(soft organ music) (indistinct singing) ♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, hallelujah ♪ 

- Dearly beloved, we are not able to make ourselves acceptable unto God. He is able to make us acceptable, and He has given us a plan by which we may be properly in His presence. One of the things that we must do is to cleanse our hearts of sin. We do this first of all, by confessing that we are sinners. May we therefore now join together our hearts and our voices in our unison prayer of confession. Oh, eternal God and most merciful father, we confess and acknowledge here before thy divine majesty that we are miserable sinners, that in us, there is no goodness, but since we are displeased with ourselves or the sins that we have committed against thee, and do sincerely repent the same, we most humbly beseech thee for Jesus Christ's sake to show thy mercy upon us, to forgive us all our sins and to increase thy Holy Spirit in us. Help us to bring forth such fruits as may be agreeable to thy most blessed will. Not because of the worthiness thereof, but for the merits of thy dearly beloved son, Jesus Christ, our only savior. Amen. Our hope rests in the revelation which God has given us in this word. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all uncleanness. Amen. (soft organ music) (singing in foreign language) 

- The scripture lesson this morning is from Luke's gospel, the fourth chapter beginning at the 16th verse. "And he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and he went to the synagogue as his custom was on the Sabbath day. And he stood up to read. And there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.' And he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, 'Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'" May God grant to us an understanding of this portion of His holy word. (soft organ music) (indistinct singing) 

- The Lord be with you. 

- And with your spirit. 

- Let us pray. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, in recognition of the fact that we are not entirely sufficient unto ourselves, that we are not our own creatures, creators, that we do receive, use and enjoy a great many things we did not ourselves provide, we now pause to acknowledge this. To be aware of our indebtedness to others and to the ultimate source of our belongings and blessings. We recognize you as that source. And we realize that we have not deserved these gifts. So we know that the only reasonable attitude we can have is one of gratitude. So here we are with Thanksgiving on our lips and in our hearts. We give thanks for the measure of health that we have, for the degree of peace there is in the world, for the percentage of employment we have in our nation, for the extent to which we have begun to master our courses this semester, and for all the pluses in our lives which tend to offset the minuses. And we thank you that even the minuses can with your help become pluses. We are grateful for light shining in darkness, for warm places on a cool day, for fresh insight in the midst of our confusion, for a friend in the time of our anxiety. We are grateful most of all for creative people in our lives, and supremely, Jesus Christ, who offers us friendship and salvation. Even, oh God, as we thank you for blessings already received, we pray for new blessings. We ask your blessings upon the efforts now being made to answer your son's prayer that we might all be one in him. Give courage and love to those who seek to bring Catholic and Protestant together, to those who seek to unite liberal and conservative. Grant to all of us a gracious portion of the mind of Christ. So that by his living in us, we may find our unity in him. We pray, oh Lord, that without being slaves to the letter of scripture, we may truly hunger and thirst after the living word of God to be found in the holy Bible. Give us liberal portions of the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth, as Christ promised. Oh, Father, we pray for Christlike graces in the important little places of our lives. May we not automatically blame the bus driver when we miss the bus. Keep us from the tendency to blame the professor when we receive a low grade. Granted, we may not put wholesale judgmental labels on individuals by calling them establishment people or hippies or animals, when we don't even know them personally at all. We ask you, oh God, for the things we've prayed for so many times, that the habit of asking for them seems almost trite. And yet we still need food to eat every day, clean air to breathe every minute, healing for our hurts, as often as they come. Comfort for our sorrows and strength for the living of this present day. We make our prayer in the name of him who has taught us a better prayer to pray, saying, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. 

