Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / December 15, 2019 | Love Came Down - To Invade A World Without Love

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December 15, 2019 | Love Came Down - To Invade A World Without Love · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hey everyone, how are you doing?
0:04
SPEAKER_00: You're doing good too.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, so let me say about tonight.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: I just was looking outside.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: There's really three options.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't come yet and you were planning to come tonight, if the snow stays like it is now, we would probably not do all of them.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: We'd probably just do five and six and not do seven, eight, and nine.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: So you'd want to come early.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: If it gets worse, yeah, we may cancel the whole thing.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: But just letting you know there's a third option in between all the light shows and no light shows.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: So got up this morning, looked out the window.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: Melody and I did, I don't know, 6:37.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: And she goes, Oh, isn't it so beautiful?
0:47
SPEAKER_00: You know.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: And she loves the Bing Crosby movie, I think.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: That's her favorite movie.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: So she's gone, oh, this is like I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Where the treetops glisten.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: You guys know this, don't you?
1:01
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: And children listen to sleigh bells in the snow.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: And uh, that's not my favorite one.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I like Johnny Mathis.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: He's more my time.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, sleigh bells ring, are you listening in the lane?
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Snow is glistening.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: What a beautiful sight.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: We're happy tonight, walking in a winter wonderland, and it is so pretty.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: It's the happiest time of the year.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: And then you get out and you get behind your wheel, you start driving in that, and all of a sudden, all of this love and happiest time of the year, and you go, This snow is evil.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: This is evil snow.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: Because you come up the stoplight on the 29th and Wanamaker, and you know the car next to you starts sliding into your lane, and you go, I need to get out of here.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: So, so the combination, this snow is a perfect combination of beauty, love, happiness, glistening, whatever.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: And evil, which is a terrific uh picture, by the way, of this series we're doing, which this series is uh uh Love Came Down.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh-huh.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there it is, right there.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh, but two weeks ago, you know, it we we said that Christmas is like a combination of up and down.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: And last week, Connor, great job.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: Connor did a great job.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: It's a combination of like illusion.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: We live in an illusion, delusion, deluded world, illusion and reality in this morning.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you about how Christmas is this, and I hate this sermon to some extent.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: People are telling me they love it, but I am such a positive mental attitude guy, I hate talking about the opposite of love, but I'm going to this morning.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna talk about how Christmas is, if you're gonna be realistic, not only love, but something called I'll just say it, hate.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: So, and I know the moment that you hear hate, you like I think of some humor, like Rodney Dangerfield telling his psychiatrist, everybody hates me, and his psychiatrist says, Don't be ridiculous, everyone hasn't met you yet.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, some of us can feel hated, and we're not really.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: But let me talk to you about how even our favorite movies are sort of this combination of love and hate.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Let's let's let's take the movie, It's Wonderful Life, set in uh Bedford Falls, and you have a loving family here.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: You have George Bailey, loves the girl, and and so forth, played by Jimmy Stewart.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, as you know, the best stories, that's what they always say with 007, best stories are those who have the greatest villains, right?
3:35
SPEAKER_00: And this story has a great villain, and his name is Potter, and he's the banker, and he controls the whole town because he controls the real estate and mortgages and so forth.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: And so you have this love on the one hand, and then you have this, you know, the opposite of compassionate George Bailey is this uncompassionate, cold and cruel Potter.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Or, for instance, take uh Charles Dickens' uh most famous, most favorite book, probably because it's his shortest, uh, called A Christmas Carol.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: And you have the love of the Cratchit family and Tiny Tim, and it's just so sweet and it's so happy and everything.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, you have this you have this villain, and his name is Evan Easter Scrooge.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, and Charles Dickens had a purpose.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: It was 1843, and and London was a cold, cruel, in a sense, heartless place where where the poor had no chance to rise by their own bootstraps.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: There were poor farms and so forth, and the economy and so forth was controlled by heartless, wealthy men.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: And so there is this combination of love and hate, and that is a that's a common thing I'm suggesting to you, even in our favorite in our favorite movies.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: And uh did we freeze up again back there?
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Hello?
4:51
SPEAKER_00: Can you guys advance this, please?
