TWP #10 | What is Secularism? Part 1

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Why is America so secular? People often ask this question. This episode explores why.

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TPW #11 | What is Secular Humanism? Part 2

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Paul warns that evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse deceiving one another and being deceived.
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The reason Paul told Timothy that was because he needed to be ready to spend the balance of his life in uninterrupted warfare for the truth.
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The most dangerous people alive today are always, always, always ordained ministers.
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They're the most dangerous people in the world, especially the ones that people think are Christians, who will sell you theological poison to the damnation of your soul.
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Folks, I just want to warn you about something. Every heretic in the entire history of the church, without exception, has taught their heresy in the name of being faithful to Scripture.
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That was the day of judgment. That is the day of final salvation brought back in time and applied to us once for all at the moment of our effectual calling when we repent and believe in our unity to Christ.
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Welcome to the... I wanted to do a sermon today that I preached not too long ago.
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I did a two -part series on secularism. I think secularism is extremely important for Christians today to understand.
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Most of the people that you work with in the workplace, I myself was a computer programmer for 11 years and the vast majority of people are non -religious, at least where I worked in Cincinnati, or they were nominally
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Roman Catholic. But if they weren't that, they were just basically secularists. But it's important for us to understand what secularism is and why it's so dominant in our country today and to understand its basic tenets and how we got to where we are as a culture.
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We need to be equipped to deal with this religion in this worldview so that we can effectively evangelize it and talk to it about Jesus Christ and the gospel and call them to repentance.
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So I hope you enjoy. This is part one of a short two -sermon series I did on secular humanism.
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Good evening, everyone. Please take your Bibles and turn to Psalm 14 for our scripture reading for this evening.
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Psalm 14. Psalm 14.
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We'll just read the whole psalm for our scripture reading. Psalm 14 verse 1.
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This is God's Word. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt.
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They have committed abominable deeds. There is none who does good. The Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
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They have all turned aside. Together they have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one.
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Do all the workers of wickedness not know who eat of my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the
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Lord? There they are in great dread, for God is with the righteous generation. You would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted, but the
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Lord is his refuge. Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion when the
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Lord restores his captive people. Jacob will rejoice. Israel will be glad. May God bless the reading of his
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Word. Let's pray, please. Our Father in heaven, we pray that you would be with us this evening as we contemplate, really, what is the most dominant perspective, the most dominant worldview of the world in which we were born into, really everybody here, secularism.
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We pray that we would understand this topic and understand some of its history and understand how we are to think biblically in order to be able to take the gospel to a nation that is very secular and also how to filter out of our own thinking those secular ideas with which we've been infected.
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We pray you would bless us to that end now in Jesus's name. Amen. What are secular religions?
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To understand this, let us first define the word secular. The English word secular comes from the
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Latin word secularis, which means the world or an age. The English word secular means of or relating to worldly or temporal, not overtly or specifically religious.
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The 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary defines secular as pertaining to the present world or to things not spiritual or holy.
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So secularism, as we see it today in our country, means this, according to a modern dictionary, indifferent to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations.
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When we speak about America becoming more and more secular, what we mean is less and less concerned with spiritual and religious matters.
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However, one point that we've emphasized in this church is that men really cannot become, in the ultimate sense, secular.
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Man really can't be totally indifferent to religious ideas and to ultimate questions. Even the staunchest of atheists, people who deny
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God's existence, cannot help but be concerned about spiritual and religious matters.
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Man, as the image of God, is not capable of being entirely indifferent to the questions of religion.
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Man is inherently religious in everything he does, including opposing God. As our
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Lord taught us, we are either for or against him, never neutral. And so the idea of secularism being indifference to spiritual things really is a bit of a misnomer because man's not capable of being totally indifferent to religious things.
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Therefore, we must speak of secular and atheistic perspectives as religions, and it has spawned a whole slew of them.
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We're going to look at a number of them in this series. Religions really just are worldviews.
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I would like you to try to equate those two things in your mind. When we speak of religions, we're talking about people's worldviews.
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And remember, very quickly, just by way of review, what is a worldview? A worldview is a network of presuppositions through which people interpret and organize all of their perceptions of reality and all of their experiences in this world.
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And what is a presupposition? Presupposition is a belief that a person holds to be true at a fundamental level.
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As such, presuppositions are not able to be tested by observation or science, and presuppositions have the highest immunity in people's thinking.
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Once something becomes a presupposition, it is nearly impossible to divest someone of it. Presuppositions are the beliefs through which all observations and all scientific data and all of our experiences are interpreted.
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As an example, I've used before, I'll just use it real quick again, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Let's say a believer and an atheist were in the tomb of Jesus with spotlights on him, and they watched him come back to life from the dead.