- A few years ago in the magazine Fortune, there was an editorial in which this statement appeared: "In days like these, what we of the world need is a word from the Lord. We look to the church where that word, and all we hear is the echo of our own voice." And in that statement, there's been something of a description of the way society has looked at the church and the way the church has too often disappointed society. As I share today on the subject, being Christian in a revolutionary world, I do this in terms of something of the existential involvement that I have found with the risen Christ. Being a part of the life of the church, but in no way, simply given to the institutional forum about church in itself. In saying this this morning, I am deeply concerned that the modern world to see fleshed out in life once again in persons like you and me, what it means to take Jesus Christ with absolute seriousness. For me as risen Lord, he becomes in my life the guide for a kind of discipleship that I believe is radically different from the normal life in society. As I think with you today on this theme, I want to lift out from Paul's letter to the Colossians, a few verses to amplify what I have in mind. And here you have a very clear note of assurance. It is not a note of pessimism. And frankly, in our kind of world, the Christian cannot afford to be a pessimist. That's the person who's seasick on the whole voyage of life anyway. You and I ought to be optimists in our kind of world because we know who we belong to, what it's all about and where we are going. A few years ago, an American tourist was in Russia. He met a communist who ask him, "Have you read Karl Marx?" And he said, "Yes, I have read Marx." "Well, then" the communist said, "You know how it's all going to come out." That American tourists should have come right back and said, "Sir, have you read the Bible? Then you know how it's going to come out." This is our faith. That God has interpreted history from its middle in Jesus Christ. And now we know the end from the middle because God is knowing the end from the beginning. In affirming this kind of optimism, I believe that the Christian should never imply that he has all of the answers, but rather be aware that God is not static in terms of his dealing with man, but in the dynamic of God's work in and through the Holy Spirit, he can help us discover in every period of history, the meaning, the implication of living under the Lordship of Christ in that particular period. This matter of being confused reminds me of that delightful little story about the man who ran into a bookstore and said, "Have you got that book, "A Piece of My Mind" by Rabbi Norman Vincent sheen?" And there are many people about that confused when it comes to trying to find their way through life. In contrast, the apostle Paul is very clear. In Colossians 2:6-10, we have this statement. "As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk ye in him. Rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith as you have been taught abounding therein with Thanksgiving. Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in him, dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are complete in him." Sometime ago, it was my privilege to hear Albert Toffler speaking in something of a resume, what he gave us in larger form in his book, "Future shock," which he exposed once again the problems facing us in society, but gave this an interpretation, in which he is saying that a kind of psychological illness has happened to us because we are living now with that kind of existential uncertainty with respect to the future. A few years ago, it would have been more of the dispensational fundamentalists who would have been talking about the end of the world, the end of the age, but not so today. In fact, one of the interesting phenomena today is that you will find among young people on campuses across the land, and I say this, especially having been in dialogue with persons on numerous campuses, and having spent some time last spring in a preaching exposure on Berkeley campus under the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and finding young people who are now talking about the end of the age, the end of the world, that it can't last very long. I know that some of the best ecologists we have say that by 1979, the seas will be dead. By 1981 to '84, it will be all over. I'm not at all sure about that. I'm glad that the whole matter rests in God's hand, but I am aware that these men are speaking to the kind of judgment that the Bible makes clear that man creates to a large degree, his own judgment in the processes of the way God works with man. We're living in a time that has been described as revolutionary. That is almost a trite statement by now. And I do not mean to labor it this morning, except to say there are factors that cause men to say this is a revolutionary age. I do not refer simply to the much change that we have had, nor to the rapidity of change that has affected us in society. But I refer rather to the fact that it is so involved, the total of man's experience. And one man analyzing this has said that revolution is caused because of the change with respect to authority since the 19th century. The second reason, because of the change regarding culture, there is no one culture anymore in a given area of the world. Or another reason is the meaninglessness of affluence, in which the middle-class American has suddenly discovered that all he was trying to gain out of his fear we might go back to another Depression, still has left in empty. And a fourth reason is because of the depersonalization of modern technology. I would like to add a fifth one. And that is because of the kind of existential immediacy