Introduction

Our society, as you know, is increasingly becoming a society of options. We speak more today of pluralism than we ever have in our history. Many of the ideas we have as a people, many of the written things that are held dear, were written when America was 90 percent Protestant, white, and without almost any minorities of any kind. Now we've become pluralistic.

That pluralism reaches beyond ethnic distinctions and becomes a description of our religious life as well. There's a kind of paternalism about the church—that the church is a subgroup in our society not unlike the Amish in Pennsylvania. To many people, the church is sort of quaint.

In the words of the great American theologian Frank Sinatra, "I'm for whatever gets you through the night." People obviously need something, and if some folks want to be quaint and come to church and listen to some religious music and get themselves jazzed up about God, if that helps them, fine. If other people want to get what they want through drugs, or golf, or whatever, that's fine, too.

Then there's that great host of PBS programs as well as editorials that ask the question, "Is the church relevant?" I don't know about you, but one thing I don't want to be is quaint. I don't want some busload of tourists pulling up in front of my house to take pictures of me, like I'm an Amish man. I don't like the idea of having people ask the question, "Is the church relevant?" I'd like to try to answer that question from a personal viewpoint, because I don't consider myself to be quaint, nor do I consider myself the kind of person who fools himself about relevance in culture.

In Matthew 16, Jesus looked at a man very much like us and said: It's upon the profession of faith, the belief system, the foundations of your life, and other lively stones that will come after you, that I'll build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

I believe in the church, because it's our only institution that deals with eternity.

I believe in the church, first of all, because it's the only institution in our society dealing with the ultimate issues life, death, eternity, judgment, and forgiveness. It's important to deal with subjects like the gross national product, the balance of power, the balance of trade. It's important to deal with issues of world health, and hunger. A thousand political problems are very, very important. But if one deals with those and does not deal with issues like, "Where will I spend eternity? How will I please a holy God?"—if one has no answer to his sin problem or the problem of his soul—he has missed the point.

We have in history a man with whom most of you are familiar, I'm sure—a medieval philosopher and mathematician named Pascal. He put forth something we commonly call Pascal's Proposition, and this proposition to his atheist friends went this way: "Suppose you are right and I am wrong" (Pascal was a believer). "Suppose God didn't make the heavens and the earth. Suppose mankind is just a coincidental cosmic joke and has no purpose or reason on the earth. He dies like a dog. Now," Pascal said, "I've believed otherwise. I've believed that the earth was made by God, that mankind is God's creation, that man has fallen away from God in sin, and God has sent his Son, Jesus, who's visited the planet and died on the cross and shed his blood for my sin, and by faith in him and through his grace, I've been forgiven my sin. I'm a new creature, and I'm on the way to heaven. I've believed that, but it's all false. Therefore," he said, "we both die. None of the promises are true. You die. I die. Annihilation.

"But," said Pascal, "suppose that's not the way it is. Suppose I'm right and you're wrong. Suppose there is a God and all these things I've described are true. We both die. Then you find yourself, because there is a God in heaven and because he's just and holy, separated from God in eternal damnation in a sinner's hell. But I am the recipient of the promises of God through faith." Pascal said, "In both cases, you have everything to lose and nothing to gain, but I have everything to gain and nothing to lose." I believe in the church because it deals with these issues.

One of my favorite novels is Watership Down. In Watership Down, you remember, we have a group of rabbits. Their warren is going to be destroyed by a bulldozer, and a subdivision is going to be built where they live. So we have a little rabbit like Moses who's going to lead them to this place called Watership Down, to the Promised Land. The novel is the story of the pilgrimage of these little rabbits.

Well, our little wild rabbits come to a hole in a fence, go through, and find rabbits like they've never seen before. These rabbits are bigger than they are. They're fatter. They have longer hair. They look very happy. They never seem to forage for food. They never work. So our little rabbits move in with them and begin to discuss life. They say, "What do you eat? You don't forage."

The larger rabbits say, "We eat pellets. If you come out of your hole, you'll find a little ceramic dish, and in that dish are pellets. You just eat the pellets and chew your cud. It's a marvelous life. You grow fatter, and your hair grows longer." So our little wild rabbits don't take long to get into the rhythm of this thing. They eat pellets and they grow heavier, and this is a marvelous place to live.

One day our little Moses rabbit notices that the biggest, fattest rabbit is gone. He says, "Where has old Fuzzy gone?" Folks say, "We don't know. Every once in a while, one of us disappears, but we don't ask questions about it. They just are gone."

Our little rabbit is not quite as domesticated. He goes out and finds a twig bent over to the ground. Hanging from the twig is a wire with a little lasso on it. He studies it for a while and eventually kicks some grass into it. As soon as he kicks grass into it, it sets off the snare, and the grass is pulled up by the lasso. He becomes almost sick to his stomach, because he can see old Fuzzy hanging there and realizes that Fuzzy is now in some farmer's rabbit stew. He goes to the other rabbits and says, "Don't you understand what happens when a rabbit disappears?" They say, "We don't like to think about it. We just eat our pellets."