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The believer would look at that and conclude, based on his presuppositions, Jesus has risen in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy by the hand of God and is the conquering
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Son of God and my Savior. The atheist, having looked at the exact same event, would conclude, now there's something you don't see every day.
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I wonder what natural processes could have led to the spontaneous naturalistic resurrection of a dead man.
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This is really an unusual event and one for which, in time, eventually, we will have a naturalistic explanation that does not invoke
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God or the supernatural in any way. So, do observations and do facts and events speak for themselves?
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Obviously not. What events and observations and observable data are allowed to mean is determined entirely by the worldview or the religion of the person interpreting that data.
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Secularism is just as powerful of a religion as is Islam or Mormonism, and therefore we need to discuss the various forms of secular and atheistic religions because they are the dominant perspective in our nation today, and all of us have been deeply influenced by them.
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Secularism really is the milieu in which all of us were born and have lived our lives.
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The indifference and disrespect towards the gospel, the Bible, the existence of God, flows from the fact that secularism has swallowed nearly everything in sight.
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Bodie Hodge wrote this, quote, the once great West, whose churches sent missionaries out to the whole world, is now crumbling at a foundational level due in part to the influence of secularism.
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Secular religious doctrines are even infiltrating the church, end quote. Many Christians lament the increasingly hostile secularism that is found in all quarters of our country, and if you watch the news or follow any news media outlets, you can't help but notice it, and many wonder what happened.
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How did America, a nation once significantly dominated by a biblical and Christian worldview, how did it become so secularized and atheistic?
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Historically, I personally believe the church has to take some of the blame for this. The naturalistic versions of corrupted
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Christianity need to shoulder some of the blame here, and I'm going to go into some of the history here. I hope that you will listen very carefully to this.
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What do I mean by naturalistic versions of Christianity? They are forms of Christianity which locate the decisive force in salvation, not in a supernatural work of God, but in a natural work of man, i .e.
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our free will and our works and our efforts, etc. America wasn't stolen by secularists, folks.
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Through the annihilation of supernatural Christianity by the rise of revivalism during the so -called
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Second Great Awakening in the 19th century, the church gave this country to the secularists.
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I remember first being introduced to this concept and studying the history of Christianity in America, and there were two books that were very, very important to my own thinking.
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The first was Made in America, The Shaping of American Evangelicalism by Michael Scott Horton, and then
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Ian Murray's book, Revival and Revivalism, The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, and he documents how this naturalistic impulse, this seeing conversion as arising from the free will of man and the way that affected the way the church does worship and does evangelism and did everything that it did, just devastated the credibility of Christianity to this country.
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Perhaps the two biggest heretics in the entire history of the church, there's two at the very top of the list, number one and number two, the
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British monk Pelagius from the 5th century who did battle with Augustine and Pelagius' most famous superstar false prophet,
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Charles Grandison Finney. They did unspeakable and incalculable damage to the church in this country.
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Many years ago, I was introduced to the writings of Charles Finney, unwittingly through reading a biography about Keith Green.
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Keith Green died at a very young age. I think that had he lived long enough, he would have seen the danger of men like Charles Finney, but he was a big fan of Finney, and because of that,
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I asked at the time my fiancee, Amy, to get me a copy of this book by Charles Finney, and I read it and it almost destroyed my faith altogether.
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It's called Revival Lectures. It is a manifesto for a completely anti -supernatural understanding of revival, conversion, and salvation.
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Finney's statements are clear and shocking, and in fact, most reformed seminaries will force their students to read
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Revival Lectures because church history professors will tell their students, if I tell you what Finney actually said, you won't believe me.
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You have to read it for yourself. In the opening chapter of his book called Revival Lectures, Charles Finney addresses what a true revival is.
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Here are his words, quote, Religion is the work of man. It is something for man to do.
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It consists in obeying God. It is man's duty, end quote. In Finney's most famous sermon, his most famous sermon is titled
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Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts, to change their own hearts.
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Finney wrote this, quote, There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature.
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It consists entirely in the right use of the powers of nature. It is just that and nothing else.
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When mankind becomes religious, they are not enabled to put forth exertions, which they were unable to put forth before.
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They only exert the powers which they had before in a different way and use them for the glory of God. A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle in any sense.
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It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of unconstituted means and as much as any other effect produced by the application of means, end quote.
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Okay, Charles Finney is not Wesleyan. Charles Finney is not Arminian. Finney is pagan. Finney is pagan.
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When B .B. Warfield, the Princeton theologian, wrote a review of Charles Finney's systematic theology, Warfield, who was a
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Kentucky gentleman, one of the nicest men, I would love to have met the guy. He's one of the most gentle critics you could ever read, but when he reviewed
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Finney's systematic theology, he said, God could be removed from this book without substantially altering its content.