that characterizes modern life. And that is, we want everything in the moment. Instant satisfaction in every level. It's not only instant coffee, but now it's instant pleasure, instant success, instant sex, instant everything. And the whole dimension of life as we knew it in the past is gone. And Francis Schaeffer talks about this in several of his writings, in which he described as the modern world, as one which has moved under the line of despair. My question this morning is really whether the Christian should simply run around parroting what I have run by in these moments, or whether we do not have something to offer modern man, that is revolutionary because of the radical depth nature of the change that it brings. And when I say a revolution comes because of total change, I know of nothing so completely revolutionary as an absolute commitment to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. About two years ago, I flew to Miami, Florida sharing a city-wide preaching mission. And Judge Bill Meadows, Methodist layman, was chairman of the committee for that citywide crusade. And he took me to some television and radio stations for interviews. And as we walked into one of these, he said, "I'll have to tell you what happened here a few weeks ago." He said, "I came here for an interview myself. And as I stepped into the room, there was a young man sitting across the table from where I was to sit at the microphone." And he said that young fellow stuck his hand out and said, "I'm Joe Smith" or whatever it was, a disciple of Bhave. Bill Meadows said, "I slapped my hand in his and said, 'I'm Bill Meadows, a disciple of Jesus Christ." Now Bhave here is the successor of Mahatma Gandhi in India, the man who has gone out and collected from the haves to give to the have-nots, and carried through a major program of reform in India. But the thing that Bill Meadows said to me was that he longs to see the day when more young people, when you step into their presence will reach out and say, "I am Joe Smith, a disciple of Jesus Christ." And that's my conviction, that this is the thing we need to see today. And somehow, I have the feeling that the spirit of God is creating this. Because all across the land, in the last few years, something new is happening. I've been in the ministry now 20 years or 21. I started when I was 21. And I have enjoyed many varied experiences in that ministry. And I have seen some wonderful preaching missions in which I was privileged to share. It was my privilege to share the one citywide preaching mission among Protestants that Salt Lake City has ever seen. And on the first Sunday afternoon, we got rained out on the Capitol steps where the meeting was being held by the kindness of the governor, Governor Clyde. And so over 3000 people pack the rotunda of the Capitol building in Salt Lake City. And I had the privilege of preaching the gospel inside to that audience. And I could give you other illustrations, but I say this only for one reason, and that is that having moved across this country and other parts of the world and preaching missions in those 21 years, I have not seen heretofore what is happening right now, especially among young people on college and university campuses, with a new awareness that most of the things that have been tried in the last few years have left them completely empty and disillusioned. And they are turning once again to find whether there is something in this Jesus of Nazareth of whom I speak. To me, this is one of the most heartening things in our day. I'm excited about it, I want to be in on it, there is much that I need to learn of the work of God and the work of the living Christ, of the work of the Holy Spirit in a deeper way in my own life. And I don't want to miss out on all that God is doing in this time. But having said that, I would like this morning to lift out three very basic, but rather simple things for your thinking and mine on this matter of being Christian in our kind of world. Because what we need today is more Christian Christians. People who'll flesh out in life what it means to walk with Jesus Christ. Men and women who will be genuine disciples and not persons who simply have a kind of intellectual, philosophical approach to Christianity. Persons who are not afraid to say, "Jesus Christ, my Lord," instead of always talking about Jesus who lived yesteryear like Abraham Lincoln. And Christ as sort of a philosophical premise of Christ kind of ideals, but persons who actually believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord is a living person open for encounter at any moment, that you and I can meet and talk with and share with and walk with. Now, if you think that's mere mysticism, I would like to say this morning, then you have a stereotype regarding Christianity that has kept you from seeing that Christianity is neither legalism, a religion of a code morality, nor is it mere mysticism, but it is a relational kind of thing. I relate to Jesus Christ at the level of spirit and mind and volition in exactly the same way I relate to my wife or to other persons that I know at that level. Because the dimension of knowing Jesus Christ is not a kind of mere mysticism. The movement today in America, in which many persons are enamored with Far Eastern religions is not a surprise to me, for one reason, because American higher education is shot through and through with Greek thought and Greek philosophy, and has missed out on the unique dynamic of the Judaic Christian tradition. And Far Eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are not really religions. They are philosophies. And there's no small wonder that American people go for this kind of thing. I have spent hours discussing with professors in India of Hinduism