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WORLD RELIGIONS 101

When Joseph Smith Meets Jesus

Ben Young

June 1, 2003

Recently I was chilling out in my house, minding my own business, when I heard a knock on the front door. Unlike a telephone that I can let ring and ring and ring, I had to go and at least see who is at the front door. So I got up, made my way to the door. As I tell my kids, always check who it is first, and I have the advantage of being tall enough to look through the peep hole. As I looked through the peep hole on the other side of my door I see two young guys wearing white dress shirts and a tie.  You have no idea how happy that made me to see them. The only way I could have been any happier was if Ed McMahon himself would have been standing in front of them with a big old check. I opened the door and met the guys. Very nice and polite.

They said, “Hey, we are here from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Have you ever heard of us before?” Yeah, I think so. They said, “We are here to share a message, a message we have from God. Do you want to hear a message?” I said, “Yes, I would love to hear your message.” So I just listened to them for a while and played very dumb. I just asked questions, as if I were inquiring into their particular religion. I usually do this and one of my questions that I ask people from different religious perspectives, whether they are Mormon or Buddhist or whatever is, “What do I need to do if I want to become a Mormon?” I was kind of taking this more inquisitive, spiritual-seeker motif in the first part of the conversation.

Now, I will tell you what happened in that conversation later on in our message. And hopefully that will provide some practical tools for us on how to dialogue with people coming from different religious perspectives, especially the Mormon perspective because that is what we are studying.

We are in a series called, When Buddha Meets Jesus. But, we are not just talking about Buddhism; we are talking about the various religions of the world and giving a brief introduction to these religious perspectives. And now if some of you are coming out of some of these different religious perspectives and you are thinking,”That is not what we believe, you forgot to say this…” I realize that there is no way I can cover everything Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims believe in 30 minutes. That is not possible anymore than I can cover what Christians believe in 30 minutes. This is an introduction to some of the religions of the world. Throughout our study we have looked at the different religious perspectives and hopefully discovered that everybody has a religious perspective.   Religion is a worldview.  In other words, everyone has answered questions like: Is there a God? How should I relate to Him? How should I live my life? What happens when I die? Most people have answered these questions, if not on a conscious level then on a subconscious level. And they live their lives according to this worldview or in contrast to it.

Open your Bible to Galatians 1:8.

I want you to have Galatians 1:8 cemented into your mind because this is a verse I believe is so important in understanding and refuting the false claims of different religious perspectives like Mormonism and Islam.  Paul writes, “But even if we (that is referring to Paul and other Apostles) or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned.”

Now, the hermeneutical implications of that verse are so vast – we don’t even have time to get into it. In other words, how that verse affects how we interpret the entire Bible is tremendous. Paul says, the gospel I received, I received directly from Jesus Christ. This gospel is the standard for what is true; for what God has revealed to us. He says, even though I come back to your church (Paul went around the world planting churches in different places) and change the gospel I originally gave to you, or if I add on to it, then you should cast me out the back door. Push me out the window. Paul says, “Even if an angel comes to you and preaches something different, don’t listen to the angel.” So Paul, in the book of Galatians unpacks the standard. The standard by which we judge that which is right and that which is wrong, when it concerns the essence of the Christian faith.

Now, we’ve been looking at “other gospels” or how people from different religions have deviated from the Christian truth. I call these deviations, “Christianity’s religious competition.”

Christianity’s religious competition can be divided into 3 groups. First, you have all of the mystical religions. Hinduism is an example of a mystical religion. Some New Age philosophy also falls into this category. Second, you have moralistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism, religions that are concerned about ethics and how we live our lives. They are more concerned with ethics than ultimate reality and the hereafter. The third category is the counterfeit religions. They are what I call Christian knock-offs. They fall into 3 different categories. First, you have polytheistic counterfeits, which is Mormonism. Second, you have Unitarian counterfeits, which we looked at with Islam and Afshin Ziafat who was a former Muslim. It is a Unitarian counterfeit of Christianity. Then you have Neo-Messianic counterfeits, which have to do with people like Jim Jones and the Son of Sam – the guys who claim to be the new messiahs and have these new religious spins on Christianity. If you want to really group the different religious perspectives that try to go against the Christian faith, you can group them in one of these three categories 99.9% of the time.

Through this series, as you know, we have been learning to ask the Big Four Questions.  The Big Four Questions help you understand what your Christian world view is and what the worldview is of other people and of other faith systems. First Question, What is Ultimate Reality? That is a God question. God has revealed Himself to us; He is the great Triune God of Scripture. John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God.” God has revealed Himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and He has revealed Himself to us in His Word, Holy Scripture, and in The Word, the God-Man Jesus Christ.

Second Question. Big Question. “How do you know?” We know primarily through revelation. God has revealed Himself to us in His Word. He has revealed Himself to us in time, space, and history in the person of Jesus Christ.

It is important to make this point – there is a balance here. We worship and we have given our lives – not to the Bible. The Bible, God’s Word does not save us.  The Bible did not die on the cross for us, Jesus did. So we give our lives to Jesus Christ. He is the focal point of all Scripture, New Testament and Old Testament. They speak of Him. Now obviously, there is a reflective relationship. To have a high view of Christ, you have to have a high view of Scripture. If you have a low view of Scripture, you usually have a low view of Christ. They are reciprocal. But we don’t need to get into Bible-idolatry either.  That is what we tend to do in our western world. We worship information instead of worshiping and following the risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The third big question is, “What happens at death?” God’s word tells us at death we will be judged. We will have to give an account for our life. We will either spend an eternity together with God or an eternity separated from Him in hell.  Jesus Christ talked more about hell than any person in Scripture.

Fourth big question, “How should you live?” We should live by keeping in step with the Holy Spirit. When we come to know Jesus Christ and we enter into a relationship with God, He is our mediator, He is our God, He forgives us, and He cleanses us. He places His Spirit inside of us to teach us all truth and to help us live a life that will truly honor and glorify God.

Now, we are going to ask these big four questions to Joseph Smith and his followers who are known today as Mormons or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

First question,“What is ultimate reality?” Mormons would say, if you have enough time to talk to them, they would say “gods” Mormonism is polytheistic, that means they believe in many gods. And they believe at one point every god was at one time a man. So, the heavenly father from a Mormon perspective was at one time a man, who through exaltation, evolved into the god that he is. And that is what is really difficult if you have no knowledge of the Mormon religion because they use almost the exact same terms that we do.

They will use the terms Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, Holy Ghost, Scripture, Grace, Mercy, Atonement, Second Coming, Heaven… they use all the same terms but they pour entirely different meanings into those terms. So you might think, “Hey…we are talking, we are clicking, but when you ask … What do you mean by ‘Jesus Christ?… What do you mean by ‘the Heavenly Father?’ What do you mean by ‘grace, atonement?’” When you do this you will see that they have radically different answers and perspectives on these biblical terms.

Here is what Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormon religion, he said, “I am going to tell how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea (which in essence he is saying he is going to refute the Bible) and take away the veil so that you may see. God the Father of us all dwelt on earth, the same as Jesus Christ did. And you have to learn how to be Jesus Christ yourself. The same as all the gods have done before you.”

Mormons teach that through living a certain life and reaching a certain standard; you can eventually evolve into a god, even the same nature as God, the Heavenly Father or as Jesus Christ. They believe that each god had a mother and a father, who copulated and produced them. They believe that human beings were born in the pre-existent world by our spiritual mother and our spiritual father- having spiritual sex creating our spiritual beings. Then on earth, our spirits are put into these human beings and we go through this time of testing to see how we can work our way up the ladder to achieve a type of exaltation, which we will talk about later. They believe that Jesus Christ is a created being.  I was having a conversation with a guy in San Diego who had converted from Catholicism to Mormonism.  And we had a long talk and finally I asked him if he believed there was a time when Jesus Christ was not. And he said, “Yes.” I said, “Then the Jesus that you believe in and the Jesus I believe in are two different beings. “

They believe that Jesus Christ was a brother of Satan. I was reading in one of their books this week, a practical doctrine on how to apply their doctrine, about how there are two plans of salvation. Satan had one plan, Jesus had another plan and God chose Jesus’ plan over Satan. Strange.

That is their ultimate reality. The Mormon’s ultimate reality would be gods, many gods. And they say, well we only worship one god while we are on earth.  In other words, we worship only one god while here on earth but in actuality there are many, many gods. It is like the heresy of modalism as far as the Trinity is concerned. God reveals Himself to us on earth, sometimes as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit- as a Triune God. But they would say, really God is not a Triune God, He is a Unitarian. Same deal there.

Let’s move on and ask the second question. Let me say something here. Once you deviate from the Trinity, once you deviate from how God has revealed Himself, everything else falls to pieces. You can see this in Mormonism, you can see this in Jehovah’s Witnesses, you can see this in the New Age Movement, and you can see this in Islam because you are rejecting Who God is, His very nature. Once you reject the true knowledge of Who God is, everything else is eventually going to fall apart and you are going to have arbitrariness and contradictions throughout the place. Just watch.

Question number two, How do you know? Mormons know primarily through revelation. Mormons accept four standards as divine revelations of God. As Christians, we believe in solo scriptura, our standard is God’s Word, how He has revealed Himself to us in Scripture. They have four standards. Number one is The Book of Mormon. Number two is the Bible or I should say, the Bible as corrected by Joseph Smith and clarified by the book of Mormon. Number three is the Doctrine and the Covenants. Number four is The Pearl of Great Price. Also as a bonus, Mormons also accept revelations from their modern day prophets as divine and binding. So there are modern day prophets on the earth today who can speak a word and that word or that belief becomes the word of God. You can see once again – when you deviate from the Trinity and you believe people can speak with the same authority as Scripture, the same authority as the Apostles, you are opening Pandora’s proverbial box. You will see how out of control it gets and how a lot of Mormon teachers today and theologians are always backtracking and doing this and that with some of the loony things they have said in the past.