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His systematic theology. Finney teaches the most crass form of salvation by works righteousness
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I have ever read from anyone. He out -Pelagianizes Pelagius himself. In answer to the question, does a
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Christian cease to be a Christian when he commits sin? Finney answers in the affirmative. Here are his exact words, quote, whenever a
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Christian sins, he must, for the time being, cease to be holy. This is self -evident. Whenever he sins, he must be condemned.
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He must incur the penalty of the law of God. You hear what he's saying? If you're a Christian, you lose your salvation every time you sin.
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He continues, if it be said that the precept is still binding upon him, but that with respect to the Christian, the penalty is forever set aside or abrogated,
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I reply that to abrogate the penalty is to repeal the precept, for a precept without a penalty is no law.
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It is only counsel or advice. The Christian, therefore, is justified no longer than he obeys, and he must be condemned when he disobeys, or antinomianism is true.
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In these respects, this is Charles Finney, the great evangelist of American church history. Listen to his words.
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In these respects, then, the sinning Christian and the unconverted sinner are upon the precisely the same ground, end quote.
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Commenting on the doctrine of justification as spelled out by the Westminster Confession, Charles Finney wrote this, quote, this error has slain more souls,
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I fear, than all the universalism that ever cursed the world. Whenever a Christian sins, he comes under condemnation and must repent or do his first works or be lost forever.
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With regard to the Confession's insistence on the forensic legal character of justification, Charles Finney makes the following reply, quote, but for sinners to be forensically or legally pronounced just is impossible and absurd.
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As we shall see, there are many conditions while there is but one ground of the justification of sinners. As has already been said, there can be no justification in a legal or forensic sense but upon the ground of universal, perfect, and uninterrupted obedience to law.
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This is, of course, denied by those who hold that gospel justification or the justification of penitent sinners is of the nature of a forensic or judicial justification.
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They hold to the legal maximum that what a man does by another he does by himself and therefore the law regards
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Christ's obedience as ours on the ground that he obeyed for us, end quote. He's rejecting that.
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And Charles Finney calls the biblical doctrine of justification as something that's befitting a romance novel. This man hated the
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Christian faith. He denies original sin, the substitutionary atonement, justification. He said if you believe that you're justified by the righteousness of Jesus Christ, you've believed another gospel.
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This man, Charles Finney, on the back of my copy of Revival Lectures is credited in the latest printing of Revival Lectures with the conversions of more than 500 ,000 people in this country.
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Even the late founder of Liberty University, Dr. Jerry Falwell, said of Finney, quote, he is one of my heroes, end quote.
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Because Finney did not believe there was anything supernatural about conversion, he did everything in his power to stir emotions, to excite people into making decisions for Christ.
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He also invented the anxious bench, which was a precursor to today's altar call.
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The anti -biblical notion of altar calls has, I personally believe, so discredited the faith to our country that it really never has recovered from the second
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Great Awakening. How many of us in this room know people who made a decision, went forward at a revival meeting?
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How many here have gone forward to altar calls? I have gone forward to dozens of them, dozens of them, wondering if I really meant it this time.
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How many times have you recommitted your life, and so on and so forth, prayed the prayer, and how many people are convinced they're going to heaven because of this kind of evangelistic technique?
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Charles Finney and his revivals and those who followed in his wake in the early 19th century in this country did most of their work in the upstate
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New York area, which quickly became known as the Burned -Over District, and towards the end of his life,
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Finney even lamented the failure of his ministry, and he even wrote that everywhere that the revival fires seemed to burn so bright, there is now nothing but contempt for the things of God.
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And upstate New York quickly became an incubator for all kinds of weird millennial cults, and the Restorationist movement, and the
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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mind Science cults, the Mary Baker, they all come out of that same area.
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I used to wonder, studying cults years ago, what in the world happened in New York that it became this incubator for all these bizarre cults?
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Well, Charles Finney left it in utter despair. When you preach a false gospel like this, the only thing that can come out of it is total despair, and hopelessness, or Pharisaism, people that actually think they're perfect enough to go to heaven, etc.
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There are many people today who are deeply influenced by the man -centered, naturalistic, Pelagian theology of Charles Finney who do not as yet realize it.
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Secularism dominates our country because the church has embraced an almost comprehensively secular view of how people are saved.
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Isn't that incredible? The church, by and large in this country, has a secular view of conversion.
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God's not involved in it. It's all based upon men and their autonomous freewill decisions. We've also been deeply secularized by the onslaught of evolution and deep time.
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Christians are not effective in reaching our secular culture because, by and large, we are incredibly secular and naturalistic ourselves.
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And the way we look at conversion, the way we look at the origin of the universe, the way we look at the origin of man, the origin of plants, the origin of animals, the age of things, the geologic features, and so forth.
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So many professed conservative and even reformed people today may hold the supernaturalism when it comes to conversion, but are deeply secular on the age of the earth and the history and origin of man.
