[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints, I’ve heard recently, in fact a lot in the last month or so, of pastors,
brothers in the office who were criticized for preaching too much about politics and
culture from the pulpit.
Now, I understand that criticism because when we talk about these things, we need to take
extreme care and be very careful, especially when we’re not able to say, thus says the
Lord, the pulpit is not the place for human opinion, but the text that Jesus⦠that the
Holy Spirit sets before us from Jesus indicates that we as Christians and as a Christian church
ought to be able and be interested and be interpreting â these are the words that
Jesus uses â interpreting the times.
It’s a part of our Christian calling.
Now, how are the people that Jesus was preaching to missing the times?
I think they were missing a lot of important political developments that were happening
at the time, political developments which would lead to the complete annihilation and
destruction of Jerusalem, which would happen only probably 37 years after the sermon.
Not one stone would be left upon another in Jerusalem.
Titus, the Roman emperor, or at least the leader of the soldier, the leader of the armies
who would then become the emperor, was going to lead the Roman army into Jerusalem and
just wipe the place out.
And all of the wheels were turning that were going to result in that.
And they missed it completely.
The Jewish people missed it.
But maybe even more importantly, they missed the fact that the kingdom of God was standing
right there in front of them.
They missed it that the Messiah, who was promised by Moses and the prophets, was standing in
front of them preaching the kingdom, that He came to redeem them and rescue them and
deliver them.
And they just, they just missed it.
They knew if the clouds were coming from the west, blowing in from the Mediterranean Sea,
that the rain was coming.
They knew that if the wind was blowing from the south over the desert, it was going to
be hot, but they completely missed what was right in front of them.
We want to ask the question also, what are we missing?
or maybe just say it better, that we would escape the accusation that Jesus gives in
the text that we would be hypocrites.
He wants us to also pay attention to the times, to interpret the present time.
But this is a daunting task, and how would you even think about it?
I was thinking through this a little bit this week.
If you just, for example, try to understand where we are technologically, and that’s
That’s a way to understand history.
In fact, a lot of people want to understand history in terms of technology and to think
how much things have changed in the last hundred years and in the last year.
You can sort of gauge your own age and the generation that you’re from by the technology
that you remember coming into the house.
Some of you, I don’t think so anymore, I think this generation has passed.
The generation that remembered when the house first got electricity.
It’s not that long ago.
And then the generation that remembers when the house first got the telephone, or when
the house first got the television.
Remember that?
Or when the television suddenly was not black and white but was color.
Or when the first computer came into the house.
Or do you remember signing up for your first email?
That wasn’t that long ago in the whole history of the world.
world, or getting your cell phone, or signing up for social media?
I look just to see.
Do you know that Facebook was founded in 2004?
That’s like a blink of the eye.
And it’s become almost ubiquitous in our own culture and our own society.
News came out â this is the technological thing that I think we’ll have to face.
News came out, I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago or a couple of months ago that one
One of the techs in Google leaked that one of their artificial intelligence machines has
developed self-consciousness and is afraid of being turned off.
I do not â that can’t be good news.
In a way, it’s almost overwhelming, the rate of technological change.
So there’s the times we live in.
But you can also think of it, I think, morally.
And I think this is probably the⦠the way that we should⦠that we should try to understand
the times in terms of ethics and morality.
Again, we’re⦠there’s been massive shifts in what’s considered right and wrong just
in the last few generations.
We’re⦠we’re living now at the long tail of the sexual revolution and in the throes
of the gender revolution, which has all been sort of conglomerated into a category of LGBTQAI
maybe should be added to it.
I saw some statistics and I’ll give you some even more in a bit, but that in 2012, which
again is not that long ago, 2012, 3.5% of American adults identified as part of the
LGBT community and that last year, 2021, that number had more than doubled to 7.1% LGBTQ.
But if you look at it generationally, it’s really quite stunning.
So here’s some numbers.
This is 2021 Gallup poll.
If you’re what’s called a traditionalist, that means you were born before 1946.
Some of you are going to dispute that and say, I was born way after that but I’m a traditionalist.
If you are a traditionalist, the percentage of your population that identifies as LGBT
is 0.8.
If you’re part of the baby boomers, that’s 1946 to 1964, it’s 2.6%.
Generation X, 1965 to 1980, 4.2.
The Millennials, 1981 to 1996, 10.5, and Generation Z, that means those of you who were born between
1997 and 2003, it’s 20.8%.