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: So my point is that we live in a world filled with with hate.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: We really do, and just to prove it, I'm not gonna go to the Bible yet, which tells us that there is a lot of hatred in the world.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna go to a branch of society that, in my opinion, is is almost prophetic.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's our songwriters who come up with ideas like this.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: And the songs I'm gonna share with you date clear back to the 1960s, and they are in almost every case America's favorite song by this artist.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: I think, for instance, of Gene Pitney.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Gene Pitney was asked to sing as the background of a movie that totally flopped at the box office.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: It was called Town Without Pity, starring Kirk Douglas.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: But the song that he sang as part of that movie became, in 1961, became the most popular hit by far that Gene Pitney ever sang.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Why do people hurt us so only those in love would know what a town without pity can do?
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Do you know that song?
5:53
SPEAKER_00: You don't know that song.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Would you go back and listen to that song?
5:56
SPEAKER_00: YouTube, Gene Pitney, 1961, World Without Pity.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: Come on, it's a great song.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I won't ask you.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'll ask Stan to sing it with me because I know he knows it.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's go to a song I think you do know.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: This is the most popular song of all time for Peter and Gordon.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And actually it was written by not Paul Lennon, but John Lennon, Paul McCartney, here inside where I hide with my alone liness, this British duo saying, I don't care what they say, I won't stay in a world without love.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Am I the only one who knows this song?
6:28
SPEAKER_00: Good, thank you.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: Now I don't like what's been done with that song.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: It's been sung by, it's been covered by about a half a dozen bands since then, and most of them are using it to encourage suicide.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: So that's not that's not what they meant by it, but uh but anyway, so world without love.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: We're in a cold, my point is we live in a world without love.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: We live in a cold, cruel world, even at Christmas.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: My perhaps my favorite artist, certainly my favorite album of all time, Songs and the Key of Life, 1976.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: Little Stevie Wonder, who grew up to become, Stevie Wonder sang, Love's in need of love today.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Don't delay, send yours in right away.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Great line, eh?
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Hate's going round, hates going round, hates going around, he sang, breaking many hearts.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: Stop it, please.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: And even those of you who like I hate to talk about hate and like to talk about love and like to talk about happiness at Christmas time, must recognize that there is this element, there is this virus inside the apple, and it is called hate.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Even more recently, a very popular song, just five years ago, Taylor Swift sang Shake It Off was the people's song of the year that year.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: Notice it was not voted the number one song by, let's say, the art critics, some of whom criticized her, you New York Times, because you see, Taylor Swift's been criticized for years because she's too squeaky clean, she's too nice, she's not political enough, she's not edgy enough.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, a friend of mine, uh, my best friend at seminary, called me, said, My son's in this band and so forth.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: This is eight, nine years ago.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: He said, Taylor Swift has asked if they will go on her tour and they'll be the opening band.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
8:09
SPEAKER_00: I said, I'm all for it.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: Taylor Swift is squeaky clean, she's a good girl.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, I I've always been a fan of hers, but she has been completely ripped for a bunch of things, okay?
8:21
SPEAKER_00: So five years ago, she sang Shake It Off.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: The hater's gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: I thought four hates would be enough, but she threw in a fifth.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: I just shake, shake, shake, shake, shake it off.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: How many of you have heard that song?