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The antidote for us with regard to secularism, I hope if there's one thing you remember in this message this evening, the antidote to all of this is for us to think supernaturally.
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We need to think supernaturally about the whole universe and its creation, its origin, the origin of all forms of life and the various kinds that God created and how they reproduce according to their own kind.
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And man has always been man. And we need to think supernaturally about conversion as well. We need to be comprehensively supernaturalists in our understanding of the creation of the universe and in our understanding of how sinners are saved.
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Triune God supernaturally entered into a covenant of redemption where God the Father sovereignly elected a people and trusted their salvation to God the
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Son who lovingly agreed to save them. And with God the Holy Spirit to apply this great work to the elect at God's sovereignly appointed time in the lives of each of them.
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I hope that everyone here looks at their own conversion that way. Your conversion was supernaturally, divinely decreed, planned, supernaturally executed by the
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Triune God. There was nothing naturalistic about your conversion. And yet for so many years of my own early
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Christian life, I really thought I had saved myself. I really did. And I remember introducing the doctrines of grace to my wife, who comes out of a background where there's no gospel at all there.
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And she saw how God had converted her at a young age and preserved her even though there was no Christianity in her family anywhere.
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And I remember sharing the doctrines of grace with her. She said, I've always believed my conversion was supernatural. I said, yeah,
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I thought mine was of my own self. The creation of space, time, matter and energy is entirely supernatural.
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Everything about creation week in Genesis 1 is miraculous and supernatural. I'll never forget reading people who believe that Genesis 1 and the days there are actually billions of years long saying things like, well, how could there be plants that needed sunlight for photosynthesis?
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How can that take place on day three when the sun isn't created until day four? Wouldn't all those plants die?
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Even then, I thought that that was an odd objection. The fact is, everything about the whole week is supernatural, isn't it? You think
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God just forgot he needed the sun to keep plants alive? It's not like the moment God creates something, he then becomes subject to the physical and chemical laws that govern it.
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Everything going on the whole week is supernatural. The first thing God says in Genesis 1, 3 is let there be light.
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And so there's a light source. We don't know what it is. People have speculated all sorts of things about what that might be before plants arrive.
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But even if photosynthesis is not yet possible because the sun doesn't exist, are we really to believe that God can't keep plants alive for a day before the sun's created on the next day?
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Why would someone even make an objection like that? Why would anyone think to make an objection like that?
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Because they've been trained by our culture to think like secularists, to think like a naturalist instead of thinking supernaturally.
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How does God create? Supernaturally. How are people brought into the faith? How are they converted?
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How do they come to Christ? It's supernatural. It's based on supernatural interaction between the members of the Godhead before the creation of the world.
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God the Father elects and gives the people to Christ. Everything about your salvation and conversion is super natural.
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It's not naturalistic at all. Do you see how Finney is just the opposite of that? He is one of the most important and influential thinkers in American Christian history.
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People have been trained by our culture to think like secularists and like naturalists and like atheists, but we are not secular.
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We are not naturalists. We are super naturalists. We are not atheists. We are biblical
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Christian theists. One of the truths that the biblical creationist groups have been pointing out to the church for decades, which
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I'm thankful that there are some who have paid heed to this, is the following. The reason the gospel is largely ignored by the culture we live in today is because the antithesis is gone.
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We think like secularists. They've already got us on their side. The broader non -Roman
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Catholic conservative Christians in this country are naturalistic in their understanding of how sinners are saved.
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Following the most thoroughgoing Pelagian in all of church history, Charles Finney. When you think about the pastors who have the most influence in this country,
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Rick Warren, I remember reading his book, The Purpose Driven Church, when he explains why do we do altar calls?
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Why do we use all these different means to try to excite people into conversions? He cites Charles Finney.
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That's just the way we've always done it. That's the way the great revivalists in the church have always done these things.
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But don't you see that Finney's methods were simply an extension of his Pelagian theology, of his completely anti -supernatural view of conversion?
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Doesn't it make sense? You would use every means available to you to try to stir people up and get them all excited and get them to come down and make a decision rather than focusing on preaching law and gospel, rather than letting the spirit of God work through his word.
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You see, the methods are the outworking of your theology. See, so many people really think, no, no, no, you can be reformed in your theology and then seeker sensitive in your methods.
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No, you can't. You can't. The method, the way you do church, the way you do evangelism, the way you look at worship, that is an extension of your theological convictions.
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Bodie Hodge and Roger Patterson use a powerful illustration. This is a great illustration. Please hear this about secularism and the way it's influenced the church.
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Listen to this quote. Consider this hypothetical situation with which missionaries have to deal. Missionaries are sent to minister with the gospel to a place that has deadly diseases.