and Buddhism, their philosophy. It's very little different from Greek philosophy in which the Greeks believe that the rational part of man is immortal, that will live on and eventually merge back into that great universal reason. And the Buddhist belief is that somehow if I can lose my identity as a person and drop like a drop of water in the ocean and merge back into that universal God, I will be at peace. Or the Hindu believing in universal life. If I can lose my identity and merge into this, then I will be at peace. He will tell you that it's a philosophy. And in our society, we're reaching for something. And this is the kind of thing that we're reaching for. But there's another reason for this. And that is because the rather general assumptions about Christianity in America have been so moralistic, I do not simply say legalistic, but moralistic. So moralistic that we can understand the relational aspect of knowing Jesus Christ. And because of that moralism, we are moving now to find something that will translate that into the more inner, meditative, psychological awarenesses that we have today. But at the same time that we are doing this, we are missing out on the uniqueness of what Jesus Christ brought. The moralism reminds me of what Dr. E Stanley Jones says about the Indian holy man. We found one day sitting on his ice sheet, the Indian holy man said, "I gave up sex 40 years ago." But E. Stanley Jones said, the interesting thing was that for the next 40 minutes, all he could talk about was sex. There are a lot of persons who don't understand that Christianity is not simply a moralism. It's a kind of relationship with an actual personality present in the world to work in one's life, the personality of God as He is known and Jesus Christ. And many people miss out on the fact that Jesus Christ makes clear a kind of God that is radically different from that mystical kind of religion that many people are going for today. Remember that the story of the gospel is a story of creation, incarnation, discipleship, and resurrection. God creating, making a good world. Humanness and sinfulness are not synonymous. Humanness in itself is affirmed by Jesus Christ in the incarnation. And the fact that God could come in Christ is the greatest compliment to man, to humanity, to humanism you can find anywhere in history. God affirming man. And then when God calls us to be disciples, he is not calling us to a kind of Christianity that has often been popularized as though it is sort of an escape hatch from real life, but he's calling us to put right into practice what it means to live for Jesus Christ in a world where you can't popularize that. And I know this, because I'm committed to a kind of discipleship that means I'm a pacifist. However, that word is far too weak and too small. Really, I believe in a kind of New Testament, non-resistant, redemptive love, the goes out to win my enemy to be my brother in Christ even if it would cost my life. I believe deeply in the matter of working for the relationship between races that makes me my brother's brother. So that I do not have to wait until the other changes, I can in Jesus Christ be that now in relation to him. I believe there is a way to take care of the problems that we call the economic gap. And somehow to reach across this gap between the haves and the have-nots, by helping persons understand that when you say value is not measured by money, by what a man carries in his pocket or his bank account, you will also demonstrate it by putting yourself on the line to be your brother's brother in helping him. I believe in grappling with the social problems in our world. But I also believe my friends in being concerned about the whole man. His spirit, as well as his physical being. And I agree with Dr. Elton Trueblood in his book, "New Man for These Times," when he says the church is suffering today from a polarization between social action on one side and evangelical action on the other. And I am an evangelist. I may be in a small degree an educator, to a small degree as president of a college and administrator, to a small degree, a writer, but I am first of all, an evangelist, basically because of my theology. I believe that if a man is in Christ, he's a new creature, as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:17. And knowing that I believe I can introduce a man any time, anywhere, in any culture to Jesus Christ, and he's not going to Americanize him, he's going to Christianize him. But the problem that we have in our society is that while we talk about the importance of freeing Christianity from its cultural trappings, we in America have been guilty of domesticating the gospel. We have Americanized Christianity so that in many parts of the world, people can't really meet Jesus Christ because they don't see him. I remind you what happened when Mahatma Gandhi was in Africa. He was turned down from a church there by being told, "This church is not for the likes of you. It's for white Europeans." And it has been said, that what Gandhi rejected was not Christianity, as much as the perverted picture of Christ that he was given. He went back to India, borrowing the teachings of Jesus, but he never became a Christian because in his words, he thought that to become a Christian meant that he had to accept Western culture. Gandhi said, "I am, first of all, an Indian, not a Westerner." And one of the problems in our world today is that we have so equated Christianity with Americanism, that many a person and other parts of the world really hungering for God misses what it means to meet God because of the kind of cultural trappings that we have put around the Christian gospel. And oftentimes, those who profess to be the most liberal in their thinking are the most