Evangelizing the Western Mindset - Part 3 — Winkie Pratney

Matthew 11 and the Questions Raised by Death

We're going to use Matthew 11 today as a departure place to look at three major ways that people in the West think. I used this some years ago here in England when I was asked to do a two-day series in Cambridge University.

In Cambridge, kick you, Cambridge Interlegiate College Union, I think it is, they assign you your subjects. You haven't got a chance to let the Holy Spirit lead you. You're told what you'll speak on. You have to, within that parameter, ask the Holy Spirit to help you.

I was given two subjects as part of an ongoing teaching series that other men would come in each week and do this. One was a Saturday night thing, which was basically a Bible study from an assigned topic.

That was basically for Christians, but non-Christians were invited that night to see if it was worth coming the night after that, which would be the evangelistic one. I was assigned the topic of Romans 5, which is probably one of the hardest and hairiest areas of exposition in the whole of the New Testament, if not Romans 7.

That was a fun one to do with two days to do it. And then the second thing, the following day, there was no music, no singing, no prayer, nothing. There was an announcement of a lecture in a church that had a pulpit a story and a half high and was about as skinny as this thing there.

And you have to give a one-hour lecture, basically to a non-Christian audience. And that lecture was on, the title was given, God. Was it called powerless, careless, powerless or dead? That was not much of an option that was, but in that thing you're supposed to answer some fundamental questions.

Is there a God? Can we know Him? What about suffering? All these hairy questions. In praying about that, the night before, I had to do it and I got my library on the road and it's not very big. I said to the Lord, how in the fat can I do something on these two hairy areas?

And you know what Cambridge is like, that's where all the big debates are and that Cambridge debating hall, that's where you get the cream of the crop there too. I thought, dear Lord, what in the fat can I talk about on these things?

And He directed my attention in the second part of this to Matthew 11. So I want to give you this again. I think it's one of the neatest little summaries of the way people think in the Western world. I was thrilled at the end of this.

Remember there's no music, no singing, no Christian thing, it's a lecture. And at the end if people want to be saved, they have to come up and line up and tell you, I want to become a Christian. I mean, no invitations, nothing man.

Just as I am is down the tubes. It's just up front, you know. And it was a thrill. It was just my wife and me and the guy invited us there. It was a thrill afterwards to just see a line of people just line up.

And the first girl came up, she said, I'm a biology major. She said, I'm not a Christian, I need to become a Christian tonight. How do I become a Christian? It was a thrill to see. I believe the Word of God really meets needs.

I want to give you this. First of all, the background of this story is found in Matthew 11. And in it, John is now in prison. He is actually awaiting execution. I don't know if he knows that or not, but at this point that's what he's doing.

He realizes, I think, in the spirit that it's just about time for the curtains of his life to close down. And I believe this. The major philosophical questions are not asked in universities. They are asked when you face the reality of things like death and suffering.

That's where the real heavy questions are. Some people who wouldn't give a fig of any of the philosophical questions in the world, they don't think about God or life after death or suffering or anything like that.

When you go through it, when you suffer, when you have somebody close to you die, or when your life itself is on the line, that's when the major questions in life are really asked. And a great deal of the...

I was reading Tony Campola's book just before I came down here, and he had a little discussion group in the university once and asked people if they'd thought much about death and how they would face it.

They all were talking about how they would face death and eat, drink and be merry sort of thing. And one middle-aged lady who was there in the circle, she said, you don't know anything at all about death.

You don't even... She said, I've thought about it a lot. And she talked about being in a concert one time. An organ was in this musical concert and one note on the organ got stuck. And you could just hear it in the back.

She said, for a while, with all the other stuff going on, it didn't matter. But she said, as the night went on and this one stuck note just kept going, it just totally ruined the whole thing. And she said, it was like that for me.

When I began to realize I'm going to die, they're going to put me in a hole and shovel dirt over my face. It was like a stuck note on an organ. It just... The rest of my concert has been spoiled by that one thing.

Now here is John and he is facing death. And so all these crowds are gone. And the question probably came to his mind, was I really part of some significant thing in history? I mean, here he is. There were crowds.