8:32
SPEAKER_00: So I think that it probably follows up from a song she sang four years before, which one country music song of the year, 2010, mean, where she was talking about people who are just mean in this cold, cruel world, who are just so mean to her.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Because again, she doesn't fit the mold that the world wanted for their dark, for dark songs and dark themes.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: You with your words like knives, all you're ever gonna be is mean.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: But so music has always, I think, caught this last year, a popular song in some circles, maybe not yours.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: Tommy Prophet, it's actually a very nice song if you look it up, 2018.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: It's a cold, it's a cruel, cruel world.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: No mercy left.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a cruel world.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: It'll break your heart, burn you down, down, down, don't ever doubt.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: It's a cruel, cruel world.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: What I'm doing is I'm proving to you that this is a theme that is in our society, that people understand that our world is not just sweet and loving.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: And this Christian artist who's led thousands of young people to Christ, Lecrae, sang a song a couple of years ago.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: We live in a cold, cold world, Lecrae.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: So that's uh my point.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: I I don't suppose I need to really prove it to you since you live in Topeka, Kansas.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it interesting to go around our country and then when people start talking about Phelps and all of this, and you know, go, I live in his town.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: And hey, those people are outside my church every Sunday morning.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: So they're not outside this part of it.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: It's between 9:30 and 11 services.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh between the second and third service, I feel gypped.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: They used to be, they used to be out there three times a Sunday and they're cutting down.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to go over and ask them about that sometime.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: But uh so you and I know what hate is like and how they how they uh sort of backdraft the hate that they feel uh and move it up into heaven and and put it as though it's God's.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: But to be honest, the single greatest and most painful example of hate that I think of this Christmas is a story just a couple weeks old that comes out of Toledo, Ohio, about a little baby called RJ, the little boy baby named RJ, born about a year ago with a hole in his heart, and two really serious diseases that he'll die of by age two or shortly after age two, if he doesn't get some real help, and that's his dad, his dad, his name's Casey Ayerley, that Casey had put up, he just put up six handwritten signs at his local mall close to his house, just saying, if you'd like to help, that thank you already.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: We've gotten 4,000, we did a genetic test and so forth.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to help, contact me and whatever.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: And and then just a couple weeks ago in November, these signs were placed next to his signs.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: Stop asking for money, let the baby die.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: It's called Darwinism.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: Happy holidays.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: And that seems to me to be a particularly horrible example of the other side of Christmas of hate.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: And I want to talk to you about that and why that's true.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: All you'd have to do is Google, by the way, because these are some of the recent articles in Psychology Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, asking the questions why do we hate each other so much?
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Why is there so much hatred and violence in the world?
11:49
SPEAKER_00: And I think Jesus answers that question or tries to in the 15th chapter of John, the night before he died.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to look that up on your cell phone, it's John 15, verse 18 through chapter 16, verse 4.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: And he answers the question, why is it that we live in a world without hate?
12:08
SPEAKER_00: Why did Jesus have to come to invade a world without love?
12:14
SPEAKER_00: Why, why, why, all the hate?
12:18
SPEAKER_00: Before I get to John 15, uh here is a verse that to my mind traces all of the hostility and the hate in the world, including ISIS, including the strange fact that 250 Americans, 250 Americans were among 50,000 people in the world who over the last 10 years have gone overseas to join ISIS to kill people.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: That makes no sense to me at all.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Why does that happen?
12:46
SPEAKER_00: Why is there such hostility?
12:48
SPEAKER_00: And Paul said this when he was traveling through Turkey, he said they killed the Lord Jesus, check, and the prophets, check, and persecuted us, check.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: They displease God, check, and get this, and are hostile to everyone.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: I take it if you reverse the order of that, the hostility that we find in the world to everyone traces back to a religious heart of hostility to God that started in the Garden of Eden and with the serpent.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus said, and I'm going to come up with the five answers, the five reasons that I think Jesus gives us for why there's such hate in the world, even in such a happy holiday.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: He started by saying to his disciples, if the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: In other words, the world hates Christ the Lord, and therefore it hates the Christ followers.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, if Jesus had just stayed a baby, there would be no problem.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
13:52
SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't they be happy if Jesus had stayed a baby if he just stayed in the manger and he hadn't grown up and become Christ the Lord that we had to obey and honor?
14:01
SPEAKER_00: And because you and I call Christ our boss, our Lord, therefore those who hate him and what he stood for hate us.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: It's really similar.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have been overseas, it's very similar to the ways that you find that people, some people overseas hate you not because of you, but because of where you come from.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people say to me, Why Jim Trailot, how many countries have you been to?
14:27
SPEAKER_00: I say, I don't know, about 45.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: And they say, Wow, can you tell me about the worst times you've had or the worst?
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I said I can tell you about that.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: There are a couple of countries I've been to, namely Pakistan and Syria, Damascus, Syria, where walking down the main street in both places, I just felt a palpable, almost physical hatred.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: And I said, no, there are other places, there's Morocco, or a man just walked up to me when I was on the main street and just slugged me in the face, or there's certain places in Egypt, you know, but no, Pakistan definitely would be there in Syria.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: And what happens is if you're there, what out you leave your hotel room or you leave your friend's house and you walk out on the street.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: This is the first afternoon after you got there, and you're trying to walk off jet lag, right?