That means, and just, and if you’re kind of astonished by that, like the further down
you were on the list, the more astonishing the numbers are, right?
If you’re in part of that generation, you say, yeah, that’s past year, I go to school,
I see it.
This is not a strange sort of thing.
But that number also is astonishing.
That generation Z number of 20%, that’s one in five of the generation born then.
That number three years ago was 10%.
So to think about that, that the number of people who would identify with LGBTQ has doubled
in that generation in three years.
Now that’s astonishing numbers, really.
And it’s happening so fast.
It’s happening faster than anyone could have thought
or could have imagined.
It’s gone from, you know, the question used to be,
the sort of cultural driving question is,
what do we think of marriage?
What do we think of intimacy, the act of marriage,
and so forth, and to whom does it belong?
strong, but it is very quickly morphed into a question of identity.
A quote was given to me last week in Bible class.
Jem mentioned a quote from the Obergefell decision, and I went and found it.
I want to read it to you.
I think this is just reallyâ¦
Remember whatâ¦
So Jesus wants us to be interpreters of the times.
So that’s what we want toâ¦
That’s what we want to try to do.
So here’s just a paragraph from the Obergefell decision.
This was June 2015.
Choices about marriage shape an individual’s destiny.
Just that already, to think about that, marriage, which is where the two become one, is understood
as an individual choice.
And that’s further highlighted as Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has explained
because quote, marriage fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven and connection that
express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision
whether and whom to marry â here’s what I want you to pay attention to â is among
life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”
Now that is an amazing thing.
This is again a Supreme Court decision that understands that the thing that the law cannot
prevent or cannot stand in the way of is the individual’s right of self-definition.
The language that is used for this is plasticity in regards to personhood.
I’ll give you one more thing, and this will be the last thing I read.
But this is from a text called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by a thinker named
Carl Truman.
human, and he speaks of the plasticity of the identity and the understanding that the
sort of project of modern humanity, of the modern individual is to define themselves.
Here’s how he writes about it, yet while sex provides much of the content of the psychological
man and the expressive individual of the present age, perhaps the most striking characteristic
of today’s understanding of what it means to be a human is not its sexual content, but
rather its fundamental plasticity.
Psychological man is also a plastic person, a figure whose very psychological essence
This means that he can, or at least thinks he can, make and remake personal identity
at will.
For such plastic people to exist and thrive, there must exist both a certain kind of metaphysical
framework and a certain kind of society with a particular social imaginary, and this brings
us to the next narrative strand which he wants to talk about.
Now, the point is this, if you were to say what’s going on in our own culture, what’s
happening out there, what do things look like, what’s the problem and what’s the solution,
where did we come from and where are we going?
We are now at a point to where the goal of the individual is to autonomously express
their own self and their own identity, and this is miles away from what the Scripture
talks about.
So, the ethics of our age.
So, technology, ethics, we could talk about politics, we could talk about foreign politics,
we could talk about economics, which needs to be talked about, and it’s not even mentioning
the pandemic.
In other words, Jesus sets us to this task of interpreting the times, but this is a somewhat
overwhelming task, isn’t it?
And the times are confusing, at best confusing.
So what do we do?
How do we do it?
I’ll give you a couple things that I want to set before, not only just today, but as
our approach as Christians living in a world which is growing farther and farther from
the Word of God.
Number one, do not be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Jesus has not authorized you to be afraid of anything but Him.
And then He comes and says, don’t be afraid of Me either.
It might look to you like the world is falling apart, maybe it is, but it’s Jesus’ world.
He sits on the throne at the right hand of the Father, and none of these things are a
surprise to Him.
None of these things snuck up on Him, caught Him unawares.
Jesus has appointed you to be alive and to live and to breathe and to speak and to hold
forth conversation and to trust and to act and to work and to love in these days.
So don’t be afraid.
And second, I think the best way to interpret the times is in fact to not look at the times
themselves, but to look at the Word of God.
Now here’s the strategy.
I call this the anti-catechism.
I think I’ve talked to you about it before, and it’s a kind of a complicated point, but
I’m going to try to simplify it as much as possible, and that is to know that when the
devil is attacking something, he’s always and can only attack those things which the
Lord has created.
The devil and the demons cannot create.
The world cannot create.
Your own sinful flesh cannot create.
It can only destroy.
So if the devil and the world and the flesh are attacking, they’re attacking something
that God made.
