|
SERMON
Salt and Light
We must repent of Christian pessimism and reaffirm our confidence in God's power.
John Stott |  Printer view |
|
|
 2 of 3
If in the community there is more violence than peace, more indecency than modesty, more oppression than justice, more secularism than godliness, is the reason that the church is not praying for these things? But I myself believe that in our normal services we should take with increasing seriousness the five or ten minutes of intercession in which as a congregation we bow down before God and bring to him the world and its leaders and cry to him to intervene. And the same is true in the prayer gathering and in the fellowship groups and in our private prayers. I think most of us, myself included, are more parochial than global in our prayers. But are we not global Christians? Do we not share the global concerns of our global God? And these concerns should express themselves in our prayers. The power of prayer.
Christians must use the power of truth
Secondly, the power of truth. All of us believe in the power of the truth of the gospel. We love to say, "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. It is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes," Romans 1:16. We are convinced of the power of the gospel in evangelism that it brings salvation and redemption to those who respond and believe in Jesus. But it isn't only the gospel that is powerful. All God's truth is powerful. God's truth of whatever kind is much more powerful than the devil's lies. Do you believe that or are you a pessimist? Do you think the devil is stronger than God? You think lies are stronger than the truth? The Christian believes that truth is stronger than lies and God is stronger than the devil. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 13:8, "We cannot do anything against the truth but only for the truth." As John said in his prologue to the fourth Gospel, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it." Of course it cannot; it's the truth of God.
Solzhenitsyn believes that. If you read his Nobel Prize speech, it's called "One Word of Truth." He says, "We haven't got any rockets to blast off. We writers don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence?" He doesn't say we haven't got any power. He says, "One word of truth outweighs the whole world." If anybody should believe that it's Christians. It's true. Truth is much more powerful than bombs and tanks and weapons. The power of the truth.
How are we going to see it at work? Persuasion by argument. Just as we need the doctrinal apologists in evangelism to argue the truth of the gospel, so we need ethical apologists in social action to argue the truth and the goodness of the moral law of God. We need more Christian thinkers who will use their minds for Jesus Christ, who will speak and write and broadcast and televise in order to command a Christian option and influence public opinion.
The American magazine Seventeen carried an article called "The Case against Living Together." It's an interview by Dr. Nancy Morclathwell, a sociologist Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
She says that for 10 years she's been studying the phenomenon of unmarried couples living together. When she began, she says, she was predisposed towards the custom. "Young people have told us it was quite wonderful." And she said she believed them. It seemed to her to be a sensible arrangement, a useful step in courtship in which couples get to know one another. But her research involving the testing of hundreds of couples married and unmarried led her to change her mind. And she says the things people say living together is doing for them it is not doing, especially with girls. She found them uptight, fearful, looking past the rhetoric to the possible pain and agony.
She makes two points. In the area of happiness and respect and adjustment, she says, "Couples who live together before they're married have more problems than couples who marry first." In every area the couples who lived together before marriage disagreed more often than the couples who hadn't. So she said living together doesn't solve your problems.
A second point was commitment. Commitment is the expectation that a person has about the outcome of a relationship. Commitment is what makes marriage and living together work. But, listen carefully, "Knowing that something is temporary, like living together unmarried, affects the degree of commitment to it. So unmarried couples are less than wholehearted in working to sustain and protect their relationship. And, consequently, 75 percent of them break up. And especially the girls are badly hurt." She concludes, "Statistically you are much better off marrying than living together, because for people who are in love, anything less than a full commitment is a cop out." Now I don't think she's a Christian. But it's a sociological argument for Christian ethics.
I'll give you one other quick example. You can't force people to go to church by legislation. You can't force them to rest on Sundays, nor can we simply quote from the Bible as if that settles the matter. But we can argue with them. We can argue that psychologically and physically human beings need one day's rest in seven and that socially it's good for families who are separated during the week to have a day together on Sunday. We can argue for legislation that protects workers from being compelled to work, encourages family life, prevents people from getting their recreation at the expense of others who are obliged to work in order to give it them. In other words, spectator sports.
In these examples we're neither imposing our Christian views on Christians nor are we leaving them alone in their Christian views nor are we quoting the Bible dogmatically as if that settled the issue. We are using every argument—physical, psychological, sociological—in order to command the wisdom and truth of biblical teaching. Why? Because we believe in the power of truth.
Christians must use the power of example
Third, the power of example. Truth is powerful when it's argued. It's more powerful when it's exhibited. People need not only to understand the argument. They need to see the benefits of the argument with their own eyes. It's hard to exaggerate the power for good in a secular housing estate that can be exerted by a thoroughly Christian family in which the whole community see the husband and wife loving and honoring one another, devoted and faithful to one another, finding fulfillment in one another. They see the children growing up in the security of a loving and a disciplined home. They see a family not turned in on themselves but turned outwards—entertaining strangers, welcoming, keeping an open home, seeking to get involved in the concerns of the community and so on. The power of example. One Christian nurse in a hospital, one Christian teacher in a school, one Christian in a shop or in a factory or office. Christians are marked people. The world is watching. And God's major way of changing the old society is to implant within it his new society with its different values and different standards and different joys and different goals; so that, people see and are attracted. And Jesus said, "They see your good works, and they give glory to your Father in heaven."
 share this page
| | |
Free Newsletters
RSS Feeds 
The Practical Journal for Church Leaders
|
|
|
|
|
|
by 3 members.
back to top
