I want to tell you a story this morning – a funny, yet strangely disturbing story. The setting was a small group retreat with a bunch of teenage boys – I was one of the leaders. We’d had a really good weekend; sharing our faith stories, digging into the Scriptures, spending time in prayer together. We were on our way home – I was driving the van with most of the boys, the other leader was driving his family car with the other two or three. About a quarter of the way home, the family car began to overheat – there was a leak in the cooling system.
We pulled into a farmers market to let the car cool down and add some water, hopefully it would be enough to see us home. While we were waiting, a couple of the boys got thirsty and wandered over to a service station that had some pop machines outside. I hung out for a few minutes with the other leader – checking on his car and reflecting on the weekend. Then I ambled over to the van, grabbed a hand full of change and headed over to the pop machines. What I found astounds me to this day.
One of the young men was tall and thin. He’d lain down with his back against the machine and worked his hand up into the thing and was gleefully pulling out pops for all his buddies. When asked what he was doing his answer was, “I was just curious to see if I could do it.” When I asked him if he realized he was stealing, he said the thought never entered his mind – he was just being curious.
Just being curious! Did you hear that – no malicious intent, no thought of dishonest gain; not even a hint of knowingly doing something wrong. He was just curious! Now the thing you need to know – this was a solid Christian kid, from a solid Christian family, who went to a Christian school. He is in ministry today. So why didn’t it enter his mind at that time to think that he was stealing? How could this solidly Christian kid end up unwittingly a thief?
There are a number of answers that could be given – one’s that we often hear in life’s moments where something similar happens; we lose our cool during a sporting event and take a pot shot at our opponent, or we let something hurtful slip out while we’re in an argument with a family member. We excuse our behavior by saying we got caught up in the moment or the person had it coming. We take pens and paper or other office supplies from work and say that the business uses it as a tax write off, they have so much they’ll never miss it. We get caught up in an emotionally messy, maybe even sexually-charged, relationship with someone other than our spouse and say it wasn’t our fault – if our spouse had only paid more attention to us it would not have happened.
So I guess the real question is how do we let ourselves get away with it? How do we buy into the lame excuses we offer without crumbling under the internal conflict we generate from living in ways that are contrary to what we say we believe? The truth is, it all comes down to the way we view the world – it comes down to what forms the basis, the foundation for our thinking; in what terms we define reality.
Last year, we went through a Sunday evening study on building a family altar called Christ in the Home. When I talk about building a family altar, I don’t mean going out into the yard and finding a bunch of rocks to pile up and sacrifice animals on the pile and offer prayers. I am talking about building an attitude of worship and the mind of Christ in your family and having Jesus as the center of your family life. And a large part of the constructing the family altar is forming what is known as a proper worldview – particularly a Christian worldview.
Over the next several weeks, we’re going to be coming to grips with what it means to form a Christian worldview. As we work our way through this series we will learn how to answer some of the questions a lot of parents ask, but often do not find an answer to – probably because there seems to be no sure fire method to follow. For example:
How do I disciple my children? Implied in that question are other questions that Christian parents often ask, like:
o How do I teach my children to believe and live what I believe and live?
o How do I raise my children in the instructions of the Lord?
o How do I teach my kids to think God’s thoughts after him?
o How do I help my children think about life in Biblical terms?
Often parents have tried to answer these questions by bringing their kids to church and turning them over to the Christian education ministry of the church and the Sunday school teachers who serve there. And while that may be one way in which to answer these questions – it is by no means a fully sufficient answer. Here at Cascades Fellowship we have a robust, effective and committed Christian Education ministry, but there remains much that we are unable to do in forming Christian character in our children, because – Biblically-speaking – it is a full-time job. Look with me at Deuteronomy 6:4-9;
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates….
These are the instructions Moses gives to the children of Israel as they are about to enter into the Promised Land. Notice where discipleship is expected to happen – when our thoughts are expected to dwell upon God and who we are to discuss them with. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you …sit…stand…lie down…get up… at home…along the road. Tie them…write them…in conspicuous places so that they are always before you and your children.
It is to be a constant and consistent concern and effort on the part of parents. There is never to be a moment when we are not instructing or modeling what it means to follow God – to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, with all our mind and with all our strength. Our primary goal and ambition is to see faith rooted in the lives in our children – passed on to the next generation; a perpetual song of praise to the Lord God Almighty.
But there is a problem for us – a concern that is embedded in the instruction of Moses, but expressed clearly in Paul’s exhortation to the Colossians in Chapter 2:6-8;
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, 7 rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.
Here in the words of Paul, we find what prevents us – what works against us – from pursuing God with our whole heart; we are so easily taken captive by hollow and deceptive philosophies. You see, there is a power at work – what the Bible calls the world – that resists the Kingdom of God, which refuses to bend the knee and continues to seek its own glory. This power is manifested in the philosophies and traditions of man, all of which seek to displace God and elevate man to place of rule.
You don’t have to look very far to see evidence of this. In 2002, “…pollster George Barna documented that only 22 percent of adults and 6 percent of teens affirmed the notion of moral absolutes. Among Christian youth, the numbers were only slightly higher with one out of ten born-again teenagers holding to an unchanging moral truth. This means that the majority of today's generation has taken to heart the predominant moral philosophy of our day: moral relativism.”