The whole of the cities had turned out to hear this man. He had spoken like a man from another world and now all those crowds are gone. There's just a few of his disciples there ministering to him when he's in prison and everything is about to shut down.

So it's a very good question. Is what I'm doing worthwhile? Is what I've been involved in something that is actually part of a great change that would take place in history? Or is this just part of some passing fad?

Society has been caught up in some temporary religious movement and now it's all gone. And that's a real question. What are you doing now? Is it just part of a religious fad that some people are into those things in those kind of days and the pressures of society and culture have just conditioned you in that particular way?

Or are you actually part of the changing of history? So John sends out his disciples to ask this question. Are you he that should come? Or do we look for another? Is this just a passing religious fad?

Or is the person that I introduced to the world the one who was promised? And I am actually part of a great sweep of history. And Jesus answers in a simple and beautiful way. He doesn't say now what I want you to do is to go back to John and tell him something of the prophecies of the past.

I want you first to make a list of all of the various prophecies of the past and then show him how in many, many ways that I fulfill those prophecies. He just says go and show John. Tell him what you've seen.

And then refers directly to the miraculous. He says the blind see and the lame walk and the poor have the gospel preached to them and blessed is he that is not offended in me. And that again, the power of the practical thing.

See what is happening. So we could say this, any philosophy in life and this is a Mickey Mouse analysis but it will do for the start. Any philosophy can be tested by a three-fold test. And the first one is very simple.

Testing Philosophies by Reality, Logic, and Practical Results

Does it work? We call that, it's a pragmatic test. Does it work? Does it really do what it claims to do? You could put that third if you like but I'll put it at the start because Jesus' appeal was simply show John what's happening.

That there is really a fulfillment of prophecy and he's not doing it in a theoretical way, it's actually happening. The other two tests would be does it conform to reality? Does it actually match what we know about reality?

And then another one would be is it logically consistent within its premises? And you understand, I suppose, after the Wimber Seminar what a premise is. He calls it a mindset. It's a little bit wider than a premise.

A premise is a pair of glasses that you wear. If I use a pair of sunglasses here and these ones are colored, if I put those on, the whole world looks the color of these things. Now if I wore those all my life I could forget that I had them on until somebody punches me in the eye and they break.

But if you put on nice pink ones, the whole world looks pink to you. And a premise is the mindset that you approach the world through. It is the way you look at life. It is the glasses through which you analyze everything.

And all of us have glasses on. There's not one of us here who has no glasses. We all have our own set of glasses. That's why there's no really objective reporting. People say, well, he's an objective reporter.

There is no such thing as an objective reporter. Matter of fact, that's why, and we were talking about this earlier, why it is so hard for people to agree on the Scriptures. Because once you take something out of the Scriptures, you are the one who select it.

What Johnny Ortiz calls Gospel of Saint Evangelical is the verses that you have underlined in your Bible. And he says you need to have a good hard look at the ones you haven't underlined. We all pick out from that which we see that which happens to minister to us.

And there's nothing really wrong with that except that it's important to understand that when we look at anything in life, we look at it through a set of glasses. It is the task of God to make our glasses as clear as possible, to actually fit the kind of glasses on us that help us see reality as it is and not distort it.

If you wear glasses, if you've ever picked up somebody else's and swapped glasses and you're going cross-eyed, how can you see with these things? And that's the same with yours. Because your glasses are supposed to correct the deficiencies in your vision so you see the world as it really is.

If you understand those glasses, it will help you see this. To be logically consistent within a premise is to start with the glasses that you're wearing or that statement that you assume up the back of your head here.

Does it make sense from where it starts to where it ends? Does it start starting from where it assumes, and there's always assumptions in every philosophy, does it make sense from where it starts to where it ends?

Now, let me give you an example of a problem in that. For instance, here is two things that look alike. Here is a fish and here is a submarine. Okay? Now, we're going to make an assumption about these two things.

The assumption is... Oh, first we'll make some facts about it. Here is the facts. The facts are that there is similarity. You notice how these things are similar. See that? I mean, they've both got fins.

They're both underwater. They both have a little light-gathering apparatus up here. Okay? There's similarities there, isn't there? All right? Okay? Now, I'm going to make an assumption. The assumption, this is my premise now.