Those are the four standards, but their knowledge is based on what supposedly happened to Joseph Smith on September 21^st 1823 near Manchester, NY. He was praying by himself and alone in the woods and asking the Lord, “Which church should I join? Methodist? Baptist? Presbyterian?”And the Lord said, “Don’t join any of those churches, they are all apostate. They are all heresy.” That is when eventually, God revealed to Joseph Smith the book of Mormon, it was supposedly written in some unknown language of reformed Egyptian, which no one spoke on earth anymore. He revealed this angel Moroni and gave Joseph Smith this revelation, the book of Mormon on these golden tablets that do not exist. They have been taken up to heaven – which is convenient.

From 1831 – 1844, Joseph Smith received 135 direct revelations. One of those revelations was that after Jesus Christ rose from the dead and appeared to the Apostles and over 500 witnesses during a 40 day period, He also went to the Americas and was ministering to a group of Native Americans or a tribe known as the Neophytes, of whom there is no archeological evidence that they ever actually existed (minor problem there).  This is one of the things Joseph Smith was told, supposedly by this angel.  In these direct revelations he had, God appeared to him one time, God the Father and Jesus Christ separately appeared to him at one time. James appeared to him, John, John the Baptist, Peter – he received direct revelations from many people. Even Moses.

The following is a revelation that Joseph Smith had, this is a direct quote: “The inhabitants of the moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the earth.” Now if you know a little bit about science, they have not found inhabitants on the moon yet. But here he tells us how tall they are on the moon, “Being about 6 feet in height, they dress very much like Quaker style.”  (You’ve seen the guy on the oatmeal box.) “And live to be very old, coming to live generally near 1,000 years.”  That is a direct quote from Joseph Smith. That was a supposed revelation that he got and that revelation is ludicrous, it is false.  There are many others like that that we don’t have time to get into tonight.

How do you know from a Mormon perspective? You know from these four standards. Everything though is really based upon what happened to Joseph Smith and how this angel and Jesus and God and John the Baptist and the whole Hee Haw gang supposedly told him that this is how the Christian religion really works. When you lose the Trinity, Ultimate Reality, everything falls apart. When you open up the playing field to extra Biblical revelations- everything falls apart.

I was reading in their literature this week (I don’t even think Tim LaHaye figured this out in his book, Left Behind since in the Mormon version of the Second Coming, you have Jesus Christ coming back to set up his millennium reign on earth. Guess where he is going to set up his millennial reign on earth? If you are from the LDS church, don’t shout it out, no… it is not UTAH. It is in the “show me” state, Missouri. That is where Jesus Christ is going to set up the New Jerusalem; the Second Coming is in Mizzou. When I read that this week, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Again, there are many things like that. For example, you have in the LDS version of the Bible; you have Adam in Genesis 3 getting baptized by emersion.  You have references in Genesis 50 concerning a prophecy that one day a guy is going to be born in America named Joseph Smith. I mean that is pretty convenient. That is like me going back into the Bible and inserting my name after I had a revelation and saying, here is the prophecy and my prophesy is in here.  It’s incredible.

Third question: What happens at death? This is where it gets even more confusing and bizarre if you can imagine that. At death, everybody goes to some type of heaven. Some type of kingdom. You either go to the celestial kingdom, which is the highest level, or the terrestrial kingdom, the second highest level or the telestial kingdom, the third level. All this is based on how you followed Mormon doctrine/theology.

Mormons are supposedly really into the family. One of the things they teach is, if you follow and make progress in your spiritual relationship with God the Father, then you can live with your family forever and ever and you can eventually become spiritual parents that create other spiritual children. Now, that is appealing and you can even go and have a temple ceremony performed for you by people who are supposedly of the Melchizedek priesthood and they can seal your marriage for eternity. So you will be married to your mate not only till you die at the ripe old age of 72 but you will live with your mate forever and ever and ever in eternity. Which to me, begs the question, you know, if you have a great marriage- hooray! If not, you’re like – man, I thought… Sorry, couldn’t resist that.

In all seriousness though, if I had to say what one of the strengths of the Mormon Church is, I would say it is their emphasis on family. In reading some of their literature this week, there are some practical things that they encourage husbands and wives to do and families to do that are dynamic and great. The Mormons do a lot of things right.  Most of the Mormons I know are good people, kind and loving people. They are good citizens of our country by and large. To me, their emphasis on family is strong. But the whole idea of sealing your family and if you work and have a certain amount of righteousness you can live with your family forever- that is a good leverage to encourage people to live a good, clean, wholesome life. Now, if you are wondering, where do you get this stuff from, where do they get these doctrines from Ben? That is not in the Bible. Again, you have to go back to “How do you know this?” when you are talking to anybody.  How do you know this? I know this from the four standards that the Mormons believe in; the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, The Bible and Doctrines and Covenants and continual revelations from their various prophets who are alive today.

Question number four – the Big Question – “How should you live?”

They believe that you should obey the commandments of the Mormon Church so you can live in eternity with your family. Again, their emphasis on family is fascinating. Let’s say that your parents, and your grandparents who weren’t Mormon are dead. Where are they going to go? How can they get into one of these upper level kingdom heaven deals? Well, you can go into the Temple and they can perform some ceremonies for you and they can spring your parents or grandparents who did not believe in the Mormon Church into the higher level. They also believe in baptism for the dead and these temple ceremonies are one of the ways they accomplish that. You can see what amazing comfort that would give to a lot of people. They say, well, we can go back and get your great, great grandfather and put them into the celestial kingdom if you do this and that, have the temple ceremonies and do everything right. That is very appealing. That is why Mormons are very into genealogy and trying to trace their roots. They definitely teach a theology of works righteousness. They will tip their hat at grace, mercy and the cross and they will say, “Yes Jesus died for us, died for me but (and of course their Jesus is entirely different from our Jesus) you better do this or that.” They will say yes it is Jesus, but their version of Jesus, plus Mormon doctrine. And if you do that then you’ll progress into a higher state of exaltation.

Here is what one of their theologians named Bruce McConkie said, “One of the untrue doctrines found in modern Christendom is that man can gain salvation by grace alone without obedience. Salvation in the celestial kingdom (that is the highest kingdom) is salvation by grace coupled with obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel.” You may put in parenthesis there, the doctrine of the Mormon Church. So obviously they are saying – Jesus, plus works. Jesus plus obedience to the law will justify you and bring you into one of these different levels of heaven.

Now, as we evaluate this and look at how they answered these big four questions, you don’t have to have a PhD in Christian theology to see what happened.  Many of you probably think, what is the big deal, don’t they believe the same thing that we believe? No they don’t. Obviously just by taking a cursory look at some of their major doctrines and their major beliefs, we see that they do not come close to believing what orthodox Christians both in the Catholic and Protestant strain have believed for 2,000 years.

Maybe you heard the story about a lady named Bobby Denson, her mother died suddenly, no reason just dropped dead. And so she had the difficult duty of cleaning out her mom’s apartment. She was giving some stuff away to neighbors and people around her in the complex. Little did she know that she gave to her neighbors the very thing that killed her mom. She gave them a salt shaker that was filled with poisonous sodium nitrate. Two of her neighbors died and two others were hospitalized. She had no idea. Her ignorance was costly. Ignorance when it comes to these big four questions, the matter of truth, is costly.  That is why we need to be able to discern the truth as we look at these various religious perspectives, as we look at Christian counterfeits like Mormonism. We have to see how they have poisoned the salt shaker.

So, how does Christianity differ from Mormonism? Let’s rewind back to my conversation with the two Mormon missionaries at my front door. I start talking to them play dumb for about 15 minutes listen to their spiel  about how I can become a Mormon, what I need to do. I start getting into it with them a little bit.  I said I just have a question, “How do you guys deal with Galatians 1:8. You know that verse don’t you, where it says, ‘If we or an angel from heaven preach to you a gospel that is different than the one you received let that person be eternally condemned.’ How do you guys deal with that question, because your religion, along with Muslims in 622 AD were formed by supposed angelic visitations and you guys have totally changed the gospel as revealed both to Paul and the other disciples. You’ve changed it or added to it or taken away from it. How do you guys deal with that? With that fact? I just want to know how you deal with the fact that for many, many years the Mormon church would not allow blacks to come into their church, would not allow African Americans to come in. And then Donny and Marie are on Barbara Walters and they say yes, that is right African Americans can’t come into our church and the very next day a prophet has a revelation that says, ‘I think it is time we allow African Americans into our church.’ “How do you guys deal with that? I want to know how you deal with this stuff, with adding to the gospel of grace.”

Another question I have is this,”You mean to tell me, when John, who is the last disciple to die died on the Island of Patmos in 90 AD, that the entire Christian church went into apostasy? See, the Mormons believe that once the disciples died out that there was an apostate that occurred both there in the Middle East and in the Americas with this so called Neophyte tribe that Jesus appeared to after His resurrection. They believe the church went into apostasy. If that is true, then John, Paul, Peter and James did a pathetic job of mentoring and discipleship if they couldn’t pass it on at least one generation. You mean to tell me from 90AD up until 1829 – when Joseph Smith had his supposed revelation from the angel Moroni – that all this time the church was in apostate? That St. Francis of Assisi, Polycarp, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathon Edwards, John Wesley really were not believers until Joseph Smith rediscovered the real new gospel as he added to the gospel?

I just asked them question after question, just like that and they did a pretty good job of trying to refute them. They never really got around the whole concept of the angelic visitation which is really the big one. One guy said about, not allowing blacks in the church.

“I really don’t have an answer for you.” I appreciated that honest answer.

We got to the end of our conversation and I said, “Guys, here’s the deal. You and I have a lot in common.” And these are nice guys, sincere guys. They really believe what they are teaching and spreading. I said, “We have a lot in common, we both follow the 10 Commandments, we have other morals in common and furthermore, I like Orin Hatch (he’s the Senator from Utah for those of you who don’t know.) But besides that, we are on two different pages because we have a different standard. My standard is Scripture, the Word of God. My standard is the gospel that God revealed to His disciples and the Apostle Paul. That is my standard and that has been the standard of the church for 2,000 years.” Then I used the old metric illustration: “What if I told you guys that this pencil right here is a meter long.  I really believe in my heart that this pencil is a meter long – it is one meter in length. God told me with a golden plate that this is a meter long.  What would you say to me? You would say you are wrong.”  And I would say, What do you mean I am wrong? God told me in my heart that it was a meter long. Well it is not a meter long. And I would say, ‘Prove it.’ You would say, “Ok let’s get on a plane and go to France to the museum where they have the standards of metric measurements and you can put your little pencil up to the meter stick and see that you fall way short. “

I continued telling them, “You can see that what you believe in the Mormon Church when compared to the orthodox teaching of the Apostles, you guys fall way short of the standard. Your standard is Joseph Smith. My standard is the Word of God. We have different standards, therefore we have different gospels and different faiths.”  They said, “Hey, if you dial this number we will give you a free copy of the book of Mormon.” I said, “Actually I already own one.” The guy said, “I figured. If you get this you can get a video.” I said, “I appreciate it. “This is my gift to you, read the book of Galatians. When you go home and as you are going out, read it. It’s only six chapters. Read it over and over and over again. Ask God to speak to you through that book.”  Finally, I asked, “What do you guys do with jerks like me who act dumb like they don’t know anything about your faith and then they come back at you?”  Then they went on their way.

