Moral Madness: Truth in the Age of Relativism

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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May 22, 2016

00:00: I want to ask that you remain standing and open your Bibles.
00:03: We're going to go ahead and read our text for the morning, and then we will have a seat.
00:13: We began last week to look at the little book of 2 John.
00:21: Very small letter.
00:25: One page in most of your Bibles.
00:31: The theme of the book of 2 John is truth.
00:37: That word occurs five times in the first four verses.
00:45: And so this morning we're going to...
00:47: We looked last week at verses 1 through 3.
00:49: This morning we're going to look at verse 4, but we're going to read from 1 to 4 as our opening for the morning.
00:56: So let us read.
00:58: The elder, to the elect lady, and her children whom I love in truth, and not only I, but also all who know the truth, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever.
01:16: Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father's Son in truth and love.
01:26: I rejoice greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth just as we were commanded by the Father.
01:40: Our Father and our God, I thank you for the opportunity to preach your word again.
01:45: I pray that you would keep me from error, as I certainly am a fallible man incapable of preaching error.
01:51: I pray that you would protect your people from that, protect my conscience from that.
01:57: Most of all, Lord, I pray that your word would go forth, would open hearts and save lives.
02:05: Lord God, for the believers in the room, that they would be challenged to evermore understand and appreciate the truth of the gospel.
02:13: And for anyone here, Lord, who does not know Christ, that they might be challenged to turn to Him in repentance and faith.
02:21: In this all we ask, Lord, in Jesus' name and for His sake.
02:26: Amen.
02:36: As I said last week, we began to look at the book of 2 John.
02:40: I told you all that we are looking at this book as a short series between Father's Day and Mother's Day.
02:49: Mother's Day was a couple of weeks ago.
02:50: Father's Day is a few weeks from now.
02:52: And I wanted to spend the time in between being able to go from the beginning and end of a book.
02:57: And there's only a few books of the Bible that you can do in just a few short weeks, and this is one of them.
03:03: But there's more than just the brevity of the book that should matter to us.
03:07: Also, the content drove me to this book because I do believe that we live in a time of moral madness.
03:16: That's the title of the series, by the way, Moral Madness.
03:20: We live in a time where truth and even the concept of truth has been abandoned in the minds of so many people.
03:30: There is such foolishness that reigns as wisdom.
03:38: Just this last, well, I guess it was two weeks ago now, one of the most famous and most well-respected and well-known scientists in the world was quoted as saying that there's really no way of knowing that all of this is not just an illusion.
04:02: He said essentially life itself could simply be like a computer program, just something that sort of is an illusion, and we don't really exist.
04:15: It was Descartes who said, I think, therefore I am, meaning I think, therefore I exist, because if I didn't exist, I couldn't think, and my very thoughts are the proof that I exist.
04:25: Well, the scientist is saying, no, that's not really true.
04:29: Your thoughts could simply be the byproduct of some larger program, sort of like the Matrix, somebody said, and this is all just an illusion.
04:41: You see, that's where we've come.
04:43: We've come to a place and a time where even the very question of existence and essence and purpose, it's all up for grabs.
04:54: There's no real foundation anymore, and everything is on the shifting sands of opinion.
05:01: And what are we left with? We're left with a world of people who have to argue over which bathroom to use.
05:13: I mean, it's just foolish.
05:16: We're in nonsense, and that's the word of the day.
05:21: It's just nonsense.
05:25: So this morning I want to talk about the nature of truth.
05:29: In the first four verses of 2 John, this short little postcard-sized epistle, he uses the word aletheia, truth in the Greek, five times in four verses, thus to establish a theme for the book.
05:51: Last week we talked about the importance of truth, the fact that truth is the foundation of what a Christian believes, is who we believe we are.
06:01: We are people of the truth.
06:02: God is a God of truth.
06:04: Jesus Christ Himself said, I am the way and the truth and the life, and the Spirit of God is called the Spirit of truth.
06:10: He who leads us into all truth.
06:12: The truth matters to the believer.
06:16: The truth is preeminent.
06:18: It's valuable.
06:18: In fact, Proverbs says, if you don't have it, go out and sell what you have and buy it, as if it were a commodity.