difficult to get to understand what it means, to actually lift Jesus Christ above their cultural trappings in the verbalism by which they want to take the old gospel and put it in new modern forms, which in other parts of the world are nothing other than Americanistic forms in our verbal cultural symbols. And to communicate the gospel in Africa or India or Indonesia, means that the old gospel of Jesus Christ as the one who reveals God who makes him clear, who calls a man to come and walk with him, to identify with Jesus Christ in his culture. That gospel is so revolutionary that the average American liberal doesn't know how to cope with it any better than the average American fundamentalist. So what I am saying this morning is to say that to be Christian in our kind of world is demanding a new thing. Dr. Glover of England said a few years ago, the early church grew because it out thought, outlived and outdied everybody around. And the challenge you and I face is the challenge of out-thinking our age regarding Christianity, as well as outliving our age as a disciple, and then being willing to out-die it if you please. The things that I suggest to them, for our thinking to elucidate what I have presented this morning are basically these three. The first, what people experience determines to a large degree what they believe. The second, what people believe determines how they behave. And the third, what people behave determines the character of brotherhood. What people experience does determine what they believe. If all you've experienced is a kind of cold, philosophical, institutionalistic Christianity, then that's what you believe Christianity is all about. If what you've experienced on the other hand is a kind of religion that is all together other than Christianity, then that's what you tend to believe. Or if what you have experienced is a kind of genuine, honest, authentic commitment with Jesus Christ, in your home among your parents, in your congregation, then you will believe that this is a possibility. Now, in our society in America, where we have boasted of being a Christian society, many people have never experienced fellowship with persons who actually know what it means to participate with Jesus Christ. A few years ago, I was on the way to Stratford, Ontario for a citywide preaching mission under the Council of Churches, in the Shakespearian art theater of all places. I flew on the little Piedmont airline from Harrisonburg, Virginia, over to Washington, D.C. and transferred to the jet for New York and Toronto. There had been a peace march in Washington that day. And there were some peaceniks getting on the plane, and I moved over and took the center seat. And this young lady sat down beside me, and a young fellow with hair about as long and stringy as hers sat down in front of her. We were off in the air, and so I opened conversation with her. I said, I presume you were here in the march today. And she said, "Yes, I was." I said, "Tell me what brought you here for this march." Well, she said, "Because I'm against killing." Well, I said, "So am I, and many others are, but why are you against it? What brought you?" Well, she said, "I'm against what's happening in Vietnam." Well, I said, "So am I, and there are a lot of us that are, but why are you against it?" And she looked at me and said, "Who in the world are you?" Well, I said, "I happen to be a Mennonite, an evangelist on the way to Canada for a preaching mission." She said, "You're a Mennonite. Well, then you're a pacifist too." Well, I said, "It depends what you mean by that term. I'm committed to Jesus Christ and I want to be his disciple. And I believe that the way of peace is a part of his teaching." And she looked at me and these were her words. "Don't talk about God to me. I don't even believe there is a God." I said, "You have no association with the church?" Oh yeah, she said, "I belong to such and such a church, but that's just for identification. That doesn't mean anything." And so for the next 40 minutes, until we scooted in on the runway at LaGuardia or JFK in New York city, we talked. I asked her to tell me how she saw the church and how she read Christianity, and she did. And when she got through, I said, "You know, young lady, if that's what Christianity was, I wouldn't wanna have anything to do with it either." And then she looked at me and said, "Well, you must think it's something different or you wouldn't be involved in it then." And so I told her what I thought Christianity was. And then to get a little last barb in, you know, because this has been a very amiable conversation, but I didn't want to leave her without saying, you can't talk about truth and remain neutral. You've got to do something about it. I said, "You know, it's a strange thing. One of these days, it's gonna all be over, the world will blow up and it'll all be ended. And there won't be anybody around, anywhere in the universe that remembers we ever happened." The plane landed. And she got up and started up the aisle with her friend, and stopped and turned around and called back over two or three people standing in the aisle between us and said, "You know, preacher, my position doesn't make much sense, does it?" Now, as far as I was concerned, I had done my job of evangelizing. Because for me, evangelism is not pressure, not manipulation, not coercion at all. Christian faith will stand on its own feet. I don't have to defend it. But for me, evangelism is making faith in Christ a clear option. And I am saying that you and I have got to realize that there are many people around who have never experienced a confrontation of Christian faith in a meaningful way that will meet them at their level of life. And so they tend to believe that Christianity