this, so I'm gonna change this and I'm gonna do this.

I don't like to say here, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna opt out of that. You've used God. You've been more concerned as God blessing what I'm trying than you have saying, God, I wanna be on your agenda and I want it to all belong to you. If you look closer in your life, you'll see that at times you could do it and get away with it, you've abused the weak. You have distorted justice and fairness and the things God's given you, you've turned it in toward yourself. All we like sinners, all we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Dark is the stain we cannot hide. What can avail to wash it away? Look, there's flowing a crimson tide.

Brighter than snow you can be today. It doesn't come through religiosity, it comes through surrender. Religiosity redefines and uses, faith surrenders.

That's what the whole book of Judges is about. There's a savior, a king, a king who saves. Do you know him? Do you know him? Why don't you bow your heads?

All campuses bow your heads. Have you ever surrendered to him? Have you ever surrendered to him? I'm not inviting you to become more religious. I'm inviting you to lay down full and total control of your life at the throne of Jesus and say, Jesus, I can't save myself. You gotta save me. And no longer will I live using you. I'm gonna live worshiping you, surrender to you, and I surrender all to you right now.