06:24: It's important.
06:25: It's valuable.
06:26: The truth has value.
06:27: It's more valuable than any precious stone.
06:30: It's more valuable than any bank account that's full.
06:33: It's valuable.
06:35: The truth is immeasurably precious.
06:42: And so that was our subject last week.
06:44: Well, this week I want to talk about the nature of truth, because in the title of the message, it's truth in the age of relativism.
06:53: We live in an age where people don't believe the truth exists anymore.
06:56: So we're going to talk about the nature of truth today.
07:00: And I want to begin by giving you a scenario.
07:04: I want you to imagine, if you would, imagine I brought in a jar of jelly beans.
07:12: Just a jar filled with jelly beans.
07:14: Now, don't get too excited.
07:15: I didn't bring a jar of jelly beans.
07:18: But imagine I brought in a jar of jelly beans, and I had them numbered.
07:23: I knew how many were in the jar.
07:25: And I said, okay, we're going to take a poll, and we're going to see who can guess how many jelly beans are in the jar.
07:34: The person who gets the number of jelly beans in the jar will win a new car.
07:39: Well, everybody would want to play if the odds were so high and the benefit so good as to be able to win a whole new car just for getting the right number of jelly beans.
07:49: Everybody writes the number down.
07:52: And then after everyone's written their number down, they place it in a container.
07:55: We say, okay, now, how many number of jelly beans there are? And I say there's 413 jelly beans in the jar.
08:05: And somebody stands up and goes, whoo-hoo! I wrote down 412.
08:10: I've got to be the closest.
08:12: And I look around, and no one else got 413.
08:15: And I say, well, yes, you are the closest, but you don't win the car.
08:20: Well, wait a minute.
08:20: I'm the closest.
08:21: I got the closest.
08:23: I didn't say whoever gets the closest.
08:26: I said whoever gets the number gets the car.
08:30: You say, oh, that's a trick.
08:32: No, it's not a trick.
08:33: It's how truth works.
08:34: You either got it or you don't.
08:36: 412 is not 413.
08:39: Is that right? 412 is close.
08:43: But as the old adage used to say, close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades.
08:50: Close doesn't cut it when you're looking for the truth, when you're looking for the accurate statement.
08:58: 412 is not 413.
09:00: Now, if we did it a different way, a different scenario, if I came in and I handed out pieces of paper and I told you, oh, I want you to write down your favorite television show.
09:10: Now, some of you I might be quite offended by.
09:13: I hope not.
09:15: But if I said, write down your favorite television show.
09:19: Everybody wrote down their favorite television show.
09:21: And I say, now pass them in.
09:23: We're going to see who's right.
09:24: Would it be possible to determine who's right? No, it wouldn't be.
09:31: Because while Dale might like MASH, that's a 30-year-old television show.
09:35: I'm not trying to date you, Dale.
09:40: You know, Courtney might like Golden Girls.
09:42: I don't even know if you've ever even seen that.
09:44: I'm still dating people.
09:45: Mr.
09:46: Ed, okay, that's a 50-year-old show.
09:49: Thank you.
09:51: Somebody names a show, whatever the show may be, it doesn't have any objective truth.
09:58: You see, what I'm trying to help you understand is the difference between objective truth and subjective truth.
10:05: There are different types of truth.
10:08: Objective truth is truth that is always true no matter who or what the situation.
10:15: Subjective truth is something that is true determined by the individual.
10:20: If I say how many jelly beans are in the jar, there's one right answer that's true and everything else is wrong.
10:27: If I say, what's your favorite television show? What's your favorite ice cream? What kind of car is best? Now, you might come in with all the data and everything, but at the end of the day, you might like a Ford better than a Chevrolet or vice versa, and to you, that's the truth, and there is subjectivity that's involved.
10:44: There is such a thing as subjective truth.
10:48: Both types of truth are viable.
10:50: Both types of truth do matter, and the Bible does describe both types of truth.
10:55: There's a place in Romans 14 where the Apostle Paul says, there are certain things that you shouldn't do because they violate your conscience.