is not a real option. Many of you are students at the university. I'd like to remind you that one of the things I find across the country that is probably the most common mistake, is that too many students will go to school and they will take their Sunday school level knowledge of Jesus and put it in a pigeonhole and go on and advance in psychology and philosophy and sociology and the arts. Four years later when they graduate, instead of being honest about the fact that they did not put into their theology, the same intellectual diligence that they put in the other areas, they will turn around and smirk at their Sunday school level religion, and pose with a kind of academic sophistication that now says that religion that I had when I came to college is naive, and never admit that they are naive and dishonest in that they haven't put into it the intelligent, honest study that they put into the other areas. Is that too straight from the shoulder? I'm saying that what you experience determines in a large degree what you believe, and you can experience if you open your life to see what God is doing around you. I was out in the Midwest. This wouldn't happen down here in North Carolina, but I was out in the Midwest. And a professor from university came to the meeting I was speaking at and after the service, he said to me, "I'm an honest intellectual agnostic." And I complimented him for opening it up honestly, and said, "I'm glad to chat with you. You're a thinking man, you've got a right to your position." And that surprised him a little bit, the way he talked. And then he said, "What would you tell me to do?" And I said, "One little experiment." Will you try everyday for 30 days praying real honestly, this little prayer? "God, if you're around, help me to recognize the evidence for you today." I said, "You do that for 30 days. If nothing happens, forget the whole thing." You know what that man said to me? Here's where his real honesty came through. He said, "You know, preacher, I'm afraid to do that. Something might happen." There aren't many intellectual atheists. There are a lot of moral atheists. They don't want a God in their lives. I turned to that second premise to say that what you believe then determines how you behave. I've told you a few things I believe by way of illustration. I believe in Jesus Christ as Lord. I believe in the reality of a changed life because I'm committed to him. I know the joy of experiencing his grace and being born from above. I believe in the reality of the presence of the Holy Spirit. I believe in being a disciple. Now, what you believe determines how you behave. If you believe in something very deeply, then you behave this way. If you believe that God is known in Jesus Christ, more clearly than in any other way, I'm not saying God has not tried to get through to men in some of the mystical forms of religion and the like, but if you believe that God is knowing more clearly in Jesus Christ than any other way, it will affect your behavior, because you will seek to know and understand Jesus Christ. You will go to the word to do this. You will go to people who experience of Christ and ask them to tell you how they experience Christ. If you believe that human personality is the most valuable thing in the world, then you will behave that way. There is nothing I know that does more to change the inequities in the area of the political and economic and social scene, than just this basic principle, but it's costly. It's really costly to live this. With respect to the issues of violence and poverty and race and war, it's a costly thing to live by this principle, but personality is the most valuable thing in the universe. And if you also believe that in reaching men for their good, that you do not simply touch them at one level, but at the total of their being, as in the passage our brother read a moment ago from Luke 4, where Jesus announcing his ministry did not simply say that he came to preach, but he came to heal the broken-hearted, to give sight to the blind, to give healing to those who are suffering and the like. If you believe that the gospel touches the whole life, you will never stop with merely giving a cup of cold water. You will always give the cup of cold water in the name of Christ so that men may be brought to God. And so what you believe determines to a large degree how you behave. There is today an unhealthy situation across the land in which people somehow have the idea that religion is something you turn on in the 11 o'clock hour on Sunday morning, but the way you behave from Monday till Saturday night or three o'clock Sunday morning has no part of it. That's not Judaic Christian thought, that's purely Greek thought. You see the old Stoics believed they could separate the real you down inside from what happened to your body. The prostitute operates on the kind of philosophy that she can give her body if she keeps the real self detached from what is happening. But Christianity talks about something altogether different. It says I, as a personality, the whole being, relate to God. And when a man is saved, you are saving persons, not just the soul as some little entity wrapped up in a plastic bag down inside. When you're dealing with Christian faith, you're dealing with a whole person. And when you understand that you were never being honest with your fellow man, if you know Christ and do not share him in an evangelistic witness. The last thing I affirmed is that what people behave then determines the character of brotherhood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his little book, "Life Together," points out that Christian community is quite different from a mere sociological community. And that in Christian community, we always relate to one