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Low Tide Evangelism - Glen Scrivener at Keswick || SLP527 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, hello and thank you for downloading the Speak Life podcast.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thoroughgood, media producer at Speak Life, and we try to engage the culture and the current meaning crisis from a Christian perspective.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of C's.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: And in this episode, you will hear a talk from our CEO, Glenn Scrivener, which he gave at the Keswick Convention on the 24th of July.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: For those of you who don't know, the Keswick Convention is a wonderful annual gathering of Christians in the beautiful town of Keswick in the Lake District, England.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Each year, over the course of three weeks, around 15,000 Christians from the UK and around the world come together for fellowship and Bible teaching.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: The convention was established in 1875, so next year will be its 150th anniversary.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Incredible.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: It's seen many notable speakers over the years, including Billy Graham and John Stott.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: It was so great to be at Keswick this year.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: And actually, we met a lot of you guys, uh Speak Life podcast listeners.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: So if you'd like to get in touch, maybe you bumped into us while we were there.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you were there at the same time, but we we didn't quite cross paths.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you'd just like to get in touch, uh, feel free to email Thomas at speaklife.org.uk.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: It's great to stay in contact, and we're always seeking to improve the podcast.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: What's the topic for this episode?
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, Glenn was invited to speak about low tide evangelism.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: When you find yourself in a post-Christian context, as many of our listeners do, what does that mean for your evangelism?
1:53
SPEAKER_00: Where can you find hope?
1:55
SPEAKER_00: And what sorts of people might be stepping into your church for the first time?
2:00
SPEAKER_00: Before I hand over to Glenn, I just want to say a massive thank you to Keswick Ministries for kindly allowing us to release this recording on our podcast.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: They're doing such great work, and you should totally check them out.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: It's free to attend the Keswick events, which is incredible.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you need to source your own transport and accommodation and be warned things do get booked up fast.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: So go to Kesick Ministries.org to find out more.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: And who knows, we might see you at the convention in years to come.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: Here is Glenn Scrivener on Low Tide Evangelism.
2:41
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for turning up uh to a title that is a little bit intriguing and might not be the most plain thing.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: What on earth is low tide evangelism?
2:52
SPEAKER_02: We'll we'll get to that in a second.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to begin with some scripture.
2:57
SPEAKER_02: Matthew chapter 13, here we are at ground zero of the Jesus Revolution, aka Christianity, and here is Jesus absolutely rock solid, certain of the triumph of the church.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: Completely certain that even though he is a penniless preacher speaking in his much derided northern accent, he's surrounded by losers and no-hopers, he's within a few years of a godforsaken execution, and he knows world domination is next.
3:35
SPEAKER_02: And I think we need a sense of confidence that the Jesus Revolution is taking over the world, no matter how it looks.
3:47
SPEAKER_02: It's definitely taking over the non-Western world.
3:51
SPEAKER_02: You think of the way the church is going in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of Asia, just phenomenal growth.
3:58
SPEAKER_02: In the West, it can make us feel like it's low tide at the moment.
4:03
SPEAKER_02: But Jesus here will tell us that the way of his kingdom is always to go low, to go slow, to go long.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: Matthew 13, verse 3, then Jesus told them many things in parables, saying, A farmer went out to sow his seed.
4:22
SPEAKER_02: As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: This is a very silly sower, you would think.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: What farmer just chucks fistfuls of seed on the path?
4:37
SPEAKER_02: This is ridiculous.
4:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm not an agronomist, I'm not a farmer, I don't know anything about agriculture.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: I probably know enough to think that this is not the smartest move.
4:47
SPEAKER_02: What is this farmer doing?
4:48
SPEAKER_02: Chucking seed on the path, and the birds come and eat it up.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus goes on to explain the parable, and he says, the birds are like the satanic opposition that is felt by the word of God.
5:02
SPEAKER_02: If the seed is the word of God, then there are opponents to the word of God, and this satanic opposition is like birds gobbling up the seed.
5:10
SPEAKER_02: The birds look much bigger than the word of God, don't they?
5:14
SPEAKER_02: Opposition looks much bigger than gospel ministry.
5:18
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus says, this is what gospel ministry looks like.
5:23
SPEAKER_02: Hit and miss, mainly miss.
5:27
SPEAKER_02: That's gospel ministry, isn't it?
5:29
SPEAKER_02: If you've been involved in church life for any length of time, you know what it looks like.
5:33
SPEAKER_02: It looks like hit and miss, mainly miss.
5:38
SPEAKER_02: But keep going, go low, go slow, go long, and there will be a rich harvest.
5:44
SPEAKER_02: This farmer scatters some seed along the path and it gets gobbled up.
5:48
SPEAKER_02: Never mind.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: He'll move to the next soil type.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil.
5:55
SPEAKER_02: It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow.
5:58
SPEAKER_02: But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched and they withered because they had no root.
6:03
SPEAKER_02: Jesus goes on to explain.
6:05
SPEAKER_02: This is like the people who hear the gospel, they love Jesus, they're very excited, and then it becomes difficult to be a Christian.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: It's not if trouble or persecution come, it's it's when trouble and persecution comes because of the word, they fall away.
6:23
SPEAKER_02: Is the farmer turned off at this point?
6:28
SPEAKER_02: Is the farmer disconsolate at the failure of the harvest?
6:32
SPEAKER_02: No, the farmer knows.
6:34
SPEAKER_02: Evangelism is hit and miss, mainly miss.
6:38
SPEAKER_02: And so he moves on to the next soil type.
6:40
SPEAKER_02: Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants.
6:45
SPEAKER_02: This is explained by Jesus as the thorns are the worries and the wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word and make it unfruitful.
6:58
SPEAKER_02: These are your friends who perhaps you were at Christian union with them in university decades ago, and you wonder, where is so-and-so with the Lord?
7:09
SPEAKER_02: And maybe so-and-so never really made a decision to walk away from Jesus, just life got on top of them.
7:16
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you can think of people you used to come to Keswick with, and they no longer come, and they would no longer think of coming.
7:26
SPEAKER_02: And if in an honest moment you asked them about their faith right now, they would say, Yeah, I think I still believe.
7:44
SPEAKER_02: That's also what evangelism looks like.
7:47
SPEAKER_02: Hit and miss.
7:49
SPEAKER_02: Mainly miss.
7:52
SPEAKER_02: But is the farmer phased by this?
7:56
SPEAKER_02: Not at all.
7:57
SPEAKER_02: The farmer just keeps on sowing on the next soil type.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: Verse 8.
8:01
SPEAKER_02: Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop, 160 or 30 times what was sown.
8:08
SPEAKER_02: Whoever has ears, let him hear.
8:11
SPEAKER_02: Here is ground zero of the Jesus revolution, aka Christianity.
8:16
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus tells us what the growth of his kingdom will look like.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: And it's it's it looks like seed that gets buried.
8:25
SPEAKER_02: Think about seed.
8:27
SPEAKER_02: It's very easy to overlook seed, isn't it?
8:31
SPEAKER_02: If you were from another planet, you would not understand what a farmer is doing, chucking these tic-tac-like pebbles at the ground.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: What are they doing?
8:42
SPEAKER_02: But there's incredible power in the seed, isn't there?
8:44
SPEAKER_02: If I held an apple pip in front of you, I have enough in the apple pip to feed the world.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: Because I could bury the apple pip.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: And sooner or later there'd be an apple tree.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: And the apple tree would give rise to fruit.
9:03
SPEAKER_02: Well, now how many seeds do I have?
9:06
SPEAKER_02: Hundreds.
9:07
SPEAKER_02: What can I do with those hundreds of seeds?