How does Christianity differ? Number one, our standard is different. Our standard is the Word of God. Their standard is Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and other prophets and revelations that followed. Number two, our leader is different. Our leader is the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the God Man. He is our leader. Joseph Smith is their leader. Before Joseph Smith became this prophet of God, he was convicted of a crime known as glass looking. People back then would put their head into this kind of black bag and they would have this rounded glass and people would come up out of this bag and say, “There is buried treasure over there… you should do this or that.”  This is a type of fortune telling and he was convicted of that.  If you can live with the fact that the founder of your religion believed in fortune telling, along with polygamy – that’s your deal, but Scripture doesn’t teach that.  Our views are different.

Number three, our Gods are different. Our God has revealed Himself as the One Holy Triune God. One in essence and three in persons. The Mormon gods are polytheistic, they believe in many gods who copulate just like humans do on earth and produce other spiritual beings and spiritual gods and spiritual humans who eventually come to take bodily form here on earth. Again, their whole concept of who God is, Ultimate Reality, is radically different from what Scripture teaches.

Number four, our salvation is different. I can lump Mormons together with Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus and other world religions who teach a works righteousness religion.  They say, if you really want to know God, to really be enlightened then you must pull yourself up by your own moral boot straps and be good and buckle down. Basically, you are dirty and if you are going to be clean, then you have to wash yourself. Christianity doesn’t teach that. Christianity teaches that someone else has to wash you. Christianity teaches that we are justified, not by works but by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Now, that doesn’t mean that once we put our faith in Jesus Christ we just sit back and kick back and do whatever the heck we want to do. Of course the faith that justifies, makes us acceptable before God is the same grace that sanctifies. Even when we are at our most sanctified moment, the holiest of holies – thirty years from now we are still utterly dependent upon the righteousness of Jesus Christ to be acceptable before God the Father.

Galatians 2:21 says, “I do not set aside the grace of God for if righteousness could be gained through the law Christ died for nothing!” Verse 15 of Galatians 2, “We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners know that a man is not justified by observing the law but by faith in Jesus Christ.” We too have put our faith in Jesus Christ that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.

You see, the people coming into the Galatian church are just like the Mormons. Except  their doctrine of God and Jesus was a little more sound than the Mormons, but they were basically saying this, “Yeah, believe in God, believe in Jesus, do that, believe in the cross, cling to the old rugged cross and… you better get circumcised… and you better obey the law of Moses or God won’t accept you.” No, no, no Paul said you are justified by faith in Christ Jesus …plus nothing.

That is the gospel. Ephesians 2:8-9, “It is by grace you are saved through faith that is a gift from God.” Even our faith and trust in God is a gift from Him so that nobody can boast. Paul said to the Corinthians, when I came to you I only wanted to say one thing, I wanted you to know about Christ and Him crucified. If you are going to boast in anything boast in what Jesus Christ has done for you.  That is the gospel of grace. That is the good news and that is where Christianity radically differs not only from Mormonism but from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and you name any other type of Christian competition. Listen we’ve got to know what God’s Word says – we’ve got to be able to discern if someone has poisoned the salt shaker.

Glenn Lucke told me this story. There is this guy by the name of Carlos, Carlos grew up in a Catholic background, then eventually went into the Methodist church, then the Charismatic Church… basically he was a church hopper. Didn’t really know God or Jesus, but kind of knew. He was sitting in his house one day, just like I was, heard a knock on his door, two missionaries come in. Boom – they lay out their spiel… before you know it this guy is full blown LDS. He is in the church and introduces his family to the Mormon faith, the whole nine yards. He wants to go into the chaplaincy program in the army so he goes to a seminary. Somehow, some way he ends up in an evangelical protestant seminary in Florida. He is in a class and he realizes all the different and bazaar teachings of the Mormon Church and he realizes he has deceived his family. After class, he is crying to his professor and said, “What have I done? I have misled my wife, my family, I have failed them.” Listen that can happen to you.

That can happen to anyone who is not a Christian but a “Christian-ette”  Right? You have just enough Christianity to be dangerous. That can happen, you can get swayed by someone who comes to your door and they have a plan, they seem to have all the answers. They can just loop you in and they have just poisoned the salt shaker and you don’t even know it. This guy Carlos cried out, “What can I do?”  What can you do now? You can do the same thing this guy Carlos did.  You can turn and trust in what Jesus Christ has done for you; to make you acceptable and righteous before God.  You can turn to Him and have new life and a new hope. You can know that Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior who has walked out of the pages of this book, the Holy Bible, is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

[Ben leads in a closing prayer.]

Marriage Map

Sex Matters

Ben Young

May – June 2003

We are talking about sex this morning.  This is your final warning.  If you have little kids and you are not ready for “the talk,” you can leave now.  If not, you will have a very fun lunch.

A while back, I was asked to be a part of a secular television talk show.  I’d been on this show many times before, and I was on there with an interesting panel of folks.  There were two comedians—one from Houston and one from New York—and also there was a local radio personality, along with a sex therapist.  Somehow we…the subject, I don’t think, that day was actually on sex, but as these shows go you tend to somehow gravitate to sex.  And so, the conversation started up here, but it gradually degenerated into basically locker room talk about sex and cosmopolitan talk from a woman’s perspective, as each gender was taking jabs at the other about sex and sexual intercourse.

And it was getting a little bit out of hand, you might say, and in the middle of this kind of debate, I just kind of piped in and said: “Hey, guys, wait a minute, wait a minute, time out.  I want to ask all you guys a question.”  And I said, “What is the purpose of sex?”  (Long pause)  And the set was just like that.  I mean, they had been talking about all this sexual stuff and performance and turning him on and turning her on, and all of a sudden: “What’s the purpose of sex?”  There was silence.

And I think it’s interesting in our culture today, we talk a lot about sex.  You can’t avoid sexual images wherever you go in our culture.  And yet though we talk about it a lot, we still know very little about the nature and purpose of sex.  So this morning we are going to talk about “Sex Matters” as we continue our series called Marriage Map: The road to happily ever after.  Maybe you’re single and someday you desire to have a great healthy marriage.  Perhaps you’re married, and you want to improve your marriage.  This series is designed to help you in that process.

The first Sunday together, we saw that marriage is basically a life-long commitment.  Yes guys, commitment; that’s with one “t.”  It’s a life-long commitment to unconditionally love an imperfect person.  That’s what marriage is all about.  It’s all about God using marriage to make you holy, to make you sacrificial, to make you more like His son Jesus Christ.  Last week we talked about what you need to do if your marriage is in trouble.  What do you do if your marriage is in the ditch?  We said you’ve got to do whatever it takes to work it out.  Basically, stay the faithful to your vows and get radical and get some help and get praying.

Today we’re going to talk about sex.  Now, let me say this right off the bat because I think that many times the church and, in particular, God gets a bad rap when we talk about sex.  Point number one, if you’re taking notes: God loves sex.  Now, that may be a surprise to some of you.  And many of you may say, “When I go home today, I’m going to send him a letter.  I can’t believe he used ‘God’ and ‘sex’ in the same sentence.”  Listen, God loves sex.  God made you; God made me.  He made us sexual beings.  God designed sexual intercourse for a purpose.  God loves sex.  God knows sex.  God knows more about sex than any sexual therapists.  He knows more about sex than Dr. Ruth, than Howard Stern, than Hugh Hefner.  God invented sex.  He is the Designer.  He is the Architect.

Let me give a little quiz to kind of see where you are—a little self-test, as far as your attitude towards sex.  God creates Adam and Eve and places them in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve never have to go shopping.  I know for some of you that may be a drag.  For others, you rejoice in that—never, never, have to go shopping.  They are naked, the Bible says, and unashamed.  There is nakedness, and there is no shame.  Let’s just say that Adam and Eve, they got tired of eating, they got tired of naming the animals, they are worn out, stressed out, so they go down to the beach.  They are down on the beach, and they are sitting there, soaking up the rays.  The rays haven’t eaten up the ozone layer yet; they don’t need the SPF 15, and they are enjoying themselves.  They go swimming in the water.  It is just pristine.  No pollution—there has been no fall yet.  And all of a sudden they get out of the water.  They’re having a great time.  They start kissing, and then right there on the beach they begin making love.  Right there on the beach, in nature.

Now, as God leans over the balcony of heaven and sees Adam and Eve buck naked making love on the beach, what expression do you think is on God’s face?  You think God is going, “Oh, Yuck!  Gross…sex!”?  No, God’s not saying that.  God’s not thinking that.  God’s saying, “This is beautiful.  This is what I designed Adam and Eve for in the context of their marriage—to become one with one another.”  So God is pro-sex.  God loves sex.  He designed sex.

Now, let’s see what else God tells us about the purpose of sex.  If you have your Bibles, you can turn to 1 Corinthians Chapter 6, Verse 15.  In the NIV version, it uses the word “prostitute.”  Don’t be confused there.  Just take that word and scratch through it, and you can put girlfriend or boyfriend.  “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ Himself?  Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with…” your “boyfriend”/your “girlfriend?”  (In this case it says “a prostitute?”)  “Never.  Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body?  For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh.’” 