These are the glasses I'm going to wear. With these facts, which are undeniable, similarities here, we could list a whole bunch of these. Now, I'm going to assume that similarity equals common ancestry.

Now, with great erudition and scholarship, I'm going to demonstrate to you that this is actually a miniaturized, organic great-grandchild of this original one, which was quite an incredible accident, but it's wonderful how it turned out.

Actually, what we had is a punctuated equilibrium bringing us these things. Now, I could give you a great number of evidences to show that this must be true. And you can see that if you have a false premise, with all the right facts, you can come to the wrong conclusion for all the right reasons.

And that is the danger of simply approaching things from, does it make sense? The point is, many things make sense within their premises, but they may not actually match reality and they may not actually be true to what is, and they may not work.

I believe that God has designed His universe and you like a well-made lock and key. And within the reality of what He describes, everything fits. The lock and the key. The key fits in, turns all the way around.

Now, you can make other keys that almost fit. Some of them haven't got a hope of fitting. Some of them get in a little way and turn. Some of them almost seem to answer it. And the closer you get to the real key, the more likely it is to look like the real thing.

My base is simply this, that what God says is true. It matches reality. That if you begin with what God tells you to begin with, you can follow it through completely consistently and not only will it make sense within what it is, it will also match external reality and it will work.

That Christianity, if you want to look at it as a philosophy, meets these tests. Now, what does God require of a man to assume, or a woman to assume? What does He actually require? What is the fundamental prerequisites of faith?

What does God want first of all? What must you assume? There are some things you're going to assume, whether you're a Christian or Buddhist or anything else. What are you going to assume? Here's what God asks.

He that comes to God, Scripture says, must believe. These are assumptions. One, that He is. We could put this another way. Reality exists. And that is an assumption. And because it is an assumption, I cannot prove to you that He exists.

I can't even prove that you exist, or that I exist. Matter of fact, I can't prove without assuming that, that anything exists. Do you see that? If I'm going to find out if anything's out there, I've got to first of all assume that maybe there is something out there to be found.

If I assume that there's nothing out there, and you can't find it anyway, you don't even look. So you can't even deny that without assuming it. You said there is no such thing as reality. You assume that what you're saying is real.

Namely, that there is no such thing as reality. So it's a fair enough assumption. God is an unfair. He only asks you to assume that which you're going to do for anything. I was a chemist. If I wanted to find out something about the world, I had to assume first of all, maybe it was out there.

And that's what starts the look. So, first it is, and then two, He will reward those who diligently seek Him. In other words, that reality can be recognized by the evidence of your senses, or some other way.

And of course, when you have an experience with God, it's going to be a lot more than your senses. It's going to be a profound level. Spirit, soul, body, and everything else. But that reality can be recognized.

Either in science, of course, if I'm looking for something and I keep tracking it down, if I'm trying to find some new kind of particle in physics, or I design ways in which I can... There it is! That's that little quack that we were looking for.

I found it. So you're looking for something. Now, the assumption is that it exists and that you can recognize it. That's the only two assumptions you make. That's all God requires. If you're going to believe, if you're going to find Him, He that comes to God must believe that He is, and that He will reward those who earnestly seek Him.

Those are two assumptions which cannot be proved. I cannot prove to you that He exists, and I cannot prove to you that you will recognize Him. You must assume those before the search begins. This is assuming that a person is completely hungry for truth, which is, we've already said, 99 .9 of the people aren't interested in that at all.

I'm just throwing this out for fun, okay? There are your three tests, then, of a philosophy, and there are two fundamental assumptions. What if I change my assumption here? What if I say similarity equals common design?

Same facts, see? We're not changing anything about the facts. All we do is change our premise. If I say now similarity equals common design, then I'll come to a totally different conclusion, namely that these two things were both designed to work underwater, one by man and one by the creator of man himself and the designer of all forms and systems that fit particular things best.

So with the same facts, we'll come to a totally different conclusion if our assumption changes. So the real battles go on in the worldviews that we have, the visions, the assumptions. It is those there that the task of apologetics is to correct those worldviews, to bring our weird ideas into confrontation with biblical reality so that all of these things will begin to match.