9:09
SPEAKER_02: Well, why not bury them?
9:11
SPEAKER_02: Then what have I got?
9:13
SPEAKER_02: Hundreds of trees, hundreds of trees, right?
9:16
SPEAKER_02: And then thousands of apples.
9:18
SPEAKER_02: And tens of thousands of seeds.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: What should I do with them?
9:21
SPEAKER_02: Well, bury them.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: And then in the next generation, hundreds of thousands of trees, right?
9:27
SPEAKER_02: Millions of apples.
9:29
SPEAKER_02: Within a few generations, I'll have enough apples to feed the world.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: All from a single seed.
9:35
SPEAKER_02: The seed is incredibly powerful, isn't it?
9:39
SPEAKER_02: But it looks weak.
9:40
SPEAKER_02: It looks pathetic.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: It's easily overlooked.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus says the word of God is like that.
9:46
SPEAKER_02: The word of God is like that.
9:49
SPEAKER_02: Interesting, word of God is a title for Christ Himself, isn't it?
9:55
SPEAKER_02: And the seed is a title for Christ Himself, isn't it?
10:00
SPEAKER_02: It's one of the first titles for Christ in the Bible.
10:04
SPEAKER_02: Think back to the Garden of Eden.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: What's happening in the Garden of Eden?
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Adam and Eve are grasping at the apple and they fall.
10:13
SPEAKER_02: And then the Lord comes and says, I know the answer to grasping and falling.
10:20
SPEAKER_02: The answer to all that is going to be the seed.
10:22
SPEAKER_02: Did you know Genesis 3 verse 15?
10:25
SPEAKER_02: It's literally the seed of the woman will crush Satan.
10:31
SPEAKER_02: And Satan will strike his heel.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: The seed of the woman, the offspring of the woman.
10:36
SPEAKER_02: And as soon as you think seed, you think something that goes into a dark place and then brings life.
10:44
SPEAKER_02: And so it will be.
10:46
SPEAKER_02: The word of God, Jesus Christ in the flesh.
10:49
SPEAKER_02: He's so easily overlooked.
10:52
SPEAKER_02: So powerful too.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: And the night before he dies, Jesus says, unless a kernel of wheat dies and goes into the ground, it remains alone.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: But if it dies, it produces much fruit.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: That is the way of gospel ministry.
11:09
SPEAKER_02: To go low, to go slow, to go long.
11:15
SPEAKER_02: And there is eventually a rich harvest that doesn't look like it in the first instance.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: And we're thinking about low tide evangelism this morning.
11:28
SPEAKER_02: We're thinking about a Western church that is looking a little worse for wear.
11:34
SPEAKER_02: Do you know this poem?
11:36
SPEAKER_02: Matthew Arnold in 1851.
11:38
SPEAKER_02: He wrote a long poem.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: He was by Dover Beach.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: He was actually on his honeymoon.
11:45
SPEAKER_02: But as the tide went out on that beach, he started to think of the tide going out on Christianity in England.
11:55
SPEAKER_02: It's fascinating.
11:57
SPEAKER_02: He wrote about the tide going out on Christianity in England in 1851.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: They did a census in 1851.
12:06
SPEAKER_02: Turns out 1851 was the high watermark of church attendance in England.
12:11
SPEAKER_02: 50%.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: 50% of every English man, woman, and child was in church every Sunday in 1851.
12:19
SPEAKER_02: And Matthew Arnold thought, the tide is going out.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: What would Matthew Arnold think today?
12:27
SPEAKER_02: Here is the most famous stanza from the poem.
12:36
SPEAKER_02: But now I only hear its melancholy, long withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind down the vast edges, drear and naked shingles of the world.
12:48
SPEAKER_02: It's a pretty depressing poem, isn't it?
12:51
SPEAKER_02: And if he writes this when 50% of England is in church, what would he write today when a tenth of that proportion is in church?
13:04
SPEAKER_02: We are certainly at low tide in England and in Scotland and in Wales, we're certainly at low tide, aren't we?
13:14
SPEAKER_02: Church of England statistics in the year 2000, there were about 950,000 people in Church of England churches on a Sunday.
13:22
SPEAKER_02: 950,000.
13:24
SPEAKER_02: In 2022, 550,000.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: In that same period, in the US, the US has lost 40 million churchgoers since 2000.
13:39
SPEAKER_02: 40 million.
13:41
SPEAKER_02: It's called the Great Dechurching.
13:44
SPEAKER_02: It's the largest demographic shift in US history.
13:48
SPEAKER_02: You might think when you think of demographics of immigration, or you might think of low birth rates, those are interesting demographic shifts to think about.
13:59
SPEAKER_02: But the most significant demographic shift in US history is that 40 million Americans have left church since the year 2000.
14:08
SPEAKER_02: There's now a greater share of exvangelicals in the US than there are evangelicals in the UK.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: You're more likely to find an exvangelical in the US than you are likely to find an evangelical in the UK.
14:22
SPEAKER_02: How far out is the tide?
14:26
SPEAKER_02: The tide is very far out indeed.
14:29
SPEAKER_02: I looked up some other statistics about views of the church and views of Christianity.
14:41
SPEAKER_02: 53% of UK citizens say that they know a practicing Christian, according to the Talking Jesus survey.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: 53% of UK citizens, when you stop them on the street, do you know a Christian?
14:54
SPEAKER_02: Only half of them say yes.
14:58
SPEAKER_02: That would be tragic enough if 53% of the UK said they knew Christ.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: Only 53% say they know a Christian.
15:08
SPEAKER_02: Now part of that is if a UK citizen knows more than 20 people, they must know a Christian.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: Part of the problem, obviously, with that is that Christians don't put up a little flag saying that they're Christians, right?
15:23
SPEAKER_02: We're not sufficiently public about our faith.
15:27
SPEAKER_02: But how far out is the tide nowadays?
15:30
SPEAKER_02: When 53% of UK citizens say that they know a practicing Christian, back in 2015, that was 66%.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: Not only is the tide low, the tide is going out.
15:45
SPEAKER_02: And one thing you can think at that point is that, well, tides do turn.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that good?
15:49
SPEAKER_02: Tides do turn, they don't go out forever.
15:54
SPEAKER_02: And that's true.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: And Justin Briley has written a great book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
16:01
SPEAKER_02: You can get it in the bookshop next door.
16:03
SPEAKER_02: He's got a wonderful podcast, if that's your thing.
16:06
SPEAKER_02: Very well-produced podcast.
16:09
SPEAKER_02: Wondering whether we're starting to see a trickle that one day may turn into a flood.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: People starting to wake up to our Christian heritage, people starting to rediscover the Christian roots of the West, people starting to rediscover faith.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: Then he starts talking about people like Tom Holland, historian Tom Holland, who writes a big fat book about the history of the West and how very Christian it is, and he ends up finding himself in church.
16:37
SPEAKER_02: Other people like Louise Perry, a feminist, starts to pull at the thread of where does my feminism come from and discovers, oh, it's a Christian thing, and she ends up in church.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: Ayan Hersey Ali, this famous convert out of Islam, became a new atheist, a very famous new atheist, and now she's converted to Christianity.
16:56
SPEAKER_02: She's finding herself in church next to her husband, historian Neil Ferguson.
17:00
SPEAKER_02: And every Sunday they're in church learning a little more about Jesus.
17:04
SPEAKER_02: There are these high-profile stories.
17:07
SPEAKER_02: But I'm also encountering this wherever I go.
17:11
SPEAKER_02: Just three weeks ago in my home church in Eastbourne, a guy shows up and he's just the platonic ideal of the sort of person who's starting to come back to church.