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The missionaries contract a disease and the missionaries die. You send more missionaries. They contract the same disease and die.
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Now, if you were ascending church, what would you do? Do you simply send more missionaries to their potential doom or do you take the time to prepare your missionaries with the proper protection for what they are about to encounter?
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Medicine or inoculation from the disease. Obviously, you want to protect your missionaries and give them what they need to be effective for the gospel work for which they are sent.
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Now, consider the same problem, but from a spiritual angle in our Western world, the United States and the
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United Kingdom were once nations greatly influenced by Christians and churches could be found in abundance, particularly in cities.
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But now churches have closed their doors on mass in many places in England. If you ever get a chance to read the book already gone page after page after page after page, you see these beautiful cathedrals that have been made into nightclubs and bars.
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The same trend is happening to the United States, albeit at a delayed pace. Today, cities have precious few churches and those that are there are typically shallow with little doctrine and compromise the authority of God's word.
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In other words, they are struggling and dying themselves. Many Christians recognize that there is a need for churches and cities.
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The cities like Cincinnati, New York, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and Bristol are ripe for church plants.
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Interestingly, few of these church plants are as effective as hoped. Some church plants grow slowly, others plateau, some merely take people from other churches, and others struggle and die.
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A lot of excuses are given, wrong church model, not enough funding, wrong music, too traditional, et cetera.
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But the main problem is that they were not dealing with the false religion that has entwined the people of the mission field.
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When a missionary goes to Africa or to the Amazon or Papua New Guinea, they train themselves to know what religions are in the area, animism,
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Islam, spiritism, et cetera. And they learn how to refute those false beliefs so they can be an effective witness in presenting the truth of the
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Bible and the gospel. They don't go with the intent of just telling people to be moral and to add Jesus to what they believe.
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How many church planters in cities in the UK and the USA have trained their missionaries to refute secular humanism,
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Darwinism, and atheism, et cetera? How many pastors and church plants in New York are trained to refute secular attacks on Christianity, like radiometric dating, alleged missing links in the fossils,
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Big Bang cosmology, et cetera, and so forth? The even bigger problem is that many of the church planters may have agreed with the secularists and believe the
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Big Bang is true, embrace millions of years, or even prefer evolution over the Bible's origin accounts.
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Imagine if we sent a missionary to Muslims who had already bought many of the tenets of Islam. While we must certainly affirm that the message of the gospel is the power of God to salvation, apologetics is an important aspect of evangelism.
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Hope you remember that. It really is. We need to understand, how do the people around us think? Most of the people in our workplaces are not from church -going homes.
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They're going to be secular. They're going to have an indifferent, sort of atheistic, secular, God is irrelevant, even if he does exist,
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I don't really care. That's the mentality that they're bringing, and they've also been indoctrinated with all the evolutionary ideology as well.
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Hodge and Patterson continue, while we proclaim the truth of Jesus as Lord and Savior, we must also help others see how their own religious views are insufficient to deal with their sin.
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We might also need to answer questions that explain the foundational elements of how sin entered the world and why they need a savior.
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If a missionary is not refuting the false religion prevalent in their mission field, which is secularism in much of the
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Western world, then why would we expect that missionary to be effective? Dealing with secularism and refuting it is a key to mission work in the new
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Western world." He's exactly right. If you keep sending missionaries and they keep contracting the disease and dying, then it's not going to be effective in dealing with that place and the people in it.
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Secularism is what our country and its citizens swim in every day, and what we must recognize, too, is that we swim in it, too.
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It's influenced us, too. I still remember that dark day in my life when I first began trying to understand science, the age of the earth, when
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I was an undergrad, when I was an undergraduate, and people would challenge the biblical account with millions of years and everything else, and I didn't know how to answer any of that stuff.
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At the time, when I was 19 years old, I would have told you, how old is the earth? 4 .5 billion years. How old is the universe?
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15 billion years old. When did dinosaurs go extinct? 65 million years ago, and man never cohabitated the earth with dinosaurs.
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I would have laughed at the idea that man ever saw a dinosaur with his own eyes. The internet was just beginning to go mainstream, and from a computer lab there on the campus of Ohio University, I printed off a bunch of articles about science and the
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Bible in Genesis 1 and took them to a coffee shop, and there I was indoctrinated by compromised scholarship that taught me this issue is irrelevant.
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The age of the earth, not a fact of divine revelation. It's a divisive issue. Don't go there. The Hebrew word for yom is entirely fluid.
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It can mean almost any length of time imaginable. And I remember at the time being somewhat relieved by this.
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That's good. Don't need to worry about any of this stuff. I can just hold to this idea, and no one can bug me about science anymore.
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But deep down, I knew something was probably wrong with that. Thankfully, by the grace of God, I was well on my way to a biblical view of creation just before I went to seminary.