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Personal story here, in all of these places, and you're so excited to be there.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: You're in a new country, you love the smells, and you just love Arab countries, you know, and you and you want to learn and you want to grow, and you got money in your pocket, you're planning to buy stuff down in the marketplace, stuff that you certainly can't get back in America, and you're gonna sample the food, and it's so exciting, and so you're grinning at people, and and you realize that you know you you're not meeting eyes with any of the women, because the women's eyes are all down as they're as as they would be in those countries.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: You know, they don't meet your eyes, but the men, they're looking at your eyes, and the first person, the first man you walk by, and you look at his eyes and you go, it almost feels like a physical punch, and you go, Whoa, whoa, what did I you know, sure glad looks can't kill, because that was a bad one right there.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And then the next one, I mean, the eyes are dark and the eyes are cold, and the eyes are black, and then you start peering around, and there are people across the street in this crowd, and they're all sort of looking at you, and they're not looking nicely at you, they're looking at you with hostility.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: And you finally get through that and you get back home and you collapse on the couch, and the person you're with who lives in the country goes, Oh, don't worry about that.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: It's not you, it's not you, it's the fact that you're an American.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: And you go, that doesn't help.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I'm sort of stuck with that.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: And they say they hate everything about America.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you were to offer them a free ticket and they could somehow become, you know, live in America, they'd probably be happy, but I mean, they despise everything about the fact that you're an American.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And that's really the way it is with Jesus Christ.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you are a Christian, the fact that you're a follower of Christ the Lord, not Christ, not Jesus the baby, but Christ the Lord, immediately, immediately makes you hated because Christ is hated.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: Does that make any sense?
16:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and you see it in the strangest ways that anything associated with Christ the Lord gets hated.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: It's been a number of years ago now, but but it's still, I think, the favorite article of all time from the Journal of the American Medical Association, J A M A, is so reputable.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Am I right about that?
17:09
SPEAKER_00: Just a great magazine.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: But the but the most popular article of all time, at least a couple years ago, was still an article written 20, 30 years ago entitled About the Death.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: It was entitled About the Death, On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: It was a professional article written describing the medical causes of Christ, of Jesus' death from crucifixion.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: It was all medical, it was all about the anatomy, it all had drawings and so forth about crucifixion, right?
17:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's not as though there are any reputable historians that deny that there was a person of Jesus, named Jesus, and a person, that person was crucified on the cross.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's enough evidence for that, far more than for almost anything else we believe about the ancient world.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: But the article actually quoted, you know, of the four gospels, the four evidences, you know, that Jesus died quickly rather than slowly and so forth.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: And so the article was describing how the pericardium expands and da-da-da-da-da-and and all this other stuff medically.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: It was all anatomical.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: It was amazing, it was brilliant.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: I've got several copies of it.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: I love this article.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: I learned so much about medicine, but you know what happened?
18:20
SPEAKER_00: The moment they published that, at that moment, the very next days and weeks, they got an avalanche of articles.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: I rate articles criticizing them for being a fundamentalist magazine for realize for revealing their theological and religious biases and so forth.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Nobody would have said anything.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: It was about Socrates dying of hemlock and how did that happen, but it was Jesus.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: And because the world hates Christ the Lord, they hate anything.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: That hatred seeps down to anything associated with Christ the Lord.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: That's the first reason if the world hates you.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Understand it hated me, Christ's follower, before it hated you.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: Number two, the world hates nonconformists.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: The world hates people who don't go along.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said in the next verse to his disciples, if you were of the world, the world would love you as its own.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: But because you're not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: The world loves those who simply agree with it.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: If the world turns left and you turn left, it loves you.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: If the world turns right and you turn right, the world loves you.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: But Christians are by nature nonconformist.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: They refuse to worship Caesar in the first century.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: They worshiped Jesus Christ as Lord, and therefore they were nonconformists, therefore they were hated, therefore they were persecuted, therefore they were burned at the stake, because they marched to the beat of a different drum, because they said they were citizens of a different world, they were hated.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: And the world is suspicious of you and suspicious of us because we are by nature truly different.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And the world has always hated people who are different.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: The first person in the first person who ever invented the umbrella in London was pelted with rocks and mud.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: What?
20:12
SPEAKER_00: What is that?
20:13
SPEAKER_00: First person who invented a car and you know didn't use the horse.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: Remember the stories about how you know evil and horrible that was going to be?
20:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the first person who I mean, Goodyear, for example, we you know, we've we got ties into Goodyear.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: The only person who didn't ridicule Goodyear for the first 11 years was his wife.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: He was vulcanizing rubber at the time, and that idea just seemed horrible.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: On and on.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: If you're a non-conformist, no matter what it is, the world will hate you.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: But if you will simply go along with the world, you see that this fall.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: You're going, wow, that person's amazing.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: Wow, that person's amazing.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: Let's see, who'd you give it to?
21:04
SPEAKER_00: You gave it to a 16-year-old girl who simply stood up before the United Nations and screamed out that we're all going to die unless we give up our cars and everything else because of the environment, who knows nothing about it?
21:22
SPEAKER_00: And they go, well, it makes sense because 20 years ago time had a huge annual issue in which they said our driving passion for the rest of our existence will be environmentalism.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: So if you go along with their driving passion, then maybe you'll get man or woman of the year.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: You see how that works?
21:41
SPEAKER_00: It's just it's but it's but it's silly.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: So when the followers of Christ at Christmas sit around a living room and a certain subject comes up, and they say, Well, you know, I'm just maybe I'm stodgy, but I believe the same thing my parents said about marriage, and my grandparents and your parents and Your grandparents and everyone we knew up till about five, ten years ago, which is the marriage is between a man or a woman, and all of a sudden you feel a whole bunch of hate coming your way, then you need to realize the world turned left about five or ten years ago.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you'd followed the world, you'd be fine.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: But staying in the same place that everybody's been for 2,000 years is not going to work if you want to be loved.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: So that's the second point.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: The world hates people who don't go along.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: The world hates nonconformists.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: I have a friend, brilliant guy.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: He's now written a couple books, Philosophy Prophet, SMU, and so forth.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: And he was getting his doctorate in theology in Germany at the most prestigious theological institution, secular institution, Heidelberg, and so forth.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: And he finished it.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: And then when they were reading it, they said, no, you can't come to that conclusion.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: He came to an evangelical conclusion.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: That is, which was the gospel statements here were true.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: That that and so forth.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: They said, That's that, we we can't handle that.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: You need to change that, change your mind on that, or we'll not give you your doctorate.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: He didn't change it.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: He came back after spending mega money and mega time without his doctorate.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: That's what happens.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: If you go along with the world, they'll love you.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: If you don't go along with the world, if you're nonconformist, they will not.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Number three, Jesus said, the world hates anyone or anything that makes it feel guilty.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: That's really true, isn't it?
23:25
SPEAKER_00: In a wonderful life.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: The angel does George Bailey a great favor.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: He says, I want you to follow me through town.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: They go through Bedford Falls.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: Here's what it would have been like if you had never lived, if, shall we say, love had never come to Bedford Falls.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Because George Bailey is a Christ figure in that movie.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: And of course, it's not Bedford Falls anymore.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: It is Pottersville, and it is a cold, cruel world.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: It is a town literally without pity.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: But love had come in the person of George Bailey, and as a result, by exposing his light, exposing the dark, you know the Bible's full of this.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: The dark hates the light by exposing the darkness of Potter, the banker, who was deliberately controlling people by keeping their mortgages high and not allowing them to pay and so forth.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: Potter had wanted him dead.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: And that's what happens.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: The world hates anyone or anything that makes it feel guilty.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: Christ's followers cannot help but make people angry at them.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: You just can't.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: You expose sin simply by coming here and singing and praying to Christ the Lord.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: You may try to get along with the world, but I'm here to tell you that A.W.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Tozer was right.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: Intelligent Christians know that the world is not a playground, it's a battleground.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: And the reason it's a battleground is that your very existence exposes sin.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: Your very morality exposes immorality.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: And if you're a college student who's raised your hand at the right time, but in front of the wrong professor, then you may have discovered that that professor can actually hate someone who disagrees with their moral or immorality.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: Or, for instance, if you're a member of a business that operates, that cuts corners and lies and cheats and whatever, and you decide that you're going to be open and honest and live with integrity.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: This week I was replacing tires on my car, and I'm I go up the counter, I go, I don't understand.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm replacing them, but I mean this is crazy because you know it's just been two years ago that I was here and I bought these nice tires and so forth, and they're 70,000 mile tires, and see, it's only been 40,000 miles, and and what gives.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: And the guy says, Well, you know, I guess we should have told you about this, you know.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: You wanted I won't tell you what kind of tires they are.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: He said, They're great racing tires over in Europe and so forth, and they really highly advertise and so forth, but everybody knows, all of us in the business know that they super exaggerate.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: So they're 70,000 mile tires only get 45,000 miles.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: I go, oh, wow, that would have been nice to know.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: But what happens is someone would have had to stood up and someone would have had to said something that would have exposed immorality and caused and caused a lot of friction.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: If you want to know what tires those are, come and ask me later so I can save you some money.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: But it, you know.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, um uh my point is here uh the world hates anyone or anything that makes you feel guilty.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, there's so many verses on this.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: If I had not come and spoken to them, Jesus says they wouldn't have known their sin.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 2.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: How come the nations are so angry?