17:21
SPEAKER_02: He was 23 years old.
17:24
SPEAKER_02: He had been listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson stuff online and biblical lectures and all that kind of stuff.
17:29
SPEAKER_02: If you don't know who Jordan Peterson is, don't worry.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: Not missing very much, but you know, but it is interesting stuff.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: That he can rent out theaters and do long, slow, meandering psychological interpretations of the book of Genesis, and people are hooked, and millions watch online.
17:47
SPEAKER_02: And everywhere I go, somebody looks over both shoulders and they say, Do you know about Jordan Peterson?
17:52
SPEAKER_02: I say, Yeah, I know a little bit about Jordan Peterson.
17:54
SPEAKER_02: They say, He said, I he is the reason why I'm here in church.
17:58
SPEAKER_02: This guy was like one of them.
17:59
SPEAKER_02: Three weeks ago, he comes to church.
18:01
SPEAKER_02: He says, I figure that the Bible has built the modern world.
18:05
SPEAKER_02: And so I needed to know more about the Bible.
18:08
SPEAKER_02: So I said to him, Oh, right, the whole Tom Holland thing.
18:11
SPEAKER_02: And he said, What's Spider-Man got to do with this?
18:13
SPEAKER_02: I was like, what?
18:17
SPEAKER_02: And I was really heartened because, you know, Tom Holland, the actor, but the cool Tom Holland is the historian, right?
18:24
SPEAKER_02: But he'd never heard of, he'd never heard of the historian Tom Holland.
18:28
SPEAKER_02: He'd never heard about this surprising rebirth of belief in God, but it's somewhere out there in the ether, and he's been picking it up.
18:33
SPEAKER_02: And so he he said to me three weeks ago, I decided to order a Bible from Amazon.
18:39
SPEAKER_02: I asked, What translation?
18:42
SPEAKER_02: He said, Oh, like the old one?
18:44
SPEAKER_02: I was like, King James?
18:45
SPEAKER_02: He said, Yeah.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: I said, Where did you start reading?
18:48
SPEAKER_02: It's like, the beginning.
18:52
SPEAKER_02: And so he's got a lot of questions about Genesis.
18:55
SPEAKER_02: And he's showing up in church.
18:57
SPEAKER_02: And he's heard lectures about Job and Ecclesiastes.
19:00
SPEAKER_02: He's got a lot of questions about Old Testament stuff.
19:02
SPEAKER_02: He's got a lot of stuff to work through in his life.
19:05
SPEAKER_02: And he's an example of the sort of fish that's jumping into the boat at the moment.
19:11
SPEAKER_02: And what I want to encourage you with is you don't need to do anything to reel this guy in.
19:18
SPEAKER_02: This guy is showing up in your church, and this guy needs to be pastored.
19:25
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't need a whole bunch of arguments about was the tomb really empty on Easter Sunday morning.
19:32
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't really need to hear about the arguments for the historicity of the gospels.
19:38
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't need five arguments for the existence of God.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: He needs to sort his life out.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: And he's a fish jumping into a boat.
19:47
SPEAKER_02: And honestly, I think the men's ministry that we're doing with him and some other people is the most fruitful evangelistic ministry of our church.
19:57
SPEAKER_02: And I wonder whether that will be the same in your church.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: That actually just going for long walks along the South Downs, shoulder to shoulder, talking about the deep issues of life, I think that is where a whole lot of evangelism will happen at the moment, as this tide is turning.
20:16
SPEAKER_02: So we are at a low tide moment.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: I think the tide may be turning, I don't know.
20:24
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I go all the way with Justin Briley's thesis that the turning of the tide is happening now, I don't know that.
20:32
SPEAKER_02: What I do know is that there are some low tide opportunities.
20:37
SPEAKER_02: Now that institutional trust in the church is low, but institutional trust in everything is low, now that there's been a smashing of all our senses of certainties in this world, now that there's a leveling of the spiritual playing field, now that people are sensing a meaning crisis, there are huge opportunities for the gospel.
21:00
SPEAKER_02: And I want to figure out how we can take those opportunities.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: And the way I'm going to do that is by introducing you to the argument of a book that I wrote a couple of years ago called The Air We Breathe, which I often refer to.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: It's like Tom Holland's Dominion for Dummies and I'm the Dummy, okay?
21:19
SPEAKER_02: But it's it's basically making the argument that the high tide of Christianity has shaped our culture, and that even at low tide, you see the shaping influence of Christianity, and you can use that in your evangelism.
21:36
SPEAKER_02: There is Indiana Jones uh about to make his famous leap of faith.
21:41
SPEAKER_02: Okay?
21:41
SPEAKER_02: Last crusade, and in order to get to the chalice at the end, uh he must somehow traverse this chasm, and it's called the leap of faith, and the voice of his father is calling him.
21:56
SPEAKER_02: And will he be brave enough to kind of step out and take A leap of faith.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: And we often think that that's what faith is like.
22:04
SPEAKER_02: I think our secular friends think this is what the leap of faith is.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: That somebody is able to believe in God and angels and the afterlife and the soul and things like that.
22:19
SPEAKER_02: And they're able to step out into the unknown.
22:24
SPEAKER_02: But other people are grounded individuals who just believe in science and reason, right?
22:31
SPEAKER_02: And we tend to live with this kind of dichotomy.
22:34
SPEAKER_02: Some people are believers and some people aren't.
22:38
SPEAKER_02: Like my friend Sally.
22:44
SPEAKER_02: That dates me, okay?
22:46
SPEAKER_02: And she wrote me a letter.
22:49
SPEAKER_02: That also dates both of us.
22:50
SPEAKER_02: She wrote a letter.
22:51
SPEAKER_02: Do you remember those kids?
22:52
SPEAKER_02: Letters, yeah.
22:54
SPEAKER_02: And in there was one line in the letter, she just said, I hope you realize, Glenn, I could never be a believer.
23:03
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's where your secular friends and family are at at the moment as well.
23:07
SPEAKER_02: She looks at me as a believer, and sometimes she's envious.
23:12
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes she thinks I've hit the jackpot because I'm a believer and she's not.
23:17
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes she looks at me and she thinks, boy, I dodged a bullet.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: But she thinks I'm a believer and she's not a believer, right?
23:26
SPEAKER_02: That belief is this strange thing that faith heads do.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: And I wrote back to her because Sally believes in all sorts of things.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: She's a much better human being than I am.
23:36
SPEAKER_02: She really believes in service and kindness and the equality of all people and diversity and inclusion and all these great things.
23:45
SPEAKER_02: She's a real believer.
23:46
SPEAKER_02: And she puts her beliefs into effect in ways that are really quite challenging for me.
23:52
SPEAKER_02: It's not that she's a person of reason and I'm a person of faith.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: We're both believers.
23:59
SPEAKER_02: So I wrote her a letter about that, and then I decided to turn it into a video.
24:03
SPEAKER_02: And here's the video.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: This is Sally.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: Sally is a rational person who could never make a leap of faith like Robbie up there.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Look at Robbie.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: He's a faith head, floating around unsupported by anything.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: No.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: Sally simply goes by the evidence and the assured findings of science and reason.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously, Sally believes that all people are equal.
24:27
SPEAKER_01: That's just normal.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: And that society must protect its weakest members, obviously.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: She is certain that consent is essential to sex, and that education, not coercion, is the path to enlightenment.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: She trusts science and what it can deliver the world.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: She is certain that all people should be free, and she's concerned to reform the evils of yesterday as we progress to a brighter tomorrow.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: Oh hey Robbie, what are you doing down here?
