Developing a Biblical World View - I Believe in God, the Father

Sunday, April 3, 2005

PASTOR BURCHAM'S SERMON

An elderly couple were celebrating their anniversary. One man came up to them and he said, “You know, I just need to know. The two of you have been married for 50 years, and you look as happy today as when I met you. You look like you did on your wedding day. What's the secret? If you had to tell me just one thing, what is it that has made your marriage so successful?” Well, the wife popped up right away and she said, “You know, I think we can trace it all the way back to our wedding day.” She kind of looked lovingly at her husband. She said, “On that day, we had a discussion. And we made a very important decision that day. We said that all major decisions in our life together would be made by him. And all the minor decisions would be made by me.” And she said, “It's worked out wonderfully for us. Because in the 50 years we've been married, we've yet to face a major decision.” Now I don't know how it works in your house and, for reasons of self preservation, I won't tell you how it works in my house.

But how do you make decisions? How do you make choices in life? And I'm talking about the important decisions, the important choices, not what you're going to have for lunch this afternoon or dinner later on tonight. But how do you make those decisions and choices in life? How do you decide what's right and what's wrong? How do you decide what you're going to stand up for and how do you decide what are you going to be a little bit more flexible on?

Another way of putting that, what is your world view? That is, how do you approach life? What presuppositions do you bring with you that you base your decisions on? What's the foundation that you stand upon? As Christians, we desire to have a biblical world view. That is, to base our decisions, our choices, even our opinions upon God's Word and what God has said to us. Well, that's a little bit easier said than done. And so for the next 6 weeks, we're going to delve into that and we're going to talk about how can we have a biblical world view. How can we approach life and make those decisions and choices in a God-pleasing way based upon what God has said to us? We're going to use an ancient document to sort of see our way through that, and that's the Apostle's Creed. It's been around for nearly 2,000 years in the form we have it right now, probably since around

300 A.D. As we walk through that confession of faith we say every Sunday morning, it's my hope and it's my prayer that when you say it in the future, not only will you be reminded of your faith but you're reminded this is how you see the world and you have a biblical world view.

This morning we need to start out with just the basics. We need to establish what is the most important ingredient. What is the most important principle by which we base all of our decisions? And what that really comes down to is what do we consider our source of truth? Where do we go and what is our source of truth? Believe it or not, the world has been searching for that. Even over the century, the world has been looking for the truth, the real source they can count on as far as truth is concerned.

You might even remember, since we're just coming off of Lent, that it was Pontius Pilate who sort of incredulously looked at Jesus and said, “Well, what is truth?” Even Pontius Pilate didn't know. Or, in the Book of Acts, the history of the early church, we see there in Chapter 17 that Paul comes into Athens . Now Athens was a rather unusual place at that time. Just before our reading, scripture reveals to us, “All the Athenians spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” Now that was the life. That's what the City of Athens was all about. This was the intellectual elite. These were the philosophers of the day, the deep thinkers, and they'd come together to try to discern what really was true. What were the things they could count on? Paul says when he walked through the city, he was amazed as he went down the streets that there were all these different idols everywhere he looked. And finally he comes to this place called Mars Hill and there are all these different altars up there from every conceivable god. In fact, there is even one, just to cover all their bases, to the unknown god. That's Athens . Athens prided themselves on their religious tolerance. They prided themselves on the fact that they could listen to all different kinds of ideas and they would pick and choose from different religions and different gods and they'd formulate their own basis of truth so to formulate their own idea of what really is the truth.

The scary thing is our world is looking very much like that. We've gone back to that. Maybe we never left it, but certainly we can see it in society today. The world we live in isn't much different than Athens . It's a combination of all kinds of different sources of truth. The buzz words for today are tolerance, diversity,

multi-cultural. They're great sounding words. They're noble sounding words, but what's really underlying them? What's behind them? What does society mean when they talk about diversity, when they talk about tolerance? What they're really saying is that all sources of truth, all religions are really on an equal standing and that really one doesn't have any priority over another, that your idea of truth and religion is just as valid as someone else's idea of truth and religion, even if they may be diametrically opposed to one another. That's the world we live in. We've come back full circle to the City of Athens where we're surrounded by all these different altars to the different gods and we're just going to pick and choose from what we want.

Newsweek , about a year ago, had a cover story searching for the Holy Spirit. And in their studies, they had this quote, “Young people today are passionate about religion as long as they can form their own.” For what it's worth, if you look to the media and the stars, if you look to Madonna when she was on 60 Minutes , she looked right at the camera and she said, “Oh, I go to the synagogue and study Hinduism because, after all, all paths lead to God.” Now this is the same woman who had her son baptized in an Anglican church. So somehow it's okay to have Hinduism, it's okay to go into the synagogue, and it's okay to have Christianity sort of all dumped in together, mixed up, and come up with our own version of truth, what it is that we want to consider to be our guiding principle in life.

What it's really come down to, in my opinion, is that there are three erroneous sources for truth we look to in society, three places we sort of determine what's right and what's wrong but, in my opinion, they are the wrong places for us to look.

