We live in a self-focused, success-driven culture. And the Bible offers radical teaching concerning where we can find true meaning and significance. Today, on Truth for Life, we'll listen to a college graduation address given by Alastair Begg. a message he titled The Only Basis for Boasting. I'm reminded of a comment by the late George Burns, the little comedian.
Who said On an occasion such as this, on an evening like this, with a temperature like this. If you are entrusted with a privilege such as is now afforded to me. It is imperative that you have a good beginning. And a good ending. And you keep the two of them as close together as you possibly can.
I think that was well stated, and I have been at many a graduation event. where the person entrusted with the privilege that is now mine. extended his sell-by date. and uh disappointed everyone, people wishing they had graduated years earlier. Tomorrow Uh the graduating class.
We'll walk out into a world in which they have emerged in a culture That has encouraged men and women to believe themselves to be. The center of the universe. A culture in which it seems perfectly normal and reasonable to have been ferried to school in a minivan Bearing a bumper sticker, That proclaims the genius of the inhabitant of the minivan. Namely you. In his latest book, The Road to Character, David Brooks observes.
That while in an earlier era There was a stronger social sanction. Against Blowing your own trumpet. Getting above yourself. Being too big. For your britch.
We now live in a culture of self-promotion that says. recognize my accomplishments I am pretty special.
Now, lest you think that I, an aging baby boomer, I'm here to suggest that my vintage avoided this self-ism. Let me quickly disavow such a notion. I think in large measure we could be said to have generated the extent to which it has flourished in the last quarter of a century. As the oldest of the baby boomers reached 65, which was four years ago. Dan Barry, writing in the New York Times, noted Of these baby boomers, They are living longer.
working longer and nursing some disappointment at how their lives have turned out. The self-aware or self-absorbed. feel less self-fulfilled and are thus now ragged. with self. Let's see.
In nineteen sixty-five. When I was 13. Paul Simon proclaimed this theme of individualism. In a song that began A winter's day. In a deep and dark December, I am alone.
He wasn't bemoaning the fact, he was announcing the fact. He went on to say, I've built walls, a fortress deep and mighty, that none may penetrate. Don't talk of love. I've heard the word before. Is hidden in my memory, and I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved, I never would have cried. And after all, I've got my books. and my poetry to protect me. I'm shielded in my armour. hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one. And no one Touches me. The culture in which you have grown up. It's a culture that produced and fostered that kind of mentality, and consequently, those who have lived through it for the longest time. Find that they are in many cases marked by indecision and by loneliness.
When Dreyfus and Kelly wrote their book a couple of years back now, encouraging people to look for significance in their lives, they pointed out that men and women, because we live in such a secular environment, are forced to try and make meaning for themselves. Which of course is a very tough Assignment. And when they do, what do we discover?
Well, we discover that the passage of time hasn't changed things very much at all. A part of our reading this evening came from Jeremiah chapter 9, about 2,500 years ago. And here in that section of Jeremiah 9, the The prophet was warning people about trusting in anything other than God's revelation of himself. If they are to learn how to live, And if they're to discover How to die.
Now, the background to all of that I'm going to assign is your homework, which as you're graduating, you won't do in any case. Not that you necessarily did it before, but nevertheless, you will discover. You will discover that it is a context of death and disaster. He says, I want you to teach your daughters to lament. Death has come up and climbed in our windows.
In other words, what he's saying is that the world there in that day was broken. And in attempting to fix it, They were prepared to trust themselves and to trust their own judgment. Essentially, in the words of Lennon and McCartney, hey, we can work it out. We'll work it out. Don't you worry about it.
And so as a result of that, God sends them a prophet. He sends them a prophet who speaks sympathetically to them in their need. and speaks with striking honesty to them in their rebellion. And as he does so, he identifies three sources of self-confidence as being inadequate in themselves. They're all there in the text.
Number one. Wisdom. or intelligence. Or Education. You're sitting there saying, Does this fellow know that he's at a baccalaureate?
That he has 150 members of the faculty in front of him, 500-plus graduating people, and all these parents that have invested a fortune in getting them this education. And he's here to say, Look out. It can really do you some harm.
Well, and I shall find that's what the writer of Ecclesiastes says. It's a miserable kind of business ultimately left to itself. Einstein concurred with that. Einstein wrote in his journal that he had found that the people who know the most are themselves the most gloomy. Because the pursuit of wisdom divorced from the fear of the Lord is a dead-end street.
Wisdom in and of itself. Intelligence in and of itself, divorced from the basis of any ultimate kind of knowing. leads you up a blind alley. Wisdom. It's an insufficient prop upon which to build your life.
Secondly, might or strength. Or your body Your body. This is a generation that is fascinated with the body. It's revealed in all kinds of ways. And the Bible is so clear about it.
God has given to us a body. He has inhabited a body himself. It really, really matters. But it matters that we understand that as all flesh is like grass and the glory of man is like the flower of the field, so the grass withers and the flower falls, and we are like a vapor that appears for a wee while and then vanishes away. Think about what a multi-billion dollar industry is involved at the moment, at this point in Western culture, to try and proclaim what the Bible says as being absolutely wrong.