What is the purpose of sex?  First of all, we see it there at the end of Verse 16.  Sex is for unity.  Sex is for unity.  The two will become what?  “One flesh.”  One spiritually.  One physically.  One emotionally.  One economically.  There is something intrinsically unifying about this sex act.  A while back I saw an old Seinfeld re-run where Jerry and Elaine are debating how they can have sex and still maintain their friendship without really going out.  It’s a funny show, and Jerry is talking.  He says, “You know, this,” talking about their friendship, “is good.”  And Elaine says, “Well, that,” pointing to the bedroom, “is good too.”  And Jerry says, “Well, how can we have that and still have this, because this is good?”  And she goes, “That’s good too.”  And as I watched that show, I thought, “This is so hilarious.”  Here is someone as cynical and probably as agnostic as Jerry Seinfeld, but he can’t escape the 1 Corinthians 6 reality, that sex is something more than physical bodies coming together and sharing different fluids.  He can’t escape it.

There is something intrinsically unifying about the sex act.  So sex within the context of marriage is for the purpose of oneness.  The two will become one flesh.  It involves two people in a life union.  It is a physical act with deep social, emotional, psychological implications.  What is the purpose of sex?  Sex is for unity.

The second purpose of sex, we can see in Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 27.  It says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”  So our sexuality—we don’t have time to go there this morning—but our sexuality, our gender, our maleness, our femaleness, both from a physical standpoint and an emotional personality standpoint, is the reflection of the very nature of who God is.

Sex always starts in heaven.  Our understanding of sexuality always starts with God.  He is the Definer.  He is the Starting Point.  Verse 28, here is the second purpose of sex, “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.  Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”  The second purpose of sex is this: Sex is for procreation.  God said what?  Be fruitful and multiply.  Be fruitful and subdue the earth.  And we saw last week in our time of baby dedication that many of you are obeying this purpose of sex.  You are producing children and fruit.  You are multiplying.  It’s amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it—that God uses this mysterious, passionate relationship (this sex act) to bring you and to bring me into the world?!  It’s amazing—God’s creativity and God’s love for us.  He uses sexual intercourse.  He uses love-making to bring us life.  That’s wild.

The third purpose of sex is found in Proverbs Chapter 5 and Song of Solomon Chapter 4.  Proverbs Chapter 5, Verse 18 says, “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.  A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breast satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.”

The Bible is much more sexually explicit than most of us are.  Many of us have adopted this platonic view of sex or this Augustinian view of sex that sees it as bad, as dirty.  The Bible doesn’t talk about sex in that way.  Song of Solomon Chapter 4, Verse 11 says this: “Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride; milk and honey are under your tongue.  The fragrance of your garments is like that of Lebanon.  You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.” 

The third purpose of sex is this: Sex is for pleasure.  God did not have to design it that way.  Did you ever think about it?  God didn’t have to design sex to be pleasurable in nature.  He could have made sex like going to the dentist and getting a root canal, which I’ve had one of those before, and it’s not very fun; I don’t recommend it.  But He made sex to be a pleasurable experience.  And we don’t have to run from that.  And we can celebrate that and celebrate the pleasurable gift that love making, that sex is to us.

The fourth purpose of sex.  Sex is for unity.  Sex is for procreation.  Sex is for pleasure.  And, finally, we’ll go back to Ephesians Chapter 5 from last week, Verse 31: “’For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’  This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”  The fourth purpose of sex is that sex is for marriage.  Sex is for marriage alone.  That’s what the Bible says there.  For what reason?  For the reason of entering into marriage.  That’s why you leave and you cleave to your wife, to your husband, and become one flesh.

It is interesting as you look at the major world religions, not that we need their verification by any means.  But if you look at Judaism, you look Islam, you look Hinduism, and Buddhism…you see that we disagree on many things.  But all four of those world religions teach that sex should be reserved for the context for marriage.  Interesting.  One pastor put it this way.  He compares sex to fire, and having fire in the context of having a fireplace.  Fire is a great thing, isn’t it?  Fire can keep you warm.  Fire can help you make s’mores; I mean, fire can do a lot when it’s in the context of the fireplace.  But if you get a spark out into your living room or into your TV room in your apartment, that spark or flame can burn up the carpet, burn up a chair.  It can burn up your whole house or apartment.  Sex is the same way.

God is the Designer of sex.  God says, “Save sex for the safe context marriage.  Keep it in the fireplace.”  Any time you take it out of the fireplace, it can burn your life, and it can burn your relationships.  That is simply the way God has designed it.  God has designed sex so that when you give your whole body to someone, you’re also supposed to give your whole life to them as well.  So when you take sex outside of its proper context, you violate the inner reality of the act.  Because sex is a life-uniting act, it must be coupled with a life-uniting commitment called marriage.  That’s why when you dabble sexually outside of marriage, and you’re engaging in premarital sex or other kind of sexual activity, there will always be guilt; there will always be shame; there will always be negative consequences for taking sex out of its proper context.  You say, “I don’t believe that.  I don’t believe in God.  I don’t believe what the Bible says about sex anymore; it’s just old and outdated.”  It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not.

After the service today I may climb to the top of the dome here and jump off and say, “I don’t believe in the law of gravity!”  Boom!  I am going to smack on the brick out there.  God designed this world.  He designed it with certain physical and spiritual laws, and if you disobey God’s laws, negative consequences will kick in.  It doesn’t matter.  God does that for a reason.  That’s why you have so much shame.  That’s why you have doubt.  That’s why you have miscommunication when you’re sexually active outside the marriage context.  So sex is for marriage.

Now, maybe you’re saying, “I got that.  I understand that fire goes in the fireplace.  Ben, I am married, and the fire in the fireplace is beginning to dwindle a little bit.  I want to know how I can have a good sex life in my marriage.  How do I keep the fire burning?”  All right, couple of things here.  Let’s look at them.

Number one: If you want to have great sex in your marriage, if you want to reignite those fires, remember, the matches are in the kitchen.  All right?  The matches are in the kitchen.  To put it another way, great sex in marriage is based on nonsexual things.  Great sex in marriage is based on nonsexual things.  So it’s all the stuff you do outside the bedroom that counts.  I mean, having great sex is not so much the goal as it is building a foundation and building intimacy that is necessary to provide a healthy sexual relationship in marriage.

So how do you do that?  Well, you have to take the time to build that intimacy.  Intimacy is built through talking.  Intimacy is built through really listening.  Intimacy is built through empathizing with your mate.  Intimacy is built through learning how to resolve conflict in a healthy manner.  As a matter of fact, the number one indicator that your marriage is going to work or not will be based upon whether or not you learn how to resolve conflict.  But all of these are things that you do in the kitchen, if you would, things that you do outside the bedroom that provide an environment for a healthy sexual relationship.  So remember, the matches are in the kitchen.

Second, to keep the fire burning in the fireplace, you need to learn to strike the flame of affection.  This is particularly to guys because, guys, we have to confess: we are a little slow.  We don’t get it.  We see things pretty one-dimensional.  Okay, two-dimensional, work and sports, okay.  And so we can’t think out of those dimensions.  We need to learn how to express affection to our mates outside of the bedroom.  We need to learn the importance of hugging, the importance of kissing, the importance of holding hands.  We need to learn how to build our mate up and encourage them, to compliment them on their work or on their looks or on the way they have been sacrificing in their giving or whatever.

Again, that’s more stuff outside of the bedroom, more stuff in the kitchen.  But all of that provides an atmosphere where the fire will continue to burn and provides a foundation for healthy sex inside of marriage.  So remember, number one: the matches are in the kitchen; number two: strike the flame of affection.

And number three (you’re going to like this): Always light the fire.  Look at 1 Corinthians Chapter 7, Verse 3: “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.”  It’s talking about sexual intimacy.  “The wife’s body does not belong to her alone, but also to her husband in the same way the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.”  Verse 5—you gotta like verse 5: “Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer.  Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” 

This passage tells us clearly that when you get married and you become one, your body is not your own—your body is your wife’s and vice versa.  And you should not go long periods of time in your relationship unless there are physical reasons where you refrain from the act of marriage—love making.  Why?  Because what happens if you do that, you can start experiencing marital drift.  You begin drifting from your mate.  And if there is a problem in the bedroom, usually, not always, that means there is a problem somewhere else.  There is a problem with intimacy.  There is a problem with communication—something else is going on inside that marriage.

I read a great story this week about a couple named Rick and Jennifer.  And they talked very candidly about their sexual history in marriage.  They have been married many years.  And they said that the first three years of their marriage, sex was great.  It was satisfying for Rick.  It was satisfying for Jennifer.  And things were going fantastic, and Rick said, “I must be the luckiest husband in all the world.”  Until…the baby.  Then this beautiful, pudgy bundle of joy burst into their lives, and all of a sudden everything changed for this couple.  And Rick would want to make love with his wife, and Jennifer said, “No, I don’t want to do it.”  And then Rick accused Jennifer of rejecting him, and Jennifer thought: “Don’t you understand?  I‘m tired, I’m worn out, I don’t have any energy left.”

And so as time progressed, and they began to kind of drift apart, they realized, “We have to do something to re-ignite the fire of sex in our marriage.”  So here is what they said they did.  Number one: They talked about their “sexpectations.”  In other words, they talked about their expectations of what their sex life was to be like in marriage.  They tried to get on the same page.  They tried to make concessions and compromise to get each other’s perspective on what they thought sex should be like.  They talked very openly and candidly about that.  Second of all: They scheduled appointments for lovemaking.  Now, some of you may say: “Well, that doesn’t sound like very much fun; that’s kind of clinical, isn’t it?  I mean, what about the spontaneity?”  Listen, when you have the stress of work and you have the stress of one kid, two kids, three kids, and (some of you whom I respect greatly) four kids, and more…when you have those stressors in your life, you’d better be proactive and be thinking and conscientious about scheduling times of lovemaking with your spouse.

And so when this couple did this, they began to look forward to these appointments.  They looked forward to these times together.  And it brought great joy and intimacy and passion back into their marriage.  Third thing they did—this is very practical—is that they bought a sturdy lock for their bedroom.  I don’t think I need to explain that one.  Number four: They read some really good Christian books on the joy of sex.  And in our bookstore, we have great resources that talk about the celebration of sex within the context of marriage.

These four things really helped re-ignite the fires of love and lovemaking in the marriage of this couple.  And I believe that if you do those things, the same thing will happen in your life and in your marriage.