11:05: They're not sins in and of themselves, but they're sins because you are violating your conscience to do them.
11:12: For instance, some people, it violates their conscience in any way, shape, or form to have one sip of alcohol.
11:20: To them, that's a violation of their conscience, and Paul says you shouldn't do that.
11:25: If it violates your conscience, you shouldn't do that.
11:27: While drinking a sip of alcohol isn't necessarily a sin, if it violates your conscience and you shouldn't do it.
11:34: Some people don't think you should smoke a cigar, and then I see a couple of faces, well, wait, wait, I know.
11:42: And some of you, like Charles Spurgeon, would say, well, I smoke a cigar to the glory of God.
11:46: Okay.
11:49: That's what Charles Spurgeon said.
11:51: He said, I'm going to go home tonight and smoke a cigar to the glory of God.
11:54: Okay.
11:56: What I'm saying is there are certain things that are subjective, and it is, and it's okay.
12:02: The Bible addresses, the Bible isn't ignorant of those things.
12:05: It addresses those things.
12:07: It addresses matters of the conscience.
12:14: The problem that we have in our society today is that all truth has been put into the category of the subjective.
12:27: It's not that there is objective and subjective truth.
12:30: That we have to agree.
12:32: But the problem with the modern mind and the modern era is that people have taken all truth and said it's all subjective.
12:40: We talked about this in Sunday school.
12:42: If I say God exists, it's either true or it's not.
12:50: That's an objective statement.
12:53: But if I say God exists for me, what did I just do? I just made it subjective, didn't I? I just made it subjective.
13:02: And guess what? It doesn't make it true.
13:06: It just makes it true for me.
13:09: It's like the lady who told R.C.
13:10: Sproul.
13:12: She said, you believe in God and you're right.
13:14: I don't believe in God and I'm right.
13:15: He said, we can't both be right.
13:18: We cannot both be right.
13:21: You're making a statement of objective truth.
13:25: And when we make a statement of objective truth, it is either correct or it's incorrect.
13:31: There is no halfway point.
13:33: There's no way it can be halfway true.
13:35: God either exists or He doesn't.
13:37: And all my faith in the world isn't going to conjure Him up.
13:40: And all the doubt in the world isn't going to make Him go away.
13:44: You can't reject Him out of existence and you can't believe Him into existence.
13:48: He either exists or He doesn't.
13:52: It's an objective thing.
13:55: You understand what I'm saying? Because especially in churches, the modern desire has been to make all truth relative, all truth subjective, all truth is up to you.
14:14: And the scariest place that this has really had its effect is in the area of ethics.
14:21: Ethics, as you probably know, is the study of right and wrong.
14:27: Ethos, the idea of something that's correct or proper.
14:31: The ethics of a people is now all about relativity.
14:39: And how we deal with one another is all about relative thinking.
14:44: It was not too long ago that it was commonplace to teach that there were things that were absolutely right and they were absolutely wrong.
14:54: And that's what ethics was.
14:56: It was a study of what was right and what was wrong.
15:00: To discover the distinctions between right and wrong.
15:05: And yet this has been abandoned in our modern day.
15:09: Especially since the revolution of common thinking that occurred during the 60s.
15:14: It's a time period in our nation's history when everything that claimed to be true started to be rebelled against.
15:20: We talk about the 60s revolution.
15:23: Everything's got to be questioned.
15:24: Everything's got to be rebelled against.
15:25: And a lot of that brought with it no more absolutes in the mind of many people.
15:30: And all the standards of truth and error were being called into question.
15:32: As a result, the study of ethics underwent a major change.
15:35: Instead of searching for absolute truth or absolute right and wrong, the students of ethics began to study cultural differences.
15:42: Relative ideas of right and wrong.
15:43: Why this person might think this is right and this person might think this is wrong.
15:47: It all became an issue of relativism.
15:48: This led even further away from the idea that absolute truth exists and further into the world view that all truth is purely subjective.
15:56: Finally, our modern world is filled with people who see truth as much like beauty.
15:59: Truth like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
16:06: And the problem is that this issue is not something that can just be put aside.
16:09: We're dealing with the subject of truth.