24:52
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: Sally is a believer.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: Because none of these morals, assumptions, or deep intuitions are the result of logic or scientific experiments.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: You can't prove equality, compassion, consent, or any of these values that we live by every day.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: We believe in these values.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: We stake our lives on them.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: But they're not the kinds of things you can deduce logically or demonstrate scientifically.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: It turns out that Sally is a believer.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: She doesn't need to make a leap of faith.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: She's already living at a great height.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: Day by day, minute by minute, she assumes any number of values that cannot be proven with mathematical certainty.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: The solid ground she thinks she's standing on is not the ground of simple logic or reason.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: Actually, the values she lives by are founded on something else, something she might not have considered.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: And without that foundation, the values she lives by don't really make sense.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: She's never read the Bible for herself, but she's grown up in a culture built by Jesus and the values He has injected into the world.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: Sally has been assuming some deeply Christian truths all along, even if she never really examined them.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: But if she takes the time to look where she's standing, she might just find that she's more of a person of faith than she thought.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: Sally's challenge is not to take a leap of faith.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: Through the Jesus Revolution, history has already taken an almighty leap.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Sally, along with the rest of us, are already in mid-air.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: What she needs is some ground beneath her feet.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: And it's Jesus alone who can provide it.
26:47
SPEAKER_01: That's the argument of the air we breathe.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: It charts the advance of the Jesus Revolution, from Genesis to the modern day and from equality to progress.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: It's for the Robbies of the world, who are happy to be known as believers.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: And it's for the Sally's, too, for those who thought that they were incapable of faith.
27:04
SPEAKER_01: It turns out that through Jesus and the growth of his movement, beliefs are far more common than we think.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: They are the air we breathe.
27:19
SPEAKER_02: So those are seven values that I've identified.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: There are many more than that, but they are the fruits of the tree that has grown from the seed of the Word of God.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: And Sally is aware of them, and you're aware of them.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: Your non-Christian friends and family are aware of them all.
27:39
SPEAKER_02: In fact, they all believe these things.
27:42
SPEAKER_02: They believe things like equality.
27:43
SPEAKER_02: We are all moral equals to one another.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: No matter how much money you've got in your bank account, no matter how fast you are, how strong you are, man or woman, gay or straight, black or white, we're all equal, right?
27:56
SPEAKER_02: Of course we are.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: That will get assent, okay?
28:00
SPEAKER_02: If you deny that, you get kicked off Facebook really quickly.
28:04
SPEAKER_02: Like they excommunicate you, okay?
28:08
SPEAKER_02: Quite rightly, because we believe in equality.
28:10
SPEAKER_02: We believe in equality for very biblical reasons, right?
28:14
SPEAKER_02: But we all believe in equality.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: We all believe in compassion.
28:18
SPEAKER_02: A society should be judged by the way it treats its weakest members.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: Don't you believe that?
28:24
SPEAKER_02: Of course you believe that.
28:25
SPEAKER_02: You put that on Facebook, you get loads of likes, okay?
28:27
SPEAKER_02: Everyone believes that.
28:29
SPEAKER_02: Kindness is king.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: Okay, we totally believe in compassion.
28:33
SPEAKER_02: Consent, elite men do not have the right to the bodies of their so-called inferiors, and consent is right at the heart of the sexual relationship, right?
28:46
SPEAKER_02: You believe that?
28:48
SPEAKER_02: Everybody believes that.
28:50
SPEAKER_02: Enlightenment.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: You should not forward your ends by violence and force, but only by persuasion and education.
29:00
SPEAKER_02: You should try to enlighten people.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: That's how you should spread your influence, right?
29:04
SPEAKER_02: We all believe in enlightenment, we all believe in science.
29:08
SPEAKER_02: We believe that science can be done, which is an extraordinary thing to think.
29:13
SPEAKER_02: Why does the three pounds of gray matter of Homo sapiens have any grasp on the mysteries of the cosmos?
29:22
SPEAKER_02: But we all believe, we just take it for granted.
29:25
SPEAKER_02: Of course you can do science, and of course you should follow the science.
29:29
SPEAKER_02: We all believe in science, we all believe in freedom.
29:33
SPEAKER_02: No human being should be the property of another human being.
29:36
SPEAKER_02: We all believe that.
29:38
SPEAKER_02: We all believe in progress.
29:40
SPEAKER_02: Martin Luther King Jr.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: was quoting from an abolitionist preacher a hundred years earlier when he said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
29:50
SPEAKER_02: We all believe that, don't we?
29:52
SPEAKER_02: That we must reform the evils of yesterday and progress towards a brighter tomorrow.
29:57
SPEAKER_02: You all believe that, don't you?
29:59
SPEAKER_02: But then the Sally's of this world will say, ah, but Glenn, all those great things, they're just secular humanism.
30:09
SPEAKER_02: You heard that phrase, secular humanism?
30:12
SPEAKER_02: I always want to tease those two words apart.
30:15
SPEAKER_02: You know, let's think about a secular worldview, a purely non-religious, godless universe.
30:22
SPEAKER_02: Let's imagine a godless universe in which human beings are clever apes, but also the humanism, and we have inviolable human rights.
30:34
SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
30:35
SPEAKER_02: Clever apes, unbreakable human rights.
30:40
SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
30:41
SPEAKER_02: No, Sally's like this the whole time.
30:45
SPEAKER_02: There's cognitive dissonance.
30:47
SPEAKER_02: Or think about you know compassion.
30:49
SPEAKER_02: We are the heirs of a brutal evolutionary history, and we should be kind.
30:56
SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
30:58
SPEAKER_02: It's like there's the secular view and there's humanism.
31:04
SPEAKER_02: Pick one.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: Because this doesn't work.
31:08
SPEAKER_02: Or on consent.
31:10
SPEAKER_02: Okay?
31:11
SPEAKER_02: The the godless worldview is you and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals.
31:17
SPEAKER_02: So let's honor one another's sexual boundaries at all times.
31:22
SPEAKER_02: I really am dating myself, aren't I, with these with these popular cultural references?
31:28
SPEAKER_02: Does that work?
31:29
SPEAKER_02: Like all of them, we're we're split between these two things.
31:33
SPEAKER_02: You know, progress.
31:35
SPEAKER_02: You know, I am a DNA replicator, clinging to an insignificant rock, hurtling through a meaningless universe towards eternal extinction, and things are gonna get better.
31:48
SPEAKER_02: It's like, you know, and our friends are doing this the whole time.
31:54
SPEAKER_02: They don't realize they're doing this because they actually lean into the good stuff most of the time.
32:00
SPEAKER_02: Sally lives most of her life over here.
32:02
SPEAKER_02: When you ask her what she believes, she gives you some kind of account that she learned in biology class when she was 15 years old over here.
32:11
SPEAKER_02: Does she live like this is true?
32:13
SPEAKER_02: She does not live like this is true.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: She does not.
32:17
SPEAKER_02: And when you show her the the dissonance, and when you tell her to pick, secular, humanist, choose one, she picks this one every time.
32:28
SPEAKER_02: She lives into this one every time.
32:32
SPEAKER_02: Sally is a believer, right.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: Hi, Thomas Thorgood here, media producer at Speak Life.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: You might recognise my voice as the guy who does the filler bits on the podcast.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to invite you to our online community, the Speak Life Discord.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: It's a great place to interact with the Speak Life team and other Speak Life followers.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: And if you are a regular giver to the work of Speak Life within the Discord, you can get access to bonus content.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: So why not go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash Discord to join today.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: We'll see you there.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Okay, back to the podcast.
33:26
SPEAKER_02: But also the secular world using these values looks back at the church and having learnt those values from the Bible, guess what the secular world says about the church?