One Barna study I read in connection with this sermon said that of those polled, only 10% of Christian youth believe music piracy – downloading music illegally – to be morally wrong. Dennis Cummings, a pastor and author for ezinearticles.com – a web-based publication – wrote in regard to the differences between Christian and Non-Christian moral attitudes writes the following,
In other words, there are more commonalities than differences between people who profess to be one-kingdom minded and people that have nothing to do with God. There is no difference because people in the church are living lives no different than the way people outside the church live. The former are not making decisions any different from those outside of the church. This can be seen in the way they live, on their opinions on specific moral issues, on viewing adult-only content on the internet and on reading magazines or watching videos with explicit sexual content. We can also look at the divorce rate. The divorce rate within the church is the same outside the church. In regard to marriage and divorce, Mr. Barna said, "When we compare Christians to non-Christians, we rarely find substantial differences and we have no reason to believe that cohabitation would veer from that pattern."
In case you didn’t get the impact of that quote, Pastor Dennis is saying that the moral compass within the Christian community has slipped so much that previously black and white issues have become gray for us – what was once clear is now ambiguous. Why? Because we have become “…captive[s] through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world….” In other words, we have had our view of the world – what we believe about the nature of existence, what we believe the nature of Truth to be, what we believe to be morally and ethically acceptable – we have had our view of these shaped more by what the prevailing culture says than what the Scriptures say.
If that’s the case, where are we picking up all these ideas about the nature of truth, the nature of existence and what is morally and ethically acceptable? Well, let me ask a few more questions before I offer an answer.
• Let’s say Forrest Gump is coming on television – how many parents here would be comfortable letting their kids watch it?
o Did you know that the foundational truth of Forrest Gump is that chance is the driving force of existence?
• Let’s try another, what about the Golden Compass?
o Did you know that the author of the Golden Compass wrote it as an allegory for the atheistic, naturalistic worldview – kind of an anti-Narnia Chronicles
• What movies do your kids watch most often?
• What station is you radio turned to?
• What books are on the table next to your couch?
• How often do you read the Bible? How about read the Bible with your children?
You see, whether we recognize it or not, the movies we watch and the movies we allow our kids to watch all impart worldview data to us and our children. And when we watch them without discernment, without measuring them against a Biblical worldview we run the risk of appearing to accept and embrace whatever worldview is presented. In other words, what we watch, what we listen to, what we read – when we do it without challenging the view of reality presented – we implicitly teach our children it is acceptable.
Here is another question:
• What does your child’s school teach about issues like:
o Lifestyle Choices and Tolerance
o Sexuality
o Character and Values
o Life Science
Do you know? I can assure you of two things if your kids are attending public schools: first, they are indeed being taught about these issues; and second, they are not being taught from a Biblical worldview unless your child has a believing teacher who is willing to risk their career.
The truth of the matter is that we and our children are being inundated daily with messages contrary to a Biblical worldview. It inhabits our media, it stalks the halls of our institutions of learning; we encounter it every day and if the only time we are countering the world’s influence on our thinking is an hour or two on Sunday…. Well, let me share with you a few statements by Josh McDowell drawn from his book Beyond Belief to Conviction on what happens when adults are not diligent in forming a Biblical worldview in their children:
Our kids are adopting distorted beliefs of God – in support he relates a story from a youth pastor that asked the question “What is God like?” One teen answered like a grandfather – he knows he’s there but he never sees him. Another kid described God as an evil being always wanting to punish him. After a number of such answers, one teen said he thought they were all right because that’s what really believed. In other words, God is defined by what we believe him to be.
Our kids are embracing distorted beliefs about truth – McDowell notes that studies show that 70% of today’s youth say there is no absolute moral truth.
Our kids are accepting distorted beliefs about reality – Most kids have embraced the spirit of the age which says “If it works, it is good.” A Barna research study shows that 72% of our teens believe “you can tell if something is morally/ethically right for you by whether or not it works in your life.”
Josh McDowell’s statements caused me to evaluate my role as both the shepherd of this flock and as the shepherd of my family. And I have to tell you, when I read these statements – they terrified me because as pastor they show me in no uncertain terms that the church has failed to disciple parents, resulting in parents failing to disciple their children. As a leader in the Christian community, I cannot rail against the evils of society or brow-beat the sheep if I have not endeavored to help you come to grips with the challenges to deeper discipleship. If I have not demanded that you offer your body as living sacrifices as your reasonable act of worship and trained you to no longer be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, then it’s high time I led you into richer pastures – not only for your sake, but for the sake of your children as well. That’s what this series is about; richer pastures, deeper discipleship for you and your children – transformation and a renewed mind that thinks God’s thoughts after him.
May God attend our way, shape our hearts, enrich our minds and be revealed through us as we seek to be a perpetual song of praise to him.
Quoted from web article The Relativistic Fog: Why Moral Relativism Can’t be True Barna's February 2002 report titled, Americans Are Most Likely to Base Truth on Feelings. http://www.summit.org/resources/truth-and-consequences/the-relativistic-fog/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3905340
McDowell, Josh Beyond Belief to Conviction Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Ill. 2002 pp.8-15.