16:11: And as we learned last week, it's the most precious thing in the world.
16:14: Why put it up to opinion? Is there no truth that surpasses us? Is there no truth that surpasses our opinion? Is there no transcendental truth? Now, let me back up.
16:29: I used a big word there, and I used it in such a way that I hope I didn't bring any confusion.
16:34: Some of you have only heard the word transcendental in regard to meditation.
16:39: Transcendental meditation.
16:41: That's where people try to rise to a higher level of being or spiritual plane through meditation.
16:48: That's not what I mean when I use the word transcendental truth.
16:51: Transcendental truth is truth that transcends the individual.
16:56: It's truth that stands above us.
16:59: It is truth that is always true.
17:02: It's objective truth.
17:05: If God exists, that's a transcendental truth.
17:09: No matter what we believe changes it.
17:12: Understand that? Well, the passage that we read today, verse 4, it says, I rejoice greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth.
17:22: This is the thing.
17:23: John is writing to this lady, and he's writing to her, and he says, I rejoice that some of your children are walking in the truth.
17:31: I rejoice that some of your household are actually going and living in the truth.
17:36: They're walking in the truth.
17:38: And here's the thing that you have to understand.
17:40: If relativism is true, if all truth is subjective, then it would be impossible to walk in the truth because there's no way to know what it is for sure.
17:53: To walk in the truth that John is proclaiming here would be impossible if we didn't have any idea what it is.
18:04: Relativism as a worldview cannot stand.
18:09: In fact, I don't do this to be a jerk, but sometimes I talk to people and they'll say, well, all truth is relative, meaning all truth is subjective.
18:22: All truth is up to the individual.
18:24: And I'll say, is that true? You get what I'm saying? If you tell me all truth is subjective, I'll say, is that true? And is that a statement of absolute? And if that's an absolute statement, then all truth can't be absolute or relative because that's absolute.
18:47: Relativism as a worldview, relativism in regard to truth is inherently dangerous because the more people fall prey to this belief both outside the church and inside the church, the more Satan will get a foothold into the world and be able to spread the evil that we see all around us because truth is the only weapon that's adequately fit to battle evil.
19:13: And when truth is allowed to be put away or replaced, we open the door for all sorts of error to come in and set up camp.
19:26: I want to make a couple of points this morning.
19:29: All that was introduction.
19:31: I want to make a couple of points on the subject of relativism that I hope will help you understand why I think it's so important that we understand how dangerous it is.
19:40: I want to expound upon why it is imperative that we seek to walk in the truth by showing the three most dangerous problems that are a result of the worldview of relativism.
19:48: If you have your notes, if you want to take notes, you can.
19:51: There's three things about relativism that we need to understand.
19:54: Number one, relativism assumes God has not spoken.
19:59: That's the first thing.
20:00: Relativism assumes God has not spoken.
20:03: Number two, relativism never provides any objective standards for morality or ethics.
20:11: Relativism never provides any objective standards for morality or ethics.
20:16: And number three, relativism makes man the authority instead of God.
20:23: That's the three most dangerous things about relativism as a system of thought in regard to truth.
20:31: So let's break those down quickly.
20:36: First, relativism assumes God has not spoken.
20:38: For someone to say that absolute truth doesn't exist means there's no absolute author of truth.
20:44: Or at least if he exists, if the author of truth exists, he hasn't told us what it is.
20:50: You see, relativism says we don't know what truth is, we can't know what truth is, we have to determine truth and truth is different for every person, which means what? There's no absolute author of truth.
21:01: And there's really two camps.
21:02: There's those who are on the atheistic side who say, well, yes, God hasn't spoken because He doesn't exist.
21:09: And then there are those that are on the theistic side who would say, yes, God has spoken, but we don't know what He said.
21:17: And both are dangerous.
21:21: Atheism would say God hasn't spoken because He doesn't exist.
21:25: Of course we don't know what truth is because there's no author of truth.
21:28: There's no standard of truth.
21:31: I use this illustration a lot.
21:33: Some of you have heard it before, but it's one of the best illustrations I can tell you about how relativistic thinking clouds the mind and corrupts the thoughts.