Now they might be attacking it from all different angles, from all different kinds of strategies
and techniques and everything else, but to understand the attack, we want to look first
at what’s being attacked, and this is the way to be clear about things.
For example, if you’re being tossed around by the confusing questions about where we
came from, were we created or did we evolve out of nothing, or if we’re caught up into
how we should act about this world and the kind of swirl of fervor around climate activism
and all that sort of stuff.
If we could just simply look at what God has created, then there’s clarity.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And we stand on that.
Or when it comes to what we’re talking about with the ethics of both identity and morality
when it comes to the sixth commandment, there’s all different attacks on it, from divorce to
to the hookup culture, to reproductive technology, to the whole thing, top to bottom.
There’s confusion about all of it.
The simplicity lies in what the Lord has created.
That He brought Eve to Adam and said, here you two are married, be fruitful and multiply,
subdue the earth, and so forth.
And that we look at this, that marriage and chastity are what the Lord has set into place,
and we rejoice in the beauty of it.
Or when it comes to questions of identity, and here’s where it gets really tricky, when
When people are confused about who they are and how to think about themselves, we want
to know this, not only for ourselves, but also for everybody.
When it comes to the question of who am I, I am who the Lord says I am, which means that
I’m a sinner whose sins are forgiven by Jesus.
That’s my identity.
That’s how I think of myself.
That’s what orients me in the world.
That’s how I know what’s true and what’s unmoving, that the Lord’s Word stands firm when everything
else is out to see.
It’s important for us to know this.
Not only is it important for us to know this about ourselves, but it’s important for
us to know this about the world around us as we interpret, as Jesus says, as we interpret
the times, because it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better.
It doesn’t look like the world is going to be any better at confessing creation or marriage
or man and woman or God’s order of redemption and the incarnation and the salvation won
for us by Jesus.
It looks like the storm is getting worse.
And so we need to know that the Lord’s Word stands and it doesn’t change.
It’s the picture, and I wish I had a better picture, but it’s the picture of a joyful
shipwreck.
Do you remember when St. Paul was sailing?
They left Crete and there was this huge storm and they completely lost control.
And the winds and the waves were tossing the boat this way and that.
And like their only hope was that they were throwing stuff overboard and they were and they were hoping and I mean it was just
Miserable they didn’t eat for something like ten days. Is that right?
They couldn’t I mean they were just out to sea and it was a disaster and when things are that rough
The only thing that you’re hoping for is that you might run into some solid ground
Somewhere now the worst the storm is
The worst the crash will be
But the more of a relief it’ll be
So this ship that they were on crashed into Malta, and the ship was completely destroyed,
but their lives were saved.
This is the Lord’s Word.
This is the Lord’s church.
This is your home and your family.
The Lord has put His Word as the immovable truth, and the more the storms are brewing,
Do you realize that as hard as it’s going to be, that the people on the boat, that the
people out to sea are hoping and praying that somewhere there will be something that doesn’t
change?
Someone who will tell them that they are not who they think they are, but who God says
they are.
Someone who will say that that is right, and that is wrong, and that is true, and that
is false, and that is beautiful, and that is ugly.
as hard as it’s gonna be to crash into that truth and we have to practice it.
That’s what repentance is, that we ourselves are crashing into the truth of
the Lord’s Word and we’re standing here to those who are out to see and saying
here is the here is the solid ground and we’re ready to scoop them up because on
this unmoving island is the lighthouse of the cross, the brightness of the
kingdom of God, the shining joy of the forgiveness of sins, the safe harbor of
the blood of Jesus, and Jesus who loves you loves the world. He loves the people
who hate him. He loves the people who’ve never heard of him. He loves the people
who are ignoring him. He loves the people who are pursuing their own self-identity.
He loves them and he dies for them and he forgives them all of their sins and he’s
calling them.
So it might be today and next week and next year that there’s more and more strangers
that are sitting next to you in church and Bible class, that there’s more and more strangers
that the Lord brings into your conversation, that you’re working with and that you’re going
to school with.
There’s more and more confusion, and we rejoice in that because the Lord is plucking each one
of us, each one of us, from the midst of our sins into the kingdom of His light.
So may God grant it by the Holy Spirit, which comes from the throne of Jesus, that we would
rightly interpret the present time, which is the time of the Lord’s mercy, which is
the time of forgiveness of sins, which is the time of the kindness of Jesus.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake, amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus
Christ our Lord, amen.