33:41
SPEAKER_02: Well, the secular world says that the church is unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive.
33:51
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that a common shopping list of complaints against Christianity?
33:57
SPEAKER_02: But I didn't just pick those seven critiques at random, did I?
34:03
SPEAKER_02: And they don't pick those seven critiques at random when they call the church unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: They do so because they believe in equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress.
34:20
SPEAKER_02: They really believe those things.
34:24
SPEAKER_02: And essentially all the culture wars are basically people hurling Bible verses at each other.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: We've just forgotten the references.
34:34
SPEAKER_02: Remember in Matthew 13 when Jesus talks about the seed going out?
34:39
SPEAKER_02: Matthew 13 finishes with this parable.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: I think this is fascinating.
34:47
SPEAKER_02: Jesus told them another parable.
34:49
SPEAKER_02: The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.
35:05
SPEAKER_02: First point to take from this Jesus is not worried about the triumph of his kingdom.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: He predicted it 2,000 years ago, and everything in the last 2,000 years has only added to our confidence that everything he says is true.
35:25
SPEAKER_02: Back when he was about to face Godforsaken execution, he says, it's world domination for me.
35:32
SPEAKER_02: Turns out that's true.
35:33
SPEAKER_02: Turns out he nailed it.
35:37
SPEAKER_02: And the last 2,000 years have only vindicated his prophecy of world domination.
35:43
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is not up in heaven saying, Oh, what are we going to do now?
35:48
SPEAKER_02: The Church of England is in crisis.
35:50
SPEAKER_02: What are we going to do now?
35:52
SPEAKER_02: Right?
35:52
SPEAKER_02: There's a great dechurching in the United States.
35:55
SPEAKER_02: What are we going to do now?
35:56
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is not wringing his hands, worried by the future.
36:02
SPEAKER_02: The triumph of the people of Jesus is absolutely certain.
36:07
SPEAKER_02: Completely certain.
36:09
SPEAKER_02: We don't need to worry about that.
36:11
SPEAKER_02: But notice something else here.
36:14
SPEAKER_02: The birds come and perch in its branches.
36:20
SPEAKER_02: Where did we last see those birds?
36:23
SPEAKER_02: Those pesky birds.
36:25
SPEAKER_02: What were they doing when we last saw them in Matthew 13?
36:28
SPEAKER_02: What were they doing?
36:30
SPEAKER_02: Get away, you birds.
36:32
SPEAKER_02: Just pecking away at the sea.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: The birds seemed so much bigger than the word of God, didn't they?
36:38
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus described it as like satanic opposition to the gospel.
36:43
SPEAKER_02: And now what are the birds doing?
36:46
SPEAKER_02: They're perching in the branches of the kingdom that the word of God has grown.
36:54
SPEAKER_02: That's why your friends accuse Christianity of being unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive.
37:03
SPEAKER_02: They are perched on a branch that has been grown by Jesus.
37:10
SPEAKER_02: They are taking issue with Christianity for very Christian-ish reasons.
37:16
SPEAKER_02: And they are like the person sawing the branch off on which they are seated.
37:22
SPEAKER_02: That's modern life, isn't it?
37:24
SPEAKER_02: You know, Richard Dawkins again and again saying, Christianity is absolute utter nonsense.
37:30
SPEAKER_02: It's rubbish, and I love cultural Christianity.
37:33
SPEAKER_02: I'm a cultural Christian and it's utter nonsense.
37:37
SPEAKER_02: It's like saying, I love grapes, I just want to burn down every vine.
37:45
SPEAKER_02: Bring me all the wine.
37:46
SPEAKER_02: I love wine, I just want to destroy all the vineyards, right?
37:50
SPEAKER_02: I want the cultural Christianity.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: I don't want the real thing.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: And as ridiculous as that is, that's what modern secular Westerners do.
38:03
SPEAKER_02: They saw at the branch that they're sitting on, a branch that was grown by the word of Jesus.
38:10
SPEAKER_02: This is where we all are.
38:13
SPEAKER_02: You know, at high tide, it's very easy to critique the church for not being Christian-ish enough because at high tide, everyone's just buoyed up by the sense of Christianity that's there in the ether.
38:27
SPEAKER_02: And so we critique the church for being unequal and cruel and coercive and all those bad things.
38:33
SPEAKER_02: But what I'm finding is that now at now at low tide, what's happening is that people are recognizing it's not just the church that are the bad guys.
38:41
SPEAKER_02: Now at low tide, we don't just not trust the church, we don't trust anyone anymore at low tide.
38:51
SPEAKER_02: I mentioned the the de-churching in the US.
38:55
SPEAKER_02: You know the number one reason for de-churching in the US?
38:59
SPEAKER_02: It's not actually abuse scandals, as horrible as those abuse scandals are.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: The number one reason for 40 million people leaving church is I moved.
39:14
SPEAKER_02: I moved city.
39:16
SPEAKER_02: And we just didn't get back into the habit of going to church again.
39:20
SPEAKER_02: You know, the the what is the number two reason?
39:23
SPEAKER_02: The the number one reason is moving.
39:25
SPEAKER_02: The number two reason is, oh, church times were inconvenient for me.
39:31
SPEAKER_02: Little Jimmy has little league on a Sunday morning, so we we just don't go to church anymore.
39:36
SPEAKER_02: Number three reason is the is a family change, like the divorce or something in the family, and life becomes difficult, and it just becomes more difficult to go back to church.
39:45
SPEAKER_02: The dechurching has been casual.
39:48
SPEAKER_02: Because what is happening in post-Christian society is we don't just stop believing in the Jesus thing, we stop believing altogether.
39:57
SPEAKER_02: Because you you break Jesus away from society, and it's not just that you can get on with a secular lifestyle happily, we suddenly don't trust anything or anyone.
40:12
SPEAKER_02: The World Values Survey in the UK reveals that confidence in Parliament has halved since 1980.
40:21
SPEAKER_02: It was 40% in 1980, it's 20% in 2022.
40:26
SPEAKER_02: Confidence in political parties is 13%.
40:29
SPEAKER_02: You're probably thinking that high?
40:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, 13%.
40:34
SPEAKER_02: Confidence in police is down from 87% to 67%.
40:38
SPEAKER_02: It's barely half in London.
40:40
SPEAKER_02: About 55% of Londoners trust the police.
40:43
SPEAKER_02: 44% of Gen Z trust the police, only 44%.
40:48
SPEAKER_02: Confidence in the press is 13%.
40:51
SPEAKER_02: Again, you might think that sounds high, but 13%, it's 5% among Gen Z.
40:57
SPEAKER_02: 5%.
40:58
SPEAKER_02: Confidence in the church as an institution is actually at 44%.
41:03
SPEAKER_02: It's quite respectable, isn't it?
41:05
SPEAKER_02: Compared to some of the other things.
41:08
SPEAKER_02: The ways in which the world is now attacking the church, it's now being shared around.
41:15
SPEAKER_02: Everyone's attacking everyone.
41:17
SPEAKER_02: There's a real leveling of the playing field.
41:20
SPEAKER_02: And here is one benefit of low tide.
41:26
SPEAKER_02: I want to take you to some low tide opportunities as we finish.
41:31
SPEAKER_02: And I'm going to take you on a tour of the world.
41:33
SPEAKER_02: That'd be nice, wouldn't it?
41:35
SPEAKER_02: Let's go to the southern tip of the South Island of New Zealand, Kurio Bay.
41:42
SPEAKER_02: And uh here is an example of what low tide can do.
41:47
SPEAKER_02: Low tide reveals what lies beneath.
41:50
SPEAKER_02: At low tide in Curio Bay, you can see a petrified forest.