That, no, no, we're really going to live forever. We can fix this. We'll be able to work it out. Just because we're not prepared to admit what we know. And many of you are young, of course you are, but some of you are like me.
Sir, gentlemen, may I say to you, without embarrassment, it's a long time since many of you shaved without wearing a T-shirt. And the reason being that you just can't stand to see yourself in the mirror, if you're honest. Or you're frightened that your wife comes in and catches you. Because it is patently obvious that things are not as they were. You're actually collapsing.
You're f You're fading away. You have a furniture problem. Your chest has dropped down into your drawers. You are in deep trouble. And the writer of Ecclesiastes makes that clear.
That's why he begins chapter 12 to say: Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come. before you find that you're not standing as straight as you were, before you've discovered that your arms begin to tremble, before you're dealing with inadequate occlusion, that you have few enough teeth on the front or the top to meet the few you've got left on the bottom. When you wake up at the sound of birds and yet you can't get to sleep and so on. In other words, when you f suddenly discover that there are aisles in the drugstore which you have never paid attention to for an entire lifetime and suddenly you have to go in them. And you're frightened that anybody sees you.
Dear, oh dear, oh dear, who would trust in this an inadequate prop? My brains, my body, Or thirdly, my box. My money. My resources. My riches.
There are two problems with wealth. Wealth may leave us. While we're living And we will leave wealth. When we die. Our culture has embraced the notion that money is the universal passport to everywhere, but it isn't the passport to heaven.
It's the universal provider of everything, but it is not the provider of happiness. And they A songwriter of the sixties again, the country Western fellow, had those memorable lines in in his song Mr. Businessman, where he says you're spending counterfeit incentive, wasting precious time and health, and placing value on the worthless and disregarding priceless wealth. It's a delusion, says Jeremiah. of thinking even for a nanosecond.
That our lives may make sense, that they may be granted significance. by the pursuit of simply an agile mind. or a healthy body. Or a fact. Portfolio.
Oh, you say this is ph this is phenomenally gloomy. This is all very negative.
Well, it is negative, but then there is a positive, and he turns it around. He says, this is then the way in which you need to approach things. Having an understanding and a knowledge of God. In other words, what we cannot finally settle by way of investigation We may know by God's grace Through revelation. Everything will fade, heaven and earth will pass away, his words will never pass away.
And so he says there are these unfading glories. Which are first of all gifts to us before they are expectations from us. And what are they?
Well again, just three, the steadfast love of God. The steadfast love of God, the covenant love of God. The love of God that is made known to us in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have read it in Romans 5. We have referred to it in our prayers.
The depth of the love of the Father for us, that we should be called the children of God, and this is what we are. The foundation of your existence, the exercise of your brain, the pursuit of your usefulness, grounded in the covenant love of God. also in the fact of God's justice. that God rules in equity, that He deals in truth. that he's not arbitrary in in what he does.
His actions are always in keeping with his character. Because he is just. Sin must be punished because he has love. He has provided a substitute to die in our place. And thirdly, is righteousness.
It's interesting. To note that when Jesus comes to John the Baptist, to be baptized. And John the Baptist says to him, don't we have this the wrong way round? Shouldn't you be baptizing me? To which Jesus replies, at least in the King James Version, Thus it is fitting now.
to fulfil all righteousness. And the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled the Father's will. Establishing his righteousness, providing a righteousness.
So that we might understand that knowing God as He has revealed Himself. We know him both as Creator, And the sustainer And the Saviour and as king.
So that when we think about saying to our culture the things that we have learned in an institution such as this. We're not suggesting that somehow or another we as coming from a Christian biblical worldview are denigrating the nature of man's aspirations, either in the pursuit of wisdom or in the exercise of physical prowess or in the ability to earn and to get gain. What we're actually saying is that there is a glory that outshines all of this glory. And it is this glory to which we seek to invest ourselves as we walk out into the future. This, said Jesus, Is eternal life.
That they know you, he's speaking to his father in prayer in John 17, that they know you, the true God. and that they know Jesus Christ. whom you have sent.
So As you think of this, and I hope you will. But I do know that Very little is remembered on an evening like this.
So the best you can hope for is an odd phrase here or there. And um glean as you can and gather as you may. Let me end my remarks by trying to ground it again. in the context of our culture and in the future of your lives. In the Wall Street Journal, In um At the very middle of twenty thirteen, Henry Allen who's a pundit and a commentator.
Began his article with the phrase, for the first time in my 72 years. I have no idea. What's going on? I have no idea what's going on. He says, as a political commentator, he used to think that he understood things, but he now finds in his early 70s.
that uh we've lost any sense of a purposeful beginning and a meaningful end. There seems to be, he says, no arc, no through line, no destiny, as the British soldiers sang in the trenches of World War One to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.