We cannot live consistently without those three things being true about what we believe. That's why a person who's rejected biblical truth will constantly be on a search. There will be a hunger there that will never be met to try and put in more studies to find out more reasons and to keep trying to match up that which doesn't fit.

If our life philosophy is exposed to reality, we could believe, like Peter Pan, we can fly. We can fly and go to the top of a 20-story building and jump out and yea, verily, if thou hast not a hang glider, thou will find that thy philosophy is up for grabs.

They will be able to say to you, there is my boy all over, because that's where you'll be. Does it work? Does it actually work when you put it to the test? Alright, you know what? So we're saying here that the power of the Christian message is threefold.

First, it makes sense from what God says to the assumptions you make, and of course that's the basis of what they call presuppositional apologetics, a big word you do not have to learn to get to heaven, which is fortunate.

But basically presuppositional apologetics starts on this premise. If we believe that the world was the way God said, then does it fit? In other words, if God is the way the Bible says He is and the world is the way He says it is, does that actually match what we know about the world?

So with that presupposition, you just say to the secular man, look, let's just think for the time being that what God says is true. Doesn't this make sense? Doesn't this match up with what you know? So we take the test of the pragmatic and the test of matching reality.

We just give them the presupposition, God is real, Jesus Christ. You don't bother proving those things, you just state them. That's presuppositional apologetics. Some classical apologetics people go, you've got to prove every one of those things, otherwise forget it.

But it is a valid way to push. In other words, by starting with the way God says things fit. They do fit. They fit better than anything else. Francis Schaeffer, of course, is the most popularly known guy who presents presuppositional apologetics.

His illustration is a big rubbish tin or a garbage can for Americans here. He says if you put a man in a rubbish tin with his head first, his legs will stick out. If you put him in head first, his legs will fit in but his head will stick out.

If you sit him in sideways, everything will hang out. If you try to fit a non-Christian idea into a biblical universe, there will always be bits that stick out that don't answer the questions. And that only in God is there a proper fit.

Faith, Evidence, and the Questions God Asks

Though we're not really going to put anybody into a garbage can in the Christian life. This is where the illustration breaks down. All right. Now, back to our story. Everybody really loves asking questions of God.

We would love to ask questions of God. If there is a God, I have some questions I'd like to ask. Well, what gets embarrassing is when God asks you questions. I know this simple answer Jesus gave, Go, show John, is one of the most powerful evidences of the reality of Jesus.

I have a friend who is now an artist for David Wilkerson. He does all his artwork and stuff. His name is Paul Annan. Paul was sitting once in a meeting of young people. We had about 80 kids jammed into a room and what they did is they had a hot seat.

I don't know if you've ever seen a hot seat. It's a chair that's put in the middle of the room and any kid who's got a problem or any kind of need, they sit on the chair and they share that need with the body of Christians there and then whoever feels lead comes up and prays for them.

So sometimes you get a whole bunch of kids around praying. This was going on all night. This was Saturday night, 11 at night. Kids were all praying. It was a neat thing. Anyway, Paul had heard about this thing and he was a bitter...

I saw the last picture he painted before he was a non-Christian. Well, he's still a non-Christian. He had this gambler. It was a gambler that had just been discovered gambling. He was still painting in the gun and he said the faces of the men around the table, he said, I used to look in the mirror and then draw the faces.

He was getting $1 ,000 a painting at 16 years old doing these paintings and he sat there bitter, arms folded, just mad at the world and everything else and not wondering how in the fad he got in with a bunch of these religious kids.

And there was a girl there who had been born with a twisted, crippled foot and her foot was like this. There had been some teaching on forgiveness and she sat in the chair finally and she began to weep.

She said, I have a confession to make. She said, I need to apologize to my parents for the lousy way I've treated them. I have blamed them for this crippled foot of mine and I've thought because I've got this, I'll never have a boyfriend, I'll never have a marriage.

And she said, here I am, I'm 16 years old, I've held this grudge against my parents all these years. And she said, I want you to pray for me that God will give me the courage to apologize to my parents for my whole lifelong rotten attitude.

She was crying and then as the kids moved forward to pray for her, she said, it's even worse than that. She said, I want you to pray for me that I'll have the courage to apologize to God. She said, because I blamed him for this.