We live in a society that lives something like that. We don't like to think about it. We buy our ski boats and our bowling balls and our carpet and don't think about it. But I am glad the church of Jesus Christ exists in the middle of it to remind me there's something about me that shall live for all of eternity. There's a God in heaven, and I must please him and have a way to overcome my sin and know him. I'm glad the church of Jesus Christ tells me how to be saved.

I believe in the church because it gives dignity to mankind.

I believe in the church because it provides perspective to give dignity to man. Psalm 8 has a very interesting phrase: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" It goes on to say, "Man is a little lower than the angels." We live in a society that doesn't think of man as a little lower than the angels. We live in a society that thinks of man as a little higher than the animals, as if there is no qualitative distinction between man and the rest of the creation. As a result, man's highest goal is seen in his societal efforts. Suddenly society becomes more important than man. Man becomes a means to an end. If someone asked me what I felt one of modern man's greatest problems would be, I'd say, "Modern man thinks of himself as a means rather than an end."

The most extreme expression of that problem was given by Mr. Khrushchev in the United Nations some years ago when he said, "You have to break eggs to make an omelet." What does that mean? If I have a political purpose to achieve—if I want to bring a country into the twentieth century and I have to kill a few million people to make it happen—then so be it. "You have to break eggs to make an omelet." After all, people are not as important as society.

C. S. Lewis helps us deal with this issue. He gives us a kind of fraction. He says, "Think of a man 100 years old. You draw a line and then you put below the line the combined dynasties of China 5,000 years. Man lives to be 100 years, society 5,000. Society must be 50 times more important than a man; therefore, men are expendable. You can use them up for society's purposes." This is basically the argument that must be used by every politician, every great mover of people. C. S. Lewis says, "Suppose it doesn't work this way. Suppose man doesn't live to be 100, but suppose he's eternal." It's a little hard to write eternity in a number. We'll have to take something more limited for our limited minds. We'll take a billion. A man lives a billion years; the combined dynasties of China 5,000 years. What do we conclude? Man is infinitely more important than society.

I have a friend who went into a village in South America. He's a Wycliffe translator to a group called the Cofan Indians. There's only 600 of them. He went as a linguist. He would make noises; they would make noises back. Imagine the adventure of this. "Nose." "Nose." "Ear." "Ear." "Mouth." "Mouth." He would make these noises and eventually teach them that their sounds could be put on paper. Then when they'd see the sounds on paper, they could say them back. He taught them to reduce their spoken language to a written language. Then he took the written language, translated the Bible into it, and a group from our church went down to dedicate a Bible to the Cofans.

There are only 600 of these people on the earth. Why wouldn't you put them in cattle trucks, take them to Quito, teach them to speak pidgin Spanish, and have them drive taxis? Why dignify them by sending a man with a $40,000 Wheaton College education and a $20,000 graduate education to teach those few unimportant people to read the Word of God? Because the unique and distinct Christian truth held by the church of Jesus Christ is that man is more important than society. I believe in the church because it's the only institution dealing with the ultimate issues, and it provides perspective to give dignity to man.

I believe in the church because it provides a moral compass.

Third, I believe in the church of Jesus Christ because it provides a moral and ethical compass in the midst of relativism. There are no absolutes in our world now. You can tell how well a man is educated not by his nouns but by his adjectives. An educated man never uses a naked noun. He says, "usually, sometimes, often."

I learned a little about this from kids. I've been in youth work for thirty years. Every year, Youth for Christ has about 15,000 boys committed to them by the courts. These boys are guilty of everything from grand theft auto—meaning that when you were in church, they borrowed your car, cut it into smaller pieces, and sold it—to murder. I've been in camp with those kind of boys.

During one particular summer, I remember, I was standing by the shack where we sold pop to the kids. A young man walked by and as he walked by, another kid sneaked up behind him, took a pop bottle, and hit this kid over the head. It didn't knock the kid out, but it knocked him down. He jumped on him just like a cat, put one knee on the kid's Adam's apple, the other knee on his chest, and began beating him across the head with this pop bottle. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him up against the building. "What kind of kid are you? Sneak up behind somebody; hit him with a pop bottle. What kind of boy?"

He said, "Well, if you're going to hit him with a pop bottle, why would you come up in front of him? He'd see you. I mean, you ought to come up behind him, because if you come up behind him you can get him." I realized this kid lived in a neighborhood where there wasn't a cat with a whole tail.

Now if you ask certain secular people, "Give me a definition of education," they'll define education something like this: "Education is the inculcation of that body of truth that prepares a person to cope adequately and succeed in his environment." I don't buy that, but that is the definition we'd be given. This kid was educated.

I tried something else on him, and this is the point of my little story. I used this word, and when I used the word, it entered his eyes and went through his brain, hit the back of his skull, and came back at me uninterrupted. It didn't even slow down. I said this foolish thing: "You ought not hit somebody with a pop bottle."

I immediately realized, How stupid! Why ought not? Why ought not steal? Why ought not murder? Why ought not commit adultery? Why ought not lie? If your government is in power and your political purposes are large enough and global enough to capture everybody's imagination, you can roast six million people in a furnace, and it's a moral thing because society's more important than people. You can drag a man into his front yard in Argentina and slit his throat in front of his six children and say you're doing a moral thing. It's necessary.