Well, there's a bumper sticker for you, isn't it? There's a T-shirt to be worn. Just such an expression of sadness. He says, I don't know what's going on. I doubt that anyone does.
I used to think the world would go on the way it was going on with better meds and the arrival of an occasional iPad or an earthquake, but that was when I knew what was going on. I worry that reality itself is fading like the Cheshire Cat, leaving behind only a smile that grows ever more alarming. What a strange time it is to be alive in America. It can't stay this way, can it? Or can it?
Now what are we going to say to that? Are we going to say humbly? Graciously. and straightforwardly that we do know what's going on. Because we do not believe ourselves to be the product of some chance universe.
were not simply molecules held in suspension. We were purposefully created in our mother's womb. He has designed us for the express purpose of giving glory to him. And that glory emerges. from the hearts and lives of those.
who walk humbly before him. One of the ways in which you can figure how to deal with Old Testament passages. Is by looking to see if the Old Testament passage is mentioned anywhere in the New Testament. And of course the verses from Jeremiah 9. are found in First Corinthians chapter one.
And here's where they come. For consider your calling, graduates. Not many of you are wise. according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful, not many of you were of noble birth.
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. He chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. He chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are. Why?
So that human beings might not boast in the presence of God, so that they wouldn't drive around in many fans declaring their genius, so that they wouldn't say, here I am, the world has been waiting for me. I am the answer. We are the graduating class, you know, that holds the answer to the universe. Really? I've met some of you.
That's a surprise to me. No, that might not boast in the presence of God, because of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God. Righteousness. And sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, Let the one who boasts Boast. And the Lord.
When he writes in his second letter. He makes the point even more graphically when he says, that God has put this treasure in old clay pots.
so that the transcendent power might belong to God and not to us. People are going to say so.
So, what did the fellow from Scotland say at your baccalaureate? Oh, he said we're just a bunch of old clay pots. Wow, that was nice of him. They brought him all that way just to say that.
Well, no, he said that he's an old play part. He said that on his best day he recognizes himself to be an unprofitable servant. He recognizes how quickly it has been from the day I was where you are to the day where I am now, and that I've got less in front of me than I have behind me. and that I'm aware of these things in a way that I wasn't and that's the value of age, so that old fogies like me can come and speak to young people like you and say, here, listen to the warning of Jeremiah. And realize this.
Most of us won't even be a footnote in history. Therefore, if we do not embrace The reality of the ordinary. The immediacy of the routine. The privilege of the little bits and pieces that make up life, we are in for a sore disappointment. Did you read George Eliot's?
Middle March Do you remember how she ends? You say she? I thought you said it was George. Check with the English department. They'll fill you in.
Do you remember how she ends with this picture of the humble person and the Great explanation of the humble life. Speaking of this individual, she writes, but the effect of her being on those around her. was incalculably diffusive. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. And the things are not so ill with you as they might have been.
is half owing to the number who live faithfully A hidden life. And rest in unvisited tombs. I invite you. to live faithfully. A largely Hidden life.
Hidden. in the protective mercy of God who has made you. Exercising justice. proclaiming a righteousness in Christ alone. And in the awareness of the fact.
that to move from one prophet to another. Isaiah says This is the one. To whom I will look. Says the Lord. He Or she who is humble and contrite in spirit.
and who trembles At my word. Father, thank you. That your word is a lamp to our feet. and a light to our path. Thank you for the privilege that we've had of having our thoughts constrained from a biblical perspective.
Grant that as we anticipate tomorrow and all of our tomorrows we may walk in the path of righteousness. For your name's sake. Amen. You're listening to Bible teacher Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. I don't know if you realize this, but Truth for Life began in 1995 as a 25-minute daily Bible teaching program on 31 radio stations.
Today, Alistair's teaching is heard on nearly 2,000 stations all around the globe. You can also listen to his messages on YouTube, the Truth for Life website, the mobile app. Podcast apps, even streaming services like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. The growth we've experienced over the past thirty years. was made possible because of listeners like you who donate each month.
We call them Truth Partners, and our Truth Partners help us extend the Gospel reach of this ministry. If you are one of our Truth Partners, please know that we are grateful to God for your participation. And when you donate to the ministry, you're coming alongside us to enable projects like translating Alistair's books into many other languages, or bringing his Bible teaching to prisoners through the learning platform Edovo. We're also able to offer many resources for free, like our library of nearly three thousand sermons, as well as books at cost, including devotionals and Bibles, children's books all of this because of your generosity.
So, if you're not already a truth partner, would you consider joining this vital team today? you decide how much you'd like to give each month. You can sign up online at truthforlife dot org slash truth partner, or call us at eight eight eight five eight eight seven eight eight four. One of the ways we will say thank you when you sign up is by inviting you to request the book Grounded in Grace. helping kids build their identity in Christ.
The book is yours when you become a monthly truth partner or give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org/slash donate. Thanks for joining us today. Tomorrow, Alistair shares some principles that have framed his life and ministry. I hope you can join us. The Bible teaching of Alastair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life.
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