And I thought, it's your fault. You could have done something different and you didn't. And so it looked like every kid in the room came around the hot seat. Well, Paul's sitting there watching this thing and this girl starts to weep and the kids lay hands on her to pray that God will give her courage to apologize.

And as they do, her foot just goes and straightens out like that and Paul just goes and breaks down and gets saved. So, you know, it is an apologetic of its kind. Jesus turns to the crowd now, having told them, go and show John what you see.

And then He asks them three questions. And these three questions, I believe, are statements of the majority of people you will run into. You'll find them, whatever you meet, you'll find one form of one of three things.

And here is the first thing He says. I'll read it. And as they departed, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John, What did you go out into the wilderness to see? I read, shaken by the wind.

But what went you out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, those that wear soft clothes are in kings' houses. What went you out for to see, prophet? Yea, I say unto you, more than a prophet.

For this is He whom it is written, Behold, I send My messenger before your face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Now, Jesus asks the crowd, When you went out to see John, what glasses were you wearing?

We'll put it that way. What were your presuppositions about this person? And here are the three things He said. A reed shaken by the wind. A man dressed in soft clothes. Or a prophet. What I want to pick up first tonight is this first thing.

The Reed Shaken by the Wind: Relativism and Eclectic Truth

And we'll call it the reed. What is He talking about when He's talking about a reed? You ever stood on top of a hillside and watched a field of grass or wheat blown by the wind? It's kind of a very pretty effect.

It's like waves running through the thing. But here's what a reed is. It's a thin piece of grass, dried or otherwise, and whichever way the wind blows, that's the way the reed moves. Like that. I believe this is a description of a huge chunk of people that you will meet.

If you ask them what their philosophy of life is, they haven't got one. It's whatever is going down. They are basically slaves of the culture in which they live. They find out whatever's in, and that's what they want to do too.

If hula hoops are in, they want to do those. If barbed wire hula hoops are in, then they will use those. Whatever is in, that's what they're into. Now the reason why this has become so popular in our day is because we have lost in our time absolutes.

We don't believe in moral absolutes anymore, especially in the Western world. So we could say the reed philosophy, and there's another name for that, there's a word, the eclectic. That means somebody who just picks, and picks a little bit, I'll have a little bit of that, I'll sample a bit of that, a little Buddhism, and I'll have a little bit of this, and a smidging of this, and a side salad of Hinduism, and we put the whole thing together.

And what you've got is a smorgasbord that keeps changing. And to ask this person, well, what particular philosophy are you? It's ridiculous, because they don't know what they're, you know, they're just into whatever.

Punk is in, and you dye your hair purple, and if it isn't, then you do something else. It's whatever is going. And because the culture shifts and changes in its opinion so much, huge chunks of people don't have any commitment to anything.

Their basic job in life is to fill the hours when they're not working or eating with as much entertainment as they possibly can, so they don't have to think about things like philosophies, and life after death, and suffering, and all those things.

Huge chunks of people are like this. So the idea behind the eclectic is that truth keeps changing. There's no such thing as absolute truth in this philosophy. Truth changes. What is true in one generation is not true in others.

What may be true for you is not necessarily true for me. And you've all seen the old illustration of the blind man and the elephant. Here is the elephant, and the three blind men were taken by the blind man taker to a zoo to meet the animals.

And the one they really liked most when they got home and all compared notes, not written notes, of course, but verbal notes, what did you like most? And the blind man said, oh, we liked the elephant most.

And in talking with each other, they asked, what did you like about the elephant? And he said, well, the one who got his ears said, well, he was such a weird creature. He was sort of thin and flat, like a huge leaf.

The other one said, thin and flat? You're crazy. I could scarcely put my eyes on him. He was so thick and huge. And the one who got his tail said, you mustn't have got an elephant. I got the elephant.

I got it. It was thin and wiggly, something like a snake. And then they argued for the rest of their lives. And so the idea comes like this in the eclectic philosophy. It goes like this. Well, you know, nobody can see the whole elephant.

So what's true for you is true. I mean, if you think it's a snake, well, that's fine because you probably got the tail and somebody else thinks it's something else. And it's fine for them too because they got the foot and others.