26:54
SPEAKER_00: How come Craig's countries devise plots?
26:57
SPEAKER_00: How can they collaborate against Yahweh and his king saying, let's tear off their shackles, let's free ourselves.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: That's because they want to tear off the shackles of standards that they do not want to meet.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: They do not want to feel guilty.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, the beloved disciple, wrote, we should love one another unlike Cain who murdered his brother.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: And why did he murder his brother?
27:20
SPEAKER_00: Because his deeds, Cain's, were evil and his brothers were righteous.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: So don't be surprised, brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: The world like Cain hates anyone like Abel.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: That makes it feel guilty.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: You will expose sin just by being a moral person.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: Right?
27:38
SPEAKER_00: Because that's what righteousness does.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: Number four and number five are a little more simple and a little more funny in some ways.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: Number four, the world hates for no good reason at all.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: John 15, 23, whoever hates me hates my father also, but they don't even know us, he says.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: And now they've seen and hated both me and my father, fulfilling the scripture.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: They hated me for no reason.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: But whoever said prejudice had to be rational, right?
28:06
SPEAKER_00: In Psalm 69, David says, the people who hate me for absolutely no reason at all are more than the number of hairs on my head.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: And prejudice is just crazy.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's absolutely, I mean, that you you there's if I grabbed hold of someone off the, which I couldn't do, off the street of Morocco and said, now, excuse me, why again is it that you hit me in the face and hit my brother Rob in the face as well?
28:36
SPEAKER_00: There'd be no good reason.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh well, you're American.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh, since when is that a good reason?
28:41
SPEAKER_00: I could maybe hate America worse than you.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: But there's no, there's, it's just completely irrational.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, our world talks pluralism, but then what does it do?
28:52
SPEAKER_00: It scrubs Christianity out of its movies, out of its books.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, let's take the movie this this fall.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: I haven't seen it yet.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: I want to see it.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: I hear it's a good movie, Tom Hanks and so forth.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: You know the movie about Mr.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: Rogers, it's called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and I hear it's an enjoyable movie, but you know, now you're seeing popping up these articles by people that really knew Fred Rogers, by friends of Fred Rogers, with headlines like his Christian faith has disappeared out of this movie.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: It reminds you a little bit of Tom Hanks' famous movie, Robinson Crusoe.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: Read the book, it's all about Robinson Crusoe as a Christian.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: Nothing about his Christianity in the movie.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: Same thing happened with Fred Rogers, basically a secular, sort of a Christmas without Christ, kind of a secular movie that doesn't say what his friends said, which is everything he ever did in his life, was motivated by a deep Christian faith.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Why would you eliminate that?
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, perhaps it's what Alan Bloom, the professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in his book entitled The Closing of the American Mind some years back, where he said it's not just their mind, but their heart.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: American mind, an American heart, at least on my college campus, is getting close to traditional values and to the traditional religion that our country was founded on?
30:12
SPEAKER_00: There's no really good reason why, you can't really explain.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: How would that hurt anything?
30:17
SPEAKER_00: Why, in your movie about Wilberforce eliminating slavery in Great Britain, would you scrub out the fact that it's all because of his Christianity?
30:26
SPEAKER_00: Why, for heaven's sake, in the movie about 9-11 and Beamer, who said let's roll, why in that movie would you scrub out and leave out the fact that he was absolutely motivated by his Christianity?
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, it has to be that you just hate that whole Christian thing, and there's no really good reason for it.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: It really wouldn't make any difference.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: Who would care if in that movie of the pilot who landed his plane and saved all those lives in the, you know, uh there in New York City on the water and saved all, why wouldn't you mind?