The first place is majority vote. Majority vote somehow decides what's right and what's wrong, what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. It's the polls. We see them probably every week, if not every day. There is a different poll taken by a different organization to get the opinion of people. And somehow the majority opinion is going to then shape what we believe. Everything from the inconsequential as far as last night during the game, “What was your opinion on what would be the best match up for Monday night?” to the most serious of affairs. Two weeks ago, it was all over the paper. I heard it on the news all day long. Someone did an opinion poll on what should happen to Terri Schiavo. Should they remove the tube or not? And 67% of the country said this. Is that how we're going to decide life and death? Is that how we're going to decide something as complex of a moral and ethical issue is the latest opinion poll? And opinion polls change depending upon who is administering them and what day of the week they give it and what hour of the day they conduct it. So it's kind of a sliding scale of truth. What is the latest opinion? Is that going to be the basis for our truth?

The second erroneous source, as far as I'm concerned, for truth is the media. The media is all around us, and you have to know the media puts a spin on everything. No matter what the issue is, whether it's mundane or important, whether it's the spin you agree with or the spin you disagree with, the media puts its spin on everything and the media has influence in our society. If you don't believe the media has influence in our society, from 1997 to 2004, the use of foul language increased 58% in prime time television. If you don't think that has affected our society, hang out in the mall one afternoon. Listen to the junior highers and the teenagers and the language they're using. It's a whole lot different from when I was in junior high and high school and I'm guessing way different from when you were there. The media has an influence on our society. The Vice President of MTV was asked in an interview, “How do you influence the kids of today?” He said, “Oh, we don't influence the kids today. We own them.” Do you believe he made that blunt of a statement? “We own them.” Media has an impact on us, and the question is are we going to let the media set the standard for our society? Is the media going to determine our values? Are they going to determine the morals of our country? Is that going to be our source of truth?

The third erroneous source is personal feelings. It all depends on how I feel about something. What is my emotional feeling? What's my gut feeling about a subject? More and more, personal feelings are taking precedence over facts. Even if the facts blatantly disagree with how I feel, my feelings are more important. What we're really saying is truth is relative. Truth is relative to how I see it, how I interpret it, and how I feel about it.

More and more, we have come to the place in society where there is no absolute truth. Truth is on a sliding scale, whether it's by opinion polls, whether it's by the media, or whether it's about how we're feeling about a subject, somehow truth is different for each person. Your version of truth may be different than my version of truth and somehow we're supposed to say that's okay. That's what it means to be tolerant. That's what it means to have diversity, to have conflicting versions of the truth and to say they're both right.

Chuck Paulson put it this way, “The cultural war we find ourselves in is really a battle of two world views. The one says we make up our own rules. The other one says the rules have already been made up for us.” As Christians, we should prefer the latter. The rules have already been made up for us. God has spoken. There is absolute truth in the world, and there is a source of absolute truth in the world. And, my friends, we have it. And it's time for us to stand up for it, and it's time for us to start living according to it. We have the truth. It's what Paul was trying to say to the people of Athens . They were so confused, even though they didn't know it, looking at all these different gods and all these different versions of truth, so Paul comes up and says, “You know, you have this altar to the unknown god. I know who he is. Let me tell you about it. He's the God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in it. He's the God as the source of all life, every breath we take. He's the God that came and lived among us and died for us and then rose again. I know who the unknown god is.” And he wanted to tell the people of Athens about that unknown god, that there was a source of truth.

You and I need to take that same perspective. We start at that same basic approach. We know who the unknown god is, and we confess that god every week in the first article of the Creed. “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.” We're saying we have the source of truth. We know the one true God, the unchangeable God and know there are no other gods and we will be that exclusive because I believe in God the Father, the maker of heaven and earth, the source of all life who gives me every breath, the Father who sacrificed His Son, the Father who then welcomed His Son back into heaven. That's what I believe in, and He is the source of truth for me. He's the foundation from which I will base the rest of my life, all of my decisions, all of my choices, because He's the God who has revealed the truth to us.

And God has revealed His truth in two ways. He's revealed His truth through the Holy Scriptures. It's His book. The bible are His words to us. And when we say we believe in God the Father, we're saying we believe in what He's given to us, that His Word is inherent, that His Word is trustworthy, that His Word is the source of truth for us, that His Word is unchanging, that we're going to base our truth and our decisions in something that doesn't change. Unlike an opinion poll that may be one way this week and something else another, unlike our feelings which change from moment to moment, the Word of God never changes. And so our source of truth comes from that unchanging God who has spoken to us in His unchanging Word. If we're going to have a biblical world view, if we're going to base our opinions, make our decisions and our choices in a god-pleasing way, then we have to get into God's Word, study that Word, and apply that Word to our life. That's how He's revealed Himself to us.

The second way in which He's revealed Himself to us is through His Son, Jesus. God came and lived among us. And Jesus, though He was a human being, He was also the Son of God. And as the Son of God, He lived the perfect life. If you want to know what it is to be the human being that God originally designed us to be, that He originally created us to be, look no further than Jesus. Jesus said of Himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus is the embodiment of truth. If we want to know what the truth is, look at Jesus and how He lived. He is the grand example of what it is to live life with a biblical world view. Every decision He made, every choice He had, every opinion He formulated was based perfectly upon God's will and upon God's Word. If we want to have a biblical world view, then we need to study Jesus and His life and His actions and the choices and decisions He made.

My friends, that's what we're going to do. For five weeks after this, we're going to study the scriptures and we're going to look at the life of Jesus and we're going to find out how we can formulate that biblical world view, how we can make the choices, the decisions, even formulate opinions according to the one source of truth we have, the source of truth our God gave us, the source of truth we confess every time we begin by saying, “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.” Amen.

Copyright 2005 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church