41:55
SPEAKER_02: It's such an ancient forest that scientists reckon the forest there is from the days when we were all one landmass in Gondwana land, right?
42:03
SPEAKER_02: That's that's how old this ancient forest is.
42:07
SPEAKER_02: You cannot see it at high tide.
42:10
SPEAKER_02: You can only see it at low tide.
42:13
SPEAKER_02: And this is what low tide does.
42:17
SPEAKER_02: It reveals the things that had always been bubbling on underneath.
42:22
SPEAKER_02: And I think in a post-Christian society, we're starting to see some really nasty aspects to human nature.
42:30
SPEAKER_02: Aspects that have always been there, but that have been covered over by Christianization.
42:37
SPEAKER_02: One person who really got to see what was underneath and who really knew what was underneath was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
42:45
SPEAKER_02: Friedrich Nietzsche was constantly saying, I hate this overlay of Christianity on top of nature.
42:51
SPEAKER_02: We should just honor nature and the strong and the powerful.
42:56
SPEAKER_02: That's what we should do.
42:56
SPEAKER_02: And Christianity comes along and it teaches us this compassion ethic.
43:01
SPEAKER_02: Horrible.
43:02
SPEAKER_02: And he hated it because pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: You know, selection?
43:09
SPEAKER_02: Survival of the fittest, right?
43:12
SPEAKER_02: The fittest should survive, and the weakest should go to the wall.
43:17
SPEAKER_02: In fact, he said the weak and ill-constituted shall perish, and one shall help them to do so.
43:23
SPEAKER_02: Yikes.
43:25
SPEAKER_02: That's what lies underneath.
43:28
SPEAKER_02: Underneath Christianization.
43:30
SPEAKER_02: And Nietzsche knew it.
43:32
SPEAKER_02: He knew the problem.
43:34
SPEAKER_02: The problem with the world was Christianity, because Christianity has taken the part, taken the side of all the weak, the low, the botched.
43:42
SPEAKER_02: It opposed all the self preservative instincts of sound life.
43:47
SPEAKER_02: Sound life is to preserve yourself.
43:49
SPEAKER_02: And Christianity comes along and it wants to help the weak and the low and the botched.
43:56
SPEAKER_02: It's awful.
43:57
SPEAKER_02: And Nietzsche gives us a vision of what life.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Beneath.
44:01
SPEAKER_02: But there are a lot of people online and a lot of people in our culture who are with Nietzsche.
44:07
SPEAKER_02: They're sick of kindness, they're sick of compassion, they're sick of helping up the weak.
44:13
SPEAKER_02: They're sick of it.
44:14
SPEAKER_02: And Nietzsche was sick of it.
44:17
SPEAKER_02: Nietzsche put his finger on where Christians got their ethic from.
44:22
SPEAKER_02: It's the cross.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: God on the cross.
44:26
SPEAKER_02: Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion.
44:31
SPEAKER_02: It's all upside down, the cross.
44:33
SPEAKER_02: Nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula.
44:37
SPEAKER_02: It promised the transvaluation of all ancient values.
44:41
SPEAKER_02: You know what the ancient values are?
44:43
SPEAKER_02: Okay, you help the strong.
44:45
SPEAKER_02: And if the weak don't survive, good.
44:49
SPEAKER_02: They're weak.
44:51
SPEAKER_02: But the cross is utterly different.
44:54
SPEAKER_02: At either end of that spear are two visions of glory.
45:00
SPEAKER_02: The ancient vision of glory is represented by the centurion.
45:04
SPEAKER_02: On that end of the spear, we have one vision of glory.
45:08
SPEAKER_02: And you enforce your power to dominate the weak.
45:13
SPEAKER_02: And if the slaves are going to revolt, we're going to put down the revolts because power reigns.
45:20
SPEAKER_02: That's one vision of glory.
45:22
SPEAKER_02: At the sharp end of the spear is a different vision of glory.
45:27
SPEAKER_02: A vision of glory that's captivated us for 2,000 years.
45:30
SPEAKER_02: It's even captivated Sally.
45:32
SPEAKER_02: At the sharp end of the spear is someone who takes violence into themselves in order to respond with kindness, with love, with mercy.
45:44
SPEAKER_02: If the law of selection is the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest, what's this?
45:53
SPEAKER_02: This is the sacrifice of the fittest Christ for we the weakest.
45:58
SPEAKER_02: So that we the weakest might survive and thrive and pass on this compassion revolution.
46:04
SPEAKER_02: That's why Nietzsche hated it.
46:07
SPEAKER_02: And in a post-Christian society, at low tide, you start to see the ancient stuff.
46:14
SPEAKER_02: And you'll see more and more of this kind of stuff.
46:18
SPEAKER_02: Power, domination, Nietzschean kind of naturism.
46:26
SPEAKER_02: What lies beneath gets revealed in post-Christian times.
46:30
SPEAKER_02: And there are a lot of people scared about that and pulling at the thread of this.
46:38
SPEAKER_02: My next door neighbor.
46:40
SPEAKER_02: We share a wall and uh he's in rental accommodation, so he's not allowed to smoke.
46:46
SPEAKER_02: So 25 times a day he's out on his porch, which is terrible for his health, but I think it's been good for his soul because we speak to each other on a multiple times a day, right?
46:57
SPEAKER_02: And uh he's now a Christian, and uh and one of his daughters is now coming to church with him, and we're working on the rest of the family.
47:05
SPEAKER_02: It's it's it's amazing.
47:07
SPEAKER_02: A real turning point with him.
47:10
SPEAKER_02: He was just out on his porch, cigarette in one hand, phone in the other.
47:13
SPEAKER_02: He was scrolling through Facebook, and he got to one of these videos.
47:18
SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you've seen something like this, but it was a video of uh a United States high school basketball team.
47:26
SPEAKER_02: And there was a kid called Mitchell Marcus, and he wasn't good enough to play.
47:31
SPEAKER_02: He had all sorts of developmental delay and all sorts of um intellectual disabilities, and he never got to play for the team, but he was the water boy and he was like the team manager and brought them the uniforms, and he always showed up to practice.
47:45
SPEAKER_02: And Mitchell Marcus was just like the glue that held this team together, and but he'd never he'd never played until the final game of the regular season, and the coach puts him on in the last few minutes, right?
47:59
SPEAKER_02: And this is high school basketball, but it's like filled, the gymnasium is just filled with people, and they're all like, Mitchell, Mitchell, Mitchell.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: And so his team passed him the ball, and he's right under the basket, and he misses.
48:10
SPEAKER_02: Oh no.
48:12
SPEAKER_02: And then they get in the ball again with just a minute to spare, and he shoots and he misses again.
48:17
SPEAKER_02: And then with just five seconds to go, he shoots again and he misses.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's like the fairy tale is not gonna come true.
48:25
SPEAKER_02: But then the opposition, there's this Christian kid, and we learn that he's a Christian kid later, but this Christian kid says, Mitchell, passes him the ball.
48:33
SPEAKER_02: And with three seconds to go, he shoots, he scores.
48:37
SPEAKER_02: And the roof is just lifted off this gymnasium, and they put him up on their shoulders, Mitchell, Mitchell, Mitchell, Mitchell.
48:43
SPEAKER_02: And my friend is there, cigarette in hand, like watching this, and he like shows me the video, and we've both got goosebumps.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: And he he says, Why is that so great?
48:54
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
48:56
SPEAKER_02: Why is that so great?
48:58
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Oh, mate, because we spent all our lives thinking you've got to be strong to win.
49:04
SPEAKER_02: And if you're strong, you'll win.
49:06
SPEAKER_02: If you're strong, you'll get a game.
49:08
SPEAKER_02: If you're strong, you'll score, and then you'll get the applause, and then you get lifted up on people's shoulders.
49:15
SPEAKER_02: And this is kind of like the opposite.
49:17
SPEAKER_02: This is this is like we we lift up the little guy, because we all recognize at the end of the day that we can't do it, we're not strong.
49:24
SPEAKER_02: We need help, we need grace.
49:25
SPEAKER_02: There's this, it's sort of supernatural, isn't it?
49:29
SPEAKER_02: Because nature is all about the strong surviving, and the supernatural is actually all about someone who is strong coming and lifting you up and giving you what you don't deserve.
49:39
SPEAKER_02: That's supernatural.
49:39
SPEAKER_02: I believe that because I'm a Christian.
49:41
SPEAKER_02: Because at the heart of my faith is the supernatural one, Jesus, and he's the strong one.
49:46
SPEAKER_02: He came down to sacrifice for us weak ones, to lift us weak ones up.
49:49
SPEAKER_02: It's it's gorgeous.
49:50
SPEAKER_02: And he was like, okay.
49:52
SPEAKER_02: He was in church within 10 days of that conversation.
49:55
SPEAKER_02: He's been a Christian now two years, right?
49:58
SPEAKER_02: And it all it all started from, you know, the Nietzschean will to power.
50:03
SPEAKER_02: That's no way to live, is it?
50:05
SPEAKER_02: But there's something supernatural about grace, about mercy, about compassion.
50:09
SPEAKER_02: It really is.
50:10
SPEAKER_02: You've never seen anything more divine than that, right?
50:13
SPEAKER_02: The cross.
50:14
SPEAKER_02: You've never seen anything more divine than that.
50:17
SPEAKER_02: The lamb is at the center of the throne.
50:20
SPEAKER_02: Don't you love that phrase from Revelation?
50:22
SPEAKER_02: It's in Revelation twice.
50:23
SPEAKER_02: Revelation in chapter 5, in chapter 7, says the Lamb is at the center of the throne.
50:27
SPEAKER_02: The throne representing God's power and authority and presence.
50:31
SPEAKER_02: And pushed through to the deepest depths of deity, what do you find?
50:36
SPEAKER_02: A bleeding victim, a sacrifice.
50:40
SPEAKER_02: You find Jesus crucified for you.
50:42
SPEAKER_02: You've never seen anything more divine than that man choking to death for the world.
50:47
SPEAKER_02: It's beautiful, isn't it?
50:48
SPEAKER_02: And as people start to see, yeah, that's beautiful, they start to see, oh gosh, that's tops, that's ultimate, that's number one.
50:53
SPEAKER_02: He's he's he's he's Lord.
50:56
SPEAKER_02: And as soon as somebody says Jesus is Lord, it's like bad luck, you're a Christian, isn't it?
51:00
SPEAKER_02: It's just it's just sneaks up on you like that.
51:05
SPEAKER_02: A curio bay, you figure out what lies beneath.
51:09
SPEAKER_02: And you see that without Jesus, it is a brutal world.
51:13
SPEAKER_02: It really is Jesus or the pit.
51:16
SPEAKER_02: It's Jesus or the pit.
51:19
SPEAKER_02: That might sound like a bigoted fundamentalism, but it turns out it's a historic fact.
51:25
SPEAKER_02: It's Jesus or the pit.
51:28
SPEAKER_02: What's it gonna be?
51:29
SPEAKER_02: People start to see what lies beneath in a post-Christian society.
51:33
SPEAKER_02: Lots of people are running back to church.
51:36
SPEAKER_02: Let me take you somewhere else.
51:38
SPEAKER_02: Thailand.
51:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm really spoiling you.
51:39
SPEAKER_02: Here we go.
51:40
SPEAKER_02: New Zealand to Thailand, Konang Yuan.
51:43
SPEAKER_02: This is there's a million Instagram posts of this and screensavers.
51:48
SPEAKER_02: And you see that sort of sugar-powdered white sand from the pounding of the sea.
51:55
SPEAKER_02: At low tide, you start to see the beach, you start to see what high tide has been doing, you start to see what the sea of faith has been doing the whole time, the shaping power of the sea.
52:07
SPEAKER_02: And I think nowadays we're starting to see the shaping power of Christianity just as we're starting to lose its influence.
52:14
SPEAKER_02: I think we never realized what we had until we start to lose it.
52:20
SPEAKER_02: You know, at high tide, you start to say things like this Declaration of Independence.
52:24
SPEAKER_02: You probably know these words.
52:26
SPEAKER_02: Thomas Jefferson wrote this we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.
52:31
SPEAKER_02: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
52:39
SPEAKER_02: That's what Thomas Jefferson wrote.
52:41
SPEAKER_02: A deist.
52:42
SPEAKER_02: He thought he was over the whole Christian thing, but he'd been so Christianized.
52:46
SPEAKER_02: He's like, we believe in these things called human rights, they're sacred, right?
52:51
SPEAKER_02: Well, there's a line put through it by Benjamin Franklin, another deist, who thought, let's not go with the whole religious thing.
52:59
SPEAKER_02: Let's just call human rights self-evident.
53:03
SPEAKER_02: But are human rights self-evident?
53:07
SPEAKER_02: Where do you find human rights?
53:09
SPEAKER_02: If you cut somebody open, do you find human rights in there?
53:12
SPEAKER_02: If you map their DNA, does it tell you that every single person is created equal and is endowed with certain unalienable rights?
53:22
SPEAKER_02: Is that what you find?
53:24
SPEAKER_02: When Christianity is at high tide, you start to think it's obvious, it's self-evident that everybody's equal.
53:31
SPEAKER_02: But you know why you think that.
53:33
SPEAKER_02: You think that because on page one of the Bible it tells you that.
53:38
SPEAKER_02: Man and woman made in God's image as king and queen of all creation, equal in dignity, having dominion over the whole world.
53:46
SPEAKER_02: We think it's self-evident because it's actually biblical.
53:50
unknown: T.
53:50
SPEAKER_02: S.
53:51
SPEAKER_02: Eliot had it right.
53:52
SPEAKER_02: He said, if you remove from the word human all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.
54:03
SPEAKER_02: Right?
54:04
SPEAKER_02: That's what's self-evident.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: Benjamin Franklin, you know what's self-evident about human rights?
54:10
SPEAKER_02: It's that human rights are not self-evident.
54:14
SPEAKER_02: They are not a human universal.
54:15
SPEAKER_02: You don't go around every culture and discover this sacred and inviolable right and dignity and worth to all human beings.
54:22
SPEAKER_02: If we're just clever, adaptable, mischievous little animals, do we really have these things called human rights?
54:28
SPEAKER_02: It's only the high tide of Christianity that made us think in these humanistic ways.
54:34
SPEAKER_02: Tom Holland, the historian, says that all men had been created equal and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not remotely self-evident truths.
54:44
SPEAKER_02: That most Americans believe they were, owed less to philosophy than to the Bible.
54:48
SPEAKER_02: That the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God's image.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American Republic, no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think, was the book of Genesis.
55:04
SPEAKER_02: People start to see that.
55:06
SPEAKER_02: It's funny, I think if Tom Holland's book came out 20 years earlier, people would say, nah, it's got nothing to do with Christianity.
55:16
SPEAKER_02: Now that Christian influence on society is much more in the rearview mirror, we're starting to figure out what we are missing.
55:23
SPEAKER_02: And we're starting to see the shaping power of the sea of faith.
55:26
SPEAKER_02: And people are starting to go to church.