30:58
SPEAKER_00: Why not include the fact that he's a fervent believer in Jesus Christ?
31:02
SPEAKER_00: There's really absolutely no good reason.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: Number five, it really gets down to this, dear friend at Christmas, the world doesn't know our Savior.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, if they did, am I right?
31:14
SPEAKER_00: If they just knew him the way you know him, Jesus says all these things, his persecution they'll do to you, because they just don't know him who sent me.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: And they've not known the Father nor me.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Which is why it's it's just this is why it doesn't work to sit there and have these political arguments or moral arguments or anything with people at Christmas.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: No, this is why we do LOL, am I right?
31:40
SPEAKER_00: Because you know if you if you just bring them and they meet the Savior that you know, this Lord of love, this Jesus who came down to earth with love in his heart, and if they get to know him personally, if they get to know his father, then you know everything will change for them because you've seen it happen.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: You've seen it happen with your friends who were so full of hate, and all of a sudden their heart broke, they saw Jesus Christ, met him, and the Holy Spirit flooded into their lives, and everything changed.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: The world just doesn't know our Savior, and so God came down, love came down.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: It's how God showed his love.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: He sent his only son into the world, and that's our message.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Love came down to invade a world without love.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: I have a terrible burden this month.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: This football season, in fact, of being a long-standing helpless fan of the Dallas Cowboys.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Now I love I love the Chiefs a lot more, okay.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm a normal person, but I happen to live in Dallas for a while.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: If you live in Dallas, there's this virus that gets into your system, it's an evil virus, gets into your system, and you cannot help it.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: You become a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, and it's always been it's always been pretty painful, all right?
33:05
SPEAKER_00: They've only had, you know, three playoff appearances in the last 10 years, but now it's just horrible because they have this great team.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: They were expected to do so well.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: They won their first three games, admittedly, against the Little Sisters of Mary.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, they they, you know, they sorry about that, but I mean, uh, they just but they have all these stars.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you compare them to the best teams in the league, they've got all these superstars, all these incredible athletes, and they're just disappointing.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's so painful, and everybody's writing into the paper down in Dallas, going, fire the coach, fire the coach, fire the coach.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: And I've only I've only sent them that message five or six times.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, but my favorite message was the one last week that came in.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: Somebody says, you know, I've got the answer, I've got the answer so that they can win this week.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: Tell the groundskeeper to lay paper down all over the field.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Somebody said, Well, lay paper down all over the field.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: He says, because they're unbeatable on paper.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: So I tell that because the fact is, you and I, we got the paper, we got the philosophy, we think we know what's best, and we do know what's best.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: We know the Bible, we know God's will, right?
34:14
SPEAKER_00: Don't.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: Christmas is not conducted on paper.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: Neither is football.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: It's conducted in the rough and tumble of actual life, sitting with people who are very emotional, who are irrational sometimes in their loves and in their hates.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: And at this time, you don't want to get into arguments.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to go there and become a victim of hate.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'll tell you what I'll do is I'll remind you that the only reason Ebenezer screwed changed is because of a supernatural break-in.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Angels coming down and giving him a new message, and his life changed.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: So let me leave you with just two lessons this Christmas, two messages, two charges.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Number one is something not to do.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: This Christmas, don't.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: Don't be naive.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: Expect, please.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: Expectations mean so much.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: Expect less than perfect love and harmony.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: All right?
35:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, you can expect the chestnuts roasting over an open fire and jackfrost nipping at your nose, but don't make that the only thing you expect.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: After all, this is a world without love.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: The other piece of advice is something to do.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: This Christmas, do be like Jesus.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Do be like Jesus.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Invade a world without love.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: With love.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: Bow your head with me in prayer.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we're so grateful that your son came to earth and endured.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: As he was coming here, he must have known, as he was shriveling down to this dot to go into Mary's womb.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: He must have seen how dark the world was.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: He must have looked ahead to how much it would hate him.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: But he came down here and invaded this world anyway, a world without love.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: He invaded it with love and transformed us, went to his death, hated all the way.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: But as a result, we have eternal life and we've come from dark to light.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, help us to invade this Christmas our world, no matter how dark it times, with the light of your love.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name we pray.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming.