What Ever Happened to Right and Wrong?, Part 2

And then it came across to America. And then they began to teach this in the universities and it began to make its way early in the seminaries of the major denominations. Dewey, then, in the early part of the 20th century would say, “You know something? The real issue isn’t what’s right or what’s wrong. The real issue is what works,” and pragmatism was birthed.

And basically, the whole educational system rather than the classics, and this is true, and what we know, and God being the authority. It’s man is the center, our reason trumps everything, truth is something that is a matter of perspective. And then it moved because since that doesn’t work, that reality doesn’t work in real life, we’ll look at it in a minute.

But then what happened, people began to experience despair. So Kierkegaard would say from a religious perspective, “You need to take a leap of faith to find meaning.” Jaspers would say, “You need a final experience.” And so pretty soon the only way to authenticate truth is your experience. Existentialism. So if it feels good do it. This would give birth to situational ethics. And so I still remember as about a ten year old, my mom was a guidance counselor and William Coffin Sloan, William Sloan Coffin, excuse me, wrote the book and then all of our public schools would begin to teach situational ethics.

And it was taught by giving these people these impossible dilemmas, you know, what would you do if there are five people back in the room, would you lie in order to protect them? And, no sense of, “Yes there are competing values.” And so, in our, all of our public schools, we begin to teach, “There is no absolute right or wrong. There is no moral fabric.” And so, you get the birth of the sixties. And the sixties is a throwing off of all moral constraint. And then the seventies is the age of experimentation.

The eighties becomes the “Me” generation. It’s not just what works but what works for me, and greed is paramount. And then the nineties, we have the kids of the parents of the sixties who grew up without any sense of absolutes. And so now we’re surprised because the divorce rate goes from single digits to over fifty percent. Why? Who’s to say? The question in life isn’t, “What’s right?” It’s not, “What’s wrong?” It’s, “What works?” In fact, it’s “What works for you?” Do your own thing. That’s true for you but not true for me.” Do you get it?

Here’s what you’ve got to understand. All of what I just shared, philosophically and historically, is why when your kids go to trade school, or college, or hang out in your high schools, at sixteen or seventeen and say, “I believe in Jesus” and people start asking them questions, one, two, three, and four that they don’t have any good answers. And that’s why, by the way, inside the Church the problem may be as big or as difficult. People in Bible teaching churches now would say that living together is morally acceptable.

Homosexuality, or loving another person of the same sex, is morally acceptable. This is in the Church. And when you say things like, “This is right and this is wrong,” you’re pegged as some sort of old fashioned, don’t you get it… They have no idea where they got that. When the guy hoists up a beer and says, “Life is meaningless!” and kills someone indiscriminately, what he doesn’t understand is that’s what John Paul Sartre said. Exactly. There is no meaning. There is no rhyme. If we’re from chaos, random chance, this is just the logical flow of what’s happened.

And the Church has got to wake up. And, by the way, if this interests some of you and I certainly hope it does, Schaeffer’s work is a good place to start. And what Schaeffer will do is give you the flow of philosophy and philosophers, and then what happens is it’s the philosophers and the intellectual elites, it starts there. And so, what, it’s, “Oh, that’s kooky, that’s out there. No one will ever believe that.” And then it usually filters into the arts. Now think about it. If you go back to Byzantine art, and the pictures of art, and pictures of God and symbols and now you think of “modern” art.

If life doesn’t have meaning, if there’s not a right, if there’s not a wrong, if there’s not an order you can take paint and throw it at a canvas and see it and go, “Wow!” Or you can be like John Cage who went into a jazz place and just began to pound on the piano indiscriminately. And then stopped. What’s he saying? The music simply represents your worldview. And so it goes from the arts, and then it moves to the music, and it goes to the general culture.

If you think I’m exaggerating a bit let me read an article from a high school student. Okay? He wrote this in his high school paper. It’s entitled: “God.” “There are too many things in Christian dogma that I can’t accept. The first of which is the universal idea of truth. Good and evil. I can’t rationalize all of that. All religion is based on subjective views of the universe.” In your opinion God made the universe. In other people’s opinion someone else did so.

So, on and on it goes. I do believe that everyone is entitled to their own subjective reality,”  “I believe that all religions are right for particular groups. But there’s no one religion that’s right for everyone. My god is not a god of love but a god of reason.”  My god is not a person or a being, he is an idea.”  He finishes by saying, “Why do I create such a world? Why do I make this place into a machine functioning on random chance and chaos?  It’s for the same reason that you make life about the kingdom of God. It’s just my opinion of reality.”

If you don’t start turning your brain cells on and if the Church doesn’t start turning our brain cells on and start learning how to think, not moralize, not just, “Don’t do that, honey. Don’t do that, honey. That’s wrong. That’s right.” Why? Why? And on what basis? We gotta get off our tablets, get off our Google searches, and read some things with substance, and content, and reality, and teach our kids to think and understand where we are in world history and how we got here, and where we’re going, and what it’s going to take to change. The Church is full of pragmatists. Well what kind of worship should you have?

Whatever works! What should you do in your marriage? What should you do with your child? Whatever works for me! What we do is we just say, “And Jesus will help me get whatever works for me.” He becomes like a cosmic vending machine. “Make my life work, Jesus, for me, my way, as I perceive it.”