What is the purpose of sex?  Sex is by design.  It’s God’s design for unity.  It’s God’s design for procreation.  It’s God’s design specifically for marriage.  And it’s God’s design for pleasure.  And ultimately—this is where it gets great and really mysterious, and we’ll end here—sex, even great sex in marriage is merely a shadow or a sign that points us to God.  The intimacy, the oneness that we experience as man and wife…it’s an incredible physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual act.  This is a signpost.  This is a shadow, an appetizer, that points us to the intimacy and the oneness that we’ll experience when we get to heaven and we worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  What a wonderful, mysterious, powerful, passionate gift God has given us through sex.  And sex, both our gender and the act of lovemaking, ultimately is a signpost that points us to the very nature and character of God.  And that is why sex matters.

[Ben leads in a closing prayer.]

MARRIAGE MAP

Marriage Redefined:

Submission and Sacrifice

Ben Young

May 25, 2003

A while back, my seven-year-old daughter was getting a ride home from a member of our church. And when you have young kids, you are always shuttling your kids from one event to the next—a very complex situation. And this lady, who is a member of our church, was driving her car and my seven-year-old was in the back seat, when out the blue, my daughter said to this lady, “My daddy cusses.” And so she is traveling along and she goes, “Yes?” And my daughter said, “Yes, he calls our dog the ‘s’ word and the ‘d’ word.” And she keeps driving, and she says, “Nicole what do you mean by that?” And Nicole says: “He calls our dog dumb and stupid.” Those are the “s” words and “d” words for my daughter.

This morning we’re going to talk about the “s” word. And we’re going to see today that if you don’t really understand what the “s” word is all about, then you really don’t understand what it means to have a relationship with God. And there is no way you’re going to figure out marriage. Open your bibles to Ephesians Chapter 5.

As you know, we are in a series called Marriage Map: The Road to Happily Ever After. Our first week, we saw that this road to “happily ever after” is a road that is sacrificial, a road that calls us to persevere and to endure. And it is also a road of holiness. Week by week, I’ve been saying that marriage is a life-long commitment to unconditionally love an imperfect person. The second week we looked at how to rescue your marriage. If you have been in a collision or if your marriage is stuck in the ditch or you’re in the mud, how do you get out of that situation? Last week, we talked about sex. We talked about how to continue to have the flames, the fire of sexual passion, continue in your marriage.

And this morning, let’s look at Ephesians Chapter 5. We’re going to talk about the “s” word. Here it is. Ephesians Chapter 5, Verse 21 [and following]: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” Verse 25: “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” The “s” word that I am talking about is the word, submission. And there is a lot of confusion about what that word means today and how we apply that to the context to marriage.

When I was a little kid, I used to enjoy watching Saturday morning wrestling. And the wrestlers were very colorful characters then. And wrestling was probably rated PG—where now it’s rated R—with Monday night Nitro and all the other kinds of glitz and bull that they have added into the pure sport of professional wrestling. And one of the things that we liked about wrestling—my brother, my best friends, and I—were the different submission holds. There was one from the Briscoe Brothers, I think Jack Briscoe from Florida, and he would get different wrestlers in a figure four leg lock. It was a submission hold, because if he continued to apply the pressure, theoretically, he could break that person’s leg. So when he would get them in the figure four, they would go, “Uncle,” and give up; they would submit.

There are other submission holds. One was the iron brain claw, I believe, perfected by Blackjack Mulligan and The Great Kabuki. And they would get the claw on someone’s temples and just squeeze them there into submission. Some of you know because you watch wrestling. I’m trying to think of other submission holds. Oh yeah, one of my favorite ones was the sleeper hold. Remember the sleeper? You’d get somebody in a headlock, and you’d cut off the oxygen to their brain, and they would fall asleep. That was a submission hold. Now, what you’re trying to do, basically, is kind of like when you’re kids, when you’re trying to get the other person to say, “Uncle,” by bending their wrist back into their elbow. That’s what a submission hold is all about.

So many times when people see the word submit in the context of marriage or anything, that’s their picture of submission: “It’s just someone grinding over me. Someone has me in this hold,” and it’s a bad thing. It’s a negative thing. Listen, that is not what biblical submission is all about. That is a false picture. So what is submission? What does real submission look like? Where do we see submission?

First of all, we see submission in the Godhead. If you’re not taking notes, I’m going to encourage you to take a few notes right now. We see submission in the Godhead. God has revealed himself to us as the great triune God. God is one in essence and three in persons. As we look at the way God has revealed himself to us, we see that he has revealed himself as a unity (God is one), as a diversity (three persons), and as equality (God the Father is God; God the Son is God; God the Holy Spirit is God—they are co-equal and co-eternal). So as we look at the very nature of God, we see a beautiful picture of mutual submission.

They cooperate with one another and depend on one another to accomplish the purposes that they set out to accomplish. So at the very heart of the universe, when you ask the question: What was in the beginning of the beginning? The answer is the Trinity—unity, diversity, equality. What is in the beginning of the beginning? You have perfect submission, perfect harmony, perfect community, and perfect sacrifice all happening within the mysterious relationship and the very nature of who God is. We first see submission beautifully portrayed, though mysteriously and beyond our grasp in many ways, in the very nature of who God is—the great triune God.

Second, we see submission in the Gospel. We see submission in the Godhead, and we see submission in the Gospel. We saw this as we studied the life of Jesus, toward his very last days. We know that he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Remember? He was praying about the cup. He said, “Lord, let this cup pass. Father, let the cup pass, but not my will but thy will be done.” Jesus Christ drank that cup. What was in the cup? It was the very wrath of God—the judgment of God on your sin and my sin. Christ took that for us. He willingly submitted to the leadership of the Father. And he laid down his life for us.

You see, that is what biblical submission is all about. Biblical submission means to willingly follow the leadership of another. It means laying down your rights for another person. That is what Jesus Christ has done for us in the Gospel. He submitted to the leadership of the Father and willingly laid down his life and experienced the separation and the punishment and the wrath that you and I deserve, so that we can turn around and receive forgiveness and his very righteousness. So to first understand submission, we have to get our eyes off of ourselves and look up to God and the Trinity. We must look outside of ourselves, to the Gospel and what God has done for us in Christ.

Now, with that strong theological foundation girding us, let’s look and see how submission applies to the context of relationships, especially to the context of marriage. First of all, we see it in our passage this morning. Verse 21 says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Then in verse 24 it says, “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

First of all, all of us—husbands, wives, singles, children—must submit our lives to Jesus Christ. Second Corinthians Chapter 5, Verse 17 and following tells us the results of submitting our lives to Christ. Listen to this. This is great news. It says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All of this is because you are so great and you are so holy and perfect…” No, that’s not what it says! “All this is from God.” It’s from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ. As we sang about earlier, God chased after us in Jesus Christ and gave us a ministry of reconciliation.

So when we submit our lives to Christ, we enter into a relationship with him. How can we enter into a relationship with this Holy God? Well, Christ comes in and he forgives us, cleanses us, and he gives us his righteousness. So now, we are accepted by God the Father. He places his Spirit inside of us. And when we come to Jesus Christ, we are saying, “Jesus Christ, I want you to rescue me, I want you to save me, and I want you to be my Lord.” And we’re saying, “I am now under the authority and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I am willingly laying down my life. I am willingly learning to lay down my rights, to follow him.”

So, first of all, we all must learn how to submit to Christ. And when we look at the context of marriage and we talk about different problems that people are having in their marriages, whether you are talking about money, sex, communication, forgiveness, you can trace all of that back (most of the time) to an unwillingness from one mate or the other to submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and to fully appropriate his Lordship and his grace in his or her life. The first thing we must do is to submit to Christ.

Second of all, Verse 21 says, “We must submit to one another.” We submit our lives to Christ: “Christ you are my God. You are my Lord. I desire to follow you, and the Holy Spirit empowers me to live this out; I can’t do it by myself.” And now we willingly choose to submit to one another. What does that mean to submit to one another? It means we decide to lay down our life for someone else. Christ gave his life away for us, and we are to give our lives away for others.

You see, marriage is wonderful, mysterious thing—a gift from God. You have two people who fall madly in love. Many times they are opposites, and opposites do attract. And we will find in a few Sunday mornings that opposites also attack. But you have these two people falling love, and if they are both following God and following Christ, they are equally yoked. And it’s a beautiful union. That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at marriage is that you have two sinners. I get asked this question a lot: “Hey, Ben, what are you preaching on this week?” And my answer is usually the same thing: “I’m preaching on sin and why I like it so much.” And it always throws them back. So this week a friend of mine that is not a part of this church said, “Hey, what are you preaching on?” I said, “Sin and why I like it.” And then I said, “You know why I like sin?” And this guy who is not a Christian said, “No.” I said, “It’s because I’m a sinner.”

And so when you get married, you have two sinners. Yes, they may be justified and righteous and accepted by God, but they are still two sinners, two very self-centered people. So when you have two self-centered people becoming one, what do you have? Follow me now…a lot of self-centeredness and a lot of selfishness. So when we say we are submitting to one another out of the fear of Christ, what we are saying is, “I am choosing day by day to learn how to put myself and my desires on the shelf,” okay?

For those of you who like Dr. Seuss and like rhymes, you can sum up the sermon like that: It is putting yourself on the shelf, green eggs and ham. Okay? That’s what we’re to do, and marriage is the process by which we learn how to do that. At the altar, we say, “I do…I will…let’s go…I’m making a commitment to do that!” And the rest of our life, the rest of our marriage, is learning how to work out what we vow to do at our wedding ceremony. The same is true in your relationship with Christ. When you come to know Christ and submit your life to him, you’re saying: “Lord, I vow to follow you.” Then the rest of your life is working out everything you said to Christ in that vow, in that public confession of faith.

So we submit to one another in the fear of Christ. I love what Mike Mason said: “Marriage at its best is a sort of contest in what might be called one-downmanship, a backwards tug-of-war between two wills each equally determined not to win.” That is really the only attitude that works in marriage because that is the way the Lord designed it. He planned it especially as a way for men and women to enter whole-heartedly, with full consent and consequent peace and joy, into the inevitable process of their own diminishment, which is God’s worship and glorification. That’s what it means to mutually submit to one another. It’s a mutual commitment in this reverse tug-of-war not to win, to lay down our lives, and to put self on the shelf. That’s what marriage is all about.