55:28
SPEAKER_02: Tom Holland's starting to go to church, and Louise Perry's starting to go to church, and I and Hercy Ali is starting to go to church.
55:33
SPEAKER_02: And my friends are starting to go to church.
55:35
SPEAKER_02: In my street, it's not just my next door neighbor, two other members, two other people on my street have started to take their families off to church.
55:42
SPEAKER_02: Again, all three of them on my street, men.
55:46
SPEAKER_02: They're all taking their families off to church.
55:49
SPEAKER_02: Some of them are taking them to church as I wish they wouldn't take them to, but never mind.
55:52
SPEAKER_02: They're taking them to church.
55:55
SPEAKER_02: And they're all starting to say, well, it seems to me like the Bible has built the modern world.
55:59
SPEAKER_02: It seems to me like Christianity is the thing that has gotten us where we are.
56:03
SPEAKER_02: And I'm ignorant and I want to find out more.
56:06
SPEAKER_02: We need to be ready for those sorts of people to walk through the doors.
56:10
SPEAKER_02: The final low tide opportunity.
56:14
SPEAKER_02: Let's go off the Brittany coast to Le Mont Saint-Michel.
56:18
SPEAKER_02: At very high tide, even the bridge is cut off.
56:22
SPEAKER_02: And it's just an island.
56:25
SPEAKER_02: But at low tide, you start to see the way that things connect.
56:29
SPEAKER_02: You know the way that things connect at low tide?
56:34
SPEAKER_02: If you were just bobbing up and down on a surfboard off the coast there, you might just find yourself bumping into that Christian community with a church at the top.
56:45
SPEAKER_02: And at high tide, people found themselves going to church.
56:50
SPEAKER_02: But no longer.
56:52
SPEAKER_02: At low tide, if people start going to church, they really have to decide to go to church.
56:56
SPEAKER_02: They've got to put one foot in front of the other.
56:58
SPEAKER_02: They've got to figure out the ways that things connect.
57:01
SPEAKER_02: And they need to understand why they're going to church.
57:05
SPEAKER_02: And we might have preferred it when people just showed up in church because it was Sunday morning.
57:10
SPEAKER_02: But now when people do show up, they're there for a reason.
57:14
SPEAKER_02: They've ordered a Bible from Amazon.
57:16
SPEAKER_02: They're diving into Genesis.
57:19
SPEAKER_02: And here are some of the steps that people can take into Christian community.
57:22
SPEAKER_02: They start to think, number one, I am a believer after all.
57:26
SPEAKER_02: I really do believe in stuff like human rights and diversity and inclusion and all these sorts of things.
57:32
SPEAKER_02: I am a believer after all.
57:33
SPEAKER_02: And my beliefs do not come from reason or science, actually.
57:36
SPEAKER_02: I can't prove this thing under laboratory conditions.
57:40
SPEAKER_02: These are beliefs.
57:41
SPEAKER_02: And my beliefs have been shaped by our Christianized culture, actually.
57:46
SPEAKER_02: And that's attractive to me.
57:48
SPEAKER_02: I'm worried by what's underneath in our culture today.
57:52
SPEAKER_02: I'm worried by that.
57:53
SPEAKER_02: I'm also worried by what's underneath in me.
57:56
SPEAKER_02: Because I recognize there's a kind of a Nietzschean will to power in me as well.
58:00
SPEAKER_02: And that's pretty scary.
58:02
SPEAKER_02: I realize I believe in these Christian-ish values far more than I believe in a godless universe.
58:08
SPEAKER_02: There'll be people in your life you'll be able to say this to.
58:15
SPEAKER_02: Which do you believe more?
58:17
SPEAKER_02: Do you believe more in human rights, or do you believe this is a godless universe?
58:21
SPEAKER_02: Which do you believe in more?
58:23
SPEAKER_02: They believe far more in the human rights thing.
58:26
SPEAKER_02: Far more.
58:28
SPEAKER_02: There's such a thing as nominal atheism.
58:30
SPEAKER_02: I hope you know that.
58:31
SPEAKER_02: Just as there's nominal Christianity.
58:34
SPEAKER_02: And with a nominal Christian, you push beneath and say, Yeah, but what do you make of Jesus?
58:37
SPEAKER_02: And with a nominal atheist, you do exactly the same.
58:39
SPEAKER_02: And what do you make of Jesus?
58:42
SPEAKER_02: And then number seven, I'm giving myself to the Jesus story with a new seriousness.
58:46
SPEAKER_02: I'm seeing it happen.
58:47
SPEAKER_02: And be ready for people in your churches who come with King James Bibles and they've got all sorts of questions about Ecclesiastes and Job and Genesis.
58:55
SPEAKER_02: And they're starting to put these things together.
58:57
SPEAKER_02: I'll finish with this.
58:59
SPEAKER_02: An artist friend of mine called Paul Hobbs painted this beautiful picture.
59:03
SPEAKER_02: It's called Nil by Mouth.
59:05
SPEAKER_02: It was a man who had not long left to live in hospital.
59:08
SPEAKER_02: He took a photograph of him and then went away and made the picture.
59:11
SPEAKER_02: That was the last time this man stood up.
59:14
SPEAKER_02: But he was desperate to stand up in the photograph, to have that last sense of dignity.
59:19
SPEAKER_02: But everything else was shabby and drab.
59:22
SPEAKER_02: There are no visitors.
59:23
SPEAKER_02: And here is a man who is nil by mouth at death's door.
59:26
SPEAKER_02: He is not economically valuable.
59:29
SPEAKER_02: Right?
59:30
SPEAKER_02: But he painted him with a halo in that classic sense.
59:33
SPEAKER_02: Is there worth to this man?
59:35
SPEAKER_02: Is there value to this man?
59:36
SPEAKER_02: Is there dignity to this man?
59:37
SPEAKER_02: Is there something supernatural about his worth, his value, his dignity?
59:42
SPEAKER_02: Well, yes, there is.
59:45
SPEAKER_02: Because that picture on the left is just an echo of the picture on the right.
59:51
SPEAKER_02: And the picture on the right is the original.
59:53
SPEAKER_02: That's the original vision of what it is that is truly valuable, truly divine, truly supernatural.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_02: And all that other stuff that there's still an echo of in our culture, we can follow the echo back to the source.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_02: That's what I hope to do.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_02: That's what you can do with the Sally's in your life.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_02: Follow the echo back to the source and tell people that they are birds perched in a branch, sitting, sitting within a Christianized culture that the word of Jesus has grown.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_02: And you can point them back to the Savior.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_02: Shall I pray for us?
1:00:33
SPEAKER_02: Let me pray for us that we'd all have opportunities to do that for ourselves, with our friends and families, and that our churches would be ready for such low-tide opportunities.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_02: Our Lord Jesus, you are magnificent.
1:00:52
SPEAKER_02: You are glorious.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_02: You are the seed who went down into the ground.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_02: You died and were buried.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_02: And you rose again to give new life.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_02: New life to your people, new life to the world.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_02: Oh Jesus, give us such a vision of Him.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_02: And give us opportunities to point our friends and family.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_02: That they might see your glory.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_02: The glory of one with arms outstretched to the world.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_02: Help us to take advantage of these low tide opportunities.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_02: For your glory we pray.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_02: Amen.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, there we go.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for listening.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_00: We also have the recording of a two-part seminar that Glenn did at Keswick, and that will be coming to the Speak Life Podcast next week.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_00: So stay tuned.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_00: Do subscribe to the Speak Life Podcast on your podcatcher of choice if you haven't done so already.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_00: And do leave a rating and review.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_00: That really helps us get seen and heard by more people.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: God bless and goodbye.