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I was fed the framework hypothesis when I was in seminary and thought for a short time it sounded somewhat plausible, but I eventually discarded it as there was no possible way
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I could bring myself to believe that any Jewish person who ever heard Genesis 1 read in their presence would walk away thinking that Genesis 1 was a poetic, literary framework that has something to do with a so -called upper register versus the lower register.
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If you don't understand what I mean by that, I don't either. What is the upper register and the lower register?
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I have no earthly idea. None. In fact, I remember talking to guys, the upper register and the lower register, where are these registers?
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Where are they spoken about in scripture? What are you talking about? Exodus 20, six days you shall labor and do all your work.
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Exodus 20 verse 11, for in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. I brought that up to Dr. Futado after he taught us the framework hypothesis during a break.
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And I asked him, is there any reason to think a Jewish person would think the phrase six days in verse nine means something entirely different from the phrase six days in verse 11?
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And his answer perplexed me. I can still see his face when he said it, just totally like, well, of course. He said, well, it's six days in the literature, but not actual history.
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And that was it. That was the answer. And I walked away thinking that's, if you grant that kind of license to people, you can make the
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Bible say anything you want, anything you want. Then words really don't mean anything anymore. Science needs to be retaken by the only worldview that makes it possible.
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Biblical Christian theism. Conversion and the work of the triune God and the salvation of his people needs to be seen as entirely supernatural.
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You see why we emphasize the doctrines of grace and God's sovereignty and that God is the one who saves sinners so much in our church here.
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We need to have a supernatural understanding, not a finite Pelagian naturalistic understanding of those things.
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God works through the proclamation of his gospel to save his people from their sins. And as a quick sidebar, I just want to point out something to you.
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I've been doing a little studying lately on the issue of the charismatic movement. Since I'm going to be attending the big debate between Michael Brown and Theodore Zachariadis in Nashville on June the 22nd next month.
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And I've been watching some videos where the Holy Spirit is supposedly moving because people being touched on the head are falling down and shivering and moaning and clucking like chickens and things like that.
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It's an incredible paradox to me that Dr. Brown, who is a charismatic, emphatically denies that God has an elect people that he has unconditionally chosen to save.
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And yet he's an outspoken defender of all of the supposedly supernatural phenomena, tongue speaking, prophetic utterances, getting slain in the spirit, people being raised from the dead, people born blind, being healed and everything else.
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So Dr. Brown basically allows God to do pretty much anything supernatural except save people.
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In fact, I might ask that question if we get a chance to go to microphones. I'd love to ask that question. Why is God able to do everything except save people's souls in your perspective?
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And these same people look at us as dead and lifeless because all we do is focus upon biblical worship and the exposition of scripture.
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But like I mentioned this morning, how do you know if someone's filled with the spirit? Their mind is filled with Christ and they're focused on Jesus.
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And that's the center of their life. This Holy Spirit works through his word,
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Romans 10, 17. So then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. The fact is we are as focused on the
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Holy Spirit as we can be because our primary concern is to hear the word read and preached. The spirit of God works through his word.
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And as soon as people divorce the Holy Spirit from the text of scripture, how do you know? How do you know if it's the
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Holy Spirit or if it's not last night's dinner, moving your heart or burning in your chest or whatever?
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The salvation and the sanctification of sinners is supernatural and is accomplished through the word of God. And so, dear congregation, the key to combating the most dominant worldview and religion of our time and place, secularism, is to be supernaturalist in our outlook of everything.
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I mean, to be supernaturalist in the way we look at everything. We are supernaturalists in our view of creation, the origin of man, of plants, of animals, the stars, the heavens.
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And we're supernaturalists in our view of redemption as well. God is not incidental to his creation.
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He is Lord over all of it. And his decree encompasses the movement of everything in it. He is not merely one of two moving forces in our salvation.
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God alone is our savior. Don't allow the naturalistic, secular, atheistic worldview to take supernaturalism away from you.
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Secular religions are very numerous. We're going to look at several of these. We're not going to cover all of them, but here's what
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Hodge and Patterson list. There's atheism and new atheism. As you're going to see, those are actually two different things.
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Agnosticism, existentialism, extraterrestrial humanism, non -religious religious humanism.
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Naturalism, stoicism, materialism, relativism, Nazism, hedonism, communism, nature worship, idealism, dualism,
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Satanism, Epicureanism, modernism, scientism, postmodernism, and secular humanism. As you can see, there's tremendous variety under the heading of secularism.
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And some of those groups have a lot in common with each other, but some of them also have very sharp disagreements with each other.
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For example, hedonism promotes every kind of sexual perversion people want to engage in. While Nazism hates homosexuality.
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Both oppose the Bible, so they have that in common, and both believe in the evolutionary account of human origins, and both believe that man is the highest authority.