Now, we submit to Christ, number one. We submit to one another—a mutual submission. And number three: Verse 22 says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” So number three applies to women. It applies to those who are married. How do you submit to your husband’s? How do you submit to your husband’s? First of all, you have to look outside of yourself to Christ to do that. It’s based upon your submission to Christ. Then it works itself out in your relationship with your husband.

Now, here’s where the feminists miss it. And years ago, when the Promise Keepers were a big thing, and the men were getting together, and the encouragement was, “Men, love your wives like Christ loved the church” (of course, that’s a real negative thing; we don’t want that to happen in our society today)…they were preaching this stuff, and they were confused about the whole concept of submission. Listen, a difference in function does not indicate inferiority in nature, okay? Let’s go back to the Trinity: the Son willingly submitted to the Father while he was on earth, but his submitting to the Father in the role of the Son does not indicate an inferiority of deity of Jesus Christ. Because there are different roles in marriage, it doesn’t mean that the man is ontologically and in his being superior to a woman. No. We are co-equal and co-heirs in Christ.

But God has established a way for this to work itself out within the context of marriage. So, so many times we miss it. We mistake this concept of roles and responsibility with that of someone’s nature, and it has nothing to do with that. Now, I know a lot of ladies here today are saying, “Well, that’s easy for you to say; you’re a guy. What do you know about what it’s like to be a woman?” You know what, I don’t (though I am married to a woman and have two beautiful daughters). So, I thought I would briefly ask my wife to come up here and talk a little bit more about submission. So, Sweetheart, come on up. Can you welcome my wife, Elliott Young?

We celebrated our 12^th anniversary this past week, didn’t we, Sweetheart? Yeah, so it’s great. Sweetheart, talk to us about submission. I’m hitting on it a little bit. Why are people confused about that in our culture?

Elliott – Well, you may not all be married to someone that is so easy to submit to like I am, but I’m teasing.

Ben – You are? (Laughter)

Elliott – But I do want to share that I became a Christian when I was 16, and I remember these verses from Ephesians Chapter 5…learning about them. And I loved Ephesians Chapter 5, Verse 21. Let’s really focus on that “submit to one another.” You know, bend over backwards loving one another (said sarcastically). But it wasn’t until I began maturing in the Lord that I really understood the next verse. I’m still learning, of course, and still understanding about wives submitting to their husbands as to the Lord. And, it’s such a joy, ladies, because here’s the benefit: the bulk of the responsibility lies with the male in leadership of the family. And so it’s so wonderful if you look at it that way; it’s God’s order. Just as Ben said, it’s not a difference in equality but a difference in a way of authority and leadership.

And there are so many things that we are going to have to answer to God on when we get to heaven. And I just think, “I’m thankful because Ben’s the one that’s going to have to answer to God on the leadership of our family.” And I’ve got plenty to answer to the Lord. In fact, I’m with our girls most of the day, and so I have authority over them, and I’m just thankful. And I just want to encourage you also to think of it this way: that God has a perfect order in this, and when we get out from under our husbands’ umbrella, so to speak, then we’re not in perfect submission to God. Now, you may be thinking, “Well, he’s an imperfect person.” Exactly, but you can still be in the perfect will of God by submitting to that imperfect person. So there is so much joy in it, and it’s a blessing.

Ben – Two things. What would you say to someone who says, “Well, that’s easy for you to say because your husband’s a Christian. You see, my husband’s not a Christian,” or, “my husband says he follows Christ, but he really doesn’t. What about me?”

Elliott – It kind of goes back to: two wrongs don’t make a right in submitting to the Lord. Your husband is certainly not going to come to Christ based on your bad behavior of not submitting to him. And so, does that answer the question sort of?

Ben – Yeah.

Elliott – You still want to be in the will of God, and it’s a witness to your husband when you submit to him even when he’s not a Christian. And Ben and I do go head-to-head sometimes, believe it or not, but honestly (and I say this, and it will probably happen this week), there has never been something huge in our marriage—a decision—that we did not agree on. There have been times when we have both had to go to the Lord about something big, and there was mutuality in the decision, and it’s been wonderful. He hasn’t had to crack the whip on me yet (sarcastic), but on a daily basis we do clash heads on little things. I mean, “Those shoes are too edgy, Honey. You can’t buy them” (I’m saying him saying that to me). No, I’m kidding.

Ben – Exactly. Thank you.

Elliott – But every person, after they’ve been married a few months or maybe a day, feels like they are married to their opposite in some ways. You are going to clash heads. But in the big decisions, he is more accountable. So we (as women) can rejoice in that.

Ben – All right. Thanks, Sweetheart. That was great. That would be a great sermon in and of itself, Sweetheart…that whole thing about women and shoes. I could do a whole message on that. (Kidding)

That’s a little bit about submission.

Let’s look at number four. It says that husbands are to sacrifice our all for our wives. Look at verse 25: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Now, how does Christ nurture us as the Body of Christ? He feeds us, he teaches us through his Holy Spirit, he encourages us, he provides us with the security that God is our Father and has adopted us into His very family, doesn’t he? No one is going to take us out of the hands of the Father. Husbands, it’s our responsibility under God to sacrificially lay down our lives for our spouse. We are to nourish our wives, we are to feed them, we are to encourage them, we are to build them up, and we are to provide security for them.

Guys, if you’re wondering: “I just can’t figure out what women want”… women want security. Ladies…“I just can’t figure out guys”…again, I told you that guys are very simple: work and sports.

But guys primarily want respect and to be honored. Guys, our responsibility before the Lord is to sacrificially, day by day, lay down our lives for our spouses. We are the servant leaders in the marriage relationship.

If you think about it, the whole wedding ceremony is designed that way. Going back to our sex talk from last week, we didn’t have time to get into the gender differences. God has designed men, physiologically speaking, to be initiators. The wedding ceremony shows us that. The man is the first to enter into the sanctuary during the wedding. He is the first to say, “I do” or “I will.” He is the first to put the ring on her finger. He is the first to lead out. That is showing that God has designed the man to be the initiator, the sacrificial lover in the marriage relationship. So God has called us to do that. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh…when he was on this planet some two thousand years ago, what did He do to his disciples—the people that he had a real close and intimate relationship with? Did he say, “Submit to me. The Bible says submit. I’m King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Submit. Ephesians Chapter 5—hadn’t been written yet, but it will be, trust me. Submit”? That’s not what Jesus did.

What did Jesus do? He picked up a towel and got some water and washed the stinky, smelly, muddy, toe cheese infested feet of those weak-faithed disciples. That’s what he did. He was a servant leader. He laid down his life. He washed their feet. And, guys, if you want a homework assignment for this week, I challenge you to do that very thing. Literally and figuratively, sometime this week, you get with your wife and you get alone with her and you get a bucket of water and you get down with a towel and you literally wash your wife’s feet, showing her that you love her and that you desire, by this symbolic act, to lay down your life for her. I challenge you to do that this very week.

As I was preparing for this message and working it out, something dawned on me. As you look through these four steps of submission, look at what happens. Check the screens out. First of all, at the bottom of this pyramid, don’t panic, there can be good out of pyramids. At the bottom of the pyramid (not Maslow’s or the New Age), you have to submit to Christ. We submit to Christ—that is the foundation of our lives. We were designed for God, and only until we are connected to God will we have any meaning, any purpose, and any power in our lives. Submission to Christ. The next step, number two, is that we then submit to one another. We put self on the shelf. Third thing, what do we do? “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” And then, number four: Husbands (this is the top), sacrificially lay down your life for your mate. And when you do that, as you go up this pyramid or this triangle, at the top we end up giving glory to God.

You see, that’s what marriage is all about. Our marriages ultimately are a sign—a symbol of the love and the commitment that God, in Christ, has to the church and a symbol of the submission and “followership” that the church has in following him. Our marriages reflect that, so that when we submit to Christ and submit to one another and submit to our husbands and, husbands, we lay down our lives, we—I love this, isn’t this great?—we give glory to God. We give glory to God. And that is what the “s” word is all about.

[Ben leads in a closing prayer.]

YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL

Doubting Faith

July 20, 2008

Ben Young

Do you feel like you are stuck in a prison of doubt or questioning? Are you waiting day after day for God to answer you, to heal you, to free you from your prison? In the third sermon of this series, Ben continues his discussion of his own personal journey of doubt and how God worked in His life to bring clarity to ambiguity, answers to questions, and understanding to uncertainty. He will lay out a few keys that unlocked different doors in his life that led him out of the prison of doubt.

Last week was a great Sunday in that we had an opportunity to write our own Psalms. Everyone here had the opportunity to write a question that they had for God or maybe a doubt that they had about God. Maybe you don’t even believe God is there. You could have written that down on your card. The card said, “God” comma, and we left the card blank for most of the service. Then we filled it out at the end. Literally, there were thousands and thousands of cards.

These are all the questions represented, and I’m reading my way through every one of them. There are thousands and thousands of questions. It’s going to take me a while, but I appreciate your willingness to ask these questions. I’m praying over all of them and want to read them all.

Next week, speaking of questions, we’re going to do something different during our teaching time. We’re going to have a time of open Q&A. I primarily designed the Q&A for people who are more skeptical in nature. Maybe you have some friends, co-workers, or family members who have questions about God, who don’t believe the way you believe, or maybe they just want to ask some questions. I invited a friend of mine, William Dembski, to come and be my guest next week to help me answer some questions. Dr. Dembski has a Ph.D. in philosophy, a Ph.D. in mathematics, a Master’s in statistics, an Undergraduate degree in psychology, and a M.Div. from Princeton. He’s an idiot! But anyway, he’s only a little bit older than me—that makes him what, about 38? He’s a great guy, and he’ll be here through this time of open forum—questions and answers, it’s going to be a great Sunday. You’ll enjoy hearing what Bill has to say.

Speaking of questions, there was a guy a long time ago who had a really good question. I’ve had the same question. It’s found in the Bible in Matthew 11. Matthew is the very first book in the New Testament. The guy who had a question was named John. This is not the John who wrote the Gospel of John. This is the John who had the funny last name—The Baptist. I see John the Baptist as some type of proto-rapper individual. He was just out there a little bit. He lived out in the desert, eating locust and wild honey, wore weird clothes, and said strange and disturbing things. John was not a Baptist, nor a Catholic. That was just his name, because that was his method of dunking people. So John the Baptist has this question. It’s an interesting question. It’s a question that a lot of us have asked before.

I’ve asked it a lot. It’s in Matthew 11, “After Jesus had finished instructing His twelve disciples, He went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee. When John (that’s John the Baptist) heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask Him, ‘Are you the One who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’”

Back then, for centuries, the Jews had been expecting a Messiah to come deliver them from their oppressors. In this context, the oppressors were the Romans. They believed the Messiah would come set up this golden age where He would restore the Davidic Kingdom, and then would reign and rule from Israel for eons to come! John was wondering, “Are You the One?” Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see; the blind receive sight, the lame walk, and those who have leprosy are cured! The deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor! Blessed and happy is the man who does not fall away on account of Me!”

Now, if you’re an inquisitive person, and I know you are, you’re wondering, “Why is John in the pokey? Why is he in prison?” Well, I kind of like to see it like this: We sometimes read the Bible and make it too archaic; I kind of like to report the story as if we were watching Entertainment Tonight, or perhaps TMZ. I know none of you watch that. It starts off like this: “Yeah, what have you got?” “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got King Herod! He has taken his brother’s wife to be his own wife!” “Man, you’ve got to be kidding me!” “No, I’m not kidding. And get this, there is some crazy, whacked out evangelist guy who called him out on it. Now Herod has thrown this evangelist guy, John the something-or-other, into prison!” “You’ve got to be kidding?” That’s why John was there. That’s the gossip that was buzzing around Palestine around that time. John the Baptist was a guy who was famous—a celebrity in his own right. He was thrown into prison because he called out this so-called King Herod for his adultery and unfaithfulness.

John is in prison and he’s waiting. I’m sure he was thinking, “Oh, don’t worry! I’m going to get out of here. You see, Jesus—He’s the Messiah. He’s the One who’s going to spring me out of this joint and He’s also my cousin. It’s going to happen.” He just waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. So John just continued to wait, “Jesus is going to get me out. He’s going to kick the Romans out of power! We’re going to be in power. We’re going to have the political power. We’re going to take over this world, and things are going to be great just like the prophets of old said.” He waited day after day, but nothing happened.

Finally, it says here, John began to question. I like what one commentator said, “Here you have in Matthew 11, not the beginning of some pristine faith, but actually you have the inception of doubt.” You have this guy, John the Baptist asking, “God, why am I here?” “John, you are here to prepare the way for the Messiah!” That’s what John had been doing his entire life. He had been saying, “Hey, you better get right because the Messiah is coming. You better get your act together. You better start repenting. He’s coming.” Then when He came, he said, “There He is right there!” “You’re talking Yeshua from Nazareth?” “Yeah—Jesus from Nazareth!” “Are you kidding?” “He is the Messiah! He will take away the sins of the world!” Then he comes and baptizes Jesus! John the Baptist is one of the most important prophets and figures in the entire Bible. He was so large and so big, people wondered, “Is John the Baptist the one?” Other people wondered, “Is he Elijah come back to life?” Or perhaps he had come back in a different form, because Elijah didn’t die. People were wondering this about John the Baptist; but here’s John the Baptist, this big wig stuck in prison, and he is doubting. He is wavering. Someone asked Jesus, “Are you the one? Or should we expect someone, or something else?”

John doubted in prison. In my life and my journey, I was stuck in the prison of doubt. We all have our prisons, right? We all have our cells; things that we’re stuck in. Have you ever been where John the Baptist is? Hey—you’re here, you’re enslaved, you feel like you’re in this prison, whether it’s a sickness, trial, or a question? You are wondering, “Hey God! When are you going to answer me? God, when are You going to heal me? I’m waiting God for You to set me free and answer me!” You wait day after day, month after month, but nothing happens. That’s what was happening to John the Baptist. He doubted. That’s what was happening to me.

Last week, I left my story where I was in graduate school in seminary, and I was drowning in a sea of doubt. Now I’m kind of changing metaphors on us. I was really imprisoned by these doubts and questions I had about the existence of God, or the non-existence of God, or the Bible, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Koran, or the Torah—whatever holy book you want; or maybe Darwin had it right, and I was locked in this prison of doubt for a long time.

I think it’s important to note that there are different kinds of doubt. There is healthy doubt, to use therapeutic language. There is healthy doubt, and there is unhealthy doubt. The healthy doubt is just doubt. It’s just asking good questions like some of the questions that people gave last week, which were simply good questions. I like what Fred Buechner said about doubt, “Whether your faith is that there is a God, or that there is not a God; if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself, or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” So there are good doubts; there are great questions that you and I can ask and they kind of serve as ants in the pants that keep us itching and moving to find out and seek out answers.

I would say if you have some good healthy doubts and good questions; don’t be intellectually lazy, or theologically lazy or slothful. Look for answers to those questions. There is good doubt.

Then there is bad doubt. There is unhealthy doubt. It’s like anything when you think about it. If you’re angry, and it’s good to be angry—the Bible says be angry; yet don’t sin. Be sensitive! But if you’re too sensitive, or too angry, that can lead to depression. Fear is a good thing. I want my children to be afraid of certain things. Fear is a good thing, but if you have too much fear in your life, what happens? You become paranoid. It’s the same thing with doubt. Doubt can be healthy; doubt can be good; doubt can be a part of faith. That’s why I called this message Doubting Faith. It’s a double entendre. But doubt can warp, and it can turn into something that can be deadly; it can be almost diabolical; it can definitely be debilitating. It can take you to a place where you don’t want to go, and it took me to a place where I felt like I was in prison. Though I could get out of myself, there were still other aspects of this prison that I had to go through, and I always had that ball and chain of questioning, of doubt, of analyzing and of uncertainty dragging around on my ankle. Kind of like the same deal Martha Stewart had when she got out of prison—the little anklet. I was dragging this thing around, and I couldn’t get free. I wanted to get out of this prison; but I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t do it. It’s the dark side of doubt when it immobilizes and paralyzes you, and you live in a state of constant ambiguity and uncertainty.

Let me read you a question, a doubt. It says, “So many unanswered questions live within me; afraid to uncover them because of the blasphemy. If there be God, please forgive me when I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven. There is so much convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me; and yet the reality of darkness, and coldness, and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul!”

Who do you think wrote that? By the way—that card didn’t come from one of these buckets, but it belongs here. Mother Theresa wrote that. She was a pretty strong lady of faith and courage, but she had times in her life, many, many times for many decades when she had extreme doubt and despair. When you’re stuck in the prison, you want to get out, don’t you? I do! You’re trapped in prison! “I’ve got to get out, and find my way through the wall! Somehow, some way, I’m going to dig may way through with a little chisel and a hammer, and I’m going to cover that up with a poster, and I’m going to get out that way. Or I’m going to jump in the old laundry truck when they come through. I’m going to get out of this prison.” I was the same way, “I’ve got to get out of this prison of doubt. I can’t live here. I can’t live like this. I am going absolutely nutty, bonkers, and crazy. Either I want to be in, with God; or out, without God. This in between is worthless.”

I tried many things to get out. The first thing I tried was discipline. If I could simply be more disciplined and read the Bible more, and pray more; then that will get me out of doubt! I remember in my apartment years ago, I had this closet. I could actually walk inside it, and that’s where I prayed. The Bible says “Pray in your closet”, so I prayed in my closet. I read my Bible in my closet. But as much as I read the Bible, and as much as I prayed; it didn’t work. I thought I’d be disciplined through obedience. So I did whatever God told me to do! If I was driving on the freeway, and there were hitchhikers—I pulled over and they jumped in. “Where are you going?” “I don’t know!”

I remember one time, I was at this park near my apartment, and there was this guy who was a street person. He was drunk, and I started a conversation with him. I remember he had Mad Dog 20-20. I don’t know why I remembered that; but it’s not my favorite drink. Anyway, I took that Mad Dog 20-20 and poured it out, threw it out in this pond, and we began to talk. He needed a place to stay, and I said, “Why don’t you stay at my place, my apartment?” So I invited him over to my apartment. I think he spent the night there. It was so funny—my roommate had not a clue. He woke up in the morning, and there was this guy on the couch.

So I tried reading the Bible, and discipline and prayer, and helping people who were hurting. All those things are good, by the way! I encourage you to read the Bible as much as you can; to pray as much as you can; and to do things for people who are hurting as much as you can. Yet, at the same time, as I did these things, my motives were tweaked, and that still didn’t get rid of the doubt!  That still didn’t free me from this prison that I was in.

I also thought I might be demonic, so I tried to get a demon cast out of me. I went down front at a church. The guy was praying for people, and it didn’t take, or the demon didn’t leave, if it was demonic! I wish it would have been! It would have been a lot easier if you could just kind of go, “Get out!” Or, “Get off! Stop this doubting!” But it didn’t work that way, and it just kind of persisted there…

What I tried the most during this time, and it’s what I think a lot of people try, both those who had considered themselves philosophical naturalists and atheists, or Christians, is that I really wanted this iron-clad certainty. I thought to myself, “If I can have certainty; if I can have rock-solid certainty about the existence of God; about the veracity of Scripture; about the reality of Jesus Christ; then all my doubts would be gone. Rock-solid certainty. But I discovered that certainty—the kind of certainty that a lot of us crave and want—it’s really a myth. That kind of certainty doesn’t exist.

As I really read the Bible, there’s a place in the Bible in II Corinthians, chapter 5 where it says, “You should walk by certainty, not by sight.” No—it doesn’t’ say that, right? It says, “You should walk by faith, not by sight.” Walk by faith; not by certainty.

When I heard that, years ago I was stuck in the prison of doubt going, “Hey—let me out of here!” I didn’t like it. Because every time I would come to church; any time I would get around Christians, they were saying, “Well, that’s great. You can do this, you can have this. All you’ve got to do is have faith. Right. God’s going to do this in your life! He’s going to do this, and this…All you need to do is have faith.” I was saying, “Whoo—I’ve got that. Faith is what I don’t have. Faith is what I want. If I had faith, I wouldn’t be in this prison! I wouldn’t have these problems. I understand that. Give me the faith, right?” But I really didn’t want faith, looking back on it, I wanted certainty.