another in and through Jesus Christ. That means that instead of a community that is merely a commonality of taste, where we click together because we like the same things, and we say it the same way, and we have the same symbols and we dress the same way. Whether that's one pattern or another from the redneck to the far out, we have this commonality of taste, but Christian community is not that. Bonhoeffer says Christian community means that I relate to my brother in and through Christ, so that he is free and I am free. Because if you relate directly, you may tend to manipulate, to dominate, to intimidate, to coerce. But when you relate in and through Christ, you are both free. The kind of community I'm talking about is a community of disciplined people, of discipled people. People aren't afraid to say that I'm committed to Christ, and what I want above everything else is to obey him. People who have made that basic commitment to Christ so when they come to the Bible, they come with their minds already made up to obey it. That's a radical thing. To really sell out to the Lordship of Christ and say, I'll come to that scripture with my mind made up to obey it, that's quite radical. It's a kind of brotherhood in which we give and receive rebuke of one another honestly. We share to exhort in the good, old fashioned sense, to exhort one another in the things of Christ. And we will walk out like John Wesley and put our hand on our brothers by saying, "If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand." And so the kind of brotherhood in which we share depends upon our commitment, because what we believe is expressed in our behavior, and what we behave, expresses the character or determines the character of brotherhood. One group of people in our country today who aren't afraid to talk about obedience are the Jesus people. I have been amazed by some of the insights that some of these persons have from the word of God, and they haven't studied theology. But they can sit in a group and tell you in a few minutes what it means to take Jesus Christ seriously and put to shame many within our own churches who are growing up around the Christian faith. I'd like to leave with you this morning the challenge of realizing that this age in which we live is no age for weak, timid, timorous, uncommitted souls. It's an age for the kind of person who's got enough intellectual integrity to say that he can make commitments, but at the same time, enough humility that says, I will always review my commitments because I can only surrender as much of myself as I understand today, to as much of God as I understand today. I'd like to close with an illustration from Paul Tillich, in one of his addresses to Union Seminary students in which he said, and I quote, "Don't give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Don't be seduced into a truth, which is not really your truth, even if the seducer is your church or your party, or your parent or tradition. Go with Pilate if you can't go with Jesus, but go in seriousness with him." Why do I quote a statement like that to conclude this message? For these reasons. Number one, because the choice that I am putting before you this morning must be that clear. No halfway ground. It's either going with Jesus or going with Pilate. It's that clear. And so I say with Tillich, if you can't go with Jesus, go with Pilate, but go in seriousness with him. Know what you're doing? Don't just water down Jesus and still claim to be Christian. Either a genuine, honest, radical discipleship, or else admit you're going with Pilate saying, "What is truth?" I can't commit myself because I can't be that sure. The second reason I quote this statement is because many people today are choosing to go with Pilate rather than to go with Jesus, because it is more palatable in our society. It is more palatable in an academic community, because there's some people still believing the myth that the skeptic or the cynic is more honest than the committed person and that's pure myth. And so I quote this statement because many people are going with Pilate, instead of with Jesus, who are implying that Jesus is a little less than real, genuine academic sophistication. And the third reason I quote this statement is because of the kind of radical discipleship to which I've sought to call you. That is a discipleship that says, if I take Jesus Christ seriously, then I mean the Jesus Christ of the New Testament, and not some watered down Jesus that people have handed me, that has been domesticated and acculturated until I can't meet him. I trust that my words have been less comforting than probing. And I hope they have been less analytical than they have been affirmative, because if anything else I would share with you today, it is the fact that I am not a professional preacher. I'm speaking out of the genuine involvement with Jesus Christ, that not only has changed my life, but keeps changing it. As I discover day by day, new things that he's got for me to change my life into his image. Let us pray together. Father God, in this moment, as we pray in the name of Christ, we confess that there is so much in our world that stands against faith. So many problems and so many issues and so many voices crying, "Where is God? Don't let this happen." But we thank thee this morning for the freedom that you have given man, for the compliment you have given us in that freedom. Even to permit us to say no to you if we want. But we praise you for the joy that comes when we say yes to Jesus Christ. Grant that in our lives, in these moments, the Holy Spirit may quicken faith to reach out and claim by greater work in our hearts through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. (soft organ music) (indistinct singing)