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There are variations in kinds of hedonism too, the pursuit of pleasure. There's quantitative hedonism that says, get as much pleasure as you possibly can in this life before you die.
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Qualitative hedonism aims at the highest quality of things in life before you die. Classical atheism simply affirms that there is no
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God or gods, but doesn't really care what anyone else believes. The new atheism, the atheism that you see today that's very aggressive, denies the existence of God and wants this belief to be imposed on others with force if necessary.
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If you want to read someone who thinks like a communist, read Sam Harris. Sam Harris is a socialist.
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He is a communist. He thinks and acts and talks exactly like the communist revolutionaries in Russia and in China.
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And Joel McDermott has done a good job of documenting that. Communistic regimes did force atheism on its subjects under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and many other communist dictators in the last century.
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Why does secularism in general lead to such a wide variety of religions? Because when men cut themselves off from God, we are left with what?
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Everyone does what's right in their own eyes. So, of course, that's going to lead to all sorts of different perspectives on that, just like the book of Judges.
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In those days, there was no king and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Without the sure foundation of God's fixed and unchanging law, word, revelation, and scripture, the result is what
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Paul described to the Ephesians. And, folks, before I read this text, just remember, almost everybody you know that's not a
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Christian is exactly described by this. Ephesians 4 .14. Everybody you know who's not a
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Christian in this country is tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.
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People who are not anchored to scripture are going to be suckers for whatever the latest political or moral fad is that comes down the pike.
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Without reconciliation and communion with God through his infallible God -breathed word, the Bible, men even become, as Romans 1 .30
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describes them, inventors of evil things. People come up with new and even more perverted philosophies of existence and life.
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The process of secularization was slow and has been devastating in this country's history. In the early 1800s, many churchmen and pastors embraced various aspects of secularism, like the older ages of the earth and evolution.
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But another culprit that has led to the secularization of our nation and of the church is the almost comprehensive handing over of education to third parties that were already secular.
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Generation after generation, this nation has been educated by taxpayer -funded government schools, which started out subtly introducing elements of secularism to students, but now have grown much more brazen in the more liberal parts of this country in their secularization.
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When public education began, the state schools had Bibles in the classroom and they used the Bible to teach history, logic, philosophy, literature, and science.
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I know there are people here who remember the Bible being read in your homeroom class or even read over the PA system.
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After the Scopes Trial in 1925, evolution began to be taught with the full backing of the law by the state.
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Hodge and Patterson write this, quote, Even so, as the humanistic religion began to permeate the state schools under the influence of men like John Dewey, the
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Bible was removed, creation was taken out, prayer was silenced, the Ten Commandments banished, and so on and so on.
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Now, entire generations of kids have been raised up being taught the religion of secular humanism.
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But what did the church do to specifically counter this false religious teaching? What did the church do?
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By and large, nothing. What was their reaction? Silence. Nothing.
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Many churches still teach morality, the gospel, and theology. Not that these are bad things. They're essential.
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But then most parents still send their kids to the state schools to be taught a different religion. So for about 40 hours a week, kids from Christian homes are taught the religious tenets of secular humanism and the church, who scarcely teaches kids two to three hours per week, wonders why the kids are walking away from the faith and following after humanistic religions.
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Those that remain in the church have often brought secular baggage with them. They often hold to evolution and millions of years, secular morality, secular views of sexuality, marriage, race, and so on.
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If you read the articles about millennials, millennials in conservative churches, what are their beliefs like? They think homosexuality is fine and we love
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Ellen and she's really sweet and everything else. They think just like the world. What does the church have to do with this?
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What does this do to the local church? It causes it to be stagnant, impotent, or die as members are actually mixing secular religions with their
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Christianity. It is no different from the former godly Israelites from the Old Testament mixing true worship with the worship of Baal.
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The mere difference is with which religion the modern Christians mix their Christianity, secularism rather than Baal worship.
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With this in mind, we as Christians have to pull the plank out of our own eye and the church before we reach for the speck of sawdust in the culture's eye.
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The church needs to get back on the right track first. Thus, the church has a big job to re -educate their congregations and the truth of the
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Bible in all areas like history, science, logic, and so forth. And I think you can really summarize them in those two major categories, creation and redemption.
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We need to be thoroughgoing supernaturalists and we need to teach the rising generation to be thoroughgoing supernaturalists in the way they think about those things.
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Allow God and his word to have the final say on what you believe about all those categories, about creation and redemption.
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America was not stolen by secularists. In fact, there's a book. It was a Pulitzer Prize winning book in 1964 by a historian named
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Richard Hofstadter, not a Christian. It's called Anti -Intellectualism in American Life. And the first opening chapters of that book are about American revivalism.
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Why is America the secular nation that it is? He's just a social commentator. He's not a Christian. But his studies and his historical analysis,
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Protestant American revivalist methods are what made this country the anti -intellectual secular place that it is.
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Isn't that incredible? I always thought the enemy's out there. It's out there. It's the secularists that are scaling the wall.
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The church handed the nation over by becoming secular themselves, by embracing all these naturalistic ideas, letting them infiltrate the church.
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It is a big deal. Whether you think God alone is the savior or not, it has massive implications. So America wasn't stolen.
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Revivalism, education, which was quickly overrun by secular and anti -biblical ideas. Children raised to have absolutely no biblical armor at all against the attacks of secularism on all sides.
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And that's the church's fault. The church needed to help young people have the intellectual machinery and ammunition that they needed.
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The armor that they needed to stay off the advance of evolution and millions of years and all that stuff.
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All of us can be thankful to the risen sovereign and almighty Christ that he has commanded us not to worry.
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It's a command that no one here keeps perfectly. But I'll tell you, I worry and I worry sinfully at times. It's a simple thing.
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But the situation before us is indeed dire on these fronts. There needs to be a renewed focus in the churches on biblical catechesis, biblical education, biblical churchmanship, a love for the health of the local church, an understanding of the incredible need to have a long -term vision to raise up ministers of the gospel to plant churches and a constant spirit of humble prayer with all of us.
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And I would like to ask all of us a simple question. We, for a church our size, we have an incredible number of children in this church.
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I mean, every time, you can't take a step backwards without tripping over somebody on Sunday mornings. And it's great. Isn't that wonderful to see all these little people running around here?
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I have a question. Where are they going to go to church? Where are they going to go to church?
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Where are all those kids and their kids and our great -grandchildren? Where are they going to go to church?
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The trajectory of the church in this country right now, I really, really wonder. It really troubles my heart.
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That's why I pray every Sunday that God would raise up men for gospel ministry, that God would grow our church, that we'd be able to do that expansion, that one day we would plant churches.
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I want to see that happen because I want my kids and their kids and my children's children's children to have good, solid,
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Bible -believing churches to go to. If we don't have that as our vision, the churches are going to die.
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Secularism is the great enemy of the faith today, and it has decimated the church in this nation. Will we rise to the challenge?
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Or will this building, will this building one day be purchased to house used refrigerators?
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Will it become a bar or a nightclub? Will the dozens of church buildings in this area one day be turned into those things?
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Will we do what is in our power to maintain the antithesis, to be supernaturalists in our understanding of all of God's creation and in the way
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God saves people? Will we maintain that antithesis or will we quietly waddle into the stocks and watch our posterity be swept into the arms of the world?
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I'll close with the words of Ezekiel, his sobering rebuke of God's people in Ezekiel 22, 28.
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Just listen to this carefully. Ezekiel said to the exiles, the people in exile, her prophets plastered them with untempered mortar, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, thus says the
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Lord God, when the Lord had not spoken, the people of the land have used oppressions, committed robbery and mistreated the poor and needy, and they wrongfully oppressed the stranger.
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So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall and stand in the gap before me on behalf of the land that I should not destroy it.
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But I found no one. There's gaping holes in the church's walls now.
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There's big problems that we're facing now. And if we don't stand in those holes, if we don't teach what needs to be taught, if we don't have a long term vision to equip our children and grandchildren and to have a church planning mentality and evangelistic outreach mentality, they're not going to have anywhere to go to church.
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I know the church has been through very difficult times where people have had to meet with three other families in basements and things like that.
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I get that that happens from time to time. I don't want that to happen to us, though. I want us to have a church planning mentality, a long term vision.
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We're not going to let that happen. By the grace of God, we're going to stay faithful to his word, to the gospel and stand in these gaps and be supernaturalists in our understanding of creation and redemption so that we don't become another burned over district.
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And then you just see the Armenian tumbleweeds blowing in the wind. And then there's no long lasting churches in those places.
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I sought for a man among them who would make a wall and stand in the gap before me on behalf of the land that I should not destroy it.
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But I found no one. Let that never be said of us in our generation.
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Let's pray. Our father, we thank you for giving us your supernatural, divine revelation and help us remember,
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Lord, every word that's in the pages of our Bible is indeed supernatural in its origin.
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Yes, there are natural laws that govern nature by your divine providence. But all of creation is itself a miracle.
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Our salvation is a miracle. The fact that you preserve us from falling away is miraculous.
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Help us to see that you are in everything, that you are all the way through all of that exists, that you are omnipresent, that your sustaining power is everywhere.
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It holds every molecule of our bodies together. Your sovereign decree and providence encompasses all that comes to pass.
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Lord, rid us of our secular ways of thinking, rid us of our anti -supernatural way of looking at creation or anything in creation or redemption.
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Help us to see you as the one who is the creator of all things and you alone as the savior of lost sinners.