21:43: In the mid-1980s, the great debate between Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein occurred out in California.
21:49: And some of you have heard me tell this story before.
21:51: Greg Bonson was one of the great Christian thinkers of the last century.
21:55: He died relatively a young man.
21:58: Wonderful teacher.
21:59: If you've ever read anything by Bonson, Bonson was a great Christian mind.
22:04: And he did a debate at a college with a man by the name of Gordon Stein.
22:08: And the debate with Gordon Stein, Greg Bonson asked Stein, why was what Hitler did evil? Why was what Hitler did evil? And Stein said, and I have it written down.
22:32: It's a very long response, but I'll give you the Cliff's Notes version of what he said because he opined for about five minutes on the subject.
22:42: But essentially what he said was this, Adolf Hitler went against the social morals and standards of his day and because he did not have the right to violate the social morals and standards of his day, what he did was wrong.
23:10: And Stein closed with that.
23:14: He said that's why it was wrong.
23:15: It was wrong because it went against the social morals and the standards of his day and that's why it was wrong.
23:22: And Bonson then said, so there was nothing transcendently wrong with what he did.
23:32: It was just against the, if the European social construct of morality and ethics had allowed for the extermination of the Jews, it would have been right.
23:52: Yes.
23:56: You see, if you don't believe that God has spoken, you abandon anything but subjectivity in your search for a reason for your ethic because there is no standard higher than you.
24:20: That's dangerous.
24:26: And that's where the atheists are.
24:27: You ask an atheist, and they'll tell you, an atheist, let me, I'm not trying to paint atheists as evil oogie boogie type thing.
24:35: Please don't get me wrong.
24:36: Atheists, a lot of them, you know, they're nice enough when you talk to them and they, some of them are very kind.
24:42: Some of them are very philanthropic and meaning they try to do good things in the world from their perspective.
24:50: So I'm not trying to paint atheists with like this evil brush.
24:54: But you ask them, why is something evil? Because they'll say, I don't believe in God because there's so much evil in the world.
25:00: Say, wait a minute.
25:01: What is evil? What is evil? How do you have evil without a standard for good? And how do you have a standard for good? Somebody says, well, I know what good is.
25:18: I don't need God to determine what good is.
25:20: Why? How? Where do you get good from? Upon what basis do you establish what is good? Well, I know what good is.
25:28: How do you know? How do you know what good is? Well, I just know.
25:36: That's not an answer.
25:39: You know why you know what good and bad is? The Bible tells us.
25:45: God has placed within every man an understanding of his law.
25:49: And that's why you know that when you lie, you should feel bad about it because lying is a sin.
25:54: That's why you know when you commit some kind of sin, you know it's wrong.
25:58: That's why you feel guilt.
25:59: You know one of the worst things we've done in society today is we've tried to remove the idea of guilt.
26:03: You know guilt is good because you shouldn't do bad.
26:09: You shouldn't feel good about doing bad.
26:11: But we've removed that.
26:13: We've become a society that the prophets of old said has forgotten how to blush.
26:19: But we don't know how to feel ashamed anymore because we've been told everything you do is right.
26:24: It's right if it was right for you.
26:25: It was right if it felt good.
26:32: I've gone a little off topic.
26:34: The atheist says God has not spoken.
26:36: But he's not the concern that I have.
26:40: My concern is the Christian relativist.
26:44: Because I've seen this.
26:46: I've talked to people like this.
26:48: How many of you have ever heard of the emergent church? The emergent church, emerging church, it's a coined phrase.
26:56: The emergent church, they're relativistic in their teaching.
27:02: And what they say is not that God hasn't spoken.
27:05: But they'll say God hasn't spoken clearly.
27:09: We have His word.
27:10: And here's the thing that's so dangerous about emergent churches.
27:12: They'll say we have the word of God.
27:14: It's inspired.
27:15: And it's inerrant.
27:16: And it's infallible.
27:17: But we ain't got any idea what it says.
27:22: And if you claim that you know what it says because you actually use grammar and context to determine what it says.
27:30: They'll say that you lack epistemological humility.
27:33: How dare you think you know what this says.
27:36: No one can really know what it says.