I say that Jesus Christ and his church have stood against that kind of relativism for all of history. If you lived in England one hundred years before the American Civil War, you could have bought stock, mutual funds, and penny stocks (if you were very poor) in the slave trade. Never get the idea that the slave trade involved a few inconsequential, isolated sea captains. At one point more than half of the British gross national product was generated by taking slaves from Africa to the New World.

John Wesley preached the gospel of Jesus Christ in England. He preached mostly to the poor and to the miners, and a great movement of God arose among common folk. But a few influential people of power were saved, among them a young dandy who had inherited his place in Parliament. That young dandy named William Wilberforce came to know Christ as Savior, the Word of God penetrated his heart, and he became convinced of the ugliness and the sinfulness of slavery. For 50 years he stood in the British Parliament to condemn the ugly sinfulness of the British Empire and its wholesale interest in slavery.

Two weeks after he died and 25 years before Abraham Lincoln pronounced the Emancipation Proclamation in this country, the British Parliament voted to end the evil of slavery as a result of one Christian man and his friends in the Clapham Group. I believe in the church because it provides a moral and ethical compass in the midst of relativism.

I believe in the church because it provides a loving community.

Fourth, I believe in the church because it's a place where I can find community, healing, and love. We can belong to lots of things, but I see the church of Jesus Christ as an extended family beyond any of that. I remember my boy, when he was small, was running full speed through the basement of the church, and my good friend, John Horn, reached out and grabbed him by the collar. His little legs were still going, and John was holding him there. He said to him, "Bruce, slow down!" Bruce looked at him and said, "Put me down! You're not my dad." John replied, "No, I'm not your dad, but I'm your uncle. I'm your uncle because your daddy is my brother in Christ, and I love you as much as if you were my real nephew. I want to help you become the kind of man you ought to be, so you just slow down. OK?" We need that in a church—to care for each other's sons and daughters.

Janie has headed up the seniors in our church for 15 years. I've been watching her group, and I've seen there's an informal ratio of about seven ladies to every one man. I know, statistically, I'm going to go before Janie. Who will bring her to church? Who will invite her over for Thanksgiving dinner? Who will fix her sump pump? Who will help her get her shopping done at Christmas? The church of Jesus Christ does that sort of thing.

When a person's life comes unglued and the effects of this culture absolutely destroy a person, where can he go to find forgiveness and understanding? To a group of men who will come around him in a nonjudgmental fashion and simply say, "There, but for the grace of God, go I. Jay, come along. We love you. We'll help you." I believe in the church of Jesus Christ because it's a place where I can find community, healing, and love.

I believe in the church because it has produced lasting, selfless contributions to humanity.

Lastly, I believe in the church because it has provided motivation for the most lasting, valuable, and selfless efforts of mankind. From whence came schools and hospitals and orphanages and colleges and relief agencies and the abolition of slavery and women's rights and the end of child labor? These came when men and women, moved by God against the backdrop of God's holy justice, decided to change the world.

If you were to put a syringe into the world today and pull from it the influence of Christian missions, the world would implode of its own moral weight. There's hardly a senior leader in all of Africa who wasn't taught to read by a missionary. I believe in the church.

Some of you have read Barbara Tuckman's great historical account, The Distant Mirror, in which she records that in one period during the Dark Ages, one third of the population of the entire earth from Moscow to Cairo died of the black plague. Who were those men in little brown outfits out picking up the dead and caring for the sick and so on? Saint Francis wasn't just somebody we sing about with birds on his head. Saint Francis went out in the name of Jesus Christ to alleviate the greatest suffering this world's ever seen, something almost like what we would experience, but not quite, if we had nuclear holocaust.I believe in the church.

Attending and being a vital part of the church of Jesus Christ is not just something quaint that we folks do who are hanging on to our ancient traditions. It's not some irrelevant chanting of ancient and dead religious phrases. Being part of the church of Jesus Christ is being part of something that Jesus Christ started, and he said, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

If we drew a schematic drawing of this church, it would be far more complicated than some simple thing like a television or a computer. It would involve every one of your lives. But when you finish looking at that schematic, it wouldn't be a bunch of arrows coming in here so we could come together and sing, "Hold the Fort for I Am Coming." It would be a great group of arrows going out where this man goes into business, and this woman goes into teaching, and this woman goes into homemaking, and this man becomes a plumber, and this one becomes a student, and this person becomes a nurse. We go out into the world to be the church of Jesus Christ. Aren't you glad to be part of something that is world changing, that has stood for 2,000 years, that makes a difference? Amen. I believe in the church.

Jay Kesler is president of Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. He was formerly president of Youth for Christ/USA and the preaching pastor of First Baptist Church of Geneva, Illinois. He has many books to his credit, including Being Holy, Being Human.

Jay Kesler
Preaching Today Tape #37
www.PreachingTodaySermons.com
A resource of Christianity Today International

Jay Kesler is president emeritus of Taylor University and pastor of Upland Community Church, in Upland, Indiana.