Now, what we're saying in the Christian life is this. There may be Presbyterian ears and Baptist tails and Pentecostal feet, but an elephant is an elephant and an alligator is something else. And if you go putting your hand in an alligator's mouth, you will notice there's a difference in your tangible contact with reality.

So we could get philosophical in this and we could say that the way for many, many years people realized this, and the East realized it, realized it a lot earlier than the West did, is that you cannot really know the whole thing.

Nobody can. That's why I said atheism is really an indefensible position unless you restate it. To say categorically there is no God is a dumb position. So most cool atheists say we don't think the question is relevant.

That's a cooler way to say it. To say there is no God is an omniscient statement. And the simple fact is nobody can see the whole elephant. Nobody sees the whole universe. Nobody knows what it's like.

So the East has always recognized that if you want to know truth, it has to be revealed to you. It must come from the infinite down to the finite. Christians don't have a problem with that. That's the way we work.

We believe in revelation. The East has always seen that you cannot comprehend truth just by logical progression alone because the finite can never see the infinite. For instance, say I am drawing here a picture of a man.

And I'm going to put an eye on the man. That's the eye. Now if I was an ant crawling on this board and I came across that dot and I'm having a good look at it now. What is the significance of that dot?

Now for me as an ant to really know the significance of that dot, I have to get back here and say Oh, I see, it's actually a face, you see. And that's an eye there. And then I've got to understand what faces are which is another thing again.

And then I've got to not only see this face on the board, I've got to see this board in the context of this classroom and I've got to see this classroom in the context of London and London in the context of England and England in the context of Europe and Europe in the context of the world and Earth in the context of the galaxies and the galaxies in the context of the universe and the universe in the context of all other possible universes and then I might be able to say the significance of that dot.

You see that? In other words, to really know whether that's a worthwhile thing or not to even talk about its position, its value or anything else in the universe, you have to see the whole thing. And people realize that after a while.

They think, well, who knows? Nobody knows everything, man. So how do you know what's true? Everything could be true. Nothing could be true. So the ways that people respond to that is multiple. Some of them go, fine, everything's true.

And you know, yes, it's beautiful. Have you ever heard that thing? I'm not in this world to measure up to your expectations and you're not in this world to measure up to mine and if by chance we should meet, everything will be beautiful.

Do you know that? That's good old eclectic thought. Now Aristotle and philosophers thousands of years ago understood that thing. You cannot understand the significance of anything unless it is seen in the context of the infinite.

So early the East recognized by logic alone you're not going to know what is ultimately true. So the East taught what you have to do is truth must be revealed to you. So here is a guru in a lotus position and he realized that the way to see truth is to have it, it's got to be revealed.

It's got to come by revelation. So we could put it like this. East taught truth comes by revelation. Now the Eastern means of getting that revelation are multiple. The various forms of yoga, for instance, most of you know about Hatha yoga, which is the physical, you know, with people in leotards on television showing you various ways to bend your neck and stuff like this.

And now we will assume this thing, you see. Now that, that's just a physical series of exercises to prepare you spiritually for revelation. But yoga in its real sense, like the Krishna people when they're chanting with the, you know, with the tambourines and the stuff, that's another form of yoga.

That's a praise to link oneself with the infinite. The East then has come up with all kinds of techniques and ways on which you can contact supposed realities. For instance, meditation. Transcendental meditation was offered in the early 60s.

Remember the Maharishi with the beard and the flowers and the beetles and that whole thing? He believed that what you'd done, you'd be given a mantra. Mantra. Mantra comes from two Sanskrit words, man, the mind, and tra, to deliver.

So it was to deliver you from the limitations of your own finite mind. And what they'd do is they'd give you a word, a meaningful word for you. And it was actually the name of a deity, of a Hindu deity.

And you chanted this word and what it would do is it would tune out this logical little lock you had and like a bubble arising from the floor of the ocean as it gets bigger as it goes up, so your head, and this is not to imply that you were bubble headed, that your consciousness would expand as you learned to do this.

And in the early days, the Maharishi's claim was that you could actually reach God consciousness. You could know all things. I think he gave a year or something, and the Beatles asked him what we were going to be doing in the future and he said, I don't know that, which bothered them a lot.