By the way—no one has this rock-solid, absolute certainty. Not the so-called intellectual, academic who thinks God is anything but a fairy tale. Not the fundamentalist, Bible-toting, pew jumping, chandelier swinging Christian. So don’t be led—“Well, there are people in the Western World—there are people of facts who live by their minds and reason; and there are people of faith!”  Bologna. Everybody, every belief system has faith and facts! Certainty is a myth. I couldn’t get out. Certainty did not get me out. I thought I had certainty for a while. I read a lot of books, but I couldn’t get there. So, I was still stuck. I like what Anne Lamott said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”

Now, about this time, something happened in my life, and I should say not something, but someone happened in my life – questions and doubt are very personal. If you come from a Christian background, you know that you can have a personal relationship with God, though at times it seems very impersonal, doesn’t it? You can have a personal relationship with God, so doubting is the personal thing; the existence, or non-existence of God. So when I began to get free from this prison of doubt, it was someone rather than some thing.

As I was getting ready for this weekend, there were probably twelve to fifteen keys that unlocked different doors in my life that led me out of the prison of doubt! Don’t panic, don’t worry! I’m only going to deal with probably three keys, quickly, for you guys this morning.

The first key began when I started listening to this radio show during chapel. Seminary is kind of a strange graduate school situation. You have chapel at 10:00 every day, Monday through Friday. So instead of going to chapel, I skipped! I was a bad Christian, a bad future preacher.

I skipped—I don’t know why I did; I just did. I would get in my car and listen to this fuzzy, AM radio station. I would tune to this guy by the name of Malcolm Smith. Malcolm was a guy originally from England, and he was simply a Bible teacher. But he taught about the same thing almost every single day. He sounded so smart with his British accent, and I had heard this word he talked about so many, many times; but it had never really sunk into me. When this word, and the reality of this word, or the Person behind this word began to sink into my heart, and my mind; it began to slowly, slowly open and push open the door, or one of the doors of the prison of doubt. There were other chambers I had to get through; but the word, the first key was the key of charis.

Derek Webb is a friend of my brother’s, who was in the band known as Caedmon’s Call, and he has the word charis tattooed on his thumb. Now I’m not into tattoos per se, but if you’re going to get one, that’s not a bad one. Charis. Now maybe you’re wondering what the word charis means? Charis is the Greek word for the word grace. So every day, Malcolm Smith would end up talking in some way or another about charis, about grace. What is grace? Grace is God’s undeserved blessing or favor in our lives. I began to discover slowly that I was a wreck. I was a wretch. I was a sinner. I was sick. I was a doubter. I was a skeptic. I was an idiot. I was all these different things; therefore, I qualified for charis, or grace.

Now you say, “That sounds pretty depressing. That sounds really negative!” No it’s not. What did Jesus say? “It’s the sick people who need the doctor!” See, the problem in my life for so long was, I didn’t think I was sick. But it was through charis, through grace that I realized I was sick, broken, and that I did need a rescuer, a Savior! Charis began to work in my life, and I began to not only think, but to feel and know that Jesus Christ actually came, died, and rose again for me, and that He really did forgive me of all my sins. I realized that God is even big enough to forgive the sins of Christians, which was quite a relief to me; because I did all my great, glorious, pretty cool sinning as a Christian. Sorry—that’s just the way it worked out. I don’t mean to mess with your theology. God can forgive even Christians. That was a good thing to know. I also knew that I could be a child of God, and I also knew that God would accept me perfectly, because He accepted me not on the basis of what I had done, but on the basis of what He did through Christ. Then I realized too—we’re getting too much here—sorry. But it relates to grace, and that is that this Gospel, this grace is completely outside of me! It is external from me! It is objective in one sense. It can’t be touched. It has nothing to do with me on some level, which is a great relief. That’s a whole other message. Anyway, it was great. It’s charis, it’s grace. It’s outside of me and had nothing to do with me. It’s what Christ did. My righteousness and my acceptance—all of this is outside of me. It is external.

That’s a great thing, because so many times, I based my life and my spirituality on my emotions, on my circumstances. It’s good to know that my acceptance and your acceptance is outside. It’s in Christ.

The first key was grace, charis. The second key goes back to verse 3 in our text when John asked, “Are you the One, or should we wait for someone else?” The second key is Christ. Christ! I believe what God’s Word teaches about Christ, that God—ultimate reality, Heaven, has actually come to earth in a real life human being. God went to a lot of trouble to become a human being, and I think we forget about that. Christ freed me up. John who wrote the Gospel said, “In the beginning was the Logic. In the beginning was the Reason, and the Reason was with God, and He was God! The Reason, the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, and we have seen His Glory, the Glory of the One and Only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth!” Paul said, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all Creation; for by Him all things were created; things in this temporal realm on earth; things in Heaven whether thrones, or powers, or rulers or authorities—all things were created by Him, Christ, and through Him. Through Christ, all things hold together!” It’s amazing! God come to earth in a person? How can all that happen? How is that possible? Christ! The Incarnation was a major key, and it’s still a major key that pulled me out of that prison.

I got a letter, or correspondence I should say, about a year ago from a guy who was locked in the prison of doubt. I don’t know him personally, but through correspondence, he seemed like a great Christian guy! He’s married and has kids. He grew up in a Christian home, and went to a Christian university. He was very active in his church, and was giving and was involved in missions, the whole deal. But about four or five years ago, he started reading all these books. He sent me a list—120 to 150 books. I’m talking about very difficult, tough, scientific, philosophic rationalistic books; both Christian and atheistic. In the process, this guy lost his faith and became an atheist. He hasn’t told many people. He lives in a different state. I entered into the dialogue with him, and I wrote this down for him, because when I talked to him on the phone, I wanted to share this with him. I want to read you my response that I gave to this guy. I said, “Christianity is a story, and not an argument. Christianity is a story about Jesus. It’s that complex; and yet that simple. Like me, you don’t want to live out the implications of your new-found faith in lucky mud. That’s why you stay married, and that’s why you love your kids. That’s why you still love your wife, though she doesn’t get you at all right now. Maybe by committing more leaps of faith than a fundamentalist Baptist layman, you can contrive the compelling argument to stay committed to the blobs of matter you call your wife and kids.

But at the end of the day, that’s not the real reason you stay. Like I used to be, you are torn, split, conflicted, filled with cognitive dissonance, doubting and despair. Yes, I know. I’ve been there.  You’re not a committed atheist at all. What you believe is what you do. Faith is more than mere mental cognition, or agreement to the fact. Faith is what you did last month. That’s why I call you a doubter and not an unbeliever. You still go to church and appreciate sermons on grace, tithing, etc…Every book you’ve read (these are books he read in his research that led him to atheism) is about a person with a story—a story, a world view that affects everything about how they research, what they research, and why they research. No one is honest. No one is a true seeker. No one is objective. This is where post-modern epistemological humility helps. Read Michael Polanyi. That’s why I threw out Jones and other apologists at the time of my extreme doubt, disbelief and despair. I said to myself, ‘They’, referring to Christian apologists, are biased. All their research is biased. Everyone they interview is biased. Give me some objective researchers. But, after rubbing shoulders with, and talking to, and debating some of these scientists who are not believers; I found them to be just as biased, or more biased than the Christian apologist! No one researches in a vacuum. There is no such thing as brute facts. No brute facts. Only God has that ability. If I were not a Christian, I would be a cynic, or a Buddhist. That’s just me. I wouldn’t be a philosophical naturalist. Again, I’m more philosophical because I believe it’s broader and addresses the human problem holistically. Like the old me, you are a rationalist; Dakar, Hume, Russell. Unlike the new me, you are not at a place to accept paradox, or mystery, and your belief system at this point, though you were already doing that, but just don’t see it. Like the old me, you’re almost completely ignoring starting points, the will, emotions, life stations, family dynamics, the history of Christianity, the history of philosophy, the history of how science came to be, and the inability to produce a credible and livable world view. A two year old, or a village idiot with a good sense of humor – Bill Maher, and Christopher Hitchens – can deconstruct. It takes a whole lot more to build something.”

“You really need to rethink Jesus! Sorry—it’s that simple. Though the liar, lunatic Lord argument has its holes; it’s ultimately about Him. At the end of the day, I like Jesus. I like what He said. I like what He did. I like how He died. I like how He came back to life. I like the movement He started; the movement, not all the people in it. I really do! I like how He doesn’t fit neatly into mine, or any other box. I like Him; but He still shocks me and challenges me beyond words. Because of what I do, I’ve been able to talk with, and get to know some extremely bright, degreed people over the years; to eat with them, debate them, to question them, and to have them question me. I’m not that impressed anymore. It helps, but I’m not that impressed, or intimidated. Again, I may die with Soren Kierkegaard, or Karl Bart, and that’s okay.”

The last key is commitment, and risk. G. K. Chesterton said, “What’s the purpose of an open mouth but to chomp down on something? Some food? What’s the purpose of having an open mind, or being open minded if not to close your mind down on someone, or something, and then live your life on the basis of that commitment and risk?”

If you are a searcher; if you are a seeker; if you are a Christian, Jesus is well worth the risk. He’s alive! He can change your heart. He can answer a lot of your questions. Some of the questions He won’t answer, but He’ll give you the charis.

Dear God, thank You that You are indescribable, and You are so much more than we can imagine. God, You are so big; yet You became so small in Jesus. God, may we never cease to be blown away by that reality.

God, I thank You that You are a God who accepts where we are with all of our questions, and all of our doubts, and all of our pains. God, for some of us here, doubt is not even an issue! We all have our own issues, our own prisons that we find ourselves in. Give freedom here, today, Lord, to people who need to be free. Give answers to those who need answers, and give mystery to those who need mystery.

God, I pray that You would help us all to be seekers of You, and seekers of truth. For those who are here who would say, “I’m open minded. I’m still circling the airport.” I pray God that You would help them land, somewhere, some day. God, some need to do that today. They need to walk down these aisles and say, “I want God to set me free! I’ve tried to get myself out of the prison I’m in, and I can’t do it. I want Him to set me free.” Lord, may they walk and come down front today. In Jesus name…Amen.