And here’s what you need to understand. There are painful consequences. See you don’t have to believe in gravity to jump off a three-story building, you don’t have to believe what God says about truth, you don’t have to believe what He says about human sexuality, you don’t have to believe what He says about homosexuality, you don’t have to believe what He says about debt, or lack of debt.

You don’t have to believe anything the Bible says about wisdom. But when you violate it because it is absolute, and it is true, there are devastating consequences. Painful ones. And here’s what you need to hear and what we need to share: it breaks God’s heart. It breaks God’s heart. “My children perish for lack of knowledge,” the old prophet would say.

How is this relative truth or absolute truth, how is it played out daily? Here’s the interesting part: The public rhetoric in our day and now in the Church is that all are right, pluralism, tolerance, truth is relative. The private reaction, however, is my rights, justice and fairness, truth is absolute. In other words, I can be as existential as I want, Christian or non-Christian, and I can say, “Everyone has a right. You have your truth, I now have my truth and now I’m driving on the freeway and as I drive on the freeway someone cuts in front of me, ‘What are you doing?’” Why are you angry? Who are you to say that that space in front of you should be yours? Or someone gets promoted ahead of you. Well, who are you to judge how your supervisor decides?

Or they get a raise and you don’t. Or someone leaves you that you love for another person and they betray you. And you get angry and frustrated and it’s not fair. Well, whoa. Fair? Who are you? That truth is okay for them. This truth is okay for you. See, here’s what you’ve got to understand. Everyone draws the line somewhere. You can verbalize, or publicly say, “Your truth for you, my truth for me.” Everyone, one hundred percent of the population, draws the line and you have an absolute. And when your absolute is violated you get hurt and wounded and angry.

And when someone you care about gets a “raw deal.” How can there be a raw deal? There is no truth. There are no absolutes. It’s just random chance. No one is consistent. Do you get it? And one of the ways that we help those inside the Church, and outside the Church, when their lives are falling apart and when things aren’t working is to gently help them understand there is absolute truth and when you violate it there’s a price to pay. But you have a heavenly Father who loves and cares about you.

And He wants you to understand what it is and cooperate with how He’s created life. That’s Galatians chapter 6 verses 7 and 8. It says, “Don’t be deceived, God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that sinful nature will reap destruction and the one who sows to please his spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” See, absolute truth is absolute truth.

And we see soaring divorce rates, breakups, communicable diseases, people in debt at levels that turn their world and their life upside down, people that have addictions that they can’t shake trying to fill the gaps and the holes that the world doesn’t fill. You reap what you sow. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to step back and think about what it means for you to think. What are you going to do with what you’ve learned? How much time are you just going to keep asking and answering the question? Not by your mouth or your words, but by your behavior, that basically as a Christian says, “What works for me? What works for my family?”

How much energy is going to keep going on to, “I gotta make more, I gotta get my kids in the right schools, we gotta do this, we gotta do that, we gotta do that, they have to be involved in all these sports so that they, so that, so that, when that, we can, so that.” When’s the last time you sat around the table and had some deep discussions? When, and where, and how are you modeling truth? How is your life different? How do you think differently? And here’s the thing I ask myself, “How much of this, because it’s in the air and the water and the culture, so subtly is squeezing me into its mold without me even knowing?”

Turn to the back page because I want to give you what Jesus said. He was the most tolerant person who ever lived. He was the kindest person who ever lived. But He made outrageous claims. He said he never sinned and no one could prove that He ever sinned. He not only said He never sinned but He said some even more outrageous things. Jesus’ outrageous claim about Himself, John 14:6, follow along. He said, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.” That is a very intolerant, non-existential statement.

But in space-time history He lived it out perfectly and rose from the grave. And there is an absolute truth that when you’re down, and when you’re hurting, and when this life is over there is a future and it’s real whether you “believe it” or experience it or not, in the right now. Notice His outrageous claim about His Word: John 17:17, “Sanctify them,” His last prayer on earth, “sanctify them by Your Word, Your Word is truth.” There’s something you can bank on.

This is Jesus, the One who rose from the dead, He said, “This is true! It doesn’t change. It doesn’t shift. It doesn’t depend on circumstances.” And after His outrageous claims, notice His outrageous concern for you. He would say this to a woman who’d been married five times, was living with someone, and instead of a “shame on you, what’s wrong with you?” He said to her, “You’re missing out on life.”

And after a little bit of a religious discussion He says, “Here’s what I want you to know,” John 4:23. He says, “I want you to know that there’s coming a day and is now when your heavenly Father is seeking, or pursuing, those who will worship and follow Him in spirit and in truth.” In truth. God has a concern for you, a concern for me, a concern for your kids, a concern for your neighbors. And He’s pursuing people. He longs for relationship and connection that’s real and absolute, and all the things we talked about don’t change.

And then finally, I love His concern in John 8:32. He says, “You’ll know the truth and the truth will,” what? “Set you free.” He wants you to be free. Free of guilt. Free of anxiety. Free of overwhelming debt. Free of addictions. Free of pleasing people. Free of codependency. He wants you to be free. But you’ll never be free with the, “Well that’s good for you, that’s good for me.

If it feels good do it. If it feels good do it and then you pay later.” Here’s my challenge: let’s become a people who think - clearly, truthfully, winsomely, no bashing of anyone. What’s true? Let’s look at the evidence. And then let’s go into our homes, and go into our neighborhoods, and go to our workplaces as thinking people, who understand truth and where and how we got where we are, so that we can make a difference.