27:39: So all that is is relativism repackaged as Christian emergent theology.
27:46: And all it is is 19th, 20th century liberalism repackaged as modern Christianity.
27:54: It says yeah, we have an infallible Bible.
27:56: That's why people say all the time well I went to a church and it said on their statement of faith we believe in an infallible Scripture.
28:03: That doesn't matter anymore.
28:05: That statement in and of itself that we believe in an inerrant Bible doesn't matter anymore.
28:11: If the person behind the pulpit doesn't believe that he can understand what it says.
28:16: If the people in the pews don't believe that the book can be discerned and we can understand what it says it doesn't matter if you believe it's inerrant if you can't understand it.
28:34: And this is why you get Bible studies where people sit around and they say what do you think it means? And what do you think it means? And what do you think it means? I don't care what you think it means.
28:43: I care what it means.
28:46: And that can be discerned by the historical grammatical process of interpretation.
28:51: It's not hard folks.
28:54: Jesus said I am the way, the truth, and the life.
28:55: No one comes to the Father except by me.
28:57: And people say I don't know if I like that.
29:00: So I'm going to reinterpret it.
29:02: I don't care what you like.
29:04: It doesn't matter what you like.
29:05: It's really easy to understand.
29:07: You know what the hardest part about the Bible is not the parts that you don't understand.
29:11: It's the parts that you do understand and don't want to believe.
29:14: That's what's hard.
29:15: You get the parts you don't like.
29:17: You get the parts you don't want to believe in.
29:18: So you reinterpret it.
29:20: It can't mean what it says because that's too hard.
29:23: I've got to change it.
29:25: And we all become relativists.
29:27: We all become willing to be subjective with truth and make it say what we want it to say.
29:32: I can't believe that guy was in the belly of a fish for three days.
29:35: I don't think God could sustain a man like that.
29:37: I've got to reinterpret it.
29:40: I don't believe God could create the world in seven days.
29:42: I don't think that that really happened that way.
29:44: I don't think God could do that.
29:45: So I have to reinterpret it.
29:46: I don't think God could speak from a burning bush.
29:48: That doesn't make any sense to me.
29:50: I don't think that's the way it happened.
29:51: I've got to reinterpret it.
29:54: If you simply take it for what it says, it's not that hard to understand.
29:58: I mean, I'm not saying the whole Bible is easy to understand all the way through.
30:02: There are parts.
30:03: I mean, there's some literature in the Bible that's a little bit more difficult to understand than other parts.
30:07: But for the most part, there is something that we call the perspiscuity of Scripture.
30:12: The perspiscuity may sound like a funny word, but perspiscuity simply means the clarity.
30:16: It comes from the Reformation period, and this is one of the things the Reformers said.
30:20: They said, you know what? We need to give the Bible to the common man.
30:23: You see, before the Reformation, the Bible wasn't in the hands of the common man.
30:26: You know where it was? It was only in the hands of the clergy.
30:29: In fact, they would chain it to the pulpit so people couldn't take it.
30:34: They didn't want the common person to have the Bible.
30:37: Do you know that William Tyndale was burned at the stake.
30:39: Why? For translating the Bible into English so that common people could read it.
30:46: Martin Luther said, the common plowman with Scripture is more powerful than the mightiest pope without it.
30:55: Why? Because it's not that hard to understand.
31:01: He said, anybody who reads it can understand it and apply it.
31:07: This is why I want you all to have a Bible and read it.
31:11: I want you to test what I say by the word of God.
31:17: We shouldn't all be relativists.
31:19: We should all be biblicists.
31:21: We should try to see what the Bible says and know that this is the source of the truth.
31:30: Alright, I'm out of time.
31:33: I still got two more points.
31:36: But let me give you just a quick breakdown of these final two and I'll draw to a close.
31:42: Relativism never provides objective standards for ethics and morality.
31:45: Again, we already said, relativism assumes God hasn't spoken.
31:49: And because of that, there's no objective standards.
31:52: Everything becomes subjective.
31:54: And we see this even within the justice of our land.
31:58: Justice has taken a long goodbye because everything now has become subjective.
32:04: As a result, we see now, it's legal to terminate the life of an unborn child, but it's illegal to kill a pregnant woman and you get charged with two murders.
32:19: How do you justify that? Mentally.
32:24: If you kill a baby while it's in the womb, it's legal.
32:29: You kill a woman who's pregnant, two murders.
32:35: That is the folly of relativism because there's no objective standard behind that.
32:47: Children in schools can't take a Tylenol without their parents' permission.
32:55: But they can have sexual counseling without their parents' consent.
33:07: Counseling on whether or not they're a boy or a girl.
33:10: Counseling on whether or not they should be having sex at 13, 12, 11 years old.
33:16: They can have counseling absolutely devoid of parent permission.
33:19: Parents don't have to know.
33:20: But you can't take a Tylenol without the parents' permission.
33:33: One of the most famous people in the world right now, one of the most acclaimed people in the world is an ex-athlete who now claims that he has been a woman in a man's body.
33:49: And he is proclaimed as a person of great courage.
33:54: He is proclaimed as a person of absolute moral authority.
34:00: And to claim anything different about his life is to say the most atrocious of things.
34:10: But what was it? Less than 10 years ago, a football player here from Jacksonville made it onto the scene and he proclaimed Christ.
34:22: And he wore little things under his eyes with John 3.16 or whatever under his eyes or Philippians 4 under his eyes.
34:29: And he would get down on his knees and pray before the football games.
34:31: And he was absolutely defamed.
34:34: Not because he was a bad football player or whatever.
34:36: That might have been the case.
34:37: I don't know anything about football.
34:39: But he was defamed for what? Because of his outspoken faith.
34:45: We want you to be outspoken about transgenderism, but shut up about Christ.
34:52: You see? There's no objective standard there.
34:56: It's all subjective.
35:01: And it's destroying us.
35:04: Because we're living in a society that behaves as if there's no God.
35:11: Fyodor Dostoevsky Try saying that three times real fast.
35:16: The Russian Christian novelist said this.
35:19: He said, if there is no God, all things are permissible.
35:25: If there is no God, all things are permissible.
35:28: Well, guess what? We live in a society that believes there's no God.
35:34: And that's why we see all things permissible.
35:41: Finally, relativism makes man the authority instead of God.
35:46: If you believe that all truth is relative and that man determines what is and is not truth and you believe ultimately that man is the authority and God is not.
35:59: And that's where we have become.
36:01: We've come to a place where the most dangerous and the most heinous thing that you can do is tell someone that they're wrong about anything.
36:11: People can make whatever claims they want to make as long as they don't tell other people they're wrong.
36:22: Go tell someone that Jesus is Savior.
36:24: They won't argue with you.
36:26: Tell someone Jesus is the only Savior and following anyone else will send you to hell and they will crucify you.
36:38: People want to be their own authority.
36:41: And relativism allows that and thus that is why it is so popular.
36:47: The problems with relativism are many-fold but the three that need to be kept in mind again, I'll give you the outline.
36:53: It assumes God hasn't spoken.
36:55: It never provides objective standards for ethics or morality.
36:59: And it makes man and not God the author of truth.
37:03: And here's the thing, folks.
37:04: Let me end with this.
37:06: God has determined the truth.
37:08: It is not ours to decide.
37:10: It's ours to discover and obey.
37:12: Let me say that again.
37:15: God has determined the truth.
37:17: It's not ours to decide.
37:18: It is ours to discover and it is ours to obey.
37:25: So my prayer for you today is that you understand that the truth comes from God not from within ourselves.
37:37: Let's pray.
37:37: Father, I thank you for the Word.
37:39: I thank you for the truth.
37:40: I pray that this has been helpful.
37:42: I pray that this has been encouraging for your people.
37:46: I pray that it's been challenging.
37:49: I pray ultimately that we would understand the nature of truth, that ultimately it is whatever is in accord with you.
37:57: And Father, though there are things that are subjective, ultimate and final transcendent truth comes from you.
38:04: Help us to be able to discern it.
38:07: Help us to be able to follow it.
38:09: Help us to be able to be obedient to it.
38:11: In Jesus' name we pray